There’s a passage in Generosity: An Enchancement, Richard Powers’ novel about genetics and creative writing, that transports us to a prominent talk show from Chicago:

It’s less a show than a sovereign multinational charter. And its host is, by any measure, the most influential woman in the world. Her own story is a remarkable mix of motifs from American creative fiction, from Alger to Zelazny. Say only that she has grown from an impoverished, abused child into an adult who gives away more money than most industrialized nations. She has the power to create instant celebrities, sell hundreds of millions of books, make or break entire consumer industries, expose frauds, marshal mammoth relief efforts, and change the spoken language. All this by being tough, warm, vulnerable, and empathetic enough to get almost any other human being to disclose the most personal secrets on international television. If she didn’t exist, allegory would have to invent her.

Powers calls his daytime doyenne Oona, but we all know he’s talking about Oprah. Here we find our scientific-literary novelist in the fine, familiar predicament of engaging with an outside world where corporate global brands are king. Allegories of real folks are tacky things, but when you pen a Chicago novel about finding the genetic basis of happiness in the anaesthetized age of mass media, there’s no detour around the Oprah problem: you’re writing her into your damned book.

(I’m not sure how well it goes. Generosity is eminently likable, and its Clarke Award nomination earlier this year is one of many reasons why you should pay attention to the Clarke Awards, but there’s an overall sense of Richard Powers for Beginners about it next to the depth of his earlier work.)

Here in the telly-impervious literary fortress of Nick’s Café Canadien, we don’t pay much attention to Ms Winfrey. My impression of Oprah has never been terribly positive: as a consumerist behemoth that uncritically promotes junk science and bad medicine while throwing its financial weight behind the overweening cult of self-help, it has often come off to me as a malignant alien presence from another world. I’m reliably informed, however, that as of last week the twenty-five-year gravity well of The Oprah Winfrey Show has finally pocketed itself into its own precious singularity.

Days earlier, Jonathan Franzen delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College that has since appeared in The New York Times (best read alongside Edward Champion’s notes on the abridgment), the latest variation on Literary Man’s perpetual anxiety over technology’s commodification of human passions. Franzen’s argument—that the casual comforts of the Facebook “like” and the easy requital of our device relationships have inoculated us from experiencing true and hurtful love—came bundled with the delicious irony that we’ve come to expect from everything involving the reluctant superstar of American letters. Scarcely a month ago, The New Yorker ran a magisterial essay of his about scattering the ashes of David Foster Wallace on the island of Robinson Crusoe only to hold it hostage behind the paywall. “Like” The New Yorker on Facebook, said the ransom note—or else.

The timing may be coincidental, but the parallel—rather, the perpendicularity—isn’t lost on those of us who absorbed everything about the Winfrey-Franzen feud of 2001 with unhealthy fascination. Here’s the story: ten years ago, Oprah Winfrey selected Franzen’s outstanding novel The Corrections for the Book Club segment of her programme, something that even her most bitter critics have to admit has been a marvel for moving volumes of contemporary fiction. Shortly after, Franzen voiced his discomfort with being marketed under the Oprah sticker, leading Winfrey to rescind the book selection along with Franzen’s invitation to the show.

You can imagine the media frenzy. High-profile literary scuffles are like classical music riots: we don’t see enough of them these days, and when we do, it’s comical yet reassuring to discover that other people care about this stuff. And here we had, in one corner, an inspirational figure of tremendous accomplishment and national renown; in the other corner—well, Oprah Winfrey.

Naturally, Franzen found himself stuck with the unfortunate reputation of a highbrow snob, a characterization that seems utterly bizarre if you’ve read his work and are aware that he’s a straightforward, accessible, and completely absorbing entertainer with an immaculate ear for everyday turn-of-the-millennium speech. Winfrey named Freedom to her Book Club in 2010 and Franzen accepted, finally appearing on the show (footage here), but that hasn’t stopped the flap over The Corrections from dogging him everywhere he goes. Read some of the grumbly backlash to the Kenyon College address and you don’t have to scroll very far down to find a jab at the incident.

The Kenyon speech got me thinking, anyway. In light of Franzen’s output, particularly as an essayist, he really does seem at odds with the value system of The Oprah Winfrey Show. This is the same programme that was peddling buy-me-to-be-happy crap like The Secret, yes? Isn’t the pre-cooked panacea of “positive thinking” the very emblem of everything Franzen writes against? There’s a deep contradiction embedded in the Oprah enterprise: Winfrey’s brand is a front for packaged, sterilized inspiration designed to sedate a passive audience of the already powerless, but through the Book Club she makes an effort to cultivate her audience, and not merely in the sense of growing its ranks. (Daniel Kaszor puts it well: “I think my biggest issue with Oprah is that she strikes me as the kind of person who would be ashamed to watch Oprah,” he says.)

Ms Winfrey is undoubtedly clever enough to be in on her own game. One doesn’t blindly invite guests like Jonathan Franzen or bizarrely, Cormac McCarthy, whose Oprah interview is only rivalled in the annals of shattered reclusion by Thomas Pynchon’s Simpsons cameo. Yet these are precisely the writers for whom literature is a refuge from the cacophony of mass-cultural unreality, and who know better than most that embracing the depths of human misery rather than buying or drugging them away is the key to preserving our sense of self.

Despite our privileged first-world comforts, we need to reassert our right to be miserable, lonely saps. That’s the Franzen paradox: through solitude, we can recover empathy. In the long conversation about whether there is a place for literature in a culture saturated with disposable entertainment and projected façades of human contact—an anxiety we can trace back to Franzen’s Harper’s essay from 1996, David Foster Wallace’s meditation on television at its zenith in “E Unibus Pluram”, or most presciently in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—the printed page is a conduit for recovering humanity, not for retreating away from it.

This is a major concern for Richard Powers, too. Compared to Franzen, Powers is more of a technological optimist (we’re talking about the fellow who dictates his novels into a tablet computer, remember), but he also considers the social effects with the warranted ambivalence. Russell Stone, the protagonist of Generosity, forms preconceptions of someone he hasn’t met based on her profile picture and upends a psychiatric diagnosis with a term he picked up on Wikipedia—and he’s far from the only one in the book to behave in accordance with how he’s wired. The novel centres on Russell’s incomprehension of someone who has every reason on paper to feel worse than he does, but doesn’t. Powers’ earlier novel Galatea 2.2 tackles the problem of humanity-via-fiction head-on, reimagining Alan Turing’s imitation game as an exercise in understanding literature.

Where the notion of the literary refuge runs into trouble is when we consider market dynamics—the production and promotion of books. The trick to understanding how literary values mesh with Oprah values may lie at this junction, I think: long-form reading provides an outlet from the commodified morass, but it’s sold and distributed as a commodity itself. It may be strange to think of a big cerebral novel as falling into the fiscal category of an entertainment product, but where accounting is concerned, publishing is publishing and books are merely books. In the end, everything gets the covers stripped and pulped.

This isn’t to say that Oprah’s Book Club is all about the money: the books have more to benefit from it than the show, and Winfrey’s taste is honestly not too shabby. But its project is to direct consumer behaviour, and the objects held up to the audience, as complex as they may be inside, are promoted as consumable remedies like anything else. Better literature than quack medicine, I’d say.

More worrisome is how market conditions may transform or limit, going forward, the kind of literature we see produced. We’ve all witnessed in the past x years (five, ten, thirty, pick your frame) how a market-driven, consumer-dictated approach to cultural production has driven popular cinema and music into the ground, while a good chunk of television has never gotten off the ground. If good books of richness, depth, and intelligence are sold on shallow terms, do we really get any closer to developing a culture of interpretive independence and nuanced thought? Or by selling the novel as a typical entertainment medium, are we just asking for it to be replaced?

Here’s what Katherine Pratt Ewing has to say in her review of Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon:

The association of Oprahfication with lack of depth is clearest in critiques of Oprah’s effects on the reading public. Lofton, like others, is skeptical of the interpretive approach to reading that Oprah encourages in her book club: she stresses that Oprah’s interpretations, which encourage readers to react emotionally to a book and relate its characters to their own lives, lack depth and reduce books to their ability to “return women to an Oprah way of life,” reiterating the core theme of Oprah-as-icon. [...] One could also draw a comparison with Sesame Street, which uses the idiom of commodities to “sell” reading to kids. Both Oprah and Sesame Street effectively reach and shape a self who always already inhabits a commodified world.

