The End of Evangelion: In Depth

I just finished my second viewing of The End of Evangelion this week. While rewatching the series, I was most looking forward to seeing End of Eva again, and trying to piece together exactly what it was saying. My first viewing of the film left me pretty baffled. I loved what I had seen, but I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on at times. The emotional core stuck, but the narrative side of things was a bit hazy.

Watching the film again, I saw a work that does pretty much everything I want a film to do. It’s astounding in its simultaneous global scope and individual focus. The film makes it clear that in the grand scheme of things, our individual struggles are just as important as global wars and conflicts, that perhaps they’re actually the same thing. Shinji’s personal trauma makes him a standin for all of humanity, when he’s forced to choose whether to continue instrumentality or return to the way things are.

Watching it a second time, I felt like the film and the series’ ending were diametrically opposed. But, much of that is the tone. The literal breakthrough, followed by applause and a smile to end the series leaves you with this feeling of such happiness. Shinji is aware of the love the others have for him, and is, for once, at peace. The film ends in a radically different way, Shinji crying over Asuka in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But, the brutality of that scene obscures the fact that both endings reach the same basic conclusion. In each case, Shinji actualizes himself, gains agency and is no longer bound by the rules of those above him. Throughout the series, we’ve seen him serve others, pilot the EVA to make them happy, so he won’t be abandoned again. He’s constantly wanted to run away, but when he’s given the opportunity for the ultimate run, the ultimate easy happiness, he passes and embraces the world in all its painful and beautiful reality.

But, let me track back a bit and discuss the film all the way through. One thing that really struck me on both viewings is just how fast the film goes by. Because the series took care of all the exposition, this movie is essentially a 90 minute climax, and as such, it just flies by. I was shocked to see that we were already halfway through the movie when Shinji got into Unit 01, it felt like 25 minutes at most, not 45. And, the backhalf of the film flows incredibly well. It just zips by, this may be the quickest 90 minute film to watch even.

The first half of the film has a few particularly notable elements. In my first review of the film, I discussed the boldness of the opening scene. Watching it again, it still makes me think. The goal of the first half is to reduce Shinji to his absolute lowest point. He has feelings for Asuka, but no way to express them, and winds up doing one of the sleaziest things possible. She is lying there helpless, utterly broken, and he sees her only as a sex object. It adds to the feeling of guilt he’s got for the rest of the film, and is one of the touchstones for trying to understand the oh so ambiguous final scene.

One thing that this viewing of the series and film clarified for me was the Ritsuko/Gendo Ikari relationship. The first time through, I got the impression that Ritsuko was supposed to have feelings for Misato, which is supported by a loose reading of the narrative, but knowing that she was meant to be in love with Gendo, everything makes more sense. So much of the series is about cycles, children unwittingly becoming their parents, and the relationship makes sense in that context. It felt like an out of left field development the first time I saw the show, but it’s clear that Ritsuko is trying to match up to her mother. She’s chosen the same job, and the same man. Much like Misato, she has followed her parent’s path, despite hating her mother on some level.

The turning point for Ritsuko is when Gendo chooses to send her before SEELE instead of Rei. It’s an echo of Gendo choosing Yui, and the cloned Rei, over Naoko. When that happens, Ritsuko realizes how much she’s messed things up with her life, and decies to turn on Gendo. However, in the end she’s betrayed by the ‘woman’ part of her mother, Casper in the Magi, at which point Gendo shoots her. It’s a pretty horrible series of events that happen to her over the course of the series. She poured her whole life into this project, and winds up betrayed by the person she loved most.

Why would she commence this relationship with Gendo? At least Naoko had the excuse that he was a different person before Yui died. The obvious, and most notable, reason is her attempt to emulate her mother, as well as a general self loathing. Perhaps she sought love from Gendo to replace the parental love she didn’t get from her mother. It seems that she was always a loner, Misato was her only real friend, and she oft lost Misato to Kaji. Perhaps Gendo initiated things, she does make reference to wanting him to take her like an animal in Episode 24. He uses her when he likes, and she doesn’t mind, because her self esteem is just that low. She masks it with sarcasm, but she doubts whether anyone could ever love her. Like all the characters on the show, she’s so alone, seeking comfort from anyone.

If I have one complaint about the film, it’s that too much time is spent with the three tech characters. They were there throughout the series, but weren’t particularly central. I think it works as a way to humanize the invasion of NERV. We get the sense that shit really is going down, people are dying and nothing can be done. It makes the impending apocalypse believable, but those scenes are less emotionally charged than the rest of the film. And, it pays off during the ‘Come, Sweet Death’ sequence later in the movie.

Misato dies relatively early in the film, but not before some strong action sequences. I love the shaky cam shot of her rushing down the hall, spraying bullets at the soldiers accosting Shinji. Her relationship with Shinji compounds a lot of the issues from the series into something a little heavier. In some ways, you could view the entire film as the process of disconnection from parents, moving beyond mother love to a larger world. In that context, it makes sense that Shinji wind up with Asuka, the only woman he interacts with in the series who isn’t either his mother or playing mother for him.

It’s a very confusing world for Shinji, and Misato doesn’t make it any easier with her mixed signals. She forms a family unit with him and Asuka, where she is placed in the role of mother. But, particularly early in the series, she is the irresponsible one. It’s Shinji who cooks and cleans up the house, she just drinks and makes a mess. Ritsuko questions Misato on this, her motives in housing Shinji. I think it’s primarily that Misato doesn’t want to be alone. This is a girl who was abandoned by her father and wouldn’t speak for two years. There’s deep, deep damage, and she tries to protect herself by not being alone again, by living with others and being outgoing and personable. In a lot of ways, it’s the opposite of Asuka. Asuka was abandoned and chose to become independent, to reject others. Misato embraces them as a way of keeping herself sane, but it’s a somewhat selfish process.

She has her own Elektra complex to deal with. She wants to get back to her father, and a large part of her attraction to Kaji is because he reminds her of her father. So, she probably just assumes that Shinji would want to blur the role of mother and lover. She doesn’t really understand parent/child relationships, not that any of these characters do, and that’s why she constantly walks the boundary between sexual object and mother. I think she really proves herself in the film, when she drags Shinji along and helps him to get back in the Eva. But, she also confuses things more with the ‘adult’ kiss.



It’s understandable that she’d try that, since nothing else is getting through to Shinji. Does it cross a boundary? Probably, for one, he is still underage. But, I think it’s also an example of her trying to give Shinji what she would have wanted at that age. She sees so much of herself in Shinji, she knows what it was like to be alone, and she thinks that it’s that kind of kiss that would get him going. It makes Shinji cry even more, but at least it gets him standing up on his own.

Speaking of bizarre mother relationships, the material with Asuka is easily the highlight of the first half. Asuka is my favorite character from the series. I find powerful female characters interesting for a number of reasons, partially because you don’t see that many. Typically the arrogance and striving of a character like Asuka would be male characteristics, while the uncertainty and timidity of Shinji would be female. But, in real life, I’ve seen more women like Asuka, who are powerful and totally committed to being the best. In romantic comedies, we often see this kind of woman cut down, told that she should really prioritize love over her career. Asuka’s arc goes in a more interesting direction, her purpose cut out when she is no longer the best.

It’s deeply tragic to watch her pushed so low by the end of the series, until she’s huddled in the Eva, bombs going off around her, totally comatose. Never before in the series has the connection between Eva and mother made clearer. She’s in the fetal position, floating in this womb like liquid, not wanting to face the world. She is scared that she’s been abandoned by her mother, that to go out in the world means going out alone and dying. This culminates in the fantastic moment where she repeats “I don’t want to die,” gradually growing from whisper to shout, and at the moment her incantation reaches its peak, she meets her mother in a hazy dreamworld.

Much like Shinji’s encounter with his mother in the series, the scene remains rather vague. The narrative explanation is that the Evas have embodied with the souls of humans, the pilots’ mothers. I don’t think that makes much sense on a narrative or logical level, but on a metaphorical emotional one, it’s brilliant. In the Eva, Asuka realizes that she is not alone, her mother has been with her, will always been with her. The knowledge that that love is there empowers to go back out and shed the umbilical cable. It empowers her to fight again. The synch ratio discussed during the series is actually the fusion of mother and child within the Eva. After the Angel attack on her mind, Asuka lost touch with her mother, her mind was clouded. Now, it’s back and she can go on a rampage.

The Asuka fight scene here is easily the best Eva fight scene of the entire series. Particularly later in the series, the fights became little more than place fillers, or excuses to engage in psychological interrogation. Only a few from the series stand out as exciting, but nothing matches this, the kineticism and raw emotional power at play. I love the way Asuka smiles as she soars through the sky, tearing the other Evas apart. It’s nicely presented as the opposite of her ‘defiling’ experience. Here, she shoots up a huge cross instead of being penetrated by a beam of light, and is united with her mother rather than divided.

And, the scene plays as a preview of what Shinji will go through at the end of the film. After her triumphant resurgence to reality, she comes down quickly. The power on the Eva runs out and the Evas brutally tear her apart. Few things are sadder than watching her pump away at the Eva controls, getting no response. She is once again abandoned, and left to die. But, the shots of her soaring through the sky, and whipping the Eva around still linger.



Then, after the movie is nearly half over, our ‘hero’ finally gets in the Eva and does something. I love that this movie was a huge release in Japan because it violates virtually ever rule of traditional film storytelling. The main character is an utter failure at almost every turn, most of the characters are dead by the halfway point, and linear narrative is totally abandoned in the second half for something much more interesting. When I make films, I frequently take a similar approach as Eva, using the trappings of genre to tell a story about a character’s psychological makeup. The combination of action and subjective psychological abstraction is very appealing for me. I’d like to see more films that got this into their characters’ heads, and stopped worrying about having everything make sense. Of course, there’s few people who can do this as well as Anno, he just makes it look easy.

The second half begins with the instigation of The Third Impact. For whatever reason, Shinji is chosen as the representative of all humanity, the one who will choose between instrumentality and the world as it was. He is given this mission because he is the pilot of Unit 01. The Evas always had a role in the instigation of Third Impact, and since Unit 01 is the only one left, it stands to reason that it would be the central figure in this drama.

Either way, everything kicks off when Rei turns on Gendo and merges with Lilith. Rei herself remains something of a mystery to me. What exactly is her motivation in the series? She wants to know who she is, she wonders what it is to feel human even as she becomes more and more emotionally connected to the world. A major turning point is her ‘death’ in Episode 23, and subsequent rebirth. She’d been in the Rei II persona for so long, she became more imprinted with humanity, more attached to Shinji. That’s why she sacrifices herself, and it’s also the reason she gives for abandoning Gendo.

Her meeting with Kaworu also plays a part in awakening her to her true destiny. She is derived from Lilith, she is the same as him, and here, she finally returns to what she was and awakens her true destiny. She is a fusion of Yui and Lilith, and in the end, she chooses her son over her husband. That’s an interpretation that fits with what we see, but her arc at this point transcends simple narrative logic. It works on visual and emotional logic, was Rei always designed to merge with Lilith? Perhaps, it doesn’t really follow up on what we saw from her earlier in the series. It may simply be that, as a cloned being, she’s the first and easiest to merge with the oneness of all things. She serves as a face for Lilith, the angel of death who appears to everyone as they pass into instrumentality.

I think the whole Giant Rei thing was motivated more by a visual intuition than a specific narrative reason. It works wonderfully as a way to visually represent the process of instrumentality. I liked the abstract psychology of the TV ending, but it can’t match the visual spectacle of the Evas forming the Tree of Life and Shinji confronting the giant Rei.

The structure of the second half is genius for me because it’s basically everything I like smashed up against each other. The arrival of Third Impact and Instrumentality is essentially a filmic depiction of humanity’s passage into the supercontext as described in The Invisibles. It’s a piece of cosmic experience, with visuals rendered wonderfully by Anno’s team. This is mashed up against intense character development, some of the finest work by Anno in the entire series. It’s pop avant garde. I want to make a movie this good one day.

