Fuck Flying Cars

Last night I read an interview with Bon Jovi where he says- tongue planted firmly in cheek- that the plan he came up with for his band while working in a women's shoe store in his home state of New Jersey only took him as far as the millennium, at which point he would be thirty eight and driving a flying car. We still have this notion somewhere that the future didn't happen, that the (more outlandish) speculations of the first half of the 20th century didn't manifest in the second half. Even in the sixties the concept of human history reaching two thousand years by the Gregorian count seemed so far off that it was a blank canvas to project whatever astounding technocracy they could dream up onto.

It usually comes around to the Jetsons where you've got the wholesome nuclear family with the stay at home mom who lives a quiet life of self indulgence and the husband with a manufacturing job, something not much less blue collar than Fred Flinstone but without the need for any real physical exertion. Nothing there really panned out, and I'm not talking about the flying cars or the pill for dinner. Besides America not being that white anymore by any definition, the atom that is the nuclear family was split decades ago, Mom's been venturing outside the house for work, and America's manufacturing base fled East long ago. There's nothing really recognizable to 21st century goggles in the Jetsons, which shouldn't be all that surprising given that particular vision of the American family drove Willy Loman over a bridge in a fast moving car.

Meanwhile the darker, some would say more paranoid visions of the future started assembling themselves in front of our eyes. Why is that? Why is it that more of the things we feared from the future came true than the things we wanted? Well, the Jetsons was always just bullshit meant to make people feel comfortable in a status quo that never had any hope at sustainability under the social, political, and even environmental pressures that were already bombarding it. That fixation on the American Dream is the currency that politicians, corporations, and myriad other interests used to buy our present right out from under us in exchange for the promise of a future no one could reasonably expect. The biggest example of this is the steady unraveling of sanity in the real estate industry that allowed credit to balloon to the point that all it took to shred the world's most powerful economy and bring the entire world down with it was a run on a single company using an obscure and highly unethical stock trading technique.

Thanks to all that, the American Dream is dormant if not dead altogether and it's not really something that we should be standing around mourning either. It was artificial and chasing it as far and as hard as we have made us vulnerable, made us weak. It's been pretty easy since this whole mess started to stand there and point at people who took these insane sub-prime mortgages as being weak or stupid or deserving of their fate. It's fair enough to say that they made some short sighted decisions because they wanted the Jetsons life, but the problem is that life has been inculcated in us as being the final destination and the holy grail since our ability to hear was developed in the womb.

Some time between The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S Thompson defined the wider context for his prose to be the search for the American Dream, which turned out to be a very ill defined journey. I'm not entirely certain if that was Thompson's fault due to his aimless meandering style or because many of the basic assumptions of what America was and what it wanted were shattering under the weight of the social upheaval of the 1960s. The idea of wanting to pursue any kind of straight, ordinary existence after having seen how the other half were attempting to live- most importantly during his time in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco- became ridiculous and farsical to him even as he watched the ebb tide of the Summer of Love from a roadside bar in Nevada. What he did correctly observe as early as that horrible epiphany in Nevada that bisected his most famous outing, was that there had been no discernable sustainable alternative to the American Dream presented by any of the social pioneers of the age of aquarius.

When Nixon was elected President, Thompson and many others took that as the end of the Summer of Love or whatever it is you want to call that brief, heady trip into the unknown. Perhaps it was the final bleeding out of the killing stroke it received at Altamont, but whatever it meant for the past it was taken as a sign of things to come. With Nixon at the helm, things would get back to "normal," back on track to that Jetsons future that is frequently called Manifest Destiny. That's what the Republicans of the day would tell you that they stood for, this return to an idlylic tranditional world of family values. It wouldn't have been a disaster either if that's what the actual agenda was. Instead, Nixon was forging the ties with China that would let successive presidents- culminating in Clinton- get cracking on builing that trade deficit and ship our manufacturing base overseas. Apparently that and bombing countries like Cambodia into the stone age were integral parts of assuring us a Jetsons future.

The whole apple pie and flying cars was never really a projection of the future. It's what politicians and various corporate concerns use to put the customer at ease. When we talk about the lack of flying cars in the 21st century, it isn't an honest disappointment that cars still have wheels. It's the disappointment that no one drove us into a bright sparkly future where things make more sense, are easier, and familiar. It's the anger and bafflement of being born into The Matrix and suddenly being unplugged. We were told that it was going to be better, instead it's a broken Philip K Dick hole. But when the discource of how bad things are happens, it isn't happening miles under the Earth in a spit and bailing wire post apocalyptic commune. It's happening on Twitter. It's being tweeted about from an iPhone.

It seems a bit incongruous, that. Talking about how Rome is in flames from a device that with a few smart taps of your fingers on a smooth buttonless surface will then carry that signal across the goddamn globe. When Rome burned, they didn't have toilets that flushed. I'm not saying that the modern world isn't in trouble, I'm not going to disagree with Bruce Sterling's assertion that we're entering an age of what he calls Gothic High Tech. What I will say though is that the sooner we abandon the American Dream, the sooner we can actually start building a future we want to live in. When I'm feeling more focused I might try to lay out why exactly I feel like most of the trouble we're in now has to do with clinging to the American Dream despite the fact that it disappeared somewhere around the Second World War. If it was a book I'd call it Hunter's Wake.

X Files 1.2 "Deep Throat"

Not one hell of a lot to say about the second episode beyond the fact that I feel they jumped the gun by giving the viewer undeniable evidence that the government has UFOs and they'll do whatever they can to protect them. I would have liked to see the show play a bit more with the ambiguity of the situation instead of giving Mulder credibility right off the bat. Put it into the mix a couple episodes later and it would have been great, I think the second episode would have been better used for the first MOTW (monster of the week) episode so as not to lead the audience to the conclusion that the show is just a government conspiracy/UFO show.

Other than that it was a fun episode with a great pre-Buffy cameo by Seth Green, (which establishes a two degree separation between Twin Peaks and Buffy) and the very first official Scully-ditch.

The X-Files: Pilot

As with most of my adventures in narrative since 2005 my re-introduction to The X Files has been fairly serendipitous, mostly owing to the fact that I am nearly finished it's immediate predecessor Twin Peaks which ended two years before the pilot of The X Files aired. What makes Twin Peaks so significant to the X Files is that despite it's spiral into oblivion into the second season, David Lynch's first foray into television broke a great deal of ground in terms of what mainstream television audiences considered compelling as well as how malleable the standard genres of television truly are.

One hypothesis that I want to explore during the course of my X Files viewing is that the continued presence and guidance by series creator Chris Carpenter is what ultimately not only kept the series from spiraling out of control but allowed it to reach a point where it not only grew out of the fertile soil left behind by Twin Peaks, but flourished to create an even more enduring and influential series.

My first thought in approaching the pilot- which I did not originally see in 1993, but as a re-run somewhere in the late nineties after having seen several other episodes- was to make a mental note of how it compares to other Fox pilots over the intervening years; most notably Fringe, Firefly, Dollhouse, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Curiously there are no motorcycles present and the pilot was in fact aired first. But seriously it appears to be uncharacteristically untrammeled, which is seriously welcome considering my current familiarity with the kind of interference Fox is famous for saddling Joss Whedon with.

Curiously the pilot suggests to us that Scully is to be the protagonist (which had been Carter's original intent) but from the moment that we are introduced to "Spooky" Fox Mulder onwards, the episode takes place firmly in his world. While I felt pounded over the head by the initial cascade of spooky things that happen to Mulder and Scully before they even reach the Oregon town where their case is based and many of the details of the case reached a bit too far and presented this huge orgy of bizarre things from apes with metal things up their noses in coffins where there should be people to strange scars and time distortion, it still did a fantastic job of setting the tone for the series, establish the dynamic between Mulder and Scully, and clearly establish just what the series was going to be.

I can understand Marty's perspective that they made it a little too clear what the conspiracy was from the very beginning, but approaching it from my perspective of having just finished Twin Peaks, I think it was fairly important that they clearly establish that fact. I knew going in what Twin Peaks was going to be; that it was going to be really strange and that I would have to put my David Lynch hat on. The problem with that is of course that the original audience of Twin Peaks did not have the benefit of having seen Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, or Inland Empire and so the actual basis for what was happening in terms of Bob, the owls, and the other more esoteric elements were a complete surprise to the audience and something that contributed to it's downfall. Of course at this point we know that it's a government conspiracy. What we do not know is if there are real aliens involved, what they want, what the government has to do with it, and what the government's goals are which leaves us at about the same place that the Fringe pilot did in that we knew that there was a company called Massive Dynamic with connections to the DHS that run even deeper than Olivia's.

Continue the comparison between those two shows and you can see how much better and clearer we can see the protagonists in the X Files. Olivia is curious, she wants to understand why John Scott died and what he was up to. Well that's just dandy. With Mulder we have this life long obsession driven by his sister's abduction (that goes on to become central to the most electrifying revelations in the entire series) and this very sinister game that the FBI appears to be playing with one of it's own agents. Why does it make any sense to task Scully- who is suggested to be overqualified for her role at the FBI within the first five minutes of the pilot- with observing and assisting what appears to be a waste of departmental resources? We still have no idea who the factions in play are and how many there are.

Overall, it really is one of the best pilots I've ever seen but The Wire still takes the gold medal.

Jennifer's Body

Question: How do you market a subversive feminist indie horror-comedy from an academy award winning screenwriter?
Answer: You package it as an exploitation flick and only release footage of Megan Fox being slutty.

