When I was a boy, my mother wouldn’t let me read comic books for
an unusual reason. At least it’s not one that I have ever heard of
another parent’s citing in favor of such a prohibition. It wasn’t
because the comics were morally or intellectually corrupting, or
because they would spoil my appetite for quality or “improving”
sorts of literary experiences. It wasn’t because she had read
Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and believed
— as David Hajdu’s Ten-Cent Plague recently claimed
millions of moms did in the '50s and '60s — that comics were
politically subversive. No, it was because, according to her,
comics would ruin my ability to spell correctly. If readers have
ever heard this charge made against them before, I would be
grateful to hear from them. The odd thing was that, although I
always was and still am a pretty good speller, I can’t remember
ever seeing a misspelled word in any of the comic books that I used
to sneak into the house under my shirt and hide under my bed. Maybe
comic books when she was a girl, such as they were, were
different.
Anyway, it seems in retrospect that I only liked to read them
because they were forbidden. Their equivalents in pulp fiction
never had the same charm for me, for instance, though both would
equally have been considered “trash” by my mother. This was not
because the latter didn’t have pictures — which, being partially
color-blind, I couldn’t see properly anyway — but because (I
assume) the pulps and science fiction were not forbidden me the way
the comics were. Apart from my surreptitious truancies with
Superman and his kind, I mostly read history books and a few
favorite novels, mainly Huckleberry Finn, multiple times. I
sometimes wonder if the whole charade of prohibition and secret
defiance that went on between my mother and me wasn’t intended from
the beginning to channel my subversive impulses into relatively
harmless courses.
At least they seemed so at the time. Now, of course, as I have
noticed before in these pages (see “In Defense of Snobbery,”
TAS, July/August, 2008) and never cease to marvel at in
the movie reviews I write for the magazine’s website, the comics
are the master art form of our age. Heavy-duty think pieces in the
Sunday New York Times — “All the News That’s Fit to
Print” used to be its motto — are devoted to what no one but,
ironically, me considers trash anymore. Nothing is trash anymore.
Or everything is. It comes to the same thing. Axel Alonso, the new
editor in chief of Marvel Comics (now a division of Disney), is
solemnly quoted by the Times’s reporter as saying that
“There’s no type of fiction that comes close to comics for the
layers of storytelling….This is mythology, but it’s not mythology
that’s refined slightly over time. It’s mythology that’s constantly
evolving.” No, no! Mythologies are things we believe in —
like the primal significance of youthful rebellion against
authority — things which we reenact again and again (see “Rebels
Without a Clue,” TAS, June 2010) in order to reinforce
our belief in them. Comics are the opposite: throwaway fantasies
that we demand to be made ever new, and ever more unbelievable.
Unless we are delusional, that is, comic books are things that
we love precisely because they are unbelievable — because they
provide us with a holiday from realities we find unpleasant or
frightening. Morven Crumlish may write in the Guardian
that, as a girl, she loved Wonder Woman “because she seemed utterly
feasible to me,” but I think she means the opposite of what she
says. If Wonder Woman had been “feasible” — that is, doable — for
her, she wouldn’t have been sufficiently Wonderful to have taken up
the space that she seems to have occupied in her girlish
imagination. Ms. Crumlish now gives herself retrospective credit
for a sort of credulity that she is most unlikely to have had at
the time in order to express in stronger terms her approval of the
political symbolism underlying the fantasy of feminine superpowers.
Like Mr. Alonso she wants, now, to see the comic as myth: the
reenactable myth of female empowerment of which Wonder Woman’s
superpowers were a metaphorical expression. But I think her
childish self must have had a better grasp of the distinction
between reality and wish-fulfilling fantasy than she apparently has
now.
Moreover, the brightly colored hyper-realism of the comics sends
its own message about the necessarily fantastical nature of what
they represent. The same paradox applies to 3-D, which couldn’t
take hold in the movies to the extent that it now has until the
movies themselves had become as completely identified with fantasy
as the comics have always been. The closer you get to perfect
visual verisimilitude, the further away you get from any other
kind, since you are inevitably emphasizing the artifice of the
medium by heightening the audience’s sense of illusion in
experiencing it. That’s why the motto of the anti-3-D party in
Hollywood is, according to Michael Cieply, also of the New York
Times, “If you can’t make it good, make it 3-D.” There does
seem to be a finite amount of disbelief-suspension that a
moviemaker, like any other artist, can ask of his audience. If he
uses it all up on spectacular visuals, there’s bound to be nothing
left for anything else, and he ends up with — Avatar,
which is both the highest-grossing movie of all time and one of the
worst, in my view.
AND THERE’S ANOTHER PARADOX for you. Audiences seem to love this
trash — perhaps just because, like comic books, it so obviously is
detached from reality — and yet a lot of directors who have
somehow managed to retain a shred of artistic integrity in spite of
having worked in Hollywood for years don’t. They’re balking at the
suits’ desire for more and more lucrative 3-D pictures. According
to Mr. Cieply, at the most recent Comic-Con convention in San Diego
audiences applauded those filmmakers who had resisted the studios’
pressure to make their movies in 3-D — or, even worse, to turn
them into 3-D movies once they had been made in 2-D:
The crowds cheered, as they had in an earlier Comic-Con briefing
by Chris Pirrotta and other staff members of the fan site
TheOneRing.net, who assured 300 listeners that a pair of planned
Hobbit films will not be in 3-D, based on the site’s
extensive reporting. “Out of 450 people surveyed, 450 don’t want 3D
for The Hobbit,” a later post on the Web site said. But in
Hollywood, an executive briefed on the matter — who spoke on the
condition of anonymity because of the delicate negotiations
surrounding a plan to have Peter Jackson direct the Hobbit
films — said the dimensional status of the movie remained
unresolved.
The dimensional status! There’s status anxiety for you. So on
the one hand you have Hobbits stretching off into the distance as
far as the eye can see, and on the other you have a visceral
reaction among a lot of the people who have chosen to deal with
this and similar stuff for a living against the movies’ further
leap into the merely cartoonish and fantastical. Their willingness
to pander to the most debased and unconservative of tastes appears
to have its limit after all. Who knew?
Could this be a sign of a growing movement in the direction of
reality in the movie industry? It’s hardly shown up yet in the
movies made in America, the homeland of unreality, but the fact
that it has shown up at all could be taken as significant of a
larger cultural shift. I am not the first to notice that of the
films which were up for the Best Picture Award at the Oscars this
year, all but two of the expanded category of 10 were made for
grown-ups. Four or five of them were even not too bad, though two
of these (including the winner, The King’s Speech) were
made by foreign directors. And by far the best in any category was
(as usual) the Best Foreign Language film, In a Better
World by the marvelous Dane Susanne Bier.
Yet on the bright side there was no Avatar in sight.
Not that there won’t be plenty more Avatar wannabes, lots
in 3-D, in the summer blockbuster season now just beginning. I
doubt that there will be many parents today who will try to keep
their children away from the trash, if only because pretty much
everything is trash now. By forbidding it they might even succeed,
as my mother did, in making the trash more attractive. On the other
hand, in a different cultural context — a context where almost
nothing is forbidden to them — children might instead begin to get
the idea that there is good and bad in art, not just generic
entertainment, and that there might be some value to them in
discriminating between the good and the bad. There’s no way to know
unless you try.
