Spawn (1997)

I've been putting off blogging about this film, because I hated it.  But I set out to do this, and I've always thought Bobby Bland's was good advice... 

So I think Spawn sets kind of a lower bound for what superhero films are capable of.  I set out to do this because I felt that as the best of the superhero films had achieved something pretty close to sublime in a pop culture way, and even the better-but-not-the-best of them had done some damn interesting things.  So I wanted to understand the whole genre.

But of course I never expected that all the superhero films would be good - I'd already seen enough losers, and furthermore I'm also a believer in Sturgeon's Law.  Here we see it in action.

The lower bound of superhero films is essentially mindless action.  Possessing superpowers presents the possessor with the temptation to use them to satisfy his or her desires:  with great power comes great responsibility is a line that's been used explicitly in at least one superhero film, but it's like the secret moral of most of them.  But some of them don't care, or perhaps set out to cater to the preadolescent in all of us who would rather not have to recognize adult responsibilities.  The infant who just wants to smash things.  Fair enough:  indulging in that fantasy is also part of the genre.  But when that's all the story does, and when it does it badly, then you have...Spawn.  'Nuff said.

Oddly, that was my impression of the comic too.  My only real period of intense, loyal reading of American comics came in the mid-'90s.  I was in my last couple of years of college, there was a comic book store within walking distance of my apartment, I was bored stiff in Utah, my eyes had already been opened to the possibilities of the comics form by my encounter with manga (in Japanese - hardly anything had been translated at this point), and I discovered that American comics were in something of a rebirth.  This was a big era for indie comics, when several big artists and writers were breaking away from DC and Marvel and starting their own companies.  I had maybe a dozen or more titles I followed loyally, and read fairly widely beyond that.  But Spawn was not one of them.  It was pretty clear to me that the new artistic room created by the indie boom could be used for two things.  You could (a) tell stories that the majors would never touch, because they were too weird, experimental, abstract, uncommercial, whatever, or (b) you could tell exactly the same kinds of stories that the majors told, but with more sex and violence.  Spawn was the latter, obvs.  I had no use for it.

Blade (1998)

I'll admit I had never heard of this character until I saw the film.  I'm aware now that it has a respectable comic book pedigree, but to be honest, watching the film there's no indication that it's anything other than what it feels like:  an attempt to quickly and easily capitalize on current trends in blockbusters, the action-horror film and the superhero film.  A hybrid born of lust for lucre.  In fact, coming after The Crow, this seems like an unoriginal hybrid born of lust for lucre.  Like, "Can we remake The Crow with more video-game violence and less intelligence?"

Yes, we can.

Godzilla (2014)

It wouldn't be quite accurate to say I went into this film with low expectations.  I had very high expectations that it would suck.  Last time Hollywood got its hands on G, it sucked.  At the time I recall I was the one who would always defend Hollywood against my friends who would dismiss standard Hollywood fare as overmoneyed and underthought.  I saw myself as an intellectual populist standing up against elite hipsters.  But Roland Emmerich's Godzilla sucked, and it sucked in all the ways that my friends always said Hollywood sucked.  I felt betrayed.  My eyes were opened.

The new one, I figured, would suck just as bad, but in an up-to-date way.  I was wrong.  It's brilliant.  It does right everything that the '98 version does wrong.  In fact it's an argument for why one might want Hollywood to get its hands on something like this in the first place. 

It's a smart movie.  It's full of ideas and it can't wait to share them with you.  This starts in the opening credits, which show you tantalizing bits of information about the post-WWII nuclear program, then redact it before you can really read it.  Note that the '98 version used the credit sequence to set up its version of the monster, too, and that's where the sucking began, because the '98 version's big steaming pile was that it Blamed It On The French, right?  This one places the blame squarely where the Godzilla mythos says it belongs:  on the Americans.  And that starts with the opening credits.

Let's reiterate:  Godzilla was the Americans' fault.  That's the whole point of the original movie.  Every later incarnation in Japan was built on that, even when G became a hero.  This is why the original and its first-series sequels are such primally important documents in Japanese popular culture:  they capture the country's ambivalence about America's nukes, about having them dropped on Japan (first and only), and then becoming America's ally, about responsibility and looking-forward and all that stuff that was clumsily suppressed when the first movie was shown in the U.S.  The '98 film saw itself as a complete reboot (G was arising for the first time in that story), and therefore it needed recently-headlined scary nuclear testing to blame, and that was the French.  But that presented viewers with a moral calculus that said America's decades of nuclear testing, and that whole Cold War thing, weren't enough to wake the monster - weren't in fact monstrous - but that French testing was.  Talk about missing the point.

