The Danger of CineMagic

From an WIRED interview with Danny Boyle on his upcoming film Sunshine:

One of my obsessions was that I didn't want this to be a green-screen or blue-screen film, to have the actors looking at a blank screen that would be replaced months later by some astonishing effect that they weren't aware of and therefore couldn't react to.

I really like this quote because it shows that I'm not insane when I criticize the hollow acting that comes with purely green-screened films. For all of its noir beauty, I think Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow has been the film most guilty of drinking the CGI Kool-Aid, but my suspicion is that the first Star Wars trilogy suffered as well. Say what you will about George Lucas being a terrible director, but he's not so bad he can totally ruin performances by Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor. That would be giving him WAY too much credit. I really think that the amount of things the actors had to imagine in both movies made it very difficult for them to give authentic performances.

I think that as cereberal as acting can be, it requires a certain amount of real context to be something more than reciting lines. And as convincing as the sky lines that Lucas Arts produces are, they're nothing without the believability of the characters in front of them. So props to Danny Boyle for refusing the Kool-Aid.

Into Great Silence

I went to see Into Great Silence yesterday. It's the documentary a German man made about the six months he spent with the notably ascetic Carthusian monastic order at the Grande Chartreuse monastery. The film as artistic as you can hope for. Philip Gröning, the films creator, does an incredible job of blending artistic ambient shots with clear, sober shots of the French Alps and the Grande Chartreuse monastery where the movie was filmed. Though, to be honest, I think it would be incredibly difficult to find a bad shot, considering the beauty of the countryside and the buildings within the monastery. I think the technical and artistic merits of the film are reinforced by the fact that Gröning was the only person allowed in the monastery to film, and with no artificial lighting. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Lars.

The feel of the movie reminded me of The Mountain Record by Yuichiro Fujimoto (listen here on a French LiveJournal site, and if you're as enamored as I was, purchase it here ). Its natural sounds, and its attention to the banal and pedestrian, both aurally and visually, evoke the rough, beautiful life of the monks. In that way it's also thematically reminiscent of John Cage's 4'33", reminding me of the importance of silence and the beauty in the stillness of small moments.

The difficulty of the film is that three hours of seemingly arbitrary footage was hard to sit through. I consider myself a patient person. I meditate daily, I play poker, I watch a lot of foreign and independent movies. These are tedious and time consuming tasks that require great focus and patience and still I was squirming through the last hour. Part of what contributed to my discomfort was Gröning's reluctance to establish a narrative of any kind. It's difficult to tell what kind of footage he had to work with, and therefore hard to know how much room he had to maneuver, but because he settles for character sketches in place of even the semblance of narrative the film often feels its three hours.

There are some genuinely beautiful moments in the film, where Gröning clearly captures the difficulty and allure of monastic life. As well there are moments of intimacy unlike any I have ever seen on film. His 30 second portraits of a 15 of the monks are beautiful and tender in a way that impressed me. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie is the story behind it, told on the film's website: "In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Gröning wrote to the Carthusian order for permission to make a documentary about them. They said they would get back to him. Sixteen years later, they were ready." But that tidbit is little consolation for sitting through the three hours of beautiful, but tedious filmmaking.

Exposition and its Ills

I finished the second third of what I am beginning to consider the abominable Foundation trilogy, and its ending, if possible, was worse than the rest of the book. Not only does the villain explain himself, his plan and his Scooby Doo-esque blunder in the final pages of the story, but he prefaces it by explaining that his loquaciousness stems from his desire to be understood. Hackneyed, trite, cliche. It's like Asimov isn't even trying.

Reading through the Mule's soliloquy I realized just how weak that kind of exposition is. At first I didn't want to call it exposition; I thought it was exposition's opposite, because it came at the end of the story rather than at its usual spot in the beginning, but that's not the case at all. It is exposition, it's just ending exposition for people like my dad who were asleep during the entire story (more common in movies; difficult, but not impossible to do while reading a book) or true and unredeemable idiots. Or perhaps Asimov thought the story was so baffling that the rear exposition was necessary to girder the story from descending in to utter incomprehensibility, but I doubt it.

