The X-Files: Season One Reflections

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been rewatching The X-Files, up through “Eve” now. The series was my favorite show when it was on, and the first TV show I really got into. However, the past two seasons really soured me on it, and obscured a lot of the good stuff that had come before. Watching it today, after seeing shows that were much more consistently successful, I think it’s a little easier to accept the show’s flaws and just appreciate it for what it is.

The show’s greatest strength, from start to finish, was the incredible chemistry between Mulder and Scully. Pretty much any episode with the two of them together has at least a couple of moments of interest. “The Jersey Devil” has a main plot that’s frankly embarrassing, but the subplot with Scully going on a date, and Mulder’s implicit jealousy, makes it worth watching. Late in the series, people might have gotten mad about their romantic entanglement, but right from the start, the show is a story of these two people who have only each other and their work. An interesting story to do would have been an alternate timeline where Mulder never met Scully and wound up either arrested or insane. Scully is his anchor, keeping him from drifting off, and Mulder helps pull her out of a narrow minded acceptance of the system into new ideas and concepts.

The series has an overarching central narrative, but that’s not in place in season one. So, the ongoing narrative arc is the strengthening of Mulder and Scully’s relationship. An episode like “Ice” tells a strong standalone story, but the scene that lingers is the moment where Scully checks Mulder for bugs. I skipped over a couple episodes that I remember as being bad, but through the episodes I watched, there is a clear progression in their relationship.

After 9/11, people said that the government conspiracy ethos of The X-Files was no longer relevant, that the government was good then. Obviously, it wasn’t, and watching the show today, trust no one is more apt than ever. I think a lot of people have issues understanding the way that genre and reality interact, particularly with sci-fi. There’s this feeling that a movie like Good Night and Good Luck can say a lot about our world, but a sci-fi show or comic can’t. For me, genre magnifies the conflicts inherent in reality, and gives us a better understanding of the stakes.

Take a look at Jack Kirby’s brilliant Glorious Godfrey story in The Forever People. That’s a powerful condemnation of the fascistic qualities of the religious right, but most people would just view it as goofy seventies comics. In the same way, I think it’s easy to dismiss the delusional military personnel and omnipresent men in black as relics of 90s paranoid culture. But, the emphasis on an ephemeral truth is perfectly analogous with what Bush has done to our world. Aliens might not be involved, but his government has covered up the truth whenever possible. Who knows what they’re doing that we haven’t heard about yet?

But, reality has shown things in a slightly different light than what the series reveals. Here, the truth is seen as something that can save people if they just find out about it. It’s a weapon that can be used against the government conspiracy. However, what reality shows is that people don’t care about the truth, we can hear about Guantanimo Bay, but we’re so powerless to do anything about it, caring about it seems almost counterproductive. Beyond that, we’ve got presidential candidates actually saying that the torture done there should be continued! That is so hard for me to believe, but Bush has shaped an us vs. them reality and created a war that can never be won. It’s a real tragedy, he has warped the truth, the very weapon that here is Mulder’s salvation.

Yes, there’s an element of quaintness when Max Fennig pops up talking about the JFK assassination. Notably, society has completely marginalized 9/11 conspiracy theory. I’m not saying that Bush attacked the towers, but I don’t think it’s so absurd to not be discussed at all, considering the attack allowed him to enact all the policy he wanted to. But, in this case, the origin of 9/11 is less important than what he did in its wake, and that’s just as evil, if not more so, as the act itself.

I always loved the government conspiracy stuff more than anything else on the series, and it’s those episodes that still resonate. The Litchfield Experiment in “Eve” is fascinating, and believable. “Fallen Angel” is another strong episode, a prototype for the larger mythology episodes to come. I really want to get to those classic mytharc two parters, but for now, I’m just enjoying the standalone stories. The show could have been so much more if guided by someone like Joss Whedon or David Simon, but as is, it’s still consistently enjoyable and frequently thought provoking. At its best, the series is as good as anything that ever aired on TV. But, it was rarely at its best, and certainly wasn’t there in these early season one episodes.

X-Men: Messiah Complex: Chapter Two (Uncanny X-Men 492)

Chapter two spends a disconcerting amount of time recapping the storyline from part one. I suppose the point of the news report stuff is to show the extent of the devastation in Alaska, but we already saw that last week, so there’s no particular need for it. I would argue that this issue and the prelude could have been combined into one 30 page issue to speed the story along. But, I suppose it’s a 13-part crossover, so it’s going to take a while to maneuver everything into place.

What’s most interesting about this issue for me isn’t the story itself, as I mentioned, basically nothing happened, it’s looking at the way that Morrison’s run and other previous X-Men stuff has been synthesized to build the current status quo. X-Men itself is an evolving concept, a title that has been through many permutations, each new one taking elements of what’s come before and combining them into something new. I actually really like where the series is now. Despite the awfulness of House of M, the shortage of mutants has given the characters a new focus and gives an urgency to this storyline.

But, this status quo is ultimately counter productive to the thematic agenda of the series as a whole. Morrison redefined the characters and concepts in a way that was more dynamic and real than they’d ever been before. His run was all about examining the way that evolved humans would be perceived in the real world. They would certainly be hated by some, but would likely be at the center of culture, and that’s what he did to them. His X-Men were cool, an aspirational model for humanity. It was a more relatable model than the dying race we’ve got here.

But, I’m hoping this storyline will eventually bring us to the rebirth of mutant culture, it’s one of the rare cases where a giant reset button would be appreciated. Does Layla Miller have a superhero name yet? If so, I hope it’s Deus ex machina, but in this case, maybe her and Forge can make something to bring the powers back.

As for the story itself, our primary focus is the conflict between Scott and Xavier. Scott has grown up and taken control of the team, something that makes Xavier feel superfluous. I think this is an effective storyline because it takes advantage of Scott’s relationship with Emma Frost. She is his go to telepath now, and is willing to do things that Xavier isn’t. I love that Scott and Emma are still together, though neither are written as well as they were by Claremont or Morrison.

So, this issue isn’t exactly great, but it’s got enough interesting stuff to keep me reading. I’m eager to get to Sinister himself, and figure out what’s going on with him and his crew.

The Wire: 2x03-2x09

The Wire’s first season is pretty close to a perfect season, telling its story and ending in a satisfying way. However, either imprisoning or killing most of the street characters, and splitting the detail up left them with some work to do to get things rolling again in season two. The second season is quite ambitious, and still immensely satisfying, but also runs into some issues that weren’t present in season one.

The major issue for me is simply the divided focus. I think it was smart to expand the focus and not just retread the cops vs. drug dealers storyline of the first season. If you keep Avon around, we’ve got the same basic conflict and not much room for the story to grow. However, this brings us to a catch 22. I loved the characters in the street storyline, so even though I think the focus needs to change for the series’ overall health, in changing the focus, we lose touch with much of what made the series successful in the first place. Particularly with all the major police characters splintered apart, I found myself wanting to spend more time with Stringer, Bodie and the other characters from that storyline.

Instead, we spend a lot of time with the dock workers. Those characters have grown on me a bit, but still don’t feel as fully realized as the characters on the street in season one. Part of it is that I find the milieu, the heavy drinking blue collar lifestyle, less interesting than the disciplined business world of the street characters. Avon and Stringer were a worthy foe, and you got the sense that they could outwit the police. Frank Sobotka is a tragic character because he’s merely a pawn in a much larger criminal enterprise.

Now, you could argue that’s true of the drug dealers too, something made explicit in D’Angelo’s speech over the chess board. But, it’s tough to watch the inevitable oncoming tragedy for Sobotka. Even if he beats the cops, the port is on the way out, his lifestyle is on the way out, and that’s driving Nick into drug dealing in the same way that the project kids get pushed there. Thematically, the storyline expands the series’ scope considerably. We get the absurdity of these struggling people paying thousands of dollars to politicians to try to preserve their jobs. Watching this series makes you astonished that anything good happens in American politics because the entire system seems to be motivated by people paying politicians off to pursue their own interests. Sobotka is driven to illegal activity because he needs to pay off the politicians to save his job. Shouldn’t they just be looking out for him in the first place?

I actually like Frank and Nick, but the other characters are annoying. Ziggy’s unhinged self bothers me, though I did enjoy his duck plot. The other characters aren’t as well realized as the minor street characters, they seem to exist more in the service of the plot than just exist because they’re there.

But, my issues with the port plot are primarily because the other plots are so much more interesting. On another show, this port stuff would be the best thing, but it pales next to the riveting drama surrounding Avon’s crew. Placed in more of a leadership role, Stringer has become my favorite character on the series. The switch from strip club to funeral home for his headquarters is appropriate because, as he says, he’s not a soldier like Avon, he’s a businessman. He’s clearly got an aptitude for economics, and I love when he applies what he learns in class to his drug business.

Stringer’s conflict in guiding his organization is between being a soldier and being a businessman. Is it more important to have the towers but no product, or to deal with Proposition Joe and lose some of his territory? Avon is stubborn and won’t concede their need to ally with Joe. Stringer is more of a pragmatist. There’s a lot of conflict brewing between Avon and Stringer, with Brianna in the middle. They’ve already set up a way for Avon to get out of prison, and I’m guessing that next season will deal with Stringer struggling to give up power after Avon’s return. Can Avon run things better than he is? Probably not, but can he shut Avon out of the organization that he started?

One of the most shocking developments for me was D’Angelo’s death. Arguably the main character on the drug side of things, I was wondering how they’d get out of the corner they’d written him into. When he started to get choked, I was shocked, and as time passed, I realized he wasn’t going to get out of it. It does make sense from a storytelling perspective, but it’s cold. D was our best hope among those characters, and now, he’s gone. Now he’ll never know the difference between Ultimate Spider-Man and regular.

Over with the police, we finally reunite the detail. A lot of shows, like The X-Files and Friday Night Lights, like to mess with the status quo at the end of season one, leading to the inevitable slide back to what things before. It makes a lot more sense to have the detail together, and thankfully they’ve made it permanent so we won’t have to deal with the split. What I loved about the first season was watching the team work together, watching everyone find what they could contribute to the whole. They’re not quite running at full strength yet, but the brothel sting was a really fun mission. There’s actually a lot more humor this season, and it’s all the funnier because of the show’s usual seriousness.