The new movie gets all that right.  The awakening of G was the Americans' fault, way back in the '50s, and when the current monster surfaces in response to a nuclear power plant crisis in Japan, an American is on the scene, fucking things up.  In fact, this movie is extraordinarily focused on nuclear power as the bogeyman:  Yucca Mountain, transport of missiles, nuclear subs, it's all there.  It's a movie that not only understands the Godzilla myth, but that truly understands why disaster and monster movies of the classic era worked in the first place. 

It's a movie that gives Godzilla credit for the potential to actually scare audiences in 2014.  And so, for the first time (despite many years of seeing and teaching and thinking about Godzilla), I really got a visceral, real-time, in-the-moment sense of how it worked.  When they go into Yucca Mountain and throw open that nuclear-waste vault and see, not tidily contained waste matter, but wide open outdoor spaces:  that's a little scary.  That Should Not Be.  That can't help but make you start to think about maybe nuclear power is dangerous.  And so when the monsters are slugging it out in the heart of San Francisco and people are dying by the score around them, you never forget that this is an allegory of how we can't control nuclear power.  What would it look like if there was a nuclear accident in SF?  This is what it would look like.  But worse.

And that's one reason why one might want a Hollywood version of Godzilla in the first place.  If one is not Japanese in the '50s but American in the '10s, one can understand the first G intellectually, but not viscerally:  seeing him stomp on a Tokyo that one only knows from photos and old movies (this is true even for contemporary Japanese, of course - only a couple of the city's landmarks from that movie remain, and the skyline that surrounds them is utterly changed) is cool.  But seeing him stomp on things much closer to you in space as well as time is different.  It brings it home.  Nuclear power threatens us, too.

And it's not Japan's fault.

Oyamada Hiroko: Ana

The 150th Akutagawa Prize, for the second half of 2013, went to Oyamada Hiroko 小山田浩子.  She was born in 1983, debuted in 2010.  She won for the story “Ana 穴” (Holes). 

Unlike the last story, this isn’t being advertised as “horror.”  But I’d submit that it is literary horror.  There is a supernatural/horrific aspect to this story.  It is (I’m going to spoil it) a ghost story.  Told in a fairly creepy way.  But for literary rather than visceral effect.

This and Tsume to me represent, I think, a kind of triumph for the J-horror genre.  Horror has of course always been with us, and this isn’t the first time “literary” authors have dabbled in it;  but I think you could argue that the present generation of literary authors dabbling in it are specifically the product of the horror boom of the ‘90s and early ‘00s, Oyamada’s and Fujino’s formative years.  Authors like Suzuki Kōji, mangaka like Itō Junji, directors like Kurosawa Kiyoshi.  I’d want to argue that, anyway (maybe I just did).

The narrator is a woman whose husband is transferred suddenly from the city where they’ve been living to a small town elsewhere in the same region.  It so happens to be the same small town where he was born and raised, and it turns out that a rental house his mother owns has just gone vacant, so his mother offers to let them live there rent-free.  So the narrator and her husband decide, rather than have him commute long distance, to move there, even though it will mean the narrator has to give up her job.  Her job is just temp work, not something she terribly identifies with, and even though their income will fall they’ll more than make up for it by saving on rent.

They make the move, and the rest of the story plays out over the course of the summer after the move.  They only have one car, and the husband drives it to work;  the house isn’t within easy walking distance of anything but a convenience store, so the narrator is somewhat trapped in the house.  She has no children, so there are few demands on her time, and she’s reluctant to spend money when she’s not working so she has little to do with her time.  Her mother-in-law lives next door, but she works, and so does her father-in-law;  her grandfather-in-law is the only one in the neighboring house who she sees regularly, and she can’t seem to communicate with him – deaf or senile or both.

So the narrator falls into a funk.  Her enforced solitude and idleness begin to take their toll.  One hot day she’s walking along the road to the convenience store, past a field with a stream flowing through it, and she sees a strange black beast.  She follows it into the weeds, trying to figure out what it is, and then she falls into a hole.  It’s only about neck-deep, but still it’s deep enough and the dirt soft enough that she can’t climb out on her own.  She’s saved by an older woman in a white dress who introduces herself as her neighbor.

