Interrogating 'bully readers'

A particular species of comicbook fan is utterly fantastic at deflecting criticism of their most beloved creators and titles. A typical and awful exchange from any number of message boards:

Reader 1: I think Book W sucks because of X, Y, and Z.
Reader 2: If you don't like Book W, then don't read it.
Reader 1: Fine, I won't. But I still think it sucks.
Reader 2: I don't care. If you're not reading it, then you're not entitled to an opinion.

It's a ridiculous turn of logic that seems aimed at eliminating criticism or negativity altogether. It's very nearly a twisted sort of syllogism, I think: if you don't like it, you shouldn't read it; if you don't read it, you can't comment; therefor, if you don't like it, you can't comment. It is also, in fact, surprisingly common to internet discussions of all sorts.

There's a certain common sense appeal, of course. That is, if you aren't informed, you shouldn't be writing as if you are. Quite right. But people of the Reader 2 sort are never satisfied by claims to information or authorities that are not Book W itself.

The problem here is that Reader 2s are (unselfconsciously, I'm sure) setting themselves up to be revealed as hypocrites. Thing is, we all register opinions all the time based on something other than direct experience of the topic in question. I can confidently say that Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor is a piece of crap, but I've never seen it. So how do I do it? Well, I've never seen anything by Michael Bay that I've liked; I think that the leads are terrible actors based on other films they've been in; it was utterly trashed by the film critics whose authority I respect and trust; the trailers didn't interest me at all; the blockbuster historical romance/war film genre generally don't interest me at all. (Granted, I could still be wrong - but, again, experience has taught me that my educated guesses are usually close to the mark.) And I'm sure that I'm not the only one who makes these sorts of decisions, whether we bother to enumerate them in this way or not.

There's an additional problem, too - the problem of never having the time or money to read or see everything. Should we be prevented from commenting or registering an opinion on a text simply because it's beyond our means to acquire it? I'm reminded of jury selection in the recently completed Conrad Black corporate fraud and racketeering trial, where Black's lawyer requested a change of venue because the average Chicagoan was not wealthy, did not own multiple homes, and did not employ servants - that is, the jury could not possibly consist of his "peers". These ploys by various Reader 2s strike me as disturbingly similar - the field of "peers" for the purposes of discussion is being systematically reduced to only those who have a similarly positive experience of the comicbook in question, reducing the space for discussion to those that would not only fail to interrogate each other and their texts, but would acquit one another of their "criminal" reading practices.


Note added several hours later: I linked this blog entry to a post I made in the discussion that directly prompted me to write this entry in the first place. The response it elicited from at least one poster is both quite (inadvertently) funny and wholly deserving of my 'bully reader' characterization. Just click the link above and follow the exchange.

Fraction's The Order

My first instinct is to accuse The Order of being Peter Milligan’s X-Force but with all the fun sapped out of it. Or most of it anyway. It’s not a totally fair accusation, but it lingers with me. Here’s a team of people trained to be heroes by a massive corporation, who can be fired and replaced by members of the farm team, and who must be ‘on’ and play to the media at all times. They’re recorded by another, unofficial team member, and
their leader has lingering
doubts because of his self-destructive streak. Death is a constant threat and two team members are melted in the very first battle.

Another similarity that also provides a slight but meaningful difference: rather than a team beholden to an owner or stockholders, this team is beholden to the taxpaying public. This is perhaps where the decision to tackle the topic with some seriousness makes sense. X-Force was expected to act in outlandish ways, to be public with their personal problems and do outlandish things that would increase their Q-rating. So long as more people were watching or buying their products, it was all good. Not so much for the Order, though.

What the Order does particularly well is reveal the hypocrisy of a consumer-culture that pays money to see pictures of intoxicated celebrities but throws closeted politicians to the wolves. Once the team is paid with tax money instead of free capital, it seems, self-destructive behavior is no longer tolerated - much less celebrated - and the public’s obsession with the night-lives of these celebrity-heroes becomes a burden for the Order instead of a marketable angle. It’s a funny (or disturbing) truism that people will freely and readily throw their money at the same ethically bankrupt people that they would never allow anywhere near public service – as if they’re even mutually exclusive categories that are occupied by different folks to begin with – and the Order turns out to be no exception. And our irony tolerance is pushed to its limit when Tony Stark, a recovered/ing alcoholic, forces team-leader Anthem, another recovered/ing alcoholic, to fire four of his team for violating their morals agreement by – you guessed it – going out and getting drunk. The exchange is subtle but powerful, and full props to Fraction and Kitson for avoiding the melodrama that a weaker team would have milked this scene for. This is not the sort of ethical dilemma that would’ve made it into X-Force’s pages, and we’re better for it.

Much of the concept remains unclear to me – like why Stark and the government aren’t converting military-types into the Order, rather than punkish girls with pink hair who would seem to be less easily controlled; or what the deal is with the military stepping all over the Order’s authority – but Fraction seems to delight in filling his comics with more subtextual content than we’re able to consume on the first read-through, and I'm willing to give him the time to develop these stories. You can bet that my copy will be well-worn before the next one hits the shelves.

Comic book vocabularly lesson #1

With thanks to Somebody from the X-Universe Message Board, this is just too funny (and useful and accurate, probably) not to post here...

continuity porn (n) -

Fundamentally, it's a story whose primary purpose is to involve some sort of past event to the detriment or even exclusion of the story which is nominally being told. (see also: "fanwank")

Exactly what stories ARE "continuity porn" therefore varies from reader to reader, since it's a pejorative term, and therefore only stories a reader considers to be bad tend to get defined as such.

Quick thoughts on Harry Potter and the latest movie

I'm not going to actually review the new Harry Potter movie. It's successful at least insofar as they somehow managed to distill an 800 page book into about 140 minutes without it becoming an incoherent disaster. Granted, there are scenes that feel totally unnecessary from the perspective of either plot or character - throw-aways that are never revisited and so offer no pay-off, like Harry invading Snape's mind to see that his dad was actually a bit of a dickhead - but one assumes that they'll be more meaningful in the next film or two. (Since this one, at least, has not read the books.) Many sequences are rushed and so the tension is totally dashed - Bellatrix should be terrifying, I imagine, but she's only very briefly foreshadowed, her escape is about 15 seconds long, and she's on-screen again for maybe a minute before she commits the only act that necessitated her inclusion. So the film makes you entirely too conscious of its own structure and narrative compression, yes. But I still enjoyed it, and maybe that's actually something of a triumph with these sorts of restrictions.