By integrating quality fiction into her audience’s existing way of life, the argument goes, Winfrey strips away the class-boundary stigma that isolates literature as a highbrow domain, cut off from everyday consumer society. Admirable enough, to be sure, but I think there’s a catch: some novels simply want to be apart. (Glenn Beck, who prefers to champion military thrillers for boys, doesn’t have this problem.) Ignoring for a moment the ocean of work-to-order books that are written to fill market needs and meet bottom lines, which entertain readers suitably enough and exist to be liked, not loved, it’s in the nature of the novel to resist its own commodity packaging.

I’m aware that I am cribbing from Franzen here:

The striking thing about all consumer products—and none more so than electronic devices and applications—is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

The double nature of a book like The Corrections is that it functions equally well as a serious novel and as salable commodity entertainment—maybe even with a tilt towards the latter. In any case, this sheds some light on how we’ve since ended up with Jonathan Franzen, Ironic Celebrity.

It’s not just Oprah, either. Consider this: Lev Grossman, the former tech-gadget journalist who has somehow remained employed as the senior book critic at Time in spite of the trendspotting, early-adopter triteness that infects his cliché-ridden drivel—got Franzen on the cover of the magazine last August, making him the first novelist to sit inside the big red box since Stephen King in 2000 (for a story about King’s online strategy, not his books). The literary cover gallery tells a vivid story of the decline of novelists in American popular consciousness, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that for all the welcome benefits of mass exposure, Time wasn’t doing Franzen’s reputation any services with its insipid, off-the-shelf, the-way-we-live-now hype.

The attitudes to literature on display could not be less compatible. Take a look at Grossman’s screed in The Wall Street Journal, “Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work”—still one of the most heinous acts of attempted criticism to grace a major publication in recent memory, in which the sentence “This is the future of fiction” is actually, earnestly said. Now compare it to Franzen’s post-Oprah essay on the subject of accessibility, “Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books”. Grossman opts for snap judgments, populist scapegoating, and bad history; Franzen makes a serious effort to sketch ideologies of the author-reader relationship. Yet look who’s connecting with the wider public.

It’s reassuring, at least, that some reluctant celebrities weather their own promotion and manage to keep their secret integrity intact. Don’t ask me how. Just ask DC Comics superhero Green Lantern, who spoke to Oprah Winfrey in 1988:

He does resemble Franzen, doesn’t he? I have this theory…

This week’s bag of links:

• In a rare sighting of the man behind Calvin and Hobbes, Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer interviews Bill Watterson fifteen years after the legendary comic strip ended its run.

• Peter Hum ruminates on the “ugly beauty” of avant-garde jazz.

• The big news coming out of Barack Obama’s 2011 budget was the abandonment of NASA’s plan for the resumption of manned spaceflight to the moon. SPACE.com has the analysis.

• Jonathan McCalmont, caught between the debate over high/low culture and his vehement dislike of the popular video game Bayonetta (“a game so dumb that it makes a weekend spent masturbating and sniffing glue seem like an animated discussion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)”), spun it all into a compelling essay on hypnotism and lowbrow art.

• This Charles Petersen piece in The New York Review of Books is one of the better histories you will find of where Facebook came from and how it has transformed, and offers a thorough look at the content-pushing pressures facing the social-network model of a nominally private Internet.

• Mark Sarvas identifies some common problems of debut novels from the perspective of a prize-committee veteran.

• In The Guardian, Darrel Ince implores scientists who rely on internally developed software to publish their source code.

In brief: This memoir-in-comics of a liberated Iranian woman who grew up in the Islamic Revolution—or, if you will, between Iraq and a hard place—is about as penetrating a look at life under the veil as one is likely to find. A supreme demonstration of resistance through art, here is that rare specimen of autobiographical identity-crisis literature with the political weight to stand outside itself and really matter. If you think you know anything about Iran, read Persepolis and think again.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Persepolis, keep reading below.)

Persepolis was originally published in French in four parts, and in English in two (Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return). My edition, The Complete Persepolis, compiled the entire English text into one volume. The difference in direction between the two parts is sharp enough to be scrutable. The first half rides on the turbulent intrigue of the transition from the Shah to the Ayatollah as seen through the eyes of a child, while the second half relies heavily on our established familiarity with the author to deliver a personal tale of cultural confusion under a stable but oppressive regime.

The artistic style of Satrapi’s illustrations is functional and subdued. Situated in regular, rectangular panel layouts, Persepolis is hardly a frame-breaking formal experiment: its rhetorical method is to show a procession of indecorous domestic scenes, occasionally punctuated by a full-page panel that leverages its own size to project everyday life into the sweep of history. Everything in the book is solid black or solid white, with no gradient of shading in between: this allows Satrapi to set the tone of every panel with the simple choice of making it black-on-white or white-on-black, and develop the symbol of the veil as a blanketing motif. The simplicity of the art never takes away from our ability to recognize the characters by their faces, leaving me curious as to how many of the characters actually looked in real life.

The easiest comparison is to Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, the similarly bipartite granddaddy of comic books about authoritarian regimes. Persepolis is a book of a more playful character in a way that Spiegelman’s Holocaust remembrance could not afford to be, which is not to say that it doesn’t take its subject seriously. To the contrary, it is always conscious of the fact that for all the absurdities of theocratic moral hysteria, the Islamic Revolution was a matter of life and death. People—often friends and family—were imprisoned, tortured, and eventually wiped out.

The young Marjane Satrapi (or Marji, as we come to know her) isn’t just any child, either. Educated in a French lycée and born to leftist revolutionary parents who were all too pleased to bring down the Shah before they saw what came next, Marji grows up on a diet of comic books about dialectic materialism. So it’s an adjustment, shall we say, when she and all the other girls at school are separated from the boys and forced to wear the veil. And things get no better when Saddam starts bombing the country.

Recognizing that a fundamentalist Iran is no place for an irreverent young freethinker, Marji’s parents send her to Austria at the age of fourteen. Thus concludes the first half.

The second part of Persepolis takes us through Marji’s time as a teenager in Europe, which is initially the standard depressing tale of a perfectly good girl gone bad. Little of it would be interesting if our sympathies were not already in Marji’s pocket, thanks to Part 1. Let this be a warning to any studious young women who make the mistake of falling in with anarchist punk-rock druggies: it’s not a lot of fun.

Luckily, Marji comes around and realizes what she has done to herself, though it takes a brush with death to get her there. She remarks on the absurdity of how, after surviving the execution of family members and witnessing the severed body parts of neighbours blown to pieces, “a banal story of love” nearly does her in.

So she returns to Iran, where the story gets interesting again because we are back in a place of the world where there is a very palpable war to be fought over liberties and rights, especially those of women. This is feminism and anti-establishment subversion at their ethical best, a far cry from the phony campus radicalism of western middle-class rebels who have never known real oppression.

An authoritarian regime isn’t content with the murder of dissenting individuals: it goes for the total erasure of their human existence. Persepolis is a courageous book because it asserts the humanity of the sensible, freethinking Iranian woman. Islamic law goes out of its way to silence people like Marjane Satrapi and pass Iran off as a conservative cultural monolith with little internal dissension. The tragedy is that too often, the western conception of Iran agrees, and we mistake the fundamentalism of their government as representative of fundamentalist popular support.

The governing theocracy is not a regime that we can afford to tolerate. But it makes no sense for us western powers to antagonize the people of Iran on top of their country’s indefensible leadership, when what we should be doing is fomenting the internal cultural overthrow of their rulers. They must do it of their own volition. Satrapi shows us that the Iranian people do not easily forget their foes: they resented Kuwaiti participation in the Iran-Iraq war enough that they cared little if the Gulf War left both Iraq and Kuwait in ruins, and the abuses of the Shah have left them permanently cynical about western powers who claim to be in the region for human rights and not for oil.

The real battle is a propaganda war—and in times of prosperity, the chauvinistic romanticization of martyrdom of the government has the upper hand. Satrapi left Iran in the 1990s, and a lot can change in a decade, but the Iran she remembers is one where the people are at a crossroads: on one hand, they receive the imagery of western life over illicit satellite television; on the other, the government has beaten them into submission to the point where they accept a fundamentalist life as the way things are. In this milieu, the emancipated woman is homeless, a citizen of an Iran that no longer grants her the rights and protections that citizens should rightly expect.

Why, then, is it significant that Satrapi chose to deliver her memoir in the form of a graphic novel?