So, the series is still going strong. The economy of the storytelling is dazzling and the writing still humbling. In Russell, we’ve got another fully realized, compelling character. My only major issue now is that the port storyline isn’t as interesting as the drug stuff. I’m guessing that will be a season two only thing, so it shouldn’t be a problem for too much longer.

House of M

I just finished reading Brian Bendis’s House of M, a storyline that had a major impact on the universe of the X-Men, but also managed to be one of the most poorly structured, logically unsound and outright boring crossovers in comics history. This I so misguided on many levels, it’s hard to even consider.

My major issue with the story is that it’s inherently pointless, because we know that the world is going to get reset by the end of it. Now, it’s true that the characters remember what happened, and there’s a couple of major lasting consequences, but really, the whole crossover winds up being about one moment. There’s six issues of messing around, then about ten pages of stuff that’s actually interesting, with Wanda and Pietro, then the story just ends.

Bendis must be a pagan because we’ve got so many gods in the machine in the story. The biggest, and most interesting, is Wanda. I think they could have done a fantastic story about Wanda’s reality warping powers going out of whack, forcing the heroes to question what they’re doing. The best scene in the book is the opening, where Wanda invents fictional children for herself and Xavier has to remind her they’re not real. In the beginning, she seems totally on the verge of losing it, and there’s a lot of potential in exploring how you deal with someone who’s so incredibly powerful, and completely out of control.

That’s what we get in the first issue, and that stuff’s not bad. However, it quickly is replaced by yet another alternate reality. Claremont’s original Days of Future Past was brilliant, but it’s opened a lot of awful doors for later writers. At this point, ten years after Age of Apocalypse, did we really need another extended trip to an alternate reality? I don’t think so, certainly not one as boring as this. While it’s admirable that we don’t have yet another fascist dystopia that ends with all our heroes dying, making a relatively ordinary world doesn’t produce the most interesting stories. We basically spend five issues following Wolverine around as central deus ex machina Layla resets peoples’ memories. The problem with this is I have no reason to care that people are being reset, I know what’s ‘real’ to them, and after seeing one person reset, we don’t gain anything from the rest of those scenes.

The big issue for me with the story as is is the fact that Wolverine so vehemently shoots down the idea that maybe they should leave things as they are. What’s so wrong with a world where everyone has what they want? In most stories like this, we get the implication that to continue to live this way would be a lie, a betrayal of some innate idea of reality. However, if Wanda can give everyone the world that they want, wouldn’t be it a betrayal to deprive them of that? A mutant powerful enough could make everyone happy, wouldn’t that be enough?

Of course, that would mean no more interesting stories. However, you could make a pretty interesting story if there was a real conflict between people who wanted to preserve the House of M world versus those who need to get back to reality.

As it is, the story is so devoid of moral or thematic complexity, it’s hard to believe. The most interesting character, the focus of the entire thing, is Wanda. She’s got a lot of issues to deal with, how does she live in this perfect world she’s created, the only one, other than Pietro, who’s aware that it’s a lie? It would be more interesting to have her knowledge of reality conflict with everyone else’s happiness, that she could make the perfect world for everyone else, but never herself.

That’s not what we get. Instead, Wanda doesn’t appear in the House of M world until issue 7, and we get very little insight into her motivations or psychosis. I think the most interesting story you could spin out of this would be to make the House of M universe a completely irrational, unsteady universe. I’m not clear on how her powers work, but is she mentally supporting the entire rewritten universe. I think it’d be more interesting if her changes were eroding, and the heroes found themselves struggling to save the universe from imploding on itself.

Of course, this crossover isn’t particularly interested in that sort of cosmic stuff. Great crossovers have been made out of character stuff, Mutant Massacre for one. However, if you want to explore characters, rewriting the entire universe to remove the central issue of the crossover isn’t the best way to do it. I guess the point was to show people what they could have been, but that’s only dealt with in Spiderman’s story. And, maybe it’s just a bias of my own reading, but it’s very weird to have Spiderman hanging out with the X-Men. I think the X-Men make a lot more sense in a world without other superheroes, it’s not good to have the other corners of the Marvel Universe intrude on them.

The reason I’d call this the worst of the major X events is primarily because it’s boring. Say what you will about X-Tinction Agenda or X-Cutioner’s Song, they were brimming with ideas, characters and craziness. You’re overwhelmed with characters and storylines, it may be hard to follow, but it’s trying for something big. Here, everything happens in a linear way, and there’s no real conflict anywhere in the story. There’s no particular urgency either, because if you could remake the world once, you can remake it again. Is it a better story than some of those early 90s crossovers? Yes, but it’s less entertaining.

And, I’m confused about why everyone thinks Magneto made this reality. They just assumed, but I always figured it was Wanda herself. The major twist seems to be that Pietro was the one who told her to, but I just kind of assumed he did, in light of what we saw in issue one. Admittedly, I knew about no more mutants before hand, but your story shouldn’t have just one twist. Really, this entire book was about that one page.

As for “No more mutants,” I think it’s pretty foolish to do this story as a result of an alternate reality. With each alternate reality, the credibility of your characters declines, and having such a major plot point come out of this one raises the question of why you couldn’t just alter reality again to change things back. Alternate realities remove characters’ agency, in this story, no one makes any choices, they just go along doing stuff. And, the no more mutants thing is undermined by the fact that so many of the characters we know still have their powers. That was an appalling plot point, and I need discuss it no further.

I did enjoy a couple of things. Dr. Strange was pretty awesome, and I’d love to read some more stories with him. The scenes with him and Wanda are easily the best part of the book. However, it really bothers me that Wanda’s entire arc is motivated by desire to have children, a bit cliché for a female character.

Bendis, how much did Marvel pay for your soul? I hope it was worth it. His work on Jinx and Goldfish was amazing, his early Marvel work was pretty good, but why are you jobbing to Joe Quesada’s editorial whims? Do some creator owned work again, and stay away from big crossovers like this. This isn’t the worst X-Men story out there, but it’s bad in a different way than most.

Compared to its DC counterpart, Infinite Crisis, there’s no contest. Crisis was full of crazy ideas, fun concepts and real world changing stuff. This, just another pointless alternate reality exercise in the service of an editorial mandate.

X-Men: Messiah Complex

So, despite my better instincts, I decided to pick up X-Men: Messiah Complex yesterday, and perhaps embark upon a thirteen issue crossover. What are my reasons? One is I have a bunch of money coming in, and pass a comics store everyday, so it would be pretty easy to follow. The other is that I do have a lot of investment in the characters, and am curious to see what’s going on in their world. While this isn’t the world’s best comic, it’s pretty solid, and is probably going to get me to the second issue of the tale.

This week, I’ve been reading the first hardcover collection of Mike Carey’s X-Men run. While no Claremont or Morrison, it’s a thoroughly entertaining look at the characters, stripping away a lot of the convoluted backstory to tell a fairly straightahead story. The big event driving these characters is M-Day, a really dumb plot twist, but one that makes more sense once it became clear that they would undo M-Day sometime in the near future. The basic deal with M-Day is that after a lengthy alternate reality storyline, the Scarlet Witch rewrote reality to remove most mutants’ powers. Conveniently, most of the X-Men were unaffected, but it has given them a new focus, fighting to protect the mutants that are out there, and searching for a cure for others.

The issue with M-Day for me is that if you change things in an alternate reality, it undermines the reality of the story you’re telling. If something so drastic can be altered, why doesn’t someone just go back and unalter it? Opening that door makes it hard for anything to have consequences. If you really wanted to go this route, why not just have mutants spontaneously start losing their powers, until there’s only a few left. That would raise a lot of key questions within the concept, like, do most of the people want to go back to being mutants, or are they happy to be ‘normal’?

My bigger issue is that the M-Day thing removes most of the story’s real world relevance. Morrison made mutants more like real life minorities, hated at times, but also central to popular culture. He simultaneously addressed human evolution and social evolution in what I’d consider a suitable finale to the series as a whole. Nothing is needed beyond Here Comes Tomorrow, to some extent everything after, from Joss’s run to this, feels like fanfiction.

Still, it’s cool to see a lot of the Morrison stuff still in place. We’ve got Cerebra, cat Beast, Cyclops and Emma together, etc. I love the Cyclops/Emma relationship because Emma has all the power, her cutting cynicism always able to put Scott down. That said, Scott’s outfit is awful looking, like a giant condom. Why couldn’t they just stick with the Morrison jackets? Those were fantastic.

That said, most of the people in Carey’s crew look pretty cool. I really like Rogue’s hooded outfit, and Chris Bachalo makes all the villains look stylish. I didn’t particularly like Bachalo’s work on “Assault on Weapon Plus,” but I’m digging it here. I really miss him when the fill in artists come in. He’s not the best storyteller, but he’s got a fantastic sense of style.

Ultimately, the best thing I can say about Carey’s X-Men is that it feels like it’s moving forward, not just servicing a trademark. I want to see what happens with these characters, and the glimpses of larger goings on, with Exodus and Sinister, are great. I’m a huge Mister Sinister fan, for no apparent reason. I had the action figure when I was younger and I’ve always loved the design of the character. The character is really theatrical and over the top, but he’s a great villain, and looks fantastic in the Simone Bianchi drawn pinup in the back of Messiah Complex.

As for the Messiah Complex issue itself, it’s pretty strong, though clearly just a prelude, not anything in itself. We get the real sense that something’s going down, something important. The art is nice, and our brief glimpse of the Marauders is cool. However, it’s going to take a couple of issues to see what the series is really about.

I’ve been reading a ton of superhero comics lately, primarily because reading one invariably leads to another story and then to another. Seven Soldiers led to Morrison’s JLA, 52, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis and I’m sure more soon. This book is going to lead to lot more, as well as an effort to catch up on some previous X-Men stuff. It’s nice to check in with the characters every once in a while, and at least here they’re competently written. I don’t know if I’ll make it through the whole crossover, but I’ll at least give it a chance.