My incredibly biased assumption is that Asimov's motive is buried in the motive of his character: he just wants to be understood. Rather than seeing this as the pitiful cry for recognition that it is in the story, I see it as the arrogant author not trusting that his readers understood the subtle nuances and brilliant turns of his craftily constructed plot. And so the exposition comes tumbling out, detail by excruciating detail forcing the reader to relive what was so painful to experience in the first place.

It's perfect crime syndrome: a brilliantly conceived crime that is perfectly executed and no one knows how it was pulled off, so it doesn't receive the attention its creator feels it deserves. This forces the attention-starved criminal to confess, because the recognition of her brilliance is more important than fruits of the crime itself. Asimov, in his own way, wants the recognition for his accomplishments. What's tiresome is that the accomplishments aren't deserving of our time or our attention. The plot is none too craftily structured and the reveal at the end of the story is hardly surprising or in need of explanation to anyone who'd been reading the story. It is yet one more nail in Asimov's fictional coffin. Thankfully, there is but one hurdle left to clear before I never have to read Asimov again.

Foundation's Founder

I consider myself a fan of fantasy. I cut my teeth on Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, graduated to Dragon Lance and exist now in the company of Peter Beagle and Usula K. Leguin. But any fantasy fan is by proxy a science fiction fan. As much as we might dislike each other, we’re forced together by the cruel whims of bookstore hierarchy. Hell, even horror gets its own section and it’s the stepchild of both genres. Nonetheless, it is our lot that Asimov is next to Anthony and Stephenson is cuddled up next to Tolkien. We’ll all curse together that Stephen King shares his shelf with no one

Despite the stereotype, I cross genres pretty easily. I’m a huge fan of Snowcrash and Neuromancer. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land really changed the way I saw the world, as did Earth by David Brin. But for all of that Isaac Asimov has always remained a mystery to me. I know very little about Asimov the person. He was the rockstar of science fiction. I say that because I know what he looks like, something I can say about no other author in the genre save Neil Gaiman, and hangs out with Tori Amos and Trent Reznor, and is therefore a certifiable rockstar. By proxy Asimov must also have been in his time. I also know that he was smuggled into the United States by his parents in a trunk, and he has a book in every section of the Dewy Decimal System, and here you can see why.

It is apt, I think, to compare the Dewey Decimal System and Isaac Asimov, since they are forever paired in history. Both can be useful tools for the organization of ideas, but are so tedious to interact with that it’s rarely worth the effort to do so. I’ve read three Asimov books now, I, Robot, The Foundation, and Foundation and Empire, and I plan on finishing the Foundation trilogy though my partner go deaf from my cursing. I should say, in the spirit of full disclosure, that when I was in junior high I did read a compilation of the Lucky Starr books, but I remember nothing about them, and have thereby nullified Asimov’s entire didactic purpose in writing the books, since I retained absolutely no knowledge of science or astronomy.

What I’ve learned more recently from Asimov’s books is that his Foundation trilogy was, and I quote from the cover, “Winner of the HUGO AWARD for the best all time science fiction series!” I mean, really? That’s like Ricky Bobby telling Jean Girard that Highlander won the academy award for Best Movie Ever Made. I know because I’ve seen Highlander (loved it) and read two out of three of the Foundation Trilogy (hated it). What it boils down to is that Asimov is a terrible storyteller.

First his characterization is weak. I understand that the books I’ve read were never meant to be novels. Originally all three of the Asimov books I’ve read were short stories that were later combined into larger narratives. I also understand that these original stories were not character pieces in the way that “Hills Like White Elephants” is, but I don’t think any of that gives Asimov a pass as an author. His characters aren’t much thicker than the paper they’re printed on; their reactions, their conclusions and their explanations never vary. No character ever works in more than one mode, and because of this they often seem more like tools that Asimov is using to construct a situation he believes should transpire than they do like human beings exploring the world around them through curiosity or fear. It never feels as though the author even once lets go of his stories to see where they might take him. He is always in control of where the stories are going and what his characters are doing, much to the detriment of the adventure.