What interests me more, though, is the way the filmmakers have gradually rejected Draco Malfoy as a suitable nemesis for Harry. He's arguably been a comic-foil since the second film, was nearly absent from the third, and hardly rates a cameo in this one. I briefly checked the synopsis of his character's role in the text of Order of the Phoenix to see how it compares, and I'm not entirely sure that Rowling rates him as any sort of threat to Harry either - it seems that he's mostly just responsible for discovering Harry's secret club and a failed attack on Harry at the book's end. It hardly compares to the threat posed to Harry by Voldemort or even Draco's own father. (Granted, too, Harry doesn't seem to be a match for Lucius in a fair fight, but he seemed to be more than capable of injuring other Death Eaters and resisting Voldemort's psychic attacks, so maybe he is.)

It's an interesting movement, anyway - Draco was positioned in the Philosopher's Stone as Harry's ostensible equal but opposite, a status that now shifts to Lucius or Voldemort himself. The move makes the story more epic and Harry himself something larger than life, but at the cost of the versimilitude and empathy: Harry is no longer good-natured orphan as contrasted against the spoiled-brat, but the yang to Voldemort's yin in some spectacular battle for the control of magic and humanity; this is no longer a story about more-or-less normal kids at a school for magic, but epic fantasy that happens to be staged primarily at a school and also happens to star kids. (Though they're quickly growing up, so the appeal of naive tweens embroiled in magical mystery has mostly vanished.)

Again, it's hard to fault because it seems to work well enough - but I can't help but feel that the Harry Potter story has strayed from what had made it initially appealing (there are caveats to this appeal, as there always are, but i won't get into them now) and gone somewhere much more generic.

One last (disconnected?) thought: During the penultimate battle where Bellatrix does that thing she does (I'm trying not to spoil anything!), I was reminded of Ebert's criticism of the fight scenes in the Star Wars prequels: they're damn fun to look at it, but they're really just visual cacophony and lack a lot of drama precisely because we know that the principles can't die. Reasonably, it doesn't matter what kind of danger you put Harry, Hermione, and Ron in because we know they'll escape it. Rowling's cast is so huge that it means there's no shortage of potential-corpses, but we'll never be as invested in any of the others. The threats have to be something other than mortal ones - it's much too late for this bit of advice, sure, but why can't the climax be something more subtle?

'Comics in the Academy' at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival

I'm organizing the 'Comics in the Academy' panel at this year's Toronto Comic Arts Festival (August 18-19), and I'm currently looking for people interested in participating as panelists. Respond if you're interested, and pass it along if you know someone or some people that it might appeal to. Details below...



“Comics in the Academy:
How to Study Comics and Why”
Toronto Comic Arts Festival ( http://www.torontocomics.com/tcaf/ )
Old Victoria College, University of Toronto /// Sunday, August 19^th (time TBD)

Since its emergence in Europe, Japan, and North America during the 1930s, and especially in the past two decades, the modern comic book has enjoyed increasing legitimacy as an artistic and literary medium. That said, the study of comic books in the University remains a marginal project: many still dismiss comics as (gasp!) popular culture or (gaaah!) ephemera, most academic papers appear in little-read and/or hard-to-find journals, and new scholars are often at a loss as to where and how they should begin their research.

The proposals being sought for this panel at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) are not for analyses of particular comics (though they can/should certainly be used as examples) or a defense of the study of comics itself (as we will take their worthiness to be a given), but rather for the presentation of a particular disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach to the comic book form and/or its various subject matter. In short, we are looking to discuss the various ways of embarking on a study of comics (“how to study comics…”), as well as an explanation of the merit and/or necessity of such an approach (“…and why”). However, as the TCAF is a public event, submitters should be mindful of the fact that their audience will likely consist of many (if not mostly) non-academics, and so presentations should be very accessible, even conversational, and avoid academic jargon and the ever-dreaded “name-dropping” of theorists wherever possible.

Presentations will be approximately 15 minutes, and it is expected that panelists will submit a preliminary (if not finished) copy of their paper/discussion notes a week in advance, so as to allow the organizer and their fellow panelists the opportunity to prepare thoughtful questions and enter into dialogue with them. Submitters are asked to prepare a 250-350 word proposal and brief biographical statement in a single Word or Rich Text file and submit them to the panel organizer, Neil Shyminsky (shym@yorku.ca). All proposals will be accepted for consideration until at least July 25^th, and questions of any sort can be submitted to the organizer at the same email address.

All-Star Superman 8

As All-Star Superman: Year 2 hits its second issue, it seems evident that Morrison is moving the book in a slightly different narrative direction. Where the first 6 issues were only loosely connected, each issue in this next movement would appear to lead directly into the next. And if issues 7 and 8 are any indication, this isn't an entirely good idea: in the grand, kitschy tradition of the golden and silver age comics that Morrison is emulating, an argument on the second page is little more than expository dialogue aimed at refreshing the reader's memory. "I already explained..." says Superman, to which Zibarro replies, "And I explained to you..." It's cute, I suppose, but unavoidably awkward. Issues 1 and 2, as well as 2 and 3, were also somewhat linked and yet Morrison never resorted to this sort of cheesy recapping.

Morrison actually increases the campiness of the comic as it progresses, though his subsequent choices seem better reasoned. The Ancient Bizarro Anthem is as strange as it is unsettling, and Superman's manipulation of the Bizarros is simultaneously clever and obvious. The Bizarro speech should also get old - and maybe it would have if issues 7 and 8 had been released four weeks apart - but Morrison manages to keep the joke fresh, with Bizarro Wonder Woman's appearance in the Unjustice League providing a particularly absurd and wonderful moment.

The real star of this issue, though, is Zibarro. Recalling that all the best issues of this series have been focalized through some other cast member - Lois in 2, Jimmy in 4, Lex in 5, and young Superman in 6 - Morrison again pulls away from Superman and makes Zibarro the center of the story. In many ways, Zibarro seems to stand for the incredulous reader who has no time for infantile Bizarro-talk and feels above the material to which Morrison is paying homage. At first insufferable, Zibarro grows on us. He's drawn with incredibly sensitivity by Quitely - just look at him in the pages where he realizes there's only space for one on the ship, and then when he ties Superman to the ship - and he comes to stoically accept a tragic end as Bizarro World returns to the Underverse. It's not on par with the funeral for Pa Kent, sure, but it'll do.