Joss Whedon's Dollhouse

Great news came out of nowhere today with the news that Joss Whedon’s going to be doing a new show, Dollhouse with Eliza Dushku. I’d hoped that he’d go back to TV at some point, but wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon, so this was an out of nowhere great surprise.

As for the show itself, it’s definitely got potential. It sounds at first like it’ll be a bit standalone heavy, but the beauty of a Joss show is the evolution of it. Watching the first season of Angel, I wasn’t thrilled with things, but as it went along, it really picked up. My big fear is that the show will get screwed like countless other Fox shows and not get a chance to develop. It would be pretty tough to take a cancellation after seven episodes, or a summer burnoff for the series. At this point, Joss has a pretty big fanbase, hopefully it will be enough to get the series up and running. If nothing else, there’ll be a lot of chatter about it online.

Joss seems to have acknowledged that he pretty much failed to make a go of it in the movies. There’s a different sort of storytelling in film, and I don’t think his talents are particularly suited to it. While he clearly can do really powerful, visual storytelling, as in Restless of OMWF, I don’t think that’s his default mode. For Serenity, he went with a fairly straightforward visual style and straightforward story. It’s a good movie, but it’s not much better than any given episode of the Firefly series. From that point of view, why should we want two hours of Joss every couple of years when we could twenty hours every year?

Ultimately, TV in its current incarnation is just a much better medium for storytelling than movies. When done properly, which admittedly it isn’t most of the time, it can allow for a vast canvas of stories that don’t require the three act structure and obvious character arcs of most Hollywood movies. In The Wire, you have no idea who’s going to die or be successful, there’s just so many people in there, anyone is expendable.

For me, movies today should move more towards Wong Kar-Wai or Malick style storytelling, the sort of atmospheric style immersions that aren’t possible on a TV schedule. That’s a reason I’d consider The New World and Miami Vice the best films of recent years, they weren’t so much about story as about going to a place and lingering there. If The Wire was a movie, I’d enjoy it, but not in the same way as the series.

Next year looks like it’s going to be an incredible year for TV. We’ve got the last season of The Wire and the debut of Alan Ball’s True Blood and Joss’s show. A lot of really great shows have ended over the past couple of years, and now it looks like we’re finally getting the replacements in.

And speaking of good news, it’s also great to hear that Terence Malick has a new film in the works. Not much is known, but the title, Tree of Life, certainly sounds intriguing. Malick is one of the most distinctive, visually skilled filmmakers ever. He uses the medium like no one else, and is coming off his best movie. Obviously, it’s a long way from starting, but I really hope this movie happens in the near future.

Infinite Crisis

A while back, I read Infinite Crisis, the followup to DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, and another series that is full of odd, convoluted storytelling, put over the top by the sheer epicness of everything that happens. It’s not a great story, but it’s got enough good stuff to carry it along. Most importantly, it’s something that’s uniquely comics, relying on a huge amount of past continuity and fan familiarity with the concepts to make it work.

It’s a pretty direct sequel to the original Crisis, plucking four other Earth characters out of the ‘heaven’ they went to at the end of the first book and returning them to current continuity. This is done primarily as a way to engage in a bunch of meta commentary on the state of superhero comics. The DCU has moved in an increasingly dark direction, so we bring in the Earth 2 Superman to point out just how far the heroes have fallen. On one level, it’s a pretty clear knock on contemporary comics, ironically housed in a book about conflicted, fallen heroes and some of the most over the top violence seen in a mainstream superhero book.

However, the reading that made the book work for me was to think of Superboy Prime and Kal-L Superman as representatives of the Bush government. They are people who think the world has fallen into decadence and moral uncertainty, and seek to use their power to restore moral order to the world, no matter how much violence in takes. Superboy Prime in particular is reminiscent of Bush’s temper tantrum my way or no way at all behavior. The big setpiece for him is the rush through the Titans, tearing limbs off b list characters, all the while chastising them for their immoral behavior. That irony is the key to Bush’s misguided worldview, everything he does is right because it’s in the service of something good, everything we do is wrong.

That would make Alex Luthor the Dick Cheney of the piece, secretly trying to reshape the world behind the scenes, and Earth 2 Superman the entire older generation, who’s been duped by Bush’s war mongering. For me, that reading takes the book beyond an echo chamber look at comics and gives it some overall relevance for the world. Was it intentional? I’m not positive, but it fits so well, it doesn’t really matter.

Of course, we’ve also got a clear tie back to Miracleman. The extreme violence made it jump out for me, but Superboy Prime is basically Kid Miracleman. Things never reach the operatic heights of the definitive superhero fight, Miracleman 15, but pretty much no series since has, so that’s not something you can knock it for.

As for the book outside that, much like the original Crisis, it’s epic and thrilling most of the time, even if the end loses a bit of the momentum. It’s interesting that people condemn the book for being so continuity reliant when if this was a literary work, people would be hailing it for the complexity. Well, maybe not exactly, but nobody cracks of James Joyce for taking a lot of effort to decipher. There’s something cool about having sixty years of story behind a single narrative. Morrison’s talked about the DCU becoming sentient, and in this case, the sheer amount of backstory involved means the narrative takes on a life of its own, commenting back on the previous stories that have been told.

The series benefits from some fantastic Phil Jiminez artwork. Unfortunately, like his run on The Invisibles, the perfect polish and style of the opening slips a bit by the end as we get fill in artists and messy inkers. But, it still looks really good, and even though I’m sure JG Jones will be great, I’d love to see Phil work with Morrison on Final Crisis.

And Final Crisis is the main reason I read this book. When Morrison’s miniseries comes out next year, I want to be fully acquainted with the backstory and ready to tackle whatever he comes up with. Having gotten caught up in the DCU recently, I’m really excited about that series and finding out what Morrison’s going to do for his final statement in the DCU, at least for now. IC is already full of characters from Seven Soldiers, I spotted everyone in there at some point, always putting a smile on my face. Hopefully he’ll bring some of those guys back and nail that series. If anyone can write something that’s truly forward thinking with the DCU, it’s Grant.

Batman and Son

Grant Morrison and Batman aren’t an obvious match. He wrote a fantastic version of the character for his run on JLA, but that was as part of a larger, crazier world than Batman usually encounters in his solo title. Reading the first trade of his run, it’s pretty clear this is a minor Morrison work, engaging in very little of his typical philosophical exploration. It’s the weakest thing he’s wrote in a while, or at least the least ambitious, but he did manage to bring a freshness and excitement to the Batman mythos. It’s a rollicking, very funny book, and does represent a kind of growth for Grant.

The thematic center of the series is Batman rediscovering Bruce Wayne, which takes the form of a performance. One of the central themes of superhero comics is the notion that putting on the costume allows the real person to come out. Batman Returns, the definitive superhero film, gives us Selina Kyle, mild mannered secretary, constantly struggling to please her boss. However, after she transforms into Catwoman, she becomes a hedonist pleasure seeker, feeding her own appetite for destruction and power. Wearing the costume allows her to engage in a part of herself that society doesn’t permit.

The interesting thing here is the reversal of that trope. Bruce has become so enmeshed in his Batman persona, he’s forgotten that Bruce Wayne can be a fun guy too. So, we get the emergence of this ultra-smooth playboy version of Bruce, dazzling the ladies at a party. It’s fun to watch as people fall for what we know to be a performance. Bruce has put on a new fiction suit, discarding grim and gritty Bruce Wayne for a Bond like character. That’s the thematic area where the series meshes most closely with Morrison’s previous work, the taking on and discarding of identities, this personal reinvention paralleling the evolution of the character over decades of comics.

Fittingly, the new foe menacing this Bruce Wayne is his illegitimate son, Damian. Damian is the breakout character from this book. Before he appeared, I was liking the series, but it hadn’t really hooked me. He kicked things up a notch, moving the series into a bizarre comic world. I love his ridiculously violent attempts to find a place in Bruce’s life, killing Robin and delivering the head of a villain being two of the most grievous. It’s so ridiculous, this little kid going around killing people, but it works as absurdist comedy and just straightforward drama. Is he an annoying character? Yes, but that’s the whole point. In Damian, Bruce sees a reflection of himself, and the old grim and gritty Batman is made into a parody.

The stuff with Bruce, Damian and Talia is all top notch. I really like the over the top selfishness of Talia, and her shameless attempts to use Bruce. However, the series slips a bit when dealing with other stories. The police Batman story is alright, but not that impressive, however I’m thinking that the three Batmen will play a crucial part in the series’ mythology moving forward. The apocalyptic Damian in the future story is reminiscent of “Here Comes Tomorrow,” an entertaining, but not quite cohesive dystopia.

The oddest story here is the Joker prose story. Morrison’s prose is very tactile and imagistic, but the cheesy computer illustrations let him down. I would have much rather seen Dave McKean come in to illustrate this. The story once again brings the notion of self reinvention to the fore, and it’s a quite entertaining vignette, but ultimately feels removed from the rest of the series.

My major problem with the run is the lack of substance next to Morrison’s other work. It’s not that he can’t do thematically substantial stuff on a mainstream title. His New X-Men is full of important themes and ideas, but that’s a series that’s a perfect vehicle for him. Evolution is at the center of Morrison’s worldview, but how do you fit that into a Batman comic? I think he does a great job of making a fresh, fun comic, but it’s clearly a minor work.

Even though I’m a bit frustrated that he’s spending his time on this book instead of something more substantial, I do admire the attempt to move beyond his usual concerns and write a new kind of book. He’s never done something this funny before, and the street level work is different from his usual cosmic focus. I’m eager to read more, particularly the JH Williams arc, but I wouldn’t be disappointed if this run ends at 20 issues and he moves on to creator owned stuff.

The Wire: Season One and The Start of Two

Earlier today, I finished the first season of The Wire, and have since watched the first two episodes of the second season. It’s been a lot of Wire this weekend, viewing that was encouraged by the serial nature of the plotlines. I’ve frequently heard the show referred to as novelistic, and the ending of season one certainly confirms that, wrapping everything up in a pretty satisfying way. At that point, there’s not necessarily a need for more, contrary to what a lot of Sopranos viewers will tell you, life goes on is a perfect acceptable ending.

