Your Belated Halloween Post

Taking a Shot at the Canon



Halloween, my least favorite holiday, is once again upon us. In the interest of getting linked to on someone's holiday-themed blogroll, I will consent to post about horror films for the remainder of the week. My resistance to Halloween might seem Grinchy to some, but it's just one of those inexplicable bits of Tim lore dating back as far back as anyone can remember: Halloween just pisses me off for strange and indeterminate reasons. I'd rather celebrate Arbor Day - at least I can get behind a tree.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah.

As much as I enjoy a good horror film, I've noticed something over the years - many of the movies considered to be "classic" examples of horror cinema are just not that good. For instance: going back to the original Wicker Man I was struck by how remarkably boring the movie was, and how - like many horror movies - it only really works if you consent to believe that the protagonists just aren't that bright and will always do whatever is necessary to pull them deeper into the machinations of the plot. The heavy thud of plot hammers in the distance can sap even the most promising material of its thrust.

Long-time readers - and I mean long-time, going back to the first six months or so, the pre-Cambrian age of the Comics Blogosphere - will remember endless controversies touching upon the concept of "suspension of disbelief". True, "suspension of disbelief" isn't a particularly useful concept in critical discourse, as it stands at a foreign remove from the more interesting features of a narrative - theme, subtext, style, context. It has nothing to do with how, ideally, a viewer or reader should engage a given text. No one asks whether or not Ulysses or Midnight's Children successfully suspend their readers' disbelief.

That said, to all the academics in the audience who may engage with genre work on a critical level, I say: phooey. I've been reading and watching genre entertainment for decades of my life. My parents love sci-fi and fantasy, and they raised me to do so as well. (Not so much the horror, however, but there was some of that as well, mostly of the non-slasher kind. To this day I don't think you could pay my mother enough to sit through any type of slasher film.) My reactions to horror films are the same as any sci-fi or fantasy film: I can't engage with it on any level unless it reaches at least some modicum of competence. I've seen too much in the way of crap to waste my time explicating bad movies.

At least, when I riff on bad comics there's a tacit understanding (or at least I hope there is!) between you - my audience - and myself, that we're all basically stuck with these metric shit-tons of bad comic book trivia in our brains, we might as well have some fun wallowing in the filth of, I dunno, Nightstalkers or something. But for the vast majority of this crap, no attempt is made to engage with it on any other level than atavistic nostalgia or unrepentant snark. It would be the height of dishonesty on my part, and just plain foolish, to try and find something deeper in the vast majority of this crap. You’d have to be, in other words, deeply, deeply invested in an extremely blinkered aesthetic to be able to find any kind of thematic weight in even something as relatively "good" as, say, Busiek & Perez's Avengers. There's just no "there" there, and it says a lot more about the people making these projections than the work itself.

All of which is to say, reading some of the critical statements that have cropped up around Wes Craven's 1972 debut, Last House on the Left, is a bit like accidentally clicking onto one of those message board threads where people spend a lot of time defending Moench and Gulacy's Master of Kung-Fu as the great unsung pinnacle of 70s graphic fiction. (I know that's one hell of a straw-man, but I don't feel like pissing off anyone specific.) It's just a poor movie, and I can't see why anyone would have the patience to spend enough time on it to find a deeper appreciation. Wes Craven would go on to do many, many better films. His Swamp Thing was a very good film, effectively creepy and campy in just the right proportions. I haven't seen The Serpent and the Rainbow in a long time but I remember it being straight-up terrifying. People Under the Stairs is an odd little movie that many people have probably never seen at this late date but which presented a good twist on some fairly conventional horror themes. (But, he also directed Vampire in Brooklyn, so there's that).

