Psy-Ops, Simplicity, and Superheroes
When I first heard that comic books were air-dropped onto war zones, I remember thinking it must be a goodwill gesture. Something fun, something bright. Something to distract the suffering children.
Yes, I’m an idiot.
It somehow didn’t click that the thousands of comics, say, dropped on Iraq in the early ‘90s were more likely show Saddam Hussein cutting off his own head than a cheery selection of Calvin and Hobbes.
I was planning to discuss psy-ops and propaganda comics while writing about Joe Sacco’s Footnotes In Gaza for Bookslut, but Sacco distracted me with his hundreds of pages of heartbreak. Would it have been too tenuous to compare his work with Captain America punching Hitler back in 1941? They’re both designed to win hearts and change minds, after all. And comics have a long history of being used as propaganda – whether to rally support at home like Hitler’s glass jaw above, or loaded into cluster bombs and dropped on the enemy to destroy morale.
Sometimes, however, the pretty pictures can have the opposite effect. During World War II, the Japanese reportedly dropped leaflets designed to convince American soldiers their wives were busy being unfaithful at home; they were illustrated – ahem – graphically enough that they became collector’s items. “Our guys loved it,” says military historian Stanley Sadler. “They’d trade them like baseball cards.”
That same article by Ian Urbina references a failed use of superhero-specific propaganda, too. In 2000, DC Comics made special Superman and Wonder Woman comics in multiple languages to illustrate the dangers of land mines. But… umm… what were those weird, word-filled clouds hanging over the heroes’ heads? Urbina explains:
“Though widely understood in some contexts, thought bubbles appearing above a cartoon character’s head left some readers, especially rural ones, completely baffled, according to press accounts.”
The perceived simplicity of comic art is what makes it so appealing for cross-cultural propaganda. Unfortunately – and setting aside the possibility that this story is another example of the “caveman panic” rumour circulating around the Lumière train – it’s never that simple. Read this fascinating piece on the attempts to cure “The Forever Problem” at a New Mexico nuclear waste vault. Once you set aside a shared written language and a shared visual vocabulary, how do you communicate grave danger to humans living a thousand years from now?
Comic books have hundreds of specific visual conventions, from the wavy lines above an angry man’s head in the newspaper funnies to the ornate font Marvel’s currently using to imply that Thor and their other Norse Gods sound kinda ‘Ye Olde’.
And superhero comics may be many things – daft, adolescent, awe-inspiring, overtly sexist and conceptually daunting – but they’re rarely simple.
The Men Who Stare At Goats: jmag review
Here’s my quick review of The Men Who Stare At Goats from the latest issue of jmag. With this source material and calibre of cast, I had such high hopes…
THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS
Directed by: Grant Heslov
Starring: Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges
Country: USA
The Men Who Stare At Goats starts with the statement: “More of this is true than you would believe.” And that’s both what’s wrong and what’s right with the movie.
It works best when it’s showing the secret history of the US Army’s unit of psychic spies, trained in paranormal abilities by a Lebowskiesque guru played by Jeff Bridges. These flashbacks, though, are intercut with a tacked-on storyline in the present about a journalist (Ewan McGregor) stumbling across a man who claims to be a member of “Project Jedi” on a secret mission in Iraq (George Clooney).
Sounds awesome? It’s inspired by Jon Ronson’s wildly entertaining book, but it misses the point that the book’s fascinating precisely because it’s non-fiction. (I mean, the soldiers are trained in something called the “sparkly eyes technique”!)
While The Men Who Stare At Goats is intermittently entertaining, it turns everything into farcical comedy. It should’ve realised that when your source material is this batshit, you play it straight.
Just one other review this month: the bizarre Twilight Zone-inspired Pontypool.
Issue #37 on sale now.
Directed by: Grant Heslov
Starring: Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges
Country: USA
Stars: 2
The Men Who Stare At Goats starts with the statement: “More of this is true than you would believe.” And that’s both what’s wrong and what’s right with the movie.
It works best when it’s showing the secret history of the US Army’s unit of psychic spies, trained in paranormal abilities by a Lebowskiesque guru played by Jeff Bridges. These flashbacks, though, are intercut with a tacked-on storyline in the present about a journalist (Ewan McGregor) stumbling across a man who claims to be a member of “Project Jedi” on a secret mission in Iraq (George Clooney).
Sounds awesome? It’s inspired by Jon Ronson’s wildly entertaining book, but it misses the point that the book’s fascinating precisely because it’s non-fiction. (I mean, the soldiers are trained in something called the “sparkly eyes technique”!)
The Men Who Stare At Goats is intermittently entertaining, but it turns everything into farcical comedy. It should’ve realised that when your source material is this entertainingly batshit, you play it straight.
Rooting For The Overdog
Now that Glee has been off our screens long enough to finaly banish its catchy pop earworms, I’ve realised something: it’ll take more than a slushie to the face to convince me that any of the cast are ‘underdogs’.