I absolutely loved season one. The show’s greatest achievement was its blurring of emotional lines due to the multiple perspectives of the narrative. I wanted the police to make their case, to get people to flip and testify, but at the same time, any time people even went near them, I was worried, knowing that it couldn’t end well. Wallace is a perfect example of someone who is struggling with things, goes to the cops, and winds up getting killed when they forget about him.

Of course, Wallace is a prime example of one of the show’s central themes, that systems exist to trap people in specific roles and never enable to change. The end of the season sees new people rising to fill the roles vacated by our main characters, with Herc and Poot repeating the speeches given to them by their mentors earlier in the season. The ‘kids’ have grown up and enthusiastically started running things while the older characters are all disillusioned, paying for what they’ve done over the course of the season.

McNulty is sent out to the marine patrol unit, while D’Angelo is sent to prison. The D’Angelo scenes in the final episode are great because they show how hard it is to get out of the system. He wants to leave, but everything he knows is pushing him towards drug trafficking. His family is drugs, he can’t get out of the game without leaving everything he’s known.

This is the same sort of thing that was central to final seasons of The Sopranos. I would argue that The Sopranos represents a more evolved form of gang life, one where your life isn’t in jeopardy every day. There, Tony can sit down and have a meal with the feds, you wouldn’t get that with the crew on the streets. The reason for that is Tony comes from a fundamentally different social world. He has a choice about the life he’s leading, the people on the streets don’t. Tony has psychological conflict precisely because he has everything he could want and still isn’t happy. People like Bodie or Wallace are just struggling to survive, they’re worlds away from him.

Where the shows are similar is in the depiction of criminal life as an all consuming force. Without the belief in and total devotion to a cause, the entire thing would fall apart. In working on the other side of the law, people are drawn together and they’re all willing to adhere to a code that can mean taking jail time. Unlike the characters on The Sopranos, these guys are all willing to take the years. It’s a big difference leaving the projects for jail instead of leaving a comfortable middle class existence for jail. Part of the resentment Phil has for Tony in the final season is precisely that Tony never had to deal with real hardship. The next generation of Barksdales will be more like Tony, growing up with everything they could want, but still trapped in the life.

Over with the police, the dramatic high point of the season is Kima’s shooting and the subsequent reaction. The series spends most of its time on the mechanics of investigating, there’s a lot of drama and conflict, but very rarely do things escalate to that level. Watching all the police around the crime scene, the scope just shoots up. The genius of the show is that even as I want the police to go get revenge on the people who shot her, I’m hoping that Stringer can get his crew together and avoid getting charged for it.

Stringer is one of the most interesting characters, fleshed out in small, but telling details. The scene where McNulty follows him to community college tells us so much about him. He sees this as a business, and wants to make as much money off the copy store as he does off the drugs. Avon has an attraction to the drug game, but I could see Stringer pushing to move the family out of drugs and towards more legitimate operations. Looking at the end of the season, it seems like Stringer used Avon as a front, taking the heat of the investigation while he walks away.

The show sometimes hits that same us against the world vibe that I loved on The X-Files. McNulty is like Mulder, the spark that sets off a far reaching investigation that throws everyone into question. He comes up against the same kind of conspiracy that controls everything, only this one’s out in the open. The show is a startling indictment of government bureaucracy, from the internal push for something to show off at the expense of real results, to the way that our electoral system inevitably ties the government to special interests, in this case, criminal interests. As we see with Daniels, it’s near impossible to break these cases because the people involved are going to do anything they can to maintain their position.

Watching the start of season two was a bit tough. After getting used to the crew and all the characters, we’re dropped into the world of the ports. While our regulars are still around, it’s frustrating to spend time with these new characters and not catch up with the others for a while. It reminds me a bit of Buffy’s “Anne,” which left me just wanting to get her back with the crew. It’s hard because even as I rag on shows that limp back to the status quo whenever possible, I kind of want the team back together.

But, after watching two episodes, I’m getting more used to the new status quo. Ziggy is really annoying, but other than that, the new people look like they should be interesting enough. And, with Carver and Prez’s involvement in that storyline, it’s becoming clearer how everything could eventually piece together. My guess is Stringer will eventually have to run drugs through the ports, connecting the two stories a bit. But, there’s not a need for that connection. The show is a portrait of a city, and it is possible to just have a bunch of stories happening without any direct connection. It would get a bit overwhelming if a whole new crew is added each season, but for now, it could work.

Ultimately, I have to give a lot of respect to the show. Season one was a virtually flawless piece of television. It was so far removed from convention and the easy narrative shortcuts most shows use that the few moments that felt like normal TV really jumped out. It’s ridiculous that a good, but not great, movie like The Departed wins best picture, but The Wire can’t even cop an Emmy nomination. The show is just so far beyond virtually everything else out there, there’s no way a two hour movie can compete with this.

There are things you can do in a two hour movie that a show like this can’t do, mainly stylistic things. Malick or Wong Kar-Wai are doing work that is tailored for the feature, but if you’re just telling a story, it’s hard to go on when a work like this, or The Sopranos or Mad Men, is out there. The Wire is just another example of what TV has done recently, give us windows into worlds, not just tell stories. It’s something totally new and exciting, and it’s made it hard for me to enjoy even good movies.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say as I watch more, at this rate, I’ll catch up to season four before it even comes out on DVD.

The Wire - 'The Target' and 'The Detail' (1x01 & 1x02)

A few years ago, there was a whole wealth of TV series I hadn’t seen, but had heard great things about. Now, not so much, I’ve seen the vast majority of HBO’s recent output, and am watching most great new shows as they air. However, there’s still one titan out there I was missing, the show that more than any other since The Sopranos has been hailed as the greatest TV show of all time. It’s a show I’ve been told to watch, and something I’ve been meaning to watch for a while, but just never got to. However, the time has come, so I’ve begun watching The Wire. After two episodes, I can say that it lives up to the hype, it’s certainly not the greatest show of all time yet, but I could see the potential there, and I’m already hooked and eager to watch more.

The show seems reluctant to engage in the sort of high concept hook that even the best HBO shows have. The Sopranos and Six Feet Under are easy to explain in one sentence, but how would you describe The Wire? So far, the hook seems to be the war on drugs, from both sides, and it’s in the dual perspective that the show finds its most powerful moments. The implicit point of most cop/criminal movies, Heat say, is that there really isn’t much difference between cops and criminals. They both keep the same hours, frequent the same places and have the same personal troubles. It’s a thin line, the law, and this episode makes it even thinner by spreading our emotional identification between many characters.

The best example of this so far is the scene where they bring D’Angelo in for questioning and almost reduce him to tears with a story about the kids who are now orphans because their father was killed. You could play this scene straight up, a criminal forced to confront his crimes, however, our knowledge that Gant was actually a single man colors everything. The police are lying and manipulating D’Angelo to serve his own agenda. It helps that D’Angelo is the one character of the crew who really has our sympathy. He’s on the outside of things, and already felt guilty when he saw Gant’s body. He is seeking some way to alleviate his guilt, and thus engages in the lie the police tell him. It’s cold watching McNulty and Bunk laughing at it afterwards.

But, at the same time, it’s a devastating moment when we see Gant’s body at the end of the first episode. He’s tried to help put someone in jail, the conviction wasn’t made, and now he dies for nothing. The gang rule punishes people for doing the right thing, leading to the perpetuation of this chaotic urban warzone that the characters live in. One of the show’s greatest strengths is the sense of place, everyone hanging out in the courtyard, an orange couch in the center. It’s a vividly realized world, enhanced by the critical location shooting.

But it’s our shifting sympathies that make things so interesting. The police officers who go down to the Tower are idiots, and it’s tough to watch as a kid gets his eye knocked out. However, at the same time, this is a chaotic violence run world, shouldn’t there be some attempt at regulation? Throughout, there’s a kind of concession to the forces of urban decay. Even if they take down Barksdale, will it solve anything? Probably not, someone new will rise up in his place. I think the show serves as a sobering picture of a world we don’t usually see. There’s no sense of a social structure in place to help these kids become anything but drug dealers. Live a legit life and work hard and you’ll get killed like Gant.

I’m imaging this has all been discussed a lot, but as a new viewer to the show, it’s pretty exciting. Discovering a new work like this is always fascinating because you’re not sure who’s going to be the main characters, what’s going to happen, what kind of world will develop. Obviously I’ll watch all the episodes, but there’s something cool about the mystery, having something to discover. Still, I’ll be going through the show and hopefully will catch up by the start of the new season in January. They edit the show where I work, and the season is just about done. I saw what I feel like might be the ending montage of the series, but I won’t say anything about that. Two episodes in, it’s a bit early to think about the end.

Mad Men - 'The Wheel' (1x13)

I enjoyed, and was very impressed by, Mad Men right from the start of the show, but it wasn’t until roughly midway through the season that I really got hooked on the season. Pretty much each episode has been better than the next, culminating in the devastating and brilliant season finale. This episode clinches the show’s spot as a television masterpiece, a worthy addition to this golden age of TV programming.

Part of what made me really appreciate the show was seeing some Fall shows. During the summer, I had John From Cincinnati and Big Love coming in every week, both fantastic shows, that conditioned me to expect that quality from every show. Mad Men stands with those series, but it felt like the quality I was expecting from TV, not an anomaly. However, watching even the most critically acclaimed network series of the new season, like Reaper and Pushing Daisies, I found nothing that even came close to what Mad Men was doing on a weekly basis. While most network shows leave you wondering how they’re going to fill twenty-two episodes, Mad Men has an ambition and characters that demand more stories.

Matt Weiner has talked about his plan for the series, with five seasons taking the character from 1960 to 1970. I think that’s brilliant because it will allow for real change. I hate shows that struggle to maintain a status quo, and that’s what’s doomed shows from Battlestar Galactica to Alias, even season seven Buffy to some extent. The best TV shows are all about characters, I want to see the characters evolve and change and go through different things. I don’t mind if Buffy isn’t fighting vampires, I’m there for the person more than the slayer. Hell, in that series, I wouldn’t have even missed Buffy herself that much by the late seasons.