There’s a series of confounding scenes with Shinji over the course of the second half. The sandbox scene that opens Instrumentality has a lot of notable elements. Again, we see a mother just out of reach, leaving young Shinji to prove himself by erecting the NERV pyramid in sand. The surrealism of the scene is enhanced by the pendulum like swing and the presence of film lights just outside of frame.



This bleeds into one of my favorite scenes in the entire film, the confrontation between Asuka and Shinji in Misato’s apartment. It’s a mashup of two previous scenes, the Shinji/Asuka kiss in Episode 15 and the scene where Shinji tells Asuka that Kaji has died in Episode 24. The kiss scene, along with the “Mama” sleep scene earlier is where we first start to really understand Asuka. She likes Shinji, but isn’t sure how to express it. What was subtextual there is made explicit here, as they argue about how cruel she was to him, and how unsupportive he was for her. Much of the psychological sequences in the film are about making what is typically kept inside and making it external. This is what Shinji could never tell the real Asuka, and it’s also the Asuka in his head preying on his worst fears.

A particularly notable line is when Asuka says that he’s asking her for help because he’s scared of Misato and the First Child. On one level, this is true, but they’re also each mother figures. Asuka is the only character who’s not a mother to him, and it represents growth that he’d seek help from her rather than retreat into the arms of someone who will always accept him.

I’ve often wondered about the true nature of Shinji and Asuka’s relationship. Does he really love her, does she love him? This scene, and the ending would lead us to believe that they do love each other, and are ‘meant for each other.’ But, both of them have so much internal damage, it’s virtually impossible to connect with each other. I love the intercutting of Asuka approaching for the kiss with their argument, a mishmash of memories and subconscious hallucinations all colliding against each other.

The scene builds to Shinji lashing out at her and himself in a display of rage unlike anything else we’ve seen from him. And then, in a shocking moment, he grabs her by the neck and chokes her. What follows is one of the most audacious music cues of all time, as the camera spirals around him crushing the life out of her, a soft rock piano starts up and we segue into one of the greatest cinematic sequences of all time. It might be hyperbole, still holding the high of experiencing the film, but right now I could make a strong argument that the “Come Sweet Death” sequence of this film is the single greatest sequence in any film of all time. The fusion of music, visual, emotion, character, everything is going at full blast, the world collapsing into Instrumentality.



The sequence begins by breaking down the image itself, much as the TV ending did. There’s children’s drawings, which segue for some reason into a quick flash of all the TV episode title screens. Notably, you can see the titles for TV Episodes 25 and 26, implying that they can co-exist with this film. It’s all part of the same story.

This leads into various characters’ experience of the passage into instrumentality. This stuff hits me on a subconscious level, it’s exactly the kind of thing I want to see in film. There’s something so beautiful about the Reis floating in and giving everyone exactly what they want to see before leaving this world, in a sudden bursting head explosion. It’s so sudden, the death, but it feels right. I love Yui floating in to Fuyutski, and Ritsuko appearing to Maya.

But, the best scene here is undoubtedly the Gendo Ikari confession. After all this awful, awful shit he’s put Shinji through, he reflects on the fact that he felt it was better to stay out of his life, that he’d only hurt Shinji if he was with him. As Asuka would say, “Are you stupid?!” Ikari thought he was doing what was best for Shinji by keeping him at a distance, but in reality, that’s where all his problems came from. If Ikari had been a more attentive father, and actually shown Shinji some affection, perhaps Shinji wouldn’t have been so messed up. And, perhaps Gendo would not have spent his whole life on a quest to be reunited with his dead wife. Maybe he’d realize that there was something to appreciate in the world that we live in now. I love the scene so much because it puts everything in perspective. We’ve seen Gendo as this unassailable villain for the whole series, but he thought he was doing what was best for Shinji.

Things continue with the various Evas impaling themselves with lances, in a way that turns the whole thing into something like a Busby Berkley musical. Concurrently, Rei is instigating the spread of instrumentality across the world, in a beautiful rise of green crosses.

The combination of these images and the music is sublime. The song starts off as a Carpenters like soft rock song, then segues into something that reminded me of ‘Hey Jude.’ Particularly with the review of episode titles, the sequence has the feeling of summation, of everything wrapping up and looking back with nostalgia on what’s come before. It’s ironic that this should immediately follow perhaps the cruelest act in the series, but it just works. At this point, the film is running on pure subconscious energy, and you’ve just got to roll with it. The song ends over a succession of increasingly frantic cuts, compounding moments of the series on top of each other. It’s hard to describe, but the whole thing is astonishing. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever seen.



From there, we continue the journey into abstraction, via the cryptic live action sequence. It was made a bit less cryptic when I found the original, deleted sequence online. On first impression, it’s just a bunch of random images of reality cobbled together, juxtaposed with a voiceover from Shinji interrogating the nature of dreams and reality. To be honest, even after seeing the film three times, I find it hard to concentrate and really investigate the meaning of the dialogue that runs over the end of the film. I get the essence of it, but it works more as just another layer, like music, than anything that has essential meaning for the series as a whole.

My takeaway on the live action sequence is that it’s meant to parallel the sequence in the last episode of the TV series, where Shinji imagines an alternate world where he’s not an Eva pilot, where he’s actually just a regular kid and everyone from the series is in his dream. As they say there, there are many worlds, many possibilities. He may be an Eva pilot in this world, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There can be a world where he doesn’t even exist.

Watching the deleted scene, the substance of this becomes clearer. In the live action world, all the characters are still there, but they play different roles. Asuka and Misato are neighbors, somewhat antagonistic. Asuka’s relationship with Toji prompts Misato to speak with Ritsuko about the trouble of forming connections between men and women. Like in Episode 26, pieces of the characters survive in the alternate world, but they are also radically different. Here, Misato is jealous of Asuka’s love, so she knocks it, saying it’s fleeting physical pleasure, nothing really meaningful. As in the series, she and Ritsuko are both lonely, and cynical as a result.

Much of their discussion centers on the way that what men really want is a mother they can have sex with, and women are happy to be this role because it gives them security. It’s a cynical, Freudian interpretation of things, and somewhat ironic coming from two women who sleep with the closest thing they can find to a father figure in the series. But, it definitely ties into the themes we see at the end of the film, when Shinji finally leaves his mother behind and embraces the harsh new world of adulthood.

I think the deleted live action sequence is interesting, and I think with some trimming, it could have worked well as a supplement to what’s already in the film. The wonderful use of classical music in both cases would have worked nicely to bridge the gap between the abstract shots and the more character based stuff.

As is, the live action sequence is notable primarily for adding another layer of trippy craziness on top of what’s come before. What could top the visual splendor of Giant Rei remaking the world, well how about going from animation to live action? The ‘real’ world feels so alien seen from the characters’ perspective. I’d have to watch it again and pay closer attention to what’s said, but there’s a lot of discussion about the interplay of dream and reality. Our world seems to represent a colder, harsher reality than the more malleable world than Shinji lives in. There’s a meta comment inherent, Shinji exists as an idea in our world, he is not real, he is closer to a dream. Dreams live in reality, where does reality exist? That’s asked at one point in the film, and the best answer is it exists all around us. Dreams exist all around us, this is just one of many possible worlds.

This leads us back to animation, and the question of instrumentality. Shinji has fused wth Rei, quite literally, and now has to choose whether humanity should remain in instrumentality or whether things should return to how they were. In the context of the series, the AT Fields have been broken down, Shinji has to design whether he wants to rebuild them. The AT Field is a beautiful metaphor because it taps into something very real. We all put up walls around our emotions, it’s the only way to guard yourself from the hurt out there in the world. You have to steel yourself to survive in a world where people aren’t always nice, and don’t always care what you feel.

When you’re put in an emotionally raw situation, the AT Field is worn down, and seems to break. Think of Asuka in the Eva, being defiled by the light beam. There, her AT Field is penetrated and she can no longer look away the bad things all around her. The AT Field is what lets us go about, but it’s also what locks us away emotionally from others. It’s the Hedgehog’s Dilemma, discussed earlier in the series. The more you let down your AT Field, the more you can get hurt, but the more others can get in. The characters in this series generally err on the side of keeping their AT Fields up, and being lonely as a result.

So, you’d think instrumentality would be what they all want. But, in the film, it’s equated with the running away dilemma Shinji’s been dealing with for the whole run. Twice, we saw him walk away from his responsibilities with the Eva and choose to go out on his own. He abandoned his responsibility, and people were hurt as a result. What he’s realized is that his burdens exist for a reason, he sometimes has to suffer himself so that others can be helped. To embrace instrumentality would be an easy way out, but it would also be running away. To exist in a world blissfully free of problems means never being able to grow or change, it means never getting better. It’s a static existence.

My initial interpretation was heavily colored by The Invisibles and John From Cincinnati. Both of those series viewed the fusion of all humanity into a single organism as the ultimate evolutionary goal, the endgame of the species. The end of the series offered that as a possible interpretation, and I jumped on it. Part of what frustrated me about the film was that it rejected that option and instead condemned Shinji to a world outside of the singular existence, it put everybody in the supercontext, then tore them out again.

But, in the context of the film, it seems that instrumentality is not necessarily a good thing. It was engineered by SEELE and Gendo to accelerate human evolution, but it was an artificial acceleration, perhaps not what should have been done. The film implies that to escape all your problems in this reality is just another fantasy, it’s running away. So much of the series is about Shinji struggling with whether he wants to be alone, struggling to deal with others, so in a lot of ways, it’s an incredibly optimistic ending when he says, yes, I want to feel the pain, I want to live in the world and be with others, no matter the cost. That’s what he reaffirms to Kaworu, a massive shift in perspective from the way he was feeling earlier in the film, being dragged along by Misato, unable to move.

It’s notable that his experience of instrumentality is quite literally being inside his mother. Rei has the body of Yui, and in instrumentality, we see him fused with her, having sex with her. So much of his experience in the series is about trying to get to his mother, to rediscover her. In the Eva, he feels at home because it is her womb, he spends 30 days in there at one point, not wanting to face the world outside. It’s easier to escape back into the womb and shut everyone else out, to float in this endless sea of connection. In the womb, you’re never alone, your mother is always there and you’re safe. The instrumentality that Shinji finds himself in resembles that, the red liquid all around, it is an in uterine state.

Shinji’s decision at the end isn’t so much about leaving instrumentality, it’s about leaving his mother behind and being born into the world again. This is made clear when Shinji literally says “Goodbye mother” at one point near the end of the film. This all instigates another spectacular visual sequence, as an orchestral score swells, Unit 01 crawls out of Rei’s vaginal looking eye, and she starts to fall apart.

This leads to a flashback to Yui and Fuyutski talking about how the Eva will live on forever in space. That speech raised some questions for me, how does Shinji get from Unit 01 back to Earth, etc. But, that doesn’t really matter. Shinji has left his mother, and his role as savior of the Earth, behind. His work there is done, and now he can be born again.

Episode 26 proper ends on a pretty up note. There’s not that much of a difference between this sequence and the TV series ending. My initial impression of the TV was that Shinji had chosen to become part of instrumentality and merge with everyone, but you could just as easily read it as Shinji breaking through his self hatred and embracing the world around him. He moves out of the psychological world of the stage and into the larger world, where everyone around congratulates him. This conflicts with the titles, which claim that the episode chronicles one person’s experience of instrumentality, but perhaps the experience humanity has of instrumentality is to reject it. Of course, the notion of Shinji’s story as just one story among many conflicts with what we see in the film, where Shinji is making the choice about whether to proceed with instrumentality or not for the whole of humanity.