That's how the geniuses at Fox seem to operate anyway. Forget the fact that we just got through the media backlash against Megan Fox brought on by Paramount's carpet bombing publicity for Transformers 2, and just plaster her image everywhere. There's no way that could fail, right? Apparently that tactic failed so terribly that people think I'm making a dumbass joke when I tell them it's actually a great movie. Well Megan Fox's acting is fairly flat and Diablo Cody still needs to transition as a writer who delivers great short stories into someone who can deliver nuanced character studies that add dramatic weight to her unique insights and razor sharp comedic instincts, but it's still an indispensible slice of pop that turns the genre on it's ear.

Ever notice how in the oh so cleverly postmodern Scream franchise- whose killer app is discussion and deconstruction of the cliches of the genre it resides in- never bothers to question why most of the victims are women, that they exploit female weakeness, and punish them for stepping outside the bounds of conventional morality? I won't hold it against you if you didn't, because the point of Scream was a vindication, a justification for the morbidly self indulgent and systematically misogynist brand of film it represents.

There's no tedious metafiction to be found in Jennifer's Body, instead Cody's screenplay wisely leaps forward to show us what it looks like when the sexual predator is a woman preying on the stereotypical weaknesses and insecurities of teenage boys (primarily their sexual appetite), shining a very bright and uncomfortable light on the tropes that most mainstream audiences have become desensitized to over the course of three decades of screaming, bleeding teenage girls. It's viciously, gleefully exploitative in a way that is sure to offend and anger a lot of male viewers and makes no apologies for it.

What is probably most interesting and unique about Jennifer's Body isn't it's insights and commentaries on teenage sexuality or high school politics but Cody's manifesto of shit kicking take no prisoners feminism. Amanda Siefried's "Needy" transforms from spineless wallflower into a plucky self assured vigilante who refuses to appeal to male authority or muscle for help in a way that few contemporary teenage girl protagonists do. When the system, conventional morality and rule of law fail her Needy doesn't give in or let justice slip through her fingers. She rolls up her sleeves and gets shit done no matter what the personal cost. Perhaps it's fitting that the perpetually overshadowed and underestimated protagonist got completely lost in the signal to noise conflict between Jennifer's Body the film and it's marketing, the ultimate poetic justice in a film set in a world that is never fair and frequently punishes the unconventional.

I could talk some more about the film's feminist dialectic, Jennifer's character arc and her willing victimization or what the conflict between Needy and Jennifer has to say about the confrontation between sensible emotionally honest sex positive feminity and "female chauvenism," but instead I'm going to tell you to go out and buy a ticket. This movie needs you, and needs you badly if what it has to say is ever going to make any impact. It's smart, funny, hip, and will speak directly to you in ways that very few movies do.

Bottle Shock

Many films attempt to convey the passion, craftsmanship, and heart that are poured into the given trade or pursuit they portray but few truly succeed in transferring that passion to a debutant audience as deftly as Bottle Shock. I'm no wine buff and I'll be first to admit that I was forced to use the phone a friend life line at the liquor store in order to find a decent wine to compliment the film (I went with a Yellow Tail 2007 Chardonnay), but I was well and truly caught up in the passion of winemaking by the poignant, human, and ultimately whimsical portrayals of the founding fathers of the California wineries that transformed the industry from being centered on a single country to a truly global affair.

To shed a bit of perspective on the film and the central tasting that occurred in 1976 one need only stop by their local liquor store and take in the multiplicity of countries producing top quality wine, something that until now I took for granted. Being born most of a decade after the tasting depicted in Bottle Shock I grew up with wine enthusiast parents who as far back as I can remember have been drinking wines across four continents. I even grew up with the Nappa (and Sonoma) Valley as a house hold name, but had no idea until watching Bottle Shock that it was scarcely five years after the historic tasting that my parents travelled down to California on their honeymoon. Thus, I could end the review by simply stating that the importance of the events portrayed justify a viewing all on it's own but that would be selling the film itself extremely short.

Beyond just being a story about wine, Bottle Shock (as a video release) enters the canon of American filmmaking at an almost unprecedented time of penitence and self mortification largely brought on by the lingering ghosts of the Bush administration, and is thus a welcome breath of fresh air of what might as well be called the American equivalent of the Arthurian spirit, evoking that which is greatest about Americans; the entrepreneurial drive and almost need to take the role of the scrappy underdog challenging the established elite (see Hidalgo, The Last Samurai, Rocky, etc). It isn't a post imperial expression of American hegemony but the human and affecting tale of an uncompromising quest for legitimacy, for vindication.

What really marks Bottle Shock as being an important film in it's own right irrespective of the historical and cultural impact is that it has a heart a mile wide and a vulnerability of spirit that denies it any kind of ribcage of post modern ironic distance or Hollywood bravado. Shades of Waiting for Guffman are especially present in the unlikely, ungainly characters who make up the California wine growers vying for the attention of Alan Rickman's visiting wine guru, but the script never compromises them for a cheap laugh and instead uses stunning silent moments of dense visual texture to vindicate them through the literal fruits of their labour, most brilliantly portrayed in a quiet, subtle sequence in which Rickman's character tastes guacamole for what one is lead to believe is the first time of his life.

Rickman functions as a clever and effective foil for the eccentric but human and richly compelling performances by Chris Pine and Bill Pullman who play the real life father son wine growing team at the heart of the narrative. Pine's charm and swagger are transcendent in his breakthrough role (which he followed up with by leading JJ Abrams' Star Trek reboot as the legendary James T Kirk), balanced by Pullman's rumpled cynicism. Their dynamic, however bizarre it gets, (specifically their penchant for stepping into an outdoor boxing ring set up in the middle of the vinyard to face off against each other whenever tempers flare) is tempered by layered, organic performances that drive the core of the film and do most of the legwork in giving the viewer a reason to invest in their world and rise to fame from obscurity.

In short, Bottle Shock is a contemporary classic of American film that is unmissable for a multiplicity of reasons, but most of all because it moves beyond the cliches of so called indie cinema to return to a form that is as compelling as it is entertaining.

"Cees"

I got the chance to watch Crips and Bloods: Made In America, a brilliant little known documentary chronicling the black presence in Southern California from the industrial boom at the onset of World War 2 until the present in an effort to chart the social conditions that led to the creation of the Crips and Bloods gangs whose ongoing war has lasted for decades unabated except for a brief period during and after the riots triggered by the Rodney King verdict.

Out of everything I encountered one specific line of narration has haunted me, the fact that many of the people living in the effected areas of Los Angeles have never seen the Pacific Ocean. From that basic fact arose the idea for a story that for now I'm just going to call Cees, a hip hop slang term for children that I believe I first heard in Dead Prez's Bigger Than Hip Hop. The basic plot is that two young brothers (aged somewhere between nine and twelve) living in war torn Los Angeles get it into their heads that they are going to the beach to see the ocean and nothing is going to stop them.

One thing I've noticed in practically every current narrative portrayal of abject poverty and the violence it generates in the urban US children are portrayed as not much more than victims of circumstance that more or less function as subjects of pity. I loved the fourth season of The Wire as much as anyone did, but the youth put in prominence were there to show the human cost of the breakdown of the social safety net and education system. Outside of surrealist and fantasy cinema (Pan's Labrynth, Surveillance) there hasn't been much of a report on the resilience and spirit of children in the face of adversity that crushes most adults.

What I want to create is something that is as whimsical and hopeful as it is poignant and disturbing, like the early childhood scenes of Slumdog Millionaire but with more mythic grandeur. To my protagonists in Cees, their trip to the beach- incredibly banal by the standards of most of the intended audience- carries the same mythic weight and dizzying sense of adventure as Frodo Baggins joining Gandalf or Luke Skywalker leaving Tattooine for the first time. They're crafty, canny youth who understand how to navigate the complex and dangerous jungle of their home environment albeit with the guileless naivety of youth. Stay tuned.

Aphorisms Round One

1. The most radical perspective/experience in our heterosexual male dominated society is that of the feminist lesbian.

2. People complain about the fact that Quentin Tarantino brought talking about movies within movies into vogue. What's more important is that he initiated an open dialogue about the significance of pop culture in every day life as well as empower the average viewer to begin interpreting film in new ways. Consider the sequence in Inglorious Basterds where the Nazi officer guesses a description the plot of King Kong as being "the experience of the Negro in America," which is a perfectly valid and darkly comic interpretation of the film itself. In every one of his films Tarantino invites and encourages his audience to investigate and interpret film, movies, and music in new and imaginative ways.

3. There are two groups of old white men from whom the control of popular narrative in the (western) world must be taken if we are to move forward into a progressive future; the ones placed as the arbiters of what is Important and the ones who control the mediums through which new narratives are created and transmitted.

A Brief Feminist Critique of Mulan

I've been getting a lot of shit lately for attacking Mulan, as if the movie is somehow "empowering" or "positive," which is probably the biggest farce I've heard in a while.

1. Mulan has to dress up like a man and pretend to be a man to be accepted as an equal among the men.
2. Mulan at no point in the film demonstrates her ability to succeed without a man. Even her little dragon mentor Mushuu is a man.
3. Mulan is never shown to be equal or superior to her male romantic interest. She is submissive to him at every turn, and returns to the typical accepted appearance and role at the conclusion of the film.

There. Fuck off, it's just as paternalistic and retrograde as The Little Mermaid, if not moreso for attempting to trick people into thinking it's somehow empowering to women.