The Mad Men plan recalls the scope of Babylon 5. For all my issues with that show, you can’t help be respect JMS for telling such a huge story that changed things for everyone involved. His character storytelling slipped sometimes, but the story was wonderfully executed. That’s what TV can do, and I’d like to see more series that evolve and change as they go along.

Weiner worked on The Sopranos, and Mad Men has that series’ wonderful mix of subtle everyday moments and the occasional melodramatic outburst to keep things moving. These characters are stuck in a situation where they are unhappy, but refuse to change their lives. Don asks Rachel to run away, but he doesn’t really think it through. In a movie, you could do a The Graduate and end with them off to some uncertain future, clearly regretting the choice. But, on TV, you have to dwell in the reality of things, Don won’t leave his wife for the same reason Betty won’t leave Don, they’re trapped in this social world and can’t exist outside it. That was the whole point of the Helen Bishop storyline from earlier in the season, outsiders have no place in their world.

I’ve heard some people complain that the stories on Mad Men move too slowly, which is a completely off criticism. Much like late season Sopranos, the show dwells in moments that most shows skip over. It’s in the small interactions that we really get to know people and understand their world. Because this show is set in a world that’s alien to us, it’s fun and illuminating to just linger there. I loved the episode where Don got high with the beatniks and they just hung around talking about stuff. Through the discussion, you could see all their differences, we didn’t need a real ‘story’ about this, just being there was enough. Throughout the show, I’m amazed by how on the writing is, giving us the pieces to understand things, but never just telling us.

This episode featured two devastating scenes. My personal favorite was Betty’s talk with Glenn Bishop. This was a scene that I’m guessing a lot of people had issues with. It’s interesting for just how on the nose Betty’s dialogue is. David Chase, whose spirit hangs over the show, said that everything his characters say is a lie, and that’s true of a lot of these people as well. In this moment, Betty says what we’ve known all along, that she’s so alone, so sad, but to hear her voice it outright, particularly to this kid, is devastating. I loved the Betty’s lock of hair storyline because it was so downright odd. It adds this layer of odd perversion to her, she is so desperate for the attention of men, even young Glenn’s flattery means a lot to her. It was the emotional peak of the episode for me, a risky, but perfectly executed scene.

The other brilliant scene was Don’s speech about the carousel. Harry left the meeting crying, and I was pretty much there too. It was a hypnotic scene, and even seemed to sell Don himself on what he was saying. Don was confronted with these images of his perfect suburban existence, such a contrast to what he knows to be true. The double ending afterwards, where Don’s imagined homecoming is contrasted with his real loneliness was devastating as well.

The episode had that feeling of everything crashing down, the characters’ own delusions being broken by truth. Peggy was so deluded that she couldn’t acknowledge she was pregnant, and when the child is there, she won’t look at him. She’s a career girl, and won’t consider that alternate path. Similarly, Pete has to face that fact that for all his hustle, Peggy got a promotion and his one major accomplishment is negated by the fact that it’s his father in law’s account.

As the episode ended, I was just so happy, so impressed by what I’d seen. Every once in a while you see a movie or TV show that does that, just gives you a high knowing that what you’ve seen is great. It happened after Six Feet Under’s ‘Ecotone,’ what happened was bad, but the execution was so good, you can’t help but smile. Those two scenes I mentioned above were so on, they alone made the entire season worth watching. But really, this show grew from really strong to outright great, and the sky’s the limit for the future. With Friday Night Lights in a bit of a downturn and Battlestar Galactica constantly uneven, I’m going to go out on a limb and call this the best show on TV.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Crisis on Infinite Earths is one of those works I’ve read a lot about, and encountered peripherally through Morrison’s Animal Man and Moore’s Swamp Thing, however I’d never dare touch the work itself. However, with my recent immersion in the DCU, via Seven Soldiers, 52 and the Fourth World, I felt up to the task of navigating this massively complicated superhero epic. Epic is the optimum word here, a lot of crossovers feel constructed for no apparent reason, this one featured a great foe and truly world shaking action. Does that make it good? Not always, but it’s an intensely readable and truly unique and odd work, one that’s well worth the time for its metafictional implications alone.

A lot of mega crossovers are based around the fundamentally ironic goal of simplifying the universe through an absurdly convoluted story. Inferno is a prime example of this, a work that relies on fifteen years of stories and is barely comprehensible even when you’ve read all those issues due to the sheer amount of tie in material. It was a house clearing exercise, and this one is too, only it’s cleaning a much more complicated house. I’m not very familiar with the DCU pre Crisis, but judging from this book, it was a crazy, exciting place that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. So, the Crisis exists with one goal, to simplify the universe and make it accessible for new readers.

This gives the entire exercise a strong meta feel. The work is simultaneously a deck clearing exercise and a valedictory for the DCU as it was. If you’re not already familiar with the concept of the multiverse, the work won’t make much sense. Wikipedia and some related sites definitely helped me keep track of what the hell was going on at times, giving me the fundamental underpinning for all the action. It’s hard to wrap your mind around some of this stuff, particularly without a grounding in years of DCU history.

There’s a sadness present in the destruction of the multiverse. I knew that this was where the entire work was heading, but it’s still tough to watch these old characters and their world destroyed. The essential problem with the multiverse is that it removes the emotional reality of the characters. If there’s five Supermans running around, it’s hard to tell which one really matters. Is Superman the old guy married to Lois Lane or is he the young guy whose identity is still a secret? People today talk a lot about how adherence to continuity is a fanboy only practice, but if you look at stories, continuity is what makes them matter. It feels like a copout when we find out everything that happened was a dream or hoax as the 50s so frequently relied on. Stories gain weight through their consequences, and without some kind of linear continuity, there are no consequences. If many other Supermans are out there, it doesn’t matter what happens to any of them. But, if there’s one, you can really engage with him.

I like to think of the American Office as The Office Earth 2. The same character archetypes exist, but they’re played in a different way. I can’t engage with the Earth 2 characters in the same way I did with the original UK ones because I felt like the story was already told. I can laugh at the jokes, but emotionally, this ‘Jim’ doesn’t feel as real as ‘Tim.’ DC’s problem was that nobody felt real, and the universe of today certainly feels more cohesive than what we’ve got at the beginning of Crisis.

However, at the same time, I love the idea of this previous Superman helping out contemporary Superman. It’s a father/son thing, and then you throw in Superboy as another child, it’s a whole family. Plus, the multiverse allows for some wackier concepts and stories that don’t make sense in the agreed upon reality of the singular Earth. I love the idea that there’s an Earth where World War II rages on, or an Earth where America discovered Europe. The multiverse allows for a multitude of ideas, but ideas without emotion don’t necessarily make good stories.

I used to be almost exclusively a Marvel fan, X-Men mainly. I struggled to engage with DC’s heroes. After reading a lot of Morrison stuff in the DCU, and 52 in particular, I’ve grown to love the DCU. So, I was actually fairly equipped to handle the demands of this work. And, I’d argue it’s a more coherent work than I was expecting. There are a ton of narrative digressions, but the conflict with the Anti-Monitor provides a strong structure and focus that anchors you even when hundreds of random characters pass through.

The book begins rather clumsily with a series of random characters getting summoned by the Monitor. The cast is just unmanageable at this point, and we have no emotional in point to engage with. Things pick up once we get to know the Harbinger, who’s dressed in a wonderfully 80s outfit. I love works that engage with the zeitgeist of their times. Yes, the Harbinger may look dated, but that’s because her outfit was so specific to the moment, the hair, the clothes. She belongs in Bob Fosse’s Star 80. Supergirl’s headband is also decidedly of the moment, though her hairstyle doesn’t hold up as well as Harbingers.

The story itself works primarily because of how big it is. There’s not particularly engaging character arcs, but the Anti-Monitor is such an all encompassing foe, and is built up so well, that the story has a grandeur and majesty lacking in most of these cosmic crossover events. It does get a bit ridiculous how long it takes for him to be defeated. Even the characters themselves are talking about how a seemingly endless battle rages on and on, but it works. The high point is the fight in the Anti-Matter universe at the dawn of time, where all the magicians lend their power and the Spectre does some kind of ritual that temporarily ruptures the Anti-Monitor.

Things do get a bit repetitive by the end, however the final moments are very effective. It’s hard to watch Earth 2 Superman in a world where he doesn’t belong, where everything he knew has been wiped away. His ascension out of the universe and back to Lois is a really powerful way to signal the end of an era.

One of the things I always love about reading DCU stuff is getting to check in on the characters I’ve enjoyed reading about in the past. Here, I get a visit with Animal Man, who unfortunately has some pretty awful jokes, as well as time with Robotman. Zatanna gets a couple of panels, and Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Constantine also pop up. And, Darkseid even plays a critical role in the final moments. It’s nice to know they’re out there doing their own thing, those characters are more than just the people who write them, they have a life of their own.

And ultimately, that’s what this work is about. The writers have created inextricable narrative traps, and the characters work their way through it and create a new workable status quo. It’s a messy story, but the sheer hugeness of the undertaking makes it work. Perez’s art is dense and detailed, and the work feels very substantial. Pages are routinely filled with 10-15 panels, and each issue takes far longer to read than today’s “decompressed” comics. Not every artist could pull it off, but Perez can do a page with 15 panels and still sell you on the characters’ emotion. An issue of the Buffy comic is like eating a cookie, each issue of this is a meal. I’m not saying every book should be this dense, but there’s a reason that more people read single issues back then.

So, what’s the takeaway from Crisis? I found it a consistently entertaining and though provoking work. It’s frequently nonsensical and hard to follow, but there’s enough ideas in there that it works on an intellectual level. The multiple earths are hard to fathom, but I think that’s a good thing. I like comics that force you to think in new ways. I don’t think most people want to think about their entertainment in this way, to ponder the cosmology of an entirely fictional universe, but for me, it’s a joy.

