Cognitive Dissonance

Why do I keep watching Smallville when the show has never risen above mediocrity? For the same reason I kept collecting every X-Men comic until more recently than I'd like to admit: I want to know what's going to happen. It's a mythology that I find easy to invest in unlike, say, Dollhouse - another mediocre show (albeit one with a much better cast, much more interesting themes, and much better writing). I can't give Dollhouse any more time because it has way too many serious narrative blind spots (and a central character and actress who don't much interest me) and yet I continue to watch Smallville every week. It's a lot easier to explain why I don't watch a show that I don't like than it is to explain why I refuse to stop watching a show I don't like. I tolerate Smallville in strange ways: I can laugh when the show is intentionally funny, when it's unintentionally funny, when it rips off Buffy for the thousandth time and botches the idea, when it nods to DCU continuity in clever ways, when it nods to DCU continuity in clumsy ways ("Some kind of Junior Lifeguard Association?" "I don't think I'm ready for the JLA just yet."), and its dogged insistence on dressing up all its super-heroes in pleather and hoods.

But, mostly, I just want to know what's going to happen. And I can't honestly tell you why.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine last night, and just felt the need to apologize to someone.

I'm sorry. It won't happen again.

Spoiler Alert

OK, I'm not trying to split hairs here, but something Dan DiDio said in his most recent interview column over at Newsarama gave me pause. Regarding the revelation that Nekron is the antagonist of Geoff Johns's Blackest Night event, DiDio explains his stance on spoilers:

We also put out information to drum up and excite readers, and to get people interested. And that Nekron issue is at the halfway mark of Blackest Night. So we wanted to get out there and show people there's a big change and something occurring within the series, and it's not just repeating the same beats over and over again. There is progression in the story. That's why you get information released like with Nekron.

In essence, DiDio is arguing that spoilers increase interest. Fair enough. That's why people read them: because they are interested. Cynically, one could add that one might seek out spoilers because the stories in question are not worth reading in themselves but a lifetime of continuity-fetishization has created an addiction to the minutiae of the ongoing adventures of certain characters or universes.

But then Mr. DiDio adds this:

This is part of an argument we had back when I had stated there were 52 multiverse worlds as part of the ending of 52. What did that mean? What did that give away? What did that spoil? Not really sure. But it did generate a lot of interest in the end of the book. And that's what we were hoping to do.

I think DiDio is playing some word games here. A little Clintonian "It depends on your what your definition of the word 'is' is." He's clearly playing coy because a spoiler, in his newfound sense of the word, is the story itself. If telling readers that one of the endings of 52 would involve the return of the multiverse isn't a spoiler in his mind, then what is? If I told him that Hamlet dies at the end of Hamlet, but not how or why, it's still a revelation that is housed within the plot. Whether or not it diminishes his/my/your enjoyment is secondary. Mr. DiDio didn't disclose the means by which the universes would be restored, or what alternate versions of DC characters they would house, but he told fans what the ending would be. That Hamlet would die.

It's clear why, though, from his earlier statement. "What did that spoil," he asks - disingenuously, I think. Mr. DiDio is a smart man. He knows that he gave away a significant plot point for the purpose of generating interest in the hopes that the interest would translate into sales. The battle between art and commerce once again. I agree with his implication that certain spoilers won't significantly affect one's enjoyment of their entertainment of choice. And I am also aware that he's dealing with a particular, and peculiar, niche market - if you're the type of person who reads interviews with Dan DiDio (guilty!), you probably were the type of person who figured out that the multiverse would be coming back at the end of 52. And if you're reading super-hero comics (guilty!), you're already in a pretty small niche. Revealing the Nekron is the baddie behind Blackest Night isn't actually a big deal. Some people probably really enjoy the hunt for his appearances back issues, or trying to piece together his current evil plot from previous evil plots. That would signify, certainly, some interest that wouldn't have been there otherwise. But it's also a spoiler. It spoiled the plot, so it's a spoiler. It would be nice to get some candor and not hair-splitting rationalizations of business decisions, but what can you do.

