In the Realms of the Unreal

Before I went to see Zack Snyder’s new film Suckerpunch last weekend, I watched the trailer – for the fourth or fifth time and in my usual state of fist-pumping enthusiasm – ostensibly for the purpose of showing a friend who’d agreed to come along what we were in for at the local Imax. Amid my exclaimed profanities and endorsing narration (“Look at the composition of that shot! And that one! Also: zeppelins?!”), he managed to get the gist of the preview, and said, once it was over and he could get a word in edgewise, “It’s a little like Henry Darger, don’t you think?” To which I squealed, “Oh my god, you are so right!” and nearly keeled over from the sudden rush of ticket-buying endorphins flooding my bloodstream.

Frequent readers of this blog will know that my affection for Zack Snyder is matched by few things, and one of those things is my passion for Henry Darger, the Chicago janitor who, working in total solitude, spent decades of his life creating a mammoth illustrated novel entitled In the Realms of the Unreal. This volume tells the story of the Vivian sisters, blameless children fighting a battle in a magical, Narnia-like realm against a confederacy of male evildoers wearing what Darger described as “college-professor hats” (mortarboards). My buddy was right on in seeing the parallel between this vision and Snyder’s admittedly juiced-up fantasy of Lolitas in peril. Darger’s postmodern visual technique involved pulling images from everywhere in commercial low culture – advertisements, coloring books, magazine illustrations, tabloid photos – via tracing, collage, and later, photo enlargements for inclusion in what was a bizarre, obsessively personal world. The sisters in particular were cribbed from clichéd paradigms of girlhood innocence, cloying figures wielding beach buckets or cowgirl hats while all around them, apocalypse unfolded. Replace Darger’s newspaper comics and Coppertone girls with anime, graphics-heavy videogames, classic sexploitation, and some back issues of Heavy Metal, I figured, and you’d be looking at something like Suckerpunch. In both cases, the characters the story follows are paper dolls, flat and familiar to the point of near invisibility. The mind we’re actually exploring is the creator’s – Darger’s and Snyder’s, respectively.

In some respects, Suckerpunch did not disappoint this expectation. The movie is fucking gorgeous, for starters. In four of the movie’s set pieces, we watch Baby Doll (Emily Browning, looking like the platonic ideal to which so much plastic surgery aspires) duking it out with clockwork samurai, steampowered doughboys, dragons, and a monorail full of robots. With enough money, anyone can film gadgets and explosions (and anyone has), but Snyder has a deep understanding of the choreography of fight sequences, and a painter’s eye for the panoramic landscapes in which they play out. As four music videos – or more accurately, silent films, since they each outlast the duration of a single song – these would be rococo, ridiculous delights.

The trouble, for me, comes from Snyder’s attempts to cram the dodecahedron of his imagination into the square hole left by recent Hollywood successes. I’m speaking here of that inconvenient thing: the movie’s screenplay.

If, unlike me, you weren’t too distracted by the trailer’s pulsating soundtrack or its images of badass dragons to see the warning signs, you’ll have gathered that the story’s frame concerns a mental institution from which our heroine wishes to escape. Her attempts are psychotically reconfigured in her ailing brain, first into a strip club/whorehouse and then into the action numbers described above.

This frame is a regrettable choice for a couple of reasons. First, it necessitates a series of scenes in which Baby Doll and several other characters talk. Let me be perfectly clear on this point: none of these characters should speak. Ever. It is totally unnecessary and invariably embarrassing when they do. I’m not maligning the actresses, who do the best they can with dialogue that sounds like it came from a cut scene in Panzer Dragoon Orta. But, if their sexy goth Halloween costumes discouraged us from imagining these women’s inner lives, their conversations confirm they have no inner lives at all. In Snyder’s masterpiece Watchmen, I considered the over-the-top obvious exchanges (“What happened to the American dream?” “It came true! You’re looking at it!”) to serve the same purpose that the superhero stances on window ledges or in fiery hallways did: the characters were striking poses, iconic ones, that served to define something significant about themselves. But in Suckerpunch, to put it bluntly, the dialogue is boring and meaningless. While writing this post, I referred to IMDB in hopes of finding some “memorable quotes” from the film to cite, but except for the fake-mysticism twaddle from the movie’s inexplicable voiceovers, even that resource seems to consider most of what these ladies say eminently forgettable.

Because Baby Doll is not believable as a character with an inner life, period, Snyder exacerbates the second and larger problem with the story's frame. It’s effectively impossible for the movie’s stunning dreamscapes to have originated in her mind. According to the production materials, the mental institution is supposed to be set in rural Vermont in the early 1960’s; because of the sepia tone, Edward Gorey-esque set design, and our heroine’s vintage sailor dress, I pegged it for even earlier. Regardless, though, the story comes from an era prior to the vast majority of the film’s many allusions and centers on a character who, as far as we can tell, is ignorant of all of them. Let’s be real: why would an orphaned cutie in New England during the Eisenhower administration fantasize about destroying androids with a samurai sword? Why would she imagine racy dominatrix outfits for all of her friends? Why, in fact, does the story that she tells herself have the structure of a videogame?