Fringe season two news!

One of the great things about working in a video store in Hollywood North is that almost every day you have people in the industry coming in to pick up movies and shows they worked on. Today I got lucky enough to talk to a guy working on the second season of Fringe (filming here in Vancouver, the first season was filmed in the US) who was renting the first season to get caught up on what happened before he joined the production.

Apparently he's one of the self described "monster guys," prosthetics specifically. I can't really convey into words how excited he was to be working on the show, that's how stoked he was. According to him they're pouring money into Fringe to the tune of what is usually spent on a feature film and the intent of season two is to go far beyond the scale of events in the first. He also said that they've been on set for up to eighteen hours when TV shows do not typically run that late (feature films frequently do).

Add in the rumour that Fox is attempting to bring Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny onto the show as a pair of famous FBI agents and you've got one hell of a production. I can't wait to finish season one and get onto the new season now!

The Elephantine Mouse in the Room

One of the most important things I ever learned from Doctor Who is that humanity will never cease to surprise, and by no means is that always a positive. Until quite recently, I was dead certain that we lived in the information age where the importance of intellectual property and who owns it was very well understood. The complete lack of concern over Disney's purchase of Marvel proved otherwise. This is a pretty terrible thing, and I'm not talking about any kind of phantom fear of Daredevil having to change his name to Dareangel or anything that insipid. What we are staring down the barrel of is one singular corporate entity weilding a massive fucking chunk of the most valuable and well known intellectual property in the world. Why it's particularily frightening that Disney is that entity takes a bit of context and a history lesson of sorts.

The year is 2007, it's a balmy summer evening in Calgary and I'm ignoring a beautiful sunset over the river because I'm gamely trying to impress the most beautiful woman I've ever seen with a kind of stump speech- that kind of irreverent yet pointed interpretation of pop culture you usually see in a Kevin Smith movie- about the lack of interesting or progressive male role models in Disney films. With the exception of Bambi, which was in my mind the real hook. That plucky little deer who grows up practically without a father, saves the forest, and refuses to buy into the might-makes-right alpha male complex when it comes time to fight for his woman. It all went according to plan. Until she responded.

According to her, the look on my face when she demolished my argument and completely reconfigured my perspective and understanding of Disney films was such that she never expected to hear from me again. (She's now my girlfriend.) Her opening line, a verbal left jab to the head, was to shift the focus from Bambi and his merits to the fact that his mate was little more than a docile, submissive female there for him to protect and bear his children. Pop went that balloon, but on she went, going through each Disney Princess and tearing each one down, explaining which stereotype each belonged to and why it was essentially worse that young girls had these characters to look up to than if they had none.

Beyond just dismantling my opinion, what Katrina highlighted was how Disney has, through their films, been able to influence public discourse on femininity and the role of women in society by disseminating a decidedly patriarchal perspective to a massive audience of fertile young minds. Feminist literary critics have for years wryly pointed out that womens' stories typically end in either marriage or death (say nothing about the fact that the literary female is almost to a fault defined by the men in her life). Disney Princess stories all end in marriage. Marriage to rich, handsome princes.

While it's true that the majority of Disney films- especially those dubbed Princess Movies- are based on much older material than the cartoons, there has never been much interest or attempt at altering the source material beyond changing the endings where the protagonist died to the protagonist getting married. There is not a single Disney Princess movie that does not feature a romantic relationship that is based on a man coming to the rescue of a woman. While some of the female protagonists assert themselves or attempt to gain control of one facet of their life or another, they are all ultimately submissive to their male love interest.

Which, is how the Sex and the City movie ends, with Big proposing to Carrie using one of her diamond encrusted shoes in lieu of a ring. The obvious reference to Cinderella wasn't even truly necessary to illustrate what the ultimate arc of the series- or at least Carrie's character arc- was; which is essentially that the duty of the Post Feminist Woman is to toil at a career and navigate the jungle of contemporary dating just long enough to find the Prince Charming ready to sweep her off her feet. It's all a cleverly masked shell game; it pretends to celebrate female economic and sexual independence while ultimately giving a thumbs up to the traditional paternalistic view of marriage. It's Disney for Grown Ups, and the best example of how pervasive the influence of Disney's repackaged fairy tales is, especially in fiction targeted at women.

At this point, it probably isn't all that clear what the social and cultural impact of Disney Princess movies has to do with the Marvel purchase. When the news about the purchase broke, representatives from Disney were widely quoted as saying that it's primary interest in Marvel is to reach the young male demographic that has- relative to it's female counterpart- eluded them in recent years. Given the kind of conservative, self-limiting message Disney has been hugely successful at marketing to young girls, I am very concerned about these same people gaining control over a large stable of characters aimed directly at impressionable boys.

Which is a very important point to make even if you take the deluded perspective that Disney only wants Marvel as an intellectual property farm for movies and merchandising, which I simply cannot believe given Disney's history in meddling with their subsidiaries, most notably film studio Miramax, pressuring the Weinstein brothers to push back release dates, purchase the international distribution rights from Disney to be sold to a third party, or in the case of Kids, purchase the film from Disney altogether, effectively removing their name from it. In every case the dispute was caused over objectionable content that sparked backlash from political and religious groups, most notably in the case of Michael Moore's documentary Fareheit 9/11. This of course contributed greatly to the Weinsteins' acrimonious departure from Disney to found their second company, The Weinstein Company.

Disney also had very public and acrimonious disputes with another collaborator; 3D animation juggernaut Pixar. It's important to note that the majority of the disputes between Pixar and Disney came while Pixar was under contract but a separate entity from Disney, and that the later purchase of Pixar came with negociations that resulted in many consessions in Pixar's favor due to their status and worth including a restructuring of the animation department that re-opened the 2D animation department and closed the direct to video department (after the release of Tinkerbell, which was the culmination of a bitter battle begun with Disney's attempt to make a Pixar opposed Toy Story sequel that forced the creation and release of Toy Story 2, taking John Lasseter off production of Monsters Inc and later led to a public debate between Steve Jobs and Michael Eisner).

In addition to Marvel having no such leverage over how Disney as a corporation will interact with them and their properties, the current leadership (above and beyond Editor in Chief Joe Quesada) has been traditionally fidgety in issues that may offend the sensibilities of important Hollywood types. In short, Avi Arad watches what happens in the comics carefully and is never afraid to lower the boom. The most notorious incident involves internet muckracker Rich Johnston informing The Daily Mail that Peter Milligan and Michael Allred were prepped and ready to publish a comic that featured the reanimated spirit of Princess Diana on a superhero team. The story goes that it was pressure from Arad, who was losing face with his Diana-worshipping Hollywood connections that forced Milligan and Allred to re-create the arc using a dead brunette popstar of their own invention, which greatly compromised the story and it's impact in parodying contemporary celebrity culture.

Since at least 2003 Avi Arad and Dan Buckley were eager to sell Marvel to Hollywood, although they bitterly argued about whether they should make overtures to Sony or Paramount (among other things), which as the example above shows, compromised the more daring creative minds at Marvel and the political manoevering doesn't end there. Shortly after the controversy surrounding the X Statix arc broke, Rich Johnston was in contact with a source either from within or close to Marvel going by the name Felicia who outlined- filtered through her own interpolations and opinions- what the next few years of Marvel would look like. The only thing that stopped it from happening is that it took another six years for Marvel to find the right buyer.

One of the more important parts of her diatribe was to point out that- in 2003 (before the release of Spiderman 2 or 3)- the publication arm of Marvel accounted for 5% of the company's revenue, which among other things led Dan Buckley to do insane things to attempt to justify its (read his) continued existence. With Quesada in tow, the two poured over every communication from the west coast they could in order to find tidbits of how the characters would be interpreted in the movies and as much as possible integrate these changes into their comic book counterparts as soon as possible, including such things as Spider-man's organic webbing and Bullseye's revised Colin Farrel look not to mention the primary unspoken motive behind the "One More Day" fiasco. Quesada's personal vision for the continued existence of Marvel comics is a literal interpetation of the company's nickname the "House of Ideas," to essentially become a pitch farm for movies and video games, a concept that so far has only been successful for individual creators (Mark Millar, J. Michael Strazynski, Tim Seeley, Robert Kirkman) but has shown no promise for entire companies. Successful or not, the tactic serves only to diminish the potential and actualization of the medium.

At the end of the day, the Disney purchase is just adding one more layer to an already poisonous cake that will not- under current leadership- result in the enviable creative and market position currently enjoyed by DC. The degree of creative autonomy enjoyed at DC and their upcoming shift to a position of contribution and consultation in brand usage across Time-Warner did not come overnight. It required the integrity and determination of Paul Levitz, Karen Berger, and Jim Lee as well as Warner Brothers' hands off approach to DC's output that allowed them the freedom to craft daring narratives, and tread on nearly any ground they desired. None of the elements of that equation exist in the current leadership at Marvel, and none of it is present at Disney either. I'm not here to Chicken Little, I'm here to remind you that Dark Reign is the perfect metaphor for Marvel. You've just got to hope there's an Emma Frost at the table.

Che Part One: America Fuck Yeah!

Che Part One is a great movie. It does everything that contemporary film should. I guess that’s the problem. If practically anyone but Steven Soderberg had directed this film, I would probably be rather ecstatic about it. The problem is that I know his capabilities too well to be fooled into thinking that this tremendous achievement is the high watermark of his achievements. It lacks the inventive spirit behind the creative choices made for The Girlfriend Experience or the raw emotional brutality of Traffic. It feels too objective and polished for Soderberg, more his attempt at Kubick than a genuine entry into his body of work.

