Okay, I'm about to get all theoretical on your ass, so make sure you've braced yourself and you know the locations of your nearest emergency exits.
I don't think of myself as a 'fan' of literary theory. It's useful as a method of analysis, primarily of texts (as a job), but of all kinds of other stuff, too. Considering I'm in pop culture, it's only logical that I should be able to turn this stuff on anything, a movie, a comicbook, the design of a desk, the place-mat at a taco restaurant, whatever. Theory just isn't a useful expenditure of my time and energy unless it gives me a new tool of analysis, or it shows me what my analytical tools already were, and here emerges my point.
According to John Storey's three-page run down of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, I'm a deconstructionist structuralist, which is either a fantastic innovation for which money, tenure-track jobs, and adoring fans (or at least the middle one) will be reigned upon me, or it's a huge, gaping contradiction in my analytical approach.
The classic example of deconstruction is not letting binaries be. Deconstructionists, including myself, just don't like them. The binary structure is too fixed, to falsely self-evident for us, and it's usually based on shoring up a very specific power structure. The easiest example is male/female. Keeping those two things oppositional, and defining them in particular ways, supports the patriarchy.
If we have a problem with that, we have two choices as to what to do about it. We can either work to show that women are 'just as strong as' men, 'just as smart as,' etc. However, doing so merely supports the binary itself. We're still defining women against men. Our other choice is to try to disassemble the binary itself, show that the two things are not inherently seperate, that the definitions we use for them are arbitrary, basically lay bare the mechanisms that support the binaries, and the mechanisms that the binaries support.
However, to do so presupposes a social structure that is consistent, that has structures of power that work in a certain way. Basically, it presumes that society itself functions like a big machine, allowing certain kinds of discourse and disallowing others (hello M. Foucault). But the belief that there's an underlying mechanism to the whole system is structuralist, non?
That leaves me kinda between worlds. I like the deconstructionist method of looking at the world, "don't accept systems as they're presented, always question the system itself," but deconstructionism allies itself with post-structuralism, which doesn't like the very idea of an underlying structure. Both are based on the idea that the systems are constructs, that language itself (percieved as the building-block of all social systems) is in (according to Derrida), infinite deferal.
So where the hell does that leave me?
Stuart Hall and Paddy "greatest name for a critic I've ever seen!" Whannel's The Popular Arts, claim that all popular culture is "pre-digested," an idea they get from Theodor Adorno (all of which is according to John Storey's An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture).
I've had this thought myself (aren't I smart!), specifically in reference to the paper I'm working on right now, Villainous Soliloquy. My initial thoughts on the series, the thoughts that led to the paper, are here. In the mini, Luthor rehearses a remarkably eloquent argument for why he hates Superman and we should too. I argue that, no matter how convincing his argument is, a lot of readers will reject that argument 'because he's Lex Luthor.' Seventy years of superhero comics have created a cultural, or at the very least generic, presupposition that whatever Luthor says must be wrong, by definition. Therefore, if he uses critical language to make an argument, and he's alway wrong, then his rehearsal of that argument in the end merely condemns critical language itself, which is a great example of 'pre-digested' mass culture.
However, if we define mass culture as 'that which is pre-digested,' then we're presumming it's inferiority, both the art and the audience. We're presumming that counter-narratives are not possible within mass culture, but only as a matter of denotative semantics. See, I think counter narratives are not only possible, but demonstrably exist within mass culture. You don't have to look any further than comics by Moore, Gaiman, Ellis, Bendis, Ennis, and Morrison to see that, and that's merely the main stream!
Readers enter some art experiences, the theatre, the television, the book, with different expectations. In some contexts, they expect to be challenged, to have to think, to actively evaluate the content of what they're reading or seeing. In some contexts, they expect the art to be 'pre-digested,' to merely justify and support whatever they already believe. In a Superman comicbook, they expect the latter, but in many, many other comics, they expect the former. The difference in comics is obvious as hell, most of the time. Comics have different imprints, and theylshow pretty clearly whether they'll be challenged or spoon-fed (puke fed?). A DC or Marvel book is unlikely to challenge you, but Vertigo, ABC, Marvel MAX, Helix all signal "there here's a book that'll make yah think, dude."
