Remarkable

Writting Off Script

2011-11-19T14:22:00.001-05:00

A one minute twenty second trailer for a book I have an essay in. Totally BADASS that his book has a trailer.

WRITING OFF SCRIPT Book Trailer from Morris Hill Pictures on Vimeo.

Kickstart

2011-11-17T17:43:00.001-05:00

Hey! Jason Powell wants all your Claremont people to know about this thing, and goddammit that means I want you to know about it too:

Adult Education: Unsung Heroes William Moulton Marston

2011-10-20T23:56:00.001-04:00

12 minutes

Hamlet Mash-Up, by Geoff Klock

2011-06-22T15:18:00.002-04:00

And now for something completely different. I created a Hamlet Mash Up on YouTube: 65 clips from 65 different movies from or about Hamlet, and no clip longer than 23 seconds. Captain Picard, Billy Madison, Jack Skellington, and the cast of Gilligan's Island are among the 65. Enjoy, and share.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Grease

2011-06-07T08:06:00.002-04:00

I continue to tell people that Kill Bill's debts to other films are totally intentional and interesting. Tarantino alludes to film history like John Milton alludes to poetic history. Because he wants to stake a big claim in the genre he is working in.

FROM GREASE

(from 1:00-1:10)

This is the song Grease Lightning from the musical Grease. Grease is a musical about a summer fling between a nice girl and a cool guy and whether than fling can translate into the rigid world of high school cliques in the 1950s.

About a minute in you will hear John Travolta call the car "a really Pussy Wagon." Thurman's car that she gets from buck is the prominently labeled Pussy Wagon.

Though the allusion here is slight I still think it worth talking about. For one thing Tarantino is obviously a huge John Travolta fan, and successfully revived his career for a minute in Pulp Fiction. Second, Tarantino is on record saying that people who do not like violence in movies are the same people who do not like dance sequences in movies. The musical is how he justifies his love of violence in purely aesthetic terms, just something very "cinematic," as he says. He is not making a social commentary. He is making a fun movie, a work of art, an aesthetic thing. So I think the allusion to Grease is actually kind of important given the orgy of violence that is about to follow.

STAN “THE MAN” LEE MONKEYS AROUND FOR CHARITY!

2011-06-02T18:58:00.001-04:00

[From Troy Wilson!]

Comics legend, Stan “The Man” Lee, and Emmy award winning artist, Dean Haspiel, have joined forces to close out Panels for Primates with a bang. “Collaborating with Stan Lee is a dream come true,” says Haspiel. Their comic strip, Even Gorillas Have Pride!, viewable only at ACT-I-VATE from June 1st onward, can be found here: http://act-i-vate.com/114-36-1.comic

Panels for Primates is a charity anthology of primate comics curated and edited by Troy Wilson and facilitated by Mike Cavallaro that has been updating with new material every Wednesday since October 2010 at ACT-I-VATE (http://act-i-vate.com), all to benefit the Primate Rescue Center in Nicholasville, KY. Like every webcomic on ACT-I-VATE, the Panels for Primates archive can be viewed absolutely free. But if Panels for Primates readers like what they see, they are strongly encouraged to swing over to http://www.primaterescue.org/ and make a donation.

Other prominent contributors include Fred Van Lente (Cowboys & Aliens), Mike Carey (The Unwritten), Rick Geary (Treasury of Victorian Murder series), Stuart Moore (Namor: The First Mutant), David Petersen (Mouse Guard), Colleen Coover (Gingerbread Girl), Faith Erin Hicks (Zombies Calling), Carla Speed McNeil (Finder), and Roger Stern (The Death and Life of Superman). In all, 56 generous creators from seven countries have donated 127 pages of all-new material for the cause.

The mission of the Primate Rescue Center is to alleviate the suffering of primates wherever it occurs by:

providing sanctuary or referral to appropriate facilities;

working to end the trade of primates both in the United States and abroad;

educating the public to the plight of primates caught in the breeder/dealer cycle;

assisting researchers and zoo personnel in finding appropriate placement for surplus primates;

encouraging compliance with applicable local, state, and federal laws and animal welfare statutes.

They currently provide lifetime care for 11 chimpanzees and over 40 monkeys.

ACT-I-VATE, the premiere webcomics collective conceived by Dean Haspiel, debuted February 2006, features original, serialized graphic novels, and is updated daily. ACT-I-VATE’s hand-picked artists produce their signature work sans editorial oversight and offer their personal comix for free to an ever-growing audience of loyal readers. The site is known for having lifted the veil between creation, creator, and reader by providing a forum for spirited dialogue between audience and auteur.

Stan "The Man" Lee has quite possibly exerted more influence over the comicbook industry than anyone in history. He created or co-created 90 percent of Marvel's most recognized characters, which have been successfully licensed and marketed since 1965.

His famous co-creations include Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, The Fantastic Four, Thor, and Iron Man, among many others. Lee, known to millions as the man whose superheroes propelled Marvel Comics to its preeminent position in the comicbook industry, first became publisher of Marvel Comics in 1972, and is presently the Chairman Emeritus of Marvel Enterprises, Inc. Lee is also the Founder, Chairman, and Chief Creative Officer of POW! Entertainment.

Emmy award winning artist, Dean Haspiel, created the Eisner award nominated BILLY DOGMA and the semi-autobiographical, STREET CODE. Dean has drawn many great superhero and semi-autobiographical comic books for major publishers, including graphic novel collaborations with Harvey Pekar, Jonathan Ames, and Inverna Lockpez, and illustrates for HBO's "Bored To Death." www.deanhaspiel.com

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Lady Snowblood

2011-06-02T09:34:00.001-04:00

Tarantino steals lots of stuff, sure, but in a good way. He takes from the past in order to write the future -- and Kill Bill is his bid for the future.

FROM KILL BILL AND LADY SNOWBLOOD

This clips has several other things mixed in as well, and the clips chosen are not always the best, but the Lady Snowblood ones are going to have to do. It is at 1:22, 2:22, and 5:21.

Lady Snowblood may be THE major influence on Kill Bill. The parallels are LOADS, some small and questionable, others FOR SURE. Here is a list

-- Female with a samurai sword hunting down several people for revenge one by one
-- she cuts someone's arm off
-- music
-- divided into chapters
-- the story is not told chronologically
-- the camera freezes at each bad guy, and they are labeled on screen with a name.
-- there is a hand drawn section
-- 4 figures, those upon whom she will take her revenge, loom in the exact same camera shot
-- a woman is having sex with a guy and kills him with a Samurai sword
-- there is a training sequence with an old man and a girl.
-- one guy begs for mercy because he has a daughter
-- she tells one of her victims "we have a little business to take care of" -- Thurman says "you and I have unfinished business."
-- there is a fight with her and the sword vs a bunch of guys and wire-fu leaps in order to get to her female prey.
-- the big showdown is at a party
-- she dies in the snow (sort of -- there is an epilogue where she gets up again, but it is clearly made to justify a sequel)

Some have gone as far as claim that Kill Bill is a remake of Lady Snowblood. This is going to far, but there are a lot of links.

Lady Snowblood is about a woman whose husband and son were killed and she was raped by three men. She gets revenge on one of them, but is sent to jail. In jail she has sex with everyone she can to get pregnant -- because her child will need to finish her revenge. That child grows up to be Lady Snowblood. She meets each villain and dispatches them but the first one has a daughter, and after she kills the last and is badly wounded in the process the daughter comes running up to her in the snow and stabs her. She dies in the snow but in an epilogue wakes up again because somebody smelled sequel.

Obviously Uma Thurman is Lady Snowblood in this equation. That is how we are to read the allusion. The parallels are numerous. This is Tarantino doing his version of Lady Snowblood. All the Kung Fu movies have this Japanese Chinese rivalry, and by aligning Thurman so heavily at the House of the Blue Leaves with both Bruce Lee and Lady Snowblood he is uniting Chinese and Japanese before taking both back to the American West for volume 2. Hence Lucy Liu's half-Chinese half Japanese American Army brat thing. It's like a metaphor for the whole movie.

But there is another way to look at the Lady Snowblood connection and that is to figure Lucy Liu as Snowblood. It is easy to forget but Lucy Liu's parents were killed and she took her revenge killing one guy in a bed while having sex with him. Lady Snowblood's parents were killed and her mother killed a guy in a bed while having sex with him. Also there is a flurry of Lady Snowblood references just as we begin the Origin of O-Ren as we see her face -- We see the four figures looming down at Thurman in a shot taken from Lady Snowblood, we the freeze frame on Liu's face and a label just as in Lady Snowblood, we transition to a hand drawn section just as Lady Snowblood does, and we get a chapter title just as in Lady Snowblood. And it is Liu in the traditional Japanese garb who will die in the snow as Lady Snowblood does (sort of), and who is killed by a woman she probably forgot all about, just as Lady Snowblood does.

In that second reading then the whole ramp at the House of the Blue Leaves, the battle with the crazy 88s and GoGo and more crazy 88s, all to get to Liu was really Tarantino fighting his way through all the movies that have influenced his project, taking each down quickly, before getting to the big one: Lady Snowblood. It is worth noting here the way Liu is killed -- scalped with a Samurai Sword. Again you get the Chinese-Japanese-America pattern -- Thurman, as the Avatar for Chinese Bruce Lee, takes down Japanese Lady Snowblood with a big American fuck you -- a scalping.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Navajo Joe

2011-05-26T09:40:00.006-04:00

Tarantino's Kill Bill is almost like a collage of other movie moments. But not like a high school girl's best friends collage. Like one of those collages from early 20th century art or whatever by like Picasso or somebody (did Picasso do collages?). Like smart so that seeing all that shit arranged in that way really makes you think, you know?

FROM NAVAJO JOE
Music plays at the start of the clip. Navajo Joe confronts Duncan, gets shot and throws a hatchet at him from like ten feet ending him. Different music plays to the end of the movie. You can hear the final music and see the hatchet here:

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman Kills a Crazy 88 by throwing at him the hatchet he threw at her.

Bad guy Duncan and his team massacre an indian village and scalp people. Navajo Joe, played by Burt Reynolds, kicks their asses. He also saves two hookers who know about Duncan's plot to collude with the town doctor to steal the town's money arriving by train. Navajo Joe will protect the town from Duncan and his men for money in exchange for scalps. He goes back and forth with Duncan but manages to steal the train, return it to the people, then go after Duncan because Duncan, it turns out killed his wife in the initial massacre. They kill each other. The end.

The scene above is the end of Navajo Joe, in which they kill each other. In that scene are three crucial things from Kill Bill.

For starters there is the hatchet, which shows up in Kill Bill. If you think it is a coincidence, notice this -- why would that one dude in the Crazy 88s even HAVE a hatchet when EVERYONE ELSE has samurai swords. The hatchet stands out and it stands out to bring up this movie at this moment. And it is only one of many Navajo Joe overlaps with Kill Bill.

The music at the start of the Navajo Joe clip above you can here more fully in this clip, which is an earlier scene where Duncan's men wait for Navajo Joe's attack:

FROM NAVAJO JOE
The music from the start of the Navajo Joe clip above plays as Duncan's men are about to be attacked.

Just as it is used twice in Navajo Joe, it is used twice in Kill Bill -- both times in vol 2. It anticipates the showdown with Bill in the first Kill Bill clip from the opening of Vol 2. And it IS the showdown with Driver in the second clip.

FROM KILL BILL
The same music plays as Thurman narrates from her car at the opening of Kill Bill vol 2.

FROM KILL BILL
The same music plays just before the final clash of Driver and Thurman.

Let's talk about why. Take a look at this clip between Duncan and his Brother:

FROM NAVAJO JOE
Duncan's brother calls him a "half-breed" and he smacks him.

Navajo Joe also kills Duncan's brother, and Duncan wants revenge. This is why Budd wants revenge on Thurman -- because she hurt his brother Bill. But there is something more important to notice here -- the accusation of "Half Breed." It echo's Lucy Liu's sensitivity to someone bringing up her mixed race status -- in both instances, if you bring it up you bring violence on yourself.
And just as Navajo Joe kills this half breed guy who killed his woman, so Thurman will kill her mixed race antagonist who robbed her of her child. And just before she confronts this mixed race woman we get a Navajo Joe reminder with the hatchet. And how is the mixed race Lucy Liu killed? She is scalped (by a Samurai sword).

But there is one final major Navajo Joe allusion left. The music that Navajo Joe ends with you can hear more fully in the opening credits, where Duncan scalps Navajo Joe's woman.

FROM NAVAJO JOE
The music that ends Navajo Joe also starts it -- it is used in the opening credits as Duncan scalps a woman.

Watch where the Navajo Joe music gets used again.

FROM KILL BILL
That music plays as Bill walks out into his garden to die.

Navajo Joe music opens and closes Kill Bill Volume 2, and both the opening and closing music of Navajo Joe appear in Kill Bill. The music that ends Navajo Joe is the same music that ends BILL.

Why? Because Like Liu's character, whose death is preceded by a Navajo Joe reference, Caradine is also mixed race, and so we get the music that is used to end the mixed race guy in Navajo Joe to end Bill. Why does Bill's race matter? Because it was a big reason that he worked in Kung Fu the Television Show -- he is American enough, foreign enough. Unlike Bruce Lee who was far too foreign for American audiences. Now look at your killers. Thurman, a white woman who in volume one is the avatar for the Chinese Bruce Lee. And BURT REYNOLDS AS AN INDIAN. In both moments the mixed race actors, mixed race characters and/or cross race casting is an issue in both movies.

I hope I have sufficiently impressed you up to now, because honestly I am not quite sure where to go next. On the one hand I can see a narrative that involves Pure Bruce Lee vs Mongrel whatever, but as much as Tarantino is on the side of Bruce Lee he is really on the side of MIXING EVERYTHING, crossing cultural, racial and gender lines as he builds COOL. And I am reminded that accusations about Tarantino using the N-word in Pulp Fiction had a lot to do with this idea that he thought he could get away with the cross race thing himself, using a word reserved for blacks. Crossing these divides, for this white guy who loves Blacksploitation movies, is the marker of cool, of being with the in-crowd. I am not quite sure how this factors into Kill Bill, but if you will forgive a weak ending, I will promise to keep thinking about it. And of course you might want to help me out in the comments section.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Green Hornet

2011-05-19T08:39:00.005-04:00

Quentin Tarantino has a point when he has bits of his movies look like other movies. He is remixing images with purpose, giving new life to things dead, reminding us of what is important, and making his story larger by connecting it to stories past -- while also revising those stories relationships to each other. John Milton did this is Paradise Lost with Virgil Homer and Dante and Tarantino does it with Bruce Lee, and Navajo Joe and Lady Snowblood.

FROM THE GREEN HORNET
You can here the song here:

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman's plane lands and the theme to the Green Hornet plays.

FROM KILL BILL
The Crazy 88s have masks like the one Kato wore in the Green Hornet. You can see this in the trailer:

This post is going to be a kind of placeholder. Though you are reading this in May I am writing in in January, just after the release of the Green Hornet movie. I cannot understand why the Green Hornet television show with Bruce Lee is not easily available on DVD. This is a bit worse than it normally would be because in addition to not being able to show you clips, I also have not seen the show. I would have skipped this one, but I think at least one connection is clear enough that I can talk about it without all the facts.

My sense is that The Green Hornet, the one from the 60s, is about a crime fighter whose sidekick is played by Bruce Lee. The sidekick's name in Kato.

Tarantino obviously intends to invoke the Green Hornet. The theme song for the show plays as Thurman lands, and the Crazy 88s all wear Kato masks. And of course when Thurman lands in Tokyo she becomes a kind of superhero -- a masked and costumed avenger taking down the bad guys.

A bit of an aside about the song. Flight of the Bumblebee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov originates in an opera from 1900. It is the music that is played as the prince is changed into a bumblebee to fly away and visit his father, who does not know he is alive. It is hard to imagine Tarantino quoting an opera through the Green Hornet TV show but that is exactly what he seems to be doing, as otherwise we will have to dismiss as coincidence that the big reveal at the end of the House of Blue Leaves sequence is that Thurman's daughter is still alive, though she does not know this.

The main point I want to make here is that obviously Bruce Lee is too awesome to be anyone's sidekick, and the reason he is a sidekick is obvious. There was a perception that people did not want to see an Asian guy in a lead role, but sidekick was ok. Lee found the role demeaning. He was so popular in Hong Kong the show was marketed there as The Kato Show, and even in America there was a TV series tie in coloring book called Kato's Revenge Featuring the Green Hornet. (Wikipedia is awesome).

The reason this link is so important I am putting it up with no clip and no experience of the show is that it completes a picture we have been putting together. Thurman is the avatar for Bruce Lee' spirit, as symbolized by the fact that she is dressed as Ultimate Bruce Lee, the Bruce Lee of Game of Death. As Lee, she fights many of the things that impinge on Bruce Lee's purity: fighters dressed as Kato the crummy sidekick; weak sauce Bruce Lee inheritor Jackie Chan as embodied by GoGo (who does the move Chan does in Shanghai Noon, a kind of total sell out movie). Thurman-as-Lee fights through settings and situations similar to those in Lee's movies (surrounded by the team of Japanese guys, fighting a Japanese Swordman, fighting in the garden -- as in Fists of Fury).

Thurman is linked to Lee because they share the same goal: the Takedown of David Carradine. She wants him because he shot her in the head. Lee wants him because he stole the lead role in Kung-Fu the television series from him, and maybe the idea for the show as well. And along the way all of film history -- from classic Samurai movies to Spaghetti Westerns to Italian Horror movies surround them, as they should. Because Lee DIED and CARRADINE GOT THE PART AND WAS TOTALLY SUCCESSFUL, and JACKIE CHAN IS FAMOUS, and LEE WAS KATO. If you imagine The House of the Blue Leaves as a kind of time travel story then what you are seeing is that in trying to go back and change film history to make Lee the winer (and of course to go back and change film history to make it into a ramp up to Kill Bill) THURMAN AND TARANTINO HAVE BROKEN TIME ITSELF and FILM CLIPS FROM MOVIES PAST ARE SHREDDED AND REARRANGED. This is the allegory of the House of the Blue Leaves.

Why does Tarantino need Lee to win? Because he needs Lee's power to defeat his own major influence -- Lady Snowblood. But that is for another day.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Yojimbo

2011-05-12T09:17:00.008-04:00

Quentin Tarantino movies do look like he took scenes from other people's movies and put in a blender. But only if it is some kind of super-intelligent blender that does not blend randomly but places things next to each other to form a kind of careful commentary on where the foods are from and how they relate. John Milton, in Paradise Lost, also had such a blender.

FROM YOJIMBO
A Japanese sword fighter looks out across the big road of a small town where dust swirls. He fights a gang. One guys yells and he yells at him and lets him run away. Here is the trailer:

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman fights and one of the Crazy 88s is revealed to her as very young. She spanks him with the sword and tells him This is what you get for fucking with Yakuza. Go home to your mother and he runs off.

Yojimbo is the story of a masterless Samurai who goes to a town where two gangs are at war. He pretends to be working with each of them, with the aim of getting them all killed and making the town a better place.

The scene above is from one of the last scenes in the film. Our hero is attacking the gang who have tortured him and hung up his only friend. Most of the bad guys are idiots -- particularly one guy, who yells "Mommy!" "Children shouldn't play with swords!" says our guy. "Go home to your mother and live a long life eating gruel."

This is pretty closely repeated in Kill Bill, as Thurman discovers one of the Crazy 88s is just this idiot kid and sends him back to his mother unharmed.

Tarantino may be sort of stealing the joke from Yojimbo, but in his hands the scene, while still a good bit of comic relief, is better -- because of course Thurman has missed out on raising children (she thinks) because the people she is revenging herself against took that away from her. The moment, while still broadly comic, fits into the story thematically, as it does not in Yojimbo.

Remember also that the Kill Bill clip above also alludes to Samurai Fiction -- a movie about a stolen sword, a movie that got the actual sword used in the filming from the legendary samurai actor Toshirô Mifune who is the star of Yojimbo. So there is a logic to going from Samurai Fiction to Yojimbo.

Yojimbo is also one of the great precursors for Kill Bill, just in terms of being this ground in which various genres and countries come into play. Yojimbo is a Japanese samurai movie with a plot very much in debt to Dashiell Hammett's Glass Key and Red Harvest, novels which were a big part of film noir (and also unofficially remade as Miller's Crossing, a film that as we will see is also alluded to in Kill Bill -- you see the same plot in Miller's Crossing, Yojimbo and Red Harvest -- the one guy who plays the gangs against each other). And I gave a long clip from Yojimbo above so you can see how much it is visually in debt to the cowboy films of John Ford. Then Yojimbo becomes the source itself for Clint Eastwood's Fist Full of Dollars. The hero in Yojimbo has no name, neither does Clint Eastwood's character in Fistful, neither does Thurman for most of Kill Bill. So Noir and Classic Westerns become Samurai stuff before becoming Spaghetti Western stuff. So anyone who wants to single out Kill Bill as being some kind of insane unjustified genre mash-up is pointed by Tarantino to Yojimbo -- and they are pointed to Yojimbo at a moment that also recalls Samurai Fiction and Highlander (a film which itself has a Scottish protagonist killing a Russian in New York City with a Japanese sword he got from an Egyptian working for Spain) -- JUST TO DRIVE THE POINT HOME. And of course Lucy Liu is SCALPED by a SAMURAI SWORD, the ultimate expression of east meets west. Film history has ALWAYS been one crazy mash up, Tarantino wants to say. He just celebrates the absurdity more than most.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Death Rides a Horse

2011-05-05T09:46:00.007-04:00

Tarantino sure has seen a bunch of movies. And those movies often show up in his movies. They do so not because he does not have good ideas of his own. He does! It is just that, like John Milton in Paradise Lost, many of his good ideas area ABOUT the bunch of movies he saw. And so his film doubles as a commentary on the history of movies.

A note on the Death Rides a Horse clips -- the DVD was crazy low grade, like VHS taped off of formatted to fit your screen TV then transferred to DVD by monkeys. Sorry about that.

FROM DEATH RIDES A HORSE
A group of masked guys kills a family while the youngest boy watches. One has a small skull necklace. They burn the place down and leave the kid alive. You can actually watch it all legally on Youtube: Here is the movie:

The family murder is in the opening minutes.

FROM KILL BILL
Lucy Liu's animated origin. A group of guys kills her family while she watches. One has a skull ring. They burn the place down and leave her alive.

FROM DEATH RIDES A HORSE
John Law goes after Lee Van Cleef. Awesome music plays. They talk about the revenge Law wants and Cleef tells him Revenge is a dish best served cold. This scene is at 27 minutes in.

FROM KILL BILL
The same music plays as Thurman hacks off Sophie Fatale's arm.

FROM DEATH RIDES A HORSE
John Law confronts a gambler. The screen gets shaded red and through the red filter you see the guy murdering his family. This is at 47:00

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman confronts Liu at the House of the Blue Leaves. The screen goes red and in the red filter we see her attacking Thurman in the chapel and looking down on her.

Death Rides a Horse is about a guy whose family was murdered in front of his eyes by a masked gang of bandits when he was a kid. So he grows up to get revenge. His name, no kidding, is John Law, not to put too fine a point on it. Meanwhile Lee Van Cleef gets out of jail and he also wants some payback -- from those same guys. Our hero and Van Cleef become mismatched buddies hunting down these dudes but it turns out that Van Cleef was actually part of the gang. Our hero decides not to kill him because he was so helpful and they part after everyone else is dead.

Death Rides a Horse is a major Kill Bill connection -- maybe, next to Lady Snowblood, the major connection. People talk about how Kill Bill is all about the Spaghetti Western, but Death Rides a Horse is the emblem of that genre for Tarantino. He will draw on Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good the Bad and the Ugly -- but it is Death Rides a Horse, a second string Spaghetti Western, that is the major representative of the genre, and a major structuring source for Kill Bill. As in his allusion to The Lodger rather than Psycho, he goes after smaller movies when he wants to suggest something big, a film that is more easily taken down.

The Death Rides a Horse allusions distinguish themselves in they way they combine with other allusions. Each allusion is an allusion to some other genre VIA Death Rides a Horse.

The first Death Rides a Horse scene above is the murder of the family at the opening. It is a dead ringer in a number of ways for Lucy Liu's origin. The family murdered while the child watches and survives to get revenge, one of the murderers wears skull jewelry and burns the house down. The scenes have the same running time. And a link is suggested between the Japanese school girl sword violence and the violence of the Western.

I grabbed, maybe stupidly, a moment where Thurman looks at a sword and thinks she can grab it in time, which happens in the same sequence of Death Rides a Horse above.

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman in Bill's house at the end goes for a sword on the TV. She eyes it before she goes for it, as in Death Rides a Horse.

That is probably too common to call an allusion, but again -- Samurai sword in place of the shotgun.

In the second scene from Death Rides a Horse our hero is chasing after Van Cleef to get info on the guys he is after -- guys they are both after. Van Cleef ditches him but not before giving him the same sage advice that appears in the epigraph to Kill Bill, the old Klingon proverb in Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan. Since Death Rides a Horse is a vital Kill Bill link, I can say with confidence that the epigraph filters Spaghetti Westerns through Science Fiction. This is one of Tarantino's big projects -- to link genres you would never link, to find connections between genres, to suggest a larger kind of history Kill Bill is a part of. Kill Bill thinks bigger than other movies. This is what makes it a "smart" movie. Very few movies think beyond their own genres.

But this is not even the only Kill Bill allusion in the scene -- nor the only allusion in the scene that asks us to link genres we would never normally link. The music that plays as our hero goes after Cleef in Death Rides a Horse is the same music that plays as Thurman calls out Lucy Liu and hacks off Sophie Fatale's arm. You will recall in an earlier post that I linked this moment to the Italian horror movie Tenebre. The Spaghetti Western is, of course, a cowboy movie filmed in Italy with Italian actors pretending to be Spanish, and Native America and whatnot. This moment in Kill Bill links up Italian Horror with the Italian Western. Kill Bill thinks about genres broadly, here connecting the violence in both genres to each other to justify his inclusion of both genres in Kill Bill.

And there is one more big Death Rides a Horse connection here. In the next clip I have above from Death Rides a Horse you see that when John Law confronting the first of the men who killed is family. The screen goes red and he has a flashback, in red, to the moment of the murder. He does this every time he first sees each those men again. The screen goes red and shows a flashback in red every time Thurman confronts someone on her Death List Five. Yet again another genre is suggested by the siren that goes off when the screen goes red -- the theme from Ironside that also appears in a Kung Fu movie.

So we get Star Trek, Tenebre, and Ironside (and the Ironside theme is coming via Five Fingers of Death) via Death Rides a Horse.

Tarantino is an especial fan of trailers -- in fact there is a Kill Bill allusion to Black Sunday that comes not from the movie but from a scene used only in the trailer. the trailer for Death Rides a Horse (which was not on the really low end disk I had), had a line like "The bandits who killed five defenseless people that night made one big mistake. They should have killed six."

The trailer is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p17i0CoHBUU

Here the matching line from Kill Bill.

FROM KILL BILL
In the cartoon version of the chapel attack you see at the end of Lucy Liu's origin Thurman says they Kill 9 people that day, but they made one mistake: they should have killed ten.

Myth, Commerce, and Art in Julie Taymor’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark

2011-05-04T16:24:00.001-04:00

[An excellent guest-blog from Mitch!]

A couple of Sundays ago at the Foxwoods Theater, the Greek spider deity named Arachne kissed Peter Parker and asked, “Can you ever forgive me, Spider-Man?” Then, her immortal curse finally broken, she ascended into a pulsing cosmic projection of stars and simply blinked out of view.

So ended the run of Julie Taymor’s infamous, inscrutable, universally derided, dangerous, eccentric, and enthralling train wreck of a musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. The 75 billion dollar money pit will return to Broadway for a June 14 opening, with many of Taymor’s more eccentric flourishes cautiously excised. Arachne’s mythological credentials are an apt example of the weighty theatrical pretension Taymor has smeared all over what could have been – and perhaps SHOULD have been – a by-the-numbers adaptation, so it is fitting that she, as Taymor’s in-story stand in, should ask for poor Spider-Man’s forgiveness; only it turns out she doesn’t need it. Healthy box office receipts suggest that the Spider-Man brand has survived Taymor’s bewildering machinations, and by the time the new movie comes out next year no one will give a second thought to the stylistic apocalypse he has endured (and inflicted upon others) in her version of the musical.

Which is actually kind of a shame to me, because even though it’s certainly a failure on practically every level, Taymor’s variation is the first purely artistic revision of the character in a long time.

Many mean things have been said about Turn Off the Dark, but few of its detractors have noted that it is at least genuinely fearless. And like with Ang Lee’s Hulk movie or Frank Miller’s Spirit movie, the utter lack of caution and external meddling is refreshing, even if the whole thing feels a little misguided. And it does. Much of the show seems to takes place in the space of a fever dream, where leaps in logic are common and events occasionally occur beneath Inception-like layers of illusion – Arachne uses her illusion-weaving talents to make Spider-Man believe a team of super villains have destroyed the world, but in actuality everything is totally fine. This seems to occur for no other reason than to prompt Spider-Man to first loose faith in himself and then regain it later. It doesn’t help that the super villains are introduced in the mode of a fashion show runway. All of this is justifiable, considering that Arachne is an illusionist (or “the only artist working today,” as she says on Taymor’s behalf), but makes a mess out of the stakes of the show. At other times, Taymor and co seem to have their story priorities confused. For instance, an entire song is allocated for Flash Thompson and the bullies to pick on Peter, but the only scene we get establishing Peter’s relationship to Uncle Ben and Aunt May is inter-cut with a scene about Mary Jane and her abusive dad.

Before I go any further I should point out two things. The first is that for a number of reasons, Spider-Man is an omnipresent figure in my own personal mythology. Despite this I have absolutely no emotional connection to him. Only a clinical, perhaps sadistic curiosity in how much he can endure as a piece of intellectual property. Something like Turn Off the Dark is exactly what I’m talking about. In the same way that Batman can be in the Frank Miller comic, the Brave and the Bold cartoon, the Christopher Nolan movies, and a porno parody of the Adam West show, Spider-Man, as a character, can appear on my infant son’s bib AND in a live stage show where he is seduced by an ancient spider deity with a shoe fetish without being wholly compromised. Spider-Man endures. This is mystifying to me. This durability just isn’t there in other licensed characters, I’m thinking of like Shrek, for instance. Hell, Green Lantern probably won’t even come out of his own straightforward movie adaptation unscathed.

The second thing is that I am also a theater critic, but not the sort of critic who usually has any business reviewing a multi-million dollar Broadway musical. I typically review non-linear, experimental performance arty things in small black box theaters downtown. In this case, I needed to speak up though, because Turn Off the Dark is just a few quirks away from a typical off-off-broadway performance piece, only with an inflated budget and a widely recognizable central property.

Being a theater person, I can see what Taymor is up to. As someone who probably never read a comic before, I suspect the only way she could wrap her head around the idea of Spider-Man was to think about it in terms of Greek mythology. Because if there is one thing we pretentious theater people love, it’s Greek shit. So what we get here is Spider-Man (and to another extent the “super hero” in general) as modern mythology – not necessarily a new idea, but one that Taymor runs with and never looks back. Contemporary manifestations and discussions of fate, obsession, the drive for immortality, and determinism litter the script, with mixed results. For instance, a discussion about free will is confused because one character thinks they are talking about the movie, Free Willy – a joke so adorably bad that you can’t help smiling about it.

So with that, I return to my previous statement, which might seem a little dramatic – that Taymor’s revision of the Spider-Man story is the most significant, purely artistic rendering of it in a long time. But if you look at every “new” version of Spider-Man in the past couple of decades and consider only the reason for each version, it becomes clear that each one was motivated only by sales or marketing. The “Ultimate” version of the character, for instance, was a successful attempt to bring in fresh readers. All the animated series and movies were in essence extended advertisements for licensed products. This is not to say that a significant amount of artistry and vision didn’t go into each of these adaptations, just that the motivating force behind them was commercial. I like the comic writer Dan Slott, but when it comes down to it his job is to write the most safely bankable Spider-Man book he can, so that people continue to buy and talk about the book. This is the jaded truth about Spider-Man, his real secret identity: Spider-Man is a mechanism that exists only to make money.

Taymor was certainly out to make money with Turn Off the Dark, having invested some of her own in the production, but clearly aimed much higher than mere blockbuster commercial success. Otherwise, why not just redo the first Spider-Man movie straight down the line? The flying and technical spectacles of the show, which despite the highly publicized difficulties are truly stunning to behold, would surely have been enough to make lots of money. Why not just do the “canonical” Spider-Man story? This must have occurred to Taymor, because she has a lot of fun with it in the narrative. Four characters known as the “Geek Chorus” narrate the story, debating throughout which of Spidey’s escapades warrant inclusion in their definitive Spider-Man story. Her conclusion seems to be that there is no definitive Spider-Man story – only an infinite number of riffs on a core myth. “Did Peter Parker have a special destiny or was he just like everyone else?” one of the Geeks asks, a question I have heard real-life geeks mull over. Taymor’s Geek’s answer is funny, pointing out the futility of such discussions: “He was more like everyone else than anyone else and that’s what made him special.”

Taymor has a stand-in in the Geek Chorus as well, in the form of the Geek’s only female member, Miss Arrow. At one point Miss Arrow casually invents a new villain for the story, a horrendously stupid robot-looking character called Swiss Miss, who is apparently some kind of mutant Swiss Army knife with breasts (played by a male actor, no less). “You can’t just make up a new villain, ” the other Geeks say, appalled. “I just did,” is Arrow/Taymor’s sneering response. She is obviously willing to kill a few fatted calves and break the pre-established rules to get to something new. Even Uncle Ben’s immortal line “With great power comes great responsibility” has been streamlined into the more ballad-friendly “Rise Above.”

Aside from Swiss Miss, the aesthetic is typically pretty immense and spectacular. In one scene at the beginning Arachne’s spider-girls swing back and forth on tapestries to weave this HUGE web out of fabric. It’s simple, but beautiful aerial choreography that goes on just long enough for you to appreciate it. Again – NOTHING to do with Spider-Man, but man did it look good. The cityscapes, which zoom in at hard, dynamic angles or open up out of each other like pages of comic books, and Spider-Man’s interaction with them, are equally impressive. The cast is mostly serviceable, with the exception of Patrick Page, who plays the Green Goblin as a vampy southern drag queen chicken-thing. I know how it sounds, but you really can’t take your eyes off of him. The music by U2 has gotten worse press than it deserves, I think. It’s fairly standard musical music, which always sounds the same to me unless it’s really, really good.

Overall, the experience was worthwhile, and trying to wrap my head around all the problems with the show led me down a lot of fun mental rabbit holes, like does the intent or motivation behind a piece of art really matter? The second Spider-Man movie, for instance, was made purely to make money and sell toys, but it still turned out pretty great. Turn Off the Dark was made to say something new about Spider-Man, to push the limits of theatrical staging, to consider the Super Hero in the context of Greek mythology, and a dozen other admirable goals, but turned out to be, at best, a parody of its own botched designs. Somehow that doesn’t seem fair.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Ironside

2011-04-28T09:38:00.006-04:00

John Milton quotes epic poetry and comments on the history of the genre in Paradise Lost, placing himself as the culmination of a tradition. Tarantino does the same thing in Kill Bill, except instead of quoting Homer he quotes, you know, like Ironside.

FROM IRONSIDE
The siren wails as the opening theme music for Ironside. You can hear it here.