I suppose it’s only personal preference getting in the way of my enjoyment of the film, but when I go in for a Tim Burton film I expect nothing less than the full force of his idiosyncratic vision, which is perhaps an unfair comparison given that Burton has a very specific visual style, while Soderberg has thus far been more interested in allowing the script to dictate the techniques used whether it’s the gritty shot on video hyperreality of Traffic or the subdued soft focus ambient light of The Girlfriend Experience. Perhaps my consternation is that Che Part One is a film about a revolutionary by a revolutionary filmmaker, and yet somehow is not a revolutionary film.

Everything about the film, even the Post-Tarantino intercut narratives, is familiar to your average American film goer, which has a certain amusing poetic justice to it given that Che Guevara is a formerly incendiary figure from the perspective of American history who today is very little more than a commodity both in the United States and Cuba.

Del Toro’s virtuoso performance will endear itself to audiences, especially the Democrat dominated youth culture eager to embrace any figure who stands in opposition to classical Manifest Destiny America. Guevara is the perfect hero for Post-Bush America; audiences can cheer his battle against oppression and American Imperialism as an exorcism for the lingering guilt of allowing Bush to indulge his disastrous doctrine of pre-emptive warfare with the added bonus of his early death ensuring that the world would never have to face his inevitable transition from revolutionary to dictator. There’s a reason people don’t wear Fidel Castro t-shirts and it has little to do with the good doctor wearing a cooler hat.

The video release also sees American audiences brilliantly prepped for the film in that it closes on it’s eponymous hero at his peak, flush with victory and ready to take on the entire world (which he does literally at the United Nations General Assembly), which mirrors the current arc of President and Pop Icon in Chief Barack Obama. Perhaps the ultimate purpose of Soderberg’s oeuvre is to give Americans the romantic, idealized vision of their own recent history cleverly packaged as a historical drama charting the rise of one of the most enduring political figures of the 20th century. Is the real truth of the matter that politics be damned, Che Guevara is in fact the ultimate American action hero, the President we’ve always dreamed of but haven’t had since Washington?

The 2008 election campaign, when viewed from this perspective, really was an attempt at turning soul grinding machine politics into some kind of mythic struggle of cosmic proportions. Consider how pathetically desperate it is to label a broken, callous old man whose best years ended a generation ago a maverick. Consider the irony of a street artist enthralled and inspired by communist propaganda changing the entire campaign with a piece of artwork informed by the personality politics embraced by tyrants spanning the full depth and breadth of human history. Children in Africa wave banners with Obama’s face on them as a symbol of hope for the future, the perfect recursive image of South American children waving banners of Guevara handed down to them by their grandparents.

We will sit in the hushed silence watching a brash, young Che stand against colonial backed oppression, daring to make enemies of the most powerful nation in the world! America- grown fat and indolent on industry driven imperial conquest- stares at him balefully, unable to recognize the fierce sparkle of it’s own youth in his eye. This is George Washington reborn, revolution at it’s most circular. The hero become the villain, tea stained Indian costume moldering away in the back of it’s closet.

Perhaps this then at last is Soderberg’s genius. He has created for us the vehicle through which we will finally understand how truly American Che Guevara is, how he lived and breathed the mythic bedrock of our republic more truly than any man born on our soil. Che Guevara has achieved ultimate immortality as the Great American Action Hero, dispensing justice and freedom for all with a cigar and a machine gun. Hasta la vista, baby.

I am an Asshole Projecting the Future

The phrase "literary bad boy" has been thrown around a lot since the emergence of the founding fathers of Generation X, but the insistent buzz surrounding first time novelist Mark Osborne seems to suggest he warrants it. Ever since his debut novel Blood Ampersand Ink cracked the New York Times Bestseller's list stories started surfacing about black magic, cross-dressing, and his scandalous girlfriend SG's own Mewsette Suicide. We sent Gene Grey out to the wilds of Vancouver to meet the self proclaimed Rock Star Novelist to sort out fact from fiction.

Gene Grey: I checked the NYT Bestsellers list on the way here, and Blood Ampersand Ink was eighth. What does that feel like?

Mark Osborne: Ambivalent, I guess. I like the idea that I can walk into any bookstore in at least two countries and see my book there, that people can get a copy from Winnipeg to San Diego. That's a nice feeling. But the Bestseller's list doesn't mean anything real. It's all about putting product in stores.

GG: So the numbers don't really concern you.

MO: The real numbers do. I worked at the lowest rungs of the book industry, both in retail and distribution. I know how many copies of my book are going to be shredded or recycled or whatever. At some point, I'll prod Vintage into telling me how many people have actually read my book. It'll mean something when I start my book tour and people actually show up to listen to me. That will be a real trip.

GG: It seems like authors in general are very divided about doing public readings, where do you fall in?

MO: I love reading my stuff, far more than I do handing it to someone and waiting for them to read it. I get anxious, I interrupt them. I'm a real asshole when someone is trying to read my stuff in front of me. (Laughs) When I read something out loud, I can gauge the reactions in real time. I can see people responding in real time. Back before we were even dating I used to read my blogs to my girlfriend over the phone because I didn't want to wait for her to read them.

GG: How does that compare to reading to an audience?

MO: Well, as I found out later, she was mostly masturbating the whole time because she likes the sound of my voice. It would be pretty awkward if I caught people doing that at a reading.

GG: (Laughs) Then you'd be Chuck Palahniuk.

MO: Chuck's gay, you'd have to feel for any poor girl getting off on his voice.

GG: Your girlfriend is Mewsette Suicide, how does that impact your relationship?

MO: My relationship with her, with my peers, or what?

GG: Let's start with her.

MO: I don't know that it really does. She probably denies this now but I harassed her into applying for ages. I was wearing a Suicide Girls t-shirt the day we met, she didn't know what it was yet. At one point she talked about how she had too many tattoos to be in Playboy. I just sort of scoffed at that because to me Suicide Girls was something so much more interesting, and yeah more titilating. Playboy just seemed too manufactured or whatever.

GG: Just to clarify, we aren't paying Mark to say that.

MO: (Laughs) To be fair, she bought me my first issue of Playboy.

GG: That's one hell of a woman, to buy you a Playboy.

MO: Sure, but she knew damn well I'd spend more time geeking out about an interview with Norman Mailler than leering at Kim Kardashian.

GG: It's kind of inescapable that tattoos are an important part of your novel, what kept you coming back to that?

MO: Well, I started the novel at a time in my life where I think that I'd fallen away from myself to work through some issues and try to get back on track. It was months since I'd drawn a thing or even thought about trying to get an apprenticeship in any productive way, so at first it was a bit of a reminder that tattooing was what I was trying to work towards and then it just kind of got a life all of it's own because of how how potent and contemporary it is.

GG: So writing this novel was a kind of therapy for you?

MO: Aversion therapy, I guess you could call it. The idea to write this first came a few months before I started writing, when [Mewsette] suggested I write her a novel as a Christmas present, with the stipulation that it had to have werewolves and vampires in it. We had a bad fight not long after Christmas- nothing to do with the novel or lack thereof- and it was looking like I'd never talk to or hear from her again, which was a very special kind of agony. So, when I sat down and started writing it, the initial idea was to sort of eulogize our friendship and all the ways that in the fairly brief time we'd known each other that she had changed my life.

GG: One of the criticisms that you've faced in the media recently is that you're, and I'm quoting this, "wildly inconsistant" about just what the novel is, what it's about, and what it represents.

MO: Oh sure. A while back, a buddy of mine who appears in my comic that I've been working on, was privy to a conversation where I was asked what the story I was working on was about, and I was struggling with coming up with what Bruce Sterling would call a bumper sticker. Chris just kind of waded in there and he said that based on my influences he'd figured that the geometry, the cross section of my work to be non euclidian. You can't just map it in normal 3d space.

GG: What exactly does that mean?

MO: You'd have to ask Chris, I just like that line. I just sort of, as a consequence of how I think, work on a few different levels at once. I'm never happy doing something simple and straight forward, I have to be hiding shit and pushing a few concepts at once. In one sense, Blood Ampersand Ink is a narrative guidebook to the city of Vancouver. Taken a different way, it's a post feminist subversion of classic vampire fiction. Read it again and you might see it as an attempt at codifying Generation Y into the canon of western literature. I tried to do a lot of things and hopefully there's someone out there to respond to each one if not all of them.

GG: You mentioned that your methods are a consequence of your influences. Have you used a certain methodology or technique that you gleaned from a specific writer?

MO: Not directly, no. You could call it gonzo to a degree. I've done things that were called "pure one hundred percent wild turkey gonzo" before, even though I generally drink Jack Daniels. I have adapted some of Thompson's methodology in writing the novel, for sure. I don't do anything crazy like cocaine or LSD, but I do make liberal use of alcohol, caffeine, and sleep depreviation. There's a lot of emotionally raw stuff that I had to write to make this feel legitimate. I couldn't just clam up and shut down the way I would if I was dealing with someone during a situation like that. I suppose I could write Yayo clamming up and fucking off, but when you're writing the narrator doing that, you have to lend it that authentic voice, describe the thought process behind that action.