Part of the mass-culture experience, then, is determining which art experiences advertise themselves as challenging and which as coddling. Counter-narratives are possible, but they're usually labelled as such so that you can avoid them if you like.
The real monkey-wrench in that system is the stuff that looks like it's mainstream coddling, but once you scratch the surface, has a whole lot more going on to it than that. Toss anything by Joss Whedon or J. Michael Straczinski in that pile, by the way. However, here's the tough part: if the audience takes it as a 'pre-digested' even though the content isn't, what happens? Some of the audience gets it and some don't. About one third of the reviews of Lex Luthor: Man of Steel that I saw on-line said that it was convincing, and about two-thirds said it wasn't, citing "it's Lex fucking Luthor!" That's a totally unscientific sample, of course. I don't claim it should have any mathematical weight. However, it does show that a good chunk of the 'mass market' doesn't read just for pre-digested art.
In closing, I'd just like to say, Stu, Paddy, you know I love ya, but get your heads out of your asses, okay?
I just read the end of Stormwatch a few weeks ago, and it felt, to me (as much as I loath psychoanalytic readings of writers' motivations) like Ellis was just plain annoyed at all the the red tape and politicing that he had to write into Stormwatch, so he built a team that would simply ignore such things.
In a way, Authority is like his personal power fantasy, all the things he'd love to go around world doing, given infinite power and resources. The soul of the book seems to be "fuck it, let's just do what we think is right." I feel, though I have not yet been able to locate in the text, that this is meant as dark satire, that Authority is supposed to be the logical progression of what a superhero team who thinks they know what's best for everyone would actually do. Given the freedom and power to act as they please, Jenny goes from not caring about anything to being a crusader for... something, and Jack and Swift go from nigh pacifists to enjoying killing people.
A lot of readers didn't take the series as dark satire, of course, and the writing itself wavers back and forth a lot. Seems to me that the Millar run was either so deep into the satire, from the characters' points of view, that it lost the little wink at the reader that indicates satire, and/or Millar was just getting off on the killing and the violence.
But that's beside the point, really, since the bulk of readers seemed to be doing the latter, and the readers' responses that have far more influence than the artists' intentions.
Explaining a villain's origins isn't the same thing as justifying his actions. The horrifying punchline of The Killing Joke is that anyone, even the best of us, could be driven to utter, psycopathic madness if pushed hard enough. The idea that there's a decent human being somewhere inside the Joker is far more frightning to me than having him just be irretrevably evil.
Of course, the book also counters that. Gordon survives his torture, and even tells Batman to bring Joker in 'by the book,' to "show him that our way works" (or words to that effect), so the story contains its own antithesis, as well. That there are some people who just won't go that far, by nature (Gordon) implies that there are also some who were inherently unstable to begin with, Joker and Batman (they are the two inmates at the asylum in Joker's joke at the end, after all).
It's a complex tale. Perhaps ideologically incosistent, but I think every character represents, performs, exactly what he really is, at the core.
That's the kind of Joker I'd like to see in the next Nolan/Bale Batman film. Someone who was normal, but was pushed so far that the only way that life makes sense anymore is to inflict the same pain he feels onto other people, his elaborate planning and theatricality implying that the universe really is out to get you. It's organised. It's conscious. All the atrocities happen on purpose. Joker has to believe that what happened to him, whatever it was, happens to everyone. It's a way of avoiding the personal outrage, the million-to-one odds, to place himself in universe in which others aren't so cosmically lucky as to have avoided his own fate.