And most importantly, what does it add to any of this imagery to claim she’s the one behind it? Ultimately, this is where I got stuck. The visual world of this movie is interesting precisely because of what it suggests about the imagination behind it, an imagination saturated in the popular culture of the last 50 years. Suckerpunch has been polarizing for a reason: just as Darger’s obsession with the Vivian girls’ courage and virtue led him to create exceptionally disturbing images of violence against children, so does Snyder’s apparent girl-power message contain an immutable gender binary and a prominent rape fixation. Where is that voice coming from? Claiming it’s all in Baby Doll’s head feels like a cop-out, one that insults the intelligence of the viewer – or, alternately, suggests that Snyder has no idea what his picture is really about.

I’m not saying that’s the worst thing. Artists don’t always know what they’re up to, or where the dark heart of their material lies. I claim to love Darger, but I’ve never read the thousands of pages of fiction that accompany his dazzling paintings, and I probably never will. It’s certainly possible to enjoy the action sequences in Suckerpunch as the stunted masterpieces that they are and ignore the rest. But if Snyder wanted to make a full-length film with this material, and supply it with an accessible emotional and psychological arc, I would have suggested he take a page out of Charlie Kaufman’s book and insert himself – or a character like himself – into the picture. By doing that, he would have foregrounded what’s unsettling and original about the movie by making us complicit: sympathetic with the type of male gaze that condemns lechery and sexual aggression while only calling women by their stripper names, with the form of escapism that celebrates bloodless violence without consequences. And even more than an icepick, that’s the kind of thing that sticks in a viewer’s mind.

Deviant Art

I've always envied cartoonists.  Not animators -- their frame-by-frame slaving sounds like a variation on that old childhood punishment of writing an apology over and over until the words become meaningful only as a carpal-tunnel ache -- but graphic novelists, comic book artists, whatever you want to call them.  I loved newspaper comics as a kid, Calvin and Hobbes and the Far Side especially, as well as collections of one-panel wonders from The New Yorker magazine, the old ones by Thurber and Charles Addams.  As an adult, I read comics less often than I used to; with the exception of Watchmen, I haven't tackled any of the big series in the superhero genre, and I only read a graphic novel every once in a long while.  But the directness of the medium, the way it combines cinematic visual techniques with the one-on-one intimacy of an author's connection with a lone reader, still fascinates me.

A few months ago, I read Black Hole by Charles Burns.  I borrowed it from a friend, consumed it almost immediately, and then hung onto it for a long time, thinking I would write a blog post about it.  Obviously I never did, and this post isn't primarily about it either.  But today, thinking again about my ongoing discussion about difficulty, some of the images from that book sprang to mind.

Black Hole tells the story of a group of teenagers in the 1970's, beset with a mysterious STD that turns them into freaks: a girl sheds her skin, a boy develops a tiny talking mouth on his neck, and others contract maladies even more difficult to encapsulate in words.  This is pulpy, suspenseful, and compelling in itself, and if Burns relied on the bare bones of the story to carry us through, I'd probably still have kept turning the pages.  However, what he does is a lot stranger.

When reading the book, I was at first inclined to think that the disease the teens suffer from is meant to represent something from our world, most likely AIDS.  But by the end, I became convinced that Burns is not working metaphorically, using one set of images to stand in for another set that the reader can supply.  Black Hole, instead, is about the hidden connections between images: the way an incision in a frog's belly or a cut on the sole of a foot looks like a vagina, the way a tail resembles a penis.  And as the book goes on, far from becoming easier to parse, these connections multiply.  Objects -- bones, pipes, sandwiches, snakes -- stream across the pages, freed from their original context; panels break out from their orderly grid.  We're no longer decoding symbols.  The meaning of the objects clearly can't be divorced from the particular way they're depicted.

This is something we're more inclined to accept in visual art than in narrative.  Perhaps it's because of the way literature is taught: at least at the places I attended, most American schoolchildren grew up thinking that it was possible to figure out what a poem "really meant," what a story was "about," and articulate this without the work's meaning being lost, as if literature were simply a foreign language they were learning to speak.  Stylistic embellishments stood as obstacles in the way to understanding, an odd regional accent that made the speaker's words tougher to translate.  "What is Wallace Stevens trying to say here?" one high school teacher said of the poem "Anecdote of the Jar," facing a classroom of dead silence.  He sighed, deciding to give us a break.  "All right, I'll just tell you: it's about environmentalism." 

Yet, with visual art, the work qua object is not so easily dispensed with.  Words can describe a painting or sculpture, but even a nine-year-old knows they cannot replace it.  And thus, even if the technical aspects of the artwork -- the perspective, the composition, the colors -- are perceived to be unpleasant or disagreeable, difficult, they're still treated as part of the thing we're seeing, rather than something that prevents us from seeing that thing clearly.

Perhaps, though, the popularity of graphic novels (at least sophisticated ones like Black Hole) can serve as a bridge between these opposed ways of seeing visual art and narrative.  Wouldn't that be nice?