How can one reconcicle these conflicts? I think it’s hard to do so on a narrative level without a lot of fan wank. But, on an emotional level. Shinji’s climb out of Rei’s eye could be equated with the shattering of the stage and his emergence onto the globe. In the episode, Ritsuko says that “Pleasant things happen on rainy days,” the kind of logic that would be playing in his mind when he decides that the bad stuff is worth it. After all, in an instrumental world, there would be no rainy days, so why would Shinji have to worry about them at all. The way I see it right now, both the TV series and the film ending chronicle not Shinji’s embrace of instrumentality, rather they show his embrace of the world he lives in, flaws and all. He will not run from problems and pain, he will accept them as part of the human condition.

This is a beautiful moment, and it’s echoed in a beautiful narration about the Eva staying in space as a record of human achievement look after the sun, moon and stars have burned up. Everyone’s happy, the world is good, humanity will return and anything’s possible. But wait, there’s one more thing, and that’s where a lot of my difficulty interpreting the finale comes in. The film does a lot of juxtaposing of joy and pain, be it in the dour lyrics and happy music of ‘Come Sweet Death,’ or most notably in the emotion of the Episode 26 ending and the pervading mood of ‘One More Final,’ a closing scene that rivals Tony Soprano’s onion ring dinner for endless debatability.

Here’s one reading, what I’m feeling now. Shinji emerges from his rebirth experience in a lake of red water. Next, we see him on the postapocalyptic beach, lying next to a seemingly comatose Asuka. He’s made a monument for Misato, Rei’s giant head lies in the distance. The implication is that everything we saw in the film happened, things are still horribly messed up, and the people who died are, for all we know, still dead. So, why is Asuka back? It may tie into the fact that she experienced a similar enlightenment as Shinji earlier in the film. She met her mother, like Shinji did, and was subsequently empowered to go out and attack the Eva series. She does not need instrumentality because she knows that her mother was there all along.

So, maybe the end of the show was right, everyone did have their own instrumentality experience, they all were faced with the question of merging with the singular being or returning to the world. They say that Shinji is the only one who can make the choice, but if everyone else is inside Rei, perhaps they all have their own psychological trials, like we see in the series. Having piloted Eva, Shinji and Asuka are used to living an instrumental style existence, and are also aware of the false security and purpose it provides. They each want to get out of the ‘womb’ they existed in and return to the world as a whole.

But, why would Asuka want to do this? She’s been through so much awful stuff in the series, what is her motivation for returning to reality? Perhaps it’s simply the fire that’s driven her before. She doesn’t want to give up, she wouldn’t want Shinji to return to reality and show her up. So, she chooses to return to the beach, she knows that her mother’s spirit is out there, but she has broken the umbilical cord and doesn’t need to return.

This leaves me with a couple of major questions. One is why does Asuka have those bandages? Why are they like the ones that Rei wore during her first appearance on the series? One reading could be that this Asuka is a ‘clone’ in the same way that the new Reis were, that the original Asuka died, but a new body emerged, from the Lilith matter. You could also read it as Shinji bandaged her up when he found her, and he’s been sitting there waiting a long time for her to come back to life. He had time to make that monument to Misato and has been sitting in the world alone.

That interpretation would also make it a bit clearer why he chokes her. Their relationship has always been based on violence. It was usually Asuka’s verbal assaults on him, but as we saw in his mind, he fantasized about choking her, about really asserting his masculinity and showing her that he wasn’t the stupid coward she ridiculed him as. And, in the world he’s chosen, violence as dialogue remains a sad necessity. He can’t cut through the AT Field, he’s got to deal with it.

And, because they’ve probably been there a while, he’s finally worked up the courage to do what he fantasized about doing for a while. Perhaps he still feels guilty about masturbating over her earlier. In choking her, he’s trying to get out some of his guilt. And, maybe it’s playing into the mess of sexual fantasies in his head, the Asuka in his mind says she knows about his jerkoff fantasies and would be happy to watch him if that’s what he wants. Rather than do that, he gives into his fantasy about choking her, and showing her he’s a man through violence. Maybe that’s the only way he can get through to her.

Of course, when he does go to do this, she reaches out and caresses his face. This is the moment when he moves out of the fantasy world he’s spent most of the film in. There, he’s hard enough to choke her and she doesn’t respond. In reality, he is not that strong, not that mean. She just laughs at his attempt to be tough. This breaks Shinji, all the guilt and feeling that went away during Instrumentality comes flooding back and he’s left with the reality of the choice he’s made. He’s still the same Shinji, and she’s still the same Asuka. This is the world he’s chosen, it’s full of pain, but it’s also real. Asuka and Shinji may communicate in unconventional ways, but him crying and her saying “Disgusting” is about as close as they’ll ever get to “I love you.” In the end, this is the way things are, the world continues, and though Shinji would be the first to acknowledge how messed up he is, he’d rather be messed up in a real world, an adult world, than live forever in a regressive womb existence.

That’s what the film is ultimately about, Shinji’s choice to grow up and leave his mother behind. Things are tougher with Asuka than they are with any of the mother figures he encounters, but that’s the way it is in the world. He chokes her, she makes fun of him, that is our world, that is adult reality. Shinji has grown up, he’s not scared of his father anymore, he’s not subject to the whims of NERV. For the first time, he hasn’t just done what people told him to do, he’s made his own choice. He may be crying about it, but at least he’s crying because of what he wanted to do. The entire series is about growing up, and in the final scene, we see the conflicted feelings that come when one actually does grow up. It’s hard to reach out to people, it’s hard to live on your own, but we have to do it. It’s the cycle of life. As one world ends, another beigns.

Mad Men: 'Three Sundays' (2x04)

Yesterday’s Mad Men increased the series’ focus on domestic issues this season, a welcome development since I consider that the more interesting side of things. The ad business on this show functions like the mafia storylines on The Sopranos, it’s the hook for viewers, a way to distinguish the characters and set up the values of their world. But, it’s the personal stories where the real drama lies, and this season has been hitting wonderfully subtle, real notes with ease.

The Don/Betty tension has been brewing all season, and kind of comes to a head here. She doesn’t want to just be the mother of Don’s children, and is increasingly frustrated with Don’s inability to be the ‘man of the house.’ She says that Don is a child, but last season, he was told that Betty had the mind of a child. It’s a troubled house, as exemplified by their daughter’s turn to the bottle in this episode. Betty’s anger at Bobby is largely redirected anger at Don. She wants to punish Don for his bad behavior, but can’t outright do so, and instead emasculates him in front of his children.

Don’s attempt to be the man she seems to want backfires when his violence shocks her. Ultimately, the way to win back her affections was to play the victim, emphasize his childhood trauma, and make it so that he needed her affection, rather than the other way around. It’s a complex mess of essentially irresolvable issues. As much as the Bobby story is actually about her punishing Don, it also raises a lot of questions about what role a father should play in disciplining children, and jealousy that Don always gets to be the ‘good guy’ with the kids.

It’s a very real argument, and thankfully divorced from typical TV melodrama. The genius of the show is largely its ability to say so much subtextually. There are the surface events, and a whole surging churn of emotions underneath. In the Peggy storyline, her sister goes to confession solely to get back at Peggy, to sour her image in the eyes of the priest. It’s never stated that that’s what she’s doing, but once she starts talking in the confessional, it becomes totally clear, and I was marveling at her devious little plan.

One of the major problems I have with watching a lot of mainstream Hollywood films, or even indie movies, is that the stories are so telegraphed, and the emotions so on the nose. In real life, people very rarely confess their feelings in eloquent ways, they let them simmer under the surface, expressed only in wordless frustration or cutting passive aggressive comments. My favorite kind of film is one that can show us the inner world of a person as much as the surface. This can take the form of the psychological psychedelia of Neon Genesis Evangelion, or it can be a lingering closeup of Don Draper here, where the weight of everything he’s done compounds and presses on him.

I’ve seen some people criticizing this season, saying that nothing is happening, things like that. Much like people criticizing the late seasons of The Sopranos, that misses the point of what the show is trying to do. It’s a character piece, and there’s a ton of development happening in the relationships. There aren’t really any ‘plots’ per se to the series, things happen, but it’s the internal events that really matter. And, this episode is full of internal turmoil.

New X-Men: 'Germ Free Generation' (118-121)

‘Germ Free Generation’ is easily the low point of Morrison’s run on X-Men, a story that might have worked under Quitely, but is totally decimated by some of the worst art ever put to print by a major publisher. It’s like watching a David Chase script directed by a four year old, some of the original concept shines through, but most of the time you’re distracted by the total ineptness on display.

The arc starts off with a scene in which a comic book loving future member of the U-Men discusses the Third Species. The X-Men have been used a metaphor for a variety of things, racial minorities, gays, etc, but considering the book’s audience, isn’t it possible they’re just a metaphor for social outcasts. Much like Peter Parker or Buffy Summers, they’re the people who are rejected by normal society, but really have so much special about them. And now, “uncool is the new cool.” In a world where comic books rule the box office, where does that leave the audience? Are these things really cool, have we ‘won’?

In New X-Men, Grant creates a clear divide between the ultra-stylish and cool core X-Men, and the stumbling outcast students. He’s recognizing that it’s a bit implausible for someone as powerful and beautiful as Jean or Emma to feel like an outcast all the time, to be ‘hated and feared.’ I like the evolutionary step of giving them a certain level of social confidence, and leaving the teen angst stuff to the kids.

And, Grant makes the logical leap that people would want to be like, and be, mutants. Who wouldn’t want special powers? We’re in a world now where the goal isn’t to be the same as your neighbor, it’s to be better than your neighbor. Parents want their kids in the best schools, they push them to be the best athletes, why not give them powers that no one else would have? That’s why I love the concept of the U-Men, though I think the execution of it here is a bit muddled. Morrison does a better job of conveying society’s embrace of mutantkind later in the run when he talks about mutant fashion and music taking over society. The old guard might still hate and fear them, but the kids want to be like them. That’s frequently the way it is with minorities in the world today. In this world, mutants are taking over the world both literally, with the impending demise of humanity, and on a psychological level. As Jean says, “Is everyone talking about us?”

Jean ponders whether Emma shutting down the protestors’ minds was wrong. In a world run by mutants, there’s got to be a new standard of morality. If what she did helped the kids, was it worth violating the minds of individual people? A lot of Morrison’s run is concerned with the limits of what the X-Men can do. In the annual, Wolverine expresses surprise that “we do this kind of thing now,” that they’re taking the fight to people. But, at the same time Scott insists that they are a rescue organization, not an army. In the early 90s, it was a big deal when Cable came along and insisted that he was going to take the fight to the bad guys, not just sit around and wait to be attacked. The same thing happened earlier this year with the new X-Force book, but invariably those characters slink back to the old patterns because an aggressive force just doesn’t make for good stories. The X-Men have been dependent on being persecuted in their stories because writers weren’t ready to really change the paradigm. Here, Morrison is pondering if the paradigm can be changed, are they playing by human rules, or mutant ones?

The scenes with Angel illustrate the divide in mutant perception. The educated elite want to take on mutant characteristics, but people in more backwater areas still fear the unknown of mutants. In this world, mutant tolerance seems to be a kind of “not in my backyard” kind of thing. People are cool with mutants, as long as it’s not their son or daughter. That’s another place where the series really resonates with the minority experience today. People may be tolerant of gay people, but are they going to be cool when their son or daughter comes out? Not necessarily. Yet, at the same time, heterosexual people are actively appropriating gay styles and culture. Are the U-Men the metrosexuals of this world?

My disappointment with the U-Men storyline comes when Jon Sublime is changed from a social pioneer to a rather standard villain. His motivation is interesting, but the execution is all old school supervillain, and that’s not particularly engaging.

