Ok so I wrote the following for Deathscribe 2011—which is, for those who came in late, a contest for live performances of original short – horror themed – radio plays. And since your friend and humble narrator was once again  rejected. Which is getting to be an annual event where this particular contest is concerned. So anyway,

Until there’s time to record these suckers myself,  figured I’d give you crazy kids a look.

It’s 1946. And America, America is one tough country. The landscape cut between New York and Los Angeles is a single poorly lit, rain slick, street cruised by black sedans and lined with whispering speakeasies, sparkling gambling dens and sweat cheap boarding houses. Every policeman is either bought or for sale. It’s infested with chip-toothed hoods perpetually muffled beneath bent fedoras, rich thrill-seeking dolls slumming to satiate their reckless appetites, neat dark con men looking to graft every stray buck and painted ladies with sharpened virtues. Not one of them shows their face before nightfall, and unfortunately for them … they are not alone.

http://documents.scribd.com.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/2rbvifb4g017ryz4.pdf?t=1319731819

Ok, it sucks to have to write what I’m about to write and to be to completely honest, I suck for having decided to write it. But there are things that need to be said in no uncertain terms and things that simply cannot be societally tolerated under any circumstances and you and I are gonna have a little chat about at least a couple and maybe even as many as three of those things here today. You see for over a month Princeton Professor and noted homeless guy in a Fredrick Douglass costume impersonator Cornell West has been engaged in something, rather reprehensible, I am no longer willing to ignore.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You could probably properly date Professor West’s current run of saying stuff that’s unacceptable to an Ed Show appearance earlier this summer during which he proposed that President Obama should be more like Martin Luther King Jr. and focus more on “bringing the love” but I’m not going to.  Like a lot of the Gen X and younger left, my tolerance level for the boomer left’s compulsive need to over-reference the 60’s is substantial. It’s something they do and aren’t likely to stop doing so there’s usually no upside to hassling about it.  I’m also not going to date the point at which Professor West crossed a line (there’s a cultural obligation to smack him back from and down for) to a recent State of the Black Union, during which he proclaimed: “Obama Is NOT The Fulfillment Of Martin Luther King’s Dream!”

See, as you may have already guessed what we’re here to discuss is how Professor West has been “Tomming” and though a statement in that context could be considered “Crabbing” because of the intended audience it couldn’t be “Tomming” since that’s a whole other thing. Now for those who came in late, I should probably back up and define those terms. Crabbing references observation that crabs in a cooking pot will cling to one another rather than allow one of their number to escape. In the African American community it’s been used to describe behavior determined to constitute “keeping another brother down” … but for me, to count as crabbing, those acts have to be part of an internecine struggle and include attacks aimed at delegitimizing a target in terms of his or her blackness.  To clarify here’s a for instance … Sharpe James referring to Cory Booker as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” or Bobby Rush telling an audience of black voters that “… he isn’t one of us and we don’t have time to teach him to be one of us” while running against Barack Obama, that was them crabbing.

“Tomming” is a troubling term on a couple of levels, starting with how it’s used in two ways:

1. Uncle Tom: A black man who will do anything to stay in good standing with “the white man” including betray his own people.
2. Uncle Tom: Term used by black people to try to convince other black people that working, education, living well, and setting a good example for their children is selling out.

Because that second definition is such horseshit it’s more like unicorn shit and the circumstances necessary for an occurrence of that first one so rare, that the term is functionally off limits at any altitude above street. Basically everyone who would use it describe someone Tomming as in the first, has been called a Tom by some jackass attempting to describing them as one in the second. So let’s just leave two in the cultural trash heap where it belongs and move on to what would be necessary in terms of action and intent, to actually-accurately charge an individual with Tomming as in that first definition.

“I think one of the best things to come out of Obama’s election is the retirement of The Office of HNIC (intermittently held by Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington among others)”

Well first off, as with crabbing that individual’s acts (attacks) would need to involve an attempt to delegitimize his or her target in terms of his or her blackness. Second, unlike crabbing, that individual would need to be making the attack in question on another African American primarily for the consumption of White America and further, as a part of some effort to attain or maintain an exalted status or position of some kind in the eyes of White America (the media for example). Third, such an attack would also need to come from an African American of the left (writ large) and be aimed at an African American also on the left. Black Republicans essentially forfeit their ability to question “blackness” when they self-identify as Republicans and as “authentic blackness” is only a commodity of value to white’s on the left, launching such attacks from left to right would be as pointless as it would be ineffective (think we can agree that an attack that can do no harm, isn’t an attack).

It’s depressing to, but I already think what Professor West has been up to of late meets that standard, and can be called Tomming. So instead of spending the rest of today’s word count expressing my regret, disgust and anger over having come to that conclusion; I’m gonna try and recount-contextualize West’s acts and actions then just ask what you think.

Now strange as it may sound, the first item on that recount-contextualize list is not something that Professor West said or wrote himself.  It’s an unnerved attitude that started to bubble up on the Professional Left that was maybe best personified by Joan Walsh, who over a series columns, expressed first her resentment of lefty persons of color who wrote in droves to correct her whenever she claimed to represent President Obama’s “base” and then her dismay that Obama was not the sort of “black leader” liberals of her sort, extraction and generation had come to expect. But that kind of stuff wasn’t just coming from Walsh, there was a notable amount of white privilege loss angst seeping out of the Professional Liberal-Left. And it was pissing people off. More importantly, by that I don’t mean that it was pissing “Jesse Jackson” off, I mean that it was pissing “people” off and could not therefore be fixed (read: swept under the nearest whatever) by doing a joint interview with a “designated black spokesperson” and being declared not a racist.  And both the expressed angst and the less than happy reactions to it were expressions of how the racial politics by proxy arrangement-system on the left has been steadily disintegrating over the last few years.  Well technically, it was steadily disintegrating then Barack Obama’s election went and blew large parts of what remained of it up. White liberal politicians (like Alex Sink) are no longer able to court black voters exclusively by proxy and still bank on getting their vote.

That arrangement’s also breaking down in the media (though not as quickly). The days when ABC News could invite someone like Tavis Smiley on during its election night coverage explicitly to provide only “black folk” color commentary are mostly over and the days when say Maureen Dowd could type out a racial slip up and move on by trotting out hiding behind  her “black friends” have mostly come to an end. Which might sound airy, but on a practical level the development’s put a lot of people who were in the business of being “designated black spokespersons” out of work, drained power from those in the racial proxy political racket and has threatened the job security (influence) of the white professional left.  So the angst makes sense, there are after all only so many elected-appointed or pundit slots to go around. What I’m pointing out here is that we’d reached a point where the people from both sides of that old order transaction (from the aforementioned professional lefties, political candidates and designated black men to the congressional black caucus) were getting increasingly and vocally antsy about the evolving new order of things. I suppose it was only a matter of time before one of them crossed the line in an attempt to defend their once secure position in the order of things. And that, well, brings us back to Cornell West.

“President Obama has a “fear of free black men,” says the celebrity professor from Princeton by way of Harvard, explaining why the president feels “at home” among people who are not black. This remark made me wonder: Which of these men do you think, is actually free, and which afraid of who he truly is?”

You’re reading this, so you already know that back in April Professor West showed up on an ill-conceived MSNBC documentary (The Black Agenda hosted by Ed Shultz) and promptly referred President Obama as a “Black Mascot” of Wall Street oligarchs and The Reverend Al Sharpton as a “mascot” of the Obama administration.  He followed that up by giving an interview to Death of the Liberal class author Chris Hedges during which he described President Obama as having “a certain fear of free black men.… It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening” referred to Obama as having “a certain rootlessness, a deracination” and being “most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want” … neither of which you’d have to go out on a limb to describe as attacks aimed at delegitimizing his target’s blackness. West was in no uncertain terms asserting a “self-anointed power to confirm or withdraw Obama’s standing as an authentic black man.”