There's a tendancy in a particular kind of mainstream fantasy, (by which I mean sci-fi, sword and sorcery, superheroes, whatever) to write metatexts, to have stories that talk about the fact that they're stories, and it's linked to the fan-writer.
See, the fan-turned-write grows up with a particular narrative, Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica, or Batman, or whatever. As she gets older, she realises that what she found engrossing and convincing as a child isn't as much so as an adult. Anybody who watched the 60s Batman show as a kid and then later as an adult knows what I'm talking about. Basically, kids are far more willing to suspend their disbelief.
So, as an adult, the fan-writer looks back at the story elements and says, 'Dang, we gots to fix this!' and alters the story so that it's more believable to an adult. You can see this in Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica. He justifies the remarkably low-technology of a space-faring society by saying that the antagonists are able to manipulate high-technology, specifically networked computers.
There's another easy path to suspension of disbeleif, though. Basically, when an audience member says, 'Hey! That doesn't make any sense,' a writer can just throw up her hands and say, 'Well, it is just a story.' Sometimes that's a childish gesture that basically says, 'stories aren't important, so don't worry about it,' or even worse 'fantasty stories aren't important.'
However, there are also times when that is a gesture of honesty and complexity. Gaiman and Moore do this all the time, revealing the constructed nature of their stories as a way to add layers of meaning and metaphor. 'Don't just read this for internal consistency or 'realism'' they say, 'read them for symbol and metaphor and reference!'
A particularly interesting example of this is in Batman Begins written by David S. Goyer, a comics writer. Much of that movie is devoted to explaining/justifying Bruce Wayne's decision to put on a bat costume and leap from roof-top to roof-top in Gotham. At night. One of the major elements of the justification is theatricality. Wayne acknowledges that he's playing a character (though how much he's playing the character and how much the character's playing him is another question!).
When Wayne says, "As a man I'm vulnerable, but as a symbol, I could be incorruptable" he's basically describing how Batman works as a fictional character. He's analysing the Batman story. Goyer justifies this character's decisions by obliquely alluding to how the narrative itself functions. Batman is a symbol, not to be treated as 'real,' in a sense. Not only is the audience not supposed to read these kinds of stories in realistic terms, but the characters don't either.
I've been kicked off of the internet many times, and I've announced a miraculous return to the digital livin' on more than a few occasions. I'm guessing I'm up to 5.
For the past two months my ISP, Primus, has been sitting on its thumbs and enjoying it way too much to fix my internet connection. Finally, literally 58 days into The Great 'Net Scare of '05, the fixed the damn thing. Frickin' idiots.
This is also my 60th entry on this-here blog, not counting the old Starman site.
The subject, today, is Warren Ellis' Global Frequency, an inspired premise and a series that left me wanting more. Essentially, just to ruin the surprise, instead of a super-team that swoops down from the heavens to save us poor, pathetic mortals, the Global Frequency is a network of skilled people around the world who, when need be, respond to 'the call' (they all have funky cell phones) and use whatever skills they have to save lives. They're kind of like Thunder Birds for a posthumanist age.
I say 'posthumanist' because there's a wiff of the emboddied but the dislocated going on. These characters, and the cast changes every issue depending on who answers the call, are part of a mutually-beneficial, extended network, instead of a central hero or even a team of heroes. The book is essentially democratic. You get to save the day by merit, and you get to do it yourself. It combines the child-like fantasy of being the hero with a powerful socio-political message.
It's not quite totally decentred, unfortunately. That would have been a bit more of a writing challenge, but this series has two regular characters, the leader/organiser of the Global Frequency, Miranda Zero ('not her real name, but the only one you're getting'), and the network interface point (sexy punk chick named Aleph). Aleph has a base of operations somewhere under New York city, in which is housed her huge computers that manage the various interfaces, and Miranda seems to have inexaustable resources coming from somewhere.