Plus, the second issue of the storyline introduces us to Igor Kordey’s godawful art. Before the reread, I thought, how bad could his art really have been? It probably just looked bad next to Quitely. But, that was not the case. I honestly don’t know how Marvel thought it acceptable to put out a book with art this bad. Was the monthly schedule so important? If you ever complain about delays on a book, just flip to this issue and you’ll understand why even the six month delays for Seven Soldiers #1 or Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman are worth it. Looking at those books today, I don’t remember the wait, I remember the book itself.

This is different, X-Men needs to come out every month, and we’d waited for Quitely, the run probably would still be going. As Whedon/Cassaday showed, for an X-book to make a real impact, it’s got to come out every month. The possibility of real change is an essential part of the X-Men. Eventually, Marvel conceded that Quitely couldn’t do the book on any sort of regular schedule and came up with the successful solution of splitting up the arcs by artist, but for the next two arcs, we’re in shaky territory.

The last two issues suffer a bit from the decompression popular at Marvel at the time. Particularly because I have no desire to get lost in these images, they’re quick reads. There’s some interesting groundwork laid for later in the run, with Jean’s increased power, and the omnipresent flu at the Mansion, but generally speaking it’s not too interesting. The best moment is definitely Emma’s anger when she finds out her nose has been broken. It’s not bad, but it’s just not the exciting pop epic that Morrison’s X-Men should be.

Luckily, things pick up in the next issue when Quitely returns for the ‘Nuff Said issue. ‘Nuff Said month was a pretty stupid gimmick, designed to show off the potential of the comics medium to tell visual stories. What it did in practice was create a bunch of issues that took two minutes to read and distracted from the major plots of their series. However, Morrison manages to make the gimmick work for him, thanks largely to Quitely’s unparalleled visual storytelling abilities. No one in the medium can use images like Frank can, and this is a perfect, bizarre tale for him to illustrate.

Most comics don’t really tell the story with their visuals. The big splash pages are there to draw your attention, but it’s the text that carries the bulk of the information. Typically, it’s reading the words that take more of your time than reading the visuals, but this comic feels just as dense and substantial as one filled with text. I had to take my time to really ‘read’ the images and see what was going on. And, because there are no words, you’re paying more attention to body language and facial expression to understand what the characters are thinking. Every comic should have this dimension, but only Quitely and a few others really push the medium to the max in that way.

The first astonishing layout in the issue is the trip down Charles’ mind, a circlular series of panels that seems to drain into itself. It’s dizzying to read and sets you up for the strangeness to come. I love the coloring in Xavier’s mind, the heavy greens and pinks that engulf Jean as she builds a bridge to the tower.

The issue really takes off when Jean journeys into Xavier’s past, to witness his conception. I’ve always been fascinated with womb imagery. There’s something so otherworldly about millions of little organisms swimming towards the egg, and building a person out of it. One of my favorite Quitely images, and comics images in general, of all time is the battle with the two fetuses in the womb. It’s so surreal and alien, a really disconcerting thing to see.

The issue progresses with the destruction of the tower, another dazzling visual. The substance of the issue is the revelation about Cassandra Nova, but it’s all about the execution. Quitely builds this whole world and lets the characters play around in it for a while. It’s a boldly avant garde piece of storytelling, in an X-Men book of all places. Doing work like this helped make him an even better artist, and set up the future triumph of We3.

And, story wise, it does tell us a lot about what’s up with Nova. But, more on her and her grand scheme in the next batch of reviews.

Evangelion: The Rewatch

I just finished rewatching Evangelion, the TV series. Watching those final few episodes again was, as before, a humbling experience. Nothing else I’ve seen so precisely sketches the realm of the mind, mashing up internal trauma with operatic robot action. The last six episodes of the series are arguably as strong a run as in any series ever.

But, how do the early days play knowing where it’s all going? The short answer is it all makes a lot more sense, and is generally easier to take. Watching the show the first time, I was baffled by a lot of logic questions. Why was it that they needed kids to pilot the Evas? Why did the Eva pilots go to school? Eventually, the show answered those questions, however, at the time there was no way of knowing if they ever would. So, it’s easier to skim over some of the more illogical things in the series. Even the goofy stuff that really bothered me on the first watching works fine now. It’s nice to see the characters at a time when they all haven’t been utterly torn apart.

But, there’s a clear divide between the first and second half of the series. Everything between the Rei poem is an entertaining, but fairly straightforward story. The Rei poem in ‘Weaving a Story’ is where everything changes. It’s the first of the hypnotic visual poem scenes that explore a characters’ psychological makeup, and become a signature as the show progresses.

Rather than comparing film to books, I think it’s most useful to compare it to music. Those are the only two arts where time is a dimension, where it’s up to the creator to control the pace at which the viewer experiences the art. Beyond that, I think they’re the most structurally similar. In music, I generally listen to songs with lyrics, but it’s rarely the content of the lyrics that interests me, it’s the sound of the music. As such, it’s usually the instrumental breakdown or guitar solo that’s my favorite part of a song. The lyrics exist to let us get to know the song, but it’s that moment where the music transcends the lyrics and exists on its own that’s most satisfying.

In film, it’s the same way. The narrative is the equivalent of the lyrics, if you have a film without a narrative, just like a song without lyrics, it’s hard to emotionally latch on to it. Abstract movies have merit, but it’s hard to ‘hook’ the viewer without any kind of throughline. Just like lyrics give you a quick way to remember the melody of a song, the narrative gives us the emotional inlet to characters, and a linear way to experience the various images. However, the narrative should actually exist to provide a spotlight for filmic experimentation that enhances our emotional experience. In the case of Evangelion, the narrative is frequently set aside for those improvisatory psychological subjectivity moments.

The brilliance of the series is that it’s able to use those psychological sequences, the ‘guitar solos,’ to tell us so much about the characters. Anno uses film in a way I haven’t really seen it used before, drawing on European art films, but going further. He uses the science fiction conceits of the narrative as a way to plunge us into the characters’ heads, and leave us there. Think of the amazing sequence in ‘Don’t Be,’ where Asuka is mentally assaulted by the angel. It’s a tour de force example of cutting to tell a story, but it’s the climax of her character arc.

The best moments in cinema are those where the emotional peak and the stylistic peak occur at the same time. Think of Magnolia’s “Wise Up” sequence, a directorial triumph that would be totally satisfying on its own, but also serves as the climax for the film’s second act. People often say that “style” can get in the way of the emotional content of the film, that’s the classical Hollywood aesthetic, doing everything you can to convince the audience that these events are just happening with no outside influence on their presentation.

In the case of Evangelion, the conceit of the characters’ psychological self exploration provides the opportunity for sequences that tear right through the fourth wall. Particularly in the last two episodes, you’re always aware that you’re watching something constructed, in some cases, barely even constructed, just the storyboards or unfinished drawings. But, that awareness only seems to enhance the experience of the narrative. The last episodes are about taking us on a psychological trip, and the breakdown of the diegetic reality is a major part of that.

There’s potential for a near endless intellectual analysis of those last few episodes, on a psychological level, a filmmaking level, a cultural level. I love the series for all those things, but what makes it so special for me is that it really hits me on an emotional level. I mentioned it when talking about the series earlier, but the psychological dilemmas faced by the characters remind me a lot of myself, in a way that very few film protagonists do. The reason for that is the focus on internal life as the source of problems.

The last episode is largely about the inevitable unhappiness that comes when our perceptions of our own lives bump up against the social ideal, and we find ourselves lacking. It is only when we measure our lives against what we should have that we feel bad about what we do have. All of the characters are trying to live lies, simultaneously deluding themselves to believe that they need other people to be happy, and that they are unhappy because of other people. I relate to Shinji the most, but it’s Asuka who just breaks me in the later episodes of the series. She’s so distraught after Episode 22, a single line, like her wondering why they sent out Shinji to save Rei, but not her, is devastating. Her perception of herself clashes against reality and she is destroyed.

Watching the show again, I tried to better follow the whole Angels/Adam/Seele/Lilith side of things. I was doing pretty well until ‘Rei III,’ when Ritsuko goes down into the chamber of Reis and tells Misato and Shinji what was up with her. My interpretation of things at this point is that in 2000, Misato’s father created a form of life, which produced the second impact. That creation was the crucified white creature they call Adam, who was in actuality Lilith. Was there a real Adam? I don’t know, but there is a difference between the Lilith creature and Adam.

It was from Lilith that they created the Evas, hence the human soul in the Evas. Each Eva seems to have been imbued with the soul of a woman, in the case of Unit 01, it’s Yui Ikari. So, that Eva is a fusion of Lilith and Shinji’s mother. But, so is Rei. She was built by Gendo Ikari to help bring about the fusion of human and higher level being, the transcendence of human loneliness on the road to godhood. There’s that mysterious shot where his hand has an eye growing in it. He is trying to become like Rei and Kaworu.

And yet, isn’t Kaworu different from Rei? He serves Seele, who have this master plan involving the angels. They want to use the angels to bring about the third impact. They decided it was inevitable, and fear that Ikari has his own agenda. They are loyal to the actual Adam DNA, not the human tainted substitute that is Ikari’s Lilith. In the end though, Kaworu realizes that life and death mean the same thing, and he chooses death.

Or something, I’ll perhaps have a more definitive view after watching End of Evangelion again. Either way, it doesn’t particularly matter. The whole convoluted mythology underlining everything is really just an excuse to get the characters to points of psychological crisis. The biggest takeaway from the Seele investigation of Rei’s ‘death’ isn’t any sort of mythology thing, it’s what it does to Ritsuko, the way her sacrifice echoes what Gendo Ikari did to her mother. Her pain is what’s interesting, but that betrayal converges with the narrative in the Rei clones revelation. So, the mythology and personal stories perfectly intersect, each enhancing the other. That’s the beauty of the series, and seen as a whole, it’s astonishing how perfectly all the character traits that are set up as fun quirks, or minor troubles become magnified with the passing of time and eventually become devastating tools of self destruction. More after End of Eva.

The Mythology of Obama/McCain

It bothers me when people invariably hold up so called ‘realistic’ works of art as more important and relevant than science fiction or other ‘genre’ works. For one, ‘realism’ is just as much a construction as ‘subjectivity’ or sci-fi. The Wire is only realistic because that style of writing and acting hews to today’s definition of realism in art. Yesterday’s ‘realism,’ think a 50s Brando performance, can look mannered today, in the way that I’m sure one day The Wire will feel just as mannered.

The Wire tells us a lot about the world we live in, but it’s not all in the ‘realistic’ depiction of events, it’s largely the editing and story construction, which juxtaposes various sectors of society against each other, that reveals the hidden connections and chain of events that hurt people. A work like The Corner can be emotionally devastating, but without seeing the whole picture, the work doesn’t reveal as much about the world.

All of this is a way of saying that sometimes it takes a constructed situation to reveal what’s really going on in the world. It’s hard to make movies directly commenting on the political reality of the world we live in, things change so fast, talking about specific events can seem instantly dated. I think part of that is also a lack of courage on the part of filmmakers. Every Iraq War film tries to take on this ‘objective’ point of view, to be apolitical, which I think is irresponsible. Nobody wants to watch a two hour essay on why the Iraq War is bad, but at the same time, it is bad, and I think there’s plenty of great material about the specific failures of the Iraq War.

For me, the only great war movie ever made is Apocalypse Now. It’s the only film that puts you in the subjective experience of war. Watching the film, you see how people could kill, because they’re in such a totally insane world. The entire film is subjective, a psychological journey as much as a physical one. It’s not necessarily a political film, but the folly of Vietnam is present in every frame. It captured the psychedelic insanity of that war, and I think we need a film that could do the same for Iraq, and the disastrous buildup to the war.