But, why? What was Professor West up to? And why am I just now asking you to ask yourself whether or not whatever it counted as Tomming? Well, initial “assessments” portrayed West as having been engaged in a petulant personal pissing match with President Obama over some half imagined slights.  Others threw rocks at his academic intellectual credentials. Hedges of course rose to the defense of “my friend Cornel West” even going so far as to call him “a prophet” and all those criticizing West “liberal sell-outs.”

Which was all fairly funny (though infuriating) until West didn’t stop. He headed back to TV at every opportunity to launch his attack again and again. And his audience no longer seemed to be the State of the Black Union crowd but rather bookers at CNN, MSNBC, ABC News and even Democracy Now. You couldn’t help but think on how he kept putting himself forward as the authentic black voice Obama wasn’t—in his telling (as he had from the beginning by informing Hedges that “Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested…”) Now Professor West and Smiley (Sancho Panza) have embarked on a “Poverty Tour” and it’s all kicking back up.

The Tour’s stop in Detroit (where Louis Farrakhan was their opening act) was met with protests and wildly panned by radio host Steve Harvey, who referred to West and Smiley as “Toms” … a charge that prompted Adam Serwer to write “Yo, whether you agree with West and Smiley or not, Tomming is most definitely NOT what they’re doing” and then “Being black and critical of Obama doesn’t make you a Tom, anymore than supporting Obama makes you a sellout” which is how you wound up here. Because even though I disagreed with Harvey (thinking he was using Tom in that second way) I simply couldn’t think of a better way to describe what Brother West has been on about than Tomming as in the first.

“God help us if Cornel West and Tavis Smiley getting arrested is our last chance at a democratic awakening.”

So now I’m going to ask you. Does my definition of Tomming seem fair? Do the addendums to it I laid out? If your answer’s “no” to either question … leave me an angry comment and cop a walk. If your answer’s “yes” on the other hand, here are a few additional questions: Did West make a conscious attempt to racially delegitimize President Obama and even his black supporters? Is he a person of the left making said charges against others on the left? Has the intended audience of West’s rhetorical broadsides been a) White America or b) Black America? And finally did the attack constitute a betrayal of other African Americans?  Yes, I know that last one’s a doozy because “betrayal” is such huge thing to tag someone with.  But that’s why the racial politics by proxy stuff is up above. Because that last answer, that doesn’t just hinge on West’s motive. If you think he engaged in all of the above but can say the only one hurt by it was President Obama as an individual, you’d have to conclude that West wasn’t Tomming. On the other hand, if you agree that West has been acting out some script posing him as the kind of “black leader” liberals of Walsh and Hedges’ sort, extraction and generation had come to expect, and further that in doing so was engaged in a conscious attempt to restore the “designated black man” status he enjoyed while African American politics was stuck in a patronage based by proxy state, then he’s been Tomming.

It’s that simple and yet not simple at all. Even if it is accurate here, it is an ugly label to hurl at a guy. But if you honestly think the cap fits, you just have to make sure he wears it. Because in the long run, the only thing worse than calling Professor West one, is him being one.

Are You So Much a Fucking Loser, You Can’t Tell When You’ve Won?

One or two of you may just recall my attempt to describe a certain – mostly useless –portion of the American Left in terms of the profoundly negative effect said sect and it’s quasi religious belief system evidences whenever it rears its head in contemporary left wing politics.  Now, it was my intention to follow that post up, to explain what I was on about in greater depth. And the last week or so has certainly provided rant impetus enough for two or three such posts. But I honestly don’t and didn’t want to say any of what’s to follow angrily.

Click here to view the embedded video.

No really. I want to be clear; I want every lefty liberal progressive democrat type person who happens across 2112 and reads this thought experiment of mine to understand, to trust that it isn’t just another anti Veruca Salt Dems (aka Professional Left-er aka Firebagger aka ObamaBashBot) reactionary counter attack screed of some kind. Yes. It is true that I’m less than fond of the Greenwald’s, Vanden Heuvel’s, Green’s and Hamsher’s that haunt and plague democratic politics as if they were the gallu of ancient Assyrian myth … But even that isn’t really about them personally. And this thing here today, it is really about all of us.

So rather than take shots at Joan Walsh’s latest episode of chronic political idiocy turrettes, let’s take the occasion of Adam Serwer’s “Is Obama Toast? – The president’s chances in 2012 don’t look good” to try and unpack the basic ideological fallacy at the core of Serwer’s general thought process re the current president of the United States … though not in quite the way you might expect. Because, I’m not of a mind to take issue with a single assessment of how the political stars are aligning for our President (Jamelle Bouie already kind of did that), instead I’m gonna use the oft stated sentiments of the Professional Left to try and lay out why I’ve come to reject and why you should reject the entire premise-pose of Sewer’s view of politics-n-progressivism along with the conceptual framework that gave birth to it.

Because he is so not alone.

“… there is a recurring liberal fantasy that if only the President would give a stirring speech, he would sweep the country along with the sheer power of his poetry. In this view, writes Chait: Every known impediment to the legislative process – special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion-are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech … This does happen – if you’re watching the American president – but not if your actually watching what goes on in Washington.”

On the surface of it much of what Serwer (and the rest of the Pro Left) has said over the last two years makes a certain amount of sense. He’s a self described progressive journalist and that piece above was just him taking a pessimistic look at some numbers the day after a Democratic politician did something that really disappointed him. From the right step back however, it’s one more in a long line of pieces he’s penned and statements he’s made that could be used to illustrate the endemic-suicidal flaw in the left’s worldview and view of itself.

But maybe I should back up for a minute to explain that in my view “The Left” as a group has three intertwined self defeating personality traits; all of them have been on display in Serwer’s writing. We’re only gonna zoom in on one of them today, but for the record they are (in no particular order) 1) A belief that a noble though crushing defeat can be sweeter than victory and is, in fact, the only true victory (example: how Al Gore went from being indistinguishable from Bush at least re Nader to being a virtual saint) … 2) A belief that pure progressive saviors can appear out of nowhere, be found worthy and once so ordained smite the left’s enemies of with eternal flames lifted directly from John F. Kennedy’s tomb—which I suppose would look like that bit from the end of Krull; I mean if it were possible (example: the lefts general insistence that happenstance rather than careful career nurturing can and will produce top notch candidates for the court, cabinet posts and high office) … and 3) A belief that being of the left constitutes membership in a scrappy upstart rebel alliance of some kind that must, to be true, stand forever opposed to the dark imperial forces of “The Man” (examples: the odd notion that President Obama can lose as an individual and/or Serwer’s retort-statement during a Twitter conversation that it’s not the Job of “progressive journalists”  to “support democrats politically” – though to be as accurate as possible it was Twitter so he probably actually wrote “prog” and “dems” – but his end point was the same).

In case you haven’t already guessed, it’s fatal flaw number three that we’re going to be throwing rocks at today. And we’re gonna start by rejecting the anthropomorphized premise of the above mentioned piece and others like it, by dealing with how Barack Obama cannot lose in 2012. Don’t get me wrong, he may not be reelected, but he can’t “lose.” In that I’d need someone to explain to me how exiling a do-gooder millionaire with unlimited earnings potential to a tropical paradise (often referred to as Hawaii) with his lovely wife and two beautiful daughters to follow in the footsteps of his Carter-Clinton predecessors by – you know: writing best sellers, having a foundation that makes the world a better place and taking time off rescue the occasional wayward hiker from North Korea – could constitute a personal loss by any rational definition.  A Romney (or gods forbid Perry) presidency would certainly be a loss for Democrats, for Social Security, Medicare, Universal Healthcare, Consumer Protection, Reproductive Freedom, Civil Rights Enforcement, Green Tech, Education and for the United States in general … But individually, for Obama? Not so much.