Secondly, does not know how to show what is transpiring. He is the king of expository dialogue, nor does he go to any lengths to disguise this. Rarely does he allow his characters a gesture to express what they’re feeling, preferring instead to allow them to say it, adding an adjective to make it emotional. When he does allow his characters to communicate nonverbally it’s to a caricaturish degree. Asimov’s stories lack anything approaching emotional complexity, which is as much a part of legacy as the ideas for which he is famous.

Because of both of those things, I think, I always have the feeling when I’m reading Asimov that he’s constantly proving that he’s smarter than I am. His writing stinks of smugness. I’m unable to get through a page without feeling as though he’s showing off in some way or another. It doesn’t feel like the excitement of exploring something that he loves, but rather satisfaction of someone showing off what they know to people who don’t. I think there are hints of this attitude in the history behind the books; that the Foundation Trilogy was based on “ideas set forth in Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”1 certainly doesn’t prove that the novel is meant to be didactic, but I think it goes a long way to not disproving it either.

What Asimov writes is not science fiction in its traditional “space opera” definition, but concept fiction. The Foundation Trilogy, and the Robot stories for that matter, don’t seem to be written as stories for enjoyment or from a need to tell a certain story that is close to the soul as some authors do, but as the exploration of logical, rational theories and concepts, much like concept albums are. To my mind Asimov’s fiction is more speculative science than good fiction. Notice I used the word fiction, not writing. Asimov is a capable writer, as his voluminous body of work proves, but he is barely an adequate storyteller. His exposition is obvious and awful, his characters are flimsy to the point of offensiveness and his plots are plodding and without surprise or invention.

Which is not to say he didn’t have great ideas. As the inventor of the positronic brain and the three rules of robotics his concepts were powerful and compelling. The idea of a galactic civilization deteriorating much like the Roman Empire is compelling, but I really don’t feel that Asimov made these stories accessible, because he was a scholar, not a storyteller. As such, his theory is impeccable, but his storytelling is pathetic. There is no grace in what he does. His characters are crudely pasted into his stories, and he is more comfortable telling us what’s happening rather than trusting his writing to show it.

It’s said that Mark Twain once commented on Wagner, “His music is better than it sounds,” which is the same way I feel about Asimov: his writing is better than it reads. Which is what’s so frustrating about Asimov: like Kant I have to suffer through his terrible stories in order to get to his fabulous and compelling ideas. The truth is, I probably won’t suffer much longer, because I don’t have to. I live in the empire that Asimov built, and as such I feel I’ve done my due diligence to its founder. Now I can go on and enjoy the fruit born of the seeds he planted, knowing now where it came from and how it came to be.

The Four Rules of Magic

The Four Rules of Magic

I have seen two movies recently that dealt with magic. Night at the Museum and Pan’s Labyrinth are surprisingly similar movies despite their strikingly superficial differences. Both films portray the profound effect that magic and belief in that magic can have on the actions and outcomes of a person’s life, but what’s more surprising is that the way in which they establish their magical worlds through the use identical rules of magic. In the end, what separates the two films is the different level of fidelity they pay to worlds that they’ve created.

The films’ premises are almost identical, but their pitches couldn’t be more different; the main characters of both movies are transformed through their introduction to a magical world that others aren’t privy to. In Night at the Museum Ben Stiller's character Larry Daley becomes a night watchman at a museum where the subjects of study come to life, from the giant skeleton of the tyrannosaurus rex who wants to play fetch right down to the miniature figurines in the dioramas of American Western and ancient Roman life who are constantly at war with one another. Life in the museum is an unlikely community of various and often times threatening constituents. In Pan’s Labyrinth a little girl, Ofelia, and her pregnant mother move to a small town where the pregnant mother’s new husband, Captain Vidal, is trying to exterminate the guerillas in the surrounding countryside. Ofelia stumbles upon an ancient labyrinth where she discovers that she is the lost princess from a magical kingdom, and that to return to her kingdom she must complete three tasks assigned her by an ancient and powerful faun.