The only work I’ve seen that really got to the core of what Iraq is about is the New Caprica arc on Battlestar Galactica. It’s a work that isn’t explicitly about Iraq, and that lets it cast our heroes as the Iraqis, and portrays the Americans as a vast impersonal invasion force. It’s intensely relevant, but also riveting filmmaking. The whole war in Iraq story is pretty unbelievable, a war for imaginary weapons that was won five years ago but wages on with no end in sight. A war that costs billions of dollars, but no one really cares about. It’s a war that everyone wants to be over, but no one will end. It’s a war that can perhaps best be expressed in mythic terms, we’re in a world that is at the midst of a vast ideological struggle between a progressive force and a regressive, violent force. It’s a war that is eternal, and has taken many forms. It’s the war of The Invisibles, it’s the war of The Fourth World, it’s the war of Star Wars. It’s not a war at all, it’s a rescue mission.

All of this is a buildup to discussing the recent John McCain ad, in which he claims that Barack Obama is “the one.” He quite literally evokes Joseph Campbell’s Heroic mythology to position Obama as the savior come to deliver us from an age of darkness. And, watching the ad, it vexed me. Couldn’t this be an Obama ad, a beloved savior here to make the world better. It’s not until I got to the Moses section of the ad that I realized the whole thing is meant as satire, a sarcastic rebuke of Obama’s rhetoric from a profoundly cynical man. I complained in the past that the Democrats were all Daily Show liberals, happier to joke about Bush’s ineptitude and language slips than to offer an alternative to his policy. But, it seems things have flipped, Obama is the one offering a vision of a better America while McCain is the guy heckling him offstage.

It really bothers me that McCain would choose this tactic because I think it can undermine virtually everything positive that Obama represents. I don’t think Obama is that different from other politicians when it comes to policy, he’s made a few too many compromises for my taste, he’s better than most, but I’d like to see him go further. Still, a while ago I realized that specific policy might be not be as important as the overall impression a candidate makes.

Obama’s presentation, the invocation of a new era can be more important than any policy. Bush’s genius was to create a political world in which his ideas were right, and anyone who disagreed with him was un-American. It became difficult to present new ideas because he could claim that anyone who disagreed with him was with the terrorists, or was disgracing the memory of 9/11, or something like that. The Democrats had to play the Republican game, claim that they were stronger than the Republicans on security. That’s why we went to war in Iraq, because politicians were afraid to oppose it, fearing being called weak when it came time to run for higher office. The poetic justice of John Kerry or Hillary Clinton’s votes on the war is that they voted for political reasons, and that vote wound up destroying their campaigns. It’s fitting that they should find that fate, having chosen politics over principle.

So, Obama is giving us a new hope, a vision of a better world. What is McCain offering? “Experience?” Yes, McCain has experience, experience of failing. His implicit message is vote for Obama and be attacked by a terrorist. But, he already betrayed our so called ‘war on terror’ by supporting the war in Iraq. He chose to vote to go to war on a lie, so he either got duped by Bush’s pitch, or he for some reason chose to invade a country that was no threat to us. If he was sold by Bush’s pitch, that means he can be easily swayed by lies, and is likely to put America in danger again. If he really thought it was smart to invade Iraq for no particular reason, then he’s a rash extremist, prone to violence. Or, perhaps he really does think it’s America’s duty to spread democracy to the rest of the world, by any means necessary.

In that case, isn’t it a noble calling, something to be proud of? Of course, that’s not really it. McCain has no backbone, no beliefs beyond perpetuating the military industrial complex. And that’s why he’s become the guy in the back of the movie theater throwing wisecracks at a serious film that people are listening to. His goal seems to be to so thoroughly shred Obama that by the end he doesn’t win, he makes Obama lose. He is the Archons from The Invisibles, trying to preserve the status quo through fear, not wanting things to be any different, any better than they are now. He is literally fearmongering, making people think that any change in their lives is invariably going to be for the worst, that we’re perilously clinging to the way things are.

If Obama really is “the one” as McCain says, isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t a good thing to be loved by the rest of the world, isn’t it a good thing to want to change the world? Isn’t this what the country’s ‘forefathers,’ so beloved by Republicans, intended. America is an experiment, it should evolve and change with the times. That’s what Obama is trying to do, and that’s why the cruel heckles of McCain are perhaps the greatest endorsement of Obama. The movie trailer practically writes itself: “In a nation’s darkest hour, one man will rise to save them all.” Obama, incarnates a twenty-first century vision of progress, a blend of races and ideas, he has transcended all manner of obstacles to come this close to the presidency. To elect him will send a message to the world that we’re ready to make the world better.

Distilled to its essence, this story is a myth as old as time. He is a messiah figure, a contemporary incarnation of a classic archetype, caught up in an eternal struggle. To simply depict the reality of events doesn’t tell the whole story, we need to look at it in the context of the eternal human mythology, which McCain has conveniently done for us. Cast in that light, who’s going to vote for Darth Vader instead of Luke Skywalker? Who's hoping the sentinels will destroy the X-Men? Who wants the past to stop the future coming?

All Points West: Friday

I haven’t been to too many concerts lately. Working the night shift means I can’t go to any shows during the week, but with some time off coming, I took yesterday off and went out to All Points West, the latest attempt to start a New York area music festival. The lineup yesterday was full of bands I liked, and on the whole, it was a great experience.

I started things off with The New Pornographers. I’ve seen them four times now, and only once did they totally impress me. Not coincidentally, that was the Summerstage two years ago where they headlined. The other times I’ve seen them, they were either opening for someone else or at a free show. It’s a huge difference when the whole crowd is there to see a band. Most people didn’t seem to know their songs, and the energy level just wasn’t as high as it was when they headlined.

But, it’s always good to see them, and they played most of my favorite songs. “Bleeding Heart Show” and “A Testament to Youth in Verse” are always fantastic live. Nothing they do can top the wordless chorale moments on those two songs. However, without Neko Case, their stage presence is pretty low energy. They sprinkle in lengthy self deprecating banter between songs that drains the show of momentum. I’m no fan of the stereotypical “Hello Cleveland!” classic rock style audience pandering, but at the same time, I think the endlessly rambling “I don’t know what I’m doing” style banter has gotten old too. We paid to be there, you guys have played a bunch of shows, I think you can string together something better than saying the camera looks like that thing from Wall-E and trailing off ashamed.

Compared to the other bands I saw, the NPs seemed to be actively trying to crush any momentum their set had. They need to get the drummer out in front, he’s the only one who seems to be really enjoying himself. But, the music was still good, particularly a great cover of ELO’s “Don’t Bring Me Down” to close out the set.

I next headed over to the ‘Bullet’ stage to see CSS, who thankfully had a fifteen minute delay on their start, so I could catch all of it. I loved their first album, but have been totally underwhelmed by my few listens to their new one. But, hearing the newer songs live, they played pretty well. They’re not as distinctive as the first album’s, but they keep the energy up live. LoveFoxx was a manic presence on stage, but got outclassed by the restrained cool of her bandmates. Still, her craziness is a huge part of the band’s success, and she killed it throughout.

Next up, I caught the last few songs of Underworld. I’ve listened to some of their stuff, and generally like it. ‘Born Slippy’ is the obvious classic, and I walked over right as it was starting. Their set was a bit odd, one guy on a mixer, and the vocalist dancing around with various video effects behind him. It’s definitely the kind of set that would play better in a club setting, where you’re expecting one guy with a DJ, rather than a festival setting like this, with a full band. It was still fun to see, but a bit underwhelming.

Of course, the real attraction was Radiohead. They came out with an amazing stage setup. Surrounded by hanging lights, and backed by a video screen that featured a multitude of angles on the band, processed through color filters. The video screen visuals were so good, you could record them and make a great music video without any editing. It was one of the best light shows I’ve seen from a live band.

Most of the set was drawn from In Rainbows. I had mixed feelings about the album going into the show, and coming out of it. I definitely liked it, “Reckoner” and “All I Need” are standout tracks, but it’s definitely a lower tier Radiohead album. My ranking of their albums as a whole would be:

Ok Computer
The Bends
Hail to the Thief
Kid A
In Rainbows
Amnesiac
Pablo Honey

The issue I had with In Rainbows was that most of the songs had a similar feel, in the same way that Amensiac did, but Computer or Thief didn’t. They used similar instrumentation on most of the tracks, and there weren’t as many of the emotional shifts that songs like ‘Lucky’ or ‘Paranoid Android’ had. Ironically, it’s like In Rainbows was all painted in one color, whereas their best work used a spectrum.

However, as the show got going, they played a bunch of tracks off Rainbows, and I was wondering why I didn’t love it. “15 Step” was a great opener to the show, and “All I Need” was fantastic live. Other than an amazing “Lucky,” most of the early going stuck to songs from Rainbows. That was fine, I figured they would start with newer stuff, then segue into older songs. It’s not that I only wanted to hear the older stuff, I just wanted a mix.

As it went on, I was loving the show, the light effects were amazing, and the song selection was pretty solid. However, towards the end of the opening set, the momentum started to slip. Closing on “How to Disappear Completely” meant a loss of energy after they left. The crowd reaction was pretty small, I’m guessing people assumed there would be an encore so they didn’t feel the need to get too loud. Still, going out on a more uptempo song would have probably left things with more emotion. It’s not that the softer songs can’t work at all live, it’s just at one point they strung three or four low tempo songs together in a row, and that cut a lot of momentum. When they came back with ‘House of Cards,’ I was like, didn’t they play this one already? They hadn’t, but it’s when Rainbows fatigue set in for me.

Still, I’ve got to stress how amazing the visual presentation was, and the performance. The slower songs still sounded great, it’s just a question of scarcity. When I’ve only got a few Radiohead songs to see, it was frustrating to have a bunch of songs I don’t particularly care for. I’d have to liked to see more off Hail to the Thief, and a couple more tracks off Computer or Bends. I don’t want to be one of those people just asking for the old stuff, I’m sure it’s more exciting to play a song you wrote a year ago than to play one written twelve years ago for the thousandth time, but by the end, I was reminded why I had issues with Rainbows in the first place.

But, this was still one of the best shows I’ve been to in a long time. The stage presence was amazing, and they had the crowd rapt throughout. I’d definitely like to see them when they pass through New York again.

Final Crisis #3: 'Know Evil'

Final Crisis #3, like the two previous issues, features some really great stuff and some material that doesn’t work. The series’ greatest strength is its atmosphere, this oppressive feel of death hanging over the whole thing, that keeps building as we move along. But, on an emotional, character level, the series remains frustratingly fractured. Largely due to the limited space, and month long wait between issues, it feels like we never get enough time with the characters, and that makes it hard to emotionally engage with what’s going on.

The strongest parts of the book are the ones taken from the areas of the DCU that Grant has built over the past ten years, particularly the scenes with Frankenstein and Mister Miracle. The opening is one of the issue’s high points, as we at last get the return of Frankenstein, last seen one billion years in the future in Seven Soldiers. How did he get back to the present? It doesn’t really matter, perhaps SHADE went into the future to retrieve him. And, why are they trying to capture Renee Montoya? SHADE head Taleb says that he’s got a future in mind for her, but their approach seems malevolent.

Either way, Renee takes some names in this sequence, smoothly departing from that trippy pop art room and shedding her skin behind her. Apparently, the bodies of those inhabited by the Evil Gods are left drained of all life. That does not bode well for Turpin.

One of the things I like about the series that’s also frustrating on the monthly read is how oblique the narrative is. Much like Seven Soldiers, it’s up to the reader to tie events together and construct the metanarrative out of the various snippets we get. I read Seven Soldiers after all but Issue #1 had come out, so it was easy to ingest huge amounts of the series and process it as I went. Reading this series monthly, the pieces come slowly, each issue makes things from the past click into place, but it won’t be until the last issue is out that everything becomes clear. Here, the stuff with the fallen Monitor explains what was up with Kamandi and Anthro’s meeting in issue one, and clarifies Metron’s role. He is seeding his sigil throughout time, setting up a covert resistance that will likely help the heroes defeat the Evil Gods.