“While The Right has learned to play the system’s levers for their goals at every level from the hyper-local to the national en masse; The Left imagines a system that can be manipulated just as effectively by the comparatively minuscule group of elected “Democrats.”"

You see, of the two major problems-issues with fatal flaw number three, the one that may be the most dangerous is how it causes even politically engaged and self-described lefties to see themselves as and worse to act as if they see themselves as disconnected from Democrats politically.  While The Right has learned to play the system’s levers for their goals at every level from the hyper-local to the national en masse; we imagine that the same system can be manipulated just as  effectively by a comparatively minuscule group of elected “Democrats.” In other words, The Right has actual training camps to teach people on the right how to run for County Clerk, for School Board, for City Council. The Left has Netroots Nation panels on What to Do When Your President Just Isn’t That Into You. And that’s because the left see’s “itself” and “The Democrats” (read: the group of a few hundred elected and or appointed individuals) as separate entities. As individuals the right mostly see themselves as “The Right” and that tends to leave The Left sitting on the sidelines loudly wondering why a few hundred, can’t just win the game they’re playing vs. tens of thousands—or more.

Because it encourages The Left to personalize (“anthropomorphize”) situations and interactions that are inherent mechanics of a system, it promotes a mindset from which elected Democrat’s political-policy defeats can be rather too comfortably imagined and therefore written up and acted on (to the often politically pathetic extent that they are) as if said defeats were their’s personally, rather than as what they are … political setbacks for The Left and defeats for The Left’s agenda. It promotes lines of criticism; that eagerly reduce occasionally terrifyingly complex societal-political dynamics to forces susceptible to manipulation via a deftly applied personality traits or sheer force of personal will (i.e. complaints that the imperfections of The Affordable Care Act were caused by President Obama having undersized testicles or being unwilling to “fight” rather than how far left the Gang of 15′s home state politics allowed them to go with their votes). It blurs the distinction between the weapons of personal rhetorical combat or engagement and the tools of national or local political combat or engagement (portraying the “bully pulpit” as an atomic bomb). It transforms political missteps into character flaws and instances of politicians acting in ways that are politically expedient into moral failings (i.e. complaints that Senator McCaskill took a position on unemployment benefits extension that is rightfully unacceptable to the coastal urban left because she is a bad person with insufficient backbone rather than because the state from which McCaskill was elected is, on its best/most progressive day, center-right).

In addition to the negative effect the trait has on straight criticism, it makes it nearly impossible for even a guy as smart as Serwer to work reality based suggestion solutions into their critiques. It fosters a dangerous brand of intellectual laziness. I mean, by regularly thinking things like … that Gitmo isn’t going to be closed because Barak Obama doesn’t “care enough” to try hard enough, lefty commentators have effectively excused themselves from grappelling with mechanics of how a president might go about combating-overcoming the opposition from – well – a bipartisan majority in congress.  Someone like Serwer gets to just say, the president doesn’t care enough which makes him bad and wrong then move on.

Just as fatal flaw number three encourages The Left to anthropomorphize problems; it allows them to believe that every policy problem has a solution that’s character or personnel based. If the President cared enough every politician in New York State from Peter King to (pre junk-shots) Anthony Weiner would bow before the light of his power rin—I mean, will, drop their opposition to trying KSM in their state and generally do the right thing.  Or if only they weren’t for a group of harridan shrew valkyrie’s intent on asserting their non-existent masculinity The White House wouldn’t have been for an intervention in Libya that basically the whole world was for. Misguided belief in personality based solutions makes it possible for good smart honest liberals to truly believe that simply barnstorming through republican states would be just the tool needed to end the Bush Tax Cuts or kill Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

That isn’t just silly, it’s maladaptive. Which is not to say that the personal plays no part in the political, it can and sometimes it does. The difference between say John Tester’s centrist positioning and Joe Lieberman’s is clearly a matter of the different personalities of the two men. Tester’s a guy trying to be a Democrat in a red state. Lieberman’s a guy who said he killed the Affordable Care Act’s Medicare Buy-in because Markos Moulitsas was too happy about it. So don’t think for a moment that I’m implying that The Liberal Left was wrong to put their chips another just as viable candidate and try and  do better than Blanche Lincoln. I’m saying that if the tendency to treat every centrist move – whatever the politics are – as venality drains away the margin of victory and cost us senate seats in Montana and Missouri, it won’t be a loss for John Tester or  Claire McCaskill, it’ll be a loss for The Left, our agenda and frankly (given the current GOP) our Nation. I’m saying that even though challenging Mary Landrieu in a primary wouldn’t be a bad idea, we are all better off with Landrieu in the Senate; than with the diapered David Vitter Republican who’d replace her.

“Are you so much a fucking loser, you can’t tell when you’ve won?”

– From Dusk Till Dawn

Now I’d like to finish this up by doubling back to the Quentin Tarantino penned verbiage I cribbed for the subtitle of this post and to that “It’s not the job of progressive journalists” thing Serwer said on Twitter. You see I (and I’m sure you) hear things like that a lot. We hear them because once a group that defines itself as a home for scrappy revolutionaries—one of your own becoming “The Man” become something that’s difficult to deal with at a very basic level. Reflexive attacks on and distrust of power are so common place, so accepted as the proper default position of a true lefty that any avenue of attack is acceptable and any motive for attack excusable. If Ed Schultz wants to edit a joke of Harry Reid’s into something he can rant angrily about, cool. If Glenn Greenwald wants to attack for not closing Gitmo and portray accused rapists and military guys charged with espionage as individuals who should be above the law, it’s still ok to call him motivated by rule of law concerns. Almost any attack can be rationalized and any defense is automatically suspect.

I think of that line from “From Dusk Till Dawn” a lot. Whenever a lefty blogger or prog pundit responds to criticism of criticism with an “It’s not the job of progressive journalists to support Democrats” or see a common online liberal utterance like “Democrats Ain’t Shit,” (yes, they’re essentially the same statement) and every time some lefty somewhere does or says something clearly motivated by the second problematic aspect of fatal flaw number three. I think of that line because as much as I’d like to rant some more, it really does sum up the basic logical fallacy of a self identified liberal referring to “Democrats” with any level detach or disdain. If Democrats aren’t shit, you aren’t shit, your policy agenda isn’t shit, your belief in what your country should or could be isn’t shit and if you’re a progressive pundit or journalist and you’ve honestly said supporting your own politics isn’t your job; you’ve not only answered that question in the affirmative, you’ve just failed to explain what you’re good for.

To Be Continued …

Guys, I have a question and it’s not really an earth-shattering question but it’s been on my mind so here goes: It’s weird that We Are the Night (aka Wir Sind Die Nacht) is an anti feminist, anti lesbian, lesbian vampire film … isn’t it? I mean, it is odd, that a pair of screenwriters and a director took what you could honestly describe as career detours to make a glamour infused, Berlin set, lesbian vampire flick (that is not, despite what you may have read elsewhere, in any way related to Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark … at least not thematically) even though they weren’t – you know – at all enthusiastic about the whole lesbian vampire part; right? But maybe I should start closer to the beginning …

Click here to view the embedded video.