Demo - "Damaged"

I will confess upfront that I find "Damaged" to be one of less satisfying offerings in Demo. I'm not sure it entirely succeeds in what it sets out to do, but it's nice when someone swings for the fences - something Wood & Cloonan attempt pretty regularly in Demo.

Thomas Martin is young, rich, and - apparently - a creep. Or so we're told, anyway, because there really isn't any evidence of his being a creep in the story. A strange young girl of rather indeterminate age approaches him and claims to be able to "read" him. He offers her money - out of guilt or obligation at first, and then as a form of salary when she begins to act as his therapist. After two weeks of sessions and seemingly by chance, Thomas discovers that his unnamed counselor is living in the adjacent unit in his building and spying on him with all sorts of high tech equipment. Thomas chases her out into the street where he is hit by a car and killed. At his funeral, the girl gives the money Thomas had given her to his mother, and tells her that Thomas had been working hard to become a better person. The ambiguity of the girl's role in the plot is further emphasized when the final image of her shadow mirrors the blood splatter of Thomas's accident.

The question the story seems to beg comes from that very ambiguity: can you really know anyone? Thomas is alienated, as the spirit guide/con artist makes explicit. "If I had your money, your clothes, your job, your friends and your apartment, I'd feel empty inside too. And you still haven't figured out how to cope with it all." We're told more than once that Thomas has no friends. He certainly jumps at the opportunity to spend time with the mysterious girl who claims to know all about his life, a decision that no one outside of a piece of fiction would make. It all feels so very staged. During one of their sessions, she even helps Thomas with this old chestnut: why didn't that girl ever call me back? Answer: because you left too many messages, of course. The reason Thomas is lonely is that his failures are cliched pop-psychological hangups that were over-analyzed in small-budget films of the late 1990s. Obviously. When Thomas needs relationship advice, and gets a riff that could be from an early Kevin Smith movie or Swingers, the characters are not simply communicating in cliches: they're precisely not able to communicate because they can only understand their lives in cliches. Thomas is a flat character, and we will never know anything essential about him.

The story denies us an easy window into Thomas's life, and forces us to interpret it through exposition. Nor do we get an answer as to the unnamed spirit guide/scam artist's motivation. Her audio/video set-up seems to undermine her claim to magical knowledge, but she doesn't keep the money she draws from Thomas. The general lack of clarity in the plot is a reminder that these characters are essentially unknowable. The story is uninterested in whether or not the girl is a telepath or a con artist who undergoes a change of heart. The story isn't even interested in whether or not Thomas is likable. Questions of likability revolve around questions of essential identity, which none of the characters have.

There is an implication that the city is partially responsible for the characters' alienation. Thomas hasn't spoken to his mother in years, and their emotional distance is emphasized by the fact that she lives in Queens. But the urban disconnection remains an unexplored theme, lingering in the background of scenes. Thomas catches the girl out because she says she will walk, and then takes a cab (and then leaves her door open WHILE SHE'S IN THE SHOWER for some unknowable reason). Cloonan fills the issue with photocopied images of New York. They're degraded, fitting awkwardly into backgrounds and the manga-like characters who populate the story. Even the bills that Thomas uses to pay the girl, $100s, are photocopied. Cloonan helps create a world where object seem flatter, less tactile, at odds with each other. None of the characters look like they fit into this world. When the story closes on a splash page of the girl casting a shadow that looks like the blood that spilled from Thomas's head after he was hit by a car, it's a stark contrast to the images of city skylines that recur frequently in Demo. No city, no landscape in which to place the girl, no context to understand her.