Almost every scene in the book has additional layers, a surface and a subtext that fills us in something going on elsewhere. The scene with Father Time clarifies what Turpin saw last issue, while also setting up the scene with Wonder Woman later in this issue. A ‘Local Warlord,’ likely DeSaad took over Command D operations and is now using Bludhaven as the center of his experimentation.

Next up is the scene with the Flashes and a trip back through time. I think bringing Barry Allen back is pretty much pointless. He looks exactly the same as Wally West when in costume, so I wouldn’t have even known what was going on without the internet. But, the scene itself is cool, watching them try to catch where the bullet was fired. Orion’s death seems to be the catalyst for the dark gods’ reign on Earth. I’m guessing that at some point later in the series, one of the Flashes will catch the bullet and revive Orion, leading to the eventual defeat of Darkseid.

Libra’s evil plan continues to unfold in a secret lair that brings to mind Slaughter Swamp from Seven Soldiers. Libra has become so dangerous even Lex Luthor opposes him. Why does Lex do this? Last issue, I speculated that it was the inherent opposition of Luthor to the natural order of the universe. Libra is trying to flip the morality of the world, and in a world where evil rules, Luthor will fight for good. Also, he’s too smart to want to surrender his mind to the anti-life equation.

Mike’s words, “Anti-life justifies my hatred” are particularly haunting. In Kirby’s Fourth World books, he made note of the easy lure of anti-life. It’s easier to think about nothing and surrender yourself to the comfortable certainty of anti-life. It’s the same kind of thing Kirby saw when fighting fascist governments in Germany and Italy. People accepted the rule of these governments, they bought in to anti-life.

The series dips for me when it leaves Morrison’s corner of the DCU and goes to characters like the various Green Lanterns, or even, in this case, Superman. I don’t know that much about the Green Lanterns, so that whole side of the plot just kind of sits on the page for me. The scene with Superman is alright, but doesn’t really hit me on an emotional level. I like the frantic pacing most of the time, but those moments really need to be expanded to make an emotional impact.

In some ways, I think this story would have been served better by being expanded, or put out as a weekly series. He’s going for a 52 style overview of the DCU, but with only seven issues, there’s no time to delve deeply into the characters’ emotional lives. Admittedly, it’s more of a big spectacle story, like his work on JLA, but it’d be nice to spend some more time on each storyline.

The highlight of the issue is undoubtedly Shilo Norman and Sonny Sumo’s adventure in Japan. I love the blend of street level action and high concept. Shilo recounts his escape from the grave, and ties things back to the prophecy he saw in his own Seven Soldiers series, which is starting to come true here. There, the New Gods were all hidden in homeless and dejected people, perhaps the same is true here? I loved the Mister Miracle series, and I’m glad that this series has turned into its sequel.

And, things pick up another notch with the arrival of Super Young Team. To be honest, I think this series might be better if it was played all Seven Soldiers style, taking the big players off the board, and sticking to lower level characters, like this bunch, The Question and Frankenstein. The reason I love 52 and Seven Soldiers is that the characters there aren’t so tied into years of continuity, or the expectations that being Superman or Wonder Woman bring. They can explore new corners of the DCU and really grow and change. When I read the parts with the Flashes or the Green Lanterns, I always feel like I’m missing something, not so here. Either way, it’s pure pop fun when Most Excellent Superbat takes Shilo and Sonny up into the sky, Super Young Team style. Don’t worry, they’ve done this sort of thing before.

The issue ends with a series of harrowing scenes. Mary Marvel, now dressed as a punked out dominatrix attacks Wonder Woman in a nasty, bloody fight scene. Her explanation for the change is interesting, “I just couldn’t stand being wholesome and plan and boring one second longer.” I’m not sure on that much of the character’s background, but she seems to be going through a period of typical teen rebellion. She doesn’t want to listen to her parents anymore, and, since she’s got super powers, her rebellion is very dangerous.

The anti-life equation hits the net, and plunges the world into apparent darkness. The Flashes trip to the future and find Wonder Woman at the head of a group of Darkseid’s female furies. She has been horribly distorted, like Mary Marvel before her. On these seedy urban streets, she seeks to destroy all that is good.

So, this issue has some brilliant scenes, but the overall shape of the work remains hard to see. Read on a month to month basis, it’s an intriguing atmospheric story, but I think we’ll need to wait for the release of the entire series to really understand what Final Crisis is.

Real World

For the past few years, I haven’t read many ‘regular books.’ I’ve read many comics, seen many movies, but for a variety of reasons, haven’t read many prose books. However, with a twenty minute subway ride to work each day, I’ve got more time to read, and have read a bunch of books lately. Over the past couple of days, I read Natsuo Kirino’s Real World, a really powerful suburban noir about a group of teenage girls who get involved with a boy who murders his mother.

The book’s power lies in its use of subjectivity. Each chapter is written in first person, from one of five characters. Notably, it’s not a Rashomon style multiple perspectives on the same events kind of thing, the narrative progresses forward as it passes from character to character, but our perspective on the people involved changes through our immersion in the various subjectivities. The murder plot is the book’s hook, but what was most interesting for me was the examination of social dynamics, between friends and between men and women. In seeing the dichotomy between what people think of themselves and how their friends perceive them, the personas we put on to function in society become clear.

Pretty much every character starts their chapter by describing how her friends can never really understand what’s going on with them, that the friends are all about surface and are unable to have meaningful discussions. There’s always going to be two layers of social interaction, the show we put on to pass the time, joking around and talking about surface things. But, underneath that, there’s another layer, the real sharing of emotions and ideas. This is something that doesn’t happen that often, because it can be painful and dangerous. The more of yourself you put out there, the more people can pounce on your weaknesses. No one is without their secret shame, and if people know what if it is that bothers you the most about yourself, they can use it to hurt you.

That’s the logic of most of the characters here. They won’t threaten the status quo of their friend circle by bringing in real emotions, they just keep it on the surface. We see this in a variety of ways, everyone’s got a secret life. Yuzan’s is the most overt. She’s a closeted lesbian, and doesn’t want her friends to know, even though two of them already do. It’s an open secret between them, but the decision to not address it lets them get on with their day to day lives. To bring the issue to the surface would complicate the friendship in a way that they’re not really ready for.

Interestingly, we never actually see the four girls together. We get to know them by what’s in their heads, and can piece together the dynamics of their interaction through that. We start with Toshi, who’s the most ‘normal’ of the characters. She doesn’t really have a secret life, she doesn’t have any of the traumas that the other characters suffer through, she’s dealing with getting into college and feels jealous when two of her friends hang out without her. Her secret life is the most mundane, a false name, Ninna Hori, that she puts on when she wants to remain anonymous. Her perspective opens and closes the book, a bookend of normalcy around the crazier events within. Her small transgression, not telling the police that she saw Worm on the day his mother was murdered, is what leads to the traumatic events to come.

For all of them, Worm becomes a way of flirting with something out of the ordinary, a respite from the pressures of everyday life. For Toshi, lying to the police is enough of a thrill. For Yuzan, it’s giving him a bike and a cellphone, helping him escape the law. But, Kirarin fancies herself the most mature of the group, and the chance to get to know a murderer proves irresistible for her. Kirarin feels very real, a girl who likes the power that she has over men, and wants to exercise that power, even as she maintains the image of the cute, popular girl at school. She reminds me a bit of Laura Palmer in Fire Walk With Me, living a double life of normalcy and sophistication, all the while drawn to danger.

She makes a huge deal of being the only one of her friends to have a gay friend, and she also thinks she’s the only one of her friends with another alternate circle of friends, in this case, a group of girls with whom she talks about only shopping and boys. She compartmentalizes her life, talking about relationships with one group of people and other things with her ‘normal’ friends. We see that with a lot of characters in the book, the constant keeping of secrets to protect a social image that their friends have created.

It’s something that rings true to me, in high school, we talked endlessly about things that didn’t matter, and never discussed anything really important. I had close friends, but it wasn’t until the end of high school that we really broke the surface and talked about more important, emotional things. I remember having these ‘discussions,’ as we called them, it was something that would just happen organically, a segue from the surface to deeper emotion, making internal dialogue external. In Waking Life, one of the character says that the sharing of ideas between two people is a religious experience, and I’d agree with that. Some of the most amazing moments of my life have been conversations where everything just clicked and ideas and emotions moved between me and someone else. But, our restrictive images of ourselves make that hard to do. We have to conform to this role that society has put us in, to not do something ‘out of character.’

In Kirarin’s case, she chooses to do something dangerous and ‘out of character’ without consulting her school friends, speaking only to her gay friend, the friend who is a social transgression for her. In her mind, his exoticism is topped only by the exoticism of meeting a murderer. Kirarin is the kind of person who uses others for her own benefit, who loves to control men, as a way of getting back at Wataru, a boy she opened herself up to, who subsequently betrayed her. She fantasizes about using Worm as a way of getting back at Wataru, only to find herself in way over her head as things go too far.

When interacting with Kirarin, Worm alternates between militant dominance and total weakness. Kirarin is such a strong presence, she would normally have total control over a guy like Worm. He is a meek guy who hasn’t had much luck with women, a loner. But, the fact that he’s a murderer gives him an edge, a power that he otherwise lacks. In his changing behavior we see the spectrum of control in relationships between men and women. Weaker men are always controlled by women, they are the ones who go where their women want them to, and do what is asked of them. They’re the guys who can’t just go out and pick somebody up, who on some level feel lucky to be with anyone. They are essentially harmless, and lack the capacity for violence. But, men with the capacity of violence change the power equation. The threat of violence gives powerful men the implicit last word. Women can try to make them do anything, but they don’t have the last word. Here, Worm switches between roles, embracing the persona of a military commander, but slipping out of that back to weakness.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is the way each character comes fully alive during the chapters they narrate. You feel like this whole thing is about whoever’s speaking, and aren’t sure how things will proceed when they recede from the main stage. Late in the book, we spend time with Terauchi, and get a fully drawn picture of this girl’s life from childhood to high school. A few months ago, I watched Love and Pop, Hideaki Anno’s film about a group of four high school girls who kind of prostitute themselves to make money. It reminds me a lot of this book, and gave me a better understanding of the kind of culture these girls are in. Terauchi talks about being felt up everyday on the train, constantly harassed by older men. This gets her down, it makes everyday a struggle, and that’s why she chooses to kill herself at the end of the book.

It all ends with Toshi, who is still living a pretty normal life at the end of the book. She meets Haru, a girl who used to be a Barbie and has now become a mod, shedding personalities with the seasons. But, Toshi puts on the persona of normality. She says she wears clothes that won’t stand out, and in doing so, she’s making her own kind of fashion statement. She’s implicitly saying I’m nothing special, and maybe living that kind of ‘normal’ life makes her the healthiest one in the book. She isn’t as enraptured with the idea of escape as the others, she can’t quite understand why they do what they do. She’s the closest the book has to an objective point of view. But, immersed in the other characters’ minds, we have a total understanding of why they acted like they did, we know the world they lived in and the struggles they faced.

I though this was a great book, a really striking use of subjectivity to make a story that could have been a simple thriller into an exploration of universal social dynamics, the way that people interact with each other, the way we build up our own public personas, and the secrets we keep from the world.

New X-Men: 2001 Annual and #117

Annuals were typically pretty pointless in the days of Claremont’s original run, but not here. Grant uses the 2001 Annual as the vehicle to introduce a ‘new’ character, Xorn, the zen mutant with a star in his head. Just a note, if you haven’t read the whole run, do not read on, spoilers will be flowing.

