Month: October 2019

REVIEW: Watchmen (HBO)

Watchmen, written by Alan Moore, is quite likely the greatest story ever written for comicbook format. It started when DC Comics obtained the rights to use old characters from the Charlton Comics company (including Steve Ditko’s The Question) and then hired Moore to write for those characters. When Moore proposed a murder mystery where at least one of DC’s new characters got killed, his editor proposed that he make slightly altered versions of those characters in a new setting- which had no continuity with the universe of Superman and Batman. The result was both very adult and very philosophical, in which Steve Ditko’s Objectivism was transmuted into Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism: in an apparently random universe, the only thing that gives life meaning is the responsibility of making a moral choice. Even if that means putting on a mask to fight crime.

The thing is, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons also wrote Watchmen on the condition that the rights would revert back to them once the comic series was no longer in publication – which given its success, means never. So Moore was so pissed he now refuses to let his name be associated with any of the work he did for DC- even though the Watchmen characters he made were themselves based on someone else’s material. In any event DC continues to exploit its intellectual property for all it’s worth, such as Zach Snyder’s semi-successful adaptation of the Watchmen story, a recent comic book crossover where Moore’s universe was in fact merged with the DC Universe, and now this TV series by Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers).

Given that the comic was a complex limited series with 12 issues, with sex, profanity and a FUCKTON of violence, a lot of us thought that a Watchmen adaptation should have been a limited series on HBO in the first place. But since the story was already done by Snyder, DC actually decided not to reboot something they’d done only a few years before (like Batman) and instead went in a totally new direction.

Whereas the original story was set in the 1980s, the Watchmen series goes into 2019, meaning that Lindelof’s story is set in the same universe, over 30 years after the events of the comic. What makes this piece interesting and valid is that it takes the background universe and uses it to present a setting that actually has some relevance to the current situation. For instance: Latter-day critics of Moore’s Watchmen point out that despite the series being set in 1980s New York, there were no black characters among the principals. (In that respect, it was sort of like Friends, if Friends was a R-rated drama about murderous vigilantes.) This series is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a multiracial police force and a cast of characters centered around Regina King, who plays a police operative called “Sister Night.” Now, why cops have to have secret identities and costumes is a background element that isn’t immediately explained in the pilot, nor is the connection between King’s character and the bloody massacre of Tulsa’s black community by racists in 1921. Presumably this is the sort of thing that gets drawn out and explained over the course of the series, in the same way that the comicbook drew the reader in by gradually explaining details, like how Nixon became president-for-life partially because another superhero won the war in Vietnam.

So given that the story starts in progress (as it did during the comic) it really isn’t necessary to have read Moore’s Watchmen to see this series, although the tie-ins are important for anyone who has. In the comic, the vigilante Rorschach left his journal with a right-wing publisher, hoping to expose the main plot of the story after he was killed. Well, in the ensuing period, his journal apparently became the inspiration for a masked racist goon squad called The Seventh Kavalry who seem to be the main bad guys of this series. (Historically, the 7th Cavalry was the unit under General Custer that got trashed at Little Big Horn.) And this was one of the things I didn’t like about the TV pilot. Rorschach in the comic might have been a right-winger with a LOT of issues (namely misogyny) but he never seemed actively racist. Now again, that might be because the main characters weren’t interacting with black people much at all. But given how many heroes in this setting (especially from the World War II generation) had racist opinions, Rorschach didn’t seem like that type. Given his other positions though, he didn’t seem like he was directly opposed to racism, which may be the point. This wouldn’t be the first time that racist goons took the writings of some dead person and interpreted them to support their position whether it fit or not.

In this respect, the other thing that distinguishes Lindelof’s project from the comic is that this world seems to be the mirror image of liberal fears of conservative dominance and the ultimate expression of the conservative paranoia that drives them to seek dominance. Since Nixon died, Robert Redford has been president for over 30 years, racial reparation is called “Redfordations” and gun control is so strict that cops have to go through bureaucratic procedure just to access their pistols in the field.