Ultimates 2 ends with a whimper

Producing the sequel to a hugely popular blockbuster film is a tricky matter. The fans of the original film generally aren't looking for, nor are they expecting, new ground to be broken. Sure, they want new and bigger explosions, but it's largely a matter of wanting more of the same. The best sequels, of course, tend to deviate from these expectations almost to a rule: the second Godfather film introduces an entirely new temporal structure, the second Star Wars offers both real philosophy and a much darker tone, and the second Ocean's film is as much a satire of the heist genre as the original was a loving homage. But the majority - and the most successful - tend not to wander far from their beginnings.

Needless to say, the conclusion to Millar and Hitch's run on Ultimates is of the less impressive sort. All sense of plot is lost as we approach the end, characters (that is, Hulk and Thor) conveniently arrive just when they're needed most and with little explanation, and the battles rage mindlessly and endlessly until the tidy ending. Bryan Hitch can draw a hell of a fight - as evinced by the huge pull-out that seems to include every hero in the Ultimate universe - but his powers seem abused on these issues. The Hulk battle that capped the very first story arc was all the more incredible because it was unlike anything else we had seen. But in Millar and Hitch's relentless push to outdo themselves with every subsequent story, it seems like there's just nowhere else to go and nothing left to do. If we can't have more dramatic fights, the logic seems to go, then maybe we just have longer ones?

I'm disappointed, as well, with the way Loki and Abdul al-Rahman are handled. Loki was far more interesting in the previous issues, when we didn't actually know whether he and Thor were Norse gods. (It's a shame that it's proven conclusively. One of the great things about the Ultimates are that they seem to exist in a world much like our own, with people are similarly unbelieving in the existence of monsters and aliens - even when they see it for themselves. Norse gods push it ever closer to the normal Marvel Universe.) al-Rahman, on the other hand, appears far too quickly - he's introduced in the first part, but it would have really been fantastic if his cameo could have appeared several issues earlier - and is dealt with much too easily. A man who could have been a great foil for Cap is already done telling his stories.

There's another sad bit in that battle with Cap. While Cap stands over al-Rahman, the latter asks him if he's going to say anything clever and John Wayne-like before he finally kills him. Cap doesn't, but the point is far too apt - it seems like every character spouts a cheesy line before surprisingly jumping (back) into the fray. Cap has his full-page return at the end of the 4th issue, Banner takes a moment to grandstand before turning into the Hulk, and Iron Man re-appears just in time to shut up the Crimson Dynamo in dramatic fashion. Oh, and Thor gets an entire two-pages for his comeback. Hawkeye also returns from the dead, though his return isn't quite as flashy and lacks that John Wayne quality.

It's affecting in the moment, sure, but it's all very cheap, and in the end it feels quite cold. It's more of the same, sure, but it seems clear that Millar has lost his drive to do anything new with the Ultimates. Its top-of-the-line special-effects budget aside, this blockbuster sequel is of the worst sort - the direct-to-video variety. (I'm over-stating, sure, but Millar and Hitch started so well that even a mediocre-to-good result is hugely disappointing.)

On comic art and artists: Visual prose and poetry

My visual comic book sensibilities seem to be very realist, I think - or at least highly conventional. My favorite story tellers - that is, the pencillers and penciller/inkers - are distinctly linear and clearly organized in their style.

For instance, John Cassaday's style is very romantic - high contrast and deep shadows (or negative space) that draw your eye to the character in the foreground (who is often almost bursting from the panel), and he sometimes duplicates panels (either literally or in a visual approximation) to indicate beats in a way that lends his work a certain rhythmic and cinematic quality. Though still an undeniably linear (or at least not unlinear) rhythm.

Note below, for instance, the absence of a distracting background in the first panel and the way that the indistinct light source make's the villainous Ord's face look hard and dangerous. The jump from first to second panel seems dramatic, but it's anticipated by the previous page (where Ord is running through a hallway while he knocks soldiers aside) and so the inference is an easy one. It also makes it clear that Cassaday considers the actual run to be of little dramatic consequence. He wants us to see Ord's eyes, and then the fantastical escape itself, which seems to be frozen in time, or at least in very slow motion. The two panels at the bottom have a kind of visual repetition insofar as Cassaday very deliberately wants us to know how Ord escapes - we can't intuit his finding a ship and stealing it as easily as we can his jumping out a window, so he walks us through it very deliberately.

Frank Quitely may seem like a curious pairing with Cassaday - insofar as his overly detailed line-work sometimes borders on the absurd or grotesque, and his absence of Cassaday-like attention to light sources heightens our awareness that this is, in fact, a cartoon - but their organization is still deceivingly simple, as he likewise employs obvious focal points, tight and accessible visual arrangements, and clear narrative panel progressions.

The first page of All-Star Superman is an exaggerated example - this is Quitely at his most self-consciously mythic and grand - but I think it does well to speak to how overwhelming and lush his visuals can be, while at the same time there is never any doubt as to where and how our eyes should be moving through them. We might return later to see if we missed something, but those subsequent peeks never significantly alter the path of the story.


Which is just to bring me to Chris Bachalo, whose work, while resembling Quitely's in its detail and Cassaday's in his fondness for light and dark, is playing an entirely different ballgame. I like Bachalo's character design work, but I'm often left confused and anxious about his layouts and panels. Unlike the other two artists, Bachalo often balks at convention and doesn't lend his pictures any clear focal point. There is often no negative space (or the opposite - an overabundance of it) and so you might find yourself at first examining the most inconsequential bit of overly detailed debris in the foreground - simply because that's where your eye has been trained to go. Bachalo's stuff is often without rhythm, and so seems to resist linearity: you're caught in the panel, trying to figure your way out, and so time seems to freeze in an uncomfortable way. (Though, I suppose, this is more true of people who are less familiar with his work than others.)

In this two page spread, Bachalo takes it a step further by providing us with more than one narrative option for moving our eyes through the panels, each in contradiction to the other. One is distinctly linear - and the small panels and grid-arrangement make it much easier for us to read in this way - while the other jumps between the visual organization in an entirely different pattern, opening up a totally different experience. From a narrative standpoint, the scene almost has to play twice - we read it one way and then go back to read it the other - and attempting to marry the two never produces a wholly coherent result. We have to decide how we'll read the comic before we can even worry about, well, reading it.


This is not to say that I think that Bachalo's a worse or better artist, but to say that the vocabulary and rules he's playing with are themselves entirely different. I'm not as fond of Bachalo because I think that he often pushes too hard to be less accessible and experimental at the cost of the larger story's (that is, the visuals and text) ostensible goal, but it's clear that his approach deserves attention. If I were to be reductive (and, sure, I'm feeling that way), I'd propose that Cassaday and Quitely's pencils are prosaic, whereas Bachalo's is poetic. And while the latter is admirable, I also have to wonder if it can ever be as fully realized as the former in a 22 page booklet with its unavoidable physical limitations. Or, rather, maybe I feel like I'm still waiting to see such a thing to happen.

