Shiny, Shiny Cowboys
Right now, DC Comics must be hoping that all publicity is good publicity – even if it’s of the oh-god-please-make-it-stop-worst-movie-of-the-year-kill-me-now variety.
The Jonah Hex movie has just been released, starring Josh Brolin as DC’s Old West anti-hero. It is, apparently, hellishly awful. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve already decided to forgive it some of its apparently glaring flaws – if only because it Todd DeZuniga says it was such a thrill to see his name in the credits. He’s the artist who co-created Jonah Hex way back in 1972, and he deserves all the thrills he can get.
To capitalise on the film’s release, DC have released a new hardcover graphic novel called No Way Back – a companion to the regular Jonah Hex series that’s been running for fifty-something issues now. Just like the series, it’s a solid example of stripped-down genre storytelling. The fact that almost every issue of Jonah Hex is a complete story, done-in-one, means it ditches most of the pleasures of ongoing continuity; instead, its writers – Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti – thrive on the tension that exists between repetition and variation.
Another corrupt sheriff, another bounty claimed, another woman who can’t be trusted. How do you make each different than the last?
The best thing about the graphic novel, though, is that DeZuniga returns to draw it. His artwork is sketchy and unpredictable: lines like they’re cut into the page, angry faces half-formed, all perfect for capturing the filth of Jonah’s world.
That’s why it’s entirely ridiculous that it’s printed on shiny, shiny paper.
DeZuniga’s art is fundamentally wrong for this plasticky stock. I know it seems like a superficial criticism, but as I read it dragged me out of the story like high-pitched squealing layered under a favourite song.
I’ve talked before about how some comic books – once intended to be disposable at best – sit uncomfortably in enormous, expensive hardcovers. That’s why I gave full credit to DC for its refusal to overly fancify its recent omnibuses collecting Jack Kirby’s Fourth World saga.
(Yes, “fancify” is a word. Maybe you should buy a fancier dictionary and look it up.)
They’re printed on something like regular newsprint, just a little thicker. This decision caused what critic Tucker Stone called “the irritating paper debate”:
“…meaning that a lot of random websites and Amazon reviews are still crying foul about how DC decided to print these Kirby books on what seems to be all that Baxter paper left over from the 80s.”
I mean, how did “shinier” become synonymous with “better”? It’s not, no more than television in 16:9 widescreen is somehow automatically of higher quality than what’s shot in good old-fashioned 4:3.
I’d say that when even the cover of your graphic novel is faux-aged – with small tears and scuffed corners pre-added for maximum Old West authenticity – maybe it’s a sign you should rethink your high-gloss interior sheen.
For best results, read Jonah Hex: No Way Back after dragging it for a few miles behind your horse.
Coppélia: Dolls Tired from Dancing
So The Australian Ballet’s latest is the rather bizarre ballet Coppélia, and they were nice enough to ask me to write for their programme about how modern special effects were leaking onto the stage in 1870s Paris. Primitive automatons! Magic shows! Uh… exclamation points!
Coppélia (Leanne Stojmenov) and Dr. Coppelius (Damien Welch). Photography by Branco Gaica.
Mostly, I focused on the ballet’s villain, Doctor Coppelius. He’s depicted as a sad and lonely inventor, surrounded by his odd mechanical creations – some half-finished, some almost human. In the original horror story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, though, he’s an alchemist suspected to be ‘The Sandman’, and is much more monstrous. (Like stealing-childrens’-eyes more monstrous.)
Yet he’s not the most horrific thing in the story. That role belongs to his beautiful, artificial faux-daughter, Coppélia. In the ballet’s programme, I write:
“The existence of a lifelike doll in Hoffmann’s original tale is not a charming curiosity. After the truth of his creation is revealed, Hoffmann describes lovers forcing one another to sing and dance off-key and out of time, just to prove they are human. Otherwise how can they be sure?”
Popular culture has provided us with more supposedly scientific ways to test if someone’s human, like the Voight-Kampff machine made famous by Blade Runner. The movie’s production designer described it like this: “Basically it was a lie-detector machine. The lie is, I am not a replicant.”
In fact, as I saw the frail Doctor Coppelius appear on stage, I was reminded of J. F. Sebastian, Blade Runner’s old inventor, living alone except for his toys. The nursery rhyme his toys sing to him – “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig” – still plays in my head with alarming regularity.
Blade Runner – and a gazillion other science fiction stories too, of course – are designed to make us wonder if we’re human after all. How can we really tell? Singing out of tune and moving off the beat? Close analysis of our pupil dilation at embarrassing questions? Maybe it’s just as the theme song ‘Coppélia’s Coffin’ from the anime series Noir says:
“People are dolls tired from dancing / Sheep on the altar / The mechanical dreams / Where are they headed?”
We’re all just dolls, tired from dancing. Coppélia tries to dismiss these question with the light-hearted farce and energetic dancing at its beginning and end – but they remain bubbling under the surface of the stage while we’re in Doctor Coppelius’ lair.