The one bit of this production that rings false is the median scenes featuring Jeremy Irons as “Lord of a Country Estate.” Because if he is supposed to be Adrian Veidt, the script does him even more of a disservice than it does Rorschach. It’s always fun to watch Jeremy Irons chew the scenery, but his character actually is a Republic Serial villain. In the comic, Veidt would freely kill people as a means to an end, but not as gleefully as Irons does. Plus, Veidt was supposed to be an American of German background. Producers have so far cast him as a decadent Eurotrash played by Matthew Goode and now Irons. Whereas the original dialogue and artwork conveyed more a plain-spoken American type. If anything, the elderly Veidt should have been played by Robert Redford himself, or maybe Brad Pitt.

But if nothing else, you can say that Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen is timely (so to speak). So far, I’d say this is like a couple of other bastard progeny of Alan Moore’s DC Comics work: The Sean Connery version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LXG) and the Constantine movie starring Keanu Reeves. If you went into them assuming they had anything to do with the source material other than the starting premise, it would only make your head hurt. But if you looked at them as their own things, they were surprisingly entertaining. I think of Watchmen the same way, and who knows, it might actually have something to say at the end of it.

REVIEW: Joker

“Dying is easy. Comedy – THAT’s hard.”

This Saturday, one of my friends wanted to see Joker with me, my roommate and another friend. And after we saw it, I said, “remember Gary, this was YOUR idea.”

Professional critics have pointed out that director Todd Phillips (The Hangover) has taken some pretty obvious inspiration from two of the classics Robert DeNiro made with director Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver, in which a complete loser succumbs to his dark side and achieves a kind of ascension, and The King of Comedy, in which an even bigger loser becomes a supervillain because he completely fails at standup comedy. These elements are actually linked in the character played by Robert DeNiro in this movie, a local late-night talk show host in Gotham City who is an inspiration to the main character, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) who struggles with mental illness and poverty even as he writes standup comedy and works as a hired clown, because he sees his life’s mission as “spreading joy and laughter to everyone.” So already you know this isn’t going to work out.

The reputation of this film has far preceded it, with said professional critics bagging on Joker not so much for its quality as a movie as for the message they think it’s sending. Gotham is clearly a stand-in for the failed administration of New York in the 1970s, prior to Rudy Guiliani (MY, how times have changed). In this age of disturbed “incel” gunmen, an unpopular and mentally disturbed person who turns to violence to make an impact seems to be too close to home. And as Bill Maher said months before, in regard to the remake of It, “if you’re trying to make a movie about a badly-painted clown who terrorizes the neighborhood – you’re a bit late.”

Reviews frequently use phrases like “numbing” and “empty.” Kevin Fallon at The Daily Beast called Joker “meaningless.” One review went into political analysis, describing the pivotal event that turns Arthur into a murderer (like that’s spoiling anything), getting on the subway in costume after getting fired from his clown job and being harassed and beaten by three drunks. He shoots them all in a scene that the critic describes as evoking the 1984 subway shooting by Bernhard Goetz of non-white teenagers. At the same time, critic Richard Brody admits that the drunks in Joker are white, but doesn’t point out that the men turn out to be connected to a certain millionaire’s company. He presents Joker as “an intensely racialized movie” in which the overt aspects of racism are “whitewashed” (as in the subway scene), but if anyone seems “racialized,” it’s Brody himself, who sees Joker as being a parody not of a Scorsese film, but of none other than Black Panther.

A lot of the backlash seems to be less the film as it actually is than the perception that critics brought to it in advance. So why is Joker such a threat to the culture? Why is this Todd Phillips/Joaquin Phoenix Joker somehow more offensive or dangerous than the Christopher Nolan/Heath Ledger Joker?
Well, for one thing, Joaquin Phoenix makes the Heath Ledger Joker look like Mr. Spock.