Driving Sideways

Awhile back, I blogged about blogging, or more specifically, not blogging -- about the temptation to pick at my posts endlessly, or, when that's time prohibitive, simply not to post at all.  In her amazing memoir Writing Past Dark (which should be required reading for everybody seriously pursuing fiction in or out of the MFA system), Bonnie Friedman writes about what she calls "anorexia of language" -- a far more accurate term for writer's block, in my opinion.  Not-writing is a kind of perfectionism, a way of seeking control over the messy, primal process of creation.  We love our work so much that we're afraid to touch it.  We want so much for it to be flawless we're afraid to let it grow.  And so it starves in the dark.

Yesterday, I saw this blog post about the artist Dalton Ghetti, who carves tiny sculptures from the lead tips of pencils.  As a writer, they appeal to me for obvious reasons: a writing utensil re-shaped into a tiny world of its own probably has metaphorical import for anyone who's ever scratched out a story longhand.  Specifically, it reminded me of a possibly apocryphal anecdote I heard about Victor Hugo and the creation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame: he considered titling the novel What Is In a Bottle of Ink, since he wrote the entire thing by dipping his pen again and again into a single well.  The way that art, specifically language, can open up a tiny space -- turning a pencil into a monument, a page into a window, a keyboard into a galaxy of swirling possibility -- is magic, pure and simple.

But the part of this story that struck me most was the pencil graveyard, the place for sculptures that Ghetti's accidentally broken while working on them.  "People might think it’s weird I keep them but they’re still interesting, " he says.  "I worked on them for months so they might be dead now but at one point I gave them life."  It occurred to me that maybe the pencil graveyard itself, rather than the perfected sculptures, is the best metaphor for writing, or at least writing of a certain kind.  On a blog, for example, where the emphasis is on process over product -- where the past's ill-considered relics greet you every time you scroll down the page.  It can be dismal, at times, to look at all the ways I've fallen short as a writer, intellectually and at the level of language.  But Ghetti explains that, in order to keep doing his nerve-wracking work on his miniatures, he had to change his attitude, to say, "This will break eventually but let’s see how far I get."  From now on, I'm going to try to start thinking about my own prose more that way.  Instead of focusing on reaching my destination, I'm just going to aim to get into the most interesting wrecks I can along the way.  Fasten your seat belts.

We Don't Need No Education

I first fell in love with Henry Darger when I saw the 2004 documentary about his life, In the Realms of the Unreal.  A janitor by trade, he gained fame posthumously for his writings and especially paintings, which depict the epic struggle of the innocent, pint-sized Vivian sisters against the forces of evil, represented by the Glandelinians, an army of rifle-bearing men wearing "college professor hats" (mortarboards).  I've since seen his work at MoMA and the American Folk Art Museum on several occasions, and each time I love it more and more.  The other night, flipping through a catalogue of his prints, I was thinking about why.

As readers of this blog have no doubt gathered, I am a sucker for many things, but my first love is probably postmodernism.  By that, I'm referring especially to artists and writers who appropriate images from history and pop culture, transforming them into raw material for something new.  Whether it's a Patton Oswalt stand-up routine (wherein he declares that during the apocalypse, Avril Lavigne will appear in the sky to recite the Good Will Hunting screenplay while sentient razors slice at our flesh) or a Thomas Pynchon novel (where Malcolm X and Mickey Rooney make cameo appearances), there's something about this technique that, in the right hands, works like catnip on me. 

And yet, paradoxically enough, a lot of art I've hated employs these same techniques.  Watching the second Shrek movie was akin to having a strand of piano wire threaded in one of my ears and out the other, and Moulin Rouge gave me the queasy feeling associated with eating a meal entirely made from refined sugar.  Cultural icons -- Porky Pig, Elvis, the Disney castle -- can come trailing associations and emotions: nostalgia, comfort, desire.  But they can also carry with them an aura of corporate impersonality and cynicism, functioning as placeholders for content the work's creator was too lazy or unimaginative to provide.  Characters are not beautiful, but "beautiful," not evil, but "evil," and we know at once what response they're meant to elicit, despite the fact we feel little to nothing at all.  Far from sending up consumer culture, postmodern works of this kind can seem like just another product of it, manufactured on a storyteller's assembly line, where interchangable parts are twisted together efficently, each functioning the same way in a different machine. 

Here's where Henry Darger comes back in.  Entirely on his own, with no formal artistic training or in fact, much education of any kind, Henry Darger invented postmodern techniques.  He traced, copied, and photographically enlarged images from magazines and coloring books; he pasted in images snipped from illustrations.  Yet, unlike the makers of, say, The Family Guy, he did this entirely without irony; his paintings neither wink nor nudge.  His desire was completely sincere: to create in reality the world in his head.  His postmodernism, like a modern cave painting, employs any and every available tool, without disdain for any of them, and without a concern for genre or "school."

In fact, I think it's fair to say he didn't like school.  (See college professor hat, bottom left.)

In a way, Darger's naivete legitimizes postmodernism for me, because it reveals that the logic of appropriation isn't merely something learned -- an artistic shorthand, a trick.  Rather, in the context of our modern society, it's something primal, even primitive: a dialect we grow up speaking, almost despite ourselves.