I've read up on hallucinogenics and drugs. Kesey, Huxley, all kinds of reports of the halluciongenic experience. These drugs, they interrupt the way your brain usually communicates with you and you get this outpouring of sensory information from parts of the brain that do not usually do that. I'm probably doing a really shitty job of paraphrasing something that Pinchbeck or Rushkoff said in a talk somewhere. My point here is that when I'm writing those tough parts, and what I mean isn't how I justify Yayo getting ahold of a kalashnikov and using it to shoot at angry biker werewolves but how I get into the frame of mind where he's standing there on the deck of a ferry talking about how mythology has abandoned him, there's nothing to hold onto, nothing to give him comfort and he is going to die, I have to get in the way of my ego. I have to interrupt my shame and insecurities about laying myself bare. People say shit, real honest unvarnished shit, when they're drunk or sleep deprived or whatever. They lose their filter, put their guard down. So I just had to duplicate that, demolish myself down to that kind of ugly place.

GG: You talked about writing the novel under the impression that [Mewsette] was out of your life permanently, but obviously that isn't the case. What changed?

MO: I don't think anything really changed per say. I think it was more that we both came back to where we should have stayed. It isn't as if we had this big long cry and worked out a ton of deep seated issues or anything as banal as that. I just used her birthday to test the waters. I sent her a text, she responded and we just picked back up into that odd space we occupied before. It was the exact opposite of The Notebook. Neither of us wrote letters destroyed by an evil parental unit or pined away or whatever. We just tried to lose ourselves in whatever came naturally, which always involves alcohol and sex with other people, but for me it was mostly the writing. Then it was her birthday and we were talking and we just sort of started to surface again, until we got back to that part where we remembered that we're stronger together than apart.

GG: Were you finished the novel by then?

MO: Christ, no. Let me tell you it almost sunk the entire novel, getting her back into my life. It's hard to write about falling in love with someone who disappears when they come back. That feels about as phony as mourning Jesus on Good Friday knowing he'll be back in a few days. At the same time though, it completely re-energized the first two acts, where Cat is this amazing whirwind that just sweeps into Yayo's life and flips it completely upside down.

GG: Did you begin writing the novel hoping that you would hear from her again?

MO: Oh absolutely. I started out pretty naive, thinking that oh maybe if she saw it on sale somewhere, that kind of Slumdog Millionaire logic that she might look me up and we could work things out then, at some magical future interval. That she'd crash a book signing. If I wasn't feeling so cynical and down on myself at the time, I probably would have been more honest with myself and known that the act of writing would bring her back into contact with me.

GG: In what sense?

MO: In the sense that for a long time now, I 've had an odd relationship with what I create. When I first met her, there was something that I felt was familiar about her despite the fact that I had never met anyone remotely like her before until one night I was digging through my notes on an old comic idea I'd had back in 2004 and that was 2007, and I found this character who was predicated on Catwoman that had these biographical details that matched her perfectly. I didn't create this character with the idea of her being any kind of ideal mate, but I could see where the signals got crossed somewhere between my creative process and a spell or two I'd fired off since then. It was a really peculiar sense of malaise, given that there were even some dates that correlated between when I'd worked on this character and when certain things had happened in her life that brought her closer to me, closer to meeting me.

So of course I went to my mentor, who I figured would get this. It usually has a more intentional aspect, but it was close enough that I figured he could help, I told him that I had apparently somehow created or manifested this woman in my life. He was very calm about the whole thing, and made it clear I couldn't let it go to my head or anything, that the key was to ask her when she invented me.

GG: That's a lot to process. You're saying that you created each other.

MO: That's the simplest, but not necessarily the most accurate way of putting it. I think something happened for sure. I don't know that anyone's biographical details got retroactively changed because of someone else's daydream or doodle. For all I know, the inspiration for the character was the result of some kind of premonition or omen telling me that she was coming. I can't say that I know in any concrete sense where artistic inspiration comes from, none of us do. But I've seen too much to be able to say that words on a page are never more than the sum of their parts.

GG: You believe there's a mystical aspect to writing.

MO: That sounds a little too pretentious for me. I think that a better way of putting it is that fiction and reality, life and narrative have the potential for a far more open dialogue than most people are willing to allow. There's two breeds of writer in that sense; the kind that read Borges and feel kind of whistful like they think some of his ideas, what he portrays would be amazing if it were real the same way that kids naturally have more interest in going to Hogwarts than a real school, but realize that there isn't an owl coming for them. The other breed reads Borges and decides they're going to make that happen. Guys like Burroughs and Dick.

GG: Burroughs and Dick went crazy, though. Is that something that concerns you?

MO: I'm already crazy in the sense that people like to write off what I say as the product of mental illness so that they don't have to contemplate the implications of it or they write me off as saying whatever to get attention and boost my circulation. But if you're asking am I worried about becoming mentally ill to the point where I become completely incoherent or unable to function normally in every day society because of my pursuits in metafiction, my answer is no. Burroughs and Dick did a lot of hard drugs.

Bad Dreams

Out of everything I read to do with The Girlfriend Experience, the one thing that everyone including me could agree on about the film was that it was somewhat amusing and shocking that the guys who wrote it also wrote Ocean's Thirteen. Roger Ebert mused that they must have been standing around waiting for something better to do. Granted there's a reason that it's "One for the money, two for the show," and not visa versa. I'm fine with considering David Lean and Brian Koppelman to be auteurs in need of rent money rather than hacks hit by lightning.

Akiva Goldsman, well the jury's out on that one. Ever since finishing Dollhouse, I've been carefully following TV writers because I've come to appreciate the fact that more than just pop juggernauts JJ Abrams and Joss Whedon work on their brain children. The opening credits of Fringe season one, episode 14 (Bad Dreams) spat a vaguely familiar name as the writing credit so I scurried off to the IMDB to find out who Akiva Goldsman is. Apparently a man whose entirel body of work I loathe and have made a great deal of noise about. He's done some truly souless hack work in his time including both Dan Brown adaptations as well as the Shoemacher Batman films, some of my most hated films of all time. I was almost expecting his writing credits to include Twilight, but definitely not A Beautiful Mind or Cinderella Man.

So I watched Bad Dreams not with something I'd call apprehension, because up until that point the series had been very consistant in tone and writing, but more along the lines of morbid curiosity. The writing on Fringe is absurdly better than Alias after all, even if it isn't anywhere near Dollhouse. So, enter my surprise as Goldsman- who also directed Bad Dreams- turned in the most compelling and thrilling episode of the series to date. While there was one bit of lurid voyeurism where we get a convenient excuse to have Olivia- bathed in Lynchian neon light- become transfixed with an incredibly bored stripper and share the most tentative, diplomatic kiss I've ever seen, that was the only actual low point for the episode.

While Bad Dreams is ostensibly an Olivia centric episode that pushes her to her psychological breaking point (without mentioning John Scott, which scores Goldsman huge points); Goldsman's script shines brightest in his characterization of Walter, simultaneously exploiting his position as being the comedic relief and building on the pathos of his involvement in the ZTE manifesto.

JJ Abrams must have seen something in Goldsman that no one else has until now, because Bad Dreams isn't just the best episode of the series so far; it's also one of the most critical plot wise, with deftly handled fresh revelations about the conspiracy. Damn good work for the guy who assassinated the Batman franchise, even if there was a really lame pseudo girl on girl scene. Maybe Fox made him do it. I know they make people put motorcycles in things.

JCVD

By this point, it should be fair to say that 2008 was an oddly consistent year in terms of the themes explored by the most widely applauded films in of the year, especially where redemption and rehabilitation are concerned. It’s tempting, but too simple to simply point to the political arena of that same year, as the voting population of America elected Barack Obama on a mandate to rehabilitate the country’s image abroad after the ravages of the Bush double feature. While it’s true that Harvey Milk, Richard Nixon, and even George W Bush were offered up to audiences as martyrs of the American political machine and fictional wrestler Randy the Ram bore much the same cross for his excesses while staring at the wreckage he left behind, two other films bring a more cosmopolitan perspective to 2008’s sobering and painful journeys.

The Reader inarguably provided the most honest and searing portrayal of guilt- that of an entire nation laid on the shoulders of the generation that oversaw the worst crimes of modern history and their horrified, uncomprehending progeny- seen on screens in the past year, and yet bears no discernible connection to the Post-Bush American condition in any concrete way. There are lessons to be learned and applied, to be sure, but there is no evidence of the concurrent American introspection in the English led adaptation of a generation defining German novel.

It seems absurd that JCVD should have anything to do with such sobering issues as rescuing the soul of a nation from the crimes of it’s government, and it truly is, except to say that JCVD is no less instructive or revealing of what the cost of redemption is and whether it is to be allowed at all, perhaps even more so than W or Frost/Nixon display within the films themselves.

Jean-Claude himself is an easy corollary to Mickey Rourke’s Randy The Ram, fusing the wreckage of the character to the shared relative state of Rourke’s career, a process that appears naked in front of the audience in JCVD, but only achieved reality in Rourke’s mind for The Wrestler. Where Rourke was allowed to gain his professional vindication wearing the mask of his character, Van Damme is left naked before the audience to plead his case. Taken against these other films, the narrative of JCVD almost necessarily becomes incredibly trivial and vain in examining the fall of an international movie star, but it retains a peculiar strength through it’s metafictional conversation with the audience and it’s methodical stripping down of the barriers between Van Damme and the audience until he finally turns to approach them directly.