FROM KILL BILL
The same siren wails as she confronts Lucy Liu for the first time since getting out of a coma.

Ironside is a TV show in which Perry Mason plays a cop who gets shot and put in a wheelchair. I assumed that he was called Ironside because of the chair but it turns out, no, his name is just Ironside. So he get together a special task force of three people and ride around in a van and solve crimes. It is actually a lot like House, with the cranky with a heart of gold crippled team leader, a black guy and white guy and a white girl.

Tarantino ganks the siren theme song thing for the moment when Thurman sees her foes for the first time since getting out of her coma.

The shot and left for dead guy seeing revenge is the major link between Ironside and Thurman. But the standard thing Tarantino does when he juxtaposes Thurman with other heroes is to always point out how she is superior (except in the case of Bruce Lee). There is always a sort of a "Oh your guy can beat up ten guys? My girl can beat up 60." Mason is crippled and looking for revenge from being shot in the back. Thurman is walking around after being shot in the head. Mason needs a team of guys? Thurman needs no one.

As a side note like three years ago I saw a movie called Five Fingers of Death, a Shaw Brothers kung fu flick. When he confronted bad guys in that movie the movie stole the theme from Ironside which was used the way Tarantino used it. I am still working on getting that movie to see if there is more to say than this, but I just wanted to give a heads up.

Jason Powell's Invader: I Hardly Knew Her: Kickstarter!

2011-04-25T13:02:00.002-04:00

Hey -- do you guys remember when Jason Powell blogged like a million free blogs about the X-Men for you guys and you guys read them and he never asked you for money or anything and just did it out of the kindness of his X-Men obsessed heart? Do you remember Jason Powell wrote a musical that I totally reviewed? Didn't you wish you could have been in New York to support him by going? Wouldn't you support him now given the chance?

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT YOUR GOOD FRIEND JASON POWELL IN HIS SUPERHERO MUSICAL ENDEAVORS FOR WHICH YOU TOTALLY BASICALLY OWE HIM AT THIS POINT

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Fist of Fury

2011-04-21T09:40:00.007-04:00

"Tarantino just steals from other peoples movies! That's bullshit." It's not bullshit and its not stealing -- it is allusion, in which one artist, John Milton in Paradise Lost for example, uses his work as a way of thinking though the whole genre again.

FROM FIST OF FURY
Bruce Lee fights a bunch of Japanese guys. He is surrounded by them, they make a circle, and he makes a flourish and they all flinch back collectively. You can watch it here:

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman is surrounded by Crazy 88s. They make a circle. She makes a flourish and they all flinch collectively. You can see it in the trailer

FROM FIST OF FURY
Bruce Lee fights a Japanese guy with a Samurai Sword and then exits into a garden. You can see it here:

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman fights guys indoors and goes into a Japanese garden.

Because of some wacky Three's Company style mix-ups the Bruce Lee movie clipped above is known by three titles: Fist of Fury and The Chinese Connection (and also The Iron Hand). The Chinese Connection was intended to be the new title of a different Bruce Lee movie, The Big Boss, to make it seem like the awesome Gene Hackman movie The French Connection (both are about drug connections), but something went wrong. Just to be extra confusing the Big Boss in the US was called Fists of Fury. The point is if you think you have seen all the Bruce Lee movies maybe you did not because the titles are super confusing to keep track of.

Fist of Fury is a Bruce Lee movie that takes place in the early 20th century. It takes place in an international settlement in Shanghai, which kind of confused the hell out of me. So even though Shanghai is a Chinese city, because of the weird politics, which I think have to do with the British taking over the world with the cunning use of flags, somehow the Japanese are a big deal there and can discriminate against the Chinese even though the city is in China. Anyway. Bruce Lee goes back to his martial arts school to marry his girl and finds the head teacher dead. Japanese students immediately show up and start insulting the Chinese. Lee goes to their school where he is super-cordial. Wait. No. He beats them all up single-handedly. The Japanese school retaliates and make Lee a wanted man. Lee goes on the run but also finds the guys who killed his master and hangs them, Spiderman style, from a lamp-post. The Japanese guys raid the Chinese school and kill dudes. Bruce Lee goes to the Boss's house for a showdown, where before he gets to the boss he fights a Russian Guy Mini Boss. In the end he turns himself in but then goes for a flying kick out the door and dies Butch and Sundance style.

In the first clip Lee is going over to the Japanese school to show them what he thinks of their insulting sign. In the second clip he is making his final assault on the bad guy compound.

As in Kill Bill (and Duel to the Death) in Fist of Fury there is a Chinese-Japanese rivalry being invoked. I went over the Chinese v Japanese thing in Kill Bill in the Duel to the Death post. Two more specific things stand out.

First the scene in which Lee is surrounded by Japanese fighters. They circle him, he makes a flourish, and they sort of all flinch. It is an overhead shot, and he is standing on squares, the practice mats I think. The scene in Kill Bill is very similar -- Thurman is surrounded by Japanese fighters there is an overhead shot, she is standing on squares (the lattice of the glass floor) she makes a stance and they all flinch. And if course the connection is stronger because she is dressed as Bruce Lee -- in Game of Death. I should have also let each clip run longer -- in both the heroes handle the large number of guys by getting down on the floor and going after the legs.

The second connection is much more weak I think. The space is similar. The fighting with lots of guys in the house with the big rooms before going to a very peaceful garden outside to fight one on one with a guy. (I should have gotten a better clip -- this clip is after the fight with the lots of guy but before the one on one fight with the Russian in the garden. I think I was trying to just get the transition, but I could have done better). The thing is the more I see these movies the more it seems like this kind of house setup with the garden is pretty standard, at least in movies, and of course so is the fight 100 guys, fight a mini-boss, then fight the boss structure. And the garden is a good place for a showdown. So maybe this is not as strong a connection as it could be. What does stand out to me is Bruce Lee vs a Japanese Swordsman. Thurman, Lee's avatar in the House of the Blue Leaves, of course also faces Japanese Swordsmen.

But the effect is that the House of Blue Leaves is permeated with the Bruce Lee -- Thurman is dressed as him, the scene reminds us of Bruce Lee fight scenes. Tarantino is not trying to overthrow Lee so much as he is trying to imbue his main character with Bruce Lee spirt as she starts her journey. Bruce Lee is like Virgil to her Dante, Obi-Wan to her Skywalker -- except Tarantino does not want the guiding spirit to be external. She embodies Lee, dressing as he dressed and walking where he walked, and fighting as he fought. With Lee only is there a bit of submission to the past -- but it is only temporary, as the Bride will leave Bruce Lee behind after the House of the Blue Leaves. He is but one master.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

2011-04-14T09:29:00.006-04:00

Tarantino steals from other movies, sure, but he has a GOOD REASON. He is using other movies to makes comments on the history of the film, the history of film leading up to his movie, which is retroactively figured as the best one in the new, Tarantino penned history of the worldwide action movie. Which is basically what Milton was doing when he quoted Dante and Virgil and Homer and the Bible right?

FROM CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON
A woman dressed as a man fights in a tea shop with 15 guys for 2 minutes, making wire leaps to upper levels and at one point avoiding a dart with a red flag on it. Here is the fight:

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman avoids a dart with a red flag on it thrown by Lucy Liu

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman's fight with the crazy 88s. 50 guys. 8 minutes.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is about these two serious fighters with no time for love even though they love each other, and a young woman who wants to be a fighter and be with her non-parent-approved boyfriend. She knows martial arts because her woman in waiting is this major baddie our fighters are after. A stolen sword kicks the whole thing off, and it ends with our male fighter dead, never having loved, the baddie dead, and our young woman in some kind of magical ending that never made a ton of sense to me, but it seems sort of tragic and uplifting at the same time. There is a story that if you make a wish and jump of the cliff the wish will be granted, and our young woman jumps off. But this is a little confusing to me in a movie where people can basically fly, and also she asked someone else, the boyfriend, to make the wish (which I think was to be with her in the desert again), and we don't know what her wish, if any, was, and I don't think you can wish for yourself since I think your death is the price of the wish. I don't really remember this well enough to even be writing about it and there is no Kill Bill connection with this scene anyway so MOVING ON.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was this big thing, maybe you heard. Won a ton of awards, highest grossing foreign film in America, got everyone interested in martial arts movies (it was the first one I ever saw, but I was not that impressed -- I DID NOT KNOW ENOUGH TO WATCH MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE). It was choreographed by the guy who choreographed the Matrix -- and who went on to choreograph Kill Bill.

Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon seems to my untrained eye to be very Western, like a romance novel with martial arts in it. The whole "the most important thing is to shirk your responsibilities and follow your heart" thing does not seem at all like, say, Hero, which ends very PRO-STATE AND DUTY. I read a story once about how in China Bridges of Madison County was very well received. In America it was a tragedy about two people who had too much baggage to live their lives for love; the Chinese saw it as a moral and uplifting movie about two people who put aside personal feelings for each other to return to their duty. I don't really know enough about this to make definitive statements, but Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon just rings a little strange to me, and maybe this is why.

To start with the dart. In Kill Bill it seems like Lucy Liu has some samurai spider sense thing -- she senses danger even though there is no real evidence of danger and throws a dart with a red flag in the direction of the danger she senses. That same kind of red flag dart thing appears in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon in the big tea shop battle, but there it seems more like a weapon. Maybe it was supposed to be a weapon for Lucy Liu as well and she just missed because the Bride leapt to the ceiling, because she has her own spider sense? I am not so sure what to do with this connection, if that is what it is.

In Crouching Tiger our young woman character runs away, dresses like a boy and gets into a fight at a 2 level tea shop with a bunch of guys. In Kill Bill Thurman dresses like a boy (Bruce Lee) and gets into a fight at a two level Japanese club thing with a bunch of guys. And both films feature that wire-fu thing where characters can make these lighter than air impossible leaps. That is of course a whole genre of movies, and we have already seen it in Duel to the Death for example, and Master of the Flying Guillotine. But because this is the only part of Kill Bill where Thurman does wire-fu and the setting looks so much like the Crouching Tiger tea shop, and Crouching Tiger was a big movie that introduced the wire-fu thing to American audiences, and the choreographer is the same on both films, it makes me think this is the link.

The fight scenes are similar, and my sense of it is that Tarantino is pumping up the volume on Crouching Tiger, making a similar 15 minute sequence where Crouching Tiger had a scene of less than 2 minutes. Tarantino says "lighter than air yeah, but also crazy bloodshed." He says "girl dressed as boy has fight with a bunch of guys in a two level club -- I can do that better."

There is a moment in the Crouching Tiger scene above where she cuts a guy in the mouth, an unusually violent moment in the movie and a uniquely violent moment in the scene -- no one else really bleeds I don't think or expresses pain beyond "Ooof! I just got hit." Tarantino of course also includes a violent mouth slice, one that he clearly connects to one of the most violent movies ever -- Ichi the Killer, as we have seen. Crouching Tiger was embraced by American audiences as a lovely date film because it has martial arts for the guys, but for the girls it not too violent and has a solid story of tragic love -- this is the classic formula for financial success in Hollywood: appeal to at least two of the four big groups: young men, old men, young women, old women. Tarantino juxtaposes this audience pleasing award winning classy film with a film that basically appeals to no one: Ichi the Killer is such a sadistic movie even I had trouble with it and I watch violent movies all the time. The point of the juxtaposition? Placed in Kill Bill we see that Kill Bill rises above both -- Kill Bill hits Crouching Tiger for a lack of blood and Ichi for a lack of human characters. Kill Bill of course has both -- in part because it has taken from both.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Duel to the Death

2011-04-07T09:40:00.005-04:00

I continue in my quest to save Tarantino from the eight people in the world who say he is not a real filmmaker but a rip-off artist. It is my point that a Tarantino allusion is like a John Milton allusion -- a quotation you are supposed to notice, with an aim toward increasing the power of the work it is embedded into.

FROM DUEL TO THE DEATH
[A ninja leaps up in a room and grabs the rafters with his hands and feet so someone will not see he is there. He is like pressed into the ceiling]

FROM KILL BILL
[Thurman does this movie when GoGo goes looking for her]

FROM DUEL TO THE DEATH
a guy is unrealistically split in half with a samurai sword, cut from head to crotch so he splits into two even halves.

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman cuts a guy into two equal parts in the same way.

Duel to the Death is a 1983 Hong Kong movie about a duel to the death between a Chinese fighter and a Japanese fighter that the countries set up every ten years because they totally hate each other or whatever. If there is one thing I have learned from watching these martial arts movies it is this: The Chinese and Japanese, however much our pan-Asian cuisine may suggest otherwise, are not pals. Our Chinese guy is a nice guy. The Japanese guy way more intense. The Japanese powers-that-be send a bunch of ninjas, working with some Chinese, to rig the fight so their guy will win and kidnap some dudes. Our guys team up as mismatched buddies to fight for the honor of this duel, which they both think should be fair. They beat the ninjas, and then fight each other, and both are mortally wounded in the end. It is one of the better martial arts movies I saw, unrealistic in a fun way.

In the first clip above you see the hide in the ceiling beings move, which also occurs in Kill Bill. The Japanese guy is looking for one of the ninjas. In the second clip you see a guy cut down the middle with a sword head to toe, a move that also features in Thurman's fight with the Crazy 88s. That is the Chinese guy getting a ninja.

There is of course a general thematic Kill Bill connection here as Japanese sword-fighting comes into conflict with Chinese sword fighting. You will recall that Lucy Liu's character's half-Chinese status is a problem with a Japanese boss and she cuts his head off. You will recall that Gordon Liu is Chinese leading a team of Japanese sword guys. And you will recall that because of the Game of Death allusion Thurman is an avatar for the Chinese Bruce Lee who is in Japan fighting Japanese sword guys. Duel to the Death justifies the martial arts mix-up/mash-up, and the cultural one as well.

The hide in the ceiling thing is pretty common I guess. I am not sure how common but I have seen it before I would think. It may be too common to really make a point about.

But the splitting the guy down the middle thing is more specific. With the Paradise Lost examples from the introduction to this project we saw Milton arranging allusions in a line, allowing them to comment on each other. Homer's use of the metaphor of the leaves for example is placed against Isaiah's use of the leaves, and of course for Milton the Greeks no matter how awesome always lose to BIBLICAL FUCKING TRUTH. The clip above, which I showed last time, alludes to Ichi The Killer.

FROM ICHI THE KILLER
Ichi cuts a guy into two parts from head to crotch.

I feel strongly that it does. When you place it in with the clip from Duel to the Death a commentary on the films emerges. Ichi's uber-violence is placed in a context -- a context that includes martial arts movies. Something of Ichi's originality is lost when it is placed against Duel to the Death. Yeah the dude getting split in half is shocking, Tarantino seems to say, but it is not like no one did that before. Get over it. Of course this takes from Tarantino's originality as well (if you know your Bloom this move is called Kenosis) -- but as this is a split second in Kill Bill, and a major set piece in Ichi, Tarantino can take the hit that Ichi takes less well. And of course the argument is made -- Duel to the Death is used to weaken Ichi so Kill Bill will overtake Ichi in terms of being a kickass uber-violent movie. Ichi is one of a handful of films competing for this particular prize and this is how Tarantino handles it.

Advantage Tarantino.

PART 2

This is not really a part two but detritus. When I started this project I was looking for predecessors for Thurman's walk in the hot sun, and found one in Duel to the Death. But it is kind of silly -- a million movies do that. Trying to talk about that scene as an allusion is like saying Spawn's cape is an allusion to everyone who wears a cape. It is sort of true, but such a standard genre thing it is kind of outside the scope of this project. I could collect 30 clips of guys walking in the hot sun, but I am not really sure what that would get us.

FROM DUEL TO THE DEATH
Samurai walks in the big lens flair sun across the desert toward the camera.

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman does the same.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Ichi the Killer

2011-03-31T09:20:00.006-04:00

Tarantino makes bits of his movies look like bits in other peoples movies. He is not a plagiarist -- far from it. He wants to remind you of other movies because he is conversation with other filmmakers, often figuring how to trump them, even his buddies.

Special warning on this post: Ichi the Killer is famously one of the most violent movies ever made. The clips below reflect some of that.

FROM ICHI THE KILLER
a guy turns around and smokes a cigarette. he has big slits in his cheeks and the corners of his mouth are held together with piercing. When he blows the smoke out it comes out of the slits not his mouth.

FROM ICHI THE KILLER
A guy has a heel with a short blade in it. He does this fast move at this dude. The dude is shocked and says something brief. Then he unrealistically splits in two from head to crotch. You can see some of this here but be warned it is extremely violent:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qEakuiEBEA

FROM KILL BILL
In her fight in the House of the Blue Leaves with the Crazy 88s Thurman slices through a guys cheeks then immediately cuts a guy down the middle from head to crotch splitting him into two halves.

Ichi the Killer, directed by Takashi Miike, is a story of gang warfare. Ichi is a "murder savant" as my friend Tim puts it. He has a handler, who has him sort of brainwashed, and who sends him at targets, members of his old gang. Ichi can only get sexual satisfaction from sadism -- in one of the most crazy scenes the opening title rises from a pool of his ejaculate after he watches a woman get beaten and raped. Ichi kills a boss but it is cleaned up so it appears the boss disappears. The boss's right hand man Kakihara goes looking for him, by torturing lots of people, including people in his own gang. Kakihara is a very brutal sadist and a masochist who longs to be tortured as he tortures others. When he catches wind of Ichi he becomes very excited that this super killer could finally bring him the pain he wants. But their meeting is a total anti-climax as Ichi breaks down crying and Kakihara does not get the duel he wants. What happens after that does not make much sense (Kakihara hallucinates Ichi attacking him and kills himself, but then is alive later unhurt and someone hung the handler?). You watch it for the crazy killings.

The scenes above feature the first time we see Kakihara, as well as Ichi killing the guy who was beating and raping a woman. How he was able to inflict that wound with a blade in his heel that looks to be an inch long I really don't know, and it is part of what makes the scene funny. One of the things I don't like about Ichi is how it combines realistic violence such as women being beaten and raped, and this kind of wacky crazy violence. I want just wacky crazy violence thank you.

Tarantino really enjoys the films of Takashi Miike. I had not expected much of a connection to Kill Bill really -- Ichi is a violent film, Kill Bill is a violent film, and naturally there was going to be some coincidental overlap, as we have seen in past movies involving arm severing (Tenebre) and eyes bleeding (City of the Living Dead), both kinds of violence that show up in Kill Bill. But the Ichi connection turned out to be a real one, one that seems to me to be deliberate. The two most memorable things about Ichi the Killer are Kakihara's mouth slits and the dude that gets sliced in half top to bottom. So I don't think it is a coincidence that in the melee at the House of the Blue Leaves Thurman cuts a guy's cheeks open leaving him with slits in both (a very unusual and unexpected wound you would not expect in the scene), and then immediately and impossibly cuts a dude in half top to bottom. In a battle where she kills like 60 guys two examples of Ichi-trademark violence are right next to each other.

This re-incorporation of two images from Ichi takes a problem in Ichi and addresses it. Ichi is known almost exclusively for its violence. Tarantino takes what works in Ichi and gives it a context that works better than the non-voilent parts of Ichi. He gives it a story that makes more sense, with more human and believable characters. He takes what works in Ichi and leaves what does not work behind. He says "hey, I love me some splatter but wouldn't it be better if that splatter was a part of a movie that had more sympathetic characters, so you did not spend the non violent parts of the movie waiting to get back to the violence?" I think it is actually a very powerful revision, one that both celebrates Ichi and also demolishes it, which is kind of what I expect allusion to do when used properly.

PART 2

There is to my eye another bit lifted from Ichi for the same reason:

FROM ICHI THE KILLER
A man in tortured -- his cheeks are pulled very hard away from his body by two people. The flesh is unrealistically stretched.

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman bites the lip of her rapist and the flesh is unrealistically stretched.

In the Ichi clip Kakihara continues to investigate what happened to his boss through torture. Tarantino takes and uses the stretchy-flesh violence in Kill Bill for a rape scene, which something Ichi returns to again and again. I feel like you don't see stretchy-flesh violence that often. Except Tarantino's revision of Ichi is that the woman is able to save herself, something that does not happen in Ichi, where the woman who is saved by Ichi is immediately and non-sensically killed by Ichi. Tarantino is all about having his women be in the same position as other film characters but giving them lots of agency and control and general kick-assery.

In Kill Bill Tarantino gives Thurman access to the kind of extreme violence Kakihara and Ichi inflict, as well as the violence that was inflicted on Kakihara. She is the inheritor and controller of a great tradition of extreme violence as Tarantino is.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Tokyo Drifter

2011-03-24T09:10:00.005-04:00

Tarantino studies 101. First lesson. Tarantino allusion are like Milton's allusions: they have a point. And the point of an artist is always the same. To be the best.

FROM TOKYO DRIFTER
A guy is escaping through like the bowels of this building that is a club. Part of the ceiling above him is glass -- the glass of the club where you can see people dancing. You see the soles of their shoes. Here is the trailer:

FROM KILL BILL
Thurman walks toward Liu in the dance club and there is a shot of her shoes from the bottom.

Tokyo Drifter is about a yakuza gang that disbands. The other side tries to hire our guy but he refuses, and lives the life of a wanderer. Assassins get involved, our man's former boss to whom he has absolute loyalty betrays him, more assassins, our guy kills everybody, and lives the life of a wanderer, ditching even his girlfriend.

In the clip above our man is escaping the a club where he was held captive.

Tokyo Drifter is a fantastically stylish movie, wacky 60s pop art style. Looks like this, often:

One of the stylish points is that the the club our man is at, Japanese obviously, has a see through floor not unlike the floor of the Japanese club in Kill Bill.

There is even a team of sword-fighters running around a place that looks a lot like The House of the Blue Leaves, but there seem to often be spaces like that in Japanese movies. The abstract use of color is a bit like the Highlander-SamuraiFiction thing in Kill Bill, but not really. At one point our guy goes into a Cowboy style saloon, so you could draw another connection to Kill Bill which also features Japanese swords and Cowboy stuff, but it does not seem crazy significant. Also modern music and sword fights I guess.

FROM KILL BILL
Modern music and a bunch of sword fighters in a space that looks similar to the House of the Blue Leaves.

The connections are not super strong, but there you go. I know the director is a favorite of Tarantino's, but I don't have much specific to say. I would love to say something about the linkage between Tokyo Drifter and Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger but I don't really have anything. They can't all be winners.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Lone Wolf And Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx

2011-03-17T09:03:00.004-04:00

I continue my weekly look at movies that have influenced Kill Bill. It is my opinion that Tarantino positions his film in relation to these other films in canny ways.

FROM LONE WOLF AND CUB: BABY CART AT THE RIVER STYX
[A samurai is attacked by three women and he quickly slashes at all three. When he puts the blade away they all three fall over dead. You can see it at 1:20 here ]

FROM KILL BILL
[Thurman faces off against three fighters at the House of the Blue Leaves. She strikes all three quickly and when she hits the hilt of her sword they all fall over dead. ]

FROM LONE WOLF AND CUB: BABY CART AT THE RIVER STYX
[Samurai kills a guy getting his blood on the camera]

FROM KILL BILL
[Sophie Fatale's severed arm gets blood on the camera.]

Lone Wolf and Cub is a manga series as well as a series of movies about a disgraced samurai who used to be the Shogun's executioner. He was framed for treason and his pregnant wife murdered. But he was able to save the kid and now they travel together as he earns money as a freelance assassin, to eventually get revenge.

In the first clip above Lone Wolf is targeted for assassination by a clan of female assassins working for the guy who made it look like Lone Wolf was a traitor. In the second Lone Wolf carries out the assassination he was hired for.

Most of Baby Cary at the River Styx was used, along with some footage from Sword of Vengeance to make the American version Shogun Assassin. Shogun Assassin is the movie BB wants to watch with Thurman -- WAY to violent for a normal little girl as you can see. The intro from Shogun Assassin is also sampled at the beginning of Liquid Swords, the best of the Wu-Tang clan spin-offs, and one I think superior to Enter the Wu-Tang. Liquid Swords is produced by The RZA who did music for Kill Bill.

And of course Lone Wolf and Cub directly related to Kill Bill as it is about an assassin and child, which is what Thurman and BB are at the end. I have said that Master of the Flying Guillotine justifies Bill sequel as it features a blind killer and a one armed one, as Driver and Fatale are blind and one armed. Lone Wolf and Cub provides further justification for this point, as it features an assassin with a kid. And of course Tarantino has made the two males female as is his way.

The allusions in the clips above are both very arguable. As in Kill Bill three opponents are struck and then fall when the sword is hit (put back in the saber in Lone Wolf). Tarantino has reversed the genders of the characters involved, which is what he always does (and there are female Crazy 88s -- they are just not victims of this move).

Blood on the camera is not unique in cinema, but I grabbed it anyway, just because Lone Wolf and Cub obviously important to Kill Bill thematically.

If we do want to say this is an allusion, than it is a simple one -- part of that "establish that you have done your research thing" that is so pervasive in the House of the Blue Leaves.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Tenebre

2011-03-10T09:24:00.002-05:00

My project of following Tarantino's allusions to other movies in Kill Bill rolls along. Tarantino's action movie surveys the history of trash cinema as Milton surveys the history of epic poetry -- through quotation, which is then interpreted.

Special note on this one. Normally I don't care about spoiling movies from the 80s but Tenebre is particularly awesome and has a particularly big secret, a secret revealed in the clip below, and in the discussion. And Tenebre only has a very arguable Kill Bill link. It is a hyper violent Italian crime movie in the DePalma mode. If you don't care move ahead, but I wanted to give you the chance to see Tenebre spoiler free.

Also I have never warned about the extreme violence in these clips I put up. Perhaps I should? I guess I assume if you are watching clips that relate to Kill Bill you expect to see violence, right? But extreme violence below.

FROM TENEBRE
[A woman gets her armed severed by a hatchet and blood sprays everywhere.]

FROM TENEBRE
[a detective looks around an empty room. He sees a handkerchief on the ground. When he bends down to pick it up we see that someone is standing DIRECTLY behind him and that he was blocking our view of that guy 100%. The guy kills him with an axe.]

FROM KILL BILL
Sophie Fatale is directly in front of Thurman, blocking Liu's ability to see her. She moves to the side and cuts her arm off.]

Tenebre is the story of a series of gruesome murders taking place in Italy. The murders mirror the murders in a popular novel and the novelist, who is visiting Italy, gets in on the investigation. It is directed by Dario Argento, who has been called the Hitchcock of Italy, though he seems to be more Brian DePalma to my eye, in part because DePalma uses some of his tricks -- including the trick in the second clip above, as you may remember from Raising Cain. These horrific Italian crime movies are called Giallos (Italian for "yellow" -- it refers to the color of the pulp books that inspire the genre). I did not expect to like them but they are awesome. Tarantino converted me to a fan of this whole genre.

The first clip comes at the end of the movie. The novelist's ex-wife is murdered by someone we don't see. In the movie the guy committing the murders is a journalist obsessed with the novel -- but when the journalist is killed brutally we are left in the dark as to who the killer could be. In the big twist it turns out our killer is the novelist himself, our hero. The journalist did kill lots of people because of the novel, but our novelist killed him and decided to keep going, killing his ex-wife and agent for sleeping together. Moments after he kills his ex-wife the detective arrives at the house and he fakes killing himself in front of the detective. When the detective steps out and returns he finds the body gone and then our novelist (magically) appears behind him.

The Kill Bill link is very debatable. A woman with a severed arm -- in both movies hacked off for reason of revenge. You have to think that is going to be sort of similar to another woman with a severed arm. The crazy excess blood spray. (I do not really know why I call it excessive. I have no idea how much you would bleed if your arm were chopped off. Probably a lot). I was going to not include it at all, except the reveal of our novelist behind the detective is an Argento trademark in the same scene with the severed arm, and the Bride reveals herself to Lucy Liu in a sort of similar way (emerging from behind a figure who blocks our view) just before taking her arm off. It's probably nothing, but I wanted to have it here for consideration.

If I wanted to make a thing out of it I would say that Tarantino revises the scene by having a character (rather than the audience) witness the "emerge from behind" effect.

It is notable that the City of the Living Dead allusion and the Tenebre allusion are both pretty weak. The whole Italian horror thing may just be a coincidence, based in the fact that all three directors are trying to be hyper-violent, and are coming up with similar stuff.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Kung Fu

2011-03-03T09:20:00.005-05:00

Tarantino's Kill Bill often looks like other movies. Why? Because he wants to remind you of the past in order to re-write the past. Because when you get to re-write the past you get to control the future, and that is what Tarantino aims to do with his movie -- dominate the future of the action film.

FROM KUNG FU

[David Carradine kicking ass in Kung Fu: The TV show, which takes place in the old west. You can see an example here: ]

An even more famous allusion than Thurman in the Bruce Lee tracksuit -- David Carradine is the lead from the TV series Kung Fu. Like the Game of Death allusion this one seems minor but it is also crucial and there is more to it than first appears.

In Kung Fu Carradine plays a half American half Chinese guy who is trained by monks in China. When his master is killed and he kill the murderer in revenge he goes on the run -- to the American west, where he searches for his half brother, helping people along the way and moving along at the end of every episode.

The flute Bill plays when he is introduced in Kill Bill volume 2 is the one he used in Kung Fu, I am pretty sure. I read Carradine's Kill Bill diary, and I am pretty sure it is his flute. I have to re-check that.

Obviously, like Kung Fu, Kill Bill combines elements of Kung Fu and the Western.

Herbie Pilato's The Kung Fu Book of Caine: The Complete Guide to TV's First Mystical Eastern Western (1993) talks about the casting of Kung Fu

Before the filming of the Kung Fu TV movie began, there was some discussion as to whether or not an Asian actor should play Kwai Chang Caine. Bruce Lee was considered for the role. In 1971, Bruce Lee wasn't the cult film hero he later became for his roles in The Big Boss (1971), Fist of Fury (1972), Way of the Dragon (1972) and Enter the Dragon (1973). At that point he was best known as Kato on TV's Green Hornet (1966–1967) (Kung Fu guest actor Robert Ito reports that Lee hated the role of Kato because he "thought it was so subservient"). "In my eyes and in the eyes of Jerry Thorpe," says Harvey Frand, "David Carradine was always our first choice to play Caine. But there was some disagreement because the network was interested in a more muscular actor and the studio was interested in getting Bruce Lee." Frand says Lee wouldn't have really been appropriate for the series — despite the fact that he went on to considerable success in the martial arts film world. The Kung Fu show needed a serene person, and Carradine was more appropriate for the role. Ed Spielman agrees: "I liked David in the part. One of Japan's foremost Karate champions used to say that the only qualification that was needed to be trained in the martial arts was that you had to know how to dance. And on top of being an accomplished athlete and actor, David could dance." Nonetheless, grumbling from the Asian community would have made sense, given the fact that major roles for Asian actors were almost nonexistent. James Hong, an actor on the show and ex-president of the Association of Asian/Pacific American Artists (AAPAA) says that at the time Asian actors felt that "if they were going to do a so-called Asian hero on Kung Fu, then why don't they hire an Asian actor to play the lead? But then the show went on, we realized that it was a great source of employment for the Asian acting community." In fact, Hong says, Carradine had a good relationship with the Asian community. (pages 32–33, via Wikipedia)

It actually goes farther than this. Bruce Lee's widow claims in her memoirs that the IDEA for Kung-Fu was from Lee and that Warner Brothers stole it.

Then, just to make things super-complicated in Kung Fu: The Movie Bruce Lee's son plays Carradine's long lost son -- named Chung Wang (which is the name of Jackie Chan's character in Shanghai Noon). Then in Kung Fu: The Next Generation Brandon Lee plays Carradine's great great grandson. In Kung Fu: The Legend Continues Carradine plays his own grandson. Crazy incestuous Kung Fu casting.

When you put the Carradine and Lee connections together a subterranean plot emerges in the House of the Blue Leaves. We don't have every element yet but Thurman vs GoGo on her way to Bill becomes Lee fighting Chan (marketed as kind of weak sauce Bruce Lee) on his way to get revenge on Carradine for stealing his role in Kung Fu.

PART 2

FROM KUNG FU

[Closing Credits of Kung Fu -- Carradine walks across the desert toward the camera with the sun huge behind him]

FROM KILL BILL

[Thurman walking across the desert toward the camera with the sun huge behind her.]

Probably not a reference. The sun beating down on a figure walking alone across a dusty landscape is pretty common in Westerns and also shows up in Samurai movies. But it is worth pointing out that the closing credits of Kung Fu echo this moment in Kill Bill.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: The 36th Chamber of the Shaolin

2011-02-24T09:59:00.002-05:00

Tarantino is obviously EXACTLY like John Milton, because both men quote the works of others, arrange those quotes in relation to each other and to the new work they are apart of, and they do so in order to achieve mastery over their influences.

FROM THE 36TH CHAMBER OF THE SHAOLIN

[The opening credits to the movie. Gorden Liu does martial arts movies by himself. You can see it here: ]

FROM KILL BILL

Gorden Liu as Johnny Mo in Kill Bill. Thurman kills him on the balcony railing at the House of the Blue Leaves.

FROM KILL BILL

[Gordon Liu as Pai Mei, training Thurman to punch through a board from 3 inches away.]

You can see Liu in both roles in the trailer:

Gordon Liu is the main character in 1978 Shaw Brothers production The 36th Chamber of the Shaolin, which is the story of a guy who becomes a monk to learn Kung-Fu, so he can go back and help his people who are being oppressed.

The Shaw Brothers made a ton of the big 70s Grindhouse Kung Fu films that Tarantino loves -- which is why he puts the Shaw Brothers logo at the start of Kill Bill, even though Kill Bill is not really Shaw Brothers production.

36th Chamber, also called Master Killer, is also a favorite of Tarantino's Kill Bill collaborator The Wu Tang Clan's RZA, who wrote original music for Kill Bill. It is because of this movie that the Wu Tang Clan's first album is called Enter the Wu Tang (36 Chambers), and one of their members is called Master Killer. The RZA spent a lot of time watching this movie, and movies like it in New York when he was a kid, and it was a big influence on him -- so much so that he does a full 2 hour audio commentary track on the DVD of the movie. And from the commentary it is clear he has seen this movie enough to memorize it.

Gordon Liu plays actually two roles in Kill Bill, one in each volume: he plays Johnny Mo (the leader of the Crazy 88s) and Pai Mei.

I am not 100% sure but I think the music that plays in the first Kill Bill clip above is by the RZA -- so the RZA is supplying fight music -- and death scene music -- for his hero.

On the Johnny Mo front it is interesting that Gordon Liu is Chinese, leading what is presumably a team of Japanese swordsmen. It would just be an uninteresting accident of the movie except that the movie itself goes out of its way to point out that a half Japanese half-Chinese American woman played by Lucy Liu is leaning the whole team. We will discuss this more as we go but the mixing of race here mirrors the mixing of genres, many of which are clearly identified with specific countries (Spaghetti Westerns, Samurai movies, Kung Fu movies, Giallo horror movies and so on). Race and Tarantino is a big subject -- from using the n-word in Pulp Fiction to casting a white woman as the incarnation of Bruce Lee -- that it looks like we will be talking about in the future.