The "28...Later" Films, Sex, and Infection

I'll get this out of the way, first: I just saw "28 Weeks Later", and it was surprisingly weak. In order for the film's central conflict to occur, we have to believe that an elite military force charged with the sole task of containing and protecting the only civilians in all of Britain fail this task monumentally, and fail monumentally twice in short order: two escaped children are allowed to make trouble for at least 20 minutes from the time they're spotted leaving their safe zone in the Isle of Dogs; and a building superintendent is not only given fully access to all sections of the base, but he retains that access even after his biohazardous wife is found by the children and subsequently quarantined by the military. There are other moments of 'why wouldn't this strike a trained military force as a bad idea?', but I'll leave it at that. The film is legitimately frightening, but the biggest frights are restricted to the first 10 minutes, which ask nothing of our ability to suspend disbelief.

What occurred to me, though, and especially when one compares "28 Weeks" to "28 Days", is that this zombie franchise is operating on a subtextual level that's very different from other zombie films. Where Romero's movies are commonly taken as critiques of 'modern life' and consumerism, Boyle and Garland's burgeoning series seems to be take aim at the germ-free society, free sex, and our anxieties over the meeting of contagion and sex - sexually transmitted infections.

Take, for instance, the scene from "28 Days" in which the soldiers intend to rape Selena and Hannah, the two female survivors who had been traveling with Cillian Murphy's Jim. The moment in which the soldiers become totally consumed with assaulting them is the same moment in which the Infected overwhelm their defenses and proceed to kill them all - the intimation of sexual violence is linked to infection and a painful death.

"28 Weeks" presents a subtler link to sexuality as such, though the links themselves are more numerous. The new outbreak begins with a kiss between spurned wife and guilty husband in a scene that's played as if he had cheated on her (well, he did leave her behind when the Infected attacked) and must beg forgiveness. Though it's certainly up for debate, the wife appears to know that she's a carrier for the infection and looks perversely satisfied as she watched the infection take hold, panicking only when she realizes that she's doomed herself, too. The unfaithful partner is met with the vengeful gift of an STI.

The suggestion that the wife can even be a carrier also links the infection to early AIDS discourse. Rose Byrne's medical researcher, the ostensible world's expert in this disease, notes early in the film that she doesn't know how such a thing is possible but that they hardly know anything about the disease in the first place. And, regardless of the wife's lack of symptoms, her blood and saliva are highly contagious. Okay, so the saliva bit is real in the film and turned out to be a myth with regard to AIDS, but the notion of a carrier was popular at one point - a person who could contract HIV and pass it on but who would never get sick him or herself. Whether the carrier in the film would have eventually developed the symptoms of an Infected is unknowable - she's killed by her husband, after all, in yet another bit of spousal revenge - but the danger in tossing around terms like 'carrier' and 'immunity' with regard to a little-understood disease are made perfectly clear: don't swap spit without protection. (There is undoubtedly a moralizing gesture here too, though that's a subject for an entirely different blog entry.)

Intention vs. Reception, and responsibility to work and audience

Last week, NOW Toronto had an absolutely dreadful interview with Avril Lavigne - one of those puff pieces that avoids asking the star any tough questions, but is coy and ironic in its exposition, as if it wants to be highly critical or mocking but fears some sort of punishment. It's a painful read.

A substantial section was devoted to perhaps my biggest pet peeve - the 'artist' who feigns ignorance or denies responsibility when pressed about their content being sexist, racist, etc.* The interviewer notes that Lavigne's lyrics on her new album are incredibly antagonistic toward other women, and even misogynistic at points - as in the highly clever descriptor "bitch slut psycho babe". Lavigne, though, is dismissive of the criticisms, as if her intention trumps reception: "I didn't really think about it that way. It's not serious to me."

Intention comes back later in the interview: "I've done a really good job of focusing on who it is I am and what it is I want, and that has always been my message to my fans: don't worry about what other people think; do what you want to do; be yourself and be strong." Unfortunately, this is a banal and probably even idiotic recommendation: our freedom to 'be yourself' and 'do what you want to do' is constrained by social and economic limits and necessities, just as Lavigne needs to admit that her songs participate in a conventional and semiotic exchange that is far larger than her intentionality. It doesn't matter if she doesn't 'think about it that way' - a responsible writer should anticipate what others will think, how they will receive a message, and what they will do with it. It is a serious matter if you're easily misinterpreted, especially if you have any kind of genuine commitment to your audience. (And even more especially if that audience is largely teenaged or preteen.)

But then, Avril Lavigne and disingenuousness seem a very apt pair.

*My favorite example of this sort of maneuver was performed by Matt Stone and Trey Parker after Team America - which I despise, despite liking South Park - was released. When they were asked, reasonably, about their film being homophobic and pro-imperialist, they resorted to the classical response of blaming the viewers - it was they who were reading too much into the film, assigning it their own biases, and these observations were not indicative of Stone and Parker's intentions and so invalid. They claimed to have criticized people of all political stances and favored none - like Lavigne, they denied any responsibility so far as interpretation goes.

Admittedly, it's difficult to tell whether Stone and Parker were being insincere or were actually ignorant of what they were doing. What is clear, though, is that some critiques are more ambivalent and more desirable than others. In the film, they describe three types of people: dicks, assholes, and pussies. In the end, the hero decides that if he has to be one, then he chooses to be the dick. (Since, as we've been told through the film, the dick keeps the asshole from shitting on the pussy and sticks it to both of them.) Americans may be dicks, Stone and Parker are clearly telling us, but we ostensibly need them to be dicks for so long as there are assholes that harass pussies. This is also saying something about American masculinity, but I won't go there - this time, anyway.

Sure, none of the three offer altogether wonderful positions, but only an Avril Lavigne (evidently) would be unable to see that one is clearly being promoted over the others.

Follow-up to the horrific London 2012 logo...

In conversation with my brother last night, he mentioned this little character: a Tibetan antelope that serves as one of China's 5 mascots for the Beijing 2008 Olympics. And it might help explain the terrible London 2012 logo that I blogged about only a couple days ago.