Despite the similarity of their themes, Night at the Museum fails almost completely at conveying a believable use of magic, because instead of scrupulously creating a world in which the fantastic can take place, Night at the Museum relies heavily on special effects to inspire the sense of wonder, suspense and rapture that movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and to a greater degree Spirited Away conjure through the judicious combination of script, editing, directing and special effects. To contrast, in Pan’s Labyrinth there is no shortage of special effects, but where Night at the Museum begins to create, but fails to complete, a believable magic world, Pan’s Labyrinth follows through on its promise by establishing and maintaining a consistent set of rules by which the magic functions.

Magic without rules is merely wish fulfillment. Magic with rules is mythology. Mythology in no way denies the wish fulfillment aspect of magic, but accentuates the cost of failure to follow its rules. Orpheus' wish is granted: he may bring Eurydice back from the dead, but he may not turn around to look at her or she will return to the land of the dead. Cinderella may go to the ball as a princess, but only until midnight. Icarus may fly, but not too close to the sun. At one extreme, magic is merely metaphor, the clever embodiment of the fears or aspirations of the characters. Buffy the Vampire Slayer seasons one through three are excellent examples of magic at its metaphorical best. At the other magic is merely a novelty.

Special effects has had an effect on this group of stories, from Harryhausen to the Wachowski Brothers, often what they do in the movies they seem to do because they can; but books like Alice in Wonderland I feel also fall into this category, written without real merit as stories themselves, but certainly enjoyable to experience nonetheless. The best stories combine the novelty of something completely new with the metaphor of something accomplished in a vision that, for even the briefest of moments, pierces the sack-cloth veil that separates our mundane world from that mysterious world beyond our comprehension and left our lives a little bit brightened, if not marginally enlightened.

Pan’s Labyrinth, does exactly that by adhering closely the rules of magic. It moves fluidly through magic’s different forms, fusing its story solidly with top of the line graphics and a solid, well-told story, so that the magic we remember is one part of a fantastic and moving journey through the world of a little girl. The first rule of magic is that not everyone can see it. The second is that we are unsure of its rules, thereby putting control of the situation in the magic’s hands.

A good example of magic that we cannot understand is horror movies. Freddy, Jason and all varieties of zombies are excellent illustrations of magic that we cannot understand and are therefore terrorized by. All of them, at their hearts, are powered by magic, but in horror films magic is a power that has gone astray, contravening the natural forces of life for a negative, and usually deadly, purpose. Rarely does this kind of magic have a singular goal, making it more frightening because it cannot be compensated, it cannot be bargained or reasoned with. It is merely representative of a dark and insatiable hunger, which can only be avoided or contained, but never truly destroyed, as sequel after degenerating sequel has taught us. This kind of magic is the most difficult to maintain an interest in; the specific manifestations of these undying evils maintain their novelty for only a short time before becoming clichés.

The faun in Pan’s Labyrinth represents this kind of magic; the source of his power is unrevealed, the limits of his powers are unknown, his goals are unclear, and his methods are dubious. But unlike the bloodthirsty maniacs of horror films, Guillermo del Toro has decided to have this power hold its hunger in check, sharpening what would otherwise be horror into suspense, and adding another note to an already complex and satisfying melody.

The third rule of magic is that there is always something to be done and a certain way to do it. These tasks have certain nonsensical rules attached to them, but they must be followed despite that, because when they are disobeyed bad things happen, as Ofelia discovers when she eats the fruit of the underworld and wakes the blind beast. Which underscores the last rule of magic: there is always a price. It is what makes magical solutions so tenuous, so fraught and happy endings so insincere. Orpheus watches his love fade away; Cinderella must flee the prince; Icarus falls to his death; and Ofelia is nearly eaten by the monster she awakens.

Night at the Museum begins along the same mythological path that Pan’s Labyrinth seems to stride so effortlessly; it’s first basic magical tenant is that the museum’s exhibits only come alive at night, when no one but the night watchmen is there to witness the spectacle. Its second rule is that Daley is unsure of why or how the exhibits come to life. All he knows is that due to the pharaoh’s tablet in the Egyptian wing everything comes to life, and because everything comes to life he must, as the night watchman, protect them from escaping because if they’re caught in daylight they’ll turn to dust. Invoking rule three, he is given a list of instructions to follow to ensure that this will not happen, but through carelessness the instructions are lost, and therefore can’t be followed. Because he loses the instructions that have been entrusted to him Larry Daley learns rule four, the price of magic, watching one of the cavemen he’s sworn to protect disintegrate in the light of the rising sun. From here the story is simple: the rising action of the film should be Daley's ability to effectively protect the museum’s helpless denizens without the instructions, the climax being when things get terribly out of control he will through his own ingenuity, understanding and hard work pull through in the nick of time.