On the Pai Mei front there is an even bigger Gordon Liu connection. 36th Chamber of the Shaolin is famous particularly for the lengthy training sequence -- it is basically the middle part of the movie, maybe a third or even half of the running time. All of act 2 is the training. Liu has to master 35 different chambers, each of which teach him something about kung fu even if he does not realize how. Like the training sequence in Karate Kid, he hits bells and carries water and so on. At the end of his training he is offered the position of head of whatever chamber he choses (except the 35th, which is old men doing some kind of very abstract philosophy religious thing). Liu rejects this offer and wants to invent a 36th -- a chamber where the training will be open to the public, not just monks, so that they can defend themselves in the real world instead of living in a monastery. For this he is banished -- though the RZA's take on it is that is a silent approval: the monks send him out into the world so that he can do what he wanted in the first place. If you know this, his role as Pai Mei takes on an added significance -- it is like a glimpse into the end of the life of Liu's character from 36th Chamber. As in 36th Chamber we see the master in charge of one skill -- here the punching through a board -- which must be mastered before you can move on, and we see the same kind of techniques: basically torturing people till they get it right.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Game of Death

2011-02-17T00:34:00.008-05:00

Tarantino. Not stealing things. Re-interpreting. Tarantino smart like Milton not dumb like Rob Liefeld.

FROM GAME OF DEATH

[Bruce Lee being awesome in Game of Death. He is in a yellow jumpsuit with black stripes down the side. You can see it here: ]

FROM KILL BILL

[Thurman on her way to the House of the Blue Leaves in a yellow motorcycle suit with black stripes down the sides. You can see it in the trailer]

This one is maybe the most famous and obvious of the Kill Bill allusions, but it is also pretty central to the House of the Blue Leaves, and a bit more complex than may first appear.

Thurman wears the outfit that Bruce Lee wears in Game of Death. Game of Death is a TERRIBLE movie. The whole movie is built around 11 minutes of footage of Lee from another movie he was unable to complete before dying. Lee's character is played by more than one other person in the course of the film, and the filmmakers take every opportunity to shoot conversations from far away and have the fake Bruce Lee's wear glasses, and beards, and dress like old men, or be in bandages after plastic surgery. Stock footage of Lee is intercut but it sticks out as the change in film quality is really obvious. Chuck Norris is in the movie sort of -- they just incorporated footage from Enter the Dragon to sort of shoehorn him in there without his permission. The character fakes his own death (he is an actor, basically Bruce Lee, trying to get away from some kind of mob-syndacate thing that is after him) and footage from Lee's actual funeral is used. At the worst point in the movie the main character is at his dressing table in front of a mirror and we see an over the shoulder shot of him -- and on the mirror they literally took like a cardboard cutout of Lee's face and put it on the mirror to make it look like that was the reflection of the guy in the chair.

There is also a weird moment in the movie when Bruce Lee's character is filming a scene and is shot with what is supposed to be a prop gun, but it has a real bullet in it, which is how Bruce Lee's son would die when filming The Crow.

The clip above is ACTUAL BRUCE LEE fighting, and it is pretty awesome. I could have shown you the scene where he fights Kareem Abdul Jabar, which is pretty cool, but this one has the better fighting.

The outfit has become iconic and is alluded to in lots of things, including Shaolin Soccer, Jet Li's HIgh Risk, and Revenge of the Nerds. It is also an unlockable outfit in a lot of video games, including Dead or Alive 4, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, and Street Fighter 6. (Wikipedia -- I use Wikipedia and The Internet Movie Database for a lot of the trivia you see in these posts).

The important thing to keep in mind about Tarantino's use of the outfit is that is does not simply mean "Bruce Lee." It means "Ultimate Bruce Lee," Bruce Lee at the top of his game, as he was when he died. This is important because there are many Bruce Lee projects being alluded to in the House of the Blue Leaves, and they are not all equal.

It is also worth pointing out that in the original project, the movie the Bruce Lee footage was intended to be a part of, he is climbing a tower defeating opponents who are weak because they rely on a single fighting style, whereas Lee combines them into a new whole. A bit like what Tarantino does as he combines styles to make a powerful film. You can see why he might be attracted to Lee for the battle with influence that is a big part of the House of the Blue Leaves sequence in Kill Bill.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Star Trek: Wrath of Khan

2011-02-10T09:55:00.004-05:00

I continue to say hey this guy Tarantino may be up to something other than just stealing stuff. Like Milton. You quote stuff, reinterpret it, that kind of thing.

FROM STAR TREK

[Ricardo Mantalban in a spaceship says something like "Kirk, my old friend, do you know the Klingon proverb that revenge is a dish best served cold? Well in space it is very cold."]

FROM KILL BILL

[The epigraph to Kill Bill: "Revenge is a dish best served cold. Old Klingon Proverb]

I talked about the epigraph to Kill Bill before, but totally failed to provide the clip from Star Trek. Here it is. [yeah this sucks without the clip but I am leaving this here as a placeholder. Sorry. More exciting things next week.]

Star Trek Wrath of Khan features Khan, a genetically enhanced survivor of the 1990 (!) Eugenics War, getting revenge on Kirk for banishing him to a wasteland which lead to the death of his wife. It is one of Tarantino's favorite movies, and is kind of awesome, although lamely Kirk and Khan never get face to face in the movie, which seems like a pretty big mistake.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Highlander

2011-02-03T09:14:00.005-05:00

I argue that Tarantino does not just steal from other movies but repurposes them, as Milton did with epic poetry and as you might with magazines, if you were making some kind of letter indicating you kidnapped some dude.

FROM HIGHLANDER
[The end of Highlander. Christopher Lambert and Clancy Brown sword fight in a warehouse. The Warehouse is dark and they guys are not super well lit. There is a big window behind them and the only thing you can see through the window is blue light. You can see it here: CLICK HERE]

FROM KILL BILL

[Thurman fights guys against a background of abstract blue squares at the House of the Blue Leaves. She and the other fighters in in silhouette. You can see it in the trailer:

]

So last time I said that Tarantino was not doing much with the Samurai Fiction allusion, other than just sort of using it because it looked cool. But one thing he does do is change the color from red to blue. It seems like an inconsequential change -- until you see the final battle from Highlander.

Highlander is the story of a handful of sword-fighters, who can only be killed if their heads are cut off. They battle throughout the centuries till there is one left, till they get "the prize," which turns out to be like mystical knowledge to help humanity or something. We actually only see five immortal fighters in the movie, and two are throwaway characters. The Sean Connery character is really just a mentor for Christopher Lambert's Highlander, to teach him so he can defeat evil Clancy Brown in New York City. It was written by an undergraduate for a UCLA screenwriting class and then bought for $200,000. If you are writing a screenplay "Immortal unless the head it cut off" is the perfect rule to justify modern day sword-fights.

Clancy Brown, by the way, is also the bad guy from Carnivale. His satanic bad guy thing is really undercut by the fact that he a) has a distinctive voice and b) provides that voice for Mr Crabbs on Spongebob Squarepants.

Highlander is weirdly a predecessor to Kill Bill. You wouldn't think of it so much, in part because it is a fantasy movie, but there just aren't that many movies taking place in modern times where people are having massive sword fights, with Japanese swords, as Kill Bill and Highlander do. Like Kill Bill, Highlander has a rock and roll soundtrack -- HIghlander's is provided by Queen. Like Kill Bill, with is half-Chinese half Japanese Lucy Liu sword-fighting a white woman, Highlander is also cross cultural -- in the clip above Christopher Lambert is a Scottish guy using a Japanese sword he got from an Egyptian serving the Spanish court to kill a Russian.

Just after the lights are turned off in Kill Bill but before we go to the full on silhouette over colored squares thing, it does look a lot like the scene above in Highlander, which is the final battle: the dark figures fighting against a background of blue squares. Tarantino transitions through the very end of highlander Highlander, before filtering it through the very start of Samurai Fiction. He uses Highlander to justify coloring Samurai Fiction blue.

He connects Highlander, Samurai Fiction and Kill Bill as rock and roll samurai sword movies. Brothers in a way.

It certainly is not the most interesting link. This seems to be another instance of Tarantino incorporating references to other movies just to pump up the density, just to make the House of Blue Leaves be as encyclopedic as possible. The House of the Blue Leaves sequence, which you keep having to remind yourself is chronologically Thurman's fight, has something in common with all those doctoral dissertation introductions, where you survey the work done by scholars thus far, before bringing your thing to the table.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Samurai Fiction

2011-01-27T08:32:00.008-05:00

I continue to say, hey, maybe Tarantino is not so much stealing from other movies as transforming them into a new whole -- not unlike how Milton drew on epic poetry.

FROM SAMURAI FICTION

[Opening credits. Fighters in silhouette do moves in front of a background that consists of abstract red squares with black gutters. It looks like two fighters, perhaps training. They are not fighting each other. You can see it here:

]

FROM KILL BILL

[In the House of the Blue Leaves Thurman fights guys. They are all in silhouette and are against a background of abstract blue squares with black gutters. You can see it in the trailer

]

FROM KILL BILL

[Pai Mei and Thurman train in silhouette against a red background.]

Samurai Fiction is a mostly black and white comedy samurai movie with a rock and roll soundtrack from 1998. The plot revolves around a guy trying to get a stolen sword back, when no one really wants him to. After his first failed attempt, in which he is almost killed, he is taken care of by an old man and the old man's daughter. The daughter falls in love with him. The old man turns out to be a super samurai warrior, who helps him get the sword back by teaching our guy to throw rocks at his opponent instead of face him with a sword. They win.

The Samurai Fiction clip above is from the opening credits.

The sword used in the movie, the stolen sword, belongs to Toshirō Mifune, from Seven Samurai, which gives the film a bit of a historical kick. The title Samurai Fiction echoes Pulp Fiction. These are Wikipedia observations. Tomoyasu Hotei, who stars as the guy who steals the sword and also wrote the music to Samurai Fiction, wrote a song important to Kill Bill -- Battle Without Honor or Humanity, used most importantly in the Kill Bill trailer.

I am not going to lie. On its own I don't really have a good link to Kill Bill here. I mean obviously Tarantino is taking the visual, but I don't see him really doing much with this one. This seems more like an old fashioned homage. This one IS Tarantino doing what people say he does. He saw a cool thing in a movie and wanted to use it in his movie, in part because he wanted to pay tribute to the actor who wrote this song he liked, to a director who was thinking of Pulp Fiction when he named his movie Samurai Fiction.

The only thing I might argue is that Tarantino adds to the pure style of Samurai Fiction urgency. Nothing is at stake in the opening credits of Samurai Fiction. It is just a mood. Tarantino uses the style as part of the narrative so that you will care more. And of course as is Tarantino's way he pumps up the volume: more fighters.

But we are not done with Samurai Fiction yet -- next week we will see how it is actually being filtered through Highlander.

Oh, and you also see a bit of a Samurai Fiction reference in the training sequence of Kill Bill -- the two figures silhouetted against a red background, training.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: [some problems]

2011-01-26T17:24:00.002-05:00

I wanted to write a brief note letting you know about some problems with the Kill Bill project.

The major influence on Kill Bill is Lady Snowblood. I needed like 8 clips from that movie. Frequently I am told that material I put up on Youtube "matches third party content" but that no action need be taken now. Twice now -- with those two cinema classics Citizen Kane and the Highlander -- embedding has been disabled, but I could still link to it. With Lady Snowblood clips were completely disabled -- as in you could not view them at all. I was sent an email in Japanese. I am not sure what it said but the next time I went into YouTube before I could enter I had to read a letter stating that there was a strike on my account, and press a button saying I understood. A few hours later a second letter went out to me, and a second strike warning went in front of my account -- for more clips as part of that batch of Lady Snowblood uploads. There were a few Lady Snowblood clips on my youtube account unmentioned in either warning, and I felt a third letter was imminent. I third letter would have been a third strike, and the termination of my YouTube account altogether.

There was also an added problem. Even if a third letter was not coming I have many more clips to upload. The strikes against my account did not go away once I deleted the material. So anyone who wanted to make an issue out of an upcoming, or past clip, would cause my account to be disabled.

I had hoped that my keeping the clips private -- that is you had to have the link to view the clip; you could not just search YouTube for the links because you were in the mood to watch The Best of Lady Snowblood -- would keep strikes from coming against me. I was giving out the links on a blog doing academic work. I had also hoped that the short length of many of the clips (one Lady Snowblood clip was 18 seconds) would give me a pass. I had also hoped the fact that I was a an assistant professor doing University grant funded work would give me a pass. But the strikes were not being issued on or acted by people easily contacted. A computer saw that the material on youtube matched material it its databanks and sent a message you youtube computers and those computers sent a message to me and acted against my account.

I could have let them shut down my account and then fought with them about it, as I think I am in the right, but I did not want to deal with it before I got more info on what to do. To be fair to them I did have like 200 clips of other peoples stuff up on youtube and while I was working it into an academic argument, they had no way of knowing that.

So I took down ALL the Kill Bill clips, even for posts already up. I have enough posts in the can to last till the end of May if they go up once a week. I plan for these to still go up, but they are going to have to go up without the clips. This is going to make them less fun, but be assured that I am still working on this project and a bunch of blogs with clips was never the final form this was going to take. I hope to have something fancy to show you eventually, built in part out of the clips on my hard drive. Hopefully putting them in a new and clearer context will help.

Anyway, thanks for bearing with me.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Shanghai Noon

2011-01-20T09:50:00.004-05:00

I continue to insist that Tarantino is JUST LIKE JOHN MILTON. They both allude to earlier works as part of a large interpretative project, which ends with their work being the culmination of a long tradition that no one will ever view the same way again.

FROM SHANGHAI NOON
[Jackie Chan ties a rope to a horseshoe and uses it as a weapon. At one point he does a flourish where he wraps it around his neck and then swings it out from there at his opponent.

FROM KILL BILL
[GoGo uses her bladed ball on a chain weapon. She swings it around her neck and swings it from there at her opponent.]

Shanghai Noon is surprisingly fun movie, actually. Jackie Chan is an 19th century imperial guard in China who tasked with getting Lucy Lui's kidnapped princess back, after she is stolen and taken to Nevada. He teams up with Owen Wilson's cowboy and they win. The end. What makes it fun is that the kid-friendly martial arts scenes, including the one clipped above, are mixed with Owen Wilson being MAXIMUM OWEN WILSON: digressive, self-conscoious, super aw-shucks casual, and just really funny. Some people don't like him. I like him. That is going to be the end of that.

Chan uses his horseshoe on a rope weapon as GoGo uses hers: there is the exact move with the rope around the neck in both. This is not the strongest connection. If you are being fancy with a weapon on a chain or rope, this is probably how you are going to do it, and it does not mean for sure that Tarantino is trying to allude to Shanghai Noon.

But there is no movie beneath Tarantino's notice, and this one might have caught his attention. For one, Owen Wilson inexplicably survives a hail of bullets and calls it a miracle, just as Samuel L Jackson does in Pulp Fiction. He also spends a lot of time talking like a Tarantino character, at one point quoting James Brown's "I don't know karate but I know c-razy." Referencing 70s songs like that is major Tarantino territory.

Like Kill Bill Shanghai Noon is a fusion of Kung-Fu and Cowboy elements, scored with contemporary music (such as Kid Rock's Cowboy). As in Kill Bill, Lucy Liu is a major object of the fighting. Tarantino, as we will see later in this post and as we have seen many times before, has he female characters allude to male counterparts into order to signal that his women have replaced the men -- that they are just as tough, and more tough. He revises Shanghai Noon by giving Lucy Liu something more to do than get saved.

And like Kill Bill, Shanghai Noon alludes to earlier films in a deliberate way. There are lots of Western in-jokes, including a villain named Van Cleef (the actor who played The Bad in The Good the Bad and the Ugly), a title that is a pun on Garry Cooper's High Noon, Chan's character is named Chong Wang, which sounds like John Wayne (Owen wilson tells him that he has to change his name because John Wayne is a terrible name for a cowboy), at the end Wilson tells Chan that his real name is Wyatt Erp, which Chan says is a terrible name for a cowboy, Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman is alluded to in the end as is the ending of Buch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (our guys leap out doors into a hail of bullets at the end but of course our guys survive). There is a reference to The Good the Bad and the Ugly, as Wilson is hanging by a noose and is saved when a rifle at a distance shoots the rope. There is also an allusion to Chan's Drunken Master movie -- Chan gets really drunk and the director hoped to do a big homage to the movie in which Chan's martial arts are brought on by drunkenness. He only gets a matching scene of Chan blowing bubble with his mouth as he does in Drunken Master, but still. A lot of this is pointed about by IMDB.com. One big one that is not is a scene where Wilson gets buried up to his neck and left to die and is found by Chan who is his mismatched buddy at this point. This is exactly the situation in of the the major influences on Kill Bill -- the little seen Death Rides a Horse.

And like Bruce Lee, whose presence is all over The House of the Blue Leaves sequence, Chan is a guy famous for using martial arts to cross over into Western movies. Chan himself is careful to distinguish is style from Bruce Lee's, so he feels the influence there. Chan worked as a stuntman on Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon and Fist of Fury when he was 17. Here is Wikipedia on Chan's early career:

In 1976, Jackie Chan received a telegram from Willie Chan, a film producer in the Hong Kong film industry who had been impressed with Jackie's stuntwork. Willie Chan offered him an acting role in a film directed by Lo Wei. Lo had seen Chan's performance in the John Woo film Hand of Death (1976) and planned to model him after Bruce Lee with the film New Fist of Fury. His stage name was changed to Sing Lung (Chinese: 成龍, also transcribed as Cheng Long, literally "become the dragon") to emphasise his similarity to Bruce Lee, whose stage name was Lei Siu-lung (Chinese: 李小龍, meaning "Little Dragon"). The film was unsuccessful because Chan was not accustomed to Lee's martial arts style.

Also

Jackie Chan created his screen persona as a response to Bruce Lee, and the numerous imitators who appeared before and after Lee's death. In contrast to Lee's characters, who were typically stern, morally upright heroes, Chan plays well-meaning, slightly foolish regular guys (often at the mercy of their friends, girlfriends or families) who always triumph in the end despite the odds. Additionally, Chan has stated that he deliberately styles his movement to be the opposite of Lee's: where Lee held his arms wide, Chan holds his tight to the body; where Lee was loose and flowing, Chan is tight and choppy.

With Thurman dressed as Lee is in Game of Death for her fight with GoGo there is a bit of Lee vs Chan here, as if Thurman and GoGo are avatars for these earlier Chinese movie stars to play something out. And of course Thurman wins. Because Bruce Lee is way better than Jackie Chan, and even if he was not Tarantino is on Bruce Lee's side no matter what, as we will see.

Tarantino has found an unlikely ally in Shanghai Noon, a spawn of Tarantino's sensibilities, and GoGo makes an almost literal nod to it.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Battle Royale

2011-01-13T09:01:00.001-05:00

I continue to look at Tarantino's influences as they factor into Kill Bill. Some jerks claim he just steals things, but I think it is more complex than that. I think he alludes as Milton alludes to epic poetry -- to rethink the history of his genre.

When I clipped I did not get the subtitles. Summary is below that will help you understand what is going on in the clips.

FROM BATTLE ROYALE
[Chiaki Kuriyama in her school girl uniform. At the start of Battle Royale]

FROM BATTLE ROYALE
[Chiaki Kuriyama in a yellow track suit. This kid follows her and wants to talk to her and she rejects him. He points a crossbow at her and they talk in Japanese. She ends up stabbing him in the crotch over and over.]

FROM KILL BILL
[The introduction of GoGo, in a bar with a guy who wants to sleep with her. She stabs him in the gut and empties his entrails. She is in the schoolgirl uniform.]

Battle Royale (2000) about a group of middle schoolers kidnaped by the government and brought to an island where they are each given a different item, most often a weapon, sometimes an unusual weapon. They are to kill each other and the last person standing wins and gets to go home. There is a time limit -- if someone does not win in X hours they all die, killed by an exploding collar. Is it possible that this movie is the origin of the exploding remote control collar? In the world of the film the reason for the whole Battle Royale scenario is the following, shown in a title card at the start of the movie: "At the dawn of the millennium, the nation collapsed. At fifteen percent unemployment, ten million were out of work. 800,000 students boycotted school. The adults lost confidence and, fearing the youth, eventually passed the Millennium Educational Reform Act, AKA the BR [Battle Royale] Act...." If this makes sense to you, let me know. I think the gist is "Repress the Youth" but this is a very odd way to do it. The movie is one of the top ten highest grossing movies of all time in Japan.

Chiaki Kuriyama plays Takako Chigusa in Battle Royale. In the first clip, you see her in her schoolgirl uniform at the start of Battle Royale. She is a track star. The second clip shows her later, once the kids have received their instructions and are sent out into the island to kill each other. This boy that she hates but who loves her wants to team up with her. She refuses and he threatens to rape her now that he has a weapon -- though he is not really committed to this. He falters a bit. The crossbow goes off and enraged she takes her revenge.

This is one of Tarantino's favorite movies, and so he cast the same actress, Chiaki Kuriyama, as GoGo in Kill Bill. Again she appears in the schoolgirl uniform and like the kids in Battle Royale she has an unusual weapon (in the fight with Thurman a ball with a spring blade on a chain) that distinguishes her from others. In the the Kill Bill clip above she is introduced, in a scene that echoes her role in Battle Royale. This guy wants to have sex with her, and she stabs him, low, killing him. She "penetrates" him as she puts it to him as he dies. Tarantino goes for entrails rather than the crotch but the effect is very similar.

The effect here is similar to that of a shared comic book universe. Tarantino of course links some of his movies in this way with Michael Parks' sheriff, who appears as the same character in From Dusk Till Dawn (where he dies in the opening scene), Kill Bill, and Death Proof. This is not quite that -- Chiaki Kuriyama dies in Battle Royale in middle school and appears as 17 here. But the feeling persists that a character has come from Battle Royale and joined the story in Kill Bill. The shared comic book universe gives us another way to think about Tarantino and Influence. There is a sense in which Kill Bill works a bit like Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman. It thinks about influences by imagining different fictional characters in the same space, literally and metaphorically interacting.

Notice also that in Battle Royale Chiaki Kuriyama wears a yellow track suit, with black and white piping. This is of course similar to Thurman's track suit in The House of the Blue Leaves, and the ultimate origin of Thurman's outfit is Bruce Lee's outfit in his last film Game of Death, which we will get to. I don't suppose that Chiaki Kuriyama's track suit is an allusion to Bruce Lee? If it were we would have something very complex where Thurman is dressed as Bruce Lee via Battle Royale. She of course then goes on to fight guys in Bruce Lee's Kato masks AND GoGo who wore the Yellow track suit in Battle Royale which Thurman wears now. It really does feel like outfits are key to the way Tarantino figures influence, and how he signals his battles with influence. We will expand on this thought as we go.

PART 2

There is one more small connection between Battle Royale and Kill Bill. In Battle Royale the guy who monitors the kids in the battle get a phone call from an estranged daughter.

FROM BATTLE ROYALE
[The bad guy from Battle Royale on the phone. You hear the voice of his daughter.]

You never see this daughter in the film. You only hear her voice. Tarantino cast her as the voice of a young O-Ren Ishi in the animated sequence.

FROM KILL BILL
[a clip of young O-Ren ishi talking in the animated portion of Kill Bill.]

In both films she exists only as a voice. In Battle Royale she comes into play in the sequel, which I have not yet seen, but is on the list. But the idea creates a link between Lucy Liu's character and GoGo: in the flashback Lucy Liu is a killer school girl like GoGo, and the justification for both positions comes from their links to Battle Royale, which is all about killer school girls.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: City of the Living Dead

2011-01-06T09:40:00.007-05:00

I continue to rant like a mad man that Tarantino alludes to other movies in an interesting interpretive way -- the same way Milton alluded to epic poety.

FROM CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD
[a priest stares at a woman in a car and her eyes begin to bleed, a trail of blood from each eyeball running down her cheek. You can see it here but be warned it is VERY gross:

FROM KILL BILL

[Thurman kills GoGo and her eyes bleed down her cheeks. You can see it at 3 minutes in here:

City of the Living Dead is a Lucio Fulci movie, an Italian horror movie that, like Scanners, is primarily built around the technical ability to make gross things happen to bodies. The plot is really beside the point, but the gist of it is that a priest has killed himself in a cemetery and opened the gates of hell. A psychic has a vision of this and joins with a newspaper guy to go to the town and stop it. They only have 48 hours because All Saint's day means it is too late. Horrible and gross things happen in the town, our guys manage to go underground and re-kill the undead priest. The plot really makes no sense.

The town of Dunwich, where the movie takes place is built on the remains of Salem, but I feel like Salem is not so much in the form of remains. I feel like there is a town of Salem. Though there is a time limit to save the world, characters causally stop for food and seem in no hurry. When they arrive the deadline has actually passed, but no one cares. Our psychic is buried alive in New York City, and our newspaper man gets her out with a pick-axe, nearly killing her. A scene shows someone being embalmed, making you wonder why that step was skipped before they buried our psychic. Also, it seems that the final scene in the movie was damaged and Fulchi just made due. Our heroes emerge from the crypt safely and this nice kid they were looking after runs up to them in the daytime backed by the police. It is all smiles and sunlight but then the psychic just looks disturbed and starts screaming off camera for no reason. The end. It is a pretty fun movie.

Tarantino actually name checks City of the Living Dead in the Kill Bill script apparently, though I have not seen it myself. He supposedly compares the bit where Thurman is buried alive to the scene in City of the Living Dead where the psychic is buried alive. They are both women buried alive, but there is not much more to the connection there. Thurman get's herself out, the psychic has a man get her out, so that is a kind of revision (my heroine can do more than yours). But there is not really a visual echo there so I let it be.

The scene above is the beginning of the movie's first gore set-piece. The undead priest appears where these two kids go to make out, stares hard, and the girl's eyes start bleeding. You will be thankful to know I cut here as it gets much much worse -- she vomits all her internal organs. The actress actually swallowed a plate of tripe and regurgitates it.

The Kill Bill link is not exactly a lock. If you want to show a character bleeding from the eyes, chances are that someone has done it before, and it is going to be hard not to make it look similar. Whether you were inspired to go with eye bleeding because you wanted to allude to the earlier movie is tough to prove.

I also do not know what to say about the Kill Bill link aside from The House of the Blue Leaves certainly alludes to a lot of diverse material, which makes me think this is an allusion too. It is a connection between martial arts gore and Italian horror gore, a connection not dissimilar to elsewhere where he connections Italian Spaghetti Westerns to Samurai movies. The only problem with this is that there IS a connection between Westerns and Samurai movies -- many Westerns are based off of Samurai movies. The martial arts Italian horror connection (which should totally be the name of a band) I don't really know what to do with. It does not seem like enough to say that the genres justify or reinforce each other.

It also does not make too much sense to say that Tarantino is really trying to outdo Fulci. Kill Bill is very violent, and the violence is often over the top, but it is in no way Fulci-esque, except maybe here. It does not feel like he is trying to say "Hey, Fulci, look how much better I can do your thing." He adds an aesthetic quality to Fulci maybe. In Fulci the eyes bleeding are gross and a prelude to one of the grossest things I have ever seen on film. In Tarantino the bleeding eyes are weird moment of beauty. Perhaps this is his revision on his source -- to make something aesthetic out of grindhouse's anti-aesthetic material. Now that I think about it that may be a way of looking at the whole Kill Bill project. Or he finds the beauty in Fulci that other lesser directors would pass by.

I could go crazy and make an argument similar to the one I made about Watchmen in my book: the return of the dead in The City of the Living Dead parallels the return of films past that "haunt" Tarantino's movie; the girl who vomits up her insides (in City of the Living Dead's first set piece) parallels Tarantino "purging" himself of his influences in the House of the Blue Leaves (Thurman's first battle chronologically). The fact that I am not 100% sold on the link is keeping me from developing this point in more detail.

On a side note: is The City of the Dead also referenced in X2?

FROM X2
[Lady Deathstrike's eyes bleed Adamantium tears because Wolverine has hit her with the injection gun. 3 minutes in here: ]

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Scaramouche

2010-12-30T09:47:00.004-05:00

I continue to look at Kill Bill's influences to argue that Tarantino's allusions are not swipes, but interpretations.

FROM SCARAMOUCHE

[Big sword fight in a theatre. 18th century. They fight on a balcony railing at one point and out guy jumps off the balcony on a rope and comes back. At another point he falls off and fights from there and climbs back up. You can see it here:

]

FROM KILL BILL
[Thurman fights Johnny Mo on a railing of a balcony and jumps off and jumps on again using impossible wire fu stuff. You can see a lot of it in the trailer

]

Scaramouche is a 1952 adventure movie starring Stewart Granger, Eleanor Parker, and Janet Leigh, directed by George Sidney. It takes place just before the French Revolution. They wear wigs and stuff, though the way everything is shot and given the actors it all looks very American. A bunch of scenes are shot in Golden Gate Park and you keep expecting to see the bridge. In the movie the bad guy kills Steward Granger's best friend in a fencing duel. (The duel, the Internet Movie Database tells me, takes place in the same spot they landed the ship in Star Trek 4; given Tarantino's Star Trek love I bet he knew that). Granger is not good enough to get revenge so he runs away to train and get revenge later. He is being hunted by the bad guy's henchmen, so he hides in an acting troupe as Scaramouche. Scaramouche is a 17th century stock clown character (the name means "skirmish"). If you are anything like me you know Scaramouche primarily from the Invisibles (if I am remembering that correctly), and of course Bohemian Rapsody's "Scaramouche, Scaramouche, can you do the fandango."

Anyway. After being kept apart by the women in Granger's life, among other things, they finally get to do battle here at the theatre, and it is a whopper. The two minutes above come from this climatic scene. But in the end it turns out they are BROTHERS if you can believe it, and so they don't kill each other. As a plus this means he is not brothers with his enemy's fiancee, who he loves, and who he thought for the movie was his sister, so they get married. Eleanor Parker, who he ditches even though she is obviously better looking than the brittle Janet Leigh, hooks up with Napoleon in the final out-of-nowhere gag in the movie. It is pretty fun in a campy sort of way, mostly because you cannot believe how good looking Eleanor Parker is. It is John Kerry's favorite film (he named his boat after it), which says a lot about him, and why we do not call him President Kerry. IMDB is fun.

Similarities are there -- the fight on the balcony railing. The fight while trying to get up from the railing. The leap off the balcony railing and then back on. In Scaramouch he uses a rope but Thurman, drawing on Kung Fu powers, is simply lighter than air. As usual, Tarantino sort of says "My hero is better than your hero. She does not need a damn rope." Tarantino outdoes Scaramouche in part because he can draw on fighting genres George Sidney had no access to, including wire-fu. And of course as a modern person one cannot help feel that Scaramouche's huge fight scene is a little bloodless for such an epic sword battle. Tarantino is happy to oblige us here.

The big villain in Scaramouche is figured in Kill Bill as Johnny Mo, the leader of the Crazy 88s -- like the big bad in Scaramouche a man in charge of other men, but unlike the big bad in Scaramouche merely a mini-boss. Tarantino reduces the earlier film by having the climatic battle be only a small part of his bigger battle at the House of Blue Leaves.

The climatic fight scene in Scaramouche goes on for a full 7 minutes and is pretty impressive. It is said to be the longest fencing scene on film. The Kill Bill connection is strong but hardly a lock. For me the key piece of evidence is not so much that it is another revenge movie for Tarantino to allude to, so much as it is a famously long and multilevel fight scene involving the theater, the balcony, the lobby, the seats, backstage and then onstage. You will recall that The House of the Blue leaves involves a dance floor, stairs, a balcony an antechamber and a snow covered garden. Tarantino targeted this for use in his film because he is out to outdo, and this is standing in his way. The famous length and complexity of the fight explains why it caught his attention when his more usual allusions, especially in The House of the Blue Leaves, is to horror, westerns, kung-fu and samurai fare. By alluding to Scaramouche he reminding you of the earlier movie so you remember how long and complex that fight scene is -- and then realize that The House of Blue Leaves is much longer and more complex.

A small housekeeping note. I have added a new label to the Kill Bill posts: The House of the Blue Leaves. I am going to try to focus on this scene for a while, as I feel like it would make a good stand along chunk if I ever needed one of those.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Master of the Flying Guillotine

2010-12-23T16:16:00.004-05:00

I continue by look at stuff Tarantino was maybe thinking about when putting together Kill Bill. My idea is that he is not stealing this stuff. He is alluding to it as Milton alluded to epic poetry. To re-interpret and to surpass it.

FROM MASTER OF THE FLYING GUILLOTINE

[The opening. The master walks and this modern music plays. He flying leaps out of his house and takes out this sort of half sphere basket on a chain weapon -- the inside of the basket has spring blades. He circles it in the air a few times before throwing it at some practice dummies. The basket lands on their heads and when he pulls it the heads come off. You can see it here:

FROM KILL BILL

[In the House of the Blue Leaves GoGo swings her bladed ball weapon in a circle before throwing at Thurman.]

FROM KILL BILL

[In the fight with the Crazy 88s Lucy Liu gets away, and the same bit of music from Master plays for like a few seconds as she leaves]

The Master of the Flying Guillotine is a 1975 Chinese movie, a sequel to The One Armed Boxer. In the One Armed Boxer The Master's two disciples are killed. In the clip above The Master, who is also blind, has just learned of their deaths in the opening scene and breaks out the titular weapon. He heads out to get revenge, which he begins by just killing random one armed people. So even though he has the title role he is the clear bad guy. Just to give us lots of fun stuff to watch in act 2, The One Armed Boxer is attending a Martial Arts tournament, where lots of guys from different countries are fighting. And some of the martial arts involve basically super-powers. The dude from India has extendable arms, like 10 feet extendable (and I have this vivid memory of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, or some such arcade game where you could fight as an Indian dude with extendo arms). The whole movie just sort of stops in act 2 to pair up fighters we have never seen before for awesome and ridiculous duels. And then the Master fights the one armed guy, who can walk on walls and the ceiling by "controlling his breath," and is defeated by him.

This is one of the best movies I have seen thus far as part of the Kill Bill project, and I totally recommend it, if you don't mind frequent decapitation. If you enjoy frequent decapitation, then bonus for you.

I had heard for years that GoGo's weapon is from The Master of the Flying Guillotine. They both have spring loaded blades and are both on chains, so you get the great whooshing noise for the warm-up, and the throw-and-pull-back move. They are both weapons for bad guys. There is a bit of a link there. But the weapons are pretty different too, and I don't really think there is a huge link between Go-Go and the Master of the Flying Guillotine.

Undeniable however is the use of the music in the second Kill Bill clip above. That is the Master of the Flying Guillotine theme music, which you can hear in the Master clip above. The music is by the early 70s band NEU, who Wikipedia tells me is retrospectively considered a founder of Krautrock, and split off from Kraftwork. They ran out of money halfway through making their second album. To make up for the lack of material they remixed their earlier single called "Super" and Wikipedia tells me this is considered an early example of a remix. It was this remixed song, now called "Super 16," that was used in Master of the Flying Guillotine, and then in Kill Bill. But Master of the Flying Guillotine did not bother to license any of the music it used, including Super 16. Kill Bill of course did secure legal rights.

Some interesting material here:

1. As we often do with these allusions we again see reversal. Master of the Flying Guillotine is the story of a master getting revenge for the death of his disciples; Kill Bill is a disciple getting revenge on her master, though to be fair Bill mixes the role of Master (and not Thurman's only master) with Lover and Boss.

2. As we often do with these allusions we see displacement: the One Armed Boxer becomes the One Armed Sophie Fatale, who the bride dismembers in front of Lucy Liu.