The criticism that this critter has earned might explain why London decided to go with something abstract and ahistorical. The problem, of course, is that China conquered Tibet about 50 years ago and their relationship remains tenuous, with the Central Tibetan Administration (the traditional leadership in exile) residing in India and the Tibetan province holding a semi-autonomous status that many Tibetan critics claim is a meaningless title. In short, then, China seems to be (mis)representing Tibet as a full and equal member of the country, as the cute mascot totally glosses over a violent and repressive history. (And, indeed, distracts from the question of whether Tibetans are Chinese at all.)

So yes, this is the kind of thing that I'm guessing London hopes to avoid. But someone should tell them that one can invoke their history without doing so in an incredibly problematic way. But I'm tempted to still suggest that the dialogue that China's Beijing mascots open (unintentionally, of course) is preferable to the erasure and/or denial of history that London's logo gestures toward.

The 2012 Olympic logo revealed

London's Olympic organizers defend the design (which consists, roughly, of four abstract shapes that spell out 2012):

"It's vital that we reach out to those young people in a language that they understand and in technology that's familiar to them. This brand is absolutely the world they live in."

"People who understand the Games, who get the Games, have a historic feel for the Games, have an emotional attachment to the Games are probably not going to be moved, one way or another by a brand."

"The new emblem is dynamic, modern and flexible, reflecting a brand-savvy world where people, especially young people, no longer relate to static logos but respond to a dynamic brand that works with new technology and across traditional and new media networks."

"The brand launched today by London 2012 is, I believe, an early indication of the dynamism, modernity and inclusiveness with which London 2012 will leave its Olympic mark."

Should I be surprised that the London team and IOC are resorting to marketing claptrap in order to justify such a hideous design? And should I perhaps acknowledge that I have a certain problematic level of comfort with Olympic tradition, steeped as it is in borders and self-aggrandizement? And admit a certain expectation that London should play to their (admittedly, white masculine-centric) history rather than use something designed to maximize their sponsors' appeal to international markets?:

London organizers want the logo to be interactive, and have encouraged people to download the design template, personalize it and upload it onto the official website. [London 2012 chief organizer Paul] Deighton said the logo would evolve into a number of forms over the years. Sponsors would be able to adapt the logo to suit them. Banking sponsor Lloyds began using the logo on Monday, with its own corporate colours of light blue and green, with the official partner description written diagonally across the bottom number 2.

No, I'm not so naive that I think this is outrageous and exceptional; it is, of course, all too normal. History and our relation to it is always ambivalent and panicked, and so it's often revised or ignored, this being a case of the latter. But it can also be productive and ecstatic. Certainly, an event like the Olympics, which claims to have cross-cultural significance in a way that no other sports event does, should actually try to engage with the host culture's history, troubling as it may be in many ways. Instead, we're saddled with something that promotes London as if it were the newest fad in branding.

But like I said, this logo is not somehow exceptional; and neither, contrary to what they would have us believe, are the Olympics.

Heath Ledger's Joker

You've probably seen this already - Heath Ledger as The Joker in next summer's The Dark Knight. I've delayed responding to it because I was just sort of made...uncomfortable?

Am I alone in thinking that this is wrong, though? And not just wrong, but wrong, wrong, wrong.

The immediate problem, to my mind, is that this Joker seems to lack the very neurotic vanity that nearly ever other incarnation suffers from. As many have suggested, there's something so neurotic about him that suggests he's hyper-rational - not one hair is out of place, his suit always looks 'just so', and his various plans to kill Batman are meticulous in the Rube Goldberg sense. Such a Joker is also purely a sadist - he gets off on the pain he causes others, not on his own, and is only captured because he enjoys the pain more than the victory. He would prefer to allow his victims some small victory so that he can put them through hell one more time. But that Joker is not the one we see in this picture.

We could also argue that the Joker is the death-drive given human form, and that he represents both Batman's and his own secret desire to enjoin in a ritual of repetitive trauma until one or both dies - the superbeing's tacit realization that they can't survive every battle, that the whole struggle is just a big joke that will end with their death. Joker's very ordered appearance, though perhaps no longer neurotic (though I can't see why these two interpretations are mutually exclusive), is an element of this highly ritualized performance. There's something masochistic about this kind of Joker - he desires to lose to Batman, to be captured, maybe even more than he desires causing him pain. This is self-inflicted pain, sure, but only in the most abstract sense - he wants to be defeated by his mirror-image.

The implication that the Joker has carved up his own face (or is celebrating his scarring somehow), just doesn't fit either model for me. It suggests some sort of unspecific psychopathology, a sadomasochist in the most superficial sense - and that's simply boring.

LOST's season finale: Maintaining the mystery through misdirection; or, Giving the audience what they thought they wanted

This is post is going to feature some spoilers for the season finale of Lost, so read on with that warning in mind...




The question about Lost has long been about how it can avoid making the mistakes of other long-running cult shows. A short while ago, they responded to the charge that, so long as it's profitable, the show might just drag on until it's tired and directionless (a la the X-Files) by announcing that there will be three more seasons at 16 episodes apiece. But with the finale of season three, the show has answered the biggest question of all: how do you maintain interest in the central mystery of the show (the island, what it is, and how they'll escape) without pissing off your viewers by being obviously avoidant (as with the X-Files, again); conversely, if you give your viewers the satisfaction of resolving the mystery, how do you maintain their interest? (this being the problem with Twin Peaks)

The answer, if you're Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, is that you pretend to do both while actually accomplishing neither - the finale is all about misdirection and only appearing to give us what we want. They wrap up the plot of rescue but leave the matter of the island's nature itself dangling, a conciliatory gesture that is satisfying in that it resolves a plot point that was going to get tired very soon but maintain the most engaging mysteries. And, to top it off, they even introduce some more provocative questions. Really, it's brilliant stuff.

At the end of the episode, we learn that the survivors have been located and are soon to be rescued. We also learn, via the flashback that is revealed to be a flashforward about two and a half years into the narrative future (as confirmed in a screen-capture of Jack's newspaper), that this is no ruse - for better or worse, they will be rescued. The central conflict that has dogged our characters for 3 years has been resolved - they found a way off the island.

Or have they? Jack's flashforward* (*flashforward isn't technically correct - see my comment below) is a cautionary tale that the viewers would do well to consider: the dangers of getting what you ask for and all that. Jack is miserable and has come to realize that he never actually wanted to get off the island - and now he wants answers and intends to return. Cuse and Lindelof have found a narrative justification for returning to the island without being forced to concoct ridiculous or overly complicated reasons to keep the Losties trapped and unable to contact the outside world. Now they (well, Jack, at least - but it's reasonable to assume he isn't alone in this) want to return and we want to return with them.