No one is at ease in this story. No one quite fits. No one's actions really make sense. The inscrutability - the girl's motivation going entirely unexplained, Thomas's sudden look of murderous rage when he finds her out - is the point. The girl's motivations are never made clear and the story ends with an image that implies a certain degree of culpability in Thomas's death, but it's never spelled out. Was she scamming him, and then driven to return the money out of guilt for his death? If so, why be so careless? If she really could read his mind, why set up the spy equipment? This essential disconnect between how characters act and how those actions are interpreted lies at the heart of the story. At the funeral, when his mother explains who Thomas is, the story rings false. Thomas, she tells us, that "he was always a mess." A miserable kid, she says he was "a bully, torturing the strays in our neighborhood, stealing from me, you name it. Bad grades, horrible attitude. It's a no wonder he never had any friends." This explains Thomas's one moment of rage, but it still doesn't seem as if it's a description of the character. Thomas is all of those things, but less. He's a cipher, a mess of contradictory motivations and emotions, and that's sort of the point. Thomas tries to change how people react to him more than he tries to change anything central in his character. He is more than the sum of his parts, and much less. Who is he doesn't really matter, because there is no essential Thomas. He only exists in his encounters with others.

"Damaged" is another attempt on the part of Wood & Cloonan to tell stories about how people interact that stumbles as it overreaches but it gets a little overwhelmed in its ambiguity. Just look at that cover - angel's wings and a laurel wreath? What the what? Still, it takes on an interesting set of themes and I'd rather read a story that tries to do something substantial and fails than one that is satisfied to have two characters punch each other for twenty two pages.

Next time: "Midnight to Six"

Demo - "Breaking Up"

Moving away from the grim and maudlin "Mixtape," Wood & Cloonan tell a somewhat similar story in "Breaking Up." It's about, quite surprisingly given the title, the end of Gabe and Angie's relationship. The plot skips achronologically about their time together, highlighting the pettiness and selfishness that ultimately lead to the parting. Though it seems to have at least a structural similarity to the recent Joseph Gordon-Levitt/Zooey Deschanel movie 500 Days of Summer, "Breaking Up" is a bit more Slaughterhouse 5. Gabe is, somewhat, unstuck in time. He has perfect recollection. The narrative skipping around has actually been Gabe's memories and it seems as if he lives in multiple moments simultaneously. Or, perhaps more accurately, he doesn't live in continuous moments. He's a bit like Dr. Manhatten, without the nudity and super-powers. Not a bad comparison because he often seems, well, dickish. This is partly because he's reacting to things Angie once said to him - his memories of her, her contradictions, her capacity for cruelty. Like a lot of the female characters in Demo, Angie doesn't come out looking too great. But neither does Gabe, who's a mess of insecurities, thoughtlessness, and little emotional infidelities. For all that, though, the ending of the story is quite poignant. After a highlight-reel of Angie's worst moments, Gabe recalls the good ones, the ones that brought them together, the selfless acts, the intimacy. He asks Angie if they'll still talk. It's both sad and pathetic and Wood & Cloonan hint at the remarkable grace of forgetting.

Grace is, for some odd reason, the word that keeps popping into my mind with this story. Whereas "Mixtape" seemed so concerned with making a point about forgiveness that it couldn't quite articulate, "Breaking Up" shows how horrible memories can be. Yet, they are often all we have of some people. Gabe, like most of us, is drawn to selfish memories when he's hurt, moments where he was slighted or wronged or, in hindsight, he was lied to. Angie is, of course, not a liar for having said one thing and then having changed her mind about it later, but Gabe can't distinguish the past from the present. At different moments in the story, he actually responds to a comment Angie made in the past as if she had just said it.

Wood & Cloonan use memory and image here to great effect. This story is permeated with questions about the power of the image over the failure of textual language. That old comicbook battle: are we art or are we literature? I don't think that Wood & Cloonan are drawing a line in the sand or anything - this story is just one long reflection on how important, but ultimately ambiguous, all representations (like art or memory) must be.