Glee prides itself on its underdog status. It’s constantly announcing that the members of the Glee Club are losers and outcasts. One promotional tagline was “A biting comedy for the underdog in all of us.” They’re even planning an upcoming competition to find new castmembers via Idolish auditions; one of the show’s creators, Ryan Murphy, told Variety that “anybody and everybody now has a chance to be on a show about talented underdogs.”
Blame my own torturous high school years, but I wholeheartedly empathised with the pain inside every single character in Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks. And before Josh Schwartz’ The OC pulled off the unlikely feat of transforming Seth Cohen from a friendless nerd into a bonafide heart throb, Seth’s hatred of high school felt genuine, too.
(There’s a heartbreaking moment near the end of The OC season two where Summer – the school’s resident princess and now, amazingly, Seth’s girlfriend – is looking through their yearbook with fond nostalgia. Then she notices that Seth is friendless in every single picture, and that she’ll never understand.)
I don’t feel any actual high school angst sitting under the loser-labels that Glee loves to throw around. The show effectively mines emotion out of Kurt’s coming out to his working-class father, yes, but otherwise it relies on its powerballads as sentimental shorthand. The slushie-to-the-face is meant to be quick visual iconography for unpopularity – but it’s a mostly empty gesture.
The recent movie Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief pushes this desire for a token underdog even further. We’re told Percy’s a loser. He admits it. We get one short scene of him supposedly struggling in school and, uh, that’s it. Other than that maybe half-a-minute of film, he seems like a together, popular, even cocky teenager. The screenwriters might as well have just given him a t-shirt with UNDERDOG written on it, dusted off their hands, and considered Percy’s backstory complete.
Do we like the idea of rooting for the underdog, but find actual losers a little too… loserey?
Jennifer’s Body – the teen horror film penned by Diablo Cody and starring Megan Fox – made a massive miscalculation when it choose its victims for Jennifer’s demonic tendencies. When Carrie eviscerated her prom back in 1976, it was the bloody revenge of the powerless against the powerful. Jennifer, however, is the most popular girl in school. Where’s the joy in watching her horribly maim her unpopular classmates? That’s not fun, fantasy, or vicarious thrills. That’s just high school.
(There is, however, plenty of fun to be had in seeing Adam Brody – The OC’s Seth Cohen – all evilled and eyelinered as the film’s true villain.)
Glee is witty and good-hearted enough that I do still enjoy it, despite the hesitations above and many others, too. (Lazy writing! Haphazard plotting! Bizarre song choices with nothing to do with the scene at hand!) After all, Jane Lynch’s delivery as the surreally wicked Sue Sylvester is enough of a reason to watch.
Even if it never becomes the Heathers: The Musical like I secretly desire, I hope it lives up to its potential. Don’t stop believin’ just quite yet.
Caveman Panic and the Lumière Train
As a child, I was fascinated by the idea of being thrown back in time. I especially loved those stories where a time-traveller goes back and convinces the primitive population of his obvious divinity with only the few artefacts of modern life that he happened to have on him.
Cigarette lighters. Cassette players. Unlikely knowledge of the next solar eclipse.
I couldn’t help thinking of those poor cavemen when I read this paragraph in a recent piece on cinema and horror in The Guardian:
“It seems obvious now that one of the inherent functions or opportunities that always faced the movies was scaring the living daylights out of us. When the train came into the station in the Lumiere brothers’ early film programme, some in the audience ran out of the theatre screaming. They thought the engine was going to come out of the screen and hit them!”
Everyone’s heard this story, over and over again. In 1895, Louis Lumière showed his short film Arrival of the Train and terrified the audience, causing them to shout, scream, and leap from their chairs in panic. This wasn’t a documentary; it was black magic.
Writing for The Moving Image journal in 2004, Martin Loiperdinger says that as the crowd’s reaction has been told and retold, it has become “the founding myth of the medium, testifying to the power of film over its spectators.” He concludes:
“Paradoxically, Arrival of the Train has come to represent both the modernity of Louis Lumière’s first documentary films, their visual power to shock audiences, and a precursor of Direct Cinema. However, neither attribute really stands up to film historical analysis.”
So maybe the crowd weren’t frightened after all, and a few excited ooohs and aaahs have been exaggerated, purple-monkey-dishwasher-style, into something more memorable. I can see why we want to believe. It’s not only an object lesson in cinematic oomph; it also lets us feel superior to those primitive audiences, sitting in the dark, screaming endearingly at the flickering images before them.
In a subsequent issue of the same journal, Ray Zone writes about a fact that seems like something everyone but those cavemen and me must’ve already known.
Why is it never mentioned, he wonders, that only two months before this infamous screening of Arrival of the Train, “a runaway locomotive at the Montmartre Station in Paris broke through a second story wall and plummeted down into the street”?
This allows the crowd their own history, rather than requiring them to be blank-faced witnesses of oncoming modernity. Maybe they weren’t thinking: oh god, this Lumière wizard has conjured a train from thin air that now rushes forth to kill us one and all!
Maybe they winced and thought: too soon.