This is also a very cute way to get around certain practical issues endemic to producing a show of this unique sort: moving the time-frame ahead by 3 years or so allows for them to update each character's appearance and admit that they've aged, which was soon going to demand too much of our sense of disbelief. It also allows for the cast to change - to bring, say, Walt back or introduce someone totally new without having to claim once again that they were always there or someone stumbled on to the island. These tricks have been done, and now Lindelof and Cuse don't need to rely on them anymore. (Assuming, of course, that season four will now relocate the narrative present in 2007 or 2008 to show the survivors returning. But why wouldn't they, given that the ambiguity of their fate was what held our interest in the narrative frame of December 2004?)

I'm not going to speculate on matters of plot or theme, here, though the shoe does much to prompt plenty of new questions of this sort: who was left behind on the island (the Others, I assume - Locke too?), what has happened to the island over the last 2 and a half years (have those who remained been killed?), who's visitation did Jack attend (Michael's is my guess), and how will they ever get back are only some of the more interesting questions. But in closing I'll return to the Biblical thread that I visited yesterday: both the biblical tale of Joseph's brothers and of Moses (with whom Ben compared Jack in the finale) feature prolonged periods of suffering and travel before an eventual return. In Joseph's story, the family is eventually reunited but only after his brothers have been tested; in Moses' story, the people eventually reach their promised land, but only after a war and the death of Moses himself.

Which is simply to restate the obvious: that the flashforward isn't an indication of how the story ends, nor is the rescue the beginning of the end. The end of this first part or series, maybe. But if you think they'd leave us with an alcoholic, pill-addicted protagonist without offering him the opportunity to redeem himself in some way, you haven't been watching this show for the last three years.

LOST and the Bible: some notes

I've pointed out quite a lot of Biblical subtext in the Ben/Locke/Jacob relationship on Geoff Klock's blog (linked to your right) and at the Lost message board hosted by tvshowboards.com, but given that the finale airs tonight, it feels appropriate to record some of those thoughts here. (I mean, in all likelihood the finale will prove that they're wrong-headed anyway, so I'm running out of time, right?)

There's a certain bit of obviousness to the Ben/Jacob end of it. Benjamin, one of Jacob's 12 sons and one of only two children born of his favorite wife, Rachel, was a founder of one of the 12 tribes of Israel and one of the two tribes that would eventually break off to form the Kingdom of Judah after the exodus. More subtly, the Bible/Torah's Benjamin was also one of his father's favorites, often placed only behind Jacob's most favored son, Joseph - not coincidently, Rachel's other son. (One other commonality is obvious but obscure, and while it reveals little about the character, it reinforces the textual connection - the mother of both Lost's Benjamin and the Biblical Benjamin died after giving birth.)

Here's where it gets interesting: Joseph was attacked by his 10 other brothers, all of them jealous that he was their father's favorite, and dumped in a pit, left for dead until some Midianites wandered by and eventually bought him as a slave. John Locke was shot by Benjamin, who was similarly jealous of Locke's connection to the island and his ability to hear Jacob in the cabin, and likewise left for dead in a pit. An important difference, though, is that the Biblical Benjamin was the only brother that did not participate in the attack on Joseph.

So what does this mean for Lost? Well, one of the things that Joseph did to anger his brothers was tell them of his prophetic dreams, which suggested that he would rule over them. This eventually came true when, after a famine lasting seven years decimated Canaan, the brothers relocated to Egypt, which was now administered by Joseph. If I were to guess, Ben is being set up for a fall - just as the brothers unintentionally aided the prophecy when they sold Joseph into slavery, Ben will hasten his own destruction by trying to kill Locke. Given the eerily apologetic tone of Ben's voice-over in the promo for the season finale - 'everything i did, i did for the island' - I suspect that his famine is about to arrive.

The real question, though, is whether Locke is Joseph - will he re-emerge as Joseph did, unrecognizable and with great power? As a villain? (Joseph pretended to be a villain in order to test his brothers - but, importantly, he did reveal himself to Benjamin first, who was subsequently in on the ruse.) And what of the dreams? Prophetic visions are Desmond's deal, not Locke's, and Desmond's future seems ominous and potentially short. But while we're playing with names, why not ask whether Joseph's place could be taken by the only 'Joe' on the island - Kelvin 'Joe' Inman, the officer that conscripted Sayid into serving the American military and was living in the hatch when Desmond arrived several years ago? Sure, Desmond seemed to think that he killed him when they fought for control of the sailboat, but can we be certain?

More likely, of course, this is a red herring. If Lost has done anything well, it's done a great job of forcing us to shift our analytic lens, juggling its ancestor texts and influences so as to avoid ever seeming to favor one over the others for more than a short period of time. The Bible has been prominent this season, but that only leads me to suspect that it's usefulness must be coming to an end - and soon.

You get what you pay for, it seems

There’s an old but good joke about the guy who brags about getting something for free, only to later learn that he paid too much. I feel the same way about the Free Comic Book Day Amazing Spider-man comic.

It’s actually a very funny story. The story of why I feel this way, I mean, not the story in the comic book itself. The comic is dreadful: unremarkable and cliché in all the worst ways. The funny story is that, superficially anyway, it offers everything that I lambasted Spider-man 3 for failing to offer, which I described in a post on the Spidey Message Board. It’s very much in the vein of 'Spider-man as the loveable loser', where he has to stop the bad guy, rescue Aunt May’s cake, and be home in time for dinner. But the villain is bland and uninteresting, and the story is one that we’ve read a thousand times with nothing new or special to recommend it. This is the sort of comic that you only remember fondly because it was your first issue of Spidey. Otherwise, it ends up in the back of your closet. And you never look at it again.

What’s truly unforgivable, though, is the way this comic has been marketed and the way that it accounts for itself. Dan Slott was hyping the FCBD Amazing Spider-man as a story that would have a real impact on the Marvel Universe, but it’s hard to see why or how. Following Slott's comments, some readers have speculated that it takes place after the upcoming ‘One More Day’ storyline. Well, if it does, we’re not told and there's nothing in the comic to actually suggest as much. Some fans have suggested the opposite, then, that it’s actually an untold story from Spidey’s past – that would explain why there’s no Mary Jane, right? Or is Mary Jane the super-heroine that debuts here - Jackpot? (Apparently, I’m the only person who assumed MJ must be Jackpot, though this assumption does nothing to clear up MJ’s status in this confusing mess of a Spider-verse - if this is supposed to be in continuity, that is.) Others have done away with trying to make it fit somewhere and declared it to be outside continuity altogether. About the only thing we do know is that it doesn’t take place in anything resembling the narrative present.