Cloonan doesn't illustrate Gabe's memories from his point of view: he's visible in most of them, for one thing. That helps add a layer of ambiguity to the story. Though Gabe professes to have something akin to photographic memory, he actually defines it as an aural skill. "Well, not really a photographic memory per se, but I do have this spooky ability to remember things people say, forever." He locates his memory not in image, but in language.

But this isn't prose; it's a comicbook. As such, we get something that doesn't quite feel like an approximation of Gabe's powers in visual form. There is an heightened sense of representation, or interpretation. These are images, and so cannot be Gabe's perfect recollections. This demands a lot from Cloonan, who does outstanding work in this issue. She chronicles changes in hair-styles, weight loss and gain, time, a vast range of emotions, and what might be Gabe's receding hairline. [Not sure about that last one, but I'd like to think that was a little flair she added to Wood's script.] These images, we are reminded, are not Gabe's memories. They are the images constructed around the conversations he recalls. They are unfixed. There is only one single moment when the picture is from Gabe's point of view. It's Angie, above him, while they're having sex. It comes immediately after an image of Angie being comforted by Gabe, tears running down her face. They're both dressed in black, and she's holding a picture frame - someone she loves has died. The wordless montage at the end, in which both these images are featured, comes in response to Angie asking Gabe if he really wants to stay together. Whereas the images of the fights and the damage done is mainly about the things that Angie said (the promise to love Gabe forever, the mocking laughter, the passive aggressive threats) the "silent" moments are of the enduring moments. The ones that he will miss. The ones Gabe cannot hold onto with such certainty because nothing was said.

Comics cannot capture sound, but can convert it into image. Wood & Cloonan are aware of that formal limitation and exploit it. Gabe's perfect memories must remain vague to us. Tone of voice, inflection, volume - these things can only be hinted at in text, just as they must remain ambiguous for the listener. Angie laughs at Gabe when he asks if she came during sex, and one presumes Gabe felt the laughter was mocking. When he remembers that Angie told him that he "should feel threatened by" her ex-boyfriends, or when she tells him to "start acting like a fucking man," they are moments out of time, out of context. Gabe can certainly remember the context, but he still divorces the hurt from the full complexity of its cause. The ambiguity of how to read those moments in the text highlights the visual interpretation that Wood & Cloonan create. Memory, we are reminded, is a similar interpretation. A similar piecing together of disparate moments to create a reality.

There's a film school adaptation of "Breaking Up." The film lacks Cloonan's subtlety and range, but it's worth watching nonetheless, for two reasons in particular. First, it's fun to see someone try and adapt a structurally dense story. Second, it can help to see someone else's interpretation to help define your own. I mean no slight to the filmmakers when I disagree quite strongly with their version of this story. They choose to make Angie a bit cutsier than I read her and Gabe a little more immature. I don't think that they achieve the weighty silence that Wood & Cloonan emphasize visually, but that's probably as much a difference of media as it is a stylistic choice.

What the adaptation really points out, though, is how much Wood & Cloonan's work uses comics in a way that film is unable. Film, as a medium, has a much different relationship with memory and ambiguity of perspective. This particular film doesn't seem interested in dwelling on the gaps and inconsistencies of memory and their relationship to images. Instead, it plays a slow song behind the series of good memories.

The story ends on a familiar image for Demo: a splash page of a city skyline buried under a looming sky. The difference with this image is the clouds and night sky, black and white never mixing. One can't tell if it's white clouds on a black sky or vice versa. A fitting way to end a story so concerned with how the limits of the image to transfer meaning.

"Breaking Up" is one of the more compelling issues of Demo. The conflict is more complex, better explored, and presented with nuance. It's no insult to say that this issue is no "Watchmaker" (Issue #4 of Watchmen), because what is.

Next Week: "Damaged"

Giffen vs Giffen

Variety magazine tells me that Joel Silver and Guy Ritchie are making a Lobo movie. This is their summary:

In the film, he is a seven-foot tall, blue-skinned, indestructible and heavily muscled anti-hero who drives a pimped out motorcycle, and lands on Earth in search of four fugitives who are bent on wreaking havoc. Lobo teams with a small town teenaged girl to stop the creatures.