3. Master of the Flying Guillotine reference justifies a Kill Bill sequel, as it features both a one armed martial arts expert AND a blind martial arts expert. It is not coincidence that Tarantino leaves the one armed Sophie and the blind Darryl Hannah around for a possible next installment -- Darryl Hannah even gets a question mark over her name in the second round of closing credits in volume 2, in stark contrast to the lines drawn through the other members of the VIPER squad. It is not so much that Tarantino is serious about another movie with these characters, but the idea that a martial arts movie is part of a franchise and that many stories can be told in that world is part of the tradition he joins here. So he is not going to just kill all the antagonists off cleanly.

4. The music is used to link Lucy Liu to the Master of the Flying Guillotine. They are both powerful deadly bad guys who will be fighting for the loss of a disciple.

5. Tarantino is often accused of stealing from other movies. But with this allusion he actually reverses a theft. Master of the Flying Guillotine stole the music. Tarantino pays for it. Nearly 30 years later NEU gets the check they should have gotten from The Master of the Flying Guillotine from Kill Bill.

6. Kill Bill is often defended and attacked on the ground that it is a kind of remix of other movies. So it is interesting that here Tarantino alludes to one of the earliest examples of a remix, a kind of stylistic forerunner in the pop culture landscape.

What makes these last two allusions especially interesting is that they feature the kind of "allusion chain" we saw with Milton. Milton alludes to Virgil and Homer THROUGH Dante in order to get us to read the figure of the leaves differently. Tarantino alludes to NEU THROUGH Master of the Flying Guillotine to position his remix to correct a mistake -- a theft -- in the earlier movie.

Uncanny 444 (#4 in a four-issue limited series)

2010-12-21T10:59:00.002-05:00

[A while back Neil was looking at Claremont's return to the X-Men, a series in four parts. He sent me the first three together, but the fourth a bit later -- and I totally missed that last part. So to give Neil the time I thought he needed I ran Jason Powell's Best Of series. Then when I decided to bug him about where he was with that fourth part, I discovered what happened. Sorry about the confusion. Here is the last of Neil's posts about Claremont's return.]

Before I talk at all about the interior of the comic, I wanted to address its cover. Where the other three comics that I’ve written about are given either standard team shots or dramatic battle poses (or, in the case of variant covers, both) – the stuff deemed appropriate for (re)launches and stories that are ostensibly epic in scope – this one is subdued and whimsical. It’s just Nightcrawler’s looping tail, and Claremont’s name is just one of the several in the bottom corner. There’s no hoopla surrounding this second return to Uncanny, and it seems that the comic is better for it.

I noted, ambiguously, at the close of the last entry that Claremont pieces his voice back together by the end of X-Treme X-Men, and carries that confidence over to Uncanny when he returns one last time. (Well, ‘one last time’ as of this writing, anyway.)

Perhaps most interesting is Claremont’s ‘creation’* of the XSE over in X-Treme, and subsequent decision to carry the concept over to the core books. (Along with more or less the same team that served as the X-Men in X-Treme. It’s a messy transition, since Claremont had to hastily resolve the tensions that originally drove the two teams apart in the last issue of XXM, and does a poor job here of explaining why some characters leave and join the XSE. Cyclops’ and Wolverine’s interaction to this effect is particularly weak.)

(* ‘Creation’ in the sense that the XSE had never existed in the mainstream MU, but Bishop worked for the XSE in the alternate future from which he came. Claremont is shows a lot of willingness to play with the toys that others added to the X-sandbox in his absence – even the stupidest ones, like Azazel. Though, now that I think about it, the issue of Nightcrawler’s parenthood is addressed only in the form of a joke – and this is probably as it should be.)

But there’s an even more important difference, here: it feels like Claremont is actually having fun. The first issues of “Revolution” were weighed down by the expectations that Claremont was feeling, and the first issue of X-Treme tried too hard to justify its own existence through painful exposition. This second return to Uncanny, on the other hand? It opens with a baseball game, and one that quickly devolves into a surprisingly and convincingly tense moment. And it should be added that this isn’t because a Sentinel crashes the party, or anything, but emerges in an entirely organic fashion between two people that were bound to butt heads. (Four words: Rachel pitching. Emma batting.) This is precisely the sort of character stuff that Claremont has always done so well.

I realize that I’ve done hardly anything to address the pictures that accompany Claremont’s stories – and when I do, it’s mostly to dismiss them as crap. Not so with Davis who, in the Rachel-Emma scene, does a wonderful job of playing up the fun and nonchalance before obliterating it: his Emma Frost looks homicidal, his Rachel positively eerie. Jason has noted in a lot of places that Claremont seems especially driven when he’s collaborating with a gifted artist, and I can only assume that the same effect is in evidence here.**

(**Just once, though, just once, I would like someone to look at a picture of a baseball game, of how the players line-up on the field, before attempting to actually draw people playing it. Because it’s clear that Davis probably has some kind of idea or visual references for how they should stand, but no idea where they should stand.)

As compared to the first issue of X-Treme, Claremont also manages to fit a remarkable amount of story and character stuff into the standard-size space. Even the obligatory scene-setting stuff is made interesting. The baseball game is an amusing, if a bit vacuous, way to establish the two factions within the X-Men, and in addition to the Emma-Rachel showdown Claremont and Davis get a chance to show that they can do more subtle emotions, too. When Emma brushes off the fight with the comment to Cyclops that “Rachel’s but a child. [whispered:] Who never should have been born,” Wolverine replies, to no one in particular, “Guess some folks have all the luck”. Davis reinforces the disconnect between the two by boxing Wolverine off in his own panel, despite the fact that he is literally standing beside Emma. (And so this wonderful scene also serves to answer Cyclops’ earlier, awkwardly staged question to Wolverine about why he would join Storm’s team.) Likewise, Sage’s surveillance review could easily be cluttered with tedious narration about who these people are and what they’re doing, but Claremont and Davis cleverly juxtapose scenes like Bishop silently leaving flowers at Jean’s grave (and, amazingly, they give us enough credit to realize that it is her grave, because we don’t actually see her name) with Scott and Emma “conferencing” in the dark in his office.

There are also a few call-backs to earlier Claremont eras that deserve mention. (And, unlike X-Men 100, where Claremont reuses the space station location but to little effect and even less purpose, these ones are meaningful.) First, Claremont puts Storm, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler together in a Danger Room scene in order to make it clear that, a) yes, these three 80s favourites are the core of the team once again, and b) even if there are only three of them, and even if the comic has seemed fluffy up to this point, they are dangerous as all hell. Second, Storm’s articulation of the team’s mission – “The first generation of mutants needs to take responsibility for their heirs” – has a particular irony to it, insofar as this was X-Factor’s original purpose and that same mission was rebuked ferociously by Wolverine and Storm at the time. (I cover this period, briefly, in my own blog post.) It’s an interesting shift from the earlier version of Storm, in particular, but hardly a surprising one – Storm has been so badly mishandled since Claremont first left her that the days of proactive mutant-liberator/terrorist Storm have long since been forgotten and would seem wholly out of place. (Which is a shame, but...)

Third on this list, although we don’t yet know it in this first issue, Claremont is also returning to a storyline that he had to abort and re-write the first time around – The Fury. What inklings we do get of the story are brief but ominous and wonderfully wrought. When Sage asks Brian Braddock whether the X-Men can stop by, his two-panel response is off-screen. Which wouldn’t be all that weird, I admit, except that in one of those panels we see a rotary phone, front-and-center – and the receiver is still on the hook. It’s one of those things that’s subtle enough that you might miss it the first time, and then you get goosebumps when you look it over again and realize what they were trying to tell you.

One of the reasons that my brief series ends here, though, is that Claremont doesn’t really sustain this level of excitement or nuance. Davis leaves after barely more than half a year and Claremont seems to flounder a bit, playing to what I would imagine he perceives to be the desire of his readers or his artists and doing things like writing self-consciously decompressed stories that don’t play to his strengths. (His “24 seconds” in UXM 467 is particularly egregious, as the story is meant to cover exactly that length of time and you can read it in about twice that.) He leaves after only 30 issues, in the middle of a storyline that gets wrapped up by Tony Bedard, no less, but which he’ll kinda follow-up on when he takes over Exiles. That’s a partial victory, I guess, but it’s a long way from the promise shown in this first issue of his final run on the X-Men.

[I would also like to add that “The first generation of mutants needs to take responsibility for their heirs” is also amusing insofar as Claremont is returning to the X-Men to take responsibility for his heirs who have done all kinds of things since he left.]

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: [intro material]

2010-12-20T16:44:00.002-05:00

I should have put an explanation of my process in introductory posts to the Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion series. I have been getting a lot of Internet questions about it so let me briefly sketch out how I am doing this.

To begin with I got a PSC-CUNY grant to study the allusions in Kill Bill. So that is where this got started.

Googling "Kill Bill references" will get you to several sites which list off movies Kill Bill references, including The Kill Bill References Guide, The Internet Movie Database, and a Kill Bill References YouTube Channel which shows you clips from all kinds of movies. There is even a Kill Bill Casebook. The Kill Bill Casebook seems especially just sort of thrown together from Internet message boards, and often includes claims like "some have seen a connection here to The Beyond," leaving you to sort out who the "some" might be, and what the presumed connection is.

These are great resources, but tend to mostly just list stuff. And once the game is started people jump in to say that any similarity between anything in Kill Bill and anything in any other movie is a reference. Case in point: the Wesley Snipes movie Boiling Point. Someone claimed a link on the basis of a gun hidden in flowers being like the gun in the cereal box in Kill Bill. The gun hidden in flowers is common enough. But I watched it anyway. No surprise, there was not a connection. But my process has been to fill my Netflix que with any movie anyone has claimed as a link and see for myself what is going on. And then every time I start one of these movies I Twitter about it, and say what the claimed connection is. Often if there is no good connection the movie is still reasonably fun.

So that part of the process is not adding anything new to the talk about Kill Bill. What you are seeing on Twitter is raw, and often fruitless, research. What you are seeing here on the blog is a kind of first draft, in somewhat random sections. That, I hope, is original work -- sketching out in more detail than I see elsewhere WHY Tarantino alludes as he does.

There is a larger question about why not just do this silently and not show people stuff as I go, stuff that is often very uncooked, but I wanted to give this process a go. I thought it might be fun. Once this is completed, which is going to take at least a year, I will take the blogs and work them into an essay, or essays, or even a small book.

It is hard for me to imagine this as a print work though -- it is very dependant on seeing the clips. But it is equally hard to imagine an online publisher willing to deal with the copyright tangles. I will also use it for presentations at conferences and at school and maybe elsewhere. But right now I am honestly not thinking that far ahead. Right now this is a fun hobby, akin to playing with model trains in the basement.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: White Lightning

2010-12-16T09:49:00.001-05:00

I continue to blog about Kill Bill's relationship to the films that influenced it. My theory is that Tarantino does more than swipe. He alludes, as Milton does in Paradise Lost, to re-think, to interpret, and ultimately to conquer.

FROM WHITE LIGHTNING

[Burt Reynolds breaks out of prison and this tense music plays. Not sure how to describe it. The loss of the clips is going to really kill us on the music front.]

FROM WHITE LIGHTNING

[That same tense music plays as he escapes from the sheriff. ]

FROM KILL BILL

[Thurman looks around at all the Crazy 88s who have her surrounded and the same tense music plays.]

White Lightning is a Burt Reynolds movie, where he plays "Gator" McKlusky, a character I knew only from the end of the eighth episode of Archer where he insists that he looks just like him. White Lightning has a very Dukes of Hazard feel -- Burt Reynolds is a southern troublemaker who is really good at racing cars around small towns, and there is an overweight sheriff (played by Ned Beaty) who chases him around and whom he eventually tricks into driving his car into a lake. But in this movie, the sheriff drowns in that lake, proper revenge for drowning Burt Reynolds brother in the swap in the opening credits. So like Dukes of Hazard if Dukes of Hazard was trying to be a drama.

Burt Reynolds is in jail at the start of the movie and, when he learns his brother is dead, he attempts a break out in the first clip I have shown. That does not work and so he agrees to go undercover and take down this corrupt sheriff who is bootlegging. Turning rat goes against everything he believes in, but this is the only way he can get revenge. Eventually the sheriff figures out Reynolds is against him and catches up with him in the second scene I have here, which is near the end of the film. He chases him but Reynolds tricks him into that lake. The end.

Kill Bill links fall into three categories. First there are those genre cues, like the Tokyo of tiny buildings. Tarantino may not be taking that from a particular movie. That may just be one of those things that a lot of movies do. Then there are the more specific shots where he seems to be more clearly invoking another film, like the opening of Citizen Kane. Then there are things like this, where the connection is not arguable. The RZA used music from White Lightning in Kill Bill. Licensed it and everything. Burt Reynolds was thanked in the closing credits because of that.

It is bizarre to hear the music in White Lightning, as it seems sampled from Kill Bill. This sort of like an effect Harold Bloom calls apophrades, the return of the dead: "the uncanny effect is that the new poem's achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor's characteristic work." That is going too far maybe, but the idea is there. Once you hear the second thing, it seems like the second thing must have been the first thing even though you know better. I get this especially when I see live action interview with the voice actors of the Simpsons.

It is mentally impossible for me to shake the feeling that the actors here are lip-synching, trying to trick me into thinking they have the voices of characters I know from the Simpsons. Hank Azaria's Moe impression seems dead on, but I cannot process it as anything other than an impression of a pre-existing Moe.

This is one of the effects of great art. You believe it is the primary thing, even though, rationally, you know better. Examples abound. There is no such thing as "The Unconscious." You cannot prove it is there with a scientific instrument. It was just an idea Freud invented. But Freud is so good you feel like he discovered it, rather than invented it. (This claim really may be going to far, but I am leaving it in).

The incorporation of music from White Lightning in Kill Bill is probably nothing more than the RZA saw the movie, remembered that awesome music, then decided he wanted it in Kill Bill years later. But a couple of things stand out when you know the context.

1. In the first clip the mood music transitions into something much more goofy. The RZA also has it transition into something much more goofy, though differently goofy.

2. In White Lightning the music is used at first as part of an escape attempt that will fail. So part of what we should read into this music choice in Kill Bill, and part of what we can see if we are looking for it, is Thurman feeling like she needs to escape, and realizing that this is not possible. The music does the work that lesser directors would rely on voiceover narration to accomplish. "At that moment, I felt like I had gotten in over my head and wanted to escape, but I knew it would not work."

3. The second time the music is used in White Lightning it is again Reynold's escaping the clutches of the law, but this time he WANTS to be followed, because this is where he will get his revenge. Crucially at the end of the chase scene he will appear to have escaped the Sheriff, but will dramatically return to taunt him and get him to keep going -- to his death. So this is also the music that starts his final, deadly, and successful confrontation with man he will revenge himself against. Thurman, like Reynolds, is looking for revenge for the murder of a family member (Reynolds' brother; Thurman's daughter who she believes to be dead), and Thurman, like Reynolds, gets this music at the start of the sequence that will end with her opponent dead.

4. There is something kind of comical and appropriate about the fact that when the music is paying for Reynolds the second time he is taking refuge at a home for unwed mothers, and is surrounded by pregnant women in the same way Thurman, taking revenge for being attacked while pregnant, us surrounded by killers.

5. Notice also Reynolds, in the second clip, has a damaged eye -- something that will come up a few times in Kill Bill, and once in the House of the Blue Leaves as she plucks an eyeball from one of the Crazy 88s. This eyeball plucking starts the black and white sequence the clip above is from. So the pattern of

a. Eyeball Damage,
b. White Lightning Music,
c. Transition to more goofy music
d. Revenge for the Death of a Family Member

is the same in both films.

Most importantly, the House of Blue Leaves sequence in Kill Bill is swirling with STUFF: so far we have a Hitchcock silent film, a Japanese monster movie, and a 70s movie about bootlegging in the south. Upcoming will be references to Bruce Lee's whole career, samurai movies, horror movies, and Spaghetti westerns -- and more. It is starting to feel like the whole history of film just gets collapsed into this insane sequence. Chronologically the House of the Blue Leaves is Thurman's first fight and it feels like she battles the whole of cinema history AS A FUCKING WARM UP. The ground must be cleared for Tarantino's hero to even get started.

Jason Powell's Top 20 Claremont X-Men Comics, part 5 (of 5)

2010-12-14T11:51:00.002-05:00

[Jason Powell finishes, FOR NOW, his epiloguing to his look at EVERY Claremont X-Men issue from the initial mega-run. BUT, if you enjoy Jason Powell's writing and/or Claremont, and god knows you do, you should continue to check this blog on Tuesdays, because we hope to have an exciting thing for you soon; and in the mean time we may be offering more Powell Claremont blogs to tide you over till that THING arrives. Anticipation! Mystery!]

Per some folks’ request (hi, Jeremy), here is my top 20 favorite Claremont X-comics. (Today.) Note: I’m going chronological, not with a ranking.

PART FIVE: 1988-1991

17

Uncanny X-Men Annual #12, 1988

Maybe this is a cheat, because this issue has two great Claremont stories for the price of one. And both are illustrated by Art Adams, which is awesome.

The first one is pretty straightforward – an all-out action story that hearkens back to the Claremont/Byrne days. But it’s doubly cool because – having been published after the Bolton Classic X-Men backups, in can actually incorporate elements of said back-ups, thus cementing those Bolton stories in the X-Men canon. This one is a great payoff for the Claremont loyalists.
Meanwhile, in glorious contrast to the un-self-conscious romp of the first story, the b-side here, “I Want My X-Men” is gloriously meta-texual, and looking at it 22 years later, one realizes that it was remarkably prescient. Via the media-parody character Mojo (created by Adams and Ann Nocenti), Claremont is mocks the commercial exploitation of the X-Men franchise. As I said in the original blog entry: ‘… Mojo creates one X-Men spinoff after another. Note that in 1988, the amount of X-Men spinoffs could still be counted on one hand. Though the writing was on the wall, the franchise was still relatively contained, and would not proliferate to absurd levels until the 1990s, soon after Claremont quit in frustration. Though he portrays himself as martyr in “I Want My X-Men” (albeit a whiny one), the fact is that Claremont – with this story – correctly sees where the franchise is heading. In the images of Mojo as he magically whips up one spin-off team after another – throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks – we see the future of the X-Men: a franchise that has become the victim of its own “excess success.” Once the hottest thing in comics, the X-Men line is now a bloated parody of itself, as Marvel overstuffs the shelves with “... X-Men after X-Men. Mutants without end ... skinny X-Men, fat X-Men, giant X-Men, tiny X-Men, musical X-Men, dancing X-Men, X-Men fish, X-Men insects, chimps in X-men costumes, X-Men mimes ... midget X-Men, X-Men made of straw or brick or mint chocolate ice cream! Each group of X-Men more boring, more tiresome, more ... malodorous ... than the one before ...” Claremont saw it coming, all along.

18

Uncanny X-Men #236, 1988

This is part two of the original four-parter that introduced the concept of Genosha, a mutant-slave state. This was the ultimate expression of the “mutants as persecuted minority” metaphor, at least in Claremont’s run. Never was it more brutally conveyed, and never did the X-Men seem more perfectly placed, politically. The X-Men are truly morally outraged here by how they see their own kind being treated, and they genuinely become freedom fighters here.

Issue 236, titled “Busting Loose,” is the best of the story’s four chapters. What I said in the blog: ‘Ultimately then, “Busting Loose” has all the trappings of a conventional superhero story: There are evil masterminds, people in trouble, a city buried under moral corruption – and a bright, primary colored superhero who emerges toward the end to take care of everything. Claremont’s genius is in both complicating and enhancing all of these story beats, making the danger harsher, the morality murkier, the heroes more troubled – then clothing it all in a real-world allegory. With its powerfully realized antagonists, morally outraged heroes, breathtakingly designed setting, superbly complex character dynamics and surprising political astuteness, issue 236 is a true triumph on the part of Claremont and company. In some ways, “Busting Loose” is the apex of Claremont’s creativity and expression on the Uncanny X-Men series, a peak blend of intelligence, action and drama that few X-Men issues before or after would match.’

19

Uncanny X-Men #242, 1988

This and the next issue – parts of the “Inferno” crossover -- are actually the only times in Claremont’s run on “Uncanny” that all five of the original Silver Age X-Men are active protagonists. Indeed, they are more or less the heroes of this story, while Claremont’s team (the “Outback” lineup at this point) are mostly portrayed as demonic villains. Part of why I love this issue is just that continuity-geek aspect of it: It’s also the only time that Claremont has the “old” X-Men actually appear and fight the “new” ones. (It seemed to happen twice in the early Claremont days, but in one case the Silver Age team turned out to be robots; in the other, they were telepathic illusions.) The fight is quite excitingly rendered too, by Silvestri and Green, who were an underrated art team on the series.

I also love evil Madelyne Pryor here. Maddie probably qualifies as one of my “comic-book character crushes,” and while the “Goblin Queen” transformation was a bit of a travesty (done to make Scott look good by comparison), Claremont gives her such a righteous rage here that I find it a little bit intoxicating. She’s such a force of nature here, confronting characters with their own hypocrisies even as she attempts to kill them (or in Havok’s case, seduce him).

Like Uncanny 137, this is another one that I always think of as being like a Greek tragedy, particularly the “brother vs. brother” stuff with Havok and Cyclops. More on that in the original blog entry here: http://geoffklock.blogspot.com/2009/10/uncanny-x-men-242.html

Indeed, “Inferno” has many parallels with “The Dark Phoenix Saga.” The one is in many respects a sequel to the other. “Dark Phoenix” is regarded a classic while “Inferno” is considered one of the worst X-Men stories, but I think they are both fantastic. Indeed, there are some ways in which I find “Inferno” superior. But most rewarding (for me) is in looking at how the two stories play off of each other.

20

Uncanny X-Men #275, 1991

And we gotta get a Jim Lee one in there. This is perhaps another cheat, as it is a “double feature” again. And once again, one part is a bright, shiny action story that is content just to revisit the glory days (this time going all the way back to Claremont/Cockrum, and the Shi’ar and Starjammers stuff). That’s all well and good (in fact it’s beaucoup fun), but the other half is where the real gold is: Magneto and Rogue vs Zaladane in the Savage Land. This of course has its roots in Claremont/Byrne as well. But the emotional core of the issue – Magneto – is all thanks to Claremont’s vision of the character. This is the climax of his character arc under Claremont, as Magnus renounces his “heroism” phase without returning to villainy. It is here that Magneto – like Frank Miller’s Dark Knight – becomes “too big” for comic-book distinctions of morality. He is simply too complex for that. This is Claremont’s last genuinely moving issue of X-Men.

And there you have it. Jeremy, I hope you enjoyed it!

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: War of the Gargantua

2010-12-09T11:17:00.004-05:00

I continue my look at scenes of Kill Bill and scenes from other movies that influenced Kill Bill. My theory? The relationship between the two is more complicated than a mere swipe or homage. Tarantino alludes to movies in Kill Bill as Milton alludes to epic poetry in Paradise Lost: to comment, to revise, to think, to interpret. The Kill Bill label below will take you to more posts in this series.

FROM WAR OF THE GARGANTUA
[Japanese people freak out during a monster attack. The city looks totally fake. Monsters attack.]

FROM KILL BILL
[Thurman's plane lands in Tokyo. Out the window the city looks completely fake. You can see it in the trailer

]

FROM OSCAR WILDE'S THE DECAY OF LYING

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence ? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate selfconscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai, or Hokkei, or any of the great native painters, beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition showed only too well. He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere."

Oscar Wilde would have enjoyed the hell out of Kill Bill, not the least because this scene in Kill Bill illustrates so fully what Wilde was talking about above. Uma Thurman does not land in Tokyo. She lands in the IDEA of Tokyo. Tarantino's IDEA of Tokyo. Thurman is basically flying into a new movie here, leaving the world of a knife fight in suburbia for Samurai craziness (yes I know the battle with Fox occurs chronologically after, but I am talking about how we experience the movie). And so the buildings she flies over look like miniatures, as they do in the monster movie above. Of course Tarantino's IDEA OF TOKYO is the Tokyo of monster movies like War of the Gargantua, not the Tokyo that any actual Japanese people live in.

(As a side-bar, this is also what the Simpsons do every time they visit another country -- they visit the IDEA of the country. On the flight to or from Japan they experience what the pilot calls "some mild Godzilla related turbulence." This is why it was so silly that Brazil got mad at the Simpsons for talking about the horrible monkey problems there: I think Brazil's objection was there were no monkeys at all there? Anyway, the Simpsons writers were not going to base their comedy episode in well researched facts about Brazil. The comedy comes from them bumping into every ignorant stereotype, the joke being that the you go halfway around the world and it is EXACTLY what you expected: the reverse of the painter Wilde describes. Also side-bar in the side-bar: The Simpsons Go to Japan features one of my favorite lines in the series: Homer complains he doesn't like anything Japanese and Marge says "You liked Rashomon" and he snipes back, "That's not how I remember it.")

In War of the Gargantua many of the buildings look like miniatures because they of course ARE miniatures. They have to be because their monsters are just actors in suits, and this is how they are going to make them look huge, and topple buildings. There are better ways to achieve this effect now, of course, but here, as elsewhere (e.g. some of the blood-spray effects) Tarantino WANTS the tech from movie history. Here he goes farther because he wants it like this just for pure STYLE. "He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art," writes Wilde. Tarantino Tokyo buildings look miniature NOT because they are going to be knocked down, but because he wants to establish a STYLE, to distinguish the IDEA OF TOKYO he is using from the real tokyo EVEN THOUGH HE WILL MIX IN SCENES OF THE REAL TOKYO WHERE HE SHOT ON LOCATION. You have to enjoy the insanity of how fake the Tokyo Thurman is landing in looks, even though the actress will in a moment be shown in the real Tokyo. I have mentioned before that Tarantino alludes to movie history in order to present himself as the culmination of the tradition. The counter example is instructive here: Roland Emmerich's Godzilla used the best tech of the day to tell his story and now it is just one more junky monster movie. Tarantino is thinking about the history of movies, including that history in Kill Bill, and so he BUILDS upon the past, he is informed by the past in a real way, where Emmerich just sort of says "Hey here is that Godzilla movie you wanted."

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist," says Wilde. Tarantino's take on this is to see things are they are IN MOVIES. To embrace the way other artists saw, to accept their distorted reality as part (though obviously not the whole) of his movie. This is why it is inappropriate to ask, for example, how Thurman was able to spend hours and hours in Buck's truck in the hospital parking lot having just left his mangled body in the hospital. Did no one find him, or go looking for her? Are the POLICE after Thurman? This is not reality. This is a world where they will let you carry a samurai sword with you on a plane. The police showing up to arrest Thurman during her fight with Lucy Liu would be more surprising than the fight being interrupted by a Godzilla attack.

"If you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere." This is clearly Tarantino's process. Except the work of Japanese artists he absorbs is in monster movies.

Finally, part of what Tarantino is doing with the miniature looking Tokyo is drawing attention to the battle between Thurman and Liu as a kind of epic attack of two giant forces, not unlike the fight between the Gargantua that comes just after the clip above. Like the monsters, they are the larger than life -- larger than Tokyo -- figures battling it out and leaving scores of Japanese wounded and running and screaming for their lives. (in the House of the Blue Leaves). So in addition to the more obvious fusion of Samurai and Cowboy in the Thurman-Liu battle, you also have the fights between giant Japanese movie monsters in there. The house of the Blue Leaves fight is where ALL of the influences come together, and it is going to take FOREVER to talk about because there are so many things being alluded to in very quick succession, including as we have seen, Hitchcock's The Lodger and War of the Gargantua. But we have made another dent.

Jason Powell's Top 20 Claremont X-Men Comics, part 4 (of 5)

2010-12-07T11:35:00.002-05:00

[Jason Powell continues to epilogue the hell out of his epic look at Claremont's X-Men.]

Per some folks’ request (hi, Jeremy), here is my top 20 favorite Claremont X-comics. (Today.) Note: I’m going chronological, not with a ranking.

PART FOUR 1986-1987

12

New Mutants #40, 1986

When Claremont turned Magneto into the new headmaster for the New Mutants, it didn’t always work. (I think Scott Lobdell commented in the “Comics Creators on X-Men” interview book that there was something horrible in seeing Magneto folding laundry.) But the story here is right on: Magneto fights the Avengers, who refuse to believe that he has reformed. I think that by the mid-80s, Claremont must have been pretty immersed in his private mutant universe, as he seems to relish the idea of taking down Marvel’s mainstream heroes down a peg. Captain America and company come off as terribly smug and sanctimonious here, and it’s quite a joy to see Magneto (and the New Mutants, particularly Illyana) take the team down. There’s a quite wonderful moment when Magneto points out the Avengers’ hypocrisy, them having accepted the formerly villainous Sub-Mariner among their ranks yet refusing to believe that Magneto could reform. Captain America points out what he believes to be a key difference: With Namor, there is a precedence for heroism, as the Sub-Mariner actually fought against Nazis in World War II. Magneto’s reply – informed by his own history with the Nazi regime – is dryly perfect: “How fortunate for him, Captain.”

People have theorized that part of the X-Men’s popularity was due to their status as the outcasts of the Marvel Universe. Since comics fans themselves often feel like outcasts, it was easy for them to identify with the X-Men, and certainly must have felt empowered by the glamorization of the characters. This particular issue of New Mutants – with its group of teenage misfits rallying around a powerful leader to defeat and humiliate a group of smug authoritarians too blind to see how very wrong they are – surely must be a quintessential example of this phenomenon. I mean, I like to think I am reasonably well-adjusted and integrated into society, but I still want to cheer when I read this one.

13

Classic X-Men #7b, 1986

Ah, the Classic X-Men backups, illustrated by John Bolton. Some of Claremont’s best X-Men stories, these. Issue 7 introduces us to a Hellfire Club run by normal humans. Sebastian Shaw has worked his way into the inner circle, but the other mutants – Tessa, Harry Leland, Emma Frost, and another female mutant, called Lourdes – are still on the outside. But an attempt by the Club’s chairman, Edward Buckmann, to eradicate mutants with a new batch of Sentinels changes things. Shaw initiates a coup, and takes over the Inner Circle, thus leading to the Hellfire Club status quo we all know and love, as introduced in X-Men 129.
These back-up stories are a great example of Claremont’s ability to be economical when needed. Here’s what I said about this one: ‘There’s a fantastic bit of dialogue toward the end of the Sentinel sequence, when Shaw’s lover, a mutant named Lourdes, dies from wounds received during the fight. It begins with a fairly standard cliché: As she starts to fade, she flashes back to a happy time in her life, and wishes she could be there again. She then looks at Shaw and says, “Oh, Sebastian ... why does Buckman hate us ...” Shaw’s reply: “Fear. Of what we are, and what we represent.” And then he adds, “Now, I’ll give him cause.”

From a sentimental flashback to a gently plaintive indictment of the villain’s racism, to Shaw’s surprisingly pragmatic response, to a chilling set-up for the story’s final act. … And it all happens in just a few lines. The flow is fantastic, and a great example of Claremont at his absolute best.’

14

Fantastic Four vs. The X-Men #4, 1987

What worse name could there be for a touching, heart-warming, character-driven drama than “The Fantastic Four vs. The X-Men”? But there it is. The title teams do fight, both in issue 2 and issue 4, but the whole series is built on emotional moments, not physical ones. The series is actually packed with psychological drama -- another example of Claremont economy, as in terms of page count this story is not that long – and everything pays off beautifully in the fourth and final issue. I’ve read it many, many times, and it always makes me cry. I mean, literally cry. Beautiful, heartwarming stuff.

15

Classic X-Men #12b , 1987

Another twelve-page Claremont-Bolton collaboration, which lays out large parts of Magneto’s back-story. Magneto is Claremont’s greatest single achievement as writer of the X-Men – by far his most fleshed-out, most three-dimensional characterization. And this is one of Claremont’s best Magneto stories, although it is trumped by …

16

Classic X-Men #19b , 1987

This is my single favorite X-Men story, ever. I’ll just link to the full write-up.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Black Rain

2010-12-02T08:17:00.006-05:00

I continue to explore the theory that while, yes, Tarantino does seem to have a lot of bits in his movies that look like bits from other people's movies, this is not swiping. He alludes as Milton does -- to comment on the history of a genre and to figure his film as the culmination of a grand tradition.

FROM BLACK RAIN

[Samurai sword wielding motocycle gang cuts off Andy Garcia's head while Michael Dougles watches helpless. You can sort of see it here: ]

FROM KILL BILL

Lucy Liu's samurai sword weilding motorcycle gang heads to the House of the Blue Leaves. You can see it here:]

Black Rain is a 1989 Ridley Scott movie about a very macho American hero played by Michael Douglass who goes from NYC to Japan to deliver a prisoner, a prisoner who escapes immediately upon arrival. He and his partner, played by Andy Garcia, stick around to capture the guy, and in the scene above Garcia gets murdered by a samurai sword wielding Japanese motorcycle gang led by their escaped prisoner.

I am not going to lie. I do not have much to say about this. Samurai sword wielding Japanese motorcycle gangs in both, I guess. Protagonists that want revenge also.

Tarantino, if he is thinking about this movie at all, makes two small moves, ones he will make over and over.

First, he revises the story he is drawing on by having a woman replace a macho male.

Second, he revises the story he is drawing on by taking something that elsewhere would be a full length film, and compressing it to a sequence, generally improving it. That compression and improvement is key. It allows Kill Bill, like the blob, to absorb a host of films and film genres. Like the blob, he grows more powerful and unstoppable every time he does this. Like the highlander every victory lends him power. Every time he can do in 15 minutes what someone else does in 2 hours, and do it better, he wins. And he beats a whole lot of people at this game when he plays.

When you say Raging Bull is a good movie, one of the main things you are implying, unless you qualify, is that it is good for a boxing movie, or good for a sports movie, or good for a realistic drama. You don't mean to say it is a better movie than Scott Pilgrim. Because you want to compare apples to apples, and whatnot. So when Kill Bill alludes to these movies, it opens itself up to a wider range of comparisons. You can imagine Kill Bill as a kind of mutant hybrid super fruit -- you may want to compare apples to apples, but Kill Bill has elements of many fruits and so you can safely compare it to apples AND oranges AND bananas.

And of course Kill Bill is a much better movie than Black Rain, and almost all of the movies it alludes to. So when you say "Kill Bill is a great movie" you mean more than when you say "Black Rain is a great movie," because Kill Bill OWNS Black Rain and OWNS many movies that Black Rain would never be compared to, such as Navajo Joe. In part this is because Tarantino comes late in the tradition and can draw on many movies made AFTER Black Rain, but specifically Tarantino is simply more audacious than Black Rain. He sees a larger landscape and believes he can conquer it.

Jason Powell's Top 20 Claremont X-Men Comics, part 3 (of 5)

2010-11-30T18:32:00.002-05:00

[Jason Powell continues to epilogue the hell out of his huge look at Claremont's X-Men.]

PART THREE: 1984 - 1985

9

Uncanny X-Men #183, 1984

Kitty and Peter break up. Original blog entry says: “Thanks to Romita’s incredible talent for drawing a fist-fight, combined with Claremont’s peerless ability to write superheroes as real, psychologically credible human beings, this is the first issue of Uncanny X-Men that – instead of being weighted one way or the other – is truly equal parts superb melodrama and dynamic action story. The balance would never again be this perfect.”