Consider that Islam has traditionally positioned itself in strict opposition to representational art. Islamic art has a proud and extensive history of producing abstract patterns of a geometric intricacy that we are only beginning to describe with mathematics, but that is in part because of Islam’s injunction on mimesis as a second-rate mockery of God’s work. Remember the furore over the Danish cartoons about the prophet Muhammad? Never mind the prophet: cartooning is itself an irreverent offence. Artistic controversies happen inside Iran too.

Late in Persepolis, Satrapi relates the story of how an illustrator with whom she worked was beaten for drawing a cartoon based on the tale of Rapunzel, but with a bearded man atop the tower in Rapunzel’s place. But why the substitution at all? Because the artist knew it was forbidden to draw a woman without a veil, so Rapunzel had to move aside.

As a story in pictures, Persepolis lets us see the people who are invisible in the media: Iranian women in their homes, with their veils off, but their curtains shuttered so their neighbours can’t see. It is an act of remembrance for the promise of an Iran that could have been, had the theocratic powers that govern Iran not shoved that promise in a closet, and had the rest of the world not believed them.

For those of you who don’t know, Scott McCloud is the author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, which is, alongside Will Eisner’s more instructionally oriented Comics and Sequential Art, the canonical primer to comic-book semiotics. So he brings his whole arsenal of frame-breaking layout tricks to the table, and the whole endeavour embodies a kind of documentarian character; you get the sense that Google is a magic workshop where the products are so omnipresent by design that that the elves have to tinker from the inside out.

More to the point, it’s educational. I learned a lot about browsers today.

My question: can McCloud do this for every major Google project? Pretty please?

It is naturally with great amusement that I discovered this video of a radical Islamist Charlie Brown Christmas, and with even greater interest that I received news of a reportedly scintillating Schulz biography by David Michaelis, released this week. Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson wrote an eloquent review for The Wall Street Journal, which is, to the comic-strip enthusiast, like Beethoven writing about Bach. Some of Watterson’s subtler remarks on the connection between the art and the artist are important, and I’ll return to them further down.

As with any biography that begs to scintillate, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography has generated a storm of controversy: the Schulz family, none too pleased with what they allege to be Michaelis’s selective fudging of the evidence, has openly responded with their grievances at one of my daily stops, Cartoon Brew—instantly transforming the thread into a thought-provoking debate on the ethics of biographical writing.

I haven’t read the book, but I’ve been given this impression: great biographical narrative, poor historical scholarship. I’m not a reader of biographies in general, so I have to wonder: is this the industry norm?

Nat Gertler, prominent Schulz collector and proprietor of AAUGH.com, raises some level-headed criticisms of both sides, and I agree with practically everything he has to say. Some of the Schulz family’s complaints (minor sins of omission) are to be expected with any biography and not too significant on the surface, while others (the systematic exclusion of extensive interviews in order to advance an obviously prefabricated hypothesis) cast serious doubt on the validity of Michaelis’s broad claims, while not necessarily taking away from the additive value of the wealth of previously undocumented facts he brings to the table. But if we’re going to question his research methodology, why shouldn’t we question those purported facts as well?

Gertler also identifies a concern that is dogging me on a more personal level of decision-making:

There is also the practical ethics of deciding to buy the book. If you do suspect that Michaelis purposely manipulated the book to paint the picture of Schulz he wanted to put forth, are you rewarding bad behavior by purchasing it? Or can you really make an objective decision about that without having read the book? And will purchasing even a flawed book show a market for Schulz biography that will encourage the production of Schulz biographies that take a different angle? Or will it just encourage other negative portraits of other people, and lower the level of discourse?

As a consumer, I’m a firm believer in voting with my pocketbook; but when the bone of contention is the content of the product itself, this presents an inherent tension with the principle of not judging a book by its cover, let alone by what everyone else is scrawling on said cover. Then again, the university library could always order a copy, and I’ll consider the problem solved.

I think we should turn our attention to another question: as readers, what’s the central interest in reading biographies anyway?

Unless you’re one of those celebrity tabloid junkies who like to see the rich and famous humiliated in order to feel good about yourself (and I’m not saying Michaelis does anything humiliating; my impression is that he is “consciously restrained in his reverence”), the simple answer would be that biography fulfills a wish to attribute causes to effects. So do history and science, for that matter—and religion, if you dig that kind of thing.

In the case of an artist like Schulz, the claim that is open for research is the critical ideology that a work of art is first and foremost the product of an individual’s psyche and experience: in short, that art is autobiographical.

All the indications that I’ve read about Michaelis’s biography, and I emphasize once again that everything I say should be taken lightly until I’ve actually read it, is that he treats this claim as an a priori assumption and devotes his research to constructing a portrait of Schulz consistent with the comic strip’s trademark tone of innocence and melancholia. In the limited context of a biography that aims to entertain, there’s nothing wrong with that: it provides a space for the same kind of fan-pleasing trivia as knowing how George Lucas came up with the name “R2-D2″. But as a work of history, one should definitely take issue with the logical circularity of the project. And as literary analysis, it holds little to no water at all.

I said earlier that I would return to a remark that Bill Watterson makes in his Wall Street Journal review. Let’s take a look:

Undoubtedly the most fascinating part of the book is the juxtaposition of biographical information and reproduced “Peanuts” strips. Here we see how literally Schulz sometimes depicted actual situations and events. The strips used as illustrations in “Schulz and Peanuts” are reproduced at eye-straining reduction and are often removed from the context of their stories, but they vividly demonstrate how Schulz used his cartoons to work through private concerns. We discover, for example, that in the recurring scenes of Lucy annoying Schroeder at the piano, the crabby and bossy Lucy stands in for [Schulz's first wife] Joyce, and the obsessive and talented Schroeder is a surrogate for Schulz.

…

If anything, I wish Mr. Michaelis’s biography had devoted more space to analyzing the strip on its own terms as an art. Knowing the sources of Schulz’s inspiration does not explain the imaginative power of the work.

Well put, Mr. Watterson. The appeal of a biography, and its insight into an artist, is its implicit promise of insight (direct or indirect) into the art itself, but that’s precisely what biography is unable to fully deliver so long as it limits itself to psychoanalysis and authorial intention.

I may have overlooked another major source of a biography’s appeal, because it doesn’t speak to me. A biography puts you in vicarious personal contact with someone, as if you actually knew the fellow. But it is in this very respect that the Schulz children are voicing their objections: they want to draw attention to the distance that remains between the reader and the subject because of the biographer’s selective intervention.

In the interest of balancing the discussion, I’d like to provide a few choice links to Michaelis’s own remarks. In Derrick Bang’s interview at the Peanuts Collector Club, conducted before the Schulz family’s objections became public, Michaelis reflects on the limitations he knew he would encounter with any ambitious biographical project, and defends some of the choices he makes; he admits that the accounts of Schulz’s life (particularly the later years) were irreconcilably pluralistic, but holds strongly to the belief that a biography is no better off when the author knows the subject on a personal level.

The Editor & Publisher article on Michaelis’s book—an excellent and balanced story, by the way—also contains this revealing remark, which you can take for what you will:

One way Michaelis learned about Schulz was by reading every “Peanuts” comic from 1950 to 2000. He knew many of the strips would be autobiographical, but said he was “stunned they were THAT autobiographical.” One example: When Schulz’s first marriage is ending, Charlie Brown rids his baseball team of the bossy Lucy, who was partly modeled on Joyce. “Without Joyce there would not be Lucy, and without Lucy there would be a lesser ‘Peanuts,’” said Michaelis. “Schulz’s life and work would have been markedly different without Joyce.”

(It’s kind of funny, because if I remember correctly, the last biography I read was a book on Winston Churchill, which I mined for evidence that he would never have gotten anywhere without his wife Clementine. The Sir Winston Churchill Society subsequently put my name on a trophy.)

And to close, I’d like to highlight some additional remarks from the Cartoon Brew comment thread that I found to be of special interest.

From Steven Withrow:

It seems to me that what Michaelis has done in this biography is not so different from what a screenwriter might routinely do with the script for a biographical film: Conduct research, and then sift through the details to develop an overarching theme (or “central conflict” is probably closer to the point) and structure a “story” and “character arc” around that primary conflict.

The “biopic” is not a journalistic piece or an historical document, a mere catalogue of seemingly random occurrences; it is a constructed fiction supported by *some* selected facts. The biographical screenwriter’s art—and the movie’s dramatic significance—rests in how well the writer weaves together these occurrences to create “events”—moments of change in perception or behavior—revealed and ordered as the story dictates.