Thus, no matter the successes or failures of any other aspect of the film, it is nothing more or less than Jean-Claude Van Damme that will make or break the film for audiences, a heavier risk than even the producers of 8 Mile could claim, as Eminem’s ferocious popularity could easily insulate the box office draw from critical drubbing. JCVD is a film that dares to believe in a man who has little to no reason to believe in himself and demands that you do the same.

The true suspense of the film is not if Van Damme will leave the post office alive, just as it has never been in any of his films. Instead, the suspense is purely metafictional in nature, which is- refreshingly- the foundation of the film. JCVD is perhaps the first of Van Damme’s films in which the screenwriter sought to defy rather than pander to the audience’s expectations and succeed. The premise and bulk of the plot operates as a serviceable European elevation of the Post Tarantino (and perhaps Post Ritchie as well) heist flick, putting it easily in the same league as Spike Lee’s The Inside Man, but it remains the mis en scene for Van Damme’s personal and public reckoning.

Even the effortlessly immersive camera work, a cut above Luc Besson’s heir apparent Pierre Morel on his best days, is there to support and amplify Van Damme, most tellingly and successfully in the film’s two climaxes, that of Van Damme’s character arc and of the heist itself. In the former, Van Damme recognizes that his hotly anticipated mea culpa cannot be sufficient if delivered to his captors or a fellow hostage, and begins to address the audience as his chair and the camera are elevated above the edge of the backdrop to the massive black lights hovering over the set, signaling a break from the supposedly fictional events unfolding below.

In the second sequence, the absurdity of the unfolding scene- Van Damme being dragged out of the post office at gunpoint by one of the criminals- seemingly causes the film itself to shake and threaten to break, much as the metafictional weight of Tyler Durden addressing the audience at the end of the second act of Fight Club caused the film in the camera to shake until it broke free and the perforations at it’s edges were visible. The cause of this disruption turns out to be Van Damme’s wishful fantasy of the resolution, where he elbows free of and roundhouse kicks his captor, before high fiving the SWAT team and saluting the screaming crowd. Order is restored and the scene is replayed with Van Damme elbowing his way free, only to be tackled to the ground and dragged into a police car over the screaming protests of the other freed hostages.

Despite his heroic role in the film and his disarming candor about his personal life and failings, he is not let off lightly. Any traces of a Hollywood ending disappear with the replay of his exit, and he plays out the epilogue from a jail cell for using the heist to “extort” money owed to the lawyer representing him in a child custody case. This punishment he accepts with the cheery resignation of the samurai way that he confesses to wanting to return to in his speech to the audience. The cost of his redemption is harsh, especially for a film that could have given in to vanity at any time it chose, and he is left to his most daunting task without the audience’s help; reconnecting with his daughter from behind a pane of glass.

This is perhaps where JCVD is allowed to shine the brightest, as many of the resolutions of the other films mentioned here were intentionally less than satisfactory. Nixon leaves the sound stage with nothing harsher than a media indictment and a pocket full of cash. Oliver Stone’s eponymous W stands tall in front of his infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner. We leave Randy with his relationships shattered, but his final fate as he flies from the turnbuckle is an ultimate mystery. Irony favors death in victory, but with the box forever shut the cat cannot be said to be conclusively dead.

Other than the tragic, yet almost necessary conclusion of The Reader, JCVD is the only film presented to offer lasting closure and hope for the future, perhaps the only notable film of 2008 to do so other than Slumdog Millionaire, but then it is also the only one that holds itself accountable to it’s audience first and foremost rather than history.

Musings

It's a fact that culture is contingent on it's milieu; the here and now of the there and then. The BBC had a lovely photo up the other day of William S. Burroughs sitting beside the wire baskets he used to jumble up his writing while pioneering that whole cut-up thing of his and it got me thinking; what if Burroughs had access to modern computers back in the Beat days? Coding and compiling programs to spit out novels based on some arcane algorithm.

Twitter.

William S Burroughs got ahold of Twitter. Microblogging heroin soaked fever dreams of reptilian rent boys spurting corrosive semen from every pore while a row of disembodied, reanimated womens' heads watch from above on silk pillows neatly arranged on a window sill as they spit and hiss in jealousy.

William S Burroughs junk-sick and disoriented typing useless entreaties to P Diddy, begging to know the arcane knowledge inherent in being "locked on."

Warren Ellis bludgeoning someone to death with his blackberry because he isn't the maddest tweeter on the block anymore.

Boom, Bust and Echo

Fire bad. Tree pretty.

I finished Omega ten minutes ago. I am tabula rasa. I am on the verge of tears. This is a state of mind I know, one I cherish but have only experienced on three previous occasions. At the conclusions of The End of Evangelion, Promethea, and... The Invisibles. Let that last one linger in your mouth a little. Swirl it around and get it's flavour like a fine wine. Anyone who knows my engagement with pop culture even a little knows what The Invisibles is to me. I need to go put on Porcelain by Moby, before I continue. I lied. Extreme Ways.

I'm not really sure where to start this, and how. I suppose I'll start with Nietzsche, even though Omega was sheer Neo-Platonic Transcendent Gnosticism. Nietzsche posited- as have many other philosophers and critics and well everyone- that it's all been done, yet he was somewhat unique by saying that the Greeks had done it all. They were the alpha and the omega of cultural output. Alpha and omega. The Beginning and The End. The best we could do, according to him, was to shuffle things around in new ways. One could then- if one were to be able to quantify a unit of cultural output- mathematically determine how many permutations of Nietzsche's finite cultural elements are possible. This would not be the upper limit of how long it could take an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters to produce the complete works of Shakespeare, it's how long it would take them to produce Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel.

That doesn't really take quality into account though. How many of those permutations are going to be worthwhile? If you have cable television, you already know the answer to that question. If you've watched Twilight you know the answer to that question. The ratio of shit to gold once the sum total of possible configurations of cultural units has been completed is going to be absolutely fucking abysmal. Perhaps then, the question is why the massive indefatigable engines of contemporary culture across all mediums are relevant, worthwhile, or necessary as anything other than a near futile intellectual exercise in figuring out how long it will take before the human species has quite literally produced a word for word perfect duplicate of Plato's The Republic because there's literally nothing else possible that has not been done.

Is that it, then? Is all human culture locked in an evil, grim joke? Is all our culture the eventual answer to the question of how long it would take an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of keyboards to produce the complete works of Shakespeare twice? If your answer is yes, stop reading now and shoot yourself. There's nothing left for you in this life. High five Nietzsche when you get there. Otherwise, we have to reject Nietzsche and continue searching for understanding why pop could possibly mean anything and how we can surpass not only the Greeks, but anyone and everyone who has come before us. No, I'm not implying exactly what you're probably thinking, but you're on the right track.

Perhaps culture is something more. Perhaps the sum total of the canon of human culture is an essentially collaborative Gematria, perhaps the monkeys on typewriters- the ghoulish zero sum game that they are- miss the mark entirely. Perhaps we have the potential as a species to be six billion rabbis attempting to decode existence in both the act of creation and consumption. Perhaps pop is a constantly mutating, evolving entity that expands to grow new organs as each medium changes and adapts to the times and in response to political, social, and technological changes (especially the much vaunted "flattening" of the post-Internet global cultural and economic exchange).

That might be even more tragic given how intellectually disengaged the general masses are these days. Sure, as a species, we're more educated than a hundred or so years ago, but that doesn't mean that we necessarily have any fucking clue of how to put that education in use or that we have any reason to. Hence Twilight. Reading Jane Austen and thieving certain set pieces and broad strokes does not make you her contemporary any more than shooting a tiger makes you George Orwell.

The tragedy of our times is not that people are shooting tigers. The tragedy is that much of both the critical establishment and general audience has lost the ability to tell a poacher from a hunter. A fraudulent hack from a genuine talent. Stephanie Meyer from Joss Whedon. I see a hemisphere of gullible, essentially exploited individuals singing the praises of a regressive misogynist fairy tale to my right and the most daring, provocative, and ontologically progressive tv show in the history of the medium becoming most notable for being the lowest rated show to ever be picked up for a second season (ostensibly because for the first time in history Fox was actively seeking to avoid a hundred million angry emails).

I'm not going to pretend that from the first episode I knew that Dollhouse was going to pancake me. I will say that I knew I was going to have a shitload of fun and that I saw all I needed in the pilot to guarantee my ass in the chair straight through to the finale, however. Bringing in Eliza Dushku to star, casting Battlestar Galactica alumni, and playing both Lady Gaga and Frontline Assembly within the first ten minutes of the pilot was essentially Whedon dedicating the series to me, and me alone. Yes, that's right. Joss Whedon created Dollhouse for me. He was so glad that I finally came around and started worshipping at the altar of The Slayer that he rewarded me just as any benevolent pagan god worth his salt would. Not that I had any idea to what depths that would feel true until Omega.

It's interesting to note that Dollhouse drew cast from the two productions that Whedon and every member of the writing staff and production team must have known the show would attract the most comparisons to given the themes, plot, and even set design of the show. It's especially interesting given that Tahmoh Penikett essentially reprises his Battlestar Galactica role. At first I was somewhat taken aback at how ridiculous the similarities were, and then my jaw hit the fucking floor with the words "There is a vase on the table with three flowers in it."

The brilliant thing about it though is how much more ultimately devious the Mellie imprint turned out to be than anything Battlestar Galactica achieved before it crumbled into a shambling fucking mess. Jumping the shark at the five yard line is unforgivable in that the identity of the final cylon was the stupidest fucking thing I have ever seen in my life. It isn't simply the shock factor and pathos of Ballard unknowingly sleeping with a doll, but what the twin deceptions of Dewitt and Dominic's manipulations of the Millie imprint changed Ballard and triggered the endgame scenario.