I shouldn’t have to buy ‘One More Day’ to make some sense of this story, but I suppose that this is precisely what Marvel is going for. Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit in the planning department – the lack of context and by-the-numbers story suggests that this comic was only ever intended for the new readers and kids that FCBD is actually targeting, making Slott’s remarks seem confusing or confused at best and an outright lie at worst. Whatever. It’s a cute enough story, I suppose, but only if you can still count your age on your fingers. For the rest of us, it’s a god-awful mess.

Spider-man 3: The good, the bad, the very ugly

What more is there to say about Spider-man 3? I've avoided reading anything, so - for me, at least - there's still a lot to say. I'll be brief, but I feel required to include something quotable: it's a C-script with an A-budget. And while there are scenes that I could watch again and again - nearly anything with Sandman effects, but especially his first attempts to reconstitute himself, which is stunning not for its technical proficiency so much as its tenderness and subtlety - there are at least as many that I could do without ever seeing again.

First, the good. Eddie Brock is a great foil, keeping the masks off so the characters could emote even when it didn't seem necessary was a great idea, Willem Defoe's appearance is perfect, and the fight where Peter loses the ring makes for some great drama.

And now the bad. There are two main problems with this film. The first is one of genre: Spider-man's story should be a comedy, or at least a tragicomedy, but Raimi gives us a tragedy. While a lot of the structures of the classical or Shakespearean comedy and tragedy that I'm thinking of when I use these terms are superficially similar - the flawed hero, the struggle against the world, the difficulty with family, the fight for a seemingly impossible love - their tone, vocabulary, and aims differ mightily. The tragedy moves inexorably toward doom, though at the end it offers some cathartic consolation that hints at a fresh start. In a seemingly opposite movement, the comedy tends to be light-hearted and fun, as it's oriented toward the certain resolution of impossible circumstances in the service of love. (Well, it's hardly that simply, but that's hardly relevant.)

If you've seen the film, you know which sort of film Spider-man 3 provides us: Peter Parker is the flawed hero who supplies the personification of hubris, an over-confidence that we know is headed somewhere awful bad. The first two films also portrayed Spider-man as a tragic figure - which, now that I recognize it, perhaps explains why I never liked them as much as it seemed I was supposed to - but Raimi's love of Spider-man has turned into a masochistic obsession with his Spider-pain in this third installment. A simple rule of film - tragic or not - is that things will quickly turn bad if they start out too good: the better they start, the badder they get. Peter and Mary Jane have far too much going for them and, knowing that this is a Venom film, there's little doubt that we're in for a mighty bad fall. Where's the levity? Where's the heart that makes Spider-man so endearing? (A comedy, I might add, would likely employ more or less the reverse plot - they'd start out in trouble and end happy.)

Harry's death is our cathartic moment, I suppose, but it offers little of the consolation that it should. Why not? For the second of my two main problems. See, Spider-man 3 isn't even a particularly good tragedy. A tragedy works because the hero is sympathetic and/or likeable, even if he's a fiend too - think Othello or Charles Foster Kane. Peter Parker is simply a self-obsessed jerk, and Mary Jane and Harry are hardly any better. Peter hunts down the Sandman not because he's an escaped criminal but because he killed Ben Parker (An aside: Say what? Why was that necessary?); Mary Jane breaks up with Peter to run away from her own insecurities as much as she does to save him from Harry; and Harry saves Peter and Mary Jane not because he realizes that he cares about them despite how they've treated him, but because the butler told him they had nothing to do with his father's death. It's hard to like characters whose heroism is steeped in such self-absorption and selfishness. How many movies will we have to sit through before Aunt May finally gets it into Peter's head that Ben Parker wouldn't have wanted him to be irresponsible/isolated/vengeful/so dense?

The humor that we do get is effective when the tone is lighter but becomes more pained and painful as the film progresses. Bruce Campbell is hilarious as the maitre d', but the later jazz club scene is as bizarre and discomforting for the audience as it is for Mary Jane and Gwen. When Peter and Mary Jane share a brief moment at the film's end, I wonder why they even bother. Not just because they're both unwilling to put their care for the other's well-being on par with their own - much less ahead of their own, as Aunt May demands - and not just because Mary Jane's jealous of Spider-man's fame. And not because Peter was an incredible jerk and hit Mary Jane while he was under the thrall of the symbiote. (Another aside: What a cop-out! "It wasn't me, it was the alien suit that fell out of the sky!") Actually, it's all those reasons and more. They just don't seem to work as a couple. And they just don't seem to be terribly nice people. Catharsis should offer some small hope that things will get better, but I don't see why they - or we - could ever be under that impression.

How Whedon got his groove back

At this point in Whedon’s run, I’m willing to just give in and have some fun. Granted, he’s making it easier for me: it seems, at first, like some of structural similarities of the first three arcs - as I laid them out in this review many months ago - are no longer in play. But then, many of the elements of my cute little morphology are still haunting Astonishing X-Men. Looking at the story’s bare bones, not much has changed: something far more difficult to describe is happening in this latest arc, and this issue is a particularly wonderful example.

So what is Whedon doing differently here? He’s always been incredibly honest in laying out his ancestor texts for the reader in easy-to-read allusions: shades of early Claremont and especially the Dark Phoenix have been littered throughout, as well as Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already notice yourself, though – or anything that I hadn’t noted here before. But there’s a new element in the mix with these last few issues. Take the Beast’s bitter snarking at Agent Brand as their vehicles are disabled by a tactical “snowstrike” and they scurry for shelter: “You’re amoral, you’re abrasive, and right now you’re looking at me like I’m a taun-taun.” The reference - which you either understood immediately or eventually Googled out of sheer curiosity – is to the creature that Luke Skywalker slices open and crawls inside for warmth when he’s trapped on the ice-planet Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. It’s a tiny reference, (though certainly not a throwaway) but it opens the field immensely. I also think that we’d be right to suspect that the visuals of the Breakworld are meant to recall Dune, though I’m not familiar enough with the series to know if it goes beyond that. Regardless, Whedon isn’t just playing with just the X-Men sandbox anymore.

Though it’s much subtler, the Empire Strikes Back connection can also be read into the situation of the captive black SWORD agent that Overlord Kruun is torturing for information. We learn in this issue that he’s made a deal with one of the Breakworlders to give them Colossus in return for saving the Earth. And that this deal is no spur of the moment thing – it has, in fact, been in the works all along. (Though Agent Brand’s complicity is unclear. We don’t know if she planned it.) Sure, reimagining the scene in terms of Lando Calrissian betraying the Rebel Alliance doesn’t add anything to your experience as far as the plot’s concerned, but it makes the process of reading it a whole lot more fun.