This common approach to biography, in the end, has more to do with the character created than with the person who actually lived. The audience’s empathy and identification with the character are paramount, and unflagging accuracy is neither possible nor preferable. (I’m not saying this as a value judgment, but simply to point out something many of us accept readily in a different medium.)

And the biographical prose writer must weigh carefully whether to play academic historian or popular storyteller. Michaelis clearly has chosen the latter.

From Chris H.:

There is a pretty strong argument in Herbert Butterfield’s “The Whig Interpretation of History” that seems to apply here. A ‘Whig Interpretation’, in Butterfield’s book rather than in contemporary use, gives a progressive account of history by taking present political divisions and mapping them on to history. Butterfield was concerned about historians who cleave history into the heroes and opponents of progress, drawing a clear causal line from Martin Luther to modern freedom and the secular state as if these results were where Luther was secretly heading all along, the idea of complete freedom of religion a deep, dark, secret aim of original Lutheranism. The problem is that the present is the product of a complete history, not of some strand of discrete events that either occur in a vacuum or would have occurred more quickly has the rest of history not gotten in the way. The ‘Whiggish’ sort of interpretation gives us a means to summarize history and to create a narrative, but the summary is poor because the justification for the narrative is circular–if we start from the narrative, and validate which facts are significant and which are not on the basis of the narrative, and then by that set of validated facts come to the conclusion of the truth of the narrative, then all we have done is used the narrative to justify itself.

So, back to the present topic. If we construe the Michaelis book as a unconnected pile of facts about a historical figure (Monte, Amy, Jill: sorry for calling your dad a “historical figure.”), then there is no harm in even the systematic omission of other facts. Of course, if the book contains more than just facts—if it is a narrative and a historical analysis—then even unsystematic omissions are a clear sign that the narrative and analysis are misleading. It is easy to come to history with a story in mind and then cherry-pick facts to make the story work, but the result still isn’t good history—it is a Whig Interpretation. The real job of a historian is to give a summary which accommodates ALL the facts.

And there’s this nugget, from the “Bad” column of a capsule review by Chris L.:

Michaelis thinks he’s skilled at psychoanalyzing Schulz, but his insights are rarely much deeper than the psychiatric opinions of a certain little girl who owns a psychiatric booth.

In the famous opening passage of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes the human species as “so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” In this way, I am only human. I have worn digital watches all my life. I cannot live without one. It’s easy to tell when I’m fidgeting, because I check the time compulsively. As far as I am able to remember, on only two or three occasions have I been without a digital watch for more than a day, and on every one of those occasions, I panicked like an abandoned child lost on a San Francisco pier (which, come to think of it, is something I’ve also been at least twice). I have probably been without my watch more often than that, but those memories lie safely repressed.

Over the past year or so, my wristwatch dependency has loosened its grip. It still follows me everywhere, and I am still disoriented without it, but I replaced the strap a year ago and never got used to it. It wasn’t because the strap was uncomfortable; it was because I took my watch off with increasing frequency, either to time my own speeches or to permit the unobstructed handling of keyboards (both QWERTY and black-and-white), and never got so accustomed to the strap that I would be at a loss without it. But in any and all circumstances, my watch was never far.

I find that it is just as vital to know when you are as it is to know where you are, if not more so. If you are lost in space, you can find your way out, or you can stay in that spot, and develop a plan from the inferred state of your observed environment. Not so with time – certainly not here, where the winter days are but a few days in length, and the moon and stars lay hidden.

My model of choice has traditionally been the Casio Databank DB35H, mostly because I got very accustomed to its interface, feature set and display after years of use in elementary school; the segment layout is easy to read and familiar to me. It has evolved over several incarnations, and the one I purchased in what must have been 1999 or thereabouts had electroluminescent backlighting, which my first one did not, though it too has had its features extended in the latest revision. That said, given that I don’t really use the databank features, I’m open to superior alternatives like this Waveceptor model. At the same time, my current model suits my needs just fine, and I see no reason to leave it for another. Maybe an obsession with time is born of a desire for stasis and a fifty-metre resistance to change.

After roughly eight years of long service – perhaps longer, as I do not recall with the utmost precision – my battery died last week. For some reason, I don’t remember this happening before. The technical specifications for the latest incarnation of this model estimate a battery life of two years, which simply can’t be right. Perhaps my extensive use of the stopwatch features accelerated its demise. Or perhaps it was nothing more than any old battery expiring of natural causes.

I was at the university when time abruptly decided to stop, so at first opportunity, I went to the Bookstore to buy a replacement cell. Then I realized I was uncertain what battery I required, so I borrowed a screwdriver from the staff and opened up my watch on a counter. As it was already open, I decided to purchase a battery and perform the replacement myself then and there. I’d never been in the guts of one of my own watches before, so this was an autodidactic experience from the get-go. The battery housing was a veritable fortress, and tinkering about in its innards was a dextrous exercise ripe for eliciting a calm eddy of introspection, even if the device was only a digital timing implement and nothing that required me to meddle with mechanics and grapple with gears.

But irrespective of the absence of moving parts, disassembling and reassembling an electronic device and voiding its associated warranties is something I recommend everybody do at least once in their lives. Changing a lousy 3-volt lithium disc may be no big deal to those of my peers who spent their childhoods overclocking their CPUs, coiling solenoids for electric motors, or downloading instructions for building cherry-bombs from a nascent, textual Internet (and actually following them, to the chagrin of the junior-high caretakers); to them, it must seem no greater a task than the humdrum routine of replacing a lightbulb. However, I happen to be a Software Guy, a hands-off theoretician comfortable in his bubble of machine-independent algorithms afloat in the soapy bathwater of Platonic, Turing-computable ideal forms. For me, playing with little springs and unscrewing little screws and jumpstarting circuits with unfolded staples delivers a welcome pretence of handymanliness. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

In a timely coincidence, on that very same day I read about Zack Snyder’s plans for the Watchmen film.

Anyone who has been following my blog for reasonably long knows that of all the movies presently in development, this is probably the one I care about the most. More than the last three Harry Potters. More than His Dark Materials, which actually seems to be coming along very well from a design standpoint, though the jury’s obviously out on the script and will remain that way until the opening day of The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights, if they’re releasing it under that title elsewhere). Maybe even more than Indiana Jones and the Spanish Inquisition or whatever Lucasian premise it is we’re not expecting. I do not exaggerate when I say that Watchmen is the Lord of the Rings of comic books, and it’s imperative that it’s done right. I’ve seen it pass from Aronofsky to Greengrass to Snyder, and 300 will hopefully give us a good indication of whether or not Snyder knows how to strike the right balance between aesthetic special effects and storytelling mojo.

All signs are good so far. Everything he says about the direction in which he’ll take the film is exactly as it should be; it’s just a matter of whether it can be done. For one thing, setting it in 1985 as a period piece is absolutely the right choice, if not a necessary one. Everything in the story revolves around the binaristic politics of the Cold War era, and the quest for a third way, a way to undo the Gordian knot. The organizing symbol of Doomsday Clock ticking down to midnight, and all of its consequent thematic material – Dr. Manhattan’s totalizing and reductivist perception of time, relativity’s coming of age with the ushering in of atomic physics, or the temporal suspension of the apocalypse – only resonate the way they do because of a very specific milieu that we now consider historical.

If you look at the James Bond franchise, observe what a paucity of truly consequential political storytelling there was in the Pierce Brosnan era, in spite of the fact that they had possibly the very best actor in the “debonair gentleman Bond” mould at their disposal. Goldeneye is by far the best, and it’s fundamentally a Cold War film; in the other three, Bond was a fish out of water, though things started getting interesting again in the deliberately comical Die Another Day. What was compelling about Casino Royale, from an adaptation standpoint, was how the writers managed to graft a Cold War story into the immediate “post-9/11″ (post-baccarat?) present, to give a media cliché another whack on the head. I’ve always thought that the Bond franchise should be grounded in Fleming’s day instead of evolving with our present technology and geopolitical climate, but Casino Royale somehow achieved precisely that effect without moving an inch away from 2006.

It worked for Bond, and I ate my words, but it would never work for Watchmen. Too much of its backdrop depends on the relative parity that exists between two well-defined state superpowers at the zenith of an arms race, and how the iconography of the American superhero grew out of a very specific ideological landscape particular to an era where the theoretical band-aid solution to all matters of military prowess was more atomic power. While I haven’t paid much attention to how the comic-book superhero has fared against terrorists and urban guerrilla warfare in the twenty-first century, I imagine our situation is somewhat different.