An odd postscript: Coppélia’s choreographer, Arthur Saint-Leon, isn’t only famous for his ballets; he also invented an early form of notation to record these all-important steps. Ironically, he failed to record his work on Coppélia, and it only survived as its popularity kept it in almost constant circulation – even though it was initially interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war. What if it hadn’t been so lucky?
And another: in 2007, Japanese scientists offered a strange solution: a human-sized robot that could mimic the steps of a human dancer. In this way, the specific movements of folk dances could be perfectly captured and replayed, even after its original performers were long dead. “My impression is that there would still be a human element lacking,” one English folk dancer is quoted as saying. “The robot would still look, for the want of a better word, robotic.”
We keep telling ourselves that – but I can’t help feeling like it’s just modernity’s equivalent of whistling past a graveyard.
Jack Bauer: No More Fun
Here’s another expanded chunk of my ACMI lecture on ‘Loveable Murderers’. (You can read the first piece here.) Who knew that 24 would finally come to an end between now and then?
Back in 2007, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan said: “The disturbing thing is that, although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.” When even the military asked producers to tone down torture on 24, it’s sometimes difficult to explain why I watched all eight seasons.
In fact, I confused some of the ACMI audience by accidentally sounding so pro-death penalty. In fiction, it’s surprisingly easy to say that some people ‘deserve to die’. In reality, I’m a bleeding-heart liberal crybaby. But I still enjoyed much of 24’s car crashes and inexplicable traitors and clenched fists and, yeah, even torture scenes. I guess I’m with Sarah Vowell, who wrote back in 2006 that “…there is a jarring disconnect between what I want my real-life intelligence officers to be doing versus what I want my fake TV intelligence officers to be doing.”
My lecture mostly focused on Showtime’s Dexter as the pin-up boy for loveable murderers everywhere. (Come on, he’s pretty dreamy.) But what’s the real difference between Dexter Morgan and Jack Bauer? Is there a slippery slope between how Dexter justifies his kills with ‘Harry’s Code’ and how Jack Bauer tortures in the name of patriotism?
I asked Dr. Jessica Wolfendale. She’s an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at West Virginia University, and the author of the book Torture and the Military Profession. You can listen to her response here:
Jack vs Dexter
In essence, what separates these men is that Dexter enjoys what he does, and Jack does not.
Further, as Derek Johnson noted recently, 24 does happily suggest torture results in “actionable intelligence”, but it also shows us what it does to the torturer. “Jack may repeatedly stop terrorist attacks,” he writes, “but at the expense of his loved ones, the health of the American political institution, and ultimately, his own humanity.”
As it continued, it was fascinating to see 24 slowly begin a new war – one against its own perceived politics. Season seven introduced a barrage of ways to address qualms over Jack’s actions. Jack was called to government hearings to justify his violence; he offended and befriended an Islamic imam; he explained that while he knows that laws have to be the most important thing, his heart won’t let him stand back when he thinks something needs to be done.
The series’ final shot – Jack, staring up into the camera of a high-flying spy drone, saying goodbye – was a suitable finish. Jack doesn’t get a happy ending. No well-deserved peace. Like John Wayne, walking away from the family he’s helped reunite at the end of The Searchers, he’s got too much blood on his hands to re-enter civilization.
(And the surveillance aspect was fitting, too, considering the obsession with mediated communication required for 24’s real-time gimmick to function.)
But it’s the ending of the penultimate episode, though, that might’ve sealed Jack’s fate. Pushed too far, out for revenge, Jack gets an old enemy in the crosshairs of his sniper rifle. Just before the familiar ticking clock ends the episode, we see him smile.
Jack’s enjoying himself. Suddenly, he’s Dexter Morgan.
Harry Brown: jmag review
Here’s my short review of UK revenge flick Harry Brown from the latest issue of jmag. One thing I didn’t manage to squeeze into the wordcount was a mention of its killer opening scene – like a low-rent remake of the first moments of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.
HARRY BROWN
Directed by: Daniel Barber
Starring: Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer
Country: UK
Michael Caine has always been a “working actor”, happy to accept a role now rather than wait around for something better. It’s why he’s been in so many great films as well as so many shockers. Harry Brown is somewhere in the middle.
This “vigilante pensioner” flick plays shamelessly into the story currently fuelling newspapers worldwide: KIDS THESE DAYS ARE SOCIOPATHIC MONSTERS WHO’LL KILL YOU AS SOON AS LOOK AT YOU, GRANDPA! Caine brings echoes of his legendary 1971 Get Carter hardarse to Harry – an elderly ex-marine who decides enough is enough. The emotional realism of his performance gives the movie a classiness that doesn’t mesh with its grimy, cartoonish thrills. (Especially the ridiculous digitally-added spurting blood.)
Most vigilante films pay at least a little lip-service to the fact that revenge is wrong – fun, sure, but wrong. Harry Brown has no such qualms. You’ll have to balance your desire to see Michael Caine kill teenage thugs with how dirty cheering him on might make you feel afterwards.
Other reviews this month: Fish Tank, Baghead, and True Blood: Season Two on DVD.
Issue #40 on sale now.