THERE ARE SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS BELOW

On the surface at least We Are the Night plays like your basic a horror cinema trifle, like a more or less entertaining though forthrightly derivative but slickly designed and creatively lensed week-night of on-demand viewing. And it all starts off well enough, introducing us to the film’s primary trio of lost girls via a photo gallery that floats back through the centuries then opens up on the vamps in question – Louise, Nora and Charlotte – as they make a meal of the crew and passengers of a private jet before leaping out into the howling Berlin night.  The remainder of the proceedings ostensibly concerns the trio’s encounter with lo-tech Lisbeth Salander clone Lena (Karoline Herfurth) and more to the point with her penchant for street thievery, blond cops named Tom (Max Reimelt) and sophisticated-seductive (and of course centuries old) vampires named Louise (Nina Hoss .. doing something like a Keifer Sutherland vs. Delphine Seyrig, impression). Right about now, you may be thinking you don’t need me to tell you where things go from there, but you’re wrong.

“Dennis Gansel orignaly wrote the script back in 1999. He pitched the movie to an enthusiastic Nina Hoss. But the script was in development hell for several years. First Franka Potente was going to direct but with the flop of Creep, no one wanted to invest in german horror films. Gansel almost gave up the hope until the release and succes of Twilight sparked a wave of vampire films and the succes of Gansel’s The Wave gave him free hands.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, Lena goes through the at first intrigued, then scared, then thrilled by her un-life, with the uber-sultry Louise, the energetic-bouncy Nora (Anna Fischer) and cold-hearted 1930 screen siren Charlotte (Jennifer Ulrich) routine. And yeah, you guessed it, the aforementioned blond and therefore kind-hearted cop’s infatuation-thing for Lena draws him in too close to the mini-coven, whereupon all matter of pissed off nosferatu hell breaks loose. But none of that’s really the what that’s the what. The thing about We Are the Night that’s worth taking a closer look at doesn’t have much to do with its Underworld meets The Lost Boys love triangle plot mechanics or its sleep all day party through the Berlin night like bloodthirsty Sex in the City extras. It’s how the film works through its stolen Lamborghinis, fucked-n-drained boy toys, cruising broken-into upscale shopping establishment shenanigans on a thematic level that’s stayed on my mind. It’s like Gene Siskel said … A film isn’t about what it’s about, it’s about how it’s about what it’s about. And We Are the Night is about how being a “lesbian vampire” is one unnatural step too far.

You see, the film is set in a world without male vampires, and I don’t mean that there aren’t any in the film, I mean one of the first “what being a vampire in this film means rules” we’re introduced to is that there are no male vampires. There were, but they were destroyed by their own foolishness and the remaining female vampires apparently all got together afterwards and decided not to make anymore of the troublesome-quarrelsome louts. (Which makes a lot of sense when you think about it) and if we were talking about a German lesbian vampire film made in say 1971 would likely have made for enough lesbian vampire-ness to make Jesus Franco blush, but in 2011 not so much. In the here and now the  “alternative lifestyle” of We Are the Night’s vampy coven functions as kind of hovering doom.

Not only does Lena recoil from every post transformation girl-girl overture; she’s only bitten (read: cursed) in the first place because she’s a bit of a junkie who’s willing to go gay for pay (read: drugs). Moreover, their male vamp free world is portrayed as so explicitly detached from the proper place and functions of femininity that various aspects of it torment and then destroys each of the primary women in turn. Nora’s bisexual promiscuity is depicted as unsafe sexual recklessness that exposes her then gets her killed during a massive shootout with Berlin’s rather well armed and strangely nonplused police department. Charlotte’s homosexuality is shown as what you’d have to call a kind of lapsed heterosexuality that’s cut her off from her proper state – the reality and possibility of motherhood – and therefore eats away at her like an Ebola infected wound until she takes her own life. Louise’s Sapphic inclinations are at least seen as her default setting. However, she’s posed a predatory gay who seduces over and literally infects previously heterosexual women and is in the end killed during mortal (well, immortal) combat provoked by her unwillingness to allow Lena to leave her for Tom (read: the straight world) despite rejection after rejection.

Even Louise’s opening narration is all about how finding the right man is the most powerful thing in the world. Which plays as a fairly bizarre thing for her to have said until she’s tossed out into the open air sunlight and you quickly realize that it was her offering American Beauty style commentary on the bond between Lena and the fatally wounded Tom. For whom, Lena quickly decides in the end to break the one and only vampire commandment we’ve been exposed to by sharing her blood and bringing him into the ranks of the undead. Then for anyone who still hasn’t fully absorbed it’s rather regressive point the film then puts an in bold period on the goings on by having Tom’s police partner discover the site of Lena and Louise’s deadly final duel, surmise what must have occurred (no, really … the cops in this film are singularly un-shocked by all of the super powered women sprouting fangs and bursting into flames in around them) and grin approvingly at the thought of how nature’s balance has been restored by Lena and Tom’s post-death romance.

Now, believe it or not guys, I am neither exaggerating nor extrapolating here. All of that stuff, that’s just in the film. No idea why it is, but it is. And to be honest, there were times when it brought to mind that sick anti-abortion horror film that came out last year. So here’s my original question again for the record: Why would an “acclaimed” filmmaker go to all the trouble of making a genre film that offers its audience a horror-fantasy world that’s essentially a bad parody of a feminist utopia that the female protagonist explicitly rejects in favor of traditional (albeit post-mortal coil) boy-girl domesticity and that goes pretty far out of its way to equate homosexuality with a curse-disease as utterly unnatural as … vampirism?

Take your time, think about it. I’ll wait patiently, ‘cause I’m kinda curious and I got nothing.

Ok so there’s this post debt ceiling budget deal post up at The People’s View called: Paul Krugman is a Political Rookie. Or How Barack Obama Left John Boehner Holding the Teabag, Again. And it’s interesting and nice to see and all that because your friend and humble narrator here is as you may have noted rather sick and tired of being sick and tired of seeing the liberal left (by which I do not mean “progressives” but do mean people from the McGovern wing of the democratic party—which has specialized in getting its ass kicked for like 40 years) overrepresented in the media and therefore in discussions on the left. But much to my surprise, I’m about to argue that Paul Krugman is not strictly speaking a “rookie.”  Don’t get me wrong, Krugman’s wrong this time and usually is wrong whenever he steps away from discussions of pure abstract economics to offer advice and or commentary related politics and or public policy, but the man is not, in fact, a rookie. You see that characterization, calling him a rookie, presumes that Paul’s been getting this stuff so wrong because he’s misguided and/or naive. He is not.

“Joining the ideologue spheres’ pure, fanatic, indomitable hysteria, Krugman declares the deal a disaster – both political and economic – of course providing no evidence for the latter, which I find curious for this Nobel winning economist. He rides the coattails of the simplistic argument that spending cuts – any spending cuts – are bad for a fragile economy, ignoring wholeheartedly his own previous cheerleading for cutting, say, defense spending.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s just that Krugman’s definition of “political success” simply doesn’t include things like say winning elections and passing legislation. What he’s clearly after is something closer to personal affirmation via political debate. He honestly wants to hear arguments from politicians that tell him that he’s right more than he wants anything else and so considerations like those politicians continuing to win elections after they’ve made him feel better just isn’t something that enters into his calculus. Think about it: Krugman was for a public option even if that meant the bill didn’t pass and kids with preexisting conditions continued to go without health insurance. He’s for nominating Elisabeth Warren even if that means she spends a year in limbo not getting the job and Scott Brown gets to keep his. He’s for risking our AAA bond rating, defaulting on our debt and tossing the world’s economy into utter chaos just to show those naughty-evil-bad republicans that we too are mad as hell and aren’t going to take their sh-t anymore (all on the bet that all victory required was a willingness to call a bluff that sadly-scarily clearly wasn’t a bluff by the way).

RT @fivethirtyeight: My latest extrapolation from @thehill’s whip count: R’s approve 153-87, D’s against 59-132, bill FAILS 212-219.