An important thing to note is that the basic conceit and plot devices shared by Dollhouse and Battlestar Galactica originate with Phillip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The producers of BSG acknowledged it in their appropriation of the phrase "skinjob" and the casting of Edward James Olmos, who played a supporting role in Blade Runner as the guy who made the paper cranes. Of course an argument could be made for Ballard being just as informed by Deckard as he is Helo with November as Rachael and Alpha as Roy. Pop, as I said before, is a team effort. From Dick's original story straight through to Dollhouse we see not simply several appropriations but successive incubations and advancements of the same basic concepts towards largely different conclusions.

Case in point is that Ballard's character arc closely resembles a personal favourite template of Clive Barker's in which the protagonist begins investigating some form of fringe behaviour or criminal activity, becomes enthralled with it- utterly obsessed- until they integrate into the originally opposing force. In discussing this on the commentary track to The Midnight Meat Train, Barker quoted The Marquis de Sade ("The greatest pleasure is an aversion overcome,") as the philosophical vindication for his frequent usage of the character arc, especially in the Hellraiser franchise. Incidentally, De Sade appears in The Invisibles working alongside the eponymous subversives to fully explore the furthest fringes of humanity- especially in sexuality- in a way that offers itself up as a potential answer for the taunting riddle of just what the true purpose of the Dollhouse is.

Grant Morrison also used a similar arc in The Filth that resulted in more of a synthesis of the two opposing forces rather than a complete integration. At this point in the series- while it's indisputable that Ballard has to a certain extent integrated into the Dollhouse both as a "customer" and "employee"- it is far too early to close the book on his development considering that if we can expect Ballard (and Dollhouse) to survive Whedon's five year plan, we've only seen a fifth of his overall character arc, which is a microscopic amount for any Whedon character.

Everything Dollhouse borrows, it surpasses. Yes. I did just call one single season of Dollhouse superior to the entirety of Battlestar Galactica. I'm fine with series that unfold over a few seasons and take their time with where they're going. Whedon's done a couple of those that were quite good. However, Dollhouse Daft Punked every mark that Battlestar Galactica aimed for. (Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.)

As for The Matrix? Well fuck The Matrix. No one is clever for making the dentist chair correlation, which is incidental. You score a few points if you noticed that Echo is (a) Buddha though. The imperfection of Topher's tabula rasa and imprinting process have crystal clear parallels with a broad interpretation of Buddhist cosmology and the phenomenon of "past life regression" that several of the Actives- Echo most notably- undergo throughout the series. It's thematically most important in the episode where DeWitt runs a test allowing Echo, Victor, Sierra, and November to escape the Dollhouse essentially unmolested, which functions best as a metaphor for achieving enlightenment or nirvana in the sense of it being equivalent to escaping the constant cycle of reincarnation, the state of duḥkha (suffering) inherent in life in the material realm.

In some interpretations of Buddhism, there is essentially a choice to be made once you reach Nirvana; stay there, or go back and free everyone else. That's why the Dalai Llama- according to dogma- keeps coming back. Or in the Platonic interpretation alluded to earlier, she left the cave and came back to show the other dolls that there is more than shadows and dust. But there's a great deal more to Echo than being what is fast becoming a cliche.

There's Omega.

It's fair to say that Echo and Caroline are still essentially the same person, that the residual bits of Caroline that survived Topher's wipes still inform her actions as Echo in both Tabula Rasa and Active modes to the point where in Needs, Adelle is able to easily make the correlation between Echo's actions during the drill and when she broke into the Rossum lab prior to joining the Dollhouse. "That's Caroline," Adelle says with something bordering on maternal pride. In that sense, Needs foreshadowed Omega and gave us all we'd need to know about why Alpha and Omega are so fundamentally different. The use of the term Tabula Rasa in Dollhouse is mostly ironic, but still critical to any interpretation of the series. The most common usage of the term is in reference to the philosophical position that we are born into life with a blank slate. From a biological perspective it's on the extreme side of the nature versus nurture debate, but is most useful in contemporary discussion in taking a non deterministic view of life, that we are open to write our own destinies. In Dollhouse, Tabula Rasa is less to do with beginnings than it does second chances, as the dolls have all signed contracts with the intent of escaping their previous lives and transgressions with the promise of starting over fresh- Tabula Rasa- at the end of their five years at the Dollhouse. But over the course of the first season, a point most clearly made in Omega, there is a certain irrepressibility about the dolls' personalities. Alpha- for instance- is not an insane criminal because he experienced a composite event and had all of the imprints designed for him loaded at once, but because he was a flawed vessel and thus the result was literal cognitive dissonance. Topher couldn't change the basic nature of Alpha or any of the other dolls, only interrupt and inhibit it. Alpha's character arc is essentially the same as that of Alex in A Clockwork Orange; he is a violent offender who volunteers to be rehabilitated through science, through attempts to alter his behaviour at a physical level with disastrous results. The point of A Clockwork Orange was not that violence is glamorous or that man should be free to indulge the whims of the id, but that to seek to limit that which makes us human- both the positive and the potentially negative (as we see that Alex's treatment robs him of the ability to defend himself or engage in consensual sex)- is to rob us of our humanity. That, and that science can never fully prevail over nature. Of course there are also shades of Phillip K Dick's We Can Remember it For You Wholesale, which is better known as the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Total Recall. While Alpha is the more obvious analog to Alex, Echo's character arc functions much in the same way but predicated on very different instincts. I'm sure that many viewers saw the last line in the episode (Omega) as being a subtle reference to Citizen Kane, it also evokes A Clockwork Orange, which ends with a smirking Alex daydreaming a sex scene, implying that the attempts to control him through behavioral modification had failed, much the same as "Caroline," implies that Omega persists in Echo's head. Alpha and Omega are more than simply experiments gone wrong, they represent the point at which Dollhouse begins to explore the concept of identity the deepest and overlaps with The Invisibles (as well as Grant Morrison's run on The Doom Patrol. For nearly his entire career, Grant Morrison has been writing about the mutability of identity and the interpretation of Tabula Rasa that suggests not only is there infinite potential for society to shape identity and human psychology, but that the individual can modify their own identity, which is a re-ocurring theme most notably employed in The Invisibles, Doom Patrol, as well Batman. While identity modification has many sources and implementations across his writing, the inspiration and philosophy behind it is heavily informed by post modern magic and the occult, most notably in the chaos magic approach to invocation, in which the practitioner seeks to take on the desirable personality aspects of a godform. The "Kali in the Disco" chapter of Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos describes methods and means for ritually taking on aspects of the personality of a given mythological figure, the eponymous example being a female acquaintance of his who invoked the goddess Kali in order to be more confident and seductive while clubbing. Morrison himself, in his Pop Magic essay, takes the concept one step further by suggesting invoking pop culture figures such as James Bond or Metron. In many ways the imprints that Topher creates for the dolls are based on the same underlying principle. In the final issue of The Invisibles Dane and his protege infiltrate a corporation about to release a video game based on the training and doctrine of the Invisibles a decade after the end of the main plot of the series, only to find that the corporation is being run by King Mob, who was involved in developing the video game, which takes the form of a virtual reality simulator in which the player lives out several randomized lifetimes. The five year contract of the dolls is very similar in premise to the Invisibles game, given the range of identities and situations that the dolls can be expected to take on over the course of their five years. Which brings us back to Alpha and Omega. While the intent of the imprints is that they are to be used one at a time and forgotten, both the accident that "created" Alpha and the procedure he used to duplicate it and thus create Omega brought them all into interaction. This of course drove Alpha even further insane than the man he was before joining the Dollhouse was, while Echo's strength of character and empathy allowed her to become not a cacophony of competing voices, but a confident and high functioning gestalt, several individual personalities working in tandem. Taken together Alpha and Omega mirror the beginning and eventual end of Doom Patrol member "Crazy Jane's" character arc whose many personalities each had a separate super power. While officially unable to add it into the narrative for copyright reasons, Morrison has suggested that Crazy Jane of his Doom Patrol is the same individual as Ragged Robin of The Invisibles, who creates The Invisibles in the future, travels to the past in order to join them, and then travels into the future through the supercontext (another metaphor for leaving Plato's cave), ending her journey at the apocalypse in 2012 where she provides King Mob with what he needs to defeat the King of All Tears, which frees them to evolve into their next stage of existence. Which brings me to my conclusion. I'm not going to say that it was necessarily written with this intent, but my personal interpretation of Omega is that she's Crazy Jane/Ragged Robin downloaded into Echo's body (slash the Dollhouse world). Hence; Fire bad, tree pretty.

Field Guide

When I'm down in the trenches debating misogyny in media, I run up against that line between portraying misogyny and being misogynistic.

At left is a classic George Lois cover about what the sixites were doing to young women. At right is an article from Details in which bankers whinge about not being able to spend fat stacks on hookers and blow any more.




Sometimes it really is this easy. Nabbed from The Reverse Cowgirl.

Sukiyaki Western Django

I've finally decided to resign myself to the undeniable influence of Japanese agent provocateur Takahashi Miike, the uncompromising sadistic creative force behind Audition, Multiple Personality Detective, and Ichi the Killer on my own creative pursuits.