10

New Mutants #27, 1985

It’s probably obvious that I’m sort of cherry-picking a favorite issue from each miniature “era” of Claremont’s run. Obviously Claremont/Sienkiewicz has to be represented somewhere, despite the relative brevity of their collaboration on New Mutants (it lasted just a little over a year, from issue 18 to issue 31). It was a really fantastic bit of synergy – Claremont was explicitly pleased with it when he talked about Sienkiewicz in the “Comics Creators on X-Men” book. I had always assumed that some of the wild concepts that cropped up over the course of that run were the result of Sienkiewicz co-plotting, but apparently I had it backwards. According to Nocenti in her interview with Patrick Meaney (as always, thanks, Patrick!), Claremont was just coming up with wilder and wilder ideas, so Nocenti felt obliged to seek out an artist whose sensibility was out-there enough to match with Claremont’s increasingly weirder ideas. (So, the next time you see someone online say that Warlock was created as a way to showcase Bill Sienkiewicz’s weirdness, be aware that it just ain’t so. Sienkiewicz was recruited so that Warlock would be portrayed according to Claremont’s vision.)

Anyway, this issue is my favorite of the Claremont/Sienkiewicz run – it’s the middle part of the “Legion” three-parter. It’s a stock plot, one of Claremont’s go-to’s: a journey through the astral plane, inside someone’s psyche. It allows for a lot of weird, dream-like imagery, which normally can feel a bit self-indulgent and wearying. But Sienkiewicz’s art style – so impressionistic in style, and so varied in form – really elevates the concept beyond what has become a superhero-genre cliché. The story is visually insane enough to actually feel like it might be taking place inside of someone’s mind. Meanwhile, Claremont’s characterization of Xavier, as he explores the mind of a son he didn’t know he had, is quite powerful and multi-faceted. Xavier has always been portrayed as the guy who knows more than he tells. He’s the one who knows all the secrets. But here, we see a fantastic reversal of that – we get to see Charles as the naïve one, for a change. And it’s all completely credible.

The issue also feels rather strikingly topical when reading it now, as part of David “Legion” Haller’s mental backdrop is informed by the Arab-Israeli conflict.

11

New Mutants Special Edition, 1985

Unlike with X-Men, where Claremont loved to shake up the roster on a regular basis, the New Mutants had a much more consistent line-up during Claremont’s tenure. Possibly because Claremont had a special affection for his own babies – the X-Men were largely created by other people, but all nine New Mutants were created or co-created by Claremont himself. (Except for Illyana Rasputin, technically, but she really was a cipher until Claremont did the Limbo story with her.)

Anyway, there is no better showcase for all nine New Mutants than the 64-page 1985 Special Edition, which drops each of them in a different domain of Asgard and then has fun watching as they attempt to survive and thrive in a realm of pure fantasy, slowly but surely making their way to each other.

What I said earlier: “Ann Nocenti once again earns her chops as an editor; she’s got every member of the creative cast working not only at peak efficiency, but seemingly in telepathic unison. The various design elements – layout, line, color, letters – complement each other so well, it’s almost hard to believe that so many different people were involved. The clarity of expression and continuity of design are breathtaking.”

Art Adams didn’t draw all that many mutant stories by Claremont, but whenever he did, the results were always gold. Adams’ depictions of the New Mutants are actually my favorites. I don’t think anyone drew these nine characters better.

Jason Powell's Top 20 Claremont X-Men Comics, part 2 (of 5)

2010-11-23T13:03:00.001-05:00

[Super-villains monologue. Jason Powell epilogues.]

PART TWO: 1982-1983

5

Uncanny X-Men #161 –1982

This is the best of the post-Byrne collaborations between Claremont and Cockrum, as they reveal the “secret origin” of Xavier and Magneto’s first meeting. Excerpt from my original blog entry: ‘That Magneto is two steps ahead of Xavier already speaks volumes about both of them – ingenious characterization on Claremont’s part – but just as clever is the contrast in their differing reactions to meeting a fellow mutant. For Magneto, it is not necessary to be commented upon; to Xavier, it is “fantastic!” That single image and its accompanying text -- Page 15, panel three – is one of my personal favorites in the entire Claremont X-Men canon. That one panel alone tells you almost everything you need to know about those two characters and their relationship. Absolutely brilliant.’
6-7

Uncanny X-Men #172-173, 1983

Wolverine and Rogue team up in Japan. Issue 172 is the standout of these two issues, but they are both fantastic, my favorite of the Claremont-Smith collaborations. Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote about issue 172: “So, “Scarlet in Glory” brims with cross-connections, right from the start: Logan catches up on what has been happening in X-Men in continuity (his enemy, Rogue, is now a team member; Kitty has a pet dragon, etc.). Meanwhile Yukio, from the Wolverine miniseries, fights the Silver Samurai, etc. Also in the mix is the slow-burning “Phoenix resurrection” bit. There is a lot going on in this issue, but – buoyed by penciller Paul Smith’s ingenuity -- Claremont handles the disparate components gracefully, weaving them into a clockwork plot that still stands as one of the most elegant and precise that the series has ever seen. So meticulously thought-out is the story that Claremont and Smith are able to execute no less than five surprises/reveals over the course of Pages 12-18, each one perfectly set-up and brilliantly executed.”

8

Uncanny X-Men #179, 1983

Kitty is kidnapped by the Morlocks. What I said originally: “With its dark tone, its powerful (and powerfully arranged) sequences of both terror and tragedy, and its genuinely hard look at the skewed politics that comprise the series’ foundation, Uncanny X-Men #179 is a watershed issue for the canon, and an overlooked gem.”

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: His Girl Friday

2010-11-18T08:30:00.002-05:00

The next part in my series looking at Tarantino's allusions in Kill Bill: my argument is that he alludes like Milton alludes in Paradise Lost -- to reinterpret the whole history that came before, and set his work up as the culmination.

FROM HIS GIRL FRIDAY

[Cary Grant says "I've always been kind of particular whom my wife marries.]

FROM KILL BILL

[in the opening to volume 2, Bill says to Thurman that he has always been kind of particular whom his gal marries.]

Here Tarantino is not, I think, making a serious link between Kill Bill and the Screwball romantic comedy. Kill Bill performs "transumption" on many genres, but the Screwball romantic comedy is not one of them. He is not trying to "out-do" the screwball comedy in Kill Bill, in the way he is trying to out-do the Western by exposing it to it's samurai roots.

In fact I might argue that this is not an allusion Tarantino is making at all. This is an allusion that BILL is making. BILL, the character, has seen the movie His Girl Friday, and is quoting the film to The Bride, wryly discovering a line from the film to be appropriate to his present position.

You could argue that Bill will shortly bring to the surface the depth of feeling the line hides in His Girl Friday -- the jealousy that Cary Grant does not want to show. But of course Grant also shows his real emotion by the end. Grant of course does a lot in the course of His Girl Friday to spoil his ex-girl's upcoming wedding, including kidnaping her would be new mother in law. And he is eventually successful. Bill's also does immoral things to ruin his ex-girls wedding, but he really leaves the Screwball genre completely behind. It is too silly to call his a raising of the stakes. It is a total game changer that shows Tarantino is not trying to comment on the screwball comedy.

There may also be something to the fact that the Kill Bill scene is in black and white. The "classical" -- as embodied in His Girl Friday, one of those movies that embodies the "silver screen" -- is about to get smashed to pieces. The allusion establishes a kind of status quo that, because we know the rest of the film is in color, we know is about to get wrecked. It is an allusion that serves to raise tension. This black and white world can only last so long. Color is coming. And with it, Tarantino.

Maybe the most you could say is that Tarantino is sort of "name checking" all the film genres, just to show that he has considered them all. But he is not equally attacking them all. I think in this case it is much simpler: on the way to building his masterpiece, he pays tribute to one of his favorite films.

Although: we will return to this scene at least twice more, as we get to allusions to The Good the Bad and the Ugly and The Searchers. HIs Girl Friday is directed by Howard Hawks, director of John Wayne's Red River, Rio Bravo, and El Dorado. I don't think it is a coincidence that Hawks is alluded to just at the moment we get to these other major Western allusions, but more on that to come.

Jason Powell's Top 20 Claremont X-Men Comics, part 1 (of 5)

2010-11-16T23:11:00.002-05:00

[Jason Powell returns for this encore presentation. Because you demanded it! Neil should be back with the final part of his series soon.]

Per some folks’ request (hi, Jeremy), here is my top 20 favorite Claremont X-comics. (Today.) Note: I’m going chronological, not with a ranking.

PART ONE 1975-1981
1

Uncanny X-Men #96 – from 1975

The first issue fully plotted by Claremont, and it introduces several motifs that will recur often over the next sixteen years: Demonic invasion (see also: X-Men 143, X-Men 184-188, “Fall of the Mutants” and “Inferno”); women kicking ass (note Moira coming out with the machine gun, and of course it is Storm who saves the day); Ororo’s claustrophobia; and the one-page cutaways that seed upcoming plots (not something invented by Claremont, but it’s a device that he loves, and this is the first issue in which he uses it).

When I first blogged about this, Josh Hechinger made a great comment about it. Here’s an excerpt …

“ … notice how everyone's attacks on the monster are mainly them trying to defend whoever just got smacked down by the monster? Storm goes down, Colossus saves her. He goes down, Nightcrawler lays into the monster. Nightcrawler goes down, Wolverine goes berserker. It escalates, to the point of overcompensation. … Everyone on the team clearly A) doesn't want to see another teammate die and B) is trying really, really, REALLY hard to make up for the fact that they sat on their thumbs when Proudstar went boom. … (Except for Banshee, who DID try to save Proudstar, and as such is barely involved in the fight.)”

2

Uncanny X-Men #113 – 1978

The quintessential X-Men vs. Magneto fight, by Claremont/Byrne/Austin. That team always did action really well, and this is one of their best fight scenes, and it’s against their arch-enemy! (It’s also pretty much the final appearance of the evil, Silver Age Magneto. His rehabilitation begins to take place over the course of his next few appearances.)
3

Uncanny X-Men #132 – 1980

Here’s what I wrote originally: “This issue is a triumph by Claremont and Byrne, containing an embarrassment of riches. With the exception of their utter masterpiece, Uncanny X-Men #137, this one’s their very best. It contains the return of the Angel, a beautiful love scene between Scott and Jean, a wonderfully suspenseful assault by the X-Men upon the Hellfire Club, the full unveiling of Sebastian Shaw (arguably Claremont/Byrne’s greatest addition to the X-Men rogues’ gallery), the payoff to Jason Wyngarde’s seduction of Jean along with the revelation that Wyngarde is actually Silver Age villain Mastermind, and to top it all off the best picture of Wolverine ever drawn.”

Then in the comments, Doug M pointed out the use of contrast in the issue: “ … it is structured, to a degree rare even for top-form Claremont & Byrne, and almost unknown in mainstream comics up to this time. … We have two parts to this issue -- the intro in New Mexico, and the attack on the Hellfire Club in New York. … New Mexico is sunny and warm and clean. In New York, it's night and cold and snowing, and some of the action takes place in a sewer. … In New Mexico the X-Men are casual, in jeans and bathing suits. In New York, they're formal, in uniform or in evening dress. … New Mexico is wide open and outdoors. All but a couple of panels in New York are indoors, and some are claustrophobically so -- Nightcrawler and Wolverine going through tunnels. … New Mexico is heavenly, with an angel soaring high above. The Hellfire Club is hellish, with the two least human members of the team -- the one who /looks/ horrible, and the one who really /is/ horrible -- creeping through the sewers. … The very first panel has Angel flying high. The very last panel has Wolverine emerging from the muck deep underground.” Doug goes on with some interesting observations about how these contrasts reinforce thematically what is happening with Jean … it’s all great stuff. Check it out if you haven’t.

4

Uncanny X-Men #137 – 1980

The issue that everything before it was leading up to. A Greek tragedy, with superheroes.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Citizen Kane

2010-11-11T09:36:00.008-05:00

I continue my look at Kill Bill's allusions to other films -- "Miltonic" because like Milton, when Tarantino alludes to something, he does not do so to simply pay homage, but to interpret, revise, subvert, and reorganize, and make himself, as the inheritor, the man who stands above it all.

FROM CITIZEN KANE (embedding and sound on this one is not allowed by YouTube, but you don't need the sound anyway):

[the opening of Citizen Kane -- the camera slowly moves forward to the latticed windows of Kane's room and we see him in profile in near silhouette on the bed with the window behind him. Snow blows. The light changes slowly. He dies and a nurse comes in to check on him. Start at a minute in here: CLICK HERE]

FROM KILL BILL

[Opening credits to volume 1. Thurman is in profile near silhouette on the bed, with a lattice window behind her. The light comes up slowly.]

The opening of Kill Bill visually recalls the opening of Citizen Kane: The slow fade in, the slow change of the light, the light slowly growing in the window, the still figure in profile.

Citizen Kane has this romantic reputation as the greatest movie in movie history. "It's not Citizen Kane" is shorthand for "That movie is dumb" -- the point, of course being that no film wants to invite comparisons with Citizen Kane. It is like a comparison to Shakespeare or Einstein. You always lose.

Tarantino is going to allude to 100 movies in Kill Bill. And like the insanely confident auteur he is, he is going to start out, seconds after quoting god-damn STAR TREK, by alluding to the greatest movie of them all. For starters the allusion is not comedic -- Tarantino is dead serious. And it is not coy and it is it oblique. Tarantino's START recalls Orson Welles' START in a BIG WAY because he wants his WHOLE MOVIE to recall ALL OF Citizen Kane. He is BEGGING for the comparison everyone else would go out of their way to avoid. "It's not Citizen Kane"? NO! Tarantino, says, this IS my FUCKING Citizen Kane. THIS WILL BE THE GREATEST PICTURE EVER SEEN, is his opening boast, made over the opening credits.

Other images in the Citizen Kane opening will figure later in Kill Bill -- the nurse, the flurry of snow. And both of those images, images at the END of the life of Charles Foster Kane, are images at the BEGINNING of the revenge quest of Thurman -- Elle Driver dressed as the nurse is one of the first conflicts Thurman must survive, and the snow falls during Thurman's first (chronological) battle in her revenge.

Citizen Kane begins with the end of its main character. We start with his death. But the death-like state of Thurman is ONLY THE BEGINNING of Tarantino's protagonist. Where Orson Welles' main character ends Tarantino's main character BEGINS. Kane is dead but Thurman only LOOKS DEAD. Advantage Tarantino.

In one of the ballsiest moves I can imagine, Tarantino figures the Death of Charles Foster Kane as one of those comic book cliffhangers where it seems like someone is dead -- and then at the very beginning of the next issue BAM! they were only faking it! Tarantino figures Kill Bill as issue 2 of Citizen Kane. Uma Thurman rises for her revenge, now possessed -- now BLESSED -- by the dying breath of Charles Foster Kane, and Citizen Kane, Patron Saint of All Films. And as she rises for her revenge, Tarantino begins his revenge on the movies that came before him. And like Thurman fighting Lucy Liu, he starts with the biggest and most obviously dangerous opponent. And also like Thurman, he appears to have no fear.

X-Treme X-Men 1 (#3 in a four-issue limited series)

2010-11-09T21:47:00.002-05:00

[Neil Shyminsky continues his look at Claremont's more recent return to the X-Men.]

In my blogs about Claremont’s return to X-Men and Uncanny, I spent a lot of space writing about how Claremont was never as tediously wordy or prone to allowing characters to soliloquize, and noted how those comics were themselves proof that fan claims had always been exaggerated. But a strange thing happens in the course of a year. Because by the time that Claremont, having been pushed from the core books for Jon Casey and Grant Morrison, transitions to X-Treme X-Men and launches it with a new first issue, his verbosity has become prolixity*, and the writer has become a stereotype of himself.

(* For those who also didn’t know this word existed – I found it by accident a few weeks ago – the dictionary tells me that prolixity is “boring verbosity.” Perfect.)

Of the 31 pages I count in the issue, fewer than half (14, and maybe 15 if you include the page where Thunderbird shoots a fireball) contain any action at all, much less a fight of any kind – and many of those pages of action consist of the X-Men getting pwned by goons in futuristic armor, which is hardly exciting stuff. That means that 17 pages feature characters who are only standing or sitting, all the while talking or thinking. Of those 17 pages, four are devoted to in-narrative storytelling that’s designed to fill-in the backstory for readers who are new to the X-Men (a one page summary of who the X-Men are) and/or wondering what makes X-Treme X-Men different from the other books (three pages about Destiny’s diaries and how they came to learn about them). And then there’s a couple pages where the characters discuss why they don’t trust Professor X anymore**. And a couple more pages where the local police and politicians explain and introduce themselves to one another for our benefit. This isn’t just a lot of exposition – it’s the exposition of your nightmares.

(**Which, on top of being unnecessarily long, also happens to be badly written, since it forces us to a) align ourselves, as the reader being filled in, with the surprisingly ignorant and personality-less Thunderbird who is asking the questions, and also b) believe that Thunderbird, having been on the team for at least a year at this point, is really that clueless and made the decision to join this mission without really knowing why they were doing it. Which is only possible to believe if Claremont thinks that either he or we are stupid.)

The characters that Claremont has chosen are a bit strange, too, given his characterization strengths and traditional favourites among the X-Men. Granted, Claremont was working under restraints, here – Morrison and Casey were given first pick, so Chris only had so many options. (This is why Beast appears only in the first couple issues – Morrison hadn’t yet put his claim in when Claremont started, and so he had to be hastily written out.) But for someone famed for writing so many varied voices, and writing them so well, the uniformity and blandness of his choices is underwhelming: the aloof ‘living-computer’, the aloof no-fun cop from the future, the aloof weather goddess, the aloof English ninja aristocrat, the slightly-less-aloof Indian aristocrat... stop me once you see the pattern. Aside from Rogue and the short-lived Beast, this is a team that is surprisingly (for Claremont) lacking in humor and, well, fun. And when you combine an exposition-driven issue with such seriousness, the result is less than exciting***. It is, in fact, just boring.

(*** Confession time: Even in re-reading this, so as to write about it, I couldn’t force myself to read every word bubble, much less every word. There are entire pages where, while I could tell you vaguely who was there and what was discussed, I couldn’t be compelled under threat of torture to tell you what they specifically talked about.)

This being, effectively, the second year of Claremont’s discontinuous return to the X-Men, it’s at least nice to see some familiar Claremontisms re-emerge in his writing:

Rogue informs us that she is both invulnerable and that her claws will “cut through anything – but ah won’t!” (though, to her credit, she makes a joke out of how she announced the former)

Sage uses the old cliché, “Not today, gentleman. And certainly not by the likes of you!”

This one, from Psylocke: “Weighed in that balance, our own fate, our very lives, they’re nothing”.

And from Beast: “Comes with the uniform, comes with the moniker of X-Men”.

It’s not enough to save the issue, of course, but it’s at least an indication that Claremont is no longer afraid to dip into his bag of old tricks. Too bad that, given the awfulness of its surroundings, this sounds more like a pale imitation of Claremont than it does Claremont himself.

In Jason’s final post on X-Men 1-3, he raves about how the qualities that made Claremont’s writing so well loved were in evidence right until the end of that 17 year run: “Fun, intelligence, eloquence, action, intrigue, an unabashed affection for the characters, and an unqualified respect for his readers.” But in this, his second go at launching a new X-Men title, it’s not clear that more than one or two of those attributes have survived the intervening years.

I want to say something nice about this comic, but I don’t have much. I certainly have nothing nice to say about the non-Claremont aspects – I think Sal Larroca is a weak storyteller and the digitally ‘painted’ panels are muddy and clash badly with the crisp outlines of the text and their bubbles. But the important point is this – it feels, after a year, like Claremont has already run out of enthusiasm. And while it also seems that he recaptured some of his old form by the time that his run on X-Treme (which lasts four years) ended and he returned to Uncanny X-Men (for another two-and-a-half years), it’s not in evidence here and this comic is hardly better than fan fiction. Not good at all.

Kill Bill and Miltonic Allusion: Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger

2010-11-04T10:41:00.007-04:00

From Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 film The Lodger:

[The lodger is a black and white silent movie. In the clip you see people downstairs, the chandelier shaking, and they look up at the ceiling. The ceiling goes "see through" and you see a guy pacing up stairs. It sort of looks like they are looking up at him through a glass ceiling. You see the soles of his shoes. It is a 17:30 here: ]

From Kill Bill

[In Kill Bill Thurman advances toward Lucy Liu over the glass floor of the club and we see her shoes from underneath. They say FUCK U.]

My first thought seeing these two clips together was that there really was no significant connection between the two. A view from below of feet walking. A coincidence. You look for Tarantino to be swiping from Spaghetti Westerns and Samurai pics. Not so much from silent movies. But the more I thought about it the more important it seemed.

The Lodger is about a town in fear of a serial killer who identifies himself as The Avenger and who only kills "fair haired" women. Daisy is a blonde woman whose parents have a room for rent. A mysterious man -- the lodger -- takes a room. He is strange -- goes out at odd hours, demands all the paintings of blonde women be removed from his room. Daisy is dating Joe, a police office who has recently been put on the Avenger case. Daisy and the Lodger share an attraction. Her parents fear he is the Avenger. Daisy breaks up with Joe because of his jealousy, at which point Joe hits on the theory that the Lodger is the Avenger. Joe has him arrested, at which point they find a gun, a map of the kills, and a picture of a blonde woman in his room. The Lodger escapes custody and explains his story to Daisy -- his sister was murdered by The Avenger and he has been tracking down his sister's killer. The town attacks the Lodger thinking he is the Avenger, but Joe gets a phone call saying the Avenger has been arrested elsewhere. He goes to save the Lodger from the mob. The Lodger and Daisy end up together.

We have no idea why the killer identifies himself as The Avenger -- in fact the Avenger is really a McGuffin in the film, just something that brings the characters into a relationship. Hitchcock wanted The Lodger's innocence to be ambiguous at the end. The studio would not allow it, but they did allow him to never show The Avenger.

The scene in the clip is the Lodger, early in the movie, pacing upstairs, worrying Daisy, Joe and Daisy's mother, below. For 1927 the "see through floor" would have been a pretty stylish effect, I think. In 1927 you have to get clever if you want to show how walking above disturbs people below, because you don't have sound. You can see why a a foot-fetishiest like Tarantino would notice it -- his films are filled with images and references to feet, from the foot massage discussion in Pulp Fiction, to loving shots of feet in Kill Bill (Uma Thurman demanding her big toe to wiggle) Death Proof (which opens with the image of feet on a dashboard), and Inglourious Basterds (Christoph Waltz fitting the shoe to Diane Kruger).

Tarantino does not just mindlessly swipe an image from The Lodger. He reminds us of The Lodger to reverse it: The Lodger revolves around a killer of blonde women. Tarantino's main character is a blonde woman who kills. The Lodger paces back and forth, aimlessly. Thurman is walking with purpose toward her target. Tarantino fills in the blank provided by Hitchcock: Hitchcock's Avenger is a non-character whose name is inexplicable. Uma Thurman is the main character who is obviously avenging a wrong. He makes literal Hitchcock's imagery: Hitchcock had a "see through floor" as a special effect. Tarantino has Thurman walk on a glass floor. It is a bit of a fuck you to Hitchcock, a bit of a "LOOK WHAT I CAN DO" so it is a nice detail that Thurman's shoes have FUCK U written across the bottom, and because of that see through floor we can see it.

Tarantino wants to establish his film as better than all other action and suspense films, and himself as better than Hitchcock. But Hitchcock is a pretty major presence to try and overthrow. So he goes after Hitchcock through one of his smaller films, but one that in its themes -- a man wrongly accused, sexually motivated murders -- will be a bit of a prototype of Hitchcock's later films. He is cutting the tree that towers over him at the root.

Uncanny X-Men 381 (#2 in a four-issue limited series)

2010-11-02T22:01:00.002-04:00

[Last week, when Neil Shyminsky started his look at The Second Coming of Claremont, Arthur commented "Welcome to the Uncanny X-Blogs, Neil ... Hope you survive the experience!" I wish I had thought to say that. Anyway here is Neil:]

If X-Men #100 was intended to feel epic in scale – and, regardless of whether it was a success, the choice of penciller and locale would seem to suggest that this was the intention – Claremont goes for a much more intimate feel with Uncanny X-Men #381. Or, at least, that’s how it begins.

One of the things that was seemingly forgotten about Claremont’s style on X-Men, even as his replacements – especially Scott Lobdell* – tried endlessly to recreate it, was that the scenes of melodrama or levity for which Claremont was famous were rarely the focus or majority of the individual issues. Take Grady Hendrix at Slate: “The classic Claremont pose is either a character, head hung in shame with two enormous rivers of tears running down the cheeks as he or she delivers a self-loathing monologue, or a character with head thrown back and mouth open in a shout of rage, shaking tiny fists at heaven and vowing that the whole world will soon learn about his or her feelings." But this is a gross exaggeration, if not entirely wrong. A ‘self-loathing monologue’ implies something lengthy and blustering, but Claremont always knew when to reign it in. For instance, when Scott and Jean share their memorable picnic in New Mexico immediately before the X-Men’s assault on the Hellfire Club, it’s only 8 panels long – less than two pages! And then there’s the iconic baseball game – would you believe that there were only three of them (issues #110 and #201 of Uncanny, as well as Annual #7) during Claremont’s whole run? (Thanks to Jason for confirming that for me!) And, yet, the frequency with which these things happened and their duration become organic things in our memories, growing in proportion to our affection (or distaste) for them. (Note, even, how Jason’s fantastic panel-by-panel analysis of the New Mexico scene is itself several times longer than the original scene – how delightfully apropos!)

(* Lobdell was the one who rammed Rogue-Gambit down our throats, and for whom the characteristic mise-en-scene was an X-Man sitting alone on the roof of a building. In the night. While it rained. During a storm. Real subtle stuff, that. And Fabian Nicieza was guilty of doing a bad impersonation of Claremont, too. In the comment thread to Jason’s summary, Arthur recalls that the xbooks newsgroup often playfully(?) referenced Fabian Nicieza's Sledgehammer of Angst(TM).)

Surely, Hendrix is thinking of Claremont’s successors and impersonators. I’m remembering, in particular, two Lobdell-penned issues devoted entirely to 22 pages of the most insufferable emo-whining: Uncanny 303, featuring Illyana’s death from the Legacy Virus, and a Lobdell-scribed issue that preceded Claremont’s second return to Uncanny X-Men, where he wastes an entire issue on a Cyclops-Corsair argument. (Don’t read them – just take my word for it.) For someone with a reputation for verbosity, Claremont could dispense with these kinds of moments both completely and with a remarkable economy of space. Not an easy balance to manage, and almost foreign to us in the age of decompressed storytelling.

I bring this up because the opening scene to this issue – a character piece in the classic Claremontian vein – is probably the best single scene that he’ll contribute during this short, second run. Coming in at an unusually long (for him) six pages – but two of which are a splash and only three of which are text-heavy – Claremont does a fine job of setting up the Phoenix-Cable relationship as the emotional center of the book. This is nicely tragic and complex stuff: Cable laments his inability to express love in any normative way, but wears his deceased dad’s visor around his neck like a soldier would dog-tags. (And as much as I dislike Adam Kubert’s pencils, the way he captures Cable’s hesitance to put his hand on Jean’s shoulder is pitch perfect.) Contrastingly, Jean espouses a sweet philosophy of hope in the face of impossible odds, a philosophy that would perhaps seem trite if not for a subsequent display of anger and aggression that would leave even Wolverine cold. Add to all this ambivalence Cable’s fear that his mother’s dark-side will overwhelm her, as well as the burden of knowing that, if and when that day comes, it’ll be his job to subdue her, and you can see that Claremont has a strong center to this team.**

(** I’ll admit, here, that while I kept up with Uncanny X-Men and X-Men in the interim, I read only scant issues of Cable’s own series and none of The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, wherein Cable’s relationship with his parents is actually (re)built in the future – that is, Cable’s own past in the future. So if Claremont is covering bases that have already been covered, or even contradicting them, I don’t know it.)

But, as with X-Men #100, we can’t give credit for what works without acknowledging that a lot of it doesn’t. Because, the Phoenix-Cable piece, while being the first proper scene in the comic, isn’t actually where it begins – it starts with narration from Gambit and an entirely predictable ‘life is like a hand of cards’ metaphor. But why is Gambit narrating at all, why are particular characters assigned to particular cards and is that meaningful in some way, and how is Gambit ‘dealing the cards’ in this story and why? And it’s both awfully convenient and left unexplained how a) Gambit knew Phoenix and Cable would already be in Venice, b) Gambit could somehow enter Phoenix’s mind (?!) to plant a card there, and c) the Shockwave Riders knew to find Phoenix in Venice, too. We do get some explanations at the end of the next issue, but too much of it relies on coincidence. It was an excuse to get this team together and get them into a fight, plain and simple. And that’s weak.

That Claremont has thrown multiple balls into the air before the first one has even had a chance to fall is a problem, and it’s a problem that will afflict him throughout this second go at the X-Men. Harras had pulled a 180 when he rehired Claremont: having hamstrung the writer in the late 80s with the requirement to recycle plots and characters from the Byrne days, he gave Claremont complete freedom the second time around. Which is too bad, because Claremont really could have used firmer editorial oversight when he created this series of dull, totally forgettable ciphers. (And I’m putting it gently – these characters were uniformly awful, awful, awful, and the Shockwave Riders are among the very worst. Cole, Macon, and Reese look wholly individuated in relation to these dudes.)

To Claremont’s credit, he apparently realized that there was a problem and was going to reintroduce Stryfe as the nemesis for the Uncanny team, but the realization came too late. This is because Harras’ replacement, Joe Quesada, would resemble the younger Harras moreso than the older one and run the writer off almost immediately. Claremont’s return was met with huge fanfare, but the honeymoon ended fast and Claremont didn’t have the caché or power that he once did – and his new take on the team certainly couldn’t compete with the newly authoritative X-Men that were appearing on movie screens.

And, so, less than a year after his return, Claremont was off the core X-books again. (Of course, he was still playing in the X-Universe’s sandbox – but more on that later.)

Miltonic Allusion in Kill Bill: The Epigraph

2010-10-28T15:01:00.004-04:00

Ok I am reposting this from like a year ago but I need it in place before next week, when we start diving into clips.

Kill Bill opens with an epigraph: "Revenge is a dish best served cold." After a beat the "source" is revealed: "Old Klingon Proverb."

"Revenge is a dish best served cold" is an epigraph that introduces the theme of the movie, obviously, but also says something about Tarantino's confidence in his own technical skill. (Technical skill is often described as "cold" in directors because we associate precision with lack of emotion; Kubrick is most often described as cold. Tarantino certainly has some serious skills, and he has also been accused of being insensitive in his use of violence, cold to its consequences. I hardly think this makes him dispassionate but since his passion is more for other films than anything else, with an emphasis on style, his films have this feel to a lot of people, people for whom film is lesser part of life maybe, rather than in continuity with it).

The epigraph also says a lot about the upcoming film just by being an epigraph -- this is a film that is epic enough to need a "literary" start (and will be divided into "chapters").

Most importanly is the reveal we get a few seconds later: "-- Old Klingon Proverb": which sends the whole epigraph into a tailspin. This is not a quote from Dangerous Liasons, but from Star Trek. That is funny in itself -- in a movie that will quote Samurai movies THROUGH their remade status as American and Italian Westerns, this one quote sets up a chain of references: just as we can go Kill Bill --> Man With No Name --> Yojimbo, we can go Kill Bill --> Star Trek --> Dangerous Liaisons. The quote is also revealing because it is not just a chain of reference but one that crosses high and low culture, and revels in the continuity rather than bemoaning it as a degeneration or even a copy. This is transumption -- Tarantino alludes not just to previous art, but to art that alludes further to still other works of art.

The whole movie is almost entirely set up right there but there but all this would be true if Kill Bill began "Revenge is a dish best served cold -- Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan." But it does not say that. It says "Old Klingon Proverb." There are only two groups of people that would refer to that phrase in that way: the characters in the fictional world of Star Trek (Klingons and whatnot), and die-hard fans who talk like that because they WISH they lived in that world. (Howard Moon on The Mighty Boosh often ends his sentences with "sir" -- what makes that super-dorky? Because like a lot of nerds he is nostalgic for some time in which people spoke like that -- a time suggested to him more from fiction than from history.) In 20 seconds Tarantino establishes his ambition, his talent, chains of reference that link up high culture and low culture, shows his unironic love of trash, and where all this comes from -- his status as a FAN.

Miltonic Allusion in Kill Bill: What is Miltonic Allusion, part 3

2010-10-28T09:26:00.002-04:00

Just an epilogue-y thing about the leaves. A passage of Ashbery and a quote by Bloom at his most ... Bloom-y.

FROM JOHN ASHBERY’S AS YOU CAME FROM THE HOLY LAND (last stanza)

out of night the token emerges
its leaves like birds alighting all at once under a tree
taken up and shaken again
put down in weak rage
knowing as the brain does it can never come about
not here not yesterday in the gap of today filling itself
as emptiness is distributed
in the idea of what time it is
when that time is already past

Bloom says "Ashbery’s finest achievement, to date, is his heroic and perpetual self-defeat, which is of a kind appropriate to conclude this book, since such self-defeat pioneers in undoing the mode of transumption that Stevens helped revive. Ashbery’s allusiveness is transumptive rather than conspicuous, but he employs it against itself, as though determined to make of his lateness a desperate cheerfulness. In the final stanza of As You Came From the Holy Land, the most characteristic of Shelleyan-Stevensian metaphors, the fiction of the leaves, is duly revealed as a failure (‘taken up and shaken again / put down in weak rage'); but the metalepsis substituted for it is almost a hyperbole of failure, as presence and the present fall together ‘in the gap of today filling itself / as emptiness is distributed.’ The two lines ending the poem would be an outrageous parody of the transumptive mode if their sad dignity were not so intense. Ashbery is too noble and poetically intelligent to subside into a parodist of time’s revenges."

X-Men 100 (#1 in a four-issue limited series)

2010-10-26T11:32:00.003-04:00

[Guest blogger Neil Shyminsky With Two Ys heroically picks up where Claremont SuperBlogger Jason Powell leaves off.]

When Geoff asked me, many months ago, to cover Claremont’s return to the X-Men – 100 or so issues after he left – I told him that I would be glad to cover the issues where he set the new status quo, but that I didn’t have enough enthusiasm to go beyond that. At the very least, I had genuinely fond memories of X-Men #100 and Uncanny X-Men #381.

But memories are a funny thing. There’s a University of Washington study that’s commonly taught to Intro Psych students where, under particular conditions, researchers found that they could convince nearly half of their subjects that they had met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Which is, of course, impossible. I bring this up because, having re-read the issues that I agreed to write about, I can only assume that Jason’s series – and, of course, the issues that I’ve read alongside his analyses – somehow warped or otherwise compromised my sense of just how good these comics were. Which isn’t to say that they’re purely awful...

But let me back up. X-Men #100 shipped only a month after #99, but six months had passed since the High Evolutionary depowered and repowered all of mutantkind. The six month gap isn’t unprecedented – the X-books pulled something similar a few years after Claremont left, after the “Age of Apocalypse”, and also skipped an indeterminate amount of time prior to Giant Size X-Men, which immediately preceded Claremont’s first run – but there’s something lazy about it. Over at uncannyxmen.net, Peter Luzifer writes that the gap occurred in lieu of “slowly building up new plot elements and having the characters coming up with lame excuses for their new looks”, and the results are generally underwhelming: there’s no explanation for why this is the current line-up, who’s leading, and why it’s such an unusually small team; Psylocke has new powers, inexplicably; Rogue’s absorption power no longer affects Colossus; Colossus and Rogue hook up spontaneously*; a new Thunderbird appears and we’re given no reason to care about him; the new villains, the Neo, have no clear motivation, ambiguous powers, or stock-villain personalities and dialogue.