But for now, let’s hope that 300 is a good film and a glorious financial success. It will keep the suits off Snyder’s back. Hopefully this time, Watchmen will motor through the production pipeline and come to the silver screen without too many complications; last time around, they only got as far as putting up a teaser website. I’d hate the job to be rushed, but I’m an impatient fellow, and the clock is ticking.

Dispute these if you must, but let me propose the following. One who is most likely to benefit from a review in the traditional sense is one who has not seen a movie, which then allows me to exercise my relative position of discursive power to encourage or discourage the related expenditure that goes into said movie depending on whether it will lead to the betterment of one’s life and understanding of the much-ballyhooed “human condition” – or, alternatively, fund terrorist cells. Such reviews will normally consist of evaluating the different structural elements of production and how they add up, whilst approaching the narrative in vague terms so as to avoid spoiling the experience.

Reviewing a film, however, is not the same thing as critiquing it. The two are not mutually exclusive, but even when they work together, the former is just an extension of the latter, and reduces to the affixation of value judgments to certain interpretive products. The problem with these stickers that read “this is good” or “this is bad” is that not everything invites the label. As for everything that does, it gets tiresome after a while.

As a writer I far prefer engaging in critique removed from the judgment of whether or not something “works,” where I can tackle something and rationalize it for what it is, and only then go back to evaluate the argument’s validity.

At the level of critique, it is impossible to give a film – or any story, really – an adequate treatment without an examination of endings and spoilers. In other words, I much prefer to discuss movies with a certain audience in mind, that being the audience that has already watched the movie. Sometimes, that audience may never get to that stage without a prior recommendation, which is why I’ll occasionally tell people to get out, see the movie, come back and read the rest of the post.

Of course, there are always the party-crashers who read the whole post anyhow, either because of a slip of the vertical scrollbar or the fallback that “I won’t see it anyway.” So here’s my advice: don’t be a party-crasher. Go see Sin City.

I’d go into what an excellent film it is and justify that claim of excellence with one example after another, but that would get boring after a while. Here’s a capsule summary of my recommendation: Robert Rodriguez has just directed/”shot and cut” his landmark film, the performances driving the three protagonists (Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen) are endearing enough to draw one’s exclusive attention amidst the visual flourish, and as for that visual flourish, wow.

There. That’s your review. Get out, see the movie, come back and read the rest of the post. Now, let’s get a-critiquin’.

You will see a lot of people call Sin City a film noir genre piece and leave it at that. I would argue that it is on the whole quite a different beast, though I should clarify that this is not merely a semantic claim under some authoritative definition of noir, but my effort to draw attention to what makes Rodriguez’s movie unique in substance.

What interests me is how so many people will take a look at Rodriguez’s adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novels, admire it for its production design and say “that’s noir” without identifying any specific similarities beyond the presence of pulp archetypes like disenchanted detectives, pernicious prostitutes and corrupt coppers. Yet they make special note of the amplified comic-book physics as antique vehicles soar above the pavement and a landed punch sends a thug across the room. They cite the explicit violence and casual nudity as distinguishing marks of the film. They fail to notice that the obtuse, centrifugal expression to be found in Sin City places it at the other side of the world from what makes film noir tick.

Film noir is not about sex, booze and violence. It is about concealment and innuendo. The lines of noir dialogue you remember are the suggestive propositions. That is precisely why film noir flourished in the era of Hollywood censorship, its defining female archetype the femme fatale seductress with something to hide. It should tell you something that the narrative mode most closely associated with noir is the mystery, a story of secrecy and revelation. It’s when you don’t see sex, booze and violence that film noir is at its most effective.

Let’s take a look at the Howard Hawks film of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe (the 1946 theatrical cut, for the purposes of this discussion). In many ways, I consider both the film and book to be the defining noir story, even though they differ in some very significant ways, and even if it was The Maltese Falcon that “started it.” The Big Sleep was, at the time of its release, one of the most chilling thriller pictures on record. Promotional posters advertised it as “the violence screen’s all-time rocker-shocker.”

It’s hard to imagine this day and age, but it used to be that even one murder was a big deal. Casablanca was advertised as an action picture on the basis of the gunpoint threats and the grand total of two onscreen shootings. Nowadays we talk about the desensitizing effect of seeing the body count run into the double- and triple-digits within the span of a two-hour trip to the cineplex, but back in the day, every snuffing counted.

In The Big Sleep, the trail of corpses beats a lower bound of seven, in a bullet-ridden domino chain of crisscrossing motives and passions. And still, every snuffing counted. After Marlowe kills Canino, the one death he inflicts in the whole adventure, he feels and expresses a modicum of regret sufficient to warrant a kiss from Lauren Bacall.

The censorship regime did its own wonders for film noir’s self-assertion as a mode of storytelling specific to the cinematic medium. The central act of blackmail that sets the plot in motion – dirty pictures of Carmen Sternwood – is referred to in vague, implicit terms. Carmen is fully clothed when Marlowe finds her posing in front of the camera at Geiger’s residence. Marlowe’s amusing charade with Agnes in the bookstore is as someone with an interest in “rare books,” if you take my meaning. And then there’s the 1946 cut’s addition of that legendary dinner between Marlowe and Vivian, arguably Bogart and Bacall’s best scene together in all their collaborations, where they discuss sexual positions with the euphemistic vocabulary of equestrianism.

Chandler’s novel was itself was a rejection of chivalric ideals in favour of a new, gritty realism. Observe the scene (excised from the film, it goes without saying) in Chapter 24 where Marlowe discovers Carmen lying naked in his apartment, and notices an unsolved chess problem nearby:

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.

This, from the novel that defined the modern conception of hard-boiled private eye fiction beyond its foundations in Hammett’s Falcon. And to think that on film, yet more of it was left unsaid. Is concealment not what put the “film” in film noir? I hope I have dispensed with the notion with sufficient conviction.

With that out of the way, we lead ourselves back to Miller and Rodriguez with a blunt rhetorical question. Do Sin City and the words “realism” or “censorship” even belong in the same sentence? And I hope you’ve seen the film by now, because in answering that question, I’m going to spoil the film like crazy.

The case for the “no” side is obvious. The exaggerated sensationalism of sex and violence in Sin City places it in an ironic position antithetical to the realism inherent to its generic influence. This is not a negative criticism of the film, but of ignorant critics – both the proponents who will tell you what a good noir flick it is, and the detractors who see it as an exploitative abomination no more than a thin and pale mimetic imitation of the classic noir oeuvre. This is a film to be evaluated on its own terms, and any comparative study would do well to make note of differences instead of merely repeating the observable similarities.

That said, the observable similarities tend to appear in the film at its most critical heights of dramatic tension. For all the amputations, beheadings and castrations in the picture – and that’s just the ABC of Sin City‘s alphabet of gore – it is with the occasional, hardly-noticed spurt of concealment that it makes a brief return to the noir tradition, when what matters is not what you see, but what you don’t.

Perhaps the most noirish scene in all of Sin City is its opening scene, based on the story “The Customer is Always Right” and starring Josh Hartnett as a hitman unaware of his ultimate purpose. The composition exhibits a constructed whiff of nostalgia, and the characters are so fresh off the stock as to remain anonymous. The sudden, silenced jolt as he does away with his unsuspecting “customer” hearkens back to the decisive shot fired at the conclusion of the best noir mystery of the last few years, Spielberg’s Minority Report. Beyond the precision of the staging and the colour palette (black and white, a red dress and blue eyes), it all feels like an elevation of traditional noir conventions to a Platonic ideal. But the movie is just beginning, and something feels off about the scene beyond its manifest artificiality; later, we see that it is a deception in the face of the tone that follows.

The three stories that make up the movie proper aren’t nearly as subdued – what, with Kevin eating hookers and mounting their heads on the wall and Marv subsequently feeding his remains to the dogs in “The Hard Goodbye,” the entire Dwight chapter (“The Big Fat Kill”) centering on a game of hot-potato with Jack Rafferty’s severed head, and Hartigan ripping out a pair of pasty happy-sacks in “That Yellow Bastard.”

The violence does not provoke suspense, though – and it should be noted that it is altogether infrequent next to how some would describe the film. While it is in a sense extreme, it incites disgust at worst, but more often a sort of base and bloodthirsty pleasure. When the skinheaded thug played by Nicky Katt (the voice of Atton in the ending-free computer game Knights of the Old Republic II) is shot through the chest with an arrow, it’s damn funny.