The beast – it’s never named, and she can’t identify it – appears again one day when she’s at home.  She sees it in the yard, and then she sees it run into her in-laws’ house.  But when she investigates, it’s nowhere to be seen.  But she finds another hole, in an alley hidden by a concrete wall.  And there she also runs into another “neighbor” – in fact, he introduces himself as her husband’s older brother.  He says he lives in a shed on the property.  She wonders why her husband never mentioned him, but he explains that he’s been a shut-in for decades, so the family is keeping him a secret.  They talk for a long time – he even takes her to see the beast’s lair, the hole by the riverbed.  While there she sees a bunch of children playing happily by the river.

The last encounter with the mysterious brother-in-law is by night:  she sees her grandfather-in-law walking out of the yard and into the street.  She runs out to try to catch him, and finds the brother-in-law aiding her.  She brings the father-in-law back.  The last scene is the father-in-law’s funeral – presumably his nighttime wandering made him sick.  At the funeral the narrator notices the brother-in-law is missing, so she goes out to the outbuilding – it’s full of junk that hasn’t been touched in years, dust and insects.  Nobody lives there.  He was a ghost.

This has the makings of an entertaining, if run-of-the-mill, ghost story.  The author presents it in such a way, though, that it’s obviously meant to have deeper resonances.  Some of these are easy to identify.

You’ll notice that I don’t name anybody.  Most of the characters in the story are conspicuously left unnamed.  The narrator refers to her family members by their relationship to her:  “my husband,” “my mother-in-law,” etc.  And when she moves into the rental house she finds herself referred to by everybody as “the bride,” even though they’ve been married for many years.  None of this is particularly unusual in Japanese, but Oyamada is putting particular emphasis on it here, and the “bride” business in particular, to make the countryside setting suggestive of traditional family roles.  In the city the narrator may have had an identity of her own, as a working woman, but in the countryside she’s nothing but an appendage of the family into which she has married.  Some of the other ghostly encounters reinforce this impression:  the woman in white may be a ghost, and in addition to pulling the narrator out of the hole, she shares with her a recipe, thus encouraging an adjustment to housewifely cooking.  Later at the funeral some old lady mourners (it’s not clear that anybody else sees them) tell the narrator to change the way the flowers on the altar are arranged – we do it differently here, they say, thus encouraging her to adjust to local ways.  Like a good housewife. 

Her status as a wife is one of the interesting issues in the story.  Her loss of individual identity, coupled with her slide into I-see-dead-people psychological instability as she slips into solitude and idleness in her new home, seems to be a critique of traditional gender roles.  She’s a modern woman suddenly placed in an old-fashioned situation, and this is what it does to her.  However, this reading is complicated by the fact that her mother-in-law is herself a working woman, and is surprised that the narrator is so willing to quit her job.  We never learn much about the mother-in-law, but it is suggested that she finds some fulfillment in her job and expects that the narrator would have felt the same. 

So the narrator’s life in the city, as a modern woman, also seems to be called into question.  She has no emotional investment in her work.  And her life with her husband is a drag, as well – since they both work, they live on takeout food and hardly see each other, and when they are together he spends all his time on his smartphone, totally ignoring her.  This is why she can accept the idea that her husband has a brother he never told her about, I guess.  So she seems to be facing anomie and anonymity whether in the country or the city, whether surrounded by in-laws or not. 

I didn’t find it a very impressive story, to be honest.  Oyamada’s narration is very thick – her paragraphs go on for pages at a time, regardless of how many people are speaking or how many times the topic shifts.  And while her descriptions of place and atmosphere are very vivid, her evocation of people is not.  All of the characters, even the flesh-and-blood ones, feel like ghosts or shells.  These factors combine to make reading it a slog.

The narrator’s passivity is the biggest problem.  Anomie and anonymity, I get it – and I’m a Murakami Haruki fan, so I’m used to passive.  But his characters at least want something – even if, following Vonnegut’s advice, it’s just a sandwich (or sex, or a Chet Baker record).  Oyamada’s narrator is passive far beyond the point of believability:  she is completely disengaged from her own life.  And because she never tells us what she feels, we’re left with only two likely explanations for this passivity.  Either she’s paralyzed by the meaninglessness of existence, or this is the only way Oyamada can think of to create suspense.  Neither is a very satisfying answer.

The first bonus story is called “Itachinaku いたちなく” (a pun:  could be read as Weasel-less, or as Weasel Cries).  It’s narrated by a middle-aged husband whose wife wants a baby;  they can’t have one, but it’s not clear if the problem is with her biology or his.  Early in the story she asks him to give her a sperm sample so she can have it tested.