(*Okay, so this one could have been good, in the classically soap opera-ish way that CC really excels at: Claremont later explained that the idea was to give Rogue a choice between a man she loved but couldn’t touch and one she could touch but didn’t love. But it unfolds too quickly and awkwardly, and it’s never picked up again.)

It’s not all bad. Aside from Warren Ellis on Excalibur, it seems like no one since Claremont himself had done much (or ANYthing) to develop Shadowcat, so the change in her appearance and attitude and the central role are nice surprises, if awkwardly executed. (Of course, she would be separated from the team and wouldn’t reappear for the duration of Claremont’s stay on X-Men.**) Take the line of dialogue, given to Shadowcat, that would become emblematic, at least among people on internet message boards of the day, of how Claremont was pressing too hard: “Reboot your system, baby. ‘Cause time only goes in one direction.” Ugh. Nightcrawler’s turn as a priest is also a worthy development, even if it’s strange that Claremont effectively skips the developmental bits – why he left, how he’s changed – in order to “return” him to super-heroics after he had retired from it for... zero issues. These are minor victories, clearly.

(**I’ve read that this was due to – stop me if you’ve heard it before – editorial interference. Kitty was supposed to get a miniseries that would address where she went, why Seth said she was a Neo, and so on, but the L.S. was dropped and Claremont was told to move on. One other interesting side-note on editors: the X-editor who chased Claremont off in the first place, Bob Harras, was presiding as editor-in-chief and rehired him for this run. And it wasn’t his fault that CC’s second run was so short, either – Claremont was booted this second time by Harras’ replacement, Joe Quesada.)

But for a Claremont reader with a long (if malleable) memory, these things shouldn’t be surprising. The first dozen or so issues of his original run have a similar slap-dash feel, as if Claremont is just throwing ideas against a wall as they come to him, knowing that most of them probably won’t stick. (Spoiler: most of them don’t, the second time OR the first.) We fans remember how early he planted the seeds for a Wolverine-Jean relationship and are impressed with his forward-thinking, but we forget that he did the same for Colossus and Storm; the first hints of what will eventually lead to the Phoenix Saga appear in Claremont’s first ten issues, but so is the suggestion that Wolverine is literally a mutant wolverine (though this was originally Len Wein’s idea), which will turn out to be much less fondly recalled. The point, simply, is that Claremont’s stories have always unfolded slowly and he needs time to set things up, to figure out what will work and what won’t. Whether this is an adequate defense of these newer issues or a knock against the older ones depends on how much patience you have as a reader.

In a move that’s entirely to be expected if you’re a long-time reader of either Claremont’s X-Men or Jason Powell’s re-evaluation of them, there is also a very deliberate effort on Claremont’s part to revisit his own work: the space station, Peter Corbeau, the telekinetic bubble to protect the team on re-entry – this stuff all recalls the first year of Claremont’s original run and the events that lead to the first appearance of Phoenix. (So, too, does the series of variant covers, each drawn by someone who had their own lengthy penciling gig during Claremont’s run, and often featuring the team as it existed when that penciler was on Uncanny X-Men. And so this has the effect of feeling like a tribute to the writer after-the-fact, a remembrance of what he’s done, which is a curious choice when you’re supposed to be pushing new stories with new characters and a new set of villains.)

What’s lacking here, though, is any obvious commentary on the older stuff. Jason’s series did a particularly good job of showing how Claremont’s backward glances were always meta-commentaries on where the team had been and where they were going – there are too many that fit the bill to list them all, but here are a few*** – but I don’t really see that meta-element, here. (Except, I suppose, in Kitty’s brief dialogue.) I’m not even sure that we can call this connection anything more than “interesting”, especially since it’s not clear that the events of the space station are meaningful outside this story – it provides a scene for a Neo terrorist attack, but why did it need to be a space station? It’s as if Claremont thought that a lazy gesture would be good enough.

(*** Thanks goes to Jason, once more, for helping me track down a lot of the posts that are found via these hyperlinks. There’ll be more of them, too.)

I should also add that Claremont is simply not the same narrator he once was. In the very confusingly rendered scene where Kitty descends into the, um, I guess the bowels of the space station, we would be forgiven for wondering whether we were watching a flashback. For a writer who was famous for over-narrating in order to compensate for poor art, Claremont is surprisingly unhelpful. More surprisingly, none of that purple, poetic language that Jason has noted numerous times is in evidence, here. The issue is set in outer-space, but he never describes it to us in anything but a perfunctory manner. It’s a notable absence.

A bit of good, a lot of bad, and the feeling that something is missing – it’s an auspicious start to Claremont’s second-coming.

Batman Inc.

2010-10-25T12:34:00.002-04:00

[Lost like Bruce Wayne in the time-stream, Guest Blogger Scott returns with a look at the idea of Batman, Inc. -- including a very well observed connection between Morrison's Batman and Will Brooker's book Batman Unmasked. I make a comment below about Dark Knight Returns.]

Perhaps this old news to some of you, but it was only upon picking up the latest issue of Morrison’s ‘Batman and Robin’ that I learned of Morrison’s plans for the Batman franchise once Bruce Wayne returned. Like most, I assumed that Dick Grayson would, of course, immediately hand cape and cowl back to his mentor and go back to doing his own Nightwing-thing. But Morrison has something bigger in mind: we are now going to have two Batmen: Grayson will remain Gotham’s Guardian while Wayne will become ‘Batman International’ so to speak and travel the world setting up a network of ‘Batmen’ (expanding upon Morrison’s reintroduction of the ‘Club of Heroes’). It’s not a completely unheard of concept; when Oliver Queen returned from the grave Connor Hawk retained the Green Arrow title as well, a similar concept has worked with the Flash even before Barry Allen’s return with Wally and Jay both bearing the mantle and there’s been more than one Green Lantern of earth for close to 40 years now, so why not Batman?

The idea of the hero passing on the torch to another is nothing new and, in fact, has long been a part of pulp-heroic tradition. Perhaps the most direct ancestor of the modern superhero is Lee Falk’s Phantom and in that strip the original Phantom wasn’t even the ‘original’ Phantom within in the continuity of the story (I think he was something like the 4th or 5th to have taken up the mantle; a way of cementing the idea that ‘the ghost who walks’ is actually immortal). Also, within the pulps, many characters over the years would develop a complex network of allies and associates to the point that, eventually, the central character would take a back seat in the action.

The idea that Batman should take this step is nothing new, in the conclusion of his book, Batman Unmasked, Will Brooker was inspired by the then most recent successful interpretation of Batman in a popular medium, Batman Beyond, to observe, “if the Batman line of comics really is being brought more into line with the animated series and its younger audience, Warners have realized that to a kid of twelve, a man in his early thirties might as well be a sixty-year old in terms of appeal […] why not take this model to its logical end, push Wayne forward to his ‘real’ age and play to the strengths of this ‘Team Batman’ concept?” (326). It is worth noting that Brooker’s book was published in 2000, when the most recent Batman film, Batman and Robin had flopped and no one could foresee that Nolan would re-invigorate the film franchise and, outside of the comics—perhaps even more so than the comics—the animated series was the most successful representation of the Bat Franchise as a whole and, with Batman Beyond as its latest incarnation, perhaps it was about time to re-imagine Batman as a whole. Brooker imagines a ‘Batman Genre Story’, “some of the codes would always remain—a Bat-costume, gadgets, crime-fighting, Gotham […] ‘Batman’ as a genre could embrace variation and improvisation around its core template, adapting to survive as Batman has always adapted to survive, both in Gotham and the real world” (328). In fact, to the younger Batman audience, Bruce Wayne is pretty inconsequential, “He just needs the suit and the gadgets, the abilities, and most importantly the morality, the humanity” (329). The latest Batman animated series, Batman: The Brave and The Bold—a series aimed towards a slightly younger audience than previous animated series, is an excellent example of this concept; while there is an unspoken implication that it is Wayne under the costume, this is not what is emphasized in the show. His motivations are unimportant; he’s just the guy with all the neat gadgets who fights crime.

Of course, older Bat-fans have a problem with this; we prefer Bruce Wayne. While the utility belt and Batmobile hooked us as kids, what brought us back was Bruce Wayne, the man behind the mask, a character with, arguably, the most complex psychology of any superhero; he must constantly balance his own darker nature and need for vengeance with justice, he must walk the line between hero and villain, savior and tyrant; however, this could equally be true of anyone who donned the cape and cowl. What anyone else would lack is Wayne’s origin; he has a very understandable, primal motivation for doing what he does and he is understandably driven—even obsessive depending on which version of the narrative you subscribe to-- to continue in his crusade no matter what. Bruce Wayne DOES NOT give up; he does not retire. When Neil Gaiman wrote his ‘Whatever Happenned to the Caped Crusader’, he envisioned several different ‘deaths’ for Bruce, all of them in the line of duty, none of them from just growing old and dying of natural causes. It is this rich psychology of the character of Bruce Wayne that, perhaps, explains why, of all superheroes, Batman has inspired works that tend to transcend the genre in terms of quality (The Dark Knight Returns, Year One, The Killing Joke, The Long Halloween, many of the vignettes in ‘Batman: Black & White’, Arkham Asylum, to name a few).

What Morrison seems to be attempting to do with the ‘Batman Incorporated’ concept is to split the difference in this controversy: he allows Bruce Wayne to remain Batman, but in a very different role than the street level vigilante of Gotham (namely the Globe-trotting adventurer that Morrison is so fond of) while, at the same time, allowing characters like Dick Grayson to move more to the forefront of the Bat-Mythos and take on new roles. While it remains to be seen how well the concept is actually EXECUTED it does make for an interesting compromise in the ongoing debate of the future of Batman. I, for one, am open to the concept at least; after all, this doesn’t preclude any ‘old school’ batman tales from being told. Titles like ‘Batman: Confidential’ could still give us tales of Bruce Wayne, the troubled, obsessive loner, patrolling the streets of Gotham, not to mention mini-series, alternate realities, and so on and so forth. So, the question that I am posing to the blog is this: could this work? Does Bruce Wayne have to be Batman, or rather, the ONLY Batman?

[I stopped reading Morrison's Batman, but I have blogged about the tension between Miller's Batman and Morrison's. I wonder to what extent is Morrison's Batman Inc a response to Miller's Batman at the end of Dark Knight Returns -- become a teacher to a new generation of Bat-Soldiers.]

Miltonic Allusion in Kill Bill: What is Miltonic Allusion part 2

2010-10-21T20:32:00.000-04:00

This post might be a little indulgent. "What is Miltonic Allusion, Part 1" may have been sufficient to explain what Miltonic allusion is. But just in case you wanted to hear more about it, here is some stuff from Bloom on how Milton's figure of the leaves continues in Coleridge, Shelley, Whitman, Beckett and Stevens. Again, my thesis is that each poet interprets the images that he inherits in the same way Tarantino interprets his favorite movies in Kill Bill. What follows is mostly poetry, and quotes by Harold Bloom. I don't have much to say about these passages today, but I will be keeping them in mind as I look at Kill Bill. I want them up here because I may need to return to them later.

WALLACE STEVENS' DOMINATION OF BLACK (1916)

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry – the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it the cry of the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Bloom says that the leaves in the poem must be understood in the context of the image of the leaves in romantic poetry: Coleridge, Shelley, and Whitman.

FROM COLERIDGE’S CHRISTABEL

There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

Bloom says "This, to Ruskin, was the fallacy of imputing consciousness to the object world. Coleridge truly inaugurated the grand Pathetic Fallacy of the fiction of the leaves. ”

Coleridge’s 1817 volume of poetry was called Sibylline Leaves, a reference to the legend of the Cumean Sibyl who wrote prophecies on leaves which she placed at the mouth of her cave. If no one came to collect them they were scattered by the wind and never read. She offered nine volumes of such prophecies to the emperor of Rome but he refused to pay her outrageous price; she burned three volumes and then three more at which point his curiosity was piqued, and he bought the last three books.

FROM SHELLEY’S ODE TO THE WEST WIND

1
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red
…

2
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean
…

4
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
…
I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

5
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken to a new birth!
And, by the incarnation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

[Bloom says that in the Milton passage quoted last time, the fallen angels “must awake and arise, or be forever fallen. Shelley, lest he fall into Satan’s predicament, does not call to the leaves, nor does he allow them to cry aloud. He calls only to the wind, like the Hebrew prophet before him. Shelley’s fiction of the leaves abandons Milton’s revision of the major Western poetic sources and origins, by forsaking Isaiah’s image of the host of heaven falling down as the leaf falls off from the vine."

I have never been super clear on how calling to the leaves like Satan calls to his troops (compared by Milton to leaves) would cause Shelley to "fall into Satan's predicament," but you get the idea: Shelley inaugurates a shift in the use of this image. Is "falling into Satan's predicament" demanding success, demanding rising, from things that are forever fallen, like the leaves in Homer?

Bloom says Shelley’s “leaves are double, adding to the Miltonic composite the image of the leaves of a book. Shelley’s words, his dead thoughts, belong to both the book of nature and the book of a new revelation.

WALT WHITMAN’S LEAVES OF GRASS

Bloom: “Whitman is more interested in the figuration of the grass," from Peter 1:24: “For all flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”

[Bloom: “But since the ‘of’ in the title means both ‘consisting of’ and ‘concerning,’ Whitman intends a more conceptual interplay also. Leaves fall annually, but the grass in Palestine has an even shorter life. Anyone who has watched a Jerusalem spring will remember how quickly and cruelly the Judean hills turn brown again after their brief green. Leaves of grass are thus also leaves of the transitory flesh, and almost come to leaves of mortality. If all flesh is grass, nevertheless leaves are both pages and, after Shelley, words that quicken to a new birth. Whitman’s title transumes both the Bible and Romantic tradition so as to suggest an intricate personal balance of immortality and mortality."

Bloom quotes John Hollander, who suggests that with so much poetic baggage it is as if Stevens is saying, in Domination of Black, “even as the leaves turn color and die; and the Sybil’s scattered leaves are reconstituted metaphorically in all our own writings, even as men fall like leaves and become mulch for new generations, even as the leaves of the book of life turn, so does the very image of the leaves present itself for revision."

FROM WALLACE STEVENS’ AN ORDINARY EVENING IN NEW HAVEN

The mobile and the immobile flickering
In the area between is and was are leaves,
Leaves burnished in autumnal burnished trees

And leaves in whirlings in the gutters, whirlings
Around and away, resembling the presence of thought,
Resembling the presences of thoughts, as if,

In the end, in the whole psychology of the self,
The town, the weather, in a casual litter,
Together, said words of the world are the life of the world.

Bloom says “The trope of leaves as words of the world is available to Stevens because Shelley has purged it of its Miltonic associations. This seems to me part of the story only.” The idea that a strong writer an "purge" an image of its earlier associations seems very important.

SAMUEL BECKETT’S WAITING FOR GODOT

Bloom: “Perhaps, though, it was most of the story for Beckett, whom I invoke here as the dead end of the trope of the leaves. In act II of Waiting for Godot Estragon and Vladimir engage in a lyrical dialogue concerning ‘all the dead voices.’ Vladimir suggests that the dead voices make a noise like wings, like sand, like feathers, like ashes, but each time Estragon replies “Like leaves.” That is a darker vision than Stevens’ in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, but no darker than Wallace Steven’s The Course of a Particular."

FROM STEVENS’ THE ROCK (1951)

The fiction of the leaves is the icon
Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness
And the icon is the man

Bloom says “The man is Walt Whitman.” I feel like this is more dramatic than accurate.

FROM STEVENS’S THE COURSE OF A PARTICULAR (1951)

Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind,
Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less.
It is still full of the cry of icy shades and shapen snow.

The leaves cry … One holds off and merely hears the cry.
It is a busy cry, concerning someone else.
And though one says that one is part of everything,

There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved;
And being part is an exertion that declines:
One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.

The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention,
Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry.
It is the cry of the leaves that do not transcend themselves,

In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more
Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing
Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.

Bloom: “Shelley’s leaves do not cry out. In Leaves of Grass also, leaves never cry aloud. Stevens leaves contrast bitterly with Shelley’s withered leaves that will quicken to a new birth and Whitman’s crucial mixed trope, leaves of grass."

Bloom concludes: “Today the leaves cry, which implies that they do not cry everyday, and they may not cry tomorrow. They are particular leaves, hanging on branches swept by wind, and Stevens cannot or will not tell us whether his hearing of the cry renders the nothingness of winter a little less or whether that little less comes merely by and in cycle. His “yet” is interpretive, and begins the depreciation of the cry of the leaves which is the apparent plot of the poem. I do not think that this plot can be trusted by any aware reader who understands the fury in the words, the antithetical fury that turns away from and against Shelley and Whitman, which here means against anteriority itself. Truly we have here what Hollander termed allusion and elusion inextricably mixed. The fiction of the leaves has become the only available image of voice, the last remnant of the human in a landscape of loss, of the possibility of mere force without meaning. Stevens makes the gesture of seeming to accept such force, but his poem belies him throughout. The cry of the leaves is no pathetic fallacy, because the poet is hearing voices, is at last hearing a misery in the sound of the wind, is at last becoming what Ruskin himself said a poet must be, a man to whom things speak."

See ya next time. Next time is a little bit about poetry and a short look at the very first thing in Kill Bill.

Justice League of America: Scary Monsters 1-6

2010-10-19T11:51:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell, in his final epilogue to his HUGE look at every issue of Claremont's initial X-Men run. This has been a tremendous ride. Thanks for everything Jason. And of course you are always welcome to come back and write about whatever you want, whenever you want.]

This one is from 2003, I believe. Claremont was well past the peak of his popularity, and I’m sure one could make a strong case that his writing skills had atrophied by this point as well.

I don’t care – I love these comics.

The premise here: A Lovecraftian race of otherworldly demons is attempting to make an incursion into our world, at a dimensional junction point located – conveniently – in the same physical space as a resort where Wally “Flash” West and Kyle “Green Lantern” Rainer are vacationing. (This trope is a Claremont favorite, of course. See: The N’Garai, Fall of the Mutants, Inferno, Star Trek: Debt of Honor, etc. ) (Alan Moore, an avowed Lovecraft devotee, also uses this one a lot.)

When it becomes clear to Wally and Kyle that something’s amiss here, they summon Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter and Plastic Man to help out. And once again – just as with Renegade in “Aliens/Predator” and Huntsman in “WildCATs” – Claremont seems to be using this story as a pilot for his own original superhero. This time it’s a female cop – half-Black, half-Native American – whose tribal ancestors fought the Lovecraftian demons several generations back. So yeah, Claremont is doing the “magical Indian” cliché again. Not very politically correct, but … well, look, I happen to have dated a Native American for years, and hell I’ll just say it: they ARE pretty darn magical.

At six issues, the story is maybe a little long given the straightforward nature of the premise. As the simplistic title suggests, this is just the JLA fighting monsters for six issues. Still, I very much like how Claremont uses his large page-count: He demonstrates a really shrewd understanding of the iconic DC characters, and he fills this series with truly charming character bits. Oh, and since I’ve gone to such pains to suggest that Grant Morrison did absolutely nothing “new” on New X-Men, that it was all just a recycling of Claremont … it’s only fair to concede here that Claremont’s JLA characterization in “Scary Monsters” has got to have been influenced here by Morrison’s revisionary take.

Claremont’s vision of the Superman/Batman relationship I find particularly convincing. As someone who has come to hate the whole “Batman is an ass-kicking genius, and Superman is a hick and a wimp” line of thought (thanks a lot, Frank Miller), I love Claremont’s intelligent, articulate Superman. Clark and Bruce are intellectual equals in this story – and they both know it -- yet each is able to offer something unique to the situation at hand. (Unfortunately I don’t have the issues in front of me, else I’d quote some dialogue from my favorite Batman/Superman scene in the series.)

The other characters are done just as well by Claremont. This is a superhero writer who knows how to craft a story so that each member of the team has something significant to contribute, and at his best he comes up with some delightfully original stuff. Claremont’s use of Plastic Man at one point is hilariously novel, and the use of the Martian Manhunter – not only his powers, but his alien origin – is marvelously creative.

No hidden Easter eggs here for X-Men fans, although there is a more blatant nod to Claremont’s roots: At one point, during a very inventive use of The Flash, Wally comments that what he’s doing is straight out of “Lee and Kirby.” I love a reference to the founding fathers of the Marvel Universe, right smack in the middle of a story starring DC’s biggest icons. Nice one, Chris.

Despite leaving matters perhaps a bit too open-ended in order to set up a solo series for his new super-heroine (which he must’ve known was unlikely to ever see fruition), the story nonetheless ends extremely satisfyingly, with a neat twist that even explains a slight inconsistency in the nature of the Martian Manhunter. (Not being a DC fan, I have no idea if Claremont’s take on DC’s martians accords with canon, but personally I thought it was fantastic.)

Although “Scary Monsters” was published in the era of TPBs, I guess the miniseries didn’t sell well enough to warrant a collected edition. That makes this a fairly obscure little gem, and one I’d heartily recommend. The individual issues are worth picking up anyway, just for the awesome covers, all six of which are drawn beautifully by Art Adams. God, it would have been great if Adams could’ve been convinced to do the interiors as well … !

And so ends my little post-1991 Claremont examination.

I think I have now said all I can say about Claremont’s work. And about comics in general, to be quite honest. With this, I’m hanging up my comics-blogger hat. Thanks for reading, guys!

-- fin --

Miltonic Allusion in Kill Bill: What is Miltonic Allusion?

2010-10-14T11:01:00.001-04:00

Miltonic Allusion AKA Transumption AKA metalepsis.

John Hollander calls transumption “the figure of interpretive allusion.” So transumption is when one work intentionally reminds us of another work, not just to say "hey, wasn't that thing awesome?" but to change the way we think about the work we have just been reminded of.

In the process it also changes the way we see the work that is doing the reminding. The artist alludes to previous work in order to increase his own artistic power. The aim of transumption, says Harold Bloom, is to capture an image away from canonical tradition. If the artist does a good enough job interpreting, he will basically own the thing he interprets. See Frank Miller, the definitive Batman guy, for a good example. It does not matter that he did not invent the character. He did it best, so he wins.

J. Hillis Miller writes “[transumption] puts early late … as late’s explanatory predecessor.” Normally, if you were an artist you would complain "Dammit everyone thought of everything else first." But with transumption you change the game. If you do transumption right guys that came first stop being BIG INVENTORS. They become merely your footnotes, the things people only need to understand to fully appreciate YOUR AWESOME WORK.

All of this is very abstract. Let's go to an example. Here is Milton talking about Satan just after his fall.

FROM MILTON’S PARADISE LOST (BOOK 1)

Nathless he so endur’d, till on the Beach
Of that inflamed Sea, he stood and call’d
His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intrans’t
Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks
In Vallombrosa, where th’Etrurian shades
High overarch’t imbow’r;

Milton's leaves, metaphors for fallen angels, are not just ordinary leaves -- he is calling on a poetic tradition of the metaphor of the leaves. These are the leaves mentioned in the Bible, Homer, Virgil and Dante

FROM ISAIAH (34:4)

“And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll; and their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine.”

FROM HOMER’S ILIAD (6.145-150)

As the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the fine timber
Burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies.

FROM VIRGIL’S AENEID (6.310-319)

Thick as the leaves that with the early frost
Of autumn drop and fall within the forest,
…
They stand; each pleads to be the first to cross
The stream; their hands reach out in longing for
The farther shore. But Charon, sullen boatman,
Now takes these souls, now those; the rest he leaves;
Thrusting them back, he keeps them from the beach.

FROM DANTE’S INFERNO (Canto 3)

“The demon Charon, his eyes like glowing coals, beckons to them and collects them all, beating with his oar whoever lingers. As the leaves fall away in autumn, one after another, till the bough sees all its spoils upon the ground, so there the evil seed of Adam: one by one they cast themselves from that shore at signals, like a bird at its call. Thus they go over the dark water, and before they have landed on the other shore, on this side a new throng gathers.”

Here is Harold Bloom on Milton's use of these guys:

“Homer accepts grim process; Virgil accepts yet plangently laments; Dante is more terrible since his leaves fall even as the evil seed of Adam falls. Milton remembers standing, younger and then able to see, in the woods of Vallombrosa, watching the autumn leaves strew the brooks. His characteristic metonymy of shades for woods allusively puns on Virgil’s and Dante’s images of the shades gathering for Charon, and by metalepsis carries across Dante and Virgil to their tragic Homeric origin. Once again, the precursors are projected into belatedness, as Milton introjects the prophetic source Isaiah. Leaves fall from trees, generations of men die, because one-third of the heavenly host came falling down. Milton’s present time again is experiential loss; he watches no more autumns, but the optic glass of his art sees fully what his precursors saw only darkly, or in the vegetable glass of nature.”

I am still working out exactly what some of that means, but you get the idea: Milton "carries across Dante and Virgil to their tragic Homeric origin." Milton references more than one guy here in order to link them. None of the guys are doing the exact same thing with the image. Homer Virgil and Dante may have thought of everything first but Milton has one big advantage to being the last guy at the party -- he sees more history than they do, and can position them in relation to the bible, which for Milton is the super-truth. Say what you want about that but it is certainly something Homer and Virgil cannot have known. This is how he will beat them. He comes late, but because he comes late he knows more than they do.

Bloom says

“By arranging his precursors in a series, Milton figuratively reverses his obligation to them, for his stationing crowds them between the visionary truth of his poem (carefully aligned with Biblical truth) and his darkened present. ... Troping upon his forerunners’ tropes, Milton compels us to read as he reads, and to accept his stance and vision as our origin, his time as true time. … Milton’s design is wholly definite, and its effect is to reverse literary tradition, at the expense of the presentness of the present. The precursors return in Milton, but only at his will, and they return to be corrected.”

In other words Milton wins because he makes it look like Homer Virgil and Dante are squished between the BIBLICAL TRUTH and MILTON'S TRUTH (which is basically a new biblical truth). Squished like that there is barely room for Homer, Virgil and Dante. Milton has no problem if his work makes you thinks of others, because rather than you just noticing similarities and calling him a rip off artist he is going to highlight the similarities and then point out the DIFFERENCES. He is going to interpret them according to his new, super-persuasive vision of HOW THINGS SHOUD FUCKING BE.

And Tarantino is doing the same thing in Kill Bill. More next week.

Video Games, Choice, Japan

2010-10-13T23:29:00.000-04:00

[Jill Duffy, who you should totally remember from her Twin Peaks blogs, is back with a look at video games.]

Sid Meier, best known for the Civilization series of games, is almost as well known for saying: "a [good] game is a series of interesting choices" (Game Architecture and Design, Rollings & Morris, eds., 2000).

Among video game designers and developers, "choice" is a consummate word. “Choice” is the thing that defines a good game. What the user can choose to do at any particular moment, and how those choices are presented, is the most crucial question that game designers ask themselves as they design and iterate their creations.

Generally speaking, developers agree that the more open the game environment — that is, the more "choice" the player has — the closer the game gets to realizing the ultimate vision of what an interactive world can be. This is especially true of virtual worlds and other games that strive to be immersive.

But there is more than one kind of "choice," and not all players want choice the way that developers assume they do.

Some of us believe in constraints. Back in 2004 Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, gave me a demo of Second Life about a year after the game first debuted. This was before Second Life really found its footing as a true virtual business world, before online universities were holding classes there, before organizations were using it to connect employees who lived far apart. At the time, users (and Rosedale himself) saw it more as a game.

He launched us into Second Life. We flew around for a while. We checked out a virtual rave. And I thought, “But what am I supposed to DO?”

The so-called freedom that comes with sandbox play isn’t for everyone. Even as a child, I sought out board games and organized outdoor play, like tag and kickball, where clearly defined rules protected me from the whims and exploitations of older kids, especially my sister, who could otherwise manipulate the unspoken rules of play.

A game of Grand Theft Auto, where there is “something to do,” a series of tasks to complete, but always the open “choice” to do something else instead, is too much freedom for me. I will always want to complete the tasks as efficiently as possible.

A recent New York Times article about the 2010 Tokyo Game Show got me thinking about this, especially because only a few days earlier I had listened to Sheena Iyengar's TED talk on the art of choosing.

The Times article reflects about Japan's place in the world of video game development, and to an extend consumption. Jake Kazdal, a game developer with a history at both Sega and Electronic Arts, was interviewed for the article:

"Part of Japan’s problem, Mr. Kazdal said, is a growing gap in tastes between players there and overseas. The most popular games in Japan are linear, with little leeway for players to wander off a defined path. In the United States, he said, video games have become more open, virtual experiences."

In light of Iyengar's talk, and other ruminations about choice and false choice (including Malcolm Gladwell's "spaghetti sauce" TED talk), Kazdal's point makes a lot of sense. But I don't think it’s a matter of "taste" so much as culture. The Japanese are not "lagging behind," as Keiji Inafune of Capcom tells the Times reporter. It's that their whole ideology doesn't embrace "choice" the same way that Western cultures do, but they're being asked to both produce and consume games in a global marketplace.

WildCATs 10-13

2010-10-12T09:22:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell writes his second to last Claremont X-Men epilogue. Though I was instant messaging him the night before last and he was reading the Claremont Willow novels, threatening to blog about them. The man is an addict, I tell you, an addict.]

Back when these comics were published – 1994, I believe – I was still not entirely recovered from the sad way that Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s collaboration on X-Men was cut so short. This four-issue “WildCATs” arc was a nice gift from Lee to Claremont fans, reuniting the team from the author’s final issue of X-Men – not just the writer and penciler, but inker Scott Williams and letterer Tom Orzechowski as well.

I hadn’t read any previous WildCATs stuff, so the characters were pretty unfamiliar. And there were a LOT of characters in these four issues. Generally speaking, the story is a bit over-stuffed. For someone coming in fresh, it was too much. Not that the story is hard to follow, really – just that the surfeit of characters made it hard to latch onto any one and find them sympathetic.

Still, it’s a great action movie. The Claremont/Lee chemistry had not atrophied in the three years between X-Men 3 and WildCATs 10. And Claremont certainly seems to be having fun with Lee’s creations (although who knows, maybe he was faking it just for the paycheck).

The point of this storyline was actually to introduce an original Claremont character, the Hunstman, who was theoretically going to be spun off into his own solo series. Had this happened, I believe Claremont would have been the first non-artist to bring an original character and series into the Image fold. For whatever reason, though, the Huntsman solo series never materialized. There WAS a later Huntsman appearance after WildCATs, in a Claremont-penned 3-issue “Cyberforce” arc. Cyberforce was Marc Silvestri’s series, so it was another reunion between the author and a former X-Men collaborator. As a huge devotee of Claremont/Silvestri, I was really looking forward to the Cyberforce arc, but it turned out just terribly.

This WildCATs arc, on the other hand, is a lot of fun. The Huntsman character is your basic “awesome at everything” action hero, very much cut from the Wolverine or Gambit cloth. He is a striking member of Claremont’s ouvre simply in that he is male – though he does have a female companion (“Tai”), and there are implications that she is actually the really significant half of the pair, in some oblique way.

The plot here is all over the place: There are something like six or seven different villains, an alternate timeline, and maybe an evil duplicate at some point too. Despite that, there is a spine to the story, and it leads to a turning point in the relationship of Zealot and Voodoo, two female members of the team (surprise). There is also, if I’m remembering right, an easter egg for X-Men fans at one point. When we’re in the office of Savant, one of the several WildCATs cast members that is much older than she looks, one of the photos on her desk is of her and Wolverine. The image is very reminiscent of the photo of Logan and Rose Wu in Uncanny X-Men 257 (Jim Lee’s third X-Men issue, and his first time drawing Claremont’s Wolverine).

If one is not a fan either of Claremont or of WildCATs, this little arc might read as just a lot of mindless action. But if one is willing to put in the concentration, it’s a fairly rewarding piece, and a fun addendum to the Claremont/Lee X-Men run.

Star Trek: Debt of Honor, from DC

2010-10-05T17:58:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell continues his Claremont epilogues.]

This one is a relatively short graphic novel (96 pages, I think?) set after Star Trek IV (the whale one), and published around 1992, maybe. (Sorry, these dates are easily found online, I realize, but I’m just kinda cruising through this stuff.)

People who are Claremont fans but not Star Trek fans possibly need not apply to this one. Claremont is very clearly a huge devotee of Star Trek, and this book is in many ways just authorized fan fiction. (But then, that is true of a lot of the licensed Star Trek stuff, really.)

On the other hand, if you’re a Trek fan (which I am), this is great fun. The gimmick here is that at key moments in Star Trek history (which we are shown in sequential flashbacks), Captain Kirk had multiple encounters with the same species of hostile alien. But so shrewd were these creatures that they were always able to cover their tracks, and Kirk has never been able to prove that these guys exist, or convince anyone that they pose a credible threat. (We learn that they inhabit another dimension, much like the limbo demons and N’Garai in X-Men, which is an idea I liked so much I pinched it for my musical, “Invader? I Hardly Know Her.”)

The only other person who knows about these aliens is another starship captain: Basically a female equivalent of Kirk (of course!) who also happens to be a Romulan. Kirk goes rogue to team up with both her and a Klingon captain (whom I think Claremont made up, although he might be from an old “Trek” episode …) to take down these aliens once and for all.

The fan-fictional elements include cameos by a ton of old Trek characters, an explanation for why Klingons used to have smooth foreheads and now don’t (years before “Enterprise” offered a different explanation; I like Claremont’s better). And I think there is at least one Mary Sue in this book as well. (Not being an expert on original Trek, I have trouble distinguishing the cameos of canonical characters from the Claremont originals … there are a LOT of people who turn up here.)

Oh, and there is also a reference to “Cat’s Laughing,” a band whose members Claremont is personal friends with, and who also have cameos in issues of Claremont’s “Excalibur” series in 1988. Claremont likes to link his different stories via musicians.

Despite all the indulgences, though, this is a tight adventure story, a great example of intelligent and rousing space opera. The artwork here is by human dynamo Adam Hughes (with inks by Karl Story), which means that the evil other-dimensional aliens are suitably terrifying, and the sexy Romulan captain is suitably gorgeous. Just visually alone, this is a beautiful package, but the intelligent story is what makes it worth the read. Plus, Claremont writes an awesome Spock. In another universe, a movie adaptation of this book would have made a spectacular Star Trek V or VI, and a much better final adventure for the original crew.

Sometime later, Claremont contributed a story to an issue of DC’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation” comic series (one of the annuals), wherein a teenage ensign from Debt of Honor (very Kitty Pryde-esque) comes back – now much older, of course – and resolves a semi-dangling thread from the original graphic novel. The details are fuzzy in my memory, though I think they involve the woman – a human -- getting adopted by a Klingon house, which leads to her crossing paths with Worf, a Klingon adopted by humans.

I guess you could call it an epilogue to “Debt of Honor.” It’s a well-written piece, with a very satisfying ending, although I don’t think it would make even the tiniest impression on anyone who hadn’t already read “Debt.” But it is a great little addendum. I personally would have preferred a full-length sequel to “Debt” set in the Next Generation era, but perhaps that was not viable.

Fantastic Four 17-18

2010-09-28T13:37:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell continues his Claremont epilogues. This is a good case for these issues. I want them now.]

Okay, this is kind of a weird one, I’ll admit.