But to me, the violence with the greatest impact is that which is concealed or shrouded – and I don’t mean offscreen. Of all the gunshots fired in the course of this 126-minute thrill ride, the best was saved for last. And you’ll notice that when Hartigan does himself in, it occurs in reverse silhouette, in the same negative space as when Dwight is drowning in tar – backgrounded as what is not present, a white cutout in a blank canvas. It is onscreen, yet it is absent. Or, in the case of the Yellow Bastard’s own ignominious end as he is pounded into a pool of piss-toned gunk, the pounding is obscured, and Hartigan’s rage is all the more visible precisely because the audience is distanced from its expression.

Shot after shot, Sin City drowns you in imagery you cannot fail to notice, thrusting it into the foreground. Film noir doesn’t do that. But every now and then, when you’re not looking, it hits you. It hits you the hardest when you don’t see it hit you, and that’s when film noir rears its shadowy head.

My point, to sum it up, is that one would do Sin City an injustice to praise or dismiss it as merely a parasitic digital-age iteration of a timeless genre infused with the aesthetics of sequential art. It is a dialectic synthesis of different philosophies and as a result, something both original and special.

As much of a neat little gimmick as it is to target the release of the film for the weekend of Guy Fawkes Day (“Remember, remember the Fifth of November”), I do wonder if it is really that wise an idea to rush the production schedule to meet it. It has a lineup to dream of, with Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond and James McTeigue in the director’s chair. McTeigue is untried, but given his background as an Assistant Director under both the Wachowskis in The Matrix and George Lucas in the Prequels, I have faith in the guy, so long as he doesn’t let too many Wachowski fingerprints get all over his work. That is appropriate for some dystopian movies about post-apocalyptic fascists that rule over a complacent populace, but it would not necessarily be a good fit here.

My big concern – and the major question mark that hovers over the otherwise perfect casting of Natalie Portman – is that the film may lose some of the Britishness of the original source, which I think needs to be retained. Alan Moore is arguably the best living scriptwriter in the comics business, and his work is long overdue for some cinematic respect, especially after the disaster that was The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Hopefully the film captures some of the more ingenious motifs, both visual and poetic, that lie in Moore’s book. The commodification of Fate and Justice as artificial feminine personifications that cheat on society and the powers that be is of particular note, as is the marvelous sequence in the third act when V, the anarchistic Guy Fawkes figure around whom the story revolves, conducts the destruction of the fascist regime’s power structures to the cannon-fire of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. As Robert Rodriguez will hopefully demonstrate with Sin City, which looks incredible, why reinvent the wheel when the original comic has already provided so much in the way of aesthetic guidance?

On the other side of the literary world lies Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which is an almost entirely linguistic experience aside from the great Helquist illustrations and the tag that follows every book offering clues as to the next one. I have now finished all eleven published books, and the series is due to conclude in the thirteenth volume. My original impression after reading the first three, if you will recollect, was that this was a series that dropped plot and story in favour of being very clever about the telling thereof. Well, that changes quite significantly as one progresses, and from about the fifth or sixth volume onwards, it becomes masterful episodic fiction in the serial tradition, with each successive adventure posing riddles that are answered with even more baffling oddities in the next one, capitalizing on everything that has come before. Even given how the author continues to unify each book with a set of idioms or literary devices that he deconstructs with scalpel precision, the series has shifted to the point where the unanswered mysteries in the plot are what generate anticipation for the next entry to come.

I must also admit a total agreement with the axis of good and evil that emerges as the series progresses. Every book has a library motif, and one of the characters in The Slippery Slope (whose identity I will not reveal) comes right out and says that well-read individuals are bound to be the good guys. All the decent people in the books respect knowledge, and amidst all the sobering melancholy in the series, one that explicitly deals with terrible things happening to undeserving innocent children, we see the promotion of what I think is a critical, yet oft-ignored value.

The antithesis of the printed page, and the mark of the enemy, is fire. When the villains employ fire, the tragic loss is always not so much material as it is a loss of knowledge. It’s an axis of conflict you don’t see every day, and certainly not in something promoted as children’s fiction.

Fiction is created, marketed and sold in a way that is completely different from the movie business. Book launches, Harry Potter aside, don’t have anything approaching the opening-weekend culture of movies that saw a revival after The Phantom Menace and reached its peak in the summer of 2001. It should really come as no surprise, then, that my most anticipated works of fiction to be published this calendar year are almost entirely sequels. Couple that with the fact that I have enough classic literature from years past to discover, and this list pales in comparison to what I can say about movies.

With that said, I want to make special mention of the four books coming out in 2005 that I intend to buy the moment they hit stores. Book the Twelfth of the Lemony Snicket series is one. Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception, which arrives 3 May, is another; I much enjoyed the first three, and this one promises to build on the dangling threads of the second whilst balancing them with the bittersweet ending of the third. Then there’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and its inclusion here should be obvious.

Not so obvious is the one non-sequel I already have marked down on my calendar, even considering that it does not have a hard release date beyond a vague promise of delivery in October (though its Amazon.co.uk entry now indicates a delay until 6 March, 2006). This would be Michael Chabon’s next novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, his first big piece since The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay after having taken a break with the children’s baseball fantasy Summerland and the Sherlock Holmes tribute The Final Solution.

Chabon, as longtime devotees of this journal should be aware, is a literary wunderkind and one of my favourite novelists of all time. Not only does he write prose that can only be described as beautiful, he somehow never manages to let it overpower the stories underneath; and oh, what amazing stories he tells. All I know about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is that it is apparently an alternate-history novel about a Jewish state established in what we know as Alaska, and I’m already dying to see where he goes with this.

I will finish this post with yet another empty promise of a detailed, extended orgasmic reaction to the new footage of Revenge of the Sith, and pop in an unrelated link or two. The first is an excellent Jim Hill feature article on Eric Idle’s new Broadway production, Spamalot. The second is an obscure, but surreal recording that fittingly, you can only order on the Internet; you know the sort. Or do you? I speak, after all, of The Rap Canterbury Tales. Its inclusion in one of my classes today made that particular course (English 300, “Social and Cultural History of the English Language”) all the more fun in a strange, delightful way. It is, after all, the same course where a recommended reading for an upcoming paper is Going Nucular, a book by Geoff Nunberg of Language Log fame.

But every now and then, my favourite periodical pumps out an excellent article that anyone can access. Such is the case with this article on the Web as a linguistic corpus, a piece that cites my favourite blog.

And how cool is this: in last week’s print edition, their weekly Obituary page was a feature on Will Eisner (again, subscriber content, but you should really sign up). The Eisner Awards – the comic book industry’s equivalent of the Oscars – are named after the late Will, and not Disney’s resident evil clown.

Curiously, while the otherwise rigorous obituary goes at length about Eisner’s own projects and his influence on the maturing of comic storytelling (indeed, The Economist concurs with the view that he practically invented the graphic novel), it has nary a mention of his masterwork Comics & Sequential Art, which everyone, everyone, recommends as the definitive textbook on how to make a comic book, and with good reason. Eisner literally wrote the book on graphic storytelling. Comics & Sequential Art is highly technical in its focus, but presents itself as introductory in the way it boils everything down to simple design principles. To comics, this book is what The Animator’s Survival Kit is to animation: all the basic principles collected in one place. The true artist doesn’t just stop there – he works his way upwards – but this is where to start.

The definitive book on reading comics is a beast of a different nature, and its name is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Between McCloud and Eisner, we have the foundations of what is a theoretical canon of the medium.

Needless to say, theoretical texts only go so far, and it’s the experience of reading the works of fiction themselves where you see them applied.

The other day I dropped by Wizards Comics & Collectibles across the street and down the road apiece from the Garneau Theatre. It isn’t a great shop for blokes like yours truly who prefer to catch up on the seminal graphic novels and mini-series in the form of a durable trade paperback – in fact, they don’t have much in the way of TPBs at all – but from what I can tell (from my limited experience in such matters), it’s definitely a store meant for single-issue collectors.

In one of the racks, I found several original issues of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, including multiple copies of the remarkable fifth chapter, “Fearful Symmetry”, which shares its title with Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye‘s study of William Blake. It makes sense, since they both take their names from Blake’s poem “The Tyger” – which, if you think about it in the context of Watchmen, is an entirely appropriate allusion.

