Monday, February 06, 2006

The Mighty Quill Award and American Imperial Power in Marvel’s 1602 Series

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Literary awards have always functioned as a way of conferring status upon their awardees. When the Quills foundation decided to include a "graphic novel" category among its vaguely populist 2005 awards -- readers elect the winners by voting for those the expert committee has nominated -- the comic book community responded with a predictable mix of cheer, disdain, and ambivalence. Less predictable, perhaps, was the nomination and eventual victory of Marvel 1602, Neil Gaiman's luminously detailed, densely textured time-warping story of Marvel Comics superheroes in Elizabethan England, which has since begat a sequel, Marvel 1602: New World, created by Gregs Pak and Tocchini, set entirely in the western hemisphere. The unpredictability stems from the fact that 1602 beat out works by Harvey Pekar, who had the weight of a movie behind him, and by Art Spiegelman, who had the weight of the New York intelligentsia behind him. Regardless, 1602 is the perfect first champion in the category, as it perfectly epitomizes the comic book genre’s formal potential, literary strivings, and, no slight intended, inherent dorkiness. (Hey, it’s about super-heroes.)

The two 1602s together also constitute, in a barely disguised way, a most American text. American imperialism goes to extremes, as the superheroes of the Marvel universe are called upon to save first the strife-ridden world of Renaissance Europe, and then the incipient civilization composed of Europeans and Native Americans. Gaiman, a Brit and a scholar of early modern culture, clearly recognizes that the comic book superhero is a particularly American invention, and so at the end of his book he resettles the heroes of 1602 in colonial Virginia, where they will, it is suggested, establish modern democracy. The superhero genre is also a particularly twentieth-century invention, of course: the costumed, crimefighting superhero, born in the 1940s, faded practically into obscurity in the 1950s, revitalized (largely due to Marvel) in the 1960s, and currently as potent as ever, has always represented a balancing act between the fantasies of transcending and protecting the masses, remaining anonymous all the while. Marvel characters like the X-Men, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Doctor Strange et al. are recast in history by Gaiman and the innovative artists Andy Kubert and Richard Isanove to strive for this dream as they save the first 1602 universe. In the sequel, Pak and Tocchini enlist the Hulk, Spider-Man and Iron Man to bring peace to the not-yet-lost colony of Roanoke.

The authors' conceit is to transplant characters based on Marvel figures into the (mostly) historically plausible past. So Matthew Murdoch, the blind lawyer who is secretly Marvel’s crimefighting Daredevil, appears in 1602 as a blind Irish balladeer. He secretly works for Sir Nicholas Fury, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster of sorts, a (pre-)incarnation of Nick Fury, the United States special government agent of the current Marvel universe. The evil mutant Magneto of our time is the Holy Grand Inquisitor (the position, which, having morphed into “Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” was held in the 1960s by the man who is now Pope). In this world, the Grand Inquisitor has worked his way into the position by capturing and persecuting not Jews and Muslims, but other mutants, here called "witchbreed." The revelations of certain of these parallels between Marvel and 1602 characters–some are much more subtle than those enumerated here–play crucial roles in the plot.

Why are these heroes popping up in this very dark, actually medieval–feeling early modern moment? In short, because of the arrogant actions of the twenty-first United States government, headed by a nameless, smirking "President-for-Life," whom Kubert and Isanove depict in garish 1950s pop-art style frames that contrast with their dynamic, shadowy, almost impressionistic figures and colors on display otherwise. The despotic not-too-distant (to our time) future administration has tried to rid itself of an antagonistic nuisance by banishing it into the earth’s past–has tried, in other words, to alter the present by changing the past, a not-unusual theme in science (or speculative, if you prefer) fiction. But the ensuing "temporal disruption" endangers the fabric of the entire universe, all of time. Here we get shades of Gaiman’s acclaimed imaginative but unapologetically new-agey Sandman series. The universe, in response, defends itself against the possible apocalypse. It births, or spurs the transformation of, the men and women whose superhero abilities raise them above the ordinary folk of their time, endowing them with those powers that, used for good and not evil, can save the universe.