Now it’s on to today and Infinite Crisis. My main reason for reading this book now was to prepare for Grant’s upcoming Final Crisis, and Infinite Crisis is the next step. I’ve read the first two issues, and it’s pretty good so far. Phil Jiminez is a worthy successor to Perez. No one draws more beautiful people than he does, everyone looks like a gorgeous model. I don’t think art that’s cheesecake usually works, but there’s nothing wrong with good looking people, and Phil delivers that like no one else. He would have been the perfect artist for Grant’s JLA run, making humans that could be gods. Behind JH Williams and Frank Quitely, he's the best artist in comics today.

Deadwood and its Secret Fourth Season

I finished watching Deadwood yesterday, a show I constantly enjoyed, but didn’t love in the way that a lot of others did. The third season in particular was brilliant, with the looming menace of Hearst throwing the entire camp into chaos. While I would love to see the promised, but unlikely to happen TV movies, I don’t think it’s quite true that the series had no conclusion. The last episode resolved the Hearst arc, and featured the pull between civilization and the wild that’s been the key motif of the entire series. Yes, it’s more of an Angel go out in battle ending than a definitive conclusion, but I don’t know that any conclusion would have been truly definitive.

Still, conclusion comes in the most unlikely of ways, and, as Milch himself has said, you’re always telling the same story. John From Cincinnati functions as a kind of Earth 2 Deadwood, taking the same character archetypes and central narrative focus, but flinging it a century forward to the present day. The last season of Deadwood put our heroes in conflict with the standardizing force of corporate America, the beginning of a process that continues to this day. It’s notable that as the series begins, the entire JFC crew has been devastated by their encounter with a large corporation that mined their talent and discarded them when it was used up. The Deadwood camp formed around the gold deposits in the town, the community in JFC grows up around the Yosts’ talent.

So, let’s imagine that Hearst had mined all the gold in the camp, then he’d leave and there’d be nothing left but the sort of messy ruins that we see on JFC. How do you rebuild from that? That’s the question that haunts all the characters in JFC, tormented by trouble in their past they have slipped into isolation. On Deadwood, we saw characters pulled out of their lonely isolation and form a community. The third season is all about the crystallization of the bonds in response to an outside threat. JFC has the same central theme, but it treats it in a different way.

In Deadwood, it is the need to survive that forces the characters to unite. Alone in the wild, they are all in peril, like Sophia in the first episode. Brought into a community, they each find their place and gradually form a functioning civilization. By the time of JFC, it’s pretty easy to survive, there is no longer the necessity to band together to survive, but isolation has thrown the characters into depression. That’s why John appears. John is a literal incarnation of the force underlying all of Milch’s work, the force of community that draws people together and allows individuals to become something more through collective effort. Whatever John’s origin, that’s what he does, he brings people together.

John From Cincinnati even offers a solution to the Hearst conflict, with Stinkweed standing in for Hearst. Rather than trying to beat Linc at his own game, as I assumed they would at the start of the season, Butchie and his crew turn Linc to their side and wind up in control of the corporation. The force that threatened to destroy Deadwood is now under the control of the people. Corporations have a huge amount of power, and harnessed for good, they could remake the world. That’s the scenario Milch offers at the end of John From Cincinnati, the destructive forces turned to positive ones.

Ultimately, that’s what I loved about John From Cincinnati. Amidst all the grittiness, there was a real light and hope. This was a show full of joy and happiness, about characters overcoming their problems and coming together. But, because he made it hard, he made it real, it felt genuine. The essential appeal of Milch’s work is this notion that everyone has a place and can be accepted. The characters in Deadwood certainly suffer, but they all have a group of people to support them.

What of the characters? The most obvious parallels are where the same actors reoccur. Milch doesn’t cast them against type, Freddie the drug dealer is what Charlie Utter probably would have been in today’s world, associated with the same vagrant underclass. Same for Trixie and Jerri, she wouldn’t be a whore in the present day, but she has the same power. Obviously, these parallels aren’t the same thing as actually seeing the character arcs resolved, but if you want to understand where the series was going, just consider John a 130 year jump into the future.

It’s frustrating that a lot of people who loved Deadwood seemed reluctant to engage with JFC, when it was as close to a fourth season as we’re going to get. Milch’s new cop series for HBO probably won’t have the same sprawling ensemble cast, he’ll probably reign himself in a bit after two cancellations.

As for Deadwood itself, those final moments were full of tension and in some respects, certainty. The community has asserted itself, and Hearst leaves on their terms. I do think it’s a bit of an anticlimax, that he all of a sudden decides to leave, but I love when a show goes out on crazy tension, and this was like that. I would love to see the movies, but the show feels more about day to day life in a singular moment, and hopping through time to get ‘resolution’ for the characters might deprive us of the show’s real central character, the camp itself. I suppose my dream fanboy Milch project would be some kind of crossover between JFC and Deadwood, where characters hop through time and see the effects of 130 years ago on the present. But, I’ve probably been reading too much Crisis on Infinite Earths.

There's Only One Sun

This film dropped out of nowhere for me. I was going around online, saw a link to it on Youtube and figured I’d check it out. Ten minutes later, I was once again in awe of the greatest filmmaker in the world. Making what’s ostensibly an advertisement for a flatscreen TV, Wong Kar-Wai delves back into the robot world of 2046 and spins another dizzying tale of identity and ennui under gorgeous neon lights.

If I was to ask someone to make a short film for me, I don’t know that they could make something perfect for this. It consists almost entirely of elements that I love. For one, Wong Kar-Wai is directing, with a ton of his signature elements in place. The voiceover ponders identity questions and lulls you into a moody haze, perfectly complimenting the music and visuals to build atmosphere. Watching Wong Kar-Wai movies always makes me want to use voiceover in my own work, since he pulls it off so effortlessly, these beautiful words flowing from the characters.

The plot revolves a female robot operative who poses as a blind woman to track down a man called The Light. The story doesn’t really matter though, it’s really about the desire she has, to see him even after he’s gone. The light is secret, and she can only find him in her memories, represented through the screen. Much like the jukebox in Fallen Angels, the TV screen here becomes a center of erotic desire. The woman is practically fucking the TV at the end of the ad, literally trying to get lost in her memories. This ties in with the themes in all his work, 2046 in particular. That work was all about living in memories, and the inability to deal with the present.

A lot of the sci-fi ideas from 2046 crop up here. We’ve got those amazing shoes that light up when they touch the ground. Those shoes alone have more style than pretty much every other film I’ve seen this year. Nobody makes his characters look as glam as Wong Kar-Wai. I love the red trenchcoat, and the black outfit the woman’s wearing when sitting on the bed. Even the odd future headcovering at the end works. And, the hair style is fantastic, looking like 1920s Edith Manning from The Invisibles, the hair has a kind of plastic quality. She’s gorgeous, in a specifically Wong Kar-Wai kind of way.

But, it’s not just the woman who’s gorgeous, the cinematography here is just so lush and moody. Even on a crappy Youtube video, you get lost in it. The neon lights and colors seem to hang in the air, palpable mood. I love those halls filled with neon colors and the out of focus shadows drifting through them. Combined with the same haunting songs from 2046, and we’ve got a lost chapter of that movie.

It really frustrates me that we’ve never gotten a definitive DVD, with deleted material from those future segments. The robot story with Faye Wong is my favorite thing in any Wong Kar-Wai movie. As this film shows, he approaches the genre in a really unique way. He turns it into an allegorical playground for emotion. The odd characters maximize the feelings involved, turning individual romantic conflicts into emotional drama that plays on the nature of humanity itself. That’s what the genre at its best can do, and Wong Kar-Wai has proved himself the heir to classic 70s sci-fi cinema.

It had been a while since I’d seen new Wong Kar-Wai material, and this one just popped out of nowhere to dazzle. It’s a perfect short, and I really hope to get a DVD quality version at one point so it’s even easier to get lost in.

I'm Not a Cyborg, but That's OK

Park Chanwook is one of the best filmmakers working today, and in his past two films, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, he told stories that melded endlessly inventive visual storytelling methods with operatic emotional content to create enormously entertaining and affecting films. But, the Vengeance trilogy is over and his new film, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK is more of a whimsical comedy. It’s an interesting movie, with a lot of great stuff, but doesn’t quite pull together in the way those two films do.

This film is like a slightly twisted Amelie, with a similarly eccentric female main character and the same tentative romance between two damaged people. It’s largely the central character, Young Goon, and Su-Jeong Lim’s performance that’s make the movie work. She is funny and keeps a realism and humanity going through the various ridiculous things that happen. The moments where she talks to various appliances, particularly the first scene with the vending machine, are really funny and also emotionally real. She sells you on the delusion that this girl believes she’s a cyborg, to the point that it becomes almost real. You don’t want her to learn that she isn’t a cyborg, and grow out of this at the end, you want her to succeed at being a cyborg.

Park has a lot of funny bits with the cyborg thing. I love when she licks batteries for dinner, and the opening sequence, where she charges herself is both disturbing and funny. The most visually stunning sequence occurs with the intercutting of her shock therapy treatment and a fantasy of her in a cyborg incubator.

The emotional high point of the film is near the end, when Il-Sun constructs a “rice-megatron” for her, and proceeds to install it. Here, the fantasy becomes real because making her believe in the rice-megatron would save her life. It’s hard to watch her get fed through a tube, hard to watch Il-Sun’s anxiety when she won’t eat. You want her to accept his salvation, but lurking behind is the fear that she’ll snap out of the trance, call him on the ridiculousness of the device and reject it. When we finally see her eat, and can see the gears through her chest while Il-Sun hugs her, that’s a perfectly executed moment.

But, the film suffers a bit from lax pacing. In Lady Vengeance, Park took time out to tell various stories about the female prisoners. That worked because we knew who our central character was and what she wanted. Here, the central character is less active, so the various digressions to explore other random characters wind up fracturing the narrative. If you cut out 15 minutes of that stuff, you’d have a really tight, emotional story focused on Il-Sun and Young-Goon. That’s the story I wanted, but for a good chunk of the film, it’s lost amidst the messy subplots that ultimately don’t go anywhere. Park seems to love telling these short stories, but with the exception of the woman with mythomania, they’re empty quirk without the emotional resonance of the main story.