Sadly this is not the case in Night at the Museum, which is what makes it so interesting and so frustrating. It’s so similar to Pan’s Labyrinth in its initial construction, but one seemingly small change to its foundation sends the movie reeling off into irrelevance. Instead of keeping things simple, which is always a good idea in stories involving magic, the writers decided that saving the unruly museum tenants from sunlight wasn’t enough, and that Larry Daley would also have to rescue the magical Egyptian tablet as well, since it turns out that the former night watchmen who trained Daley plan on stealing it.

This plot complication completely changes the focus of the movie, undoing all four of the rules of magic as Daley is forced to protect his charges from the internal threat of their own chaotic natures as well as from the external threat of the loss of their livelihood. This kind of conflicting motivation is the stuff of high tragedy and high comedy; Caesar's empire is being torn apart by rival factions in the senate while barbarians threaten its borders; Lucy’s got to make a dinner for 10 and learn the steps to a new dance number in Ricky’s show. Obviously when done well this kind of pressure results in higher stakes and therefore a bigger payoff, but Night at the Museumdoesn’t do it well. In the shuffle of the climax the focus falls on retrieval of the tablet, and the caretaking of the magical museum people is an afterthought, resolved with a tidy piece of deus ex machina that fails completely to fulfill the promise of the four rules of magic, leaving the audience unfulfilled and making the movie’s only real magic cheap slight of hand.

Both Pan’s Labyrinth and Night at the Museum prove that the best use of magic in literature and film is always limited and costly. The best use of magic by creators shows the discipline that magic requires, and the dangerous consequences that magic without discipline has. Magic without limits represents unlimited power, a set of circumstances which is initially thrilling, but quickly boring; Superman’s ultimate flaw is that he has no flaws, he is nothing short of a god on Earth, making him a far less compelling character than Batman, who is painfully mortal, and whose power has come at a costly price. The best example of magic in fiction is Ursula K. LeGuin’s original Earthsea trilogy, where magic is hard-won, scarcely used when other methods are available, and whose price is great. The understanding of the proper use of magic is what ultimately separates Night at the Museum from Pan’s Labyrinth. Larry Daley never really pays for what he takes, he never really works for what he earns. Much like the Magician’s Apprentice his magical misadventures are wacky, but never truly dangerous, and so his triumph is hollow and ultimately unsatisfying. Ofelia, on the other hand, understands the danger of her situation, so that the price she pays for her escape is no more than would be expected of any other great magician. And like all other great magicians, from Merlin to Gandalf to Potter, her road is not happy, but it is satisfying to watch her walk it.

Harvey or Why the Bunny isn't Funny

Harvey
or
Why the Bunny isn’t Funny

Recently I was strong armed into watching Harvey, the rabbit movie with Jimmy Stewart. As a rule I generally avoid old movies. I think that a lot of old movies, like a lot of old music, are over-hyped; whatever technical or narrative device that revolutionized the way that we see movies (see Citizen Kane) has usually been so thoroughly incorporated into the films that I cut my teeth on that it’s impossible for me to understand its revolutionary aspects. The one exception to that rule may be The Wizard of Oz whose revolution is embedded in the film, and whose effect still blows me away.

Old movies require me to construct a context that I’m generally too lazy to develop unless I have a personal investment in the movie. That personal investment rarely extends past the late 1950s, which is when I believe the roots of contemporary movie-making vocabulary solidified. I find movies from before that era either redundant, mystifying or both.

Hitchcock’s 39 Steps is a good example: there is an extended flashback scene reciting a good portion of the murder that takes place at the beginning of the scene that seemed overly long to me. Hithcock’s not a bad filmmaker, so I have to believe that the flashback is so long is because the movie is so old that flashbacks hadn’t yet become an accepted trope in film yet, and was still new and novel. On the other hand, I often had a hard time understanding what the actors were saying because they spoke so quickly, which is something I can only chalk up to people talking faster back then.