The main thread of the story concerns an old buddy of the husband’s who has married a much younger woman and moved out to the country.  They’ve renovated an old house and moved into it, doing the country life thing to a T, but now they find they have weasels in their attic.  Nothing works.  They keep catching them but more always appear.

Eventually the narrator and his wife go to visit the buddy and his wife at their country home.  Over a dinner of wild boar nabe they talk about the weasel’s, and the narrator’s wife, who had a country upbringing herself, tells a long intense tale about how her family got rid of weasels in their house when she was a girl.  They caught the mama weasel, and then her grandmother drowned it in a bucket in the front yard.  The girl and everybody else was harrowed by the weasel’s screams, but then the grandmother explained that those screams were the mama weasel telling the rest of its family to stay away from the house or you’ll get drowned.  It would only work with a mama weasel:  a baby weasel would just cry, and a papa weasel would fight until he was worn out.  Only a mama weasel would use her dying breath to warn her family.

Later the narrator’s wife gets a call:  the buddy’s house is now free of weasels.  And the narrator doesn’t know what happened with the sperm test, but his wife has stopped talking about kids.

It resonates with the title story in some obvious ways:  clearly this author is thinking about marital issues, and rural-urban issues, and using the one to get at the other.  And animals.  There’s less of an emphasis on trad gender roles here – though perhaps that’s because we’re getting the husband’s perspective, and maybe he’s a bit clueless.  He claims not to know what the result of the sperm test was, but as my wife points out, if the wife stopped talking about kids it probably means it’s his biology at fault, and she’s just being tactful.

The way the last paragraph reads, it’s clear that the weasel story is meant to somehow explain or comment on the fertility/virility issue.  I’m not quite sure how, though.  Is it just a vision of primal mommy-daddy behavior, meant to contrast with human ineffectuality? 

The third and last story, “Yuki no yado 雪の宿” (A place to stay in the snow, or:  Yuki's Home), connects to the second.  The buddy’s wife has a baby, a daughter named Yukiko, and the narrator’s wife is with her during the birth.  A little while later the narrator and his wife drive up to visit the buddy and his wife and get caught in a blizzard.  They have to spend the night.  There’s a lot of business about walking quietly around the sleeping baby, cooing over it when it’s awake, etc.  And a bit about an elderly neighbor woman (mentioned in the earlier story) who brings over some food when she sees the stranded guests’ car. 

During the night the narrator and his wife sleep in a room with tropical fish tanks, and he has a kanashibari episode – a night paralysis in which he dreams that one of the fish, a big arowana, has jumped out of its tank and is dancing on his belly, while his wife has gone out of the room.  In the morning the narrator and his buddy are playing in the snow, and the neighbor lady comes over and whispers to the narrator that his wife is pregnant.  Implying that the dream about the fish, the night paralysis, was anxiety over unconfirmed but dimly sensed impending fatherhood.

And a complete lack of communication with his wife.  This is the real connection between this pair of bonus stories and the title story:  a picture of married people with, evidently, nothing at all to say to each other.  They may even be essentially (not literally) the same people – that the picture is much less bleak in the second and third stories than in the first may simply be a function of them being narrated by an oblivious husband, rather than by a wife who’s bothered by his obliviousness.  But that may not really be what Oyamada’s trying to get at here – it may be incidental.  She seems far more interested, at least in this book, in the symbolic meanings of animals.  I’ve been analyzing these stories mostly for their social commentary, but I may be on the wrong track.  Dream analysis might be more appropriate.

Dashiell Hammett: The Continental Op (1974)

My conscience is bothering me about my last post, as I knew it would.  It's not so much that it's not

really fair to compare Hemingway and Hammett.  It's perfectly fair in the case of Hemingway's boxing and gangster stories - that's Hemingway meeting Hammett on Hammett's home turf.  And overall, even though comparisons are, yes I agree, generally odious, they're also inevitable and can be instructive.  What I didn't do was try to be instructed by the comparison.  I was glib.  I try not to be.

Why do I want to compare the two, other than because I've been reading them both lately?  Period, of course:  they're contemporaries. But the style, more than that.  They were both lionized for a modern, lean, masculine prose style.  Both lionized, but Hemingway more than Hammett, certainly in their lifetimes.  And while now I'm not sure there's much critical disparity regarding them (we're in the age of pop culture's ascendancy), still I feel protective of the underdog.  It shouldn't be called the Hemingway style.  It should be called the Hammett style. 