It would be hard to argue that my viewing of Ichi the Killer didn't fuel a complete re-evaluation of Japanese pop and fringe culture that fed directly into the creative approach behind Shinigami and Tentacle Hunter, with emphasis on the latter, but Sukiyaki Western Django represents something of a reconciliation between us. I was originally drawn into the movie by the audacious anachronism of a Japanese matinee idol with a labret piercing decked out in a hybrid of Tokyo street fashion and Spaghetti Western costume and further drawn in by the apparent cameo by the eponymous ambassador to Asian cinema Quentin Tarantino, but the revelation that it was a Takahashi Miike film made me apprehensive in a way that necessitated a viewing.

Sukiyaki Western Django is best described as Miike beating Stephen Chow senseless with a tire iron. Comparing it to Chow's now classic Kung Fu Hustle is as unavoidable as it is inadequate. True it is just as ludicrous of a spoof with many of the same tropes, but where Chow injected the whimsy of classic American cartoons and the pure self indulgent spectacle of Akira Toriyama anime, Miike infuses Django with the narcisisstic anachronistic flare of Baz Luhrman's Moulin Rouge and an earnest yet sarcastic investment in the western genre to rival David Cronenberg's A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.

With the exception of Tarantino the cast is entirely Japanese yet in an amusing twist the vast majority of the spoken dialogue is in heavily accented and poorly structured english, sly satire of the long dead Spaghetti Western. American fans of Miike's work will recognize his fondness for playing with spoken language from the Lynchian Gozu where an American character reads her dialogue off cue cards written in romanji, but the effect is much more akin to the lighthouse shoot out in Battle Royale in which the polite teenage girls snarl at each other in Yakuza tough guy one liners.

Much like Shinichiro Watanabe's Samurai Champloo, it helps to know Japanese cooking to understand the joke behind the title. Sukiyaki, which Tarantino's character makes, describes, and throws at a woman is a Japanese noodle dish whose significance in the title is to complete the appropriation of the Italian Spaghetti Western. "Django" then is the true title of the film with "Sukiyaki Western" establishing the genre.

Fusions of Japanese and American cinema have been done in varying forms since Kinji Fukasaku directed the Japanese portions of Tora, Tora, Tora! to varying degrees of success with a surge in popularity within the last decade most notably in Kill Bill Volume One, Samurai Champloo, Afro Samurai, Speed Racer, and Road to Perdition most of which were American led productions cashing in on lucrative Japanese tropes and cliches. The problem with most of those productions and even lesser ones like the spate of reamkes of Japanese horror films including Miike's own One Missed Call is that few have managed to step out of the shadow of the material they borrow from to become a truly unique film. Even Kill Bill, for all of it's unmistakable Tarantino flair still feels more like a patchwork quilt of homages than a singular film.

Miike, however, has no time for such indulgences and eschews any obvious homages or references to pre-existing work to create a singular ideosyncratic vision much like Pineapple Express and in direct contrast to Hot Fuzz. The influences of period and genre are unmistakable, but not of individual films from the period and genre, which creates a much more coherent and independently enjoyable experience. As much fun as the Pegg-Wright winking is, at the end of the day I'd rather enjoy James Franco attempting to kick the windshield out of a car while behind the wheel for what it is than being told which film he saw it in or being made to feel like I'm sitting a movie geek SAT exam, wracking my brains to see if my kung fu is strong enough to recongize who kicked the windshield out of a cop car while driving it in what movie.

To me Sukiyaki Western Django represents Miike stepping out of the shadows of fringe cinema and take his seat at the table as one of the world's premier action-comedy directors along with other idiosyncratic entertainers such as Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz, Sean of the Dead), Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Pineapple Express), Ben Stiller (Tropic Thunder), and Guy Ritchie (Snatch, Rocknrolla) at a time when the genre is not only thriving but dominating it's more serious cousin. Sukiyaki Western Django is for anyone who managed to see past the gore and tits of Afro Samurai to be deeply disappointed that it didn't do anything interesting. It's for the people that thought that singing Nirvana in Moulin Rouge was cool, Sweeney Todd needed more samurai swords and less singing, and that Wild, Wild, West just plain sucked.

It ain't easy being green II

More musings by my hypothetical Brainiac 5:

“Am I concerned about Ultra Boy’s effect on the children of the United Planets? In a word no. I would imagine that somewhere, somewhen there has been a tense and angry meeting of executives about the subject, arguing back and forth between the inevitable backlash from purportedly concerned parents and the potential revenue streams related to using his comically absurd antics.

It has not escaped my notice that I have been inextricably linked to him in this broadcast, I am a twelfth level intelligence and you are sixth at best editing together footage for an audience you cynically assume to be fifth or fourth. I am capable of extrapolating you see, and this wondrous power suggests to me that this diatribe is being used as a voice over for footage of Ultra Boy drinking ludicrous amounts of alcohol and then setting himself ablaze while trying to light a pipe stuffed with some narcotic I do not want to contemplate the existence of.

This fact, and the eventual controversy he will cause, do not concern me in the slightest. Why should I wring my hands at the fate of children who set themselves on fire when statistics on the matter will conclusively prove that they would have done so with or without Ultra Boy? It isn’t as if the Science Police would allow a broadcast that functions quite well for them as a de facto wiretap to be interrupted over something so petty.

In all honesty, the tragic stupidity of a chosen few will serve as a smoke screen for an even smaller, far more important minority. It is inescapable that there will be a certain amount of children who will see me speak, and it will stir something in them. Being of this terminally lost, self indulgent civilization they will understand little of what I say, but they will understand just enough to realize that they wish to understand more, and as they grow and seek the knowledge their parents disdain, they will slowly but surely undermine and subvert the very foundations of this crumbling empire until one day their parents and by extension the establishment will wake up to find that in the long dark sleep of their ignorance they have lost control to these brilliant few.

So I invite you to use me as an ironic foil for his stupidity, and I further invite the audience the men and women of the United Planets to invent sordid drinking games to put them in the stupor that Ultra Boy lives in because it will make the business of apprehending everything you hold dear and replacing it with something worthwhile all the easier. Ultra Boy will indeed be the downfall of society, but not in the way you imagine.”

“Why do I smoke? I had thought it to be self evident, but you are never lost for finding new and disturbing ways to lower my expectations of human intelligence. Smoking, at one time in your history, was a grand and poetic paradox at the heart of human civilization. It was a burgeoning industry that was instrumental in maintaining a rigid status quo of life from the nineteenth century through to the twenty third. Smoking sapped the health and disposable incomes of the working class, distracting them nearly as well as alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine from the larger unpalatable truths about the status quo they were fenced into. It was a subject that could constantly be revived for public debate regarding the legality of it’s use and the inane details of when and where it ought to be allowed to keep the public discourse out of inconvenient arenas. It fueled and maintained the healthcare complex from both the perspectives of the medical establishment and insurance firms, while funding a myriad of charities and events through tax revenue and regularly debated advertisement. Smoking was a brilliant tool of conformity and control marketed and mythologized as an expression of individuality and cavalier fearlessness.

Smoking now of course represents the ultimate victory of the main aim of human scientific pursuit within that same timeframe; the harnessing and reversal of natural processes. This of course started modestly with ideas such as gas lamps to make work and leisure possible at night, caffeine and other pharmaceutical products designed to interrupt and adapt sleep cycles, snowballing from there into mad fever dreams of dominating and subverting nature in new and frequently horrifying ways. I need not reiterate what science on this planet has wrought in the intervening years, but the amusing passage from ironic tool of repression to curious taboo of the cigarette is worth noting.

Cancer, emphysema; these are matters of history that have long since passed out of the public vernacular, and yet it is rare and even incredibly taboo to be a smoker in this day and age. Not for the long conquered ill effects of inhaling the smoke from burning leaves into your lungs, but the fearful hand wringing by the establishment of the anti-social free thinking image associated with the smoker throughout antiquity, which is laughable at best since the brand of free thinking most usually associated with the historical smoker is a louche sort of affair that lends itself more to petty crime and a lack of common sense than it does intellectual superiority or genuinely subversive acts.”

“There is a certain indomitable quality to the human spirit that I have come to both admire and disdain. I have seen Garth- Lightning Lad- broken and bleeding with a smile on his face. I have seen him clawing himself away from a brutal beating by the Science Police, his fingernails snapping and breaking against the concrete as blows continued to rain down on his cracked and broken ribs. He is confident that his strength of will will see him through and his faith in his comrades is as well placed as the synapses in his brain. This self same spirit is what convinced me that helping him to found the Legion would be a worthwhile pursuit. That Garth will never bend or break heartens me and allows me to indulge in some measure of hope for his people and planet.

However, Garth has my backing, a twelfth level intelligence. Our opponents, most notably the Science Police, do not. However, they maintain that same dogged determination as Garth, which leads me to believe that it is more than simply a faith in my ability to carry him through that drives his spirit and by extension theirs, which is a source of some consternation for myself. I have made it clear to our enemies that their determination is moot. I am likely the most intelligent entity in the universe and most certainly the most intelligent entity on Earth. Victory will inevitably be mine. The Science Police once shared with Garth a vision of the future, a vision of their future; it was their boot crushing his face again and again as long as could be done. Allow me to use this to explain how utterly hopeless it is to oppose me. Even that simple profane dream is not safe from me. No enterprise, no wish, no plan, no hope is tenable should I oppose it. You may attempt to slow, inconvenience, annoy, or stymie me. You may brook as great or as little opposition to me as you wish, it is destined to fall to ruin. I alone am Brainiac 5. I am the unstoppable force, there is no immovable object.”