You can see why I was reluctant to watch Harvey. I didn’t know anything about the movie other than its premise, its lead actor and that it was old. Despite all of that, I watched it, and what I saw was a great play trapped inside a mediocre movie. Harvey just screamed “theatrical production” to me. Its characters’ archetypes, the pace of the action and the staging all would have, if performed crisply, been an excellent study in what makes theatre tick.

But the play didn’t translate well to film. The shots were claustrophobic, especially inside the Dowd house, and really limited the tragic-comic aspects of Elwood P. Dowd’s sister and niece reactions to his “affliction.” The real strength of film as medium of expression over theatre is its ability to capitalize on nuance and detail. The theatre must be gross in its approach to conveying anything because its proportion is, for the most part, one to one; the people that I see on stage are exactly the proportion they would be if I was seeing them from the same distance outside the theatre. The movies know no such limitations, and can make a face 30 feet tall, making it much easier to translate the subtle gradations of emotions moving across a face. How this explains the popularity of Adam Sandler movies, I don’t know, but it does go a long way in explaining why zany stage productions in the vein of Harvey often flounder on screen: because the energy of the play has an incredibly difficult time being translated to the screen, where precision, not enthusiasm, is more important.

That being said, I think the movie could have been better, and there are two reasons for that: the rabbit and the man. As to the first, I haven’t seen or read the play, so I can’t say how it’s staged, but since the playwright was also the screen scribe, my suspicion is it was written the way she wanted it. In the movie there is no doubt as to the reality of the pooka Harvey. He opens doors and gates. For me, making the rabbit real and not leaving the decision up to the audience robs the entire story of its mystery and its conflict, and makes it impossible for the audience to empathize with Dowd. If the rabbit is assuredly real, then the character of Dowd is much less compelling, because we know that the story is no longer the study of a man affected by tragedy, but the comic mishaps of a man and his magic rabbit. It becomes a fantasy rather than a drama, and I think that Dowd’s character is much more compelling in the ambiguity of sanity.

Secondly, I feel the character of Dowd lacks dimension, and I blame either Jimmy Stewart or the director Henry Koster for that. The character of Elwood P. Dowd is certainly disturbed in one way or another. It’s more than hinted at throughout the movie that some great change was wrought in Elwood when his mother, to whom he was devoted, died. Elwood attributes the change to the appearance of a six foot three tall white rabbit named Harvey, while his family attributes it to his mother’s death. In either case, Elwood is no longer the man he once was and people treat him differently because of it, he drinks because of it and his family is embarrassed because of it.

What I found uninteresting about Stewart’s portrayal was the lack of regret in Elwood for the man he used to be, the lack of longing to be a part of something again. Stewart makes it apparent that the pooka, Harvey, brings something beautiful into life in the form of helping people who come into the bar unburden their sadness, but we never see Dowd acknowledge the conflict it seemed he suffered from, the conflict between who he is and who he was.

There is a scene near the end of the film when Dowd is in the alley behind the bar dancing alone, and when he is joined by the doctor and the nurse who have been chasing him all over town Dowd tells them about all the dances he used to know, and for a moment the audience is treated to a rare glimpse of the original Elwood P. Dowd, good looking, gregarious popular, and we see that Dowd misses that life as well, but also that he is incredibly lost and has no way of knowing how to return to it. Unfortunately for the film, that the moment was brushed past in order to get to the “more important” scene where Dowd recounts the beauty that came with Harvey, and the magical moments that they share over drinks when people, upon finally being able to see Harvey, suddenly realize that their problems aren’t so large after all. That for me is the flaw in the way that Stewart plays Dowd; there is too much “gee golly, sure” and not enough doubt in a man whose character is largely shaped by loss.