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I mean, the man’s favorite political speech … is probably this concession speech.  And he isn’t alone. And you know what, this is mfking America, so that’s all their mfking right and god bless the professional left and all that; but their ramblings shouldn’t in any way  be mistaken for a sane, rational or practical advice to voters or politicians about how to run a political party. And that’s something the actual progressive left needs to get into its head and act on.

And. Soon.

Ever since being basically forced to sit through the otherwise utterly forgettable Tom Hanks vehicle  Larry Crowne (what, don’t judge … that said forced) I’ve kinda been wondering if Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Talia was the black “manic pixie dream girl” the folks over at Racialicious have kind of sort of been searching for-asking about since mid June. Or, if Talia represented a rare female “magical negro,” and more to the point of the rant you’re about to stumble into, if the fact that’s a valid question means that maybe the Racialicious crew have been looking in the wrong place.  If there aren’t any “black manic pixie dream girls“ because they’re all men? If the magical negro, is in effect, a manic pixie dream man?

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Mbatha-Raw’s character Talia is a free spirited, scooter riding classmate of Larry Crowne, who is ultimately responsible for teaching him how to have swagger and gain the attention of his on-screen crush, Julia Roberts”

You see, Racialicious has defined the manic pixie dream girl as epitomized by Zoey Deschanel as “an unreal amalgam of white male fantasies” … which is to say as character archetypes separate from their plot function (i.e. helping the male main character find himself, love life again, or overcome some obstacle).  And being kind of stickler for defining ones terms correctly when engaged in this kind of shit, I am just not sure that’s possible. Shouldn’t they be asking which black characters have the same function as manic pixie dream girl’s and which character type typically functions that way for black male protagonists? Since that’s a thornier question than simply asking which black celebrity represents “an unreal amalgam of black male fantasies” I can see why they’d choose to skip over the larger question, but your friend and humble narrator here at 2112 isn’t here to make things easier on himself and I will, therefore, endeavor to answer all three.  Well, that first question, the Racialicious question, is actually easy, because its premise is so flawed.

“Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She’s on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness.”

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Who Is the Black Zooey Deschanel (aka ultimate manic pixie dream girl)? No one. Zooey Deschanel isn’t even Zooey Deschanel as they’ve defined her. Not that I’m exactly a qualified  spokesman for the opposite-sex fantasy lives of white males, but even from my POC detach I can safely inform you that Ms Deschanel is not an unreal amalgam of white male fantasies in that she is not, strictly speaking,  a fantasy object. Christina Hendricks is a fantasy object. Angelina Jolie is a fantasy object. Zooey Deschanel is perhaps the penultimate white male “dream girl” … but that’s a whole other thing. The difference being that whereas 99.9% of the planet’s males – white and otherwise – understand that they will never even be in a room with the unreal amalgam of fantasy that is Angelina Jolie, Deschanel is experienced as a possibility.  As a fantasy Jolie is wholly unattainable, seen as not of this earth and as not to be compared to mortal women. By contrast, “dream girls” like Zooey Deschanel and Natalie Portman are seen (however foolish this may seem) as elusive but attainable. And that quality, the vague unsupportable notion that you could meet “a Zooey” in real life is, in some respects, the thing “dream girls” are in the business of selling.

It occurs to me that some subconscious recognition of the difference is probably what fosters the suspension of disbelief level necessary for a 100 pounds worth of Jolie to regularly “realistically” portray a one woman killing machine onscreen. So here’s a handy rule of thumb to distinguishing between the two onscreen archetypes … If you’re watching a film, wherein an actress has just killed a horde of non slasher-killer enemies and that actress is not Summer Glau, she is, most likely, an object of fantasy in the Jolie mold. If on the other hand you are a woman watching either a romantic comedy or relationship dramedy of some kind with a heterosexual male who is watching willingly, you can safely assume the heroine of said film has attained or aspires to dream girl status. Got it? Good.

Unfortunately even in a form modified as above, there’s another problem with the whole “who’s the black Zooey Deschanel” question, as its been asked. It presumes that a penultimate white male dream girl is white and that a penultimate black male dream girl is black.  And you hardly need me to explain how not true that assumption is in real life. But on film it’s a tougher question. Well, not so much in second instance but very much so in the first (please don’t take that the wrong way). It’s simply me acknowledging the fact that men of color don’t exactly have the option to not consume many of the same fantasy women and dream girls as their white male peers. Our top ten rankings – so to speak – tend to be different, but at least where film and television are concerned our options are mostly the same. Which is sad and all, but also isn’t just a one way thing. Emma Stone’s male fan base certainly contains more than three or four persons of color and Zoe Saldana’s clearly contains a few million white dudes. (Please note the obvious and inherent rub there).

You see, while the Hollywood-New York axis has pretty much always aided and abetted white male “fantasy” by including woman of color … offering them the Zoe Saldana’s, Maggie Q’s and Sofia Vergara’s of the world on a regular basis. Excepting the mid 90s (read: Nia Long’s career)  it’s tough to identify a non-white actress being cast in plain dream girl roles in non-white films who isn’t pulling double duty as a killer fantasy object in mainstream films.

So no, there isn’t a penultimate black manic pixie dream girl because there aren’t really enough onscreen candidates for the title for one of them to have crossed over from being a “she” to being an “a” … there may be one laboring away on a sitcom or on UK television but on film, not so much.  (Note: Racialicious expanded their search by including the music industry, but that seems like a weird place to find an archetypal character personae to me.)

Now about that second question: Which typically black character archetype performs the same in-story function as the manic pixie dream girl? Easy: The Magical Negro … Hence my easily-immediately reached confusion over Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s character type status in Larry Crowne. It’s not hard to see once you’ve gotten clear on the idea that the manic pixie dream girl is more than simply an idealized feminine character type. Think about it, magical negros are characters with rather vaguely defined otherworldly qualities who serve as plot devices, who appear in stories to help white guy protagonists get out of trouble, help them recognize their own faults and overcome—stuff. Doesn’t that sound kind of familiar to you?

I’d argue that it is only difficult to identify Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Talia as gender bent spin on the magical negro because she’s all dressed up in manic pixie dream girl cloths (No, really. She literally has a public storage unit filled with a stores worth of hipster thrift store gear) and because it would be fair to say that in addition to fixing the white guy in questions life, she essentially shares the plots romantic duties with Julia Robert’s. Raw gets all of the Pixie style courtship-makeover-life fixing, Roberts mercifully handles the “kissy-kissy” stuff.