The thing that makes “Fearful Symmetry” (Watchmen #5, that is) so remarkable is that, well, it’s symmetric. In the 28-page chapter, pages 1 and 28 have mirroring panel layouts, down to the colour coordination of alternating reds and blues. The same goes for pages 2 and 27, 3 and 26, and so on until you get to the pivotal assassination attempt bridging pages 14 and 15. Moreover, each of these symmetric pairs follow the same characters. You see the same juxtaposition of the newsstand and the fictitious Tales of the Black Freighter on page 12 as you do on page 17, and a parallel shipwreck on pages 9 and 20. It opens with Rorschach, and it closes with Rorschach.

A gimmick? Far from it. It doesn’t just preserve the flow of the story, it adds to it. Like the other visual motifs that characterize every chapter of Watchmen, the layout is at the service of the story – and to its credit, this is a prime example of something comics can do that other formats simply can’t. At the end of the chapter, the question at the end of Blake’s poem – “What immortal hand or eye, / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” is turned on its head and directed to the reader as a riddle to be answered.

If you’ve read Watchmen and know the solution, look at the question again. The answer lies in that very chapter, embedded in the symmetry itself.

And while on the subject of fearful symmetry – you didn’t think this post was over, did you? – I want to mention the cover of Tuesday’s Gateway, which, for reasons intrinsic to what you can do in print that you can’t on the Web, has not been reproduced in the Web edition.

While I typically keep this weblog text-only aside from attaching the occasional Scrabble post-mortem photograph for illustrative purposes, I feel like saving a thousand words:

Maybe I missed a few issues, but I can’t recall this ever having been done in the three years I have been on campus, and it’s going to take a historian or editor armed with a few bound editions to tell me if it’s ever been done. As with Watchmen, at first glance it’s a simple trick anybody could devise, a gimmick. Here we see two cover stories instead of the usual one, but the real kicker that makes it worthwhile is that they are two opposed cover stories. In this corner, Blatz – in this corner, Amrhein. It’s nice to see a paper take some risks every once in a while – real risks, not just your standard old Transformer blowjobs.

One thing, though: the cover would have been cooler if it were really symmetric.

There’s one more thing I want to mention about this issue, and it has to do with Kristine Owram’s piece in the Opinion section, “English really isn’t teaching English anyway.” To quote:

I couldn’t agree with their arguments more, but I must admit that I find these views of the English department more than a little ironic. After all, this is the same department that completely overhauled its course guide last year to offer a much more theory-based approach to the study of literature. Yep, nothing’s going to teach me how to communicate better than a course called “Textualities: Signs and Texts,” in which students will be introduced to “the structural study of sign-systems and discourses.” Take heart, though, for it will not be “an exercise in structuralism alone”! No, my friends, instead it will provide us with a “comprehensive historical review of the principles of semiotics and the analysis of discourses.”

Now, as someone who actually took ENGL 217 (“Textualities, Signs and Texts”) last semester, I find it rather amusing that Owram pinpointed it as her example. Naturally, this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it is arguably the best and most intellectually exciting course I have taken at this fine institution, and alongside the MATH 117/118 Honours Calculus route, the one I am readiest to recommend to every student who thinks he has the wits, bowels and overall academic machismo to handle it.

See, here’s the thing – the English department’s restructuring last year wasn’t moving in a more theoretical direction. The creation of the Textualities series, that being the 217/218 pair, was a direct result of axing ENGL 216 from the course catalogue. 216, a full-year course in literary theory exclusive to English majors, was effectively split in two.

This entailed two consequences. The first is that now, non-English majors can get their fill of the foundations of sign theory. Of course, according to Owram, critical theory is “only important to someone interested in a career in the humanities, like an aspiring English professor.” You’d never have, say, a Computing Science major take a course like that, so why let them? Everybody knows sciences and humanities don’t mix.

The second consequence is that the two courses no longer go hand in hand – you can take one, but not the other. Unless you take both 217 and 218, you can’t compare and contrast across different intellectual traditions. Moreover, without 216, there is no integrated alternative.

You will also notice that the 300-level catalogue is about as bold a move away from theory as it gets. Take a look: “Postcolonial Literature and Culture.” “Medieval Literature and Culture.” “Early Modern Literature and Culture.” What are cultural studies, if not literature placed in context? What are cultural studies, if not literature applied?

Actually, what’s really interesting is that the 217/218 professor, in his introduction to either course, stated his personal conviction that they should be properly offered at the 400-level, and in fact are at most other universities. That’s an assessment of relative difficulty, really. I think the courses are fine where they belong.

My reasoning here is that an introduction to critical theory is purely that – an introduction. These courses consist of readings that are foundational, and more importantly, interdisciplinary. By cataloguing them in the 200s, you encourage students to take them earlier – which means they can apply those theoretical concepts elsewhere instead of acquiring them at the end of their educational careers, when the theoretical rudiments are but a footnote.

Mathematics courses are analogous, and that’s why I so highly recommend the 117/118 route to entering students. The standard 114/115 path (or for Engineers, 100/101) will give you what you need to proceed along your merry way and work with rates of falling objects, basic electrical circuits and all the other fun stuff calculus is good for. But it’s one thing to have the tools, and it’s another to understand the tools and have an upper hand later on. That’s why theoretical foundations, particularly those that come early in your education, are a good thing.

As it stands right now, if the English department encounters further cuts, it’s actually the theoretical disciplines that you can expect to wither away. It’s a crying shame, because theory is exactly the direction in which university-level English should be moving, but isn’t. Owram states that the common defense of English courses is that everybody needs competent writing skills and a background in major works of literature. If that is really the case – and it probably is, given the department’s reorganization in favour of an easily defensible attachment to culture – it really is a pity.

I posit that it is a defect in K-12 education that students enter university without basic skills in composition and critical reading. Higher education isn’t just about vocational preparation, and certainly shouldn’t be. Theory is only relevant to aspiring English professors? Preposterous. Theory should be what the Department of English exists to offer.

I conclude my discussion of the matter with this morsel of advice: take the Textualities courses. They are, in a word, rewarding.

Among the required readings for 217 was Northrop Frye, whom you may recall from earlier in this post as being the author of Fearful Symmetry. The book that was covered was a more theoretical text, Anatomy of Criticism, which is such an essential addition to your bookshelf (even if you don’t care much for structuralism) that suggestions to keep this material away from casual passersby, lest we scare them away, is really quite unbelievable.

Also on the reading list last term was The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man by the Patron Saint of Wired Magazine and my second choice for the Greatest Canadian. Interestingly enough, much of the book is a critique of print media and layout design. McLuhan would have loved Watchmen.

We come full circle back to comic books as I leave you with this piece of trivia: The Mechanical Bride makes a cameo appearance in The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #4, nestled in a pile of books that a killer robot from the far future studies in his quest to destroy the Escapist once and for all. Industrial Man, indeed.

Before I proceed, it is probably beneficial to establish where I sit with respect to comic superhero movies – my value system, as it may be. Of the standard DC and Marvel stables, there is not one superhero movie that I would proclaim to be the hallmark of the filmic subgenre of the comic adaptation. A good many of them make a decent stab at it and grind to a halt halfway through. Take Superman, for example – an epic journey of self-discovery for the most part, then it hits a brick wall with that “Can You Read My Mind?” nonsense. X-Men had some nice character setups going on, then stops and says, “Oh, crap – we need an evil plot in order to lead to a final fight. Bring on the United Nations!”

And speaking of the United Nations, while the campy Adam West Batman and the television series from which it protruded were a pretty close approximation of the colourful, tongue-in-cheek comics of the sixties (and a great deal of fun), it would be a stretch to call the feature film a shining example of cinematic storytelling. Batman – now that’s a character that has never truly been done justice – not even by Tim Burton, even though he was on the right track. With a powerful backstory and the best dramatis personae of supervillainy in any franchise at the disposal of a given filmmaker, I expect better.

The most honest effort I have seen to take a comics franchise to the next level is Ang Lee’s Hulk, which was an example of phenomenal storytelling technique, only it lacked an involving and coherent story to tell. In trying to bridge the occasional gap between art and entertainment, this well-made and underrated character drama veered just a tad far from its prerogative to the audience, but stopped short of living up to its intellectual promise. What was admirable was what Hulk wanted to be. This will become important.