I think the textual evidence for Dowd’s conflict is his alcoholism. While it may be argued that it’s necessary for Harvey and Elwood to meet sad people they have to hang out in bars, I think the locale of the bar is convenient for Elwood’s alcoholism. You can find, sit and talk with sad people anywhere, the park, the zoo, the bus. And Dowd doesn’t just use the bar for his mission of beauty with the pooka. He suggests the bar for any occasion at all. The fact that Dowd is constantly drinking seems glossed over in the film, outshined by Dowd’s niceness and genuine care for the people around him. Dowd’s dark side is written into the script, but never admitted to by the film, and I think the film has less impact because of it. The beauty that Dowd sees in the world is never contrasted with the pain he feels, because we the audience are never allowed to experience it with him. It is symbolized in the bar, but never spoken of, and the film misses a chance to describe the beauty of Elwood P. Dowd’s tragedy, and that in itself is a shame.

Ware, Darrow & Loser Sheik

There was a time when it was very cool to be a loser. It is true that there are circles in every city all over America where it is always cool to be a loser, but the period from the release of American Splendor to the moment that the hype around Sideways died (it's dead, right?) was the height of what I affectionately call 'loser sheik'.

It all started with Giamatti's throat-wrenching, but heart-warming portrayal of Harvey Pekar, the genius that nobody had ever heard of, pushed the value of Giamatti's stock as an actor, and sold more books than Pekar had ever dreamed of. And clinging to those skyrocketing coattails was artist R. Crumb, who some people had heard of, but mostly not very nice things. And who should come tumbling after those two, but all the contemporary guys who'd been inspired by both of them who had, until then, been peripheral but persistant self-pitying moans in the impromptu orchestra of the comic book jungle, became the dominant melodic theme: Dan Clowes, local favorite Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware were lauded and lobbied in the windows of independent bookstores and comic book shops everywhere. Owners and counter jockeys sighed with relief: finally the hard working boys of the indie comic scene were getting their due, much in the same way that pinot noir drinkers celebrated merlot's comeuppance upon the release of Sideways.

The captain of this ship of foolish losers is Dan Clowes, whose visionary opus of loser-dom Ghost World anticipated the loser sheik trend years before it reached it's wine-dreg-guzzling peak. It starred Steve Buscemi (the Paul Giamatti of the '90s) and Thora Birch. Perhaps its only stumble was casting Scarlett Johansson who would ditch all her loser cred to become not only a sex-pot, but a successful actress as well. But, as with all things ahead of their time, Ghost World failed to pierce the modern consciousness the way that American Splendor and Sideways later would, and was forced to settle for being a cult classic.

And the whole thing really bothered me. Here was a chance for comics to prove their merit as real storytelling vehicles, but the only stories they were telling were utterly depressing. Pekar's work, while authentic, seemed to be a tale of never ending drudgery, culminating in the book, Our Cancer Year. Crumb's work is at best amusing, but at its worst a clear and shocking look into the mind of the guy who stares at breasts on the city bus, in other words, not a place you necessarily want to be. Clowes is the most aggressively pessimistic of the bunch, actively attacking people he obviously doesn't like. His work reads to me like a pictorial editorial where he maliciously picks apart the flaws of people and pet peeves he doesn't like. His book, Eightball reads like a caricature, constantly portraying people and the world around them as without merit or redeeming value. Chris Ware's picture books are less malicious than Clowes, but perhaps more sadistic. His obsessive control of the creative space and his obsession with diagrammatical minutiae and convolutions of the narrative process often make absorbing his vision difficult to the point of impossibility.

What bothers me most about the work of all these people is its functional hypocrisy: that these men constantly portray themselves as failures, but who are, in reality, not that at all. Their work sleights the work of cartooning, buying into the idea, and therefore reinforcing it, that cartoonists are lay-abouts, depressives and losers, when in actuality their portrayal requires a draughtsmanship and characterization that requires hard work and persistence that is rarely glimpsed in the books themselves.

Because all of their work sails under the flag autobiographical, albeit in varying degrees from fully to semi-, they have given their work a weight that implies "this is the world is", but might be more rightly described, "these are feelings I really felt." Ultimately the stories in these books, that are often portrayed as more "real" than their superhero counterparts, are just as fictive, merely in a more mundane and depressing way. While their emotional quotient is more quotidian, dealing with the difficulty of everyday life, their composition, such as it is, requires the necessary negation of success, or the portrayal of success in a negative light, in order to maintain its "loser" or "real" credentials.