In other words, it is the twenty-first century American government’s particular way of dealing with a threat to its own dominion that causes a greater threat to the world, surely invoking recent international developments. Indeed, 1602 is an emphatically post-9/11 work of fiction. Gaiman himself tells us in his "Afterword" that on September 11, 2001, he decided that his incipient book would contain "No planes. No skyscrapers. No bombs. No guns." Instead 1602 emerges as a glaring embodiment of the idea that a work of fiction that is set in a prior historical moment refers ineffably to its own, redressing the problems of the present by costuming them in the past. Of particular interest in that regard is the centrality of America’s role – America’s careless, self-centered, inadvertent role – in the affairs of another continent here, that the remedy with which Gaiman will save his world, the superhero, is drawn from one of the most American and most popular genres of American popular culture, and embodies the American dream of individual power and fame. Thus 1602 suggests how circumscribed we in 2005 have become by the cultural logic of American power. Now, Team America: World Police this is not. (Thank goodness.) Gaiman’s heroes are for the most part thoughtful and reasoned, weighing the consequences of their actions and choices. Fury, the career military man, is particularly torn by his conflicting duties to conscience and to the newly crowned King James (and therefore to his god and religion that placed James on the throne after Elizabeth). This is a shrewd enough move on Gaiman’s part, making his most physiologically human protagonist the one we twentieth-first century readers would most recognize as psychologically human.

All this shrewdness, and the subtlety of the artwork, sadly, disappears from the sequel, which one can safely assume will not be winning any awards, Quill or otherwise. Happily, it is not in anyone’s interest for me to excoriate the inferior quality of the writing or the slapdash quality of the illustrations in New World. Of greater significance is the way New World enlarges on the original 1602’s project of having United States popular culture colonize the past. New World sends its superheroes (and a few other Marvel characters) to Roanoke and implies that had these avatars of freedom and justice been there all along, strife between Europeans and Native Americans would have been assuaged. Here, it is Peter Parquah, proto-Spider-Man, who is given all the best renaissance lines that, really, a 14 year-old shouldn’t be thinking in 1602 unless he’s been reading Marvel Comics 400 years later. ("In our hearts, we know . . . deep inside, we are good . . .") New World evinces its deep sympathy for the victimization of those societies that predate the European arrivals, but stops short of implying that the Native Americans would have been better off without the presence of the British colony altogether. In the book’s most telling moment, the Native Americans (with the Hulk’s assistance) seem to have driven the colonists out (over Peter’s objections), but Pak has Iron Man interfere, leading to an ending in which everybody tries to hammer out their differences as if it were some idealized, oversimplified version of 1776 (the year not the book).

Both 1602s are, in the end, specifically examples of their genre, the comic book. (The vogue over the last twenty years to call such texts graphic novels actually demeans the comic book genre, the validity of which we should accept without having to rechristen it.) New World has all the simplicity and silly dialogue those who pooh-pooh comics would expect. The Gaiman book, though, as a comic book, is often brilliant, reworking aspects of the genre so that they enhance the overall text. For example, the very lettering of speech, or the shape of speech bubbles, often reinforces aspects of character: Count Von Doom’s words appear in gothic font, while the Human Torch’s are a fiery gold. It may be that these innovations can be found elsewhere in the comic book world, but certainly here they add to the air of intense invention that surrounds Marvel 1602. They also reveal, along the way, that our ideas of artistic invention still revolve around some essentially modernist criteria; that is, it is the energy its creators have poured into having the text make sense holistically, having the details of form seem appropriate, somehow, to the content of the story. Such devices irrevocably draw attention to the author, of course, reminding us of our inherited (from the romantics, via the modernists) notions of artist’s role in society, as a kind of superhero him/herself. And since literary awards have, indeed, supported such notions, it seems appropriate that the first mainstream award to go to a comic book should land here, making explicit a subtle yet telling relationship between the arts and entertainment in American culture -- that we glorify most those author-figures whose innovations persuade us that they are modernist superheroes.