Remember in 1996, when Marvel reunited with all those Image artists, and gave them control of “Heroes Reborn,” a quasi-reboot of their major characters? Liefeld got Captain America, Portacio got Iron Man, and Jim Lee got the Fantastic Four. Then when they collapsed the “Heroes Reborn” idea, they rebooted everything *again.* Scott Lobdell and Alan Davis were given control of the Fantastic Four this time, but after only three or four months, that team was replaced by Chris Claremont and Salavador Larocca.

Apparently the assignment just sort of dropped into Claremont’s lap; this was 1998, when – as I recall -- Claremont was working as an editor for Marvel rather than a freelance writer. He didn’t seem to have any FF ideas, and so for the first few months the title was in danger of becoming Excalibur redux. Perversely, Claremont started using material from the Alan Davis-penned issues of Excalibur, as well as the issues he wrote himself. There was even talk of Kitty Pryde joining the cast. The first full FF arc that Claremont wrote took them to Genosha of all places. It was a mess.

Eventually Claremont started to find his FF voice, and while he never came close to making any kind of masterwork, there were two issues wherein I think he just nailed it.

FF 17-18 seem to have been influenced by The Matrix. That’s assuming the dates work out … I’m not sure if the movie was in theaters yet at this point in 1999, but if not Claremont could easily have been influenced just by teaser information about the film’s premise. It’s possible that Dark City was influencing Claremont here as well.

So the FF end up in a shared virtual reality scenario. As in the Wachowski Bros. film, the populace of this world are actually all unconscious, each one secure inside one individual chamber of a massive hive. They are all plugged into a fake city, playing roles that they do not know are fake.

But here’s the twist: The city in question is basically a virtual Gotham, complete with its own versions of Batman and Robin, called – respectively – Lockdown and Rosetta Stone. (There are shades here as well of the old Bottle City of Kandor stories where Superman used to become a Batman-like figure to protect the Kandorian populace.) When the FF – during one of their characteristic treks across various dimensions – wind up getting plugged into this virtual scenario, the master computer that runs the show does the logical thing: Makes each member of the FF into a new villain for Lockdown’s rogues gallery. And while Sue, Johnny and Ben are brainwashed into playing these new roles, Reed manages to retain his own identity – but he still has to play along in order to figure out a way to escape.

Lockdown, meanwhile, becomes fascinated with Reed, realizing that this is the first “villain” he’s ever faced that qualifies as his intellectual equal. He’s found his perfect arch-enemy basically, and he doesn’t want to let him leave.

So it’s Batman vs. Mr. Fantastic inside The Matrix. That’s the kind of high concept that would have the modern-day comics community going insane if it was being done by, say, Matt Fraction or Jeff Parker [Ed. note: Fair point.]. Claremont, however, just doesn’t inspire that kind of excitement in modern fandom. (And I understand there are reasons for that, I am simply not persuaded by any of them.)
It just ain’t right. This story is kick-ass by any standards. Everyone should go grab these out of their local LCS’s dollar bin. Granted, it is part of a longer arc that features the FF wandering through different worlds, and because of that there are a few subplots that are brought in from earlier installments. And FF #18 kind of ends on a cliffhanger as the FF move on to the next weird world.

It doesn’t matter. These two issues can easily be enjoyed on their own terms, without buying any of the rest of the run. And Salvador Larocca’s art is really fun, too. Go get these comics, guys. They’re a hoot!

Two Mamet quotes on Teaching

2010-09-22T22:56:00.000-04:00

From David Mamet's Redbelt:

Chet Frank: Ah, but you train people to fight.
Mike Terry: No, I train people to prevail.

From David Mamet's Spartan:

Scott: What they gotcha teachin' here, young sergeant?
Jackie Black: Edged weapons, sir. Knife fighting.
Scott: Don't you teach 'em knife fighting. Teach 'em to kill. That way, they meet some sonofabitch who studied knife fighting, they send his soul to hell.

I like the idea in both of these quotes that what it appears you are teaching, what you think you are teaching, what you think are are learning, is not the real thing. The real thing you should be teaching is something else, something more fundamental. I wonder if when I teach writing I am really teaching something more basic, like thinking.

Post 1991 Claremont part 2

2010-09-21T22:22:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell continues to epilogue away. Three more after this one.]

Continuing a look at Claremont’s post-1991, non-X-Men work …

This week, the “High Frontier” trilogy.

Claremont wrote three sci-fi novels all set in the same universe that was – at one point – marketed by publisher Ace under the umbrella title “High Frontier.” The individual titles are:

FirstFlight (1987)
Grounded (1991)
Sundowner (1994)

It’s cheating a bit to include FirstFlight in this “post-1991” series, but what the hell. Grounded I guess technically shouldn’t count either, as I think it was released before Claremont’s last X-Men issue was published. Ah well.

This series is probably the very best demonstration of Claremont’s ability to create a fully-fleshed out fictional universe, something he wasn’t able to ever fully show off when writing within the Marvel Universe.

The world of “High Frontier” is marvelously well-realized in Claremont’s prose, each novel building consistently on earlier material, making it clear that even from page one of FirstFlight, Claremont had put a lot of work into developing a coherent milieu.

The timeframe in which the books take place is never explicitly spelled out, though most of the clues suggest sometime circa 2050 (which, of course, felt a lot further away then than it does now). The backstory for “High Frontier” involves the unexpected invention, well ahead of its time, of a practical means of faster-than-light travel, which has in turn led to radical upheavals in the space program. Claremont’s lead character is a female (naturally) pilot named Nicole Shea, whom we encounter just as she’s about to be given her first off-world mission.

FirstFlight is a straightforward adventure story detailing the increasingly surprising events of that mission (well, surprising if you don’t read any of the spoilers on the back cover or front-page teaser). X-Men fans will enjoy Claremont’s dedication in FirstFlight – “to Charley, Scott, Jean, Ororo, Logan, Peter, Kurt …”. And there are some Easter eggs (or, less charitably, just plain old duplicates of X-Men characters) amongst the novel’s cast. The Wolverine analogue, Ben Ciari, is particularly noteworthy. And there’s another familiar name dropped right in the opening chapter, when we learn who Nicole’s favorite musician is.

The book is a brisk 250 pages, and the story jumps quickly from one set-piece to the next. The tangled complexities that one expects from a Claremont story are mostly missing here – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The prose is strong, albeit not nearly as solid as Claremont’s concurrent comic-book work was.

Grounded is something else. This one features a Claremont who seems very assured in the medium of prose, and he produces a much more characteristic piece here. His use of language is masterful, expertly exploiting the poetry inherent in both sci-fi and real-world technical jargon. The cast this time around is quite a bit more well-realized, and the storyline more layered and complex. Compared to the narrative straight-line of FirstFlight, the trajectory of Grounded is multi-vectored, even recursive at times. But the pay-off is there: an exciting, fully realized climax that incorporates every narrative thread, even those that seemed more like digressions at the time. A spectacular effort, this one is; the best of the three books.

(And as with any good speculative fiction, Grounded features some shrewd predictions about the world to come. Published in ’91, it gives us a universe of PortaComps – basically iPhones and Blackberries – and cars with built-in GPS trackers. There is even a direct reference to the Second Gulf War, which seemed like a perfunctory “Look, we’re in the future!” sort of detail when I read the book in 1991. Rereading it in 2010, I found it pretty darn striking.)

Sundowner ended up being the final volume of a trilogy, though I am not sure Claremont planned on stopping at three books initially. The story certainly leaves things open, but at the same time there is an “everything but the kitchen sink” quality to this novel that makes it feel suitably “grand finale”-ish. The major characters from FirstFlight that had been absent from the sequel return here, and the villain from Grounded is given a chance to be redeemed. The ending actually recalls that of Deadliest of the Species, basically leaving things open for the cast to engage in more adventures. Come to think of it, this is how his X-Men run ended as well: All three of these Claremont epics feature the cast in an aircraft, flying optimistically toward the future.

Overall, the ending of Sundowner feels a bit rushed to me, and I think Claremont kind of botches what should’ve been a really fantastic twist in the final chapter, because his writing is too opaque. Still, it is one eventful finale – kind of reminiscent of the final episode of Angel, with that same spirit of “the adventure isn’t over yet.” A worthy ending to the saga, albeit Grounded is more the quintessentially perfect Claremont sci-fi novel.

Overall, like “Deadliest,” this trilogy is a great sci-fi epic, loaded with great ideas and clever twists.

Antichrist is to Horror what Dark Knight Returns is to Superheroes

2010-09-19T22:59:00.002-04:00

So you read Batman comics and you start to notice it is the story of a guy who hides his identity and tramples over people's civil rights and beats them up till they do what he wants them to do, all in the name of a higher order of morality that the police are incapable of serving because they are inept or corrupt or whatever. Superheroes are sort of like the KKK. You start to notice that there is something politically questionable about all superhero comics.

Then Frank Miller makes the Dark Knight Returns and there is something just crazy about how the characters in the story are suddenly engaging in debates about whether Batman is the spirit of American heroism or just a crazy fascist psychopath. Meanwhile Batman is still totally being BATMAN: kicking ass with Batarangs and Batmobiles, and yeah its TECHNICALLY illegal but it's BATMAN for christ's sake. It's a superhero comic book made from theories about superhero comic books, and it leaves things maybe a little ambiguous, before Miller went more clearly conservative. The whole genre is pumped up to ELEVEN, which means it can read as a satire, or just a really hardcore version of what you have been loving this whole time.

You watch enough horror movies and you start to notice that these patterns emerge: nature is evil, sex is evil and will get you killed, women are connected to nature, violence is sexually charged, the reason and logic and science of men is overturned by cthonic forces they think they can control or understand, but can't.

Then Lars von Trier's Antichrist comes out and you have these characters totally talking about the theory of horror movies. The characters are talking about the conflict between Men-Reason-Good and Women-Nature-Evil, like something out of Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, or one of Slavoj Zizek's pieces about the symbolic order of language barely covering up the horror of THE REAL. Or Nietzsche talking about Apollo vs Dionysus. And you totally get the stuff of a horror movie: extreme violence, sexualized violence, helpless people being chased through the woods by someone who wants to torture and kill them. It's a horror movie made from theories about horror movies. And it leaves things maybe a little ambiguous because the whole thing is so over the top. The movie is called ANTICHRIST and at one point a dead fox speaks "CHAOS REIGNS." Because it is so over the top it can be read as satire of the misogyny of horror movies, or just a really hardcore version of what you have been loving this whole time.

PROFESSOR SEES PARALLELS BETWEEN THINGS, OTHER THINGS

Repetition and Irony in Frost and the Mountain Goats

2010-09-17T18:20:00.003-04:00

Here is Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy evening.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there's some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The famous final pair of lines are justly famous because although the words are exactly the same, the final line means something more than the second to last one. The second to last line means something like "And I have a lot of things to do, and traveling to get in, before I get home and go to bed, and I don't have time to be looking at nature." The last one, terminating the poem, makes you remember that sleep is a famous metaphor for death ("to sleep, perchance to dream"), that darkness and winter and silence ("the rest is silence") also mean death, and so it means something like "death is very attractive right now, but I have a lot to do before I get the sweet release of death."

I was reminded of this listening to a Mountain Goats song today.

Here are the lyrics

on the morning when I woke up without you for the first time,
I felt free.
and I felt lonely.
and I felt scared.
and I began to talk to myself almost immediately,
not being used to being the only person there.
hmmmm

the first time I made coffee for just myself,
I made too much of it.
but I drank it all,
just 'cause you hate it when I let things go to waste.
and I wandered through the house, like a little boy lost at the mall.
and an astronaut could've seen the hunger in my eyes from space.

and I sang oh
what do I do?
what do I do?
what do I do?
what do I do without you?

on the morning when I woke up without you for the first time,
I was cold, so I put on a sweater.
and I turned up the heat.
and the walls began to close in
and I felt so sad and frightened,
I practically ran from the living room out into the street.

and the wind began to blow and all the trees began to bend.
and the world in its cold way started coming alive.
and I stood there like a businessman waiting for a train.
and I got ready for the future to arrive.

and I sang oh
what do I do?
what do I do?
what do I do?
what do I do without you?

He is like a little boy because he feels lonely and scared without a woman to take care of him. She obviously made the coffee. And so his metaphors are appropriately boyish: the astronaut, the non-specific "businessman." He is heartbroken and more than a little pathetic. The thing about drinking too much coffee threatens to distance us from him. But ultimately, once he gets out of the house he starts to feel better: the world comes alive again, and his world won't be like this forever: the future is coming. The second "What do I do without you," though the words are the same, and it is sung in almost the exact same way, is subtly more hopeful than the first. The first "What do I do without you" suggests "nothing" as an answer, where the second is almost imperceptibly answered by a tentative "well actually I have a lot of options."

Other examples?

Post-1991 Claremont Part 1

2010-09-14T19:45:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell continues to talk about Claremont. And we will listen to him forever because he is awesome.]

In the spirit of not-wanting-to-quit, and as a testament to the addictiveness of Claremont’s writing, I thought I’d follow up the end to the Claremont/X-Men blog series with a few epilogues, if you will. (Epi-blogs?)

First off, people at one point were asking if I was going to look at any of Claremont’s “return to X-Men” work that started in 1998 and has pretty much continued non-stop since then. As noted, this simply isn’t in me, because I don’t have any interest in that material.

But I do hate that it makes me sound as if I find none of Claremont’s post-1991 work edifying. Quite the opposite, actually. There is much of it that I enjoy – it’s just that none of it is “X”-related.

So I thought I’d do a multi-part run-down of what I consider the best of Claremont’s post-1991, non-X-Men work.

First up:

ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: DEADLIEST OF THE SPECIES 1-12

This was released by Dark Horse over the course of more than a year (a monthly schedule, with a few delays). I think it was over 1995-1996 … ? Art was supplied by Jackson Guice for the first issue or two, then quickly transitioned to Eduardo Barretta for the bulk of it. (Hope I got that name right … a lot of these comics are in storage …)

Clocking in at 300 very text-heavy pages, this is pretty much a full-on sci-fi novel. The use of the respective mythologies from the two movie franchises is canny and accurate without being overwhelming, so that the story can stand as a solid, self-contained epic in its own right. (Really no more than a rudimentary knowledge of the Aliens or Predator films is required.)
Set in a future wherein the aristocracy live in giant, luxury space-stations while the planet Earth itself is an alien-overrun slum, “Deadliest” takes as its departure point the concept of the “trophy wife,” which here is explored to a science-fictional extreme: women who are genetically engineered to be the ideal mates for the billionaires who requisition them – “perfect” not just physically but psychologically as well.

Interestingly, the storyline also involves Predator/Alien hybrids, which I seem to recall reading was the macguffin of the most recent crossover film. Claremont did it first AGAIN! Ten years ahead of Hollywood! (Although this strikes me as such a no-brainer of an idea for a crossover between the two franchises that I doubt Claremont was really the first to do something with it.)

For the Claremont fan, characteristic touches here include the strong feminist agenda: Beyond the critique of the whole trophy-wife phenomenon, there is also the title’s implicit pushing of the female gender as the more formidable one, and the fact that the three protagonists are, as Claremont put it when he plugged the series in an interview, “a female human, a female Predator, and a female Alien.” (The latter, of course, is a perfectly natural choice, as the original films already established the “Queens” as the dominant creatures.)

The storyline gets characteristically complex too, with a large cast and several nicely fleshed-out settings. Claremont’s talent for world-building is shown off to good effect here (a skill he never got to demonstrate much in X-Men, since he was operating in the already-established Marvel Universe). It’s not all just flash and dazzle, either. Every detail gets woven into the overarching mystery, all feeding into a strong payoff.

For X-Men fans, the series also features lettering by Tom Orzechowski, which is awesome. And there is something fun about seeing Claremont being able to write actual “Aliens” after having contented himself previously on doing his pastiches via The Brood. Each issue also features a beautiful cover by John Bolton (my favorite of all of Claremont’s artistic collaborators, on X-Men or anything else).

The series is still in print, courtesy of Dark Horse’s “Aliens vs. Predator Omnibus Volume 2,” which features all twelve issues of “Deadliest.” (Sadly, though, it omits the Bolton covers.) I have the original issues, but I’ve often been tempted to buy the Omnibus, just to have the whole epic in one handy little volume.

Then there’s …
DARK HORSE PRESENTS 1-2

The ending of “Deadliest of the Species” reads very much like an “origin” story for a new sci-fi/superhero comic-book. It’s even got the superhero name spoken melodramatically as the last line of dialogue in the story: “RENEGADE!” Apparently at one point there were plans for Claremont to do a comic with this title for Dark Horse – in fact, a year or two before “Deadliest” was published, Claremont did a sixteen-page Renegade story published in the first two issues of a Dark Horse anthology comic entitled DARK HORSE PRESENTS (which also, somewhat coincidentally, featured a Predator story drawn by Claremont’s occasional X-collaborator Rick Leonardi).

This li’l tale (titled simply “Renegade,” appropriately enough) appears to be set years after the events of “Deadliest of the Species,” despite being published first, so it stands as kind of an odd quasi-prologue/epilogue to the longer work. I think I’d suggest reading it AFTER “Deadliest” even though I personally read it first. (I picked up all this stuff as it came out, ‘cause I was all Claremont-crazy back then).

As a story in its own right, it’s quite brisk and exciting. At its core a basic construct of superhero versus supervillain (both of them female, unsurprisingly), it’s notable for the larger universe hinted at. Claremont seems to have an elaborate backstory/history/milieu all worked out, and even in the space of sixteen pages he paints a compelling portrait of it, through only a few deft strokes. A shame this one never got off the ground, as it had a lot of intriguing potential.

Can’t remember who supplies the artwork to “Renegade,” but I quite like it. It’s rather sleek and sexy (but not at all doing the pandering Image art style so en vogue at the time), particularly the design of the antagonist. And once again, lettering is by Tom Orzechowski (yeah!).

Taken all in all, the above two works comprise a fabulous sci-fi graphic novel, well worth the time of any fan of the genre.

JLA: Scary Monsters 1-6 (these have kick-ass covers too, this time by Art Adams)

Fantastic Four 17-18 (most of Claremont's Fantastic Four run from 1998-2000 is too mired in confusing subplots, but right in the middle he does this fantastic "Matrix meets Batman" two-parter that is just amazingly entertaining)

WildCATS 10-13 (good solid action, feels like a direct continuation of the slam-bang Claremont/Lee stuff at the tail end of Claremont's Uncanny run)

The "High Frontier" trilogy of novels (FirstFlight, Grounded, Sundowner). (The last one gets just a *tad* confusing at times, but overall this is great, pulpy sci-fi material.)

The Black Dragon and Marada the She-Wolf (Claremont's fantasy collaborations with John Bolton. Fantasy is not my favorite genre, but the combo of Claremont and Bolton is awesomeness that can't be denied)

Star Trek: Debt of Honor (Set after Star Trek IV, a really brilliant synthesis of Star Trek mythology up to that point and great space opera in its own right as well. Art is by the awesome Adam Hughes, who really goes all out. Claremont even gives us the best-ever explanation for why Klingons look different now than they did in the 1960s. A beautiful graphic novel, all across the board -- exciting, clever, touching. Who'd have thought a comic book would turn out to be the best Star Trek movie ever made?)

Gen13 issues 0-7 (I think ... whatever is collected in the September Song trade. I honestly think this had the potential to become a really fantastic team book. The characters were fun, the Manga-inspired art was bright and attractive, the writing was snappy and engaging. The September's Song arc is loads of fun. But I get the impression that when sales dipped on this series, Claremont changed his focus mid-stream, so that a story about a whole new team instead became a confusing arc about revivifying the original Gen13, who I don't think were all that great. That's why issues 8-16 don't make the list. Very frustrating to read these comics now, because it all seemed to be heading somewhere really interesting.)

A review of Jason Powell's "Invader? I Hardly Know Her!"

2010-09-08T08:56:00.001-04:00

I first met Jason Powell in the comments to this blog, and of course you all know he became the site's major Guest Blogger -- in fact you can hardly call him a guest anymore, as the place is now more his than mine. Well now I have met him in person. He came to New York from Milwaukee because his science fiction musical -- Invader? I Hardly Know Her -- was accepted to the New York City Fringe Festival. A few years ago Mich Montgomery, who I also met in the comments of this blog, and who also became a guest blogger, had a play accepted to the Fringe Festival: Triumph of the Underdog. Since he lives in New York, he was able to give Jason some advice, and he and I went to see the final performance of Jason's musical -- a musical Jason wrote both the words and music for, and also has the lead role in, where, yes, he sings, and sings well.

I hate musicals. I went to a performing arts high school for choir, and listened to way too many musicals as a kid, so I am kind of allergic to them now. Phantom and Les Mis and Cats and all that. Just like when I saw Mitch's Triumph of the Underdog at the Fringe festival I went in doing something obligatory for a guy I knew, was not at all sure what I thought about it for the first 15 minutes or so, then got into the grove of it, then had a great time.

Just as in Mitch's Triumph of the Underdog the plot of Invader is absolutely not the point. In both, the world is threatened by extinction by a meteor and an extra-dimensional menace respectively, but in both what the doom of the world really heralds is a chance to geek out. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. You know that moment on the Simpsons, in one of the Halloween episodes, where the meteor is heading at comic book guy and the last thing he says is "I have wasted my life"? Both Mitch's Triumph and Jason's Invader reject that idea. I think both these guys, staring down the barrel of extinction, would ultimately feel like they had had great lives. Because as we all know, all this geeky bullshit matters, deep down. Because happiness matters.

Mitch's protagonist is delivering a lecture about pop culture and mythology, as the world is about to die -- that is his geek out. Powell's play is about a guy who finds out on his wedding day that his bride is an alien and they have to go to space to stop a 5th dimensional force from destroying the world. Powell's geek out is about sexy women and vocabulary. You are not at all surprised that this is a guy who could write 280 blogs about Claremont's X-Men, because wow does he love sexy powerful women and vocabulary. Not even as separate things. Powell's sexy powerful women use great vocabulary just about all the time. The bride has sexy super-agent bridesmaids, one of whom gets into a lesbian affair with a former female lover of the bride, and they all talk like this, while dressed as a sexy cowgirl, a sexy school girl, a sexy Pocahontas type, and a sexy French maid, all dancing:

CATHERINE
It’s true that we’re all ravishing creatures,
The kind that cause bold men to give chase.
We’re fortunate to have flawless features;
We’re blessed to have such feminine grace.
I’m glad that in this shallow society,
I occupy so privileged a place.
But let me tell you, in all sobriety,
I’m not just another pretty face.
MISSY/LUCY/AMELIE
She’s not just another pretty face.
CATHERINE
Now I know I’m extremely curvaceous.
MISSY/LUCY/AMELIE
‘Stremely curvaceous
CATHERINE
I’m hot in leather; lovely in lace.
MISSY/LUCY/AMELIE
Lace lace lace lace lace lace
CATHERINE
My schoolgirl garb might seem ostentatious,
MISSY/LUCY/AMELIE
Seem ostentatious
CATHERINE
Designed to cause your heartbeat to race.
MISSY/LUCY/AMELIE
Race race race race race race
CATHERINE
And granted, on my whole physicality,
MISSY/LUCY/AMELIE
Whole physicality
CATHERINE
Of imperfection there’s not a trace.
MISSY/LUCY/AMELIE
Trace trace trace trace trace trace
CATHERINE
But let me tell you, in actuality,
MISSY/LUCY/AMELIE
In actuality
CATHERINE
I’m not just another pretty face.
MISSY/LUCY/AMELIE
She’s not just another pretty face.
CATHERINE
Oh, behind
AMELIE
Hind
LUCY
Hind
MISSY
Hind
CATHERINE
This fetching physiognomy
(continues)
CATHERINE
(continued)
Is a mind
AMELIE
Mind
LUCY
Mind
MISSY
Mind
CATHERINE MIS./LU./AM.
Immersed in physics and astronomy.
And though I’m built like an ecdysiast,
My brain’s one of the busiest, Aaaaaah
Always cogitating, contemplating, calculating
Even while my figure’s got the fellas salivating.
And not only am I among the planet’s very smartest,
I’m a classical musician and a black-belt martial artist.
I can outshoot any marksman; I can out-fly any ace.
Yes, I’m more than a pretty face!

When David Mamet's mixed martial arts movie Redbelt came out I said I was going to love it because all I really want from movies is fancy poetic dialogue and violence (which is also why my favorite movie is Kill Bill). It is girls who kiss girls and use words like "ecdysiast," for Powell. And for me too, from now on. I have written two books. Alone. Jason Powell, in Wisconsin, wrote a science fiction musical where pretty girls make out with each other and him. Then he came to New York City and cast VERY attractive, very talented, actresses in all the parts. The man is a genius, before you even get to the word play and the music.

The strong women and the vocabulary are not the only places you see Claremont's influence on Powell -- he also makes little nods to Claremont, as a robot character refers to himself as "This Unit" like a good Sentinel. In the conclusion of the story the 5th dimensional menace possesses someone, and when attacked burns out the body and jumps to the body of the attacker, then again, then again, then again, until it goes for a robot at which point is gets trapped there by a kill switch. Shades of Claremont's Proteus abound.

Jason Powell and I are also die hard fans of Newsradio, which we both quote with abandon. When I got married, my wife and I quoted Newsradio in our vows (in the fifth season Lisa marries Johnny Johnson, who writes his own, beautiful vows about how she is his rose; Lisa, who did not know they were writing their own vows, improvises with "You are my sunshine ... my only sunshine ... and heybabeyourockmyworld." That was what my wife said when we were married, and maybe one person in the audience noticed).

In Invader one of Powell's character's says of her effeminate robot, "He's indispensable!" which is what Phil Hartman says about his "gentleman's gentleman." Later in the play the same character says "We are dealing with a dimension much higher than three or four." Someone asks, "How high exactly?" And she says "Five." Which Powell admits is a direct steal from the White Noise episode of Newsradio.

And if you think that is an obscure in-joke, nothing could be more obscure, or please me more, than one character having gotten something out of my book on superheroes:

Of the reference books
Worth the slightest of looks,
I’m the latest and greatest revision.
In the parlance of Bloom,
I’m the poet in whom
One can find other poets’ misprision.

What's funny is that while you can see the influence of so many things that Powell loves in his musical, you can also see the influence of one thing he elsewhere hates: Joss Whedon. Whedon of course did a musical episode of Buffy and created the webisode musical Dr Horrible. Powell, like Whedon, is bringing the musical to sci-fi geek outs, and like Whedon he loves to deflate the ridiculousness going on: at one point one of his characters, a sexy Indian, sings:

Then there is I,
Lucy Walks-on-Sky.
I don’t think you’ll deny,
I’m a pretty far cry
From any semblance of what you’d call political correctness.
But I admit, I’ve come to expect this.
Still, come on, a blonde girl dressed as a Native?
Couldn’t somebody have been a bit more creative?

He even breaks the fourth wall more explicitly at the end of act one, whose final words are "Don't worry this will make more sense in act 2!"

But my favorite thing about Invader is the rhymes. Claremont may have a great vocabulary, but Powell rhymes his great vocabulary with other great vocabulary:

The world will never be the same.
Who's to blame?
An old lady's been possessed.
My fiancee's extra-terrest-
Reality has just been turned upon its ear.
And I fear
The worst is yet to come.
My brain is starting to go numb.

It isn't right; it isn't fair.
It bends the rules of karma.
Of lousy breaks, you've had your share.
You nearly bought the farm; a
Casual observer would say
That for good luck, you're overdue.
But instead -- to your extreme dismay --
Someone drops the other shoe.

"Extra-terrest-Reality" is a nice play on words; the fact that before it is over it is rhymed with "possessed" makes it doubly good. There are a lot of things you can rhyme with "Karma" including "Samba" and "magma" -- but "farm; a (casual observer)" is fantastic good fun, as is the whole show.

In Summary …

2010-09-07T12:20:00.003-04:00

[Jason Powell CONCLUDES his look at every issue of Claremont's 17 year X-Men run. I literally don't know what to say, other than thanks Jason. And thanks to everyone reading. You guys generated 2,826 comments on Jason's work and I know both he and I appreciate it. Even though at least a chunk of that was spambots and Jason taking the time to respond to basically every single person who commented, it is still goddamn tremendous.]

I’ve written so many words about Claremont at this point – and I know I’ve repeated myself a lot from entry to entry, far moreso than was necessary I’m sure – and the result is that a summary is probably not necessary. I think I’ve said all I wanted to say about Claremont at this point, despite the fact that he has a huge body of material outside of Uncanny, much of which is very, very good. And even within the X-sphere, there is stuff like The New Mutants, Excalibur, the Wolverine ongoing, which I didn’t talk about.

Still, I think I have done what I set out to do here. My feeling was and is that Claremont gets short shrift as a comics writer. This is someone who defined for more than one generation how to do mainstream superhero comics, particularly team books. From “New Teen Titans” on down through “Gen13,” his influence can be felt. (Claremont actually wrote a “Gen13” series in 2003 that wasn’t half bad. Well, okay, actually the second half was pretty bad. But the first half was good.)

The list of X-characters that Claremont created or co-created is rather amazing, and consider how many of these characters are still hugely important components of the franchise: Kitty Pryde, Sebastian Shaw, Emma Frost, Rogue, Mystique, Pyro, Sabretooth, Mr. Sinister, Forge, Jubilee, Gambit … plus Dani Moonstar, Wolfsbane, Sunspot, Cannonball, Cypher, Warlock, Magma, etc. Add to that all the characters for whom Claremont gave us the definitive incarnation, including Wolverine, Storm, Magneto, Nightcrawler … Also, it is Claremont who made Magneto a survivor of the Holocaust, who made Charles and Magnus into old friends, who created the Scott-Jean-Logan love triangle. These are contributions not just to the relatively insular world of comic-books, but to pop culture in general: So many elements of the Bryan Singer films (and even the Ratner one) are drawn from Claremont’s material.

A recent article on Singer – who was slated at the time to direct the upcoming “X-Men: First Class” film -- gave the director literally all of the credit for the opening scene of the first X-Men film: young Magneto in a concentration camp. The article makes no note of Claremont, although there is a sentence noting that Jeff Parker wrote a comicbook called “X-Men: First Class.” Parker gets name-checked for a title. The man who produced the material that set the entire tone for Singer’s take on the franchise? Not a mention. Meanwhile, jokey-joke internet pieces about the ten lamest comic-book characters, or whatever, will gleefully use Chris Claremont’s name as a punch-line in their entry on The Dazzler.

Via the work of Joss Whedon, Chris Claremont has impacted pop culture even beyond X-Men. The character of Buffy is an avowed Kitty Pryde analogue (based on Claremont’s characterization), an entire season of “Buffy” riffed on Claremont’s Dark Phoenix Saga, and Whedon’s “Firefly” has a heavy Claremont influence as well. (That show also has boasts a clear Kitty analogue as well, in the character Kaylee.)

Claremont’s use of women in “X-Men” was ahead of its time 30 years ago, and I feel that modern comics are still catching up. During his tenure, Claremont populated the X-universe with so many female characters that were well-realized in their own right, and not defined by how they related to their male counterparts. The females of Claremont’s X-Men were essential to that mythos, far moreso than in any other franchise. A great test of this is the film adaptations, which so often have to pare down the continuity to the core elements. For the first X-Men film, this gave us an ensemble including Storm, Jean Grey, Rogue and Mystique, all key players in the action – to be joined in the sequels by Kitty Pryde and Callisto. Contrast with the Spider-Man films, in which the only major female character is Mary Jane, whose job it is to get captured in the third act – every time. The third film added Gwen Stacy. Her purpose: To be a romantic foil for Spider-Man, just like Mary Jane.

Cartoon adaptations are just as telling. The X-Men cartoons again feature Rogue, Storm, Kitty Pryde and Mystique prominently, just for a start – again, as heroes fighting alongside the males. In Spider-Man, the women exist for no other reason than to be attracted to Peter Parker.

I don’t see much different in contemporary comics (though I confess I am hardly an expert). In team books, the males always outnumber the females. If it’s the opposite, usually there is some kind of gimmick involved, or it is a series aimed specifically at “girls.” Has anyone other than Claremont ever given us a mainstream super-team in which females outnumbered the males (and in which this wasn’t any kind of ironic twist or something that needed to be commented on, it simply WAS) … ?

And finally, there is the sheer length of the run, which Claremont never seems to get credit for. He wrote X-Men uninterrupted for 17 years. No one has duplicated that length of time on a mainstream superhero comic. Factor in all the X-related spinoff series, and you get something in the area of 380 comics, which far outweighs any other run in terms of quantity. Claremont has said that he considers everything from his first issue (Uncanny X-Men 94) to his last (X-Men 3) as one single story. On these terms, then, he even beats Dave Sim’s 300-chapter “novel.” Claremont’s “novel” is not only longer, but he also finished first. No one since Claremont has even come close to this.

For all that, the guy is mocked. As the world turns and the X-franchise continues to forge ahead -- and the time since Claremont’s original run ended becomes longer than the time he spent crafting it – less and less people seem to remember or care that he built the X-universe from only a few seeds. On comic-book message boards everywhere, idiots who think of themselves as die-hard X-Men fans decry Claremont’s work and diminish his contribution, apparently not realizing the irony that if Claremont hadn’t done what he did, they wouldn’t even BE die-hard X-Men fans.

With all the poison directed at Claremont on the net, I wanted to put something out there that redressed the balance somewhat. And an issue-by-issue look seemed to make the most sense, as it was a way to truly emulate the massiveness of Claremont’s accomplishment.

Now I’ve done that. At the end of the day, it doesn’t seem like enough. I still feel like the positive is outweighed by the negative regarding Claremont, particularly on the internet. But hey, I did my best.

Thanks to everyone who read and commented. It was heartening to read other people speaking positively about Claremont, and it was always particularly nice to be given new insights that made me appreciate his work even more. Thanks to Art, Dave, Neil S, Douglas, Nathan A., Scott, and all the other incredibly erudite and fantastic commentators, who really made this whole project come to life with their addendums, corrections, arguments and elucidations.

And my eternal gratitude to Geoff Klock for hosting this blog. Putting these writings here gave them a much larger audience than they’d have gotten had I posted them at my old Live Journal. More importantly, his deadline forced me to stick with this even at times when I started to think this was a gigantic fool’s errand. And his encouraging comments on the content itself were immensely gratifying, particularly given how much a fan I am of Geoff’s own writing. Thanks so much, Geoff!

And even though he’ll probably never read this or any other the other 230-plus (!) blog entries … Thank you, Chris Claremont, for the hundreds and hundreds of awesome superhero comics.

-- fin --

X-Men 1-3, part 3

2010-08-31T12:29:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell started writing these from Wisconsin, years ago. He came to New York City this summer because his science fiction musical, which I will review soon, was accepted to the New York City Fringe Festival. Today he leaves New York City, on the same day his blog about the final Claremont X-Men issue in the initial run goes up. There will be like 6 more posts from him in the next six weeks, epilogue type stuff, but we have reached the end of an era folks.]

“Mutant Genesis”

(Part Three of a Three-Part Blog)

I do wish to end on a positive note after the last two entries about this arc. So let it be said that -- troublesome politics and backstage dramas aside -- “Mutant Genesis” is a genuinely fun superhero story. Jim Lee and Scott Williams were at the top of their game in 1991, and their enthusiasm is evident in every panel of X-Men 1-3. The artists adorn both the plot and the visuals with a lot of slick, sci-fi trappings: Note the abundance of sci-fi technology in almost every setting, and how many of the characters wear brand-new costumes, tricked out with extra bucks and pouches (common in 90s superhero couture). Even Professor Xavier’s chair is now a piece of science-fiction machinery.