But that's obviously not the whole of it.  It's that macho bullshit.  Why do I hate it so much in Hemingway when I don't have a problem with it in Hammett?  After all, Sam Spade and the Continental Op are men's men - they define a kind of 20th century archetypal masculinity every much as does Nick Adams. 

Is it about milieu?  Do I accept noir protagonists' machismo because it's located in a world that demands it?  Because their toughness is a reaction to the predatoriness of those around them?  But is that not true of Hemingway?  Doesn't the brutality of war, which lies in the background of his early work, serve as an argument that his protagonists needed to become tough?  That the author himself, sensitive poetic soul that he is, needed to become tough, to assume a guise of masculinity in order to survive? 

I want to go on, but my heart's not in it.  It may be as simple as pleasure.  Hammett does the stylistic innovation thing, does the crisis-of-masculinity thing, but always within the context of a pleasurable story.  Hemingway's stuff doesn't have that same narrative drive.  He's not as interested in good stories.  He's too fastidious to fully invest in a gangster story or a boxer story, although he's intrigued by those manly milieux.

Maybe I just like pop fiction better.

*

These stories are in some ways the definitive Hammett.  I don't know why I saved the short stories for last, but they're brilliant.  Clever, dark, exciting, and every bit as brutal in their portrait of society's underbelly as his longer stuff.  Perhaps not quite as deep - not as comprehensive an indictment as Red Harvest.  But they're good.

Ernest Hemingway: Men Without Women (1927)

Yeah, my Hemingway experiment may have reached an end.  I read his second short-story collection, Men Without Women, and I'm glad I did because I just learned that Murakami Haruki borrowed the title for his latest collection.  So, now I'll get the reference, which is half of why I read literature anyway. 

But honestly that's all I got out of this book.  It just felt like more of the same.  Macho bullshit.  Crisis of masculinity.  I'm not sure he's saying anything new with it.  And I suspect he was worried about that, too, because more of these stories are extroverted, flirting with genres - the bullfighting story, but also the boxing story and the gangster story.  But at least with the latter, I found myself almost crying with frustration, because Hemingway's contemporary Dashiell Hammett - who I was reading immediately after this - does it so much better. 

So I should quit, right?  Cut my losses, life's too short, right?  I may not be able to, though.  In the interest of getting the reference, I may end up feeling like I have to read two or three more.  Fair warning.

Walter Mosley: Little Green (2013)

I'm not a hundred percent sure what I think of the latest installment of Mosley's Easy Rawlins series.  The biggest surprise might just be that he titled it after a Joni Mitchell song:  and I doubt it's coincidence, given what Mitchell has said her song means, and that much of this book turns on an unacknowledged son of Mouse's.


I've written repeatedly that I'm mostly interested in the historical commentary these books offer:  each book carefully shows Easy interacting with historical and cultural trends specific to the year in which the book is set, making the series an ongoing commentary on black life in LA in the mid-20th century.  On that level, Little Green falls down a little bit.  It does the work - it has Easy moving among hippies and finding that the counterculture too contained racism, even as it held out the hope of moving beyond racism.  But I don't find it making any points in that regard that Cinnamon Kiss hadn't already made.  Perhaps since this is a reboot, Mosley felt he had to retread a little of this territory in order to provide a jumping-off point for the next installment.

Reboot.  I use that term guardedly.  Of course he's not nullifying any previous storylines, not reintroducing characters as if they've never existed before.  It's not a reboot in that sense.  But there's a lot about this book that suggests it's meant as more than just a continuation of the previous book, more than just picking up where that one left off.

And that's to Mosley's credit.  At the end of the last book he killed Easy off, or nearly so.  Bringing him back with a trivial explanation would have been forgivable, but he doesn't do that.  The whole book is really about Easy's rebirth.  For most of the book he's struggling with the physical aftereffects of his near-death and subsequent coma;  he's kept going only by a strange concoction provided to him by Mama Jo, the shamaness who followed Easy and Mouse to SoCal years before.  And that concoction - made of God-knows-what, maybe even dead white men (there's a hint in that direction at the end) - seems to trigger a spiritual and emotional rebirth as well.

Which means that this book has much in common with Gone Fishin'.  It's as much about backwoods mysticism as mystery-solving.  Ever since he brought Mama Jo to LA this has been a trend in these books, but never has it been as front and center as in this volume.

The result is a book that feels less like a meditation on history than a meditation on death and rebirth.  This is myth-making.  Which suggests it really is a reboot.  It leads me, at least, to expect the series, and its protagonist, to be a bit different from here on out.  I mean, I may be wrong.  But this feels like a transitional book to me.