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Thursday, February 02, 2006

Post-Noir Confidential: Style, Politics, and the Case Against James Ellroy

On January 15, 2006, James Ellroy addressed the San Francisco Film Noir Festival, whose website identifies Ellroy as “America’s greatest living writer of noir fiction.” Now, if you’re putting together a film noir festival (or a noir fiction festival, or a book fair, for that matter) and you can book James Ellroy, you probably should: lots of people read his books, even more people went to see L.A. Confidential (1997), the film adaptation of his novel of the same name, and later this year, probably more people than that will go to see Scarlett Johansson in The Black Dahlia, an adaptation of another novel in his famous “LA Quartet.” Many of these people will agree with the San Francisco festival’s assessment of Ellroy; they will buy tickets to hear him speak; your festival will make money. But let’s not get confused here: James Ellroy does “noir” like Bill O’Reilly does “journalism.” If you prefer, calling Ellroy a “writer of noir fiction” is like calling Howard Dean a liberal firebrand. Ellroy apes noir style and convention, and it’s true that he reproduces its characteristic tone and mood. Ellroy’s novels, though, for all their fidelity to the iconography of the kind of noir film and fiction that film noir festivals celebrate, empty noir of its historical acumen and its political content.

Ellroy himself probably wouldn’t argue with this assessment; he imagines himself correcting the mistakes of classical noir—a body of stories and films that runs, generously, from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s and whose characteristics I’ll take up later. In a 1991 interview, he told John Williams that “the private-eye icon/hero . . . that Raymond Chandler created and which has spawned so many imitators is essentially bullshit,” and that his novels seek to provide “an antidote to that.” In the same interview, he says that “[his] Los Angeles” was “very much a white city,” as opposed to the “black and Latino” metropolis of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Talk about bullshit: to claim that El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula became Latino in James Ellroy’s lifetime is preposterous. The fact that the self-appointed guardian of civic history, interviewed in the months between the beating of Rodney King and the trial of Officers Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind and Theodore Briseno, deracinates the city’s past seems more insidious than any misrepresentation Raymond Chandler may perpetrated. More to the point, when he writes the private eye out of history, Ellroy manufactures a reactionary image of Los Angeles at mid-century.

Noir is famously difficult to define, especially if we open up the category chronologically to include Ellroy’s or Walter Mosley’s novels, or Polanski’s Chinatown. The “private eye icon/hero,” though, is close to a constant, so we can begin there: think of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashell Hammett’s Sam Spade (and their most famous onscreen equivalent, Humphrey Bogart), Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, James Cagney as Cody Jarrett in White Heat (1949), Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (1944), or any of the down-and-out small-time crooks who populate James M. Cain’s and Jim Thompson’s stories. This figure works outside of, whether against or alongside, the law and the police department. His greatest asset is street-level knowledge of the city where he operates, and he uses that to hold together the social landscape and maintain an acceptable level of disorder. This is a democratic take on the crime narrative: it entrusts the private citizen, not the state, and privileges local knowledge and personal encounters over centralized, governmental authority. Noir shows us the triumph of street-level urban intuition and human interaction over impersonal, government surveillance.

In Chandler’s novels, Marlowe provides precise driving directions as he pieces together stories and makes sense of the modern city. For a cinematic example, we can look at White Heat. There, after Cody Jarrett robs a train and eludes law enforcement, the LAPD sets up an elaborate dragnet to follow Ma Jarrett back to Cody’s lair. They follow her in several cars, organized and directed by a central switchboard operator who holds a map of Los Angeles, but her intuitive, irrational driving allows her to avoid them in a manner she cannot have predicted: after she doubles back on a side street, a truck pulls out of a driveway between her car and the one following her. When it disappears, so has she. In this early scene, White Heat affirms the value of expertise to the noir crime narrative: she is able to outperform the better-equipped and better-prepared police department because she knows, and uses, the city streets more practically and effectively. Noir made popular this kind of urban practice.