Claremont, while not nearly so enthusiastic about the comic at this point, clearly has no intention of being outpaced by his young collaborators. Displaying all the confidence of a master craftsman, the author produces text that matches the visuals at every turn. Lee and Williams clearly want the X-Men to seem as futuristic and “cool” as possible, so that’s what Claremont delivers. Even Xavier, the perennial “mentor” figure, has become something of a bad-ass (continuing the characterization that began with his pummeling of a Skrull in Uncanny 277).

By the same token, he also still has a huge emotional investment in these characters, having lived with them for a decade and a half. By all accounts, including his own, Claremont thought of them almost as real people. (His first prose novel, First Flight, is dedicated to “Charley, Scott, Jean, Ororo, Logan, Peter, Kurt, Sean, Kitty, Rogue, Betsy, Alex, Ali – and all the rest – who helped (and help) pay the rent!”). That affection shines through to the end as well. For all that they are infused with Lee’s sense of contemporary coolness, the X-Men are still portrayed with characteristic sensitivity and depth: Consider Rogue’s plea to Magneto, which displays continuity from the recent Savage Land arc that increased the two characters’ emotional closeness. At every turn, Claremont and Lee strike a beautiful balance between characters who seem remarkably sexy and hip yet still emotionally relatable. Of course, this is, to some degree or another, what Claremont had been doing for the entire 17 years.

Note also that despite the fact that he’s leaving, Claremont still employs his favorite trick of sprinkling smaller mysteries amongst the broader goings-on, to be explicated at some later date: The “Delgado” mystery in the first issue is absolutely Claremontian; while I have no evidence to back it up, I’d bet money it was Claremont’s idea and not Lee’s.
Darragh Greene, a favorite comics commentator of mine, writes about his experience of the first issue of X-Men, saying:

“My first American superhero comic was adjectiveless X-Men 1, so I just caught the tail-end of Claremont's long run writing those characters; but those three issues made an indelible impression on me. (Indeed, without them, I probably would not have gone so deep into either the genre or the medium.) They were a swansong, of course, but they were all the more powerful and passionate for that. Naturally, I was blown away by Jim Lee's art, but Claremont's assured command of language, the theatrical fluency and elegant rhythm of the words, elevated the collaboration to a dazzling work of art/literature whose epic grandeur and deep humanity fired my fourteen-year-old imagination.

I had to hunt down the back issues of Uncanny X-Men, of course, and when I did, I realized that there had been a slump in quality prior to Lee coming onboard. After he came on as regular penciller, and began taking a hand in the plotting, the book began to fizz again. I think Claremont certainly became better with the right collaborator, and I think Lee was such a collaborator even if I now know that Claremont was not happy with Lee's plotting and plot changes. Whatever the situation, there was a synergy that worked, and the book was better for it.

So, as a reader, I think Claremont's run ended on a high whatever his own thoughts were at the time. Certainly, ever afterwards, I judged the quality of the X-Books with reference to those first three startling issues of X- Men, but nothing came close.”

Though Greene is perhaps singularly eloquent in the expression of it, his experience is far from unique. Upon its release in 1991, X-Men #1 was the best-selling comic ever. Many people bought and read it, including scores of fans who had never read an X-Men comic-book before. And unlike two earlier massive Marvel best-sellers, McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 and Liefeld’s X-Force #1, Claremont and Lee’s series actually delivered on the hype. The issue was so effervescent and absorbing that it turned brand-new readers into lifelong X-Men fans.

This is part of the brilliance of Claremont’s departure – to leave on such an extraordinarily high note. His seventeen years as writer of The X-Men is not only remarkable just for the sheer length of time itself, but for the fact that – from his first issue to his last – he was hooking vast amounts of readers. As he noted himself in an interview in 1992, the average X-Men fan when he quit hadn’t been born yet when he first started.

Having spent years now attempting to enumerate what makes each individual chapter of Claremont’s opus a unique jewel unto itself, I feel qualified to argue that just about any given issue – including his very last -- contains all the qualities that made the series a success: Fun, intelligence, eloquence, action, intrigue, an unabashed affection for the characters, and an unqualified respect for his readers.

The final monologue of X-Men #3 contains an unabashedly humanist message, a call for everyone in the world to do everything he or she can “to leave our world better than we found it.” The very fact that we live, Xavier says, “gives us the obligation to try.” Considering just how many people have been positively affected by the X-Men franchise – especially after the widespread dissemination of the mythos thanks to television and film adaptations – and considering just how much of that franchise is the invention of Claremont, it seems fair to say that the author has certainly followed his own advice. Claremont put his heart and soul into The X-Men, and infused the entire mythology – for all time, I would argue – with an irresistible power and pull. John Byrne once said that every writer and artist who worked on The X-Men after Neal Adams were just riding the wave that Adams created, but I disagree. Adams’ influence was strong, but eventually it dissipated in the wake of a much larger phenomenon. It is Christopher S. Claremont who built this mythology to last.

X-Men 1-3, part 2

2010-08-24T11:28:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell in his second to last post on Claremont's X-Men run, though there will be some epilogues.]

“Mutant Genesis”
(Part Two of a Three-Part Blog)

Claremont writes the first three issues of the newly minted X-Men series in a subtle dialogue with the franchise’s other new launch, X-Force, whose first issue also broke the sales record, two months earlier. X-Force, drawn and plotted by Rob Liefeld and scripted by Fabian Nicieza, was the quintessence of lowest-common-denominator crap: A borderline incoherent mish-mash of violence, scowling faces, impossible musculature, giant guns and ripped-off layouts, all held together with nonsensical text by Fabian Nicieza (“Stab his eyes, he got away again!”). That the comic spun out of Claremont’s own brainchild, The New Mutants, clearly didn’t sit well. It’s not difficult to glean the subtext, then, when in on Page 8 of X-Men #1, we see Xavier holding a portrait of The New Mutants as he says, “I look at the world, and cannot help wondering … if my dream has any validity anymore.”

Magneto, meanwhile, is manipulated into playing the villain by an unsavory new lieutenant who is eventually revealed to have his own traitorous agenda. This new villain’s name: Fabian. (Thanks, Nathan Adler, for pointing this out.) Claremont’s little swipe may also be to do with Nicieza having been the one who finished off “The Muir Island Saga” when Claremont couldn’t bring himself to write the concluding chapters.

Magneto’s scheme this time around is telling as well: To brainwash the X-Men into villains. The first time we meet the transformed X-Men, in X-Men #2, Scott justifies thusly their reason for acting so out of character: “…Times have changed. We have to change to match it. Same as Cable and his X-Force.”

Clearly, for Claremont, X-Force was emblematic of the franchise’s future, and where it was going wrong. With hindsight, it’s easy to agree with him. (Actually it wasn’t too hard at the time either, for perceptive fans and pros, both.)

The problem wasn’t just the mindless action, but the re-establishment of the conservative politics that Neil Shyminsky identified in his paper, and which has been discussed here. While the Silver Age versions of the X-Men were assimilationists, vilifying the revolutionary faction represented by Magneto, Claremont eventually “mutated” them to the other extreme. By 1985, they were aligning themselves with the mutants they had previously vilified: the revolutionary Magneto and the disenfranchised Morlocks. Those mutants who allied themselves with the “establishment” (Freedom Force) were now the enemy. As Neil and I both talked about, the Genoshan arc in Uncanny 235-238 represents the point of fullest turnaround: The X-Men are true freedom fighters, whose goal is to topple a government that oppresses their race through a relentless system of apartheid. (Note that we are explicitly told in that story that Genosha is a U.S. ally, so there can be no confusion that the X-Men might actually be acting in alignment with the establishment.)

But as Neil points out, the politics of The X-Men did not stop revolving at that point. Instead, they just kept on swinging past 180 degrees, slowly but surely turning back to the zero point thanks to increasingly more constrictive editorial mandates. Once we get to “Mutant Genesis,” the “explicitly counter-revolutionary” iteration of the X-Men are back in full force. We’re in the Silver Age again, only it’s worse because the comic can no longer hide behind the curtain of naiveté. We’ve seen now what the series is capable of, which makes the pro-establishment politics seem not only cowardly, but almost sinister. When Magneto’s acolytes launch a strike against Genosha in X-Men #1, the X-Men rush to the country’s defense! Not surprisingly, the Acolytes accuse the X-Men of being race traitors, and Gambit’s explanation is that the Genoshan government has changed, and so have its policies. Really? From what I can garner from “X-Tinction Agenda” and this issue, the country is now being headed by Anderson, the Chief Magistrate – the woman who, in the original Genoshan arc, was the most zealous defender of the government’s anti-mutant policies.

Meanwhile, the X-Men here are attacking Magneto at the behest of Nick Fury, in tandem with the U.S. government. This is the same government that – unless I missed something – is still enforcing the Mutant Registration Act. It is also implicit that it is the U.S. that are acting as the watchdogs for Genosha, to prevent them from re-instituting their system of apartheid (the one we never actually explicitly saw dissolve in any case). So the X-Men are trusting the enforcers of the Mutant Registration Act to police Genosha?

As for Magneto himself, he emerges – as always, under Claremont’s pen – as the most sympathetic (and just plain coolest) character. He establishes Asteroid M as a sovereign nation for mutants, and says that all mutants are welcome – including, Magneto says quite explicitly, the X-Men themselves. The so-called “villain” is the most magnanimous and inclusive character in the story!

Interestingly, Claremont even has Magneto himself question what has turned the X-Men into counter-revolutionaries (though he doesn’t use that term). He notes that during their fight in issue #1, Logan actually tried to kill him. “I have fought by [Wolverine’s] side,” Magneto muses. “For the brief time I worked with the X-Men, he accepted me wholeheartedly. If not as a friend, then at least as a comrade-in-arms. Why then has he turned on me? What has changed?” Indeed, we never get an answer to Magneto’s question. Claremont knows there isn’t one that will satisfy.

Scott Pilgrim, C'est Moi! (plus a little more on Inception) [Movie Reviewery]

2010-08-18T10:49:00.002-04:00

Spoilers for Inception maybe a bit

When I see a movie I like my brain spins around trying to figure out exactly what I thought of it, a process that can takes weeks of conversation and movie-review reading. Inception is a good example of this. Mitch and I wrote a whole blog about Inception, and talked about it with like a dozen people and I only just now feel like I can really articulate what I thought about it in a clear an specific way.

(For the record what I think of Inception this: the five levels of reality shown in Inception break down like so:

Level 1 is like the mind blowing first act of the Matrix.
Level 2 is a Steven Segal movie
Level 3 is this really excellent sci-fi thriller in a hotel starring Joseph Gordon Levitt in an awesome suit zero gravity fighting in a rotating hotel.
Level 4 is another Steven Segal movie
Level 5 is a weak version of Stephen Soderbergh's Solaris, where I see what is going on but don't feel it.

The awesomeness of the movie is not in the levels but in how the levels are edited together to make a compelling machine of a movie, which is more an engineering feat than a philosophical, emotional, or stylish feat, which sounds like more of a complaint than it is because the engineering is REALLY good. A-).

This part of my brain was always muddled reading the Scott Pilgrim comics, which I enjoyed, but was never really able to form a strong or clear opinion on. Neil Shyminsky or the Savage Critics would say things on their blogs about what is wrong or right with the comics, and I would sort of agree with both while still liking the book basically, even though they were maybe disagreeing with each other. It happens, maybe more often now than it used to. It's like Flowers for Algernon over here sometimes.

The Scott Pilgrim movie, like the comics, I liked. I liked it more than the comics probably, but I am not 100% why. Probably because it was much shorter, and as Neil pointed out this is not really a story that needs 1200 pages, however decompressed. When the movie calls itself "An Epic of Epic Epicness" this is ironic. It is harder to be ironic on that point, though not impossible, when you have 1200 pages. I liked the fight scenes and the sense of humor and the direction was always entertaining, and I loved how even though it was not always perfect, every line and scene was trying to do something interesting, and there was enough stuff so that when things did not work you were on to the next thing before you could say "That didn't work". Making a pun on "bi-curious" with "bi-furious" for example would be a weak joke if there were not so much other stuff going on, and calling Ramona a "has-bian" (as opposed to a lesbian) made me laugh, though maybe it should not have. Some people have called that ADD-addled, but it makes for a fun energetic movie. And for a summer pop movie action comedy thing energy and verve and bounce count for a lot, more than anything else maybe. I think my favorite joke was when Scott is on the phone with his sister and she says something Wallace Wells just said a moment ago as he was passing out, and Scott asks her how she knew that; she says Wallace texted her, and suddenly has a phone in his hand, though he is still passed out.

But ultimately I am not able to really judge it too specifically, or respond very well to claims that the movie is misogynist, for example, because I am too close to it, and specifically to Scott. He doesn't drink, and when he does drink he drinks gin and tonics, and he worries about his hair, and he wants to impress a girl who is clearly out of his league, and he is going nowhere, and he is weak-willed, and he only knows how to make garlic bread but is surprised and distressed to find out bread makes you fat, and screws up and he sees his life as a video-game, and everyone loves him and he gets the girl the end? Yeah that particular brand of wish-fulfilment is too close for me to judge. It just makes me want Scott Pilgrim to win so bad I don't really care about anything else.

With wish fulfillment you want a character who is a blank slate for the audience to project themselves into, which is why you get so many movies with bland leads, characters who are just cyphers for the audience. I mean I like the Jason Bourne movies but the hero works because he has no memory, is not that specific, so he could be you. On the other end you have movies that create specific characters that are still relatable or sympathetic but also real people who are not you. You relate to them as people, without feeling like you are them. Like everyone on the Wire. Otherness is involved. Scott Pilgrim is a third thing, something that is maybe part of what makes cult movies work. The main character in Scott Pilgrim is a blank cypher like Jason Bourne, but for a much more narrow audience. Jason Bourne hits a nerve with most men I would bet. Scott Pilgrim hits the same nerve for nerdy videogame-influenced ineffective dopes like myself. This may account for its modest success at the box office. It went up against the Expendables and Eat Pray Love, both movies that I imagine most men and most women, respectively, can easily project themselves into. I imagine that in the Expendables you get to imagine you are a big action hero. The pleasures of imaging you are a mostly ineffective kid from Toronto with no job are smaller, though more intimate, even after he defeats the bad guys and gets the girl. So I don't know what to say about it other than I thought it was a blast. I can't for example, get into the debate about whether Cera was a good choice or a disaster, because anything negative I would say would be like going after myself. I want him to get the girl and save the day and be funny, and I can't see the flaws that are probably there, just as I can't see so many flaws in my own life. Scott Pilgrim, c'est moi.

On a side note, I don't know that much about homosexuality as it appears in PG-13 mainstream movies generally, or in movies attempting to be big summer movies, but it seems to me that Scott Pilgrim is pretty progressive, in the way both Wallace Wells and Ramona have same-sex relationships and it is presented as just something that is just part of life, no big deal. Scott is surprised Ramona had a girlfriend but the joke is that he failed to catch the warning sign of her correcting his "evil ex boyfriends" with "evil exes." It is presented as something he should have seen coming, but was oblivious about. Even Scott sharing a bed with his gay roommate, and even his gay roommate's boyfriends, is just like something people do and barely worth remarking on. I thought the presentation of this as unremarkable was remarkable.

X-Men 1-3, part 1

2010-08-17T11:28:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell has reached X-Men 1, 2, and 3 in his look at Claremont's X-Men run. Every time he says something about how many issues Claremont did, all I can think of his how many blogs Jason did.]

“Mutant Genesis”

(Part One of a Three-Part Blog)

Rather than talking about Claremont’s final three issues one at a time over the course of three blogs, I’ve decided it makes more sense to look at the three issues as a single arc, and simply break up the review into three parts.

1991’s X-Men #1 was, at the time, the best-selling comic-book ever. And I believe (someone jump in to correct me if I’m wrong) it still holds that record. Claremont describes this issue and the next two as his “severance package.” Considering how well those issues sold, and Marvel’s royalty system at the time, it must be said that that’s one incredible package.

Still, creatively, Claremont was far from satisfied with the work he turned in here. And indeed, the story is very much an epilogue. Magneto is the central character – appropriate, as Claremont’s version of Magneto qualifies as the writer’s finest single creation – but we saw the tragic, brilliant ending to this character’s journey in Uncanny X-Men 275. That was the true climax. Magneto even says, right in the opening sequence of “Rubicon,” that he has “no more cause.” But he is nonetheless persuaded by a new group of young acolytes to put on his costume and be the X-Men’s arch-enemy – one last time.
There are some clear parallels here. Claremont was done with the X-Men; yet Bob Harras and Jim Lee -- both avowed fans of the glory days of Claremont and John Byrne – coax Claremont into writing one more X-Men tale. So, having realized that there is no place for himself in the current state of the X-franchise, Claremont writes the story of how there is no place left in the world for Magneto.

It ends with the character’s death, which is an eminently appropriate way for Claremont to go out. As a one-dimensional Silver Age villain given extraordinary psychological depth and complexity by Claremont, Magneto is emblematic of the author’s achievement as the writer of X-Men. That Magnus departs when Claremont does is a truly poetic stroke.

Of course, the move was destined to be undone by subsequent X-writers, but such is the nature of the game. Claremont would eventually play the game from the other side, undoing Grant Morrison’s “death of Magneto” story with a carelessness that disheartened many Morrison fans.

In fact, in the present story, Claremont actually attempts to preclude too much future deconstruction of his definitive Magneto. In issue 2, the possibility is introduced that everything Magneto has done since his “resurrection” (read: since Claremont started writing him) was not his own choice; the heroic quest -- begun in Uncanny 150 only to fail tragically in Uncanny 275 – was all manipulated by Moira MacTaggert and Professor X. Note, though, that this possibility is introduced only so that Claremont can reject it. Moira’s long monologue in issue 3 reveals that, no, the attempts at manipulation were always doomed to fail: “The choices you made,” she tells Magneto, “were the ones [you] would have made, regardless.” It’s a fascinating attempt by Claremont to maintain the integrity of his noble Magneto, to gird that figure against any future reinterpretations. I’d argue that it was ultimately unnecessary. Comic-book writers will do whatever they want, and for anyone with eyes to see, Claremont’s Magneto will always stand as the quintessential version, the minutia of continuity be damned. (And speaking as a fan, I’ll always be grateful to Bryan Singer and Ian McKellen for making the noble Magneto the definitive version in the eyes of the mainstream audience as well.)

Along with Magnus’ death, the story comprising X-Men 1-3 contains several other noteworthy elements of finality. Although conceived by the creators as a new beginning – it would eventually be packaged under the umbrella title “Mutant Genesis” – the story’s deliberate allusions to other watershed moments in X-Men history make it a strong ending as well for Claremont’s run. (Years later, Claremont would confirm that he considers his run from (Uncanny) X-Men 94 to X-Men 3 to be “all one story.”)

The basic, straight-ahead “X-Men vs. Magneto” premise recalls the Silver Age X-Men 1, of course. In fact, the basic plot skeleton for “Mutant Genesis,” wherein the X-Men fly to Asteroid M to rescue their teammates, has a twin amongst one of the earliest Silver Age X-Men comics (issue 5, wherein Magneto captured the Angel). One team flying to rescue another is also the premise of Giant-Sized X-Men #1, which introduced the new team and was the last issue before Claremont became the writer.
The “Magneto Protocols” plot-thread, a ticking-clock that even the villain is aware of, recalls an element of Claremont’s very first issue, “The Doomsmith Scenario.” Part two of “Doomsmith” also ended with the death of a character – and, both in that story and in “Mutant Genesis,” Xavier taps into the thoughts of the man who dies.

Claremont’s run also, famously, began with thirteen X-Men. It ends with the exact same number. Eight of them are the exact same characters; and among the other five, a rather surprising number of correspondences can be found.
John Byrne espouses the philosophy that a writer can wreak all sorts of changes on a comic-book series during his time on it, so long as he “puts the toys back in the box” before moving on. While some elements of the “Mutant Genesis” re-boot are editorial mandates and/or the desires of plotter Jim Lee (e.g., the rebuilt mansion, Xavier back in a wheelchair), it must be said that Claremont did exactly what Byrne suggests. Despite a 17-year run containing massive, sweeping revisions of the status quo, the X-Men are, as of Claremont’s final issue, back where they started just before he arrived. For better or worse. (It turned out to be worse.)

"Everybody needs Money. That's why they call it Money."

2010-08-16T15:16:00.000-04:00

David Mamet's Heist, an underrated movie, includes the line "Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money." I have a friend who hates that line, and mocks it by saying things to me like "Everyone needs chairs. That's why they call them chairs." I was defending it in an email, but then figured, why not put it on the blog, and link him to it, just to get on his nerves.

These are the opening lines of Heist.

Coffee Cart Man: Hey buddy. You forgot your change.
Joe Moore: [Takes the change] Makes the world go round.
Bobby Blane: What's that?
Joe Moore: Gold.
Bobby Blane: Some people say love.
Joe Moore: Well, they're right, too. It is love. Love of gold.

Gold, money, is established as the end-all be-all in the opening exchange, the thing that makes the whole world go round. Money is not FOR anything else -- everything, including love, and the world spinning around, is FOR MONEY. Money is the THING IN ITSELF. It is the ROOT, in Mamet's view. Radix malorum est cupidita. Money is the root of all evil. Psychoanalysis describes the object of desire as this ever deferred thing -- you want something, but when you get it you want something else. Mamet does not agree. Love and the world turning are for something else -- MONEY. But money is it, the end of the line.

The the key exchange is Heist is this:

Joe Moore: Anybody can get the goods. The hard part's getting away.
Bergman: Uh-huh.
Joe Moore: You plan a good enough getaway, you could steal Ebbets Field.
Bergman: Ebbets Field's gone.
Joe Moore: What did I tell you?

So this is not just about low level street crime, dudes swiping gold from each other. This is about capitalism, which in Mamet's view erodes all values. Mamet's American Buffalo was about the same thing. The street level gold theft is the same thing, according to Mamet, as major corporate deals.

So when the Bergman says "Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money," this a joke about the same idea set up in the opening. If you want to understand Love you have to look outside of love because love is really a love of money. In David Mamet's world you can't joke "Everybody needs love, that's why they call it love," because the objection would be "but people don't really need love, what they really need is money." But the desire for Money is not a desire for something else. It is its own justification, its own reason for being. So Mamet jokes that the word "Money" by definition means "Everybody need money." Because the desire for money is so obvious and pervasive, and such a dead end, he ironically claims that the word it self must justify the thing it refers to. In Mamet's world, it is unique in that nothing else could justify it. It would be like asking a religious person, "if god created the world, who created god?" At some point you find this self-creating origin, and for Mamet, in our world, that thing is cash.

Uncanny X-Men 279

2010-08-10T11:09:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell's final post about Uncanny X-Men. Sheesh. The guy is a Piotr Nikolievitch Rasputin among men.]

“Bad to the Bone”

This is Chris Claremont’s final issue of Uncanny X-Men. Per his Comics Journal interview in 1992, it became so “painful to write” that he stopped halfway through, and writer Fabian Nicieza was brought in to complete the issue (and the remaining two chapters of “The Muir Island Saga,” in X-Factor 69 and Uncanny X-Men 280).

Thus, none of the latter material – featuring Forge, Wolverine and Rogue and a few others on Muir Isle – is Claremont’s. Essentially his 186th and final issue is a single vignette featuring Professor Xavier vs. a possessed Colossus.

It is not the most sonorous note on which to end, although happily Claremont gets to go out on a more tangible high, with X-Men #’s 1-3. And other material from around this time – Uncanny 275 and 277, and X-Factor 65-68 – contains some prouder material. Perhaps it’s best to think of it all as a grand fireworks display, with those other, greater stories the ones that provoke all the “oooh”’s and “aaah”’s, while issues 278 and 279 are the inevitable duds.

Then again, that’s not entirely fair. Uncanny X-Men 279 actually does contribute a unique note to this chorus of endings: one that is dark, and rueful, arguably adding a bit of bluesiness to the brightly colored excitement of “Endgame” or “Mutant Genesis.” Claremont’s pages in Uncanny X-Men 279 are narrated by Xavier, and his running monologue – surely being informed by Claremont’s own feelings at this point – are profoundly depressive in both tone and content. Consider first his early description of Colossus:

“Piotr Nikolievitch Rasputin. I found him in the Siberian collective that had been his home for most of his young life, a farmboy with the soul of a poet. But also – most importantly in my eyes, in my arrogance – a mutant. And so, I made him a warrior.”

Xavier’s chastising himself for recruiting Peter in the first place is quite affecting – it takes us back to Giant Sized X-Men #1, which is, of course, the issue just before Claremont began writing. There is a genuine sense of regret being conveyed here. Xavier questions his actions from 17 years ago; just as, perhaps, Claremont is questioning a decision that he made 17 years ago? It doesn’t seem at all impossible that, with his tenure ending so ingloriously, the author might genuinely be questioning whether writing a comic book was the best way to spend the last 17 years of his life. (Note that this was all happening not long after Claremont had turned 40 years old – prime mid-life crisis time.) It’s a surprising moment from both Xavier and Claremont, not least because it seems so very much from the heart.

The other particularly significant moment in the sequence occurs towards the end, when Xavier uses his telepathy to snap Colossus out of the Shadow King’s mental control. Per the narration, the key to accomplishing this end is by stripping away the “Peter Nicholas” persona that Piotr gained via the Seige Perilous, thus forcing him back into his original, Colossus identity. Considered as metaphor, this is harsh stuff. Only a few pages after lamenting having made Piotr into “a warrior,” Xavier finds himself forced to commit the exact same sin. There is a sense here that Peter’s humanity is being sacrificed to Xavier’s agenda.
As noted earlier, a lot of the tension between Claremont’s aims and Bob Harras’ was to do with Claremont viewing these characters as people first, superheroes second. Harras – representing the view of Marvel shareholders as much as anything else – held the reverse priority. Uncanny X-Men 279 can be persuasively read as Claremont’s final surrender. The character of Colossus is the final battleground, which seems appropriate as he has long been portrayed as, first of all, the artist/creator in the cast (thus well aligned with Claremont), and also the “soul of the team” (and therefore emblematic of Claremont’s humanist outlook).

With Peter’s humanity sacrificed on the altar of editorial fiat, the war is truly over. This is why Claremont can’t write anymore. After one last scene -- a two-page interlude wherein the villain of the story proclaims that his evil influence will now spread beyond Earth and to “the stars!” – Claremont calls it a day on the series that defined him as much as he defined it for the better part of two decades.

As for “The Muir Island Saga,” it is guided over the rest of this issue and the next into a decent – if somewhat anti-climactic – conclusion. Nicieza manages to weave several of Claremont’s subplots into a logical ending that quite cleanly disposes of the Shadow King. The material is all perfectly readable, though from Nicieza’s first page the character voices seem off. It’s astounding how quickly it becomes clear that these really are Claremont’s characters, and anyone else attempting to continue their story will seem like a shadow (so to speak) in comparison.

Uncanny X-Men 278

2010-08-03T17:10:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell. X-Men, Chris Claremont, every issue, this blog, reviews, Unscramble, go.]

“The Battle of Muir Isle”

In looking for a truly satisfying ending for Claremont’s epic run, the most fitting candidates thematically are Uncanny 275 (with the conclusion of Magneto’s story), Uncanny 277 (the ending to the Shi’ar space opera), or X-Men 3 (the death of Magneto, and Claremont’s last issue of any mutant comic for seven years).

But in terms of the actual Uncanny X-Men series, the fact is that his last full issue is the present one, 278, and the last one to which he contributes anything at all is 279 (Claremont writes the first eleven pages out of 22). Neither one seems quite majestic enough, all things considered.

What we have here is the four-part culmination to the Shadow King subplot, which had been on a slow burn for a year and a half. Issue 278 is the opening chapter of the “Muir Island” saga, which then continues into Uncanny 279, then X-Factor 69, then finally Uncanny 280. (X-Factor 70 features a pleasantly reflective epilogue by Peter David.)

In the era before decompression became en vogue, four issues was a perfectly reasonable length for a superhero epic – yet after such a large build-up, the payoff as presented is undeniably scrappy. The concluding chapters, penned by Fabian Nicieza, contain some nice payoffs to some of Claremont’s dangling threads, but the entire affair is nonetheless a bit rough around the edges. After the satisfying conclusions to the recent Savage Land and Shi’ar arcs, one can’t help but wonder how things would have gone had Claremont and Lee stuck around to see it through. But Claremont was avowedly too frustrated at editorial’s restructuring, and Lee was presumably gearing up for the new X-Men #1.

Claremont’s planned conclusion to the Shadow King/Muir Isle story, if it was anything like his typical work, was going to be a rather complicated affair. The most striking thing about “The Battle of Muir Isle” is its utter straightforwardness (title included). Even his “X-Tinction Agenda” contributions, despite being the middle parts of a strictly contained nine-part structure, contained a reasonable share of Claremontian subtleties and complications, but no such complexity exists here.

The X-Men simply fly to Muir Isle to investigate Moira’s strange behavior, and are duly attacked by the island’s possessed mutant population (including, curiously, such characters as Siryn and Madrox, who were not seen at all during any of the Muir Island scenes in earlier Uncanny issues). Six members of the team are beaten, with only Forge left on the loose (so that he can whip up a deus ex machina or three in later chapters).

Xavier, meanwhile, returns to the X-mansion, where he’s attacked by a possessed Colossus. It’s all superhero-by-numbers, basically.

Art comes from Paul Smith, with whom Claremont collaborated on some of the best Uncanny issues in the entire run. While his work here lacks the dynamic imagination of his 80s X-material, his storytelling is still very much on point. There very little to complain about in “The Battle of Muir Isle” – it contains everything it needs to contain. Yet, after the excitement of the previous four issues, Uncanny 278 seems just a bit too placid. After so much build-up, the Muir Isle arc really ought to have quite a bit more spark.

X-Factor 65-68

2010-07-27T11:08:00.002-04:00

[Jason Powell continues his look at every issue of Claremont's X-Men run. He continues to rehearse his musical in New York City, and would probably love it if, instead of buying a ticket because you do not live in New York, you just sent him some cash in an envelope.]

“Endgame” (Parts 1-4)

The summer and fall of 1991 saw a full-scale overhaul of the “X” franchise, overseen by editor Bob Harras. The New Mutants was discontinued with issue 100, to be replaced with X-Force. Meanwhile, the five original Silver Age X-Men were moved out of the X-Factor series, rejoining the parent team, whose adventures would now be chronicled in a pair of series – the long-running original, Uncanny X-Men, and a brand-new comic, simply titled X-Men (which actually was the official title of the Silver Age series, at first; the adjective wasn’t added until the Claremont/Byrne run). The void left in X-Factor was filled with a new team of “B-list” mutants, to be written with characteristic quirk by Peter David.

These sorts of reshuffles are actually SOP at Marvel now, particularly with the mutant comics. At the time, though, this was something rather novel. It truly did feel like the start of a new era – and, with Chris Claremont’s departure three months in to the new status quo, it very much was.

Before this new beginning took place, however, the various X-titles had to supply some endings. The story running through X-Factor 65-68, appropriately titled “Endgame,” is clearly designed to bring some closure to the first unofficial volume of X-Factor, just before the “Muir Island” crossover that would spin the characters back into the parent title. Plotted by Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio (the latter of whom also supplies pencils), the story is successful in all the important ways: There is a “final” showdown with Apocalypse, the major villain of the series; we are shown the death of a major character and the loss of another; and Cyclops, whose unheroic actions are – in fact – the very foundation of the X-Factor series – is finally given a reasonably convincing redemption.

Also noteworthy about the plot are its deliberate resonances with the twin-crown storylines of the X-franchise, “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Days of Future Past.” Thirty years old now, these two stories still influence the X-franchise more than any others. Back in 1991, when they were barely over a decade old, their influence rang that much louder. Only logical then that the scripter of both those classics should be called in to supply the text for “Endgame.”

If Chris Claremont was at all bored by working from someone else’s plot – particularly one that drew so much from his own, decade-old works – it doesn’t show at all in the finished product. The story reads beautifully, and is littered throughout with characteristic touches that seem very much the writer’s own. The montage in Part One, with each member of the team spending time with his romantic partner (Scott and Jean being each other’s, of course) is very much in keeping with Claremont’s style, for example. In particular the bit with the Beast, as he watches reporter Trish Tilby covering the Iraq War (that’s the 1991 iteration, for all you young’uns) appears to be informed by Claremont’s own personal life. “That’s a war out there,” Hank says, “So be careful.” (One of Claremont’s best friends at the time was a woman who works as a war correspondent.)

I recall reading some idiot online saying that Claremont would have been “better off writing romance novels” instead of X-Men, but such a suggestion stupidly ignores Claremont’s affinity for fantasy and sci-fi. In this story – particularly the first two chapters – the author seems particularly inspired by Portacio’s love for images of complex and esoteric technology. This results in some of the writer’s finest ever sci-fi poetry, e.g. the Beast’s climactic, frantic commands to the team’s sentient Ship at the end of issue 66: “Access please, ship … to all core memory and systems nexii. …. Strike that routing … no use to us … hold it, reference that file again! Try a sidereal shunt … There, Ship! Hold and lock that circuit structure! … Systems initialized, Ship! Enable and execute – NOW!”

Meanwhile, if Lee and Portacio’s desire was for Claremont’s text to add to the resonances with the material that inspired them, they certainly had no cause for disappointment. Claremont’s assured mastery of the X-Men’s storied past – “Dark Phoenix” and “Days” in particular – lets him create some brilliant allusions, the most striking being Scott’s narration during the final, astral-plane sequence: “Once, a long time ago, I fought on the astral plane to save [Jean]. That duel, I lost.” Then, as his sword strikes through the heart of Apocalypse’s psychic avatar -- “This one, I won’t!” The result is exactly as desired. “Endgame” reads as the triumphant capstone to a truly epic myth.

As for the rehabilitation of Cyclops, one cannot turn an entirely blind eye to the commercial considerations at work: It is such a cheat to have Cyclops give his infant son up to a nebulous future-timeline. Granted, it’s a clever way to bring the series full circle, given that X-Factor began with Scott’s abandonment of Nathan. But ultimately this is the creators giving Scott a “get out of jail free” card, freeing him up to be a commercially viable superhero again while absolving him of all guilt.

Here, too, it’s up to Claremont to cover the façade with his text. And here, too, it works, as the writer is canny enough to give Scott’s interior monologue the appropriate sense of guilt, and an acknowledgement of his failures. There is lovely pathos in his line referring to him, Jean and Nathan as “the family I’ve always dreamed of. The one I know I’ll never have.” In context, this is not self-pity on the character’s part. Rather, it is a gentle acceptance that through his own failures, he has lost his chance to achieve that particular dream; he must accept that and move on. This feeds directly into his final narration, wherein he tells us that his “ghosts [have been] put finally to rest.”

One last brilliant turn occurs in the final page of the “Endgame” four-parter, as Lee and Portacio bring in The Watcher – again, to strike a resonance with “The Dark Phoenix Saga.” Claremont, shrewdly aware of what’s required, provides a lovely Greek-chorus-style epilogue, which perfectly dovetails with Oatu’s epilogue from Uncanny 137. It is an ingenious bookend, and a worthy companion to arguably the finest single issue of Claremont’s entire run.

Although not plotted by him nor contained in Uncanny X-Men itself, “Endgame” is – title and all – a genuinely moving capstone to his 17 years of writing these characters. But it wasn’t quite over yet …