Lobo was co-created for DC by Keith Giffen, who also happened to write a 2006 mini-series for Marvel called Drax the Destroyer: Earth Fall (well, not really, but that's the title of the TPB). In that story, Drax crashes to Earth on a prison transport and has to hunt down four escaped prisoners (the Blood Brothers, Lunatik, and Paibok the Power Skrull) with the help of a young girl named Cammi [pictured below, with Drax and Phyla-Vell].

Given that Silver and Ritchie want a PG-13 for their Lobo movie, it makes sense to use Earth Fall rather than, say, the Last Czarnian, which is wildly violent (though, also, wildly entertaining).

Now, of course, it's far more likely that the similar-sounding summaries won't be reflected in the execution. Who knows if Silver and Ritchie have even read Drax. The Lobo movie has been in development for maybe ten years. Longer, anyway, than it has been since Giffen wrote Drax. It's just funny is all. The idea that they're using a Giffen story for a different Giffen property.

Demo - "Mixtape"

Trying to describe the events of "Mixtape" is like, and not at all accidentally, trying to describe a particularly vivid dream - criticism of the logic of the plot is beside the point. Nick wakes up to an empty bed and finds his girlfriend, Jess, lying dead in another room. On the floor beside her is a tape for Nick that he puts into his walkman. It's one half of a recorded conversation. The tape speaks to Nick, tells him to go outside, reminds him to bring a hat, responds to his comments and sometimes answers his questions. He is able to see Jess and tries to make this most of this last day together. Through the tape, Jess points out that Nick didn't ever really know her, that he only loved the idea of her, and that he needs to take more time to understand why she did what she did. Jess advises Nick to let go and to move on, but the story ends with Nick unsure about whether or not to throw the tape away.

Ugh. "Mixtape" doesn't flow with the thematic resonance of a dream-story, but without the character motivations to be discussed logically. The only way to take the story on its own terms is as an extended metaphor the distance between people, how that space can ultimately kill the relationship, and the paradoxical impossibility of wanting to be understood but remaining separate.

The problem with "Mixtape" is much like the problem with "What You Wish For." Wood & Cloonan want their characters' actions taken seriously in the context of the story, but it's difficult to do so when they are so obviously meant to stand in for something else. In "What You Wish For," Ken didn't just let his anger loose - he killed people. Although the text of "Mixtape" goes to great lengths to wear out the possible ways of saying that Jess killed herself without actually stating it, the fact remains that Jess commits suicide. There are no obvious wounds or vomit - though the cover shows blood none appears in the story itself. It's as peaceful a death as could be, almost as if it just happened on its own. I wonder about the ethics of portraying suicide in this way, but that's my hangup. In the story, Nick never seems upset, only slightly distraught at the conclusion when faced with the prospect of getting rid of the tape (which, of course, represents Jess). Given the muted reactions and emotions, and the dream-logic of the narrative, the suicide stands in for something else. This is a problem for me. The act of suicide is very difficult to deploy metaphorically. It has too many connotations to be controlled. It demands too affective a reaction. It is not an act that stands in for something else - it is an act that ends metaphoric possibilities rather than enabling them.

Jess is a more rounded character than Amy in "Stand Strong" or Kendra in "One Shot, Don't Miss" but she lacks definition. As readers, we know almost nothing about her other than she thinks she was a bit of a doormat for her boyfriend and feels as if he didn't understand her. That is it. That and the fact that she likes sundresses even in winter. The irony of the image of optimism contrasted with her suicide is only a gesture toward a personality, however. The potential contrast is never explored. She's a cipher.