Settling on an answer to what sits at the pinnacle of superhero movies is something to be done begrudgingly, as the best of them are still short of being five-star instant classics in the pantheon of all films, not just the ones derived from panels and text bubbles. By the best of them I refer to X2 and the first Spider-Man, two very different films in terms of what works and what does not. X2 is a very difficult film to complain about, because identifying specific flaws in such a thoroughly enjoyable thrill ride is no easy task. It wrangled a large cast of characters and somehow gave them depth and individuality, means and motives. Unlike its predecessor, it had a plot – a match of wits in which even our chessmasters, Magneto and Xavier, proved fallible. There is so much to like about the movie, what keeps it back is hardly a specific complaint as much as it is a desire to have seen it go further and be iconic in all respects instead of merely very good. It built real-world character dynamics on the foundation of superheroic powers, and left unspecified room for improvement.

Spider-Man, instead of being all-round very good, had its fair share of both milestones and annoyances. Without a doubt it laid claim to the most interesting protagonist, and the presentation of the origin story was beyond compare. However, as a movie not entitled Peter Parker (or even Pavitr Prabhakar), there was a certain imperative to include a few superheroics. Enter a second half with a schizophrenic evil corporate executive with a green helmet and a hoverboard as a thoroughly insufficient villain in a thoroughly insufficient hero-villain conflict.

So with all that said, it should be easy to extrapolate what it was I wanted to get out of Spider-Man 2: cinematically-conscious storytelling that takes advantage of the motion picture medium while remaining true to the comic book aesthetic, complex characters delivering complex lines, the continuation of the insofar compelling Peter Parker story, and a much better handling of “Spider-Man versus the bad guy” – lofty demands, but not impossible.

Lo and behold, I got my wish.

The film begins with a thrilling opening titles sequence. One thing you cannot fault the Marvel films for is their brilliant opening titles, regardless of the quality of the rest of the film – the Braille in Daredevil is a fine example; even The Punisher started with a bang. (Shame about the rest of the movie, though.) Spider-Man 2 outdoes them all with a dynamic sequence of panels that evoke some moments in Hulk and emulate pages of art being flipped in all directions. The panels contain still paintings of the first film’s most pivotal moments, particularly the inverted kiss, in a two-minute recap of the story thus far. It is a fine and innovative example of how to get an audience to sit through a lot of names, and the first of many little things that stack up to make an intruiging whole.

The Peter Parker story is once again the highlight of the movie, and cements him once again as the most human protagonist out of all the movie superheroes, the ordinary boy charged with living under extraordinary circumstances. Time and again, Spider-Man 2 reminds us that these extraordinary circumstances do not absolve him of the trials and tribulations that come with being a fresh-faced, sleep-deprived college kid. Playing the web-slinging good guy does not pay the rent, get the girl or deliver the pizza on time. It’s a realist’s approach to a world governed by the fantastic; no film does it better, and in no film is it more appropriate.

If there was any doubt after the first movie that Tobey Maguire was perfect for the role, the sequel erases it. He demonstrates resolve, sadness, longing, innocence, confusion, reluctance in the face of responsibility, self-conflicted concealment in the face of unspoken truths – it’s all there. In one sequence in the middle of the film that hearkens back to a certain musical interlude from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where Peter tries to crawl back into the warm and comfy shell of an ordinary life, Maguire has all the same nerdilicious charm as Ewan McGregor’s scenes in Down With Love when he is masquerading as the astronaut Zip Martin.

Kirsten Dunst, reprising the role of Mary-Jane Watson, evolves with her character. In this movie, Mary-Jane gets a little further in achieving her ambitions of modeling and acting, but what happens at the funeral in the end of the first movie has some personal ramifications that are not forgotten, and serve as the basis for her relations with Peter Parker throughout the movie. She displays a touch of bitterness on her own search for happiness, and there are few complaints to be had about how Dunst handles this. James Franco as Harry Osborn is perhaps the weak link of the trio; Harry has some very strong scenes where his ambitions of being a tycoon like his father show through, and a particularly memorable one at a reception where he is quite intoxicated and takes it out on Peter, but some of the later scenes that require fear, confusion and moral uncertainty are not quite there.

Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina) is one of the highlights of Spider-Man 2, and addresses exactly the biggest problem with the first movie, which was an uninteresting and unchallenging villain that the rest of the work was above. (No offense to Willem Dafoe, so much as the material he had to work with, or lack thereof.) In film journalism one often sees the term “comic book villain” used in a perjorative sense, to describe soulless evil clowns written and played in as over-the-top a fashion as is manageable. This is not the case with Doc Ock, who may be the most satisfying megalomaniacal villain in any superhero movie. The Green Goblin, in contrast, was a soulless evil clown on drugs who conveniently murdered Oscorp’s board of directors and still got away with his secret identity intact, with the occasional bout of talking to himself that everybody forgot about as soon as they saw Gollum do it right in The Two Towers. He’s an evil corporate executive who wants his government contract, damnit – oh, and let’s fight Spider-Man since he’s a good guy, and we shan’t have any of those getting in the way.

Doctor Octopus – now there’s a villain: someone whose characterization actually has something to say about mad science, which is by movie standards a really novel idea. He begins as the groundbreaking fusion scientist Otto Octavius, a happily married and well-mannered genius who is secure in his precautionary measures – until the technology goes awry and his sentient robo-tentacles take over. Even then, his motivation is not to destroy the world with his great ball of fire, but a desire to finish his life’s work and show the world that said great ball of fire is harmless, furry and energy-efficient. He fights Spider-Man because the titular arachnid pulls the plug on his invention early in the film – with good intentions, naturally. Best of all, when it comes down to the effects-heavy fight scenes, he is enough of a match for our hero that the combat is interesting. The strategic employment of super power against super power breathes life into the extended, show-stopping action sequences in a way that was never once present in the first movie, where the Goblin hovered around a lot and chucked a few radioactive snowglobes here and there without so much as a “Rosebud”.

Spider-Man 2 is rife with visual symbolism both picturesque and subtle, from a pivotal moment when Peter’s rimmed spectacles shatter on the ashphalt to him standing across the street from an unnoticing Mary-Jane under a theatrical marquee reading “The Importance of Being Earnest”. Oscar Wilde’s text is woven into the film in a way that refrains from being overbearing, but hints at the subliminal relevance of the excerpts in question. There are some genuinely funny moments where the humour is clean, situational and completely derived from the timing of a given shot, like a scene where Spider-Man ascends an elevator in full costume and fuller awkwardness.

Danny Elfman’s score to the first Spider-Man gave the initial impression that it was less memorable than his work on the likes of Batman, without an instantly recognizable theme to trumpet around – but as an audience we have had plenty of time to get used to it over the past two years, and to hear it reprised in all the right spots here is refreshing. Unfortunately, it does not carve out an identity for Spider-Man 2 like John Williams did for The Empire Strikes Back with the Imperial March or for Attack of the Clones with “Across the Stars”, but like the score to the first, perhaps this will sink in.

Does Spider-Man 2 have problems? Well, yes – but that depends on the weight you put on these specific logical gaffes. Spider-Man’s mask comes off quite frequently, though it provides an opportunity to see some expressive facial exertion, without which climactic sequences like the scene with the runaway train would not be the same. He survives some fairly impossible falls without so much as a scratch, which is ambitious by Jackie Chan standards and pushing it even for a comic book. To paraphrase Aunt May (who also makes a welcome return), he’s not Superman, you know.

I do have an issue with how far the stories of the respective characters go in this movie; namely, it may seriously undercut the potential of future sequels, especially if Sam Raimi wants to do another one after the third, which is currently in the germinal stages. I refer specifically to Mary-Jane’s decision at the end of the film, a temporary resolution of the romantic arc just as unsatisfying as the end of the last one, only this time around, the choice is really asking for trouble. In that sense, the ending stretches a bit long, especially because it goes a few scenes beyond my favourite shot in the movie, the one of Peter and Mary-Jane suspended on a web side by side, a scene that has a poetic finality of its own. Still, it can be argued that reasonable choices have no place in dealings pertaining to love, and the choice can still be validated by its consequences, which is something to look for in Spider-Man 3.

Perhaps the most telling observation about Spider-Man 2 is that the set pieces and super powers are but accessories to the weapons with which the real battles are won or lost: individual choices and the determination of one’s own destiny. This is the dramatic ideal, a story pulled along by a chain of dilemmas, actions and consequences instead of web-shooters and robotic claws – just as how the best science-fiction stories are never truly about spaceships and time machines, but ethics and social responsibility in a world where anything is possible. At long last, here is something to point to as the exemplar of everything a superhero movie should aspire to be.