The other major issue for me was the ending sequence. The rice-megatron’s success was the perfect emotional moment to go out on. The subsequent lightning rod scene had its moments, but the movie sort of ended without any real closure for the characters. There’s no reason for that to happen, in light of the fact that we already had the perfect closure. So, that scene winds up just feeling superfluous.

Strangely enough, the guiding narrative drive behind this film is also a drive for vengeance. However, it’s treated almost as a parody. Here, the need to get revenge on the white ‘uns turns Young-Goon into a cyborg. The conclusion of Lady Vengenace indicated that the search for vengeance strips people of their humanity. That’s reinforced here, Young-Goon is at her most cyborg when she reveals her finger guns and shoots the hospital staff. But, the film’s whimsical tone means it never reaches the deep emotion that Oldboy and Lady Vengeance did. The final moments of Lady Vengeance are devastating, when she plunges her face into the cake in a gracefully falling snow. Nothing here reaches that power.

But, even Park slightly off his game is still better than almost everyone else out there. The film is consistently visually inventive and really fun to watch. Everyone has some lesser projects in their catalogue, and I think it was necessary to lighten up a bit after the vengeance trilogy. So, the film is a success, but not a masterpiece.

The Forever People #4

I got the second Fourth World Omnibus a few days ago, and after reading one issue, I’m once again in awe of what Jack Kirby’s doing here. Forever People #4 continues the exploration of fascism and societal complacency that began in the previous issue’s story about Glorious Godfrey. It’s a startingly effective critique of society, illustrating how people can be so easily distracted from the awful things going on in the world.

The issue’s conceit is that the Forever People are trapped in an amusement park that’s actually designed by DeSaad to torture people. This sort of concept has produced a myriad of awful stories, like say, every single story involving Marvel villain Arcade. There, the amusement park was just an excuse for goofy visuals and inane death traps. Here, the major reveal of HappyLand is decidedly more sinister. The caption asks “Who among us would rush to aid the victms of this cruelty—when the sights we see and the sounds we hear are bright and joyous? For are we not in Happyland?”

When you look at an issue like this in light of what Kirby experienced in World War II, it becomes almost oppressively sinister. The people are so easily distracted by the attractions here, they don’t notice the screams of their fellow citizens. He uses a sci-fi device, the “master scrambler” as an allegorical representation of the way that we let empty pleasures obscure the darkness around us. Look at America today, no one wants to look at the real horrors of Iraq or Guantanimo Bay, it’s easier to live in Happyland.

The issue is notable for the fact that it spends more time with Darkseid than it does with the Forever People. We’re made to understand his view of things, most notably in the amazing scene where Darkseid walks among the people, at home in the crazy world of the amusement park. The adults have been hardened to sublimate their fears, and just accept his presence without mention. Only a child, who has not yet been numbed by societal coping mechanisms, recognizes the real evil in him. Darkseid understands the way adults have consigned evil to children’s stories, accepting only the surface of what they see.

The rest of the issue focuses on the various tortures of the Forever People, in each case, the fun that the park visitors are having is converted in pain and fear for our heroes. The implicit message is that the distractions we indulge in to avoid the pain out in the world is letting dark leaders pursue their own agendas. One need not stretch things far to connect this story to today’s political situation, and a war that exists in the shadows, deaths happening far away while we’re all in Happyland, giddily unaffected.

It’s interesting to see Kirby’s radical belief in the power of freedom. People today generally write off that generation as conservative believers in a set social order. But, Kirby clearly believes in freedom and change and progress. This issue, and the previous one, are deeply affecting critiques of fascism and the way that leaders can make people oblivious to the awful things going on around them. I used to wonder how people could go along with the slaughter of an entire religious group during the Holocaust, but looking at America today, it’s not that the people went along with it, it’s that a few leaders were deeply committed, and everyone else just didn’t care enough to stop them.

While these issues have some goofiness, I don’t think that should obscure the very real, important points they have to make. This is a perfect example of using genre conceits as a way to illustrate very real world points that would come off as preachy if they were presented in a real world context.

And, amid the darkness, we still have hope, in the form of Mother Box. If the anti-life equation is total control and the loss of individuality, Mother Box is the human spirit, it cannot be destroyed by Darkseid, it will escape and live on, and eventually lead to freedom. That is the direction humanity is moving in, and it is only through our fight against the darkness that we can become strong enough to accept a better destiny.

52: Volume 3

After thoroughly enjoying 52: Volume 1, I had a few issues with the direction of the series in Volume II. The tightly focused character threads started to slip, and more and more obscure DC characters were layered on. However, this Volume, which moves the story into its final act, is a lot tighter and more emotional, taking the characters through a variety of really wrenching moments and providing some moments of crazy Morrisonian genius. The series still has its issues, but it’s so entertaining and addictive, they don’t really bother me. There’s a whole bunch of plot strands running through these issues, let me tackle them one at a time.

The stuff with the mad scientist island didn’t grab me for the first couple of issues. The concept was good, but the execution was a bit off. However, over the course of these issues we get more development and an increasing level of insanity. The craziest thing here is Egg Fu. The very concept of this character, a giant evil egg, is so ridiculous, and here he’s turned into a legitimately menacing villain. The highlight is the Thanksgiving dinner issue, but pretty much any moment with Egg Fu was gold.

Along with this, we get some great stuff with Will Magnus and Veronica Cale, journeying on opposite trajectories. Will starts out as the only one on the island with a conscience, but is forced off his meds, off towards insanity. This is a classic conundrum, the character whose medicine strips him of his genius. The insanity and the genius are wrapped up in each other. Veronica Cale is more interesting, at first a gloriously immoral femme fatale, she is humbled by an encounter with the gods they summon. In the moment she summons them, you can see her enthusiasm turn to fear, recognizing the reality of what she’s done. I’m guessing things won’t go well for her in the next volume, as her creation gets out of her control.

Arguably the major plot thread of these issues was Charlie’s gradual journey to death. This was really well executed, making good use of the real time format. We could witness him succumbing to the illness, the cold reality of cancer intruding on the fantasy world of these characters. This was some sad stuff, full of really nice moments between Renee and Charlie. I like the way they brought Kate Kane in, and the closing journey to Nanda Parbat was suitably epic.

As Renee trudged through the snow, the story moved beyond traditional narrative and became an allegorical representation of her state of mind at the time. She’s pressing on through this endless white expanse, getting help from no one, unwilling to admit that Charlie is going to die, there’s nothing she can do about it. In the end, she collapses and gives up, he passes on, and she accepts it. The journey doesn’t make that much sense from a reality based point of view, but as a metaphor for her mental state, it’s perfect.

I also loved the intercutting of the New Year’s Eve countdown in the hospital room with Luthor cutting the powers on the Everymen. While the Everymen storyline, particularly the Steel and Nat stuff, was by far the weakest storyline, that was a really powerful moment. They broke out of the grids used throughout the series for a wide expansive intercut double page spread, gradually pressing towards the tragedy of all these superpeople falling to Earth. It was great to have Phil Jiminez cameo for the aftermath, a tragic descent for these would be heroes.

Thematically, the Everyman Project is tough to fit in with Grant’s recent work. In his last JLA storyline, World War III, he empowered every citizen and they all flew up to fight with the heroes. It was a wonderful moment, illustrating humanity’s potential. In Seven Soldiers, we witness a lot of ordinary people struggling to be extraordinary, to be heroes. There, a group of wannabes gets murdered by the Sheeda in the first issue. Those characters were more obsessed with the idea of being superheroes then with doing the work that goes into actually being a superhero.

For Morrison, and the genre in general, the goal is to maximize your potential. Batman is doing as much as any human can, training his body and mind, and using technology to be the ultimate crime fighter. In All Star, Superman does more, he is beyond simple interpersonal conflict and seeks to move the world forward. In Seven Soldiers, the characters all struggle through a series of obstacles that forces them to grow and in the end, their unique talents help them to defeat the Sheeda. The characters in #0 all rush into battle without training, their goal is to be a superhero first, to do good second. In Morrison’s worldview, heroism is all about responsibility. It can be fun, but it’s also a burden to carry. The real heroes are the ones who can carry that burden, and risk their lives for others. It is not about doing violence, frequently peace is the better route.

Considering his focus on evolution, you’d think Grant would embrace Luthor’s Everyman Program as an easy way to move humanity forward. But, in the end, the Everyman Program is proven false. I’m not sure how much input Grant had on this decision, and there’s also the fact that the DCU can’t just have anyone who wants to being a superhero, however, I do think what happens here fits in with the portrait of heroism Morrison’s been creating. Like Gimmix or Sally Sonic, these characters just want power and fame, they’re not committed to living with the responsibility of their powers. That’s what we see in the dichotomy between Nat and the other members of Infinity Inc.

Did the story have to go this way? I do think it would have been cool to explore more of the way that ordinary people reacted to the program. However, it does fit. There was an inevitability to the end of Everyman, and at least this conclusion fits it within GM’s worldview. There is danger in accepting power from an unreliable source, the greatest strength comes from within. That’s not to say people couldn’t have done great things with these powers, as Bulleteer did after having power forced on her, but in this case, they made a deal with the devil, and the devil doesn’t play fair.

It’s interesting looking at this Lex Luthor in light of the Luthor from All Star Superman. Both are obsessed with Superman, desperate to compete with this ideal even though they never can. One of the best scenes here is the moment where Lex has Clark completely at his mercy, but asks only about Supernova, mixing the chance to bust Clark once and for all. He is motivated by jealousy and lust for power, not the need to do good. That seems to be the problem with all the Everyman heroes, they’re doing it for selfish reasons.

Elsewhere, we get major development for the space heroes. Lady Styx didn’t work that well for me, partially because we get the random cosmic civilization that doesn’t really mean anything to me. Much like the Shiar in X-Men, there’s just a whole bunch of people with no definition or grounding. The bigger problem is that Lady Styx feels like a retread of Gloriana from Seven Soldiers, she’s got the same color palette and world conquering tendencies. Her death is a bit quick, I’d rather have seen her stick around to menace the DCU, or perhaps build her up as more of a threat so the payoff when she’s defeated is better.