Jess is a cipher quite deliberately - she is Nick's ideal. She contends that he doesn't know the emotions and desires that lie underneath the surface elements that attract him though his responses back her up somewhat, it may be that he just lacks the ability to articulate how he understands Jess as separate from him. Jess, for instance, asks Nick if he likes her because she wears cute sundresses or "becasue you can go to the bar with your friends and you know I'm home waiting for you." She asks if he likes the idea of Jess more than the "real" Jess. She demands an impossibility from Nick, illustrated to the reader by the utter denial of any information about Jess as a character. He, like the reader, has no access to the "real" Jess, if such a thing exists.

This is the emotional core of the story. She tells Nick that "in time, you'll understand, and appreciate what I'm saying. Take that time, remember me, and understand me." When, two pages later, she tells Nick to throw away the tape that stands in as a distillation of their relationship, Jess isn't being contradictory. Nick needs let go of Jess in order to mourn the loss of the relationship and understand why it ended. He can't do one without the other. However, it leaves Jess as an unknowable figure, one who Nick is asked to understand - a task for which the reader isn't equipped.

Again, though, the problem of Jess's suicide looms large. After she gently chides Nick for liking the idea of her more than her real self, Nick shows a bit of emotion. "So what, Jess, you think I don't like you so that's why you did what you did? Lame, Jess. That's like an afterschool special." The fact that Jess never reveals the reasons for which she took her life stands as evidence that Wood & Cloonan seem determined to keep this strange meditation on death and relationships from falling into the simple moral platitudes of an afterschool special. But, by using suicide metaphorically, they deny Jess's actions of any clear motivations. Did she kill herself or is that just a code for breaking up with Nick? Though the stereotype is that afterschool specials preach rather than try to understand, "Mixtape" doesn't seem interested in trying to understand suicide either. Jess is such a blank, and her act is so separated from consequence, that her death rings hollowly.

"Mixtape" seems to be, foremost, about the struggle for two people who love each other to understand each other. The ultimate impossibility of that, but the need to try. What is interesting, though, is how a relationship is constructed in "Mixtape" as precluding outside involvement. The tape and walkman insulate Nick from the world: he spends the whole issue wearing headphones. He speaks to a voice that no one else can hear, and no one notices. Other than Nick and Jess, there are only two faces that appear in the issue and they are both incidental background characters. No family is involved, no friends - though we hear that Nick apparently has some.

It's a bleak portrait of romance, though not without some poetic images. As Nick goes to throw out the cassette, the tape twines itself around him. The final two images are of Nick's hand holding the tape, unsure about letting it go, and Jess's legs as she rises above the city, the tape twisting up over her body. The connection is beautifully illustrated by Cloonan. This image of the tape coiling around Jess appears during her conversation with Nick at the point she asks if he likes her because of her dresses and her willingness to wait up for him. It could almost be blood streaming from her wrists, and it's one of the few links between her sadness and her death, though the dialogue one page later forecloses that possibility. The black tendrils are shown to emanate from the tape, further illustrating how it stands in for her. The dream-like quality of the story serves to allow these images to be considered outside of the rigid logic of plot dynamics. The images seem to suggest that the intangible connections, the ties that bind, are not so simply cut. Even after the end of a relationship, or a life. Though access to the "real" person may be forever denied, it is worth struggling to try to understand these bonds.

I'm sorry, but that is a crap use of suicide as a metaphor. The lack of emotional intensity in the issue, Nick's strange passivity, Jess's mournful pseudo-wisdom, grate on me in a way that no other story in Demo does. Jess, pardon my French, fucking kills herself and it's treated as a sad but ambiguously meaningful gesture. I'm not arguing that the story endorses Jess's decision to kill herself, but the story doesn't explore it at all. It's a means to enable Nick to listen to a tape and for Jess to ruminate on how he never understood the "real" her. There are limits to how far a metaphor will carry you, and the dream-like quality of "Mixtape" doesn't seem interested in exploring what those limits are. Rather, it seems content to make an obvious point dressed up in some shallow ambiguity.

In three weeks: "Breaking Up"