For another thing, the Heath Ledger Joker was never intended to be a character study. The whole point was that he was a character without a past. (Or as the Alan Moore Joker put it, ‘I prefer (my past) to be multiple choice.’) He is somehow easier to accept as a character who came into being ex nihilo as an Agent of Chaos.

Arthur Fleck, on the other hand, is presented as a product (if not a victim) of circumstances: child abuse, class struggle, an unfeeling or hard-pressed government that cuts social services, the works. The fact that there are violent losers in the real world who could claim such circumstances (and do use them to justify anti-social acts) makes the stakes seem that much more real to some people. Indeed, this movie goes so far into “realism” that it makes Christopher Nolan’s unrelentingly grim take on the Batman mythos look as wacky and family-friendly as Batman ’66.

Moreover, The Dark Knight is a movie where Good wins. Batman (and Lucius Fox) bet that the people of Gotham will not do the evil thing to save themselves under pressure, and because they do not, the Joker’s scheme is foiled. Joker is not nearly so optimistic. Arthur/Joker is simultaneously leader and follower of a stochastic wave of violence, in which an aristocratic class that thinks it knows better than the common rabble are pitted against a “kill the rich” mob determined to prove them right.

The Dark Knight was in 2008, only 11 years ago. I wonder what changed since then?

Joker is a good movie, in the sense that it is a unique personal vision that is perfectly executed. It’s just not a very uplifting one. Joker does NOT put the “fun” in “funeral.” As my friend Don said, “It was deeply disturbing, and then it was deeply disturbing over and over again.” We also agreed that it was more disturbing than the before-the-movie trailer for Doctor Sleep, which is the sequel to The Shining.

Still, Joker isn’t as disturbing as the trailer to Cats.

Nothing is more disturbing than that.

Ukraine Clown Posse

(credit for title to Virginia Bauman on Twitter)

Just a little over two weeks ago, September 21, I went on Facebook and posted a little tweet by Libertarian Party Chairman Nicholas Sarwark: “Nancy Pelosi is one of the most experienced House speakers of the last century. She’s only 70 votes short of an impeachment inquiry. She knows how to whip a vote. She doesn’t want impeachment. She wants a Democratic President to able to abuse the office like this one.”

And it got flak from some of my mainstream liberal Facebook friends, the kind of people who think that Nancy Pelosi actually knows what she’s doing. I was told “she also seems worried that an impeachment battle in DC will boost (Trump’s) approval ratings and help get him reelected. I really loathe to say it, but she might be right about that.” I said “the only reason she’s even Speaker is because voters wanted to put a check on this Administration.” I was told, “and what mechanism would stop him without awakening the beast and getting him elected again? The only thing that will work is get him out of office and try him for his crimes.”

You know, the same old scaredy-cat posture of learned helplessness, where Democrats assume that it’s better to do nothing than antagonize an enemy who’s already out to get them.

But what a difference a week makes, huh?

The Democrats are all, “What gives? The poll support for impeachment has closed the gap! It’s actually popular! We would have done this earlier if we’d known there was more support! What changed?”

And my answer is, “your party finally grew some balls.”

The flak I got was on the basis that there are certain rules that necessarily apply and can be predicted. The whole premise of Democratic passivity – which differs from but does not contradict Sarwark’s suspicion that Pelosi just wants the next Democrat to have Trump’s level of unchallenged power – is the naive assumption that Trump is just a mutation that will be resolved in the next cycle, and it would be better to just wait out the next election rather than antagonize the other party, which as we know, is going to be antagonized whether one does anything or not. This is of course based on the belief that there is going to be a free and fair election. In the fact of Donald Trump’s pressuring a foreign head of government for opposition research, it should be clear – even to Democratic leadership – that Trump has no intention of having a free and fair election, and neither does his Party. Thus, whether Pelosi wanted to or not, she had to act. And pretty typically, the Democrats only got off their asses once their own power and privileges were threatened.