Whedon extends his palette of literary references far deeper in time, too. The rebel Breakworlders explain to Colossus that they believe the prophecy – the one that says Colossus will destroy their world – might mean that he’ll destroy the order of the world, a sort of restructuring from which something better will emerge. Their interpretation recalls the Biblical origins of ‘apocalypse’, where ‘the end’ is only ever the end of life-as-we-know-it and not life, period. I’m probably wrong to also read this as a gentle chiding of typical comic book doomsday-prophecizing, where the apocalypse is always the end of everything in existence, but it certainly stands in stark contrast to the usual the-end-is-nigh super-hero stories where the fate of all existence hangs in the balance. Despite the chaos and death that necessarily accompanies it, apocalyptic literature has historically admitted that what follows a day of judgment is eventually better than what preceded it. It’s nice to see Whedon recall that.

Whedon isn’t doing anything particularly new - the clever appropriation of ideas and deepening of subtext through allusion is as old as writing itself – but he is getting more creative with where and from whom he steals those ideas. I’m reminded here of what Geoff Klock says about Matt Fraction’s Casanova: “Before anyone objects that Casanova is hardly new, drawing in everything in its gravity, Casanova FEELS new, which is all I am really asking for.” Whedon is still writing a love letter to Claremont and Morrison, but it no longer feels like that’s all he’s doing, or that it’s even the main thrust of Astonishing X-Men any longer.

The funny thing about mediocre issues...

I’ve delayed writing about All-Star Superman #7. Not because it’s a masterpiece that defies description, and not because it’s an unmitigated disaster that I could spend a dozen paragraphs unpacking. No, it poses a much subtler difficulty: it’s just sort of mediocre. Granted, a mediocre issue of All-Star Superman is still much better than a mediocre issue of nearly anything else, and even very good by another book’s standards. So where does it go wrong?

Two things catch my attention, one relating to Morrison’s half of the storytelling (if we can ever so conveniently separate a story into ‘halves’ like that) and the other to Quitely’s. As far as the writing goes, this issue stands out as a curious sort of failure for the same reason as issue 3. That is, Morrison forgets that what makes Superman interesting – and what’s made the rest of the run so great – isn’t Superman himself, but rather the way that his supporting cast provide us with all sorts of wonderful paths into and through an otherwise clichéd archetype. In issue 2, we feel Lois’ paranoia and her doubts; in number 4, Jimmy’s desperation to preserve Superman’s quasi-mystical aura is tragic and sweet, especially since it serves to reminds us just how human and fallible Superman really is. This sort of absence of any humanizing frame is ‘Thing No. 1.’ Instead, we get a fun but fairly mindless battle that depends even more than usual on Quitely’s ability to sell the story. And while Quitely is almost always more than up to the task, he stumbles on this issue.

This is ‘Thing No. 2’, and at least three scenes caught my attention immediately and for all the wrong reasons. I can’t, for the life of me, tell determine just what the hell is happening on the first page. I don’t know what or why a contorted body is floating in space and I don’t know what Quintum is crashing into. This isn’t all Quitely’s fault, of course, but it doesn’t get any better on the second page, where Superman is releasing his adolescent Sun-Eater into space. We don’t really know this until he explains it later in the issue, though, and so we’re all on our own in determining exactly what’s happening in 5 dialogue-free panels where Superman may or may not be fighting with the octopus-like creature, since it has no face, there's no dialogue, and so there's no conventional way to express what's occurring to the reader. Retrospectively, it seems like this should be almost akin to a foster-parent saying goodbye to a child, but I shouldn’t have to complete the entire issue in order for the scene to work. While theoretically a given moment could be purposefully vague or difficult, there's no reason that it should simply be left incomplete. But the final error is the most egregious: Steve Lombard throws a bizarro-mutated Allie out a window but the dialogue clearly indicates that it should have been the bizarro-clone that took the faceplant on to the street below. That’s not a lapse into poor storytelling, as it was in the first two instances – that’s just sloppy.

Funny enough, these failings actually help to call attention to the near-flawless execution of the first story arc. (Especially since I bought the hardcover collection on the same day.) It’s easy to harp on about the bad stuff while missing the good simply because you expect or demand it. Little steps backward like this issue remind you that you can’t take great comics for granted.

Lost in the Land of Women

'In the Land of Women' has all the naive enthusiasm of early 'Dawson's Creek', but it wants to be a remake of 'Garden State'. Rather than starring an aspiring teen director, this story is about a 20-something screenwriter that's had to compromise and is writing for soft-core porn; rather than New Jersey, we're given another butt-of-all-jokes sort of state, that being Michigan. And it's too self-conscious, too eager to let us in on these ambitions and jokes. This is a problem, and not simply because the cute meta moments are so sweet that they're practically candy-coated - the problem is also that it's just not a very good joke.

The film's final scene says it all. Carter, the writer who had traveled to Michigan to take care of his grandma and find himself in the process, is sitting in a diner, trying to finish writing the story of her life. (Let me guess - that story was turned into this screenplay, right? Blech.) A waitress wanders over and tries to help, but mostly just exchanges some adorably flirtatious banter with him. And so a discussion about how to end the film, in a scene that has basically nothing to do with the rest of the movie, becomes itself the end of the film. It's painful not just in that sugar-rot-in-your-teeth sort of way, but for its complete disregard for the intelligence of its audience.

Another significant problem is revealed in this scene, too. Carter is writing about his grandma when he should be writing about himself. Throughout the film, grandma has only ever been a pale imitation of Sophia Petrillo; the story is Carter's, after all, and she's interesting only insofar as she provides some comic relief for his quarter-life crisis. (Likewise, Kevin Williamson lost sight of the fact that Dawson,his title character, was the emotional center as the series went on - joining Joey and Pacey in the end seemed aimed at surprising his audience rather than satisfying them.)

But then the film isn't quite sure of whose story it's telling from the 30-minute-mark on. Carter dominates the entire first act, but as soon as the mother and daughter from across the street appear, the film re-focuses variously through any one of the now three protagonists. That metafictional element where Carter is writing the very film that he stars in - an already too nice and too obvious trick - isn't even structurally coherent, as it demands that Carter tell stories that he didn't know about characters that he didn't really understand. (Well, the latter is certainly true of Sarah, the mother, if not her daughter.)

To what end, then? In order to broaden its market appeal, I suppose.