I can imagine a low-tech, totally decentred version of this story. Simply a bunch of people with chat windows and cell phones and email who discover horrible things happening and, instead of relying on a central source of organisation or funding, rely on the power of the network. Need a helicopter? There's a member of the Global Frequency who flies a news chopper ten blocks away. Need someone to translate Sanskrit? There's a professor from Egypt on the line for you. You could do all of this without a central character or any 'marvelous toys.' As for the origins of the whole thing, maybe nobody knows? The creation of high-tech communications technology might just 'give rise' to these kinds of global communities, which is itself a fun idea to play with in a sci-fi book.
Of course, totally decentering the story would take some of the fun out of it from a writer's and a reader's standpoint, but it would also inject a certain kind of fun back into it, not to mention creating a truly unified premis.
Dr. Wong Fei Hung is the one character to be portrayed in more movies world-wide than any other, and he's a historical figure. Regardless of historical accuracy, he has become a towering figure in kung fu cinema, a master physician who lays a beating down like nobody's business.
Both Jackie Chan and Jet Li have portrayed Dr. Wong. Chan's Drunken Master movies showed him as a young man, irresponsible and under his father's guidance, learning the secrets of drunken boxer-style kung fu. Chan's physical comedy is a perfect match to the premise, which has Wong Fei-Hung getting smashed drunk and beating the hell out of everyone in sight, often as not while prancing around like a waitress at a bar.
Chan's version works partly because it's a parodic, but gentle, reference to the earlier versions of the character, who were usually middle-aged men who reminded you of your granddad, if he knew kung fu. Li's version, however, is also a young man (Li was in his 20s when he started portraying the character), but he's also a grown-up, a doctor, and a well-respected member of the community, for being generous with his medical skills as well as laying the smack down on local bad guys.
There were two Drunken Master movies (the second one's better, despite Chan's age making suspension of disbelief a little difficult to come by), and three of Li's. The first one is amazing, by the way. The sequels far, far less so. Put Jet Li and Yeun Woo-ping on the same movie, and you're going to have a good time. Even Danny the Dog (a.k.a., Unleashed) didn't suck nearly as much as it could have.
But my point, and I do have one, is that both of these sets of movies were made, filmed, and watched at around the same time. Drunken Master II was made in 1994, and Once Upon a Time in China in '91. Now that I think of it, the success of the latter might have inspired Chan to make that sequal, since the first Drunken Master movie was way back in '78.
Okay, really, the point now. No more mucking about in IMDB. At the end of Last Hero in China (sorry), Li's fourth Wong Fei Hung movie, Li's Dr. Wong lapses into Chan's Fei Hung. He faces a kung fu master, a laughing police chief who's actually a member of the Boxer Rebells, whom he cannot beat. Throughout the movie, there are side-long references to Dr. Wong promising his father he would never drink, a reference to Chan's Drunken Master movies, but in the end, Li sucks back two giant pots of rice wing, and goes all drunken on the police cheif's ass.
Suffice it to say, as talented and physically amazing as Li is, he's not Jackie Chan. Nobody else is really capable of that kind of physical comedy, perfectly timed with fight scenes. Chan was trained in the Chinese Opera, after all, and Li was an actual fighter.
The wierd thing is the intertextual reference. Last Hero in China is an action movie that centres on a monastery of 'perverted monks' who kidnap worshipping women and sell them into sex slavery. Nevertheless, it's a comedy. Dr. Wong manages to beat his opponent's hired goons by dressing up as a rooster, for example. No shit. A fuckin' rooster. So in this comedy-fu movie starring the illustrious Dr. Wong Fei Hung, the perfect little wink at the audience is for Li to do Chan doing young Fei Hung doing drunken-style kung fu. It doesn't work on a visual level. Li can't quite pull it off, like I said, but the complex web of cinematic, literary, and cultural references (the equivalent of dime-store novels were what made Dr. Wong famous to begin with) makes the moment that Li takes Chan's drunken stance a real pay-off for a fan of the genre.