League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
January 30th, 2008
I shelve my Alan Moore books next to Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, and I am sure all three postmodern masters would get a healthy kick out of this wildly imaginative third book to Moore’s Gentlemen series, which draws on a vast storehouse of influences and blends them into an ecstatic new whole. The last time around, I wrote “Just when you thought you understood the parameters of where the story can go, Moore pulls another fast one” — and that was when we were still with the original Victorian group of heroes (Allan Quartermain, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man, and Mr. Hyde) and happily confined to Kevin O’Neill’s clear, appealing artwork.
Black Dossier explodes all that. Framed by a storyline set in an alternate version of the 1950s, the book concerns the theft of a book that, in the comic, looks like the one you’re holding in your hands. Along with the comic book adventure, the Dossier also contains a facsimile of a lost Shakespeare play (Fairie’s Fortunes Founded), fascist propaganda booklets warning of sexcrimes, the life of Viginia Woolf’s Orlando in nine illustrated chapters, a sequel to the erotic classic Fanny Hill, a few pages from a Beat novel featuring our heroes, reprinted postcards from Shangri-La, cutaways of the Nautilus, and section in 3-D (goggles are provided.) While the first two books concerned a Victorian team of heroes, Moore uses Black Dossier to sketch, through the various fragments, the history of several British incarnations as well as French and German teams that included the likes of Fantomas and Rotwang.
The ease with which Moore accesses high and low culture is truly mind-boggling: Ian Fleming, Herman Hesse, Charles Chaplin, H.P. Lovecraft, and George Orwell are added to the already impressive list of influences (and I’m pretty sure I missed a good third of them.) Any imaginary creation is fair play for Moore’s ambitious tale, and the density of ideas is absurdly high, as if Moore was cramming an entire series’ worth of characters and storylines into a single book.
A word about Moore and the movies: he’s famously taken his name off all adaptations, and rightfully so — most of them have been dreadful (worst of all, incidentally, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Moore’s best effects are always inextricably bound up with the medium of comics, and this holds especially true for Black Dossier, which is essentially unfilmable (and wouldn’t work as a novel, either.) I positively dread Zach Snyder’s upcoming Watchmen.
Like The Tempest, Black Dossier ends with a monologue by Prospero (himself an Extraordinary Gentleman), who celebrates one of Moore’s grand themes: the power and paradoxical reality of imaginary characters. “If we mere insubstantial fancies be, how more so thee, who from us substance stole? On Dream’s foundation matter’s mudyards rest. Two sketching hands, each one the other draws: the fantasies thou’ve fashioned fashion thee. Intangible, we are life’s secret soul.”
The League of Extraodrinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, 2007. *****
Q*Bert at the Holocaust Memorial
September 6th, 2007
This is not what architect Peter Eisenman had in mind when he designed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of concrete slabs (or stelae) on a 4.7 acre site between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate: “The stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.” (Wikipedia)
It’s possible that the man hopping from stone to stone like Q*Bert in the photo above is enacting some sort of postmodern commentary on Eisenman’s intentions — after all, “losing touch with human reason” is second nature to some of us, and “an uneasy, confusing atmosphere” is what we like to call “the modern condition.” Either way, instead of remembrance, introspection, and grief, the 2,711 stones seem to invite inappropriate behavior. Visitors can be seen sunbathing on the stelae, playing hide-and-seek, or eating curry sausages.
Other scandals and failures accompanied the memorial: the stelae were covered in anti-graffiti paint by Degussa, a company that produced Zyklon B for the gas chambers, the stones are already beginning to crumble, light fixtures are broken, and Der Spiegel reports that in the darkness, drunkards from a nearby club come to urinate and horny couples screw in the maze.
Perhaps R. Mutt would have enjoyed the Stelenfeld’s playground repurposing, but there is a harsh lesson here about the disconnect between artistic intention and actual use; clearly, the memorial’s symbolism is too arbitrary, too wide open to interpretation, to produce the desired effect. I don’t know of another memorial that fails on such a spectacular scale.