And even more typically, Republicans use the same language that Democrats used during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, like what he did “doesn’t rise to the level” of impeachment and removal from office. Well, if perjury over sex rises to that level (so to speak) why does withholding military aid from a country under subversion from its neighbor – a neighbor that Trump just happens to have begged for opposition research in the past, and that he just happens to have handed intelligence from our allies while president – on the condition of a “favor” to research Ukrainian connections to a cyber-research firm that exposed Russian hacking of the Democratic Party and to research Hunter Biden’s connection to Ukrainian business NOT rise to the level of an impeachable offense? As far as the Party of Trump is concerned, the real scandal is that Burisma paid Hunter Biden 50,000 dollars. Sure. Eric and Donald Jr. are running a business that is clearly not a blind trust. Ivanka is attending meetings of NATO countries with her father. And her husband is running diplomacy with Saudi Arabia, when nobody in the Republican Party can tell us what Jared Kushner’s JOB is or what he is actually tasked to do. But sure, let’s get our undies in a wad over Hunter Biden and his FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS.

Cause that’s the way you’re supposed to say it now. At least if you’re a Republican on TV. Loudly and righteously. As in, “I’m sorry your husband got shot, Mrs. Lincoln, but can we focus on the fact that Burisma paid Hunter Biden FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS??”

Thing is, as much as Democrats have cause to regret their bargain with Bill Clinton now (in this politically correct age when a grown man can’t manipulate a girl into sex in the privacy of his own Oval Office), they did at least get something out of it. He was popular. The economy was actually good. They got a lot of legislation done, and some people other than rich donors liked it. What exactly are Republicans getting by fighting so hard for Trump? Why is this fatty orange hill the one they want to die on?

On September 27, Trump twitted:

“To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN! “

Or, “I’m going to nitpick your misspelling of a word I made up, and I’m going to do so by exposing the fact that I can’t tell an apostrophe from an accent mark from a hyphen.”

See, this is why, even now, I find it hard to call Trump a Nazi. Not that he isn’t just that evil and racist. Not that he doesn’t intend to turn America into a one party thug regime. It’s just that he’s so fucking BAD at it. I mean, look at this, he can’t even do Grammar Nazi right.

And yet, this is the level of mastermind that Republicans think is presidential. And it always causes one to ponder the question, why is it that people who are NOT dumber than wet camel shit continue to worship someone who is? Well, I may have finally found the answer.

I have said, more than once and in more than one place, that the secret to Donald Trump’s political success is that Donald Trump is what the average Donald Trump voter would be if they had money. Well, it turns out there is a new study out that makes much the same assertion, only with academic credentials.

It’s detailed in a recent article for The Atlantic, appropriately titled “The Most Dangerous Way to Lose Yourself.” Essentially, people will do certain things to preserve their sense of identity, even counterproductive things, if their sense of self is essentially negative. They may also display a certain amount of “team spirit,” like if you grew up as a Dallas Cowboys fan way back in the day and then Jerry Jones took over and the first thing he did was fire Tom Landry and every dumbass thing that happened to the team since proceeded from there, yet you still go along with what Jerry Jones wants because you’re a Cowboys fan, and what are you going to do, quit being a Cowboys fan?

But the article takes this sense of identification and goes deeper.

“Over the past decade, a new conceptualization has gained attention. It began with the seeds of an idea after the attacks on 9/11, (William) Swann says, in that the terrorists’ actions seemed to him to be driven by unusually powerful group identities. A willingness to die—and to kill thousands of others in the process—goes beyond simple allegiance. He reasoned that these people had essentially taken on the group identity as their own.

“Swann gradually developed the concept and deemed it “identity fusion.” Along with a collaborator named Angel Gómez, he defined it in 2009 as when someone’s “personal and social identities become functionally equivalent.”

“When people are fused, your personal identity is now subsumed under something larger,” says Jack Dovidio, a psychology professor at Yale. One way researchers test for fusion is to ask people to draw a circle that represents themselves, and a circle that represents another person (or group). Usually people draw overlapping circles, Dovidio explains. In fusion, people draw themselves entirely inside the other circle.

