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"

Demo - "One Shot, Don't Miss"

   The disquiet of "What You Wish For" gives way to the grim, disorienting landscapes of "One Shot, Don't Miss." In this story, PFC John Hatfield flies into Iraq with his reputation preceding him. He isn't just a crack shot - he never misses. Stationed on patrol, his colleagues explain to him how to spot a suicide bomber: they're the ones that don't stop their vehicles. Hatfield is instructed to shoot the driver of any vehicle that doesn't stop. When he's confronted by such a situation, he aims at the tires instead. He is, of course, reprimanded for the failure to follow protocol, but when Hatfield vaguely threatens his commanding officer he is able to negotiate his discharge. His girlfriend Kendra has just had their first child, and she's upset that Hatfield has revoked not only their insurance but also their only source of income. He returns home to face an unhappy Kendra and a deeply uncertain future.

   "One Shot, Don't Miss" is most similar in theme to "Stand Strong." Kendra is as one-dimensional a character as Amy, and for most of the same reasons. Kendra wants Hatfield to support the family and is angry at him for failing to live up to that commitment. She shows no other desires or ideas. Like James McMurray, John Hatfield takes on a job he hates in hopes of upward mobility. He wants to go to college and the army is his only means of ever making enough money. Like McMurray, Hatfield’s ability is seen by others as a tool they can use. He is only valuable insofar as he uses that ability within the limits and directions set by others.

   Unlike James McMurray, John doesn’t have a sense of lineage. They are both cogs in a machine, but James's life is leavened by a sense of familial responsibility. The moving ambiguity of James's reaction to the course of life he chose by allying himself with his father is replaced with Hatfield's desire for a family unit that he will likely never have. He doesn't have parents or friends, only Kendra and their daughter. 

   “One Shot, Don’t Miss” is about the those left out of the shrinking middle class. The metaphor of the Iraq conflict, still so fresh when this issue came out in 2005, helps illustrate the struggle as Wood & Cloonan imagine it. Hatfield, like all the other soldiers, fights in an endless battle with no real opponents and a shifting landscape upon which he never quite knows his place. He doesn't know what the obstacles are, much less what will help him overcome them. He is adrift - the featureless white backgrounds of the Iraqi desert mirroring those of the homefront. Though Kendra is shallowly rendered, she asks important questions. Where will the money come from now? They had to borrow from her father to even get Hatfield to qualify for the GI fund and now face the prospect of telling him that Hatfield quit.

   Kendra thinks Hatfield couldn’t hack it, but the problem is much more complex (that the story so clearly illustrates the fact, while Kendra remains belligerently ignorant of it, is to Wood & Cloonan's discredit because it makes Kendra all the less likable and her point of view that much more difficult to integrate into the story's themes). Hatfield makes the distinction men in war are told not to make when he calls killing “murder.” For Hatfield, though, it’s an even more ethically charged proposition because he can kill so easily. He cannot miss when he fires a gun - if he wants to kill a man then that man will die. The dilemma is keenly portrayed in the scene with the suspected suicide bomber. There is enough ambiguity in the situation to offer the possibility that the truck isn’t loaded with explosives. We are never told if the truck, in fact, exploded and all Hatfield's commander intimates is that the PFC disobeyed orders. Hatfield does not see the conflict as the others do. For them, it’s a fight. They have to assume the worst because they cannot guarantee that they will survive otherwise. For Hatfield, he knows that he has the better of every gunfight he’s in.

  The matter at stake is competing virtues, and how economic conditions put people into such untenable binds. Hatfield has an ability that seems designed only for killing. Take the best sharpshooter in comics [Bullseye, left] for example. The ability to shoot things with unerring accuracy seems to be primarily suited for extermination. More particularly, in his historic moment, it makes Hatfield suited for military service. Hatfield is unremarkable in any other way, as Cloonan’s art so potently illustrates. When we first see Hatfield, his face is reflected in the window of his troop transport plane. His eyes are hooded and covered in shadow, his features undistinguishable from all the other soldiers. The only thing that singles Hatfield out from the crowd is his ability to shoot, and he refuses to use that ability. The only thing that makes him special is a thing he is not suited to do. He doesn’t want to fight, to kill, to be injured or maybe to die. Economic necessity forces him to do it. After returning home following his discharge, he finds Kendra sitting in a darkened kitchen smoking. Her eyes are also hooded. He hands her all the money he owns, a measly wad, and goes into the other room to see his daughter. The final splash page is of Kendra and Hatfield, their backs to each other and divided by their shadows. She is holding their money and Hatfield cradling their daughter. The competing claims on Hatfield's life, money or family, are starkly opposed.

   “One Shot, Don’t Miss” isn’t so much a story as it is a bleak portrait. It’s one of the most sophisticated issues of Demo, and one of the most emotionally affecting.