However, you almost can’t help but walk away from the proceedings with harbored suspicion that the confusing courtship like bits of the film are more the result of Mbatha-Raw having simply been cheaper to put on a film set than Roberts. There’s no way to prove that here of course, but film is deconstructed in a way that reminded me of The Expendables; which is to say in a way that allows for the maximum number of marquee names to appear by ensuring that they have a minimal number of scenes together.  Now that’s only important because the answer to my original magical negro or manic pixie dream girl revolves around screenwriter intent. If Raw’s character was paired back and Robert’s built up because Hanks was say uncomfortable with the idea of a May – December romance, she probably counts as a black manic pixie. If however she her role was expanded to make Roberts participation cheaper, even with all the scooter riding, she probably counts as a magical negro. And that does, now that I’ve typed it and thought about it, answer the second question I’ve set out to … Yes. The magical negro and the manic pixie dream girl do perform the same function in story, operate in much the same way (bromance vs. brief romance aside) and are aided and abetted as they do so by a similar – otherworldly – esthetic.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Insert Christopher Lee doing Dracula voice here] Third:  So. Which character archetype offers the same yeoman’s service to black male protagonists? Well, that’s such an easily answered question, you hardly need to think about it, the “white shadow“ … but since I only just now thought of calling it (a type a character anyone who happens to be reading this could name more than a few examples of) that, you may want me to spend one or two words defining the term. A “white shadow” is a gruff or hardnosed or gruff and hardnosed but benevolent guardian—a fairy godmother or godfather, less a character more of a ghostly presence hovering over the film. A white shadow often though not necessarily disconnected from society (and therefore its race related ills) but definitely positioned above those evils and the bigotry they’ve engendered in others. He or she says and does whatever needs to be said or done in order to keep the black male protagonist on the path to post-racial triumph by first introducing their protégés to then working to facilitate their entrée into the wider world beyond “blackness” They function as composite parents-mentors-best friends, helping with homework, specialized talent development, romance and even generalized life skills as necessary. Because they are assisting the black characters escape from the confines of blackness and enabling their acceptance into the opportunity rich world of whiteness, they are frequently the targets of attacks from representatives from both communities and always subject to suspicion or scorn from the white (so as to better demonstrate their near-saintly virtues). If you’ve recognized those tropes and traits in Dangerous Minds’ LouAnne Johnson, Finding Forrester’s William Forrester, Freedom Writers’ Erin Gruwell and The Blind Side’s Leigh Anne Tuohy you aren’t alone … Hell, one of my favorite comedians, Bill Burr, does a damn funny bit about how he’s seen the trope so often in films, that he feels like he should actually know a white person who “saves ghettos.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why Hollywood is so invested in telling the white shadow’s story over and over to the point of exhaustion, while producing comparatively few portrayals along the lines of Stand By Me or Stand and Deliver is a mystery. But if you’re looking for an otherworldly character type with a plot function parallel to the manic pixie and the magical negro, the white shadow’s habit of swooping in to save black people with talent or athletic ability who need saving from themselves provides it.

Yes that’s depressing, and also true.

Hadn’t exactly occurred to me before Alyssa Rosenberg wrote this post espousing the virtues of the unbelievably tripped out Jim Shooter Dazzler treatment that’s been floating around the internets all week, but in addition to being Baz Luhrmann on peyote and maybe some crystal meth insane (but in a good way) the aforementioned treatment-approach solves both the most origin stories are just rather boring problem with comic book adaptations … And the how comic books are at their core ridiculously incestuous while films aren’t, because rights sales aren’t problem with comic adaptations.

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To properly adapt any book like say Alias (Jessica Jones) or of course Dazzler to the screen Marvel would need to make use of the backdrop of their “expanding lattice of movies.”  In Dazzler’s case it would be absolutely essential because her whole “wants to be a disco dancing singer not a superhero” thing as a metaphor for every young fool who dreams of being to be an artist rather than a suit wearing-whatever-professional (which would clearly be impossible to convey within the boundaries of a filmed universe where she’s the only heroic super-being). That “within the backdrop” approach would also be necessary because the basic template of a classic Dazzler story goes something like: Your basic blond square jawed macho male superhero pops into Dazzler’s life and makes one two or three rather ham-fisted attempt to impress-seduce her.  A real live supervillian shows up and beats said would be-wannabe Alison Blaire paramour into to a rather seriously unconscious pulp. Whereupon Alison steps up to save him, usually but not always herself and often the day or even the world by kicking said naughty supervillian’s round ass square.

Once again, the only way to retain that element – the thing that makes Dazzler almost unique in comicdom and a character well worth pointing cameras and screenwriters toward – would be to set any adaptation in Marvel’s shared film universe (and in a cameo rich pre Saturday Night Fever 70’s disco scene that showcases perfect for it Kristen Bell … please).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, I said most of that in comments over on Alyssa’s post so you’re seeing it again here, because there are a few things related to why Dazzler is such a fascinating and almost unique character (who really does need to be filmed and soon) that I just feel compelled to unpack.  Why? Because that story template above is, I think, among the most unbelievably subversive story templates in all of comics. Even though The Disco Dazzler was originally thunk up in the mid-70s as a cross-promotion project in the mold of KISS, (who had comic book tie-ins and this needs to be seen to be believed TV movie). Marvel would develop a singing superhero and Casablanca Records would develop a singer then Filmworks would produce a motion picture (which is where that there rocket fueled acid-trip treatment of Jim Shooter’s came from).  Once all of that corporate cynicism maneuvering and product development that imagined Dazzler as Bo Derek (yes, this Bo Derek) fell apart, Dazzler became something kind of amazing … well, at least in the context of comic books of the day and in many ways a model for today’s comics as Meta commentary on comics (like say Alias) in that it’s a superhero book about not wanting to be a superhero, that takes place mostly in a “real word” that only brushes up against the world of costumed heroes and supevillians. Her book (at at least until issue 37) focused on her career, family and relationships rather than using such elements as mere back drop.  She does battle with stalkers, corrupt music industry types and even natural disasters as often as supervillians. When Dazzler inadvertently kills a supervillian she’s actually put on trial. When she’s tossed into prison, a group of locked up villainesses make an ill-fated attempt to turn her out … not for revenge or anything, but just because they’re the top dogs inside and she’s new.

More importantly, for 37 issues Dazzler was the least sexist-most feminist thing in comics and frankly you’d have a hard time scanning shop shelves today and finding a better use of forthright – as opposed to very special episode – feminism. Which was odd and is notable today because it was never “liberation craze“ 70s style feminism but rather something closer to what Joss Whedon did with Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and I’d actually argue more evolved than); in that Dazzler’s strength is never something she pays a price for romantically or otherwise.  Unlike say Phoenix, whose power bedeviled her relationship and required her death or Elektra’s strength that removed her from the possibility of having a relationship and required her death or how Storm power riddled portrayal seemed to come at the price of a couple of decades worth of celibacy. Dazzler got to be talented, Ivy League law school worthy smart, typically the most powerful superbeing in a room and date … like a lot, and without anything in the way of tragic consequences (unless you count constantly having to save her boyfriends lives). Unlike too many other women in comics, she was generally the rescuer and rarely if ever the rescued. No. Really. When she hires Power Man and Iron Fist as bodyguards, it;s Dazzler who has to save them.  The whole Dazzler as rescuer thing was so much a part of the character that it bled over into her encounters withe other heroines … She Hulk goes insane, Dazzler chills her out with the assistance of a Mack Truck, Spiderwoman gets captured by bad guys, Dazzler busts her out. When a male character is seen to do her a solid, that male is a father figure character so powerful he has been removed from the day to day action in the Marvel Universe (Odin, Galactus, Black Bolt). And even their assistance is offered based on their “respect and admiration” for Alison’s ever evident “strength and courage” rather than because of anything resembling condescension.

So. Isn’t that the kind of heroine filmed entertainment desperately needs right around now?

Ok so there are two things on your friend and humble narrator’s mind today.

First … the question of how to effectively respond to the sorry spectacle of Cornel West having engaged in a petty fit of (anti President Obama) pique that was – in no uncertain terms – a full throated defense of the sclerotic community level patronage politics that have retarded African American political progress for at least three decades. Second … Me, for reasons related to a post Thor dive through the work of Walt Simonson and Greg Pak plus the welcome news of NBC having decided to pass on David E. Kelly’s ill-conceived Wonder Woman pilot, attempting to suss out exactly what everyone means when they say things like: “but Wonder Woman’s complicated” or “tricky” or “problematic” because well … I have never, personally, noted anything particularly complicated or tricky or problematic about the character.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That first thing, it is far more important and worthy of my time and yours. So of course what I’d like to do right now is spend a few words on the second. Why? Because Professor West having simultaneously resorted to the Uncle Tom slash Oreo card, offered himself up as a blocker, a black friend to a “but even (the decidedly black) Cornel West says ..” excuse for the increasingly racially troubling ranting of professional lefties like Joan Walsh and become an enemy of everyone interested in moving beyond the so pathetic it’s sad CBC model of black political representation – has left both my head and heart hurting so, that a good old fashioned comic book geekry related blog post is just what the metaphorical doctor ordered.