“…By a similar token, pundits often chalk “radical” behavior up to pathology, or simply to a vague “mental illness” or religious or political extremism. But fusion offers a framework that involves an ordered thought process. It is thought of as distinct from blind obedience (often assumed to be the case in cults and military violence), in which a person might follow orders and torture a prisoner, either unquestioningly or out of fear for personal safety. In fusion, people become “engaged followers.” These people will torture because they have adopted the value system that views the torture as justifiable. Engaged followers do so of their own volition, with enthusiasm.

“…The fusion might explain some apparent contradictions in ideology, Dovidio says. Even people who typically identify as advocates of small or no government might endorse acts of extreme authoritarianism if they have fused with Trump. In fusion, those inconsistencies simply don’t exist, according to Dovidio: Value systems are only contradictory if they’re both activated, and “once you step into the fusion mind-set, there is no contradiction.”

“…Fundamentally, fusion is an opportunity to realign the sense of self. It creates new systems by which people can value themselves. A life that consists of living up to negative ideas about yourself does not end well. Nor does a life marked by failing to live up to a positive self-vision. But adopting the values of someone who is doing well is an escape. If Donald Trump is doing well, you are doing well. Alleged collusion with a foreign power might be bad for democracy, but good for an individual leader, and therefore good for you. “Fusion satisfies a lot of need for people,” Dovidio says. “When you fuse with a powerful leader, you feel more in control. If that person is valued, you feel valued.”

Even if the identity fusion theory did not exist to describe the current phenomenon, we are clearly looking at a situation where Trump is where he is because a critical percentage of the country wants him there, and they want him there because they identify with him to a truly bizarre level. They think he “fights” for them, even when that just means he’s telling them what they want to hear. (When ARE we going to lock Hillary up, anyway?) They think he’s one of them because even though he isn’t, in broad measure he is – an aristocrat whose crassness means he has never been fully accepted as such, someone who despite his background shares many of the beliefs of “flyover country.” A man whose persecution complex and inflated sense of victimhood almost approaches that of his fan club. And to the extent that he doesn’t share their beliefs, he knows that his survival depends on telling them what they want to hear, even when they themselves know he’s lying.

This is why people who are by no means stupid end up becoming Trumpniks. In a certain sense, they’re self-programmed. And now, these people believe in Trump under the impression that he’s invincible, not realizing that the reason he’s been untouchable is because his “base” has made it politically unprofitable to confront him. What they also don’t realize – or don’t care about – is that growing numbers of Republicans in the Congress are retiring, because some of them are not victims of identity fusion, they just know which way the wind is blowing. And without a party in Congress, it is that much less likely that the Republican Party will get anything done. What exactly are “conservatives” fighting for, if all they’ve got to fight for is Trump? If a Party consists only of Trump and his ever-changing moods, is it even a political party?

It’s like a dog that chews a bone and tastes the marrow. He chews even harder and breaks the bone, splintering it. The marrow comes out and he chews even harder. The splinters break his gums. He fixates on the taste and digs in deeper, not realizing he’s tasting his own blood.

It really is a sort of faith. There is a critical difference between “conservatives” (read: Trumpniks) and Christians, however.

At the Last Supper, Jesus predicted that even Peter would betray him three times before the cock crowed in the morning. After the Romans arrested Jesus, Peter was recognized by a servant girl, but he denied knowing Jesus. She asserted “he is one of them (the followers of Jesus) but again Peter denied it. At one point, Peter was spotted by one of the High Priest’s men, and again he denied knowing Jesus. And at that point the rooster crowed.

Whereas over the past three years, Republicans have learned more and more about how ungodly their Leader is, and how much his position as leader makes a mockery of their claims to piety. And still, none of the party “leadership” will speak out against him, and the redcaps in social media are if anything more defiantly supportive than ever.

So congratulations, conservatives. You’ve proven that you’re more loyal to Trump than you are to Jesus.

Somehow I don’t think this cult will last as long, though.