Next Week: “Mixtape” and biting off more than you can chew

Demo - "What You Wish For"

   "What You Wish For" is, quite frankly, more than a little problematic. Ken, a newly married and generally contented guy, brings his wife to visit the place where he grew up. Formerly a suburban neighborhood, it's now a ghost town, abandoned and overrun with weeds. Ken remembers being bullied for his mixed heritage (his father a white, American soldier married a woman of Japanese ancestry) by all the other townspeople except a gardener - the only other Asian in town. When Ken's puppy is killed by the racist father of a racist bully (also the gardener's employer), Ken loses it. All the rage he feels is released and he reanimates the town's dead animals. His zombie puppy kills the racist patriarch and the other animals begin killing anyone nearby. In the middle of the rampage, the gardener warns Ken that "hate will eat you too" and, just like that, Ken stops animating the animal corpses. The adult Ken recalls the gruesome event over an image of young Ken rubbing his puppy's ears while the bloody carcasses of the murdered townspeople lie sprawled all around. Ken remembers it as "the one day I lost control, the one day I got mad. The one day I let those feelings out." He doesn't tell his unnamed wife but he shares a look with his dog, the same dog he brought back to life now grown, and ponders the wisdom of the gardener's words. "That gardener was right, hate will eat you up, if you let it. I stopped in time, and yeah, life is good now. But I will never forget how close I came." The final image is of the town, in the fading light, peacefully nestled under a clear sky and gentle mountains.

   "What You Wish For" is, most earnestly, a cautionary tale against letting the hatred of others consume you. Racism creates a cycle of anger and retributive violence that will never solve anything. This is clear. However, the metaphor that Wood & Cloonan use to tell this story is more than a little extreme: Ken kills the racists who have made his life painful. It seems a rather disproportionate response to say the least. Wood & Cloonan seem to want to illustrate the destructive anger that the victims of racism feel and this would be all well and good if Ken didn't murder an entire town because he was bullied. This is terrifyingly close to many other incidents of violence in North America in the last decade and a half (Columbine being the most seared into the public imagination) and the resemblance, unacknowledged by the text, leaves this reader with a gnawing sense of disquiet.

 

  The weaknesses of Wood & Cloonan's extended metaphor in this story are multiple. The most uncomfortable is the fact that the text seems unaware of the irony of Ken's statement that he will never forget how close he came. How close to what? Murdering an entire town because he was angry? Oops. Ken's power seems to be that he is friendly with death [see cover, above right] and that he can bring back dead things. Perhaps he brought the dead townspeople back to life and they all ran away, thus leaving the town empty. There is no indication in the text that this happened, but one might imagine that if Ken did kill a whole town he would be somewhat less contented. The lack of acknowledgment for this incongruity is glaring. Furthermore, the seemingly well-adjusted and happy Ken stands at odds with the text's two moments of fleeting recognition of the disturbing magnitude of his actions. The first is the look of fear on Ken's parents' faces during his killing spree before they slam the door on him, potentially implying that they never spoke to him again. The second occurs in the panel where young Ken sits with his puppy, surrounded by the bodies of those he's killed. The caption reads "not mad anymore." Madness seems to be the realm to which young Ken fled when his puppy was killed and it's quite possible that the whole event was a macabre fantasy rather than an enacted massacre. Ken even admits his recollection isn't entirely reliable: "I remember that day well enough," he says. Yet the text on a later panel when Ken stops by his old house asks "did they deserve it?" implying that the racist townspeople did, in fact, die. The resurrected puppy would imply that Ken does, indeed, have the power to reanimate the dead and would give added credence to his recollected version of events.

   Regardless of whether or not Ken actually did go on a murderous rampage or if he merely wanted to, the metaphor for letting go of hatred being the solution to racism is underdeveloped. Ken is happily married "to the best girl in the world." He has a condo, "a good job and a killer record collection, too." He is haunted by the events - not the deaths of individuals but of those deaths as signifiers of the possible magnitude of his rage if he unleashes it. Rage, an entirely understandable and natural consequence of racism, is a matter of choice. The language of choice permeates this story. Though anger is an autonomous response, to let go to of hate is a conscious choice, illustrated by the sudden and complete change that Ken undergoes after the gardener imparts his wisdom. To let go of hate is an individual proposition.

   The fact of individual choices being enough to overcome racism is hinted at as being insufficient early in the story when Ken defines the American Dream as getting "one up on everyone else." This prototypical individualist mantra (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) is briefly interrogated. But Ken is able to achieve those things after he leaves town and his condemnation of the American Dream is more a critique of suburban prejudice than anything else. He is not interested in how the American Dream functions except as a frame of reference to the bigots on his street. They are not even representatives of endemic or systematic racism. They are not the people who can pass Ken over for promotion or who will deny him a bank loan. They're just the dumb redneck racists, the easy ones to dismiss. 

   It isn't entirely fair to criticize "What You Wish For" for being a shallow examination of racism. The story is a shallow examination of racism but it doesn't set out to be much more. It is, foremost, a story about the need to let go of hate. What it does, though, is make me wonder about the limits of metaphor. Ken's unleashed rage is symbolic and, as such, engages in levels beyond the simple points of the plot. Ken's childhood town functions as little more than a reminder of the price of anger and a time he almost let rage consume him, not the site of a murderous rampage. It's not a real town; it's a nostalgic device. It has no function outside its limited mandate in the story. The fact that it is where Ken committed murder sits at odds with the tenor of the story. Ken's comment that he came "close" is entirely wrong because he didn't come close - he actually did let anger consume him for long enough to end lives. Just because those were the lives of poorly drawn characters for whom racism was their only defining quality and who didn't serve the text as actual characters, doesn't mean that he didn't cross a pretty clear moral line. The unsettling comparison to Columbine aside, "What You Wish For" seeks to actively engage in a metaphor for which it is entirely unprepared. The maneuvering of Ken from angry, possibly murderous, boy to well-adjusted member of society is probably the single biggest unresolved tension in the whole collection of stories. In the end, Ken's killing spree becomes a memory that makes him a better person - which makes "What You Wish For," quite possibly, the most disturbing story in all of Demo.

Next Week: "One Shot, Don't Miss"