The most immediately notable thing about the annual is the choice to have it printed sideways. Trying to make ‘widescreen’ comics literal doesn’t produce too much of an effect here, it mainly just makes it annoying to hold the book. I think there’s some potential in printing the comic like this, but there’s not too much in the story that really takes advantage of it. The art in general is lackluster, Lenil Yu cannot match up to Frank Quitely, and his cartoonier style doesn’t match well with the odd realism of Quitely’s pencils.

This issue introduces a lot of critical concepts for the rest of the run. One of the most notable is the idea of the X-Corporation, a global network of Xavier affiliated groups doing positive work mutants. I think it’s one of Morrison’s best concepts, broadening the scope of the series and giving the more obscure mutants something to do. The spinoff books seem like they’d write themselves.

We also get the introduction of John Sublime, a proponent of the ‘third species.’ Like any cool subculture, people who aren’t mutants are going to be interested in adopting mutant traits. If you lived in that world, wouldn’t you want mutant powers? It’s another example of a concept that seems to write itself, though, so far at least, it’s more interesting in theory than in narrative practice.

The issue itself has a James Bond flavor, the glamorous X-Men globetrotting and battling evil governments, not supervillains. Wolverine and Emma Frost again steal the show here. I love the moment where Logan is able to smell Domino’s interest in him, and the way they work together. Domino is a character from the darkest days of the 90s, but Morrison manages to make her work by putting her in an over the top, fun story. Her luck power is a deus ex machina, but it works if you keep the story moving along at a fun clip.

Much of what happens here is affected by the foreknowledge that Xorn is actually Magneto. How does that reconcile with the events of this issue? It makes sense if you accept that Magneto constructed the whole prison scenario as a way to infiltrate the X-Men. It strains credibility a bit, but in light of Magneto’s previous schemes, is it so unbelievable? The thing I love about Xorn as Magneto is the way it ties in with the concept of fiction suits from The Invisibles. In shedding Magneto and becoming Xorn, Magneto finds the acceptance and admiration he’s always wanted, all directed at this false persona.

On the whole, the annual is one of the weaker pieces of Morrison’s run. It sets up some important things, but doesn’t have the scope of emotional dynamism of the later parts of the run. Things pick up with the next regular issue, #117.

We begin with troubled mutant Beak, and a return to the idea of Xavier’s as an actual school. It’s another seemingly blindingly obvious idea that was never done before, to have an actual student body at Xavier’s. There’s a lot of potential stories there, it allows the X-Men to grow up, and gives them something more to deal with than just supervillains. The major X-Men characters are all so old, it felt weird to have them at a school, they had no growing left to do. New Mutants had some good moments, but a school needs more than five students, and I like the way Morrison builds a fully functioning student body over the course of his run.

At a school of mutants, there’s going to be an even bigger divide between the pretty, popular students and the ‘loser’s than in a regular school. How can a guy like Beak interact with the Stepford Cuckoos? In the subplot with Beast, we see the sad side of mutation. Trish won’t go out with him because, despite his very human mind, he just isn’t physically compatible with her anymore. It’s a real tragic development, and things only go worse for Hank when Xavier turns on him and brings all his fears to the surface, when he ‘throws up on your soul.’

The Xavier/Beast scene is one of the hardest to read, the way he turns Beak’s admiration for Henry into a physical assault is heartwrenching. A lot of writers have played with the danger that an evil Xavier presents, but this small scale psychic control is more troubling than the sort of global destruction we’ve seen before. Xavier can see into anyone’s mind, he can pull up any secrets, what can that power be if used for destructive purposes? He can make people do things they don’t want to do, and make them hate themselves for it. In Seven Soldiers, we see the guilt monster walking around the city, a manifestation of the hate people feel for themselves. Here, Xavier becomes the embodiment of self-hatred, forcing people to confront the things in themselves they’d rather keep hidden, bringing every awful feeling to the surface. That’s the most effective villain, one who plays on the weakness within, so that even if he is defeated, the emotional scars will still be there.

Elsewhere, we get more of Zen Logan. Morrison’s take on the character is a particular highlight of the run, a truly mature Wolverine. The kiss between him and Jean is interesting because he’s the one who resists her. He may still want her, but he thinks he’s wrong for her. And yet, in this incarnation of the character, would he be so wrong? He seems much more levelheaded, and emotionally in touch than the cold, distant Scott.

The issue ends with Xavier heading off into space. I’ve never particularly liked the Shiar part of the X-Men mythology, it’s hard to reconcile with the more realistic elements of Grant’s run. But, it does take place in the Marvel universe, and I like the way they talk about mutants being the first ones to tolerate extraterrestrials. This is a really strong issue, and a nice setup for the storylines that will run through the rest of Grant’s first year on the book.

X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills

Back when I did my writeups of Chris Claremont’s original X-Men run, I skipped one of the most acclaimed parts of that run, the graphic novel “God Loves, Man Kills.” Unlike some people, I don’t consider GLMK one of the best things Claremont’s written, primarily because the standalone format doesn’t really play to his strengths. However, it’s perhaps the best book to give someone who’s never read a Claremont X-Men comic, a primer for the sort of stories he told on the main book for many years, mostly devoid of the stranger, more “comic book-y” tropes that could cause problems for people who aren’t used to those elements. It’s still a superhero comic, but one that aspires to, and generally succeeds in achieving real world relevance.

I feel like at some point I should do a post on the ten greatest critical misconceptions surrounding the X-Men, one of the biggest being that everyone’s just been redoing Claremont/Byrne for the past twenty-five years. The Claremont/Byrne run lays the groundwork for much of what followed, but if one book cemented the popular perception of the X-Men as heroes fighting for a world that hates and fears them, it’s this one. Nowhere is the Professor X as Martin Luther King, Magneto as Malcolm X divide more clearly articulated, and rarely was anti-mutant sentiment so big an issue in the main book.

The second X-Men film was a loose adaptation of this book, in many ways a toothless one, since it stripped the story of its most biting, and relevant, piece of social commentary, the conflict between conservative religious figures and mutants. In a world where Evangelicals dispute the existence of evolution, how would they treat mutants? Probably not too well. I love the fact that Claremont makes such an explicit statement against religious motivated bigotry, a move that’s more relevant today than it was when the book came out. Yes, Stryker exists more in the world of superhero comics, I don’t think most preachers have death squads going around in their name, but in the context of a superhero genre work, it makes sense.

My major issue with the book is that it doesn’t have much relation to continuity or the ongoing narratives that make up Claremont’s best work. The thing I loved about reading his whole run was seeing the way that events built on each other and characters changed as a result of what they experienced. This is kind of a standalone book, so even though it has some nice character moments, you don’t get the added payoff of watching it build to something else.

But, as a standalone piece, it holds up as an edgy, and still relevant political commentary. I think the X-Men work best, on a thematic level, if they’re fighters for the future. That’s how I saw them in Grant’s run, and it’s how I see them here. They may be hated and feared, but they’re fighting for more than their survival, they’re fighting to raise tolerance and make a new and better world. In the traditional X-Men paradigm, where they’re a superhero team, the peaceful approach doesn’t make that much sense. If you’re battling people out to kill you, it’s hard to be Gandhi, and it’s hard to make that work for stories. However, this story makes clear why the X-Men approach is frequently preferable to Magneto’s. They don’t want to remake the world by force, and turn humans into an oppressed majority, they want to make a world where everyone can be accepted, and humans can accept mutants. Much like The Invisibles, they don’t want to kill the enemy, they want to save them.

But, the whole metaphor becomes a bit different when mutants have such dangerous powers. If I was writing the X-Men, I would do an arc about a teenager who discovers he’s got huge powers and doesn’t use them responsibly, he uses them to get whatever he wants, and make people do his will. I don’t think the X-Men fighting supervillains is that interesting, but how would they deal with someone who’s using their mutant powers for self gratification with no social responsibility whatsoever? Think of the cornfield episode of the Twilight Zone, how do you fight back against that?

Much as I love Claremont’s take on the concept, I do think new writers could tell interesting stories taking the X-Men out of a superhero paradigm and thinking more about what it means to be post-human. That’s what Grant was doing, and I think others should continue the exploration. This story is a step towards that, probably the most ‘real world’ of any Claremont X-Men story.

That’s not to say it’s totally removed from his traditional stuff. There’s some great material with Kitty and Magneto. I’m not sure if this is meant to be before or after 150, but the connection between them is cemented. One of the things I like about Magneto’s holocaust background is the way it gives a very clear motivation for his antagonism towards humans. He cannot be naïve and hope for a better world like the X-Men do because he’s of a generation that’s seen such terror. Kitty hasn’t suffered through that, and as a result, she’s able to believe in peace. And, seeing through her eyes, Magneto has the chance to redeem himself. Not every generation is going to as scarred as he is.

In the end, this isn’t my favorite X-Men story, but it’d be a great intro for someone looking to get into Claremont. It distills a lot of central X-Men into one convenient package, and is a compelling enough story in its own right. In the future, I’m hoping to review some of the Claremont miniseries from the era of his X-Men run, as well as continue looking at Grant’s work on the book. So, stay tuned for more X-Men.

Mad Men: 'Flight 1' (2x02)

This week’s Mad Men was full of bubbling under the surface emotion, characters unable to deal with the troubles facing them, and unwilling to talk to their families about the problems afflicting them. Notably, pretty much no one on the show ever says what they’re really feeling to someone else, they’re all in the ‘business of persuasion,’ and part of that business is projecting an image of success. To open up to someone emotionally is to expose a potential weakness, and that’s not going to fly in office politics or family life.

I’m not alone in comparing the show to The Sopranos, and I think it’s interesting, in light of an episode like this, to consider the role of violence in The Sopranos as a cathartic element. Tony can go through all kinds of personal problems, and we see that come out in him physically attacking someone. Think of the whole ‘Pie-o-My’ drama leading up to Tony beating Ralphie to death. The Sopranos featured the same gnawing under the surface dissatisfaction, but gave us those occasional outbursts of violent release. Here, outside of the generic environment of the gangster show, there is no easy emotional outlet. It’s closer to real life in that sense, most of the time you don’t do violent things, you suffer in silence, and only in moments of extreme stress do we see characters let down their emotional guard.

The series’ signature moment so far is in the first season finale. After Don’s brilliant, emotional pitch for the Kodak Carousel, we’re led to believe he’s finally come to appreciate his family. Looking at those photos, he understands how much Betty and the kids mean to him and goes home to tell them that. Only, they’re all gone, and the season ends with him sitting there alone. That is the emotional climax of the season, a man sitting alone in an empty house, but in the context of the world Weiner has built, it really works.

This episode is all unspoken issues for the characters. The most striking scene was Don sitting in the Japanese restaurant alone, reflecting on what the Mohawk rep told him. Don likes to believe that his pitches are more than just sales talk, that they have some real meaning. But, the Mohawk rep sees him as just a smooth talking guy, doing whatever it takes to make a sale. He assumes that Don is feeding him a line when he says that it’s not his fault, we know he’s not, but this guy just sees Don as part of the game. And, Don sits there wondering if he’s so wrong. He makes these impassioned pitches, but Sterling Cooper just uses him for its own ends.

That corporate parasitism is made clear in the scene with Pete and the American Airlines rep. Pete is asked to use the death of his father to get the contract, and he doesn’t want to do it. But, abandoned by Don, he goes along with it, and moves one step further ahead in the company. The whole death of the father storyline is notable for what it doesn’t do. We’re teased with Pete’s impending cry, but never actually get it. Instead, he goes through a curious lack of mourning, and winds up using the death to move one step ahead in the company.

When I looked back at the first season, I felt like the whole “Mystery of Dick Whitman” plot was a bit out of place. Did the series need these overarching questions to drive it? Wasn’t the day to day narrative enough? And, it seemed kind of implausible that Don could so successfully take on this other identity. But, watching this episode, it becomes clearer why that plot exists. Much of the series is about characters putting on personas, everyone’s trying to be someone different, trying to keep their secrets away from the surface. They’re trying to buy into the American dream, and gradually finding out that dream is just something cooked up advertising.