So yeah, where was I? Wonder Woman right?  … I think I’ve maybe finally realized what people are on about re Wonder Woman’s so called complications. Now for a long time it was easy to assume folks were referencing either a) our culture and popular culture’s rather problematic relationship with powerful women, or b) that whole thing where Wonder Woman’s creator was a bisexual pseudo polygamous bondage fetishist whose extracurricular proclivities appear to have heavily influenced the Amazon Princess’s character iconography, or c) something that no one really seems to want to say out loud.

It has to be one of those three things … right? It can’t, as some claim when pressed to explain what they mean by complicated or tricky or problematic, be a storytelling source material tough to do stories about her type thing. I mean, in terms of possible stories you could basically do everything writer’s like Walt Simonson, Bob Layton, Greg Pak, John Byrne and Neil Gaiman have done with Thor, Hercules, The New Gods and The Eternals. Reading through Simonson’s and Pak’s utterly myth infused work again was particularly instructive as to what could be done with Wonder Woman on screen and off—but hasn’t.  The complicated or tricky or problematic element also can’t have to do, as others claim when pressed, with Wonder Woman being a particularly goofy character. Yes the magic lasso, bullet-resistant bracelets and invisible airplane are goofy … but can anyone honestly say they’re goofier than say Flash’s cosmic treadmill or Superman’s cape clad super dog and miniaturized bottled city or the entire Legion of Superheroes or the simple fact there is still a kind of semi prominent African American character called Black Lightning? Honestly?

What I can’t seem to stop thinking is that it’s just as untenable a proposition to pin Wonder Woman’s alleged complicated or tricky or problematic on our rather profound cultural issues with strong women. Though that’s certainly a thing, it hasn’t stopped anyone from penning great in comic stories for the likes of She Hulk, Catwoman, Power Girl or Elektra or doing great things onscreen with the likes of Emma Peel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Le Femme Nikita or The Bride. And while those great stories certainly aren’t common place, on the small screen at least, strong female fronted fantasy and sci fi has proven itself to be both arguably easier to do and likely to be more successful. Which leads us to all of that there aforementioned kink—like say Wonder Woman losing her powers and being forced to “obey” whomever could successfully wrap her up in that magic lasso. And there are no two ways around it, that stuff is problematic but it also hasn’t really been a part of the characters modern (i.e. 60s onward) mythology. So how big of a problem could it really be?

No the correct answer here is clearly c) or rather the something that no one really seems to want to say out loud or rather the existence of Steve Trevor or rather the idea of Wonder Woman having any male love interest suitable for a family friendly marketing campaign or rather the fact that everyone knows in their heart of hearts that neither Steve Trevor nor a stepping out on Lois Superman or a doing his playboy thing Batman nor any other broad shouldered male paramour makes any sense at all in the context of Wonder Woman’s back story. Yes. What I’m saying here is that the only complicated or tricky or problematic thing about writing Wonder Woman is that Wonder Woman is gay … and whether that’s prison gay, full blown lesbian gay or actively bisexual gay, it’s something that no one who wants to see her on either the big or small screen wants to write her as and an implied character trait post Crisis comic book writers have contorted themselves in various ways to try and avoid.

Don’t get me wrong here, I am not agreeing with the rather ridiculous recent assertion that Wonder Woman: Is an inherently not so interesting  female Superman, who could-should be “turned” gay in an attempt to liven her thing up a bit.  I’m saying that Wonder Woman is gay … already, that she was – if you will – born that way; and that writers have shoved her into a closet.  And more importantly, that readers-viewers are subconsciously or otherwise aware of said closet and experience Wonder Woman’s stories as “somehow off” as a result.

Edit-Addition. A couple weeks after this was written Dan Savage made a similar point about how our pop culture currently experiences  the “lie” of closeted gays ..

“Straight people haven’t just gotten used to gay people—to openly gay people—they’ve come to the realization that they prefer openly gay people to lying closet cases. They would rather have a beer with an honest Cam than a glass of champagne with a lying Liberace. And that’s why Marcus Bachmann is being ridiculed: it’s not because he’s perceived to gay—it’s not because he pings on everyone’s gaydar save Michele’s—it’s because he’s perceived to be dishonest. He appears to be a lying closet case, a lying closet case who’s made convincing other gay people to join him in the closet his life’s work. And straight people don’t like being lied to.

Not anymore.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, normally at this point in a post I’d drop another 500+ words on defending my potentially bullshit conclusion, but that isn’t really gonna be necessary here is it? We all already know Wonder Woman is a lesbian, right? After all, the Princess of the Amazon’s is an immortal from a hidden mystical magic island of Greek uber women … arriving at her being well let’s just say: familiar with the grove of Lesbos hardly requires engaging in advanced math and or rhetoric and I am hardly the first person to have said or noted any of the above (i.e. the obvious). This one time, and just this one time, that Fredric Wertham guy was absolutely spot on right about the character’s “lesbian overtones.” (Note: Not “subtext” – Not “themes” – “overtones”) It’s clear that William Moulton Marston imagined her as at the very least bisexual. So any portrayal of Wonder Woman, failing to acknowledge the obvious, is doomed to feel somewhere between completely ridiculously (read: ice cream sleepover on account of boy troubles) off and mildly not quite right until it is addressed. Of course, given the likely size and scope of the resulting shit storm if anyone ever dared write that, you can’t really blame anyone for the ongoing display of creative dishonestly. But then again,  you could make very much the same argument as to the logic of sex symbol news anchors or action film stars remaining closeted and I’ve heard tell that there’re people who aren’t so forgiving of the failure of other cultural icons to just … come out.

Back when I first saw Neil Marshall’s Centurion something struck me as odd. Not bad odd you understand but odd as in off and or inexplicable odd. It wasn’t until months later when I found myself watching a representative slice of this film called Lesbian Vampire Killers that the odd thing in question began to crystallize. You see Vampire Killers features an actress named MyAnna Buring (which is the kind of name that pops out of credits or you might not be reading this) who happens to have appeared in two of Marshall’s earlier films The Descent and Doomsday. Now that’s not even almost kind of sort of remarkable but here’s the thing … I honestly didn’t connect the sexed up though chaste Buring from Vampire Killers to the actress from either of Marshall’s films until I caught her rather distinct name in the credits. And that was well a second dose of odd because Buring happens to be in maybe my favorite scene form The Descent—the bit wherein she as a surgical intern has to decide to ruin her hands in order to survive. It’s a great three seconds or three, almost a freebie, a cinematic giveaway (to outright pilfer Roger Ebert’s phrase), the tiny kind of detail that can push a movie out of your really enjoying it column and into your fucking loving it column. Buring’s also the evil lord of Blackness Castle’s daughter in Marshall’s Doomsday.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So I’m saying I’d noticed her, remembered her name and her face and knew who she was but that her lustily virginal appearance in Killers was her unrecognizable. What that reminded me of in the context of Centurion was how Olga Kurylenko in Centurion hadn’t been “posed” in the way that Olga Kurylenko had been posed in literally everything else.  Even though she had played essentially the same character in Quantum of Solace, in Centurion she hadn’t been as blatantly sexualized (note: which is in no way the same thing as “hot” and or just plain “sexy”) or employed in a way that involved a primarily physical display. Recalling that lured me into thinking about Marshall’s Doomsday again in general and the specifics of Rhona Mitra’s participation in it in particular. And you know what, as thoughts go it was a mostly a repeat. As juxtaposed with random performance selections from her IMDB page, Mitra’s appearance in Doomsday is strikingly – well – skin free. Don’t get me wrong here; I’m not referring to some attempt or effort to remove physical qualities inherent in the aforementioned actresses but rather no attempt having been made to emphasize them over, above or even in addition to other aspects of their characters. That the same proved true of cast of characters in The Descent, hardly needs to be pointed out.