While I have issues with the handling of some of that stuff, I did really like the fight against her. Lobo gets provoked and finally snaps out of his pacifism in a fun, over the top scene. What really makes it work is the connection between Kori, Adam Strange and Buddy. I like the way that Kori wears his Animal Man outfit, and the moment where Buddy yells out that he believes in his family moments before Adam flies in shooting is one of those perfect blends of action and emotion that Morrison does so well. These three are a great team, and it’s sad that they’re separated when Animal Man dies.

I hadn’t heard about Animal Man dying in the series, so I was figuring this wasn’t going to stick. It bothered me to do another resurrection, so soon after bringing back Booster as Supernova, particularly after the great emotional stuff involving his wife’s sadness and Kori’s tears. However, that trepidation was all wiped away with the return of the yellow aliens from Morrison’s Animal Man run. They were like the Seven Unknown Men of that series, agents of the authorial hand in the DC Universe. I’m curious to see where Buddy goes from here, is it another metatextual journey? Side note, I really have to reread Morrison’s Animal Man.

The other big storyline focused on the Black Marvel family, and their struggle to be accepted by the mainstream superhero community. This storyline is primarily interesting for the way it illustrates the impact that point of view makes on audience response to a story. The Black Marvel family is almost saintly in what they’re doing, and I’m totally behind them, but the world just won’t listen. They can’t accept the idea that Black Adam has reformed, and consequently, set out to sabotage them. The ambush sequence is really effective, building a lot of momentum to the moment where Osiris flies right through one of the assassins. This is what would happen if people with unlimited power, but little training or discipline were let out into the world. The whole storyline brings back memories of Miracleman, and I’m guessing we’re heading into the dark stages soon. They are exiled from the world, and Black Adam can only stay saintly for so long. It’s hard to watch the cruel march of impending tragedy.

Perhaps the most Morrison of all the issues was Ralph Dibny’s trip to Nanda Parbat. Ralph’s been through a lot, and his stuff is generally entertaining, though rarely a highlight of the series. However, under the guidance of the perfectly named Accomplished Perfect Physician, Ralph goes through the same kind of transformative experience that Barbelith offers. It is revealed to Ralph that “There is no death. Death is an illusion of being in time.” Rama Kushna goes on to say that “No Love is wasted. No love is lost in time.” This all ties in with the Invisibles idea that all time exists simultaneously, so even if someone is dead, the moments they lived still exist. So, even though Sue is dead, the love they shared still exists and can never be destroyed. It’s nice to see this sort of conceptual stuff appear in a series that’s mainly concerned with exploring variations on the superhero narrative. My guess is, Ralph will be taken outside of time and get a chance to relive some moments with Sue, and come to terms with her death through that experience. We also get some meta discussion of writers and an end being written. Will this tie in with Buddy’s storyline? We shall see.

Finally, a brief discussion of the Batman issue. Personality as something we can put on and take off is key to Morrison’s work. Bruce Wayne has been wearing the Batman fiction suit so long it has become him, but the suit has been corrupted. In this issue, he kills that Batman and plans to rediscover the core of what was underneath. It’s a cool concept, and it’s nice to see Bruce getting a moment in the series.

That said, it’s a joy to read a DC book without the big three, or most of the really powerful heroes in general. Much like Seven Soldiers, this book digs into less prominent corners of the DCU and creates real characters out of minor figures in other books. There’s some really interesting people and concepts here, and I like how the ensemble structure takes us between them. I could see how it would get frustrating waiting weeks for a plot you like to return, but read in trade, I’ve got no real complaints about the way things are progressing. While I would have loved the weekly reading experience, there’s definitely advantages to the trade. I’d love to see “the band” come back for another weekly series like this, but it sounds like Morrison wouldn’t be up for that. Still, this is a wonderfully fun book full of crazy concepts and exciting characters, everything that a superhero book should be. I can’t wait for the fourth and final volume.

Dissent is The Essence of American

The US has been through a lot of awful stuff over the past few years, but this week brought what I’d consider the most ridiculous government legislation so far, the condemnation of a MoveOn.org ad which criticized General Petraeus. There’s a number of reasons this really bothers me, more than all the other shit that’s been foisted on us by Bush and his crew, and this incident as much as any other sums up why the Bush team is still so powerful, and why the Democratic party is such a pathetic bunch of cowards who won’t really change anything if they’re elected.

Back in 2006, I wrote: “The critical thing after 9/11 was the construction of the idea that to not support American aggression was to be anti-American, to oppose Bush's policies was to be a traitor. This was evident in the Dixie Chicks controversy, how could having a difference of opinion mean being anti-American? Isn't the whole point of freedom having the option of doing and saying whatever you want? But as constructed by Bush, it's an us vs. them, the "free world" vs. the axis of evil.” Since then, there’s been a massive erosion of support for Bush, the vast majority of people are incredibly dissatisfied with the way the war in Iraq is going, yet no one is standing up to combat the Bush administration.

The Democrats got elected on the promise that they would end the war, however, they’ve done absolutely nothing. Now, the president’s veto power means they can’t do whatever they want, but that’s not an excuse to do nothing. They should be passing bills cutting funding for Iraq all the time, and forcing Bush to veto them, put the responsibility for every American death firmly on Bush and whoever voted for that legislation, where it belongs. Of course, the Democrats are so incredibly pathetic, they can’t even censure Bush for his execution of the war. It’s pretty sad.

But things got sadder this week when we got this condemnation of an ad. I don’t understand how people running a nation that was founded on criticizing exiting order can legitimately be angry at a group for criticizing the handling of this war through an attack on the man handling it. It’s absolutely perplexing to me, and I’d love to hear someone try to defend it as anything other than pure politics. The Republicans are absolutely shameless to call this ad disgusting, but have no problem with the tens of thousands of people that George Bush killed with his war in Iraq.

But, the saddest thing for me is that Democrats not only voted for the condemnation, but actually tried to expand its reach and further diminish free speech. It’s unbelievable hypocrisy to criticize MoveOn for attacking Petraeus after the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry, but condemning those attacks three years after the fact isn’t going to do anything. Where the fuck was the attack on Republicans then, particularly when Bush was attacking anyone who attacked his “military service.” That’s one the greatest testaments to their patheticness, even when their candidate actually fought in the war, they lose the military cred.

Now, I think running from Kerry’s anti-war record was a huge mistake. The protest movement in Vietnam was one of the proudest moments in our nation’s history, a moment when people tried to fight back and not just accept the will of the government. Kerry was a hero for that, not for his service in Vietnam. The soldiers in Iraq and Vietnam are not heroes, they are victims. Bush does not care about the soldiers, he does not support them and he does not respect them, nor do any of the Republicans who sent them into war for no good reason.

But, that’s just my opinion. Would I condemn someone who thought otherwise? No, and that’s why anyone who voted for the condemnation will never have my support again. I can’t respect someone who says it’s wrong to criticize the military because that is not wrong, sometimes it’s the only way to create change. No institution in this country is above critique because no institution is perfect, and they never will be, we always can be better and we should strive for that.

Inherent in conservative politics by its very definition is the notion that things should remain the same. Because so many conservatives believe our nation is going downhill morally and socially, they respond to politicians who talk about the good old days and traditional values. Guess what, the good old days never existed, the moments they lionize were marred by racial prejudice and suppression of groups based on their gender and religion. We’re still far from perfect, but I’d rather see politicians who imagine a better future, and fight for that.

It’s unbelievable that some of the people in power remain in power considering the stupid things they say. I hear people say evolution doesn’t exist, that’s patently wrong, I thought we cleared the issue up in the 1920s. How could you trust someone who denies the existence of evolution to run our schools? And, evolution and God are not mutually exclusive, the way I see it, evolution is the engine designed to make us all better. Look at 2001: A Space Odyssey, evolution is moving us closer to godliness.

Beyond that, it’s hard to believe that people making hate speech against gay people can remain in office. Humanity’s destiny is towards acceptance and unity, we’ve knocked down a whole bunch of divisions, and prejudice based on sexual orientation is the next to go. The politicians who don’t support gay marriage today are the ones who would have supported slavery and the oppression of women years ago. It’s the same belief in a new guise, and soon, this barrier will fall like others in the past have. We are destined for greatness, but need to overcome these temporary obstacles.

The problem is, the Republicans still control the game. That’s why criticizing the military is analogous to treason, it’s the same as the Dixie Chicks controversy from a few years ago. They want to make dissent with the party line un-American, when in reality, dissent is the essence of America, and even the essence of the Christianity they all value so. Jesus was a revolutionary who upended social order, just because something has become an institution doesn’t mean it must lose the spark of change that ignited it. That is the core American and Christian value, not the imagined values of a time that never was the Republicans present us with now.

But, because they control the game, everyone is pushing towards the right. Democratic candidates refuse to really oppose the war, when in reality they should be fighting it hard. People hate the war, but this small group of extremists has captured our government and the idea space in America. Democrats must define themselves in relation the Republican values because they don’t really stand for anything. I’ll freely admit that, but it doesn’t mean we can’t dream of something better. Hate and fear have possessed our politics, and no one is willing to fight it with love and progress. Republicans would have you believe they are an oppressed group fighting for mainstream values against a small bunch of extremists who control the media and cultural dialogue. That would be hilarious if it wasn’t actually being said, Bush and his crew are the extremists, completely out of touch with the mainstream.

Sadly, most Democrats don’t really do anything. They are cowered by the brilliant attacks Republicans threw at previous candidates. Bush ran in 2000 on responsible fiscal management and a refusal to go on nation building military expeditions, but it’s Kerry who was tagged as a flip flopper. Once that tag was on, there was nothing he could do to combat it because everyone has slight variations in belief over time, that’s evolution. But, that adaptation was characterized as weakness.

This inaction is enforced by the fact that it feels like average people can’t do anything to enact change. No march or petition is going to stop the war in Iraq, and I get the distinct sense people can’t do anything but laugh at the situation, hence the popularity of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. But, laughing at it isn’t going to make it go away, and until a really dynamic, exciting leader comes along, we’ll have to just wait for time to change the game and push the Bush agenda away. But, with ridiculousness like Rudy Giuliani’s sudden belief in guns for everyone and the constant use of 9/11 as justification for everything, that could be a long time.