It's possible that my interpretation of the nature of the interrelation of an author's life and its work is needlessly negative. It could as easily be said that the hypocrisy is a hopeful one, since the fact that the work, in whatever form, did in fact get published and that these men therefore can't hide the fact that they are hardworking and successful artists, and because of the unavoidable reality that the reader is holding and reading their work that they then have license to portray themselves in whatever way they like within the confines of their work, since its so obvious that they have been successful despite their shortcomings. I disagree because of the association that seems to have been implicitly attached to their work; that it has been labeled "real" in contrast to the more fantastic superhero books, giving their equally fictional content more weight in the minds of readers.

•••

There was a time when I believed that because of the hypocrisy of the books that they were without merit. In fact, I believed this until Friday. Or at least mostly believed it. I had been wooed in some ways by Tony Millionaire's "Maakies" which is to loser sheik like Bukowski was to the Beats: present, but often unaccounted for. "Maakies" takes the same unsympathetic view toward the frustrations of everyday life that the others' books do, but there is something more charming about it to me than the rest of the work, perhaps because it falls on the far side the duchy of autobiography, and is therefore more accessible to me because it does not purport to be "real".

So perhaps my resolve had already been weakened by then. Or perhaps it was at the "Masters of American Comics" exhibition at MOCA and the Hammer Museums in LA last year where I got to see the breadth of Chris Ware's work in person, from his mechanical productions to original pages of Rusty Brown, where his draughtsmanship, rather than his obsession, came through. Either way, on Friday, I pulled a copy of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth from the comic book shelves of Pendragon books on College and didn't put it back immediately. A good friend of mine from college swore by the book, and friends whose opinions I value regarding picture books had often spoken highly of Ware's opus and so I stacked it on top of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and took it home.

What I discovered is a melancholy world meticulously portrayed through clean lines, solid colors, and an obsessive rendition of architecture, from the skyline of contemporary Chicago, to its predecessor at the 1837 Columbian exhibition to the uninspired interior of Jimmy's father's cheap apartment. And it's not that I don't like detail; I love Geoff Darrow. I bought the King Size version of Big Guy and Rusty the Robot so I could examine his drawings in detail without having to squint or hold it up close. Ware and Darrow are nothing if not compatriots in attention to details, but they are opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to how it happens. Ware has a strangle hold on his narrative, allowing it to slip from his fingers one panel at a time at an often times excruciating pace. He lingers over every moment, appreciating it in all of its beautiful stillness.

Darrow's work runs riot over the page, its details lending the expansive and lively narration a weight that is lacking in any similarly themed book, and what makes Darrows work unique is not the themes (robots, dinosaurs and heaps and heaps of violence), but the level of exquisite detail in which those themes are rendered. No pebble goes unvariegated, no face goes unpocked, no skin goes unwrinkled. But readers are encouraged to pour over the material at whatever pace and in whatever order they like. His most recent book, Shaolin Cowboy, is marked by its lack of panels. The narrative is often told in spreads that take up the entire two pages of the open comic book. In issue six four of the last six pages of the book are actually a panel that is four pages large; two by two. Darrow's work does the exact opposite of Ware's: it expands past the page, turning the full page into merely a panel of larger work, where Ware divides the page into hundreds of tiny panels.

Despite Ware's tyrannical control of narrative pacing, there is a beautiful and haunting story of abandonment within Jimmy Corrigon. It is a complex and textured narrative that, as has been noted by John Carlin in his essay "Masters of American Comics", never lets you forget you're reading a comic book. The self-conscious narrative is at times tedious, but also allows Ware to indulge in acts of design that would not otherwise be allowed, and should they have been abandoned for a more 'natural' form of narrative the story and the book would suffer for it. It is both the haunting sense of emptiness and abandonment and this anxious sense of self-awareness that in no uncertain terms make Ware the poster-boy for Postmodern picture books as well as solidify his credentials as a member in good standing of loser sheik, which, as I happily discovered this weekend, does not mean that his work isn't worth reading.