When he hands over the city to the police department—in particular, to the LAPD in the 1950s—James Ellroy undoes all that. He moves his novels away from noir’s street-level navigation and the democratic politics of urbanity it implies. This observation is both generally skeptical of the repressive state apparatus’s liberatory capacities and grounded in the specific history of the Department in the middle of the century. In the 1950s, the LAPD substituted technology for manpower in an effort to remove the street and the people there from police work—compare Marlowe’s painstaking navigation and interviews to Joe Friday’s “just the facts, ma’am.” The police department into which Ellroy displaces his noir detectives is in fact a model for impersonal, technological surveillance. In the 1980s and 1990s, Ellroy gives over the figure of integrated or experienced community to the space police.

Spatial surveillance at the expense of urban practice is apparent in L.A. Confidential (1992), when Edmund Exley, the most cerebral of the novel’s flock of morally compromised antihero policemen, goes about organizing the facts of the baroque crime plot. Exley has, to this point, been the novel’s one consistent source of narrative fiction (even as the novel itself breaks down periodically into collages of headlines, chronologies and police reports); he is a professional storyteller who invents the department’s and the city government’s official explanations of police misdeeds and he turns this storytelling to his personal and professional gain. Faced with police work, though, Exley turns to visual logic:

One wall of his den was now a graph: Nite Owl related case players connected by horizontal lines, vertical lines linking them to a large sheet of cardboard blocked off into information sections . . . Ed crossed lines. (393)

Where classical noir navigates the city intuitively, in narrative, in order to put together an understandable order of events, Exley brings the mathematical precision of graphing to his detective work. This allows him to make sense of the plot that surrounds him without leaving his den and immersing himself in the city. The novel’s plot fictionalizes the construction of modern-day Los Angeles, from the political scandals surrounding freeway construction to the development of a barely-disguised Disneyland (the cartoonist and entertainment magnate Raymond Dieterling’s “Dream-a-Dreamland” outside the city limits, whose icon is Moochie Mouse) in Orange County. Exley comprehends it from a panoptical perspective, rather than the synoptical one that is traditional in noir, suggesting that stories are best told from the top down, by a police officer. Raymond Chandler would, I think, feel suitably (if incorrectly) chastised by this passage from L.A. Confidential. Removing the act of navigation from the process of understanding or decoding the city changes its definition; urban space is recognizable, in Ellroy, via surveillance and management.

Ellroy appropriates noir iconography and occasionally noir style, then, but he contradicts (sells out, really) its claims about knowledge and urbanity. Something similar happens in The Black Dahlia, when morally compromised antihero policeman Bucky Bleichert announces that “bop was moving into its heyday” (280). That’s a fine thing to say in 1987, or in 2006, but it wouldn’t have made any sense at the time. (One almost expects Bucky to go out and buy a “Best of Dexter Gordon” compilation CD here, so removed is his perspective.) Such historical shorthand transforms a resistant movement in jazz, defined by its difficulty and its shock to listeners, into a reified aesthetic period, limited and mass-marketed, something the cops listen to.

It’s that logic, unfortunately, that leads us to call Ellroy’s novels noir (or Dean’s politics liberal, or O’Reilly’s bullshit journalism): they’ve got the right packaging, however reactionary (very, mostly, and very) they may be. But we’re talking about a body of work that once had actual cultural-political value, that continues to be evocative and powerful in the present day, and that has contemporary practitioners doing interesting, innovative work. To dress up a street scene in old cars, trenchcoats and fedoras and call it noir is to deny all that.