Last House on the Left has some good ideas, inasmuch as they're the same ideas Ingmar Bergman had when he directed The Virgin Spring. But even if the spirit is willing, the proverbial flesh is weak. I guess if I had to pinpoint the movie's singular failure, it's probably one of ambition. The movie's main trick is juxtaposition - juxtaposition between the grisly murders on display and a deceptively placid early 70s light rock soundtrack, interjections of comedic relief in the form of a bumbling sheriff and deputy straight out of Smokey and the Bandit. The problem is that whereas a more confident director might have been able to pull of these kind of tricks while still maintaining a cohesive mood, the result here is simply a mess. The sad-action / happy-music trick wears out its welcome real quick, making the transition from interesting to bizarre to funny in about the time it takes the girl to get up from being raped and walk to her death to what (for the life of me) sounds like Harry Chapin.

It just doesn’t hang together, and even a few effectively creepy performances on the part of the murderers (who strangely look just like Michael Imperioli, it's uncanny.) can't salvage what is, ultimately, simply a badly directed film - a good effort for an absolute beginner, but of little interest outside of its historical significance. (Incidentally, you could say the same thing about Deep Throat, and at least you might get turned on by the latter.) To see it rate so high on so many horror fans' lists, and to see otherwise intelligent people like Roger Ebert rank it so highly, well . . . it makes me happy to realize that the inbred world of superhero comics isn't the only fan culture with drastically lowered expectations, the Stockholm Syndrome for nerds held hostage by bad media for so long they can't recognize the difference between crap and quality.

Next: Assuming I can actually post something before Halloween, I'll write about my favorite horror movie of all time. If you're a long-time reader, you might remember what I'm referring to.

Stuff I Read

Amazing Spider-Man #574

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Amazing Spider-Man #574 will be the worst comic I read all year. Now, true, I read a lot of shitty comics - what can I say, it's relaxing after a long week of school - so my standards for recreational reading are somewhat degraded. I've been known to read whole runs of putrid garbage like Deathstroke the Terminator just because it came in a nice, tidy .CBR file, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I just don't have the mental wherewithal to sit down with Bottomless Belly Button, sometimes I need to have my atavistic nostalgia belly rub.

But nevertheless I think a comic like this deserves to be singled out for a real, honest-to-God drubbing. Because it's not just a bad comic - all things considered, from a craft standpoint, you'll read many worse comics this year. Hell, a massively popular book like Secret Invasion can get away with being downright unreadable in places and people go with it. But no, the art is OK, the scripting is competent, it hits the basic structure of a 22-page short-form comic book story just fine, including an EC-ish shock ending that you'll probably see coming a mile away.

But what is actually in the story? Flash Thompson goes to Iraq. Now, this isn't necessarily bad in and of itself - remember, Flash went to Vietnam back in the day. If you concede that these serial characters have to live in some semblance of the real world - and it's always been a hallmark of the Spider-Man franchise more than most other books - then you accept it as a given. Harry Osborn had a drug problem. Mary Jane was retconned to have an abusive father. Gwen Stacy lost her father and then lost her own life, albeit in super-villain related circumstances, but painful nonetheless. Hell, you can say that from the very beginning of the franchise it's defining trait was juxtaposing "real" concerns with fantasy adventure elements - how can Peter defeat Doc Ock when all he can think about is his sick and dying aunt?

But this reads slightly different. True, there's no way a super-hero comic can adequately address these kinds of real-world issues without seeming somewhat ham-fisted - but, ham-fisted or not, if the intentions are relatively noble the stories can usually be forgiven. For instance, Harry's aforementioned drug problem may have been dealt with in an oddly exploitive, G-rated Beyond the Valley of the Dolls way, but the basic message was sound and the creators actually dealt with the long term consequences in a relatively well-reasoned manner. It holds up better than most "issue" stories from the period - that is, still not well, but readable. Ultimately, it's hard to argue with the earnest sentiment, even if the execution leaves something to be desired. (The Green Lantern / Green Arrow story from the same period is a good comparison, because it tries for something more ambitious with its drug story it comes up that much shorter.)