We see that theme with Joan, who doesn’t want anyone to know her actual age. She puts on this front of total confidence, but is quite troubled by Paul’s new girlfriend. She likes to think that no man can ever get over her, and isn’t sure how to deal with him. Having her birthday known to the office makes it harder to keep up the illusion she’s trying to project.

The episode’s strangest scenes were Peggy’s trip back home. She tries to always project this image of herself as a successful career woman, who can control men and get what she wants. But, when she goes back home, she finds not only her working class roots, but also her child, a physical record of her own self delusion and lack of control. There’s still a lot to be revealed about what exactly happened to her, but she apparently had some kind of mental breakdown, and had to undergo mandatory psychological intervention. The reveal of the kid was really well done, as was the final scene with her holding a screaming child in the church, a visual summation of what’s up with her. She’s trying to maintain this front of cool, but her past mistakes won’t stay quiet.

On top of this, we get the funny scenes with Don and Betty’s kids. While the bartending scenes are the obvious gaffes, what stands out even more is the enormous distance both Betty and Don have from their children. The kids are just props in their perfect American life, you never get the sense that they actually love them. Notably, Don is the one taking point with the kids now, Betty is clearly still holding the power after almost discovering his affair last year. They both are apparently agreeing not to talk about it, using the other couple as a surrogate way to discuss their own situation.

The first episode back was solid, but this one had me fully back in the swing of the show, full of complexities and unspoken subtext. It’s a brilliantly layered episode, and sets up for some even more interesting developments down the line.

New X-Men: 'E For Extinction' (114-116)

Of all Grant Morrison’s major works, the only one I haven’t really covered here is New X-Men. It’s ironic because NXM is one of my favorite things he’s done, a wonderful fusion of the best of Claremont’s style and Grant’s thematic concerns. As a big X-Men fan, and a big Morrison fan, there could be little better. I’ll be going through, arc by arc, digging beneath the surface and pondering how this work fits in with the rest of what Grant has done.

The most striking thing about ‘E For Extinction’ isn’t so much the arc’s quality in and of itself, it’s the way it makes you reconsider the quality of virtually every other X-Men comic or movie that’s not part of the original Claremont run. In three issues, Morrison and Quitely tell a story that’s both epic and personal, that’s both totally new and perfectly integrated with the existing mythology. The arc makes you wonder why other people can’t write the book this well, can’t create something that feels so fresh and alive. It’s the same as they did with All Star Superman, you read that book and it feels effortless. They make it look like they’re not great, it’s the rest of the world that’s slacking.

One of my favorite things about E For Extinction, and Grant’s run as a whole, is the way it presents the growth of mutant culture as an inevitability. They are the next evolution, and will eventually overtake mainstream humanity. That was a huge change in paradigm for the series, and one that was unfortunately erased by the lame deus ex machinas of House of M. I think having mutants on the ascent only makes the ‘hated and feared’ elements of the series even stronger. If humanity’s headed towards extinction, aren’t they going to fight harder than ever to preserve themselves?

The way Grant presents the X-Men, they’re essentially The Invisibles, people who have evolved and are fighting to ensure that humanity moves forward successfully. That’s part of the change in paradigm, from superheroes to rescue workers. They are post-human cool in every way, from Beast feeling like a ‘Hindu sex god’ to Jean’s casual use of her TK abilities in everyday life. They are those humans we see in Cassandra’s vision, only they’re not chasing the Neanderthals out with violence, it’s a nonviolent approach, they are better than the humans, and that’s why they’ll triumph.

X-Men comics, post Claremont’s original run, had a tendency to feel very insular. They battled a series of superhero villains, and any attempt at portraying these characters in everyday situations came off as contrived, or wasn’t attempted at all. The genius of Claremont’s work was the way he made the X-Men pretty much a soap opera. I think Buffy gets closer to the core of what made Claremont’s work great than either of the X-Men movies. Reading his stories, you always felt like these were real people, who were changed and affected by what they experienced. As the characters became corporate properties, that became harder to do, mid 90s X-Men comics didn’t feel like the ‘real’ versions of the characters, they were just stories that had no impact. Grant makes the characters feel real again, he gives you a different status quo and an increased focus on the characters’ personal lives. As the series goes on, it’s not the big action stories that hook me, it’s Scott and Emma Frost’s relationship, or the integration of Xorn into the team. It’s the personal stories.

In a lot of ways, the X-Men concept is wasted in the Marvel Universe. It’s an uneasy fit, having people hate the X-Men for being mutants, while loving the Fantastic Four or the Avengers. I think someone could do a great story with the X-Men set in our universe, showing how the rise of mutant culture changes everything. And, Grant has probably come the closest here, there’s still a lot of superhero tropes, but he takes the time to examine parts of the universe we haven’t seen before. Ugly John is a great example, not every mutant’s going to have cool powers, some will just be messed up. A guy like Ugly John makes it hard to feel so bad for the great looking, ultra powerful X-Men.

While I love Quitely as much as anyone, I’m not sure he’s the best artist for the stories Grant’s telling in this book. He’s brilliant as always, but I think the sexier, more real incarnation of the X-Men was best served by Phil Jiminez, later in the run. Quitely’s design work on the uniforms was amazing, and I love his Wolverine and Emma Frost, but his slightly more idiosyncratic artwork doesn’t fit here as well as it does in The Authority or All Star Superman. Obviously, I love what he did, and going from his work to Igor Kordey’s later in the run is like switching from Christopher Doyle as DP to your five year old cousin as DP halfway through a movie. But, I don’t think the book is as groundbreaking or essentially Quitely as We3 or All Star Superman. Basically, when Quitely is such a limited resource, I don’t think he’s as needed for this story as he was for most of the others he drew.

As for the arc itself, the first two issues serve mainly as setup, bringing us into this new world that Morrison’s created for the X-Men. There’s a lot of iconic, fun moments, but it works best on the initial read, when you get the shock of actually reading a competent X-Men comic, a great X-Men comic for the first time in a long time. Things really pick up at the end of the second issue, when we get the introduction of Emma Frost, and the destruction of Genosha.

Emma Frost is easily my favorite character in Morrison’s X-Men run, a bundle of attitude and edge, she captures the cold, futuristic feel of the book as a whole. You can tell he’s having a whole lot of fun writing her quippy, snarky dialogue. Basically every moment with her in these first few issues is an instant classic, be it spying on the thoughts on her favorite screen idols or marveling at her diamond appearance moments after her entire civilization has been wiped out. And, nobody in the run drew her better than Quitely. He could never quite get a handle on Jean, but he always makes Emma look good, in her long coat and ridiculously tall platform boots.

I also really like the way Morrison reinterprets Wolverine. Toning down the bezerker rage, Wolverine is now the elder statesman of the team. This makes sense if we’re to believe that he’s two hundred years old, he’s a kind of edgy, zen master. It’s particularly interesting that here he’s the calm one, and Scott has all the rage issues. Logan takes joy in poking fun at Scott’s repression, and Scott boils underneath the surface the whole time.

And, he looks much cooler in his leather jacket outfit than in the usual hat the shape of his hair outfit. Even in Claremont’s run, I feel like he spent most of the time in his civilian clothes. I have no clue why Marvel moved away from the Morrison outfits at the end of his run, they’re so much slicker than the ugly look Cassaday gave the characters. I normally love Cassaday’s art, but Beast’s adult diaper and Scott’s body condom didn’t work out so well. The Quitely outfits look better and more functional than anything else we’ve see in comics or the movies.

You may wonder why I’ve spent this whole review talking about culture and fashion, with nary a word on the story. I think that was Grant’s intention with the run. Yes, there’s some tension with Cassandra Nova, but the real goal of the arc was to remake the X-Men as sexy heroes for the twenty-first century, in a world that’s one step ahead of tomorrow. I think it works wonderfully, he nails these characters from the outset, and for the first time since Claremont, it feels like things can change, that these stories matter. Unlike some people, I don’t think this is the best arc in his run, but it’s a great overture for what’s to come. With well written X-Men, the longer the story goes on, the more the characters grow and change, the better it gets.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

The new X-Files movie seems to have already been left behind by the internet, a one weekend failure that will quickly vanish from theaters. Now, few people were as big fans of the show as I was, but after watching the film, the major question was why did somebody decide that this was a story that needed to be told? I don’t think there was anything inherently wrong with doing a new film, I was eager to see Mulder and Scully together again, but this film was just so aggressively pointless, it leaves you wondering what Chris Carter was thinking.

That’s not to say it was actively bad. If this was an episode of the show, it’d have been okay, one of the series’ weaker episodes, but not one of its worst. But, coming six years after the show went off the air, and playing in a movie theater, you’ve got to be a bit more than just a decent episode.

The biggest flaw of the film was that, once again, Carter exhibited a seemingly perverse desire to not give people what they want to see, to arbitrarily withhold information for no apparent reason, and tell a story that’s such a boilerplate ‘scary story,’ with none of the fun or excitement of the series at its best. The show is about Mulder and Scully working together to solve these cases, that was the constant, a template flexible enough to span elaborate mythology episodes, really scary episodes and funny episodes.

But, this film gives us essentially no moments of Mulder and Scully working together. Instead, he puts the two of them in a weird relationship, the details of which we’re not quite sure of. Presumably, Mulder has been hiding out in this house for the past six years, just hanging out. Scully wants him to get out, yet is angry at him when he goes back to investigating. What does she think he’s going to do? And, why have they just given up the fight and chosen to stay in this house? That’s an issue that comes out of the show’s messy conclusion. The film wisely avoids referencing most of seasons eight and nine, but it’s hard to reconcile the series’ rather urgent ending with the laid back world of this movie.

And, it really bothers me that they put Scully on the sidelines throughout the whole movie, giving her the subplot with the kid rather than letting her get out there and investigate. I thought the show had laid to rest the idea that Scully was a doctor, not an agent. On the show, she was every bit Mulder’s equal, as he says in the film, he needed her to do his work. So, why isn’t it treated that way in the film? I suppose the plot with the kid is meant to tie into her losing her own child, but that’s all so far in the background, a tossed off bit of information, it’s hard to emotionally engage with the character. I’ve seen reviews that said their kid had died, I assumed the part about ‘losing’ him referred to giving him up for adoption in the series.

Either way, if you’re going to go with Mulder and Scully as outsiders from the FBI, why not have them united, and not do this lame messing around with their relationship. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with putting stress on their relationship, but the way it’s played, it makes Scully into the domesticated character, not wanting her man going out and doing stuff. There are some nice Mulder/Scully scenes, but considering how tossed off the main plot was, it’s their relationship that the movie hinges on, and there’s no sensical or interesting development with them.

As for that plot itself, it didn’t really work for me. It doesn’t come close to ‘Beyond the Sea,’ an episode that plays a lot of the same beats in a much more emotional and effective way. Plus, the whole aesthetic is so relentlessly downbeat. There’s very few jokes in the movie, and I think the show always did have a strong humor component. I’d have rather seen a story that was a bit more fun. And, for me, there was a huge disconnect between the summer weather outside and the winter world of the movie. I think this would have been better released in the fall or winter.

The problem with The X-Files at this point is that nearly all the compelling supporting characters have been killed. Without the Smoking Man, Kryceck and the Lone Gunmen, the movie universe feels kind of empty. Skinner got perhaps the best role of the film, coming in for ten minutes, kicking some ass, then getting out of the way. But, if you’re going to do a movie with only two characters from the series, it’s got to be better. It’s got to be Jose Chung or Home good. Where the first film was a great expansion of everything the series did well that probably made no sense to new viewers, this film was so disconnected from the series itself, it’d probably play better for people who’d never watched the show, then for people who had watched the whole thing and wind up disappointed that it’s so poorly handled.