None of which would be odd at all if this were a blog post about say the women in the Cassavetes-wannabe films of a Derek Cianfrance or Marc Forster or Todd Field but we’re talking about the almost retro exploitation genre films of Neil Marshall here and in that particular context, anything less than aggressively sexualized women are a fairly rare breed.

Now, there’s no way to say why that is. Having had a heated-instructive exchange with his wife—actress Axelle Carolyn after somewhat lazily comparing Centurion to both The Warriors and Gladiator (as a shorthand way of describing how it plays stylistically-tonally as caught somewhere between exploitation film Roman Saga and serious film Romans Saga) it’s tempting to write off his feminist characterization tendencies as a result of her influence. But Killing Time, Dog Soldiers and The Descent pre-date his marriage. And not that they might not otherwise but his stories include all the character archetypes that you’d normally find in any genre exploitation film—the female assassin, the lady lycanthrope, the vampy comrades of a final girl, the post apocalyptic gladiatrix, the barbarian woman—but Marshall’s handling of each is almost unique to his filmography. Dog Soldier’s lady lycanthrope is singularly detached from the rest of her shape changing oeuvre by virtue of a  decidedly bridled sexuality. The vampy friend in The Descent’s life-ending sexual transgression occurs off-screen; as back story. And not to be trite or anything, but the barbarian women of Centurion are so clothed by comparison to literally all of their cinematic peers that their garb can’t possibly have been the result of a costume designer’s first sketches.

So what is that? What exactly was noticed? What’s Marshall up to? Well. There are no answers or theories this time folks. I’m honestly asking and yes pointing it out because no else has to my knowledge; so that maybe more someone(s) will lend him the kind of filmic feminist cred, that someone like Joss Whedon hasn’t lately been a deserving beneficiary of.

This is going to be one of those rant post that started off as one rant and ended up as another. You see, the other day Alias (the show not the series) came up in conversation with a buddy of mine who’d never seen it. And over the course of singing the praises of its outstanding pilot episode and recommending that he drop the series into his Netflix cue toot sweet; the strange career of its star – Jennifer Garner – started bothering me. By which I mean that a couple of Balvenie Double Woods later I was rather deeply committed to a rant listing her various virtues (not like that pervs) and wondering why they’ve yet to be put to full use on the big screen.  During which I asked if my by then hapless comrade could imagine a male series star with Garner’s positive reputation and can do action can do comedy skill set having had Garner’s career.  Can you? While he was thinking, this guy who’s kind of a Bizarro Jennifer Garner, Hawaii Five-0 lead Alex O’Loughlin, came to mind. Thinking about it later – sobered – it occurred to me that asking why in the name of all that’s right or even mildly holy Alex O’Loughlin has a career might be a bit more instructive.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You see, whenever you stop and think about white male privilege as it applies to pop culture double standards in general and career advancement + on screen representations in particular … it’s Alex O’Loughlin you’re thinking of whether you’re thinking of him or not—whether you know who he is or not.  So right about now, those who came in late are probably asking something along the lines of: Who the hell is this freakin’ O’Loughlin guy?

Well, he’s an Australian born actor, who starred in that weird Man Thing flick, appeared in seven of the worst episodes of The Shield, in response the harsh suits of CBS allowed him to top-line the thankfully promptly canceled vampire detective series Moonlight as a direct result of which he was cast as the lead in the even more abruptly terminated young doctors in love show Three Rivers; in response to whose failure he was dropped into the role of Steve McGarrett (yes that’s the Jack Lord role) in CBS’s Hawaii Five-0 re-imagining. You know the one that features Ocean’s 11 guy Scott Cann, Lost’s Daniel Dae Kim and Battlestar Galactica’s Grace Park in supporting roles so supporting in Kim and Park’s case that blogger-reviewers have taken to referring to episodes in terms such as: “That one where Grace Park sort of does something more than stand around in a bikini” or “The one where Daniel Dae Kim has over seventeen seconds non expository dialogue.” (Hey, did I forget to mention that Brotherhood of the Wolf star Mark Dacascos as well as Buffy the Vampire Slayer + Angel alum James Marsters have appeared on the show as recurring bad guys?)

So what I mean by referring to him as the Bizarro Jennifer Garner is that O’Loughlin is a mildly talented individual at best who has yet to appear in a single project whose success could be attributed to his participation and who nevertheless has been cast as the lead in a steady stream of high-profile projects. He has failed upward in a way so … that’s so nakedly about the kind of people who make decisions in Hollywood only really wanting to be in the handsome kinda tall decidedly white guy business, it’s frankly fairly fucking shocking.

It’s easy not to take it that way, easier. But try a thought experiment or three. Ask yourself if you can see Katee Sackhoff being thrown the lead role in three network series in as many years? Ask yourself if you can imagine Bionic Woman star Michelle Ryan being the protagonist of another network show—after being the face of her show’s epic awfulness and after only eight episodes demise? Ask yourself if you can picture Mad Men’s Peyton List being sought after to play say Lara Croft then given the lead in say a re-imagining of Honey West on the basis of the utter and complete implosion of The Lost wannabe formerly known as Flashforward and her appearance in the human trafficking thriller horror flick Shuttle (the fact-existence of which is like this whole other thing I’d like to get into one of these days)?

Well, can you?

Not sure I can either.

No it’s not that the film and television development process isn’t known for producing “how the hell did that happen” stars; it’s that the process clearly values “actors” over “actresses.”

The development suit energy, the number of maybe he can carry this one chances responsible for the career path(s) of actors  such as Eric Bana, Colin Farrell and Jake Gyllenhaal is quite simply missing from the career trajectories of actresses like Jessica Biel or Eva Green or January Jones.

You see, it’s not lack of talent on one side or the other that makes the preferential treatment more than obvious but rather the disparity with regards to how evidenced talent is nurtured, found a place for and promoted. In short: In the moment of their becoming pop culture icons neither Christina Hendricks nor Evangeline Lilly were the beneficiaries of the “we better jump on that train” development + personae-marketing machinery of the filmed entertainment industry in the way that George Clooney was and   Alex O’Loughlin clearly has been. Even when faced with the reality that he had so little appeal in his own right, the industry went into action to make O’Loughlin seem like a star … Giving him the opportunity to stand atop a no-brainer brand name franchise (with one of the coolest ever theme songs) supported by  – sublimated – non-traditional actors and actresses who are far better known.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t say that because of any particular distaste for O’Loughlin. He seems to be a genuinely inoffensive sort of fellow, and in fact – to paraphrase Roger Ebert’s description of the Olsen Twins – being mostly inoffensive seems to be his primary skill.  But being inoffensive while handsome, taller than noticeably short and white, has worked out better for him than being say undeniably talented veterans of various Emmy showered series have worked out for his co-stars. And industry types Jennifer Garner’s management were unfamiliar with have clearly been hard at work to further his trumped up pseudo stardom as a result of what you’d have to in all fairness summarize as a pretty meager skill set.

But hey, I could be wrong.  Maybe Mister O’Loughlin has pics of some network execu-suits golfing with Satan. Maybe his oddly forced upon us faux stardom is simply the result of good old fashioned nepotism … as there are rumors that he’s either the illegitimate son of late AC/DC front man Bon Scott or Harrison Ford’s on the DL nephew.  If true, either would kind of explain everything. Which would be nice, because there’s not really a better way to.