But for some reason the issue at hand read differently for me. True, it was created with input from real-life Iraq vets. And it deals with the war, for the most part, in an even-handed manner, making nothing that could even resemble an overarching statement about the war's purpose, but rather portraying a specific incident of the type that, to read news reports and documentary evidence, is all too common, down to the portrayal of relatively sound insurgent tactics and urban guerilla strategy. But the real queasy part is when Flash Thompson begins to relate his own experiences as a soldier - his own battles - to similar battles in Spider-Man's history. Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to juxtapose a picture of Spider-Man facing off with the Sinister Six to Flash blasting away at six Iraqi insurgents with a machine gun? You can't put those two ideas side by side without trivializing one of them, and guess which one. It's not like this is some piece of wartime propaganda, like Captain America punching Hitler or Superman mowing down a line of fifth-columnists - this is something that actually reaches towards a "profound" statement on courage, using Flash's admiration of Spider-Man as his personal motivation for an act of real-life heroism. It feels odd and queasy in a way that, say, similar stories with characters like the Punisher and Nick Fury haven't.

Essentially, when you're dealing with real-life in such a pressing fashion, I think creators in the modern era have to keep fantasy elements at a remove. Otherwise, you end up with something like the 9/11 issue of Amazing, which leapfrogged over "well-intentioned" on its way to "massively stupid and wrong-headed", and reads all the worse for seven years' remove. Similarly, who the hell thought it was a good idea to devote a whole mini-series to Magneto's adventures at Auschwitz? That at least seems to be relatively benign in that the whole point of the story - let us pray and hope - is that the person who will become Magneto has no magical powers until after he survives the camps. It's a bit of back story probably best kept at a safe remove for obvious reasons, but an acceptable bit of motivation nonetheless for some thirty-odd years.

But this - this just seems wrong to me, all the more so for the "twist" at the end (which I haven't specifically mentioned for fear of getting people pissed at me in the comments). For all the talk about how the reboot was intended to get Spider-Man back to his roots and re-engage with his strong supporting cast, what they did in this issue was arguably the worst misstep of the whole run so far. Essentially, when Flash Thompson gets back to New York after his stay in Germany, his presence is going to totally distort the tone and shift the focus of the books, which up to now even I will admit had been trending upward and improving steadily since the first few, shaky months. Sure, it's "real", it's "ripped-from-the-headlines", but it's also not a story element that can ever be swept under the rug, and every single person who uses the character from this day until the end of Spider-Man will have to address it in some fashion.

Am I wrong, or have they made a terrible mistake, a horrible misjudgment in tone and execution? Is this genuinely touching in the way it's obviously meant to be, or does it come off as crass and exploitive, at least in the context of a comic book about a man in blue and red tights who fights crime? Am I overreacting? I am honestly interested in your comments on the matter, and would like to hear some differing opinions.

Tony Has Some Explaining To Do

November Fifth

You will wake early with a slight headache. Your eyes will be sore, you will remember tearing up. There is a bottle of champagne still corked in the refrigerator, party food only half eaten. Everyone left surprisingly early, discouraged and demoralized.

How did it all go so terribly wrong, is the first thought that passes through your mind. How could things have slipped so far out of our grasp? The polls were so positive, the wind was at our backs, the sails were full, etc etc. All the leading economic indicators were plainly working against the incumbent party.

And yet, deep down, you had known all along, known that the higher the polls went, the more certain an upset victory became. There was literally no way to win - it wasn't that the system was rigged, or that there weren't enough voters, or the voluntary registration system was an inefficient joke designed solely to disenfranchise, it was all the above. Ultimately, it didn't matter, because there was only one party people trusted to rule, even if they didn't know how. The insurgent always lost, because everyone likes a winner.

And when everyone else had courted euphoria, predicting a landslide above and beyond all conservative expectations, you had stayed back, afraid that the opposition was merely hiding in wait, playing the part of the wounded animal as a means of lulling the enemy into a false sense of security. It didn't matter by how much we had outspent them, or how confident tracking polls had been - the result was the same as if we had stayed home. We didn't win. We would never win.