The Good German
December 6th, 2006
I fully support all of Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic experiments, whether it’s highly personal weirdness (Schizopolis), big-budget romps (Ocean’s 11), remakes of Russian scifi classics (Solaris), or minimalist melodrama (Bubble). So when he makes a 1940s noir with period technology, I’m very much there. The Good German is set in the heart of what’s called “the Zone” in Gravity’s Rainbow: bombed-to-rubble Berlin in 1945, which is a place very much like Casablanca a few years earlier. Nobody can be trusted, everybody’s for sale, and everybody wants to get the hell out. Clooney comes in as war correspondent, Tobey Maguire plays a hometown boy who might not be as apple-pie as he seems, and Cate Blanchett is the German dame with a mysterious history. It all looks fantastic, and what Pynchonite wouldn’t be a sucker for a plot that involves rocket scientists, the Potsdam conference, and the Mittelbauwerke?
But The Good German has a deadly weakness, and it’s the script. We don’t feel for Clooney, we don’t understand Blanchett, there is little chemistry between them, the tangled plot is so confusing you have to figure it out over dinner afterwards, and Maguire (the best thing about the movie) leaves the story much too early. It’s ok if noir doesn’t make sense right away (Raymond Chandler famously had no idea who killed one of the characters in The Maltese Falcon), but at least the emotions have to be readable. In The Good German, it’s all a blur.
Finally, there are the Casablanca references, which overwhelm the movie. Sure, other films are also alluded to (The Third Man, Psycho), but The Good German starts as faithful recreation of a period movie with contemporary attitudes (more sex than they showed in ‘45 etc), but by the end you feel like you’re watching just another post-modern pastiche–and by god, as much as I love Casablanca, it’s been copied, ripped off, and parodied enough.
The Good German. Steven Soderbergh, 2006. **
[tags]steven soderbergh, film, 2 stars, noir, crime, berlin, germany world war ii, george clooney, cate blanchett, tobey maguire, the maltese falcon, thomas pynchon, rocket science, casablanca, psycho, the third man, raymond chandler, postmodernism, pastiche[/tags]
Once in a Lifetime
October 31st, 2006
Calendar says it’s been ten years to the day since we told the department head we’d be attending the conference on postmodernism and desire in Atlanta and instead skipped out to see the Phish Halloween show at the Omni. It was the night they covered Remain in Light. Here’s what fellow NYFCO critic Kurt Loder had to say at the time. (There’s no video of my reaction.)
[tags]phish, music, shows, mtv, atlanta, postmodernism, desire, kurt loder, mtv, youtube, talking heads, remain in light, halloween[/tags]
A Brief History of Everything
May 31st, 2005
Brilliant. If anybody can map a way forward out of the exhaustion of postmodernism, it’s Ken Wilber. This book, written as socratic dialogue, is a boiled-down version of his Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and I’ll be damned if I can boil it down any further–the title isn’t as hyperbolic as it might seem.
My favorite idea here–and there are tons–is the concept of Transcend and Include, which according to Wilber is how evolution moves forward, how transformation happens. It is part of his integrative vision, which does a fantastic job at ferreting out useful insights from all disciplines of human thought. He places everything in a four-quadrant system (internal/external, individual/communal), and the beauty here is that suddenly everything from psychoanalysis to abstract painting, transcendental meditation, communism, and nanophysics suddenly fits together in a very baggy and appealling system.
As I read over this, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t make any sense at all. Here’s what Amazon has to say:
“This account of men and women’s place in a universe of sex and gender, self and society, spirit and soul is written in question-and-answer format, making it both readable and accessible. Wilber offers a series of original views on many topics of current controversy, including the gender wars, multiculturalism, modern liberation movements, and the conflict between various approaches to spirituality.”
Yeah, I guess that’s better. Either way, this is full of fresh ideas.
