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Vigilante or Punisher?
Below is a synopsis, followed by some discussion, of an Alan Moore-scripted story for the DC comic book Vigilante (nos. 17-18, 1985), titled "Father's Day." Moore is the writer of Watchmen, From Hell, and other amazing graphic novels. Poor Vigilante had no legs compared to Marvel's The Punisher, a similar, rival comic from the '80s that is hitting the big screen this year. But Moore's comic makes me wish the reverse was true, and that Moore was still involved: despite its brutality, it has the ambiguous edge of '70s movies.
"Father's Day"
By day Adrian Chase prosecutes crooks for the county but after hours he pursues them extracurricularly as a costumed hero called Vigilante. In an earlier case of his, a man named Carl Linnaker raped his own 8-year old daughter. Chase put him away, we assume (but aren't specifically told), with a little help from the old alter ego.
Now Linnaker is out of prison. The book opens with Linnaker's wife telephoning Chase in a panic. While she is on the phone, Linnaker breaks down her door. Before Chase can get to her apartment, Linnaker stabs her to death. Their daughter Jodie, now 11, flees out the fire escape and upon reaching the street is nearly hit by a car.
The driver is a pot dealer named Fever, ferrying her half-drunk roommate Louise, a prostitute, across town. They are acerbic, sympathetic characters. Learning Jodie is being pursued by a psycho dad, they take her to their apartment.
The next morning the cop-shy Fever goes out for a meeting with Chase to discuss a place to hand over Jodie so the cops won't find Fever's dope stash. Chase shows up in his Vigilante guise. Hand to hand combat and verbal sparring ensue. Ultimately Vigilante agrees not to bust Fever if she'll just hand over the girl.
At the same time hung-over Louise foolishly makes a trip to the store to buy the kid breakfast. Linnaker tails Louise home from the market, knifes her, and snatches Jodie. Fever returns to the flat with Vigilante to discover her best friend and roommate bleeding to death on the floor. Distraught, she vows to avenge Louise.
Searching the back streets for Linnaker, Fever is more savvy than the uptight Vigilante. She has better luck questioning neighborhood people and laughs when his fancy motorbike is stripped for parts while chained to a lamppost. As they continue their search--Fever driving and Vigilante riding in the back after she almost ditches him--she kids him mercilessly about his moral rectitude. One of her girlfriends sees them and asks if he's G.I.B (good in bed). Fever replies "He's OK if you put a bag over his politics." Later, this exchange takes place:
Meanwhile, Linnaker makes plans to drive to the Adirondacks with Jodie, whom he obviously adores. In voiceover we hear him reading excerpts from the tender letters he wrote her from prison, pleading for her not to think of him as a monster. In the car, he frets that her mother has "turned her against him." With the child in tow, he steals a pistol from a gun store, then pushes the proprietor's head through the glass display case.
As Linnaker's car is pulling out of the store parking lot, Fever spots him and Vigilante shoots out his tires. Linnaker flees on foot, taking Jodie with him. Vigilante catches up with him and the two fight. Jodie screams for them to stop. Linnaker drops his gun and Jodie picks it up. Then, surprisingly, she takes aim and shoots, not Linnaker, but Vigilante, in the shoulder. Before Linnaker can grab Jodie again Fever comes around a corner, hits him with her car, and in an act of cold premeditation, locks the rear wheels on her 4WD vehicle and makes a mess of him with the spinning front tires.
At the end of the story, Jodie is taken to the hospital (in shock). Fever kisses Vigilante before leaving town, which she must do to avoid explaining 40 kilos of marijuana found in the apartment with her dead roommate. Chase returns to his flat, nursing his bandaged shoulder, and as he is taking off his costume we hear the voice of the dead Linnaker reading more excerpts from his gentle prison letters to Jodie.
OK, let's count the ways this story is subversive: (1) Vigilante is a peripheral character, and kind of a buffoon (2) Two females, operating "outside the law," are strong, smart, sympathetic leads; the one who survives is cleverer than Vigilante (3) The child molester loves his daughter (4) More troubling, the daughter loves him and uses violence to protect him (5) Just as our sympathies are vacillating because of the daughter's unexpected if misplaced feelings for her father, we watch her become an orphan (as does she) in a spectacularly sadistic fashion. This is played as black comedy. By contrast, the upcoming Hollywood Punisher appears from the trailer to be a typical, by-the-numbers Xtreme Revenge fantasy.
This may be old news to some, but I recently came across a great website, Japander, as in Japanese+pander. It consists of streaming videos of the commercials American celebs who would never sully their images in the States do over there for bucks. Like Bill Murray's "For relaxing times, make it Suntory time," only for real. See Harrison Ford guzzling Kirin beer, or a Labyrinth-era Jennifer Connelly advertising some dildo-shaped container of hair goo. (Requires Quicktime.) Not everyone likes this site; posted there is a copy of a cease-and-desist letter from the lawyer of super-square Leo di Caprio (stuffy Meg Ryan also threatened suit).
Left: my lo-res, "remixed" clip of Rebecca Allen's Kraftwerk video Musique Non Stop, a pop-cultural landmark from 1986. The video was actually completed in 1983-4; Allen visited Kling Klang studios and hung out with Ralf, Florian, et al in Dusseldorf. They shipped their dummy heads to New York and she did the computer modeling at the Institute of Technology there. No slouch, Allen is another pioneer figure sadly overlooked in the Whitney's lousy "BitStreams" exhibition. Check out her website, which now has streaming video of some of her other projects, including the video wall for the Palladium in 1985, Twyla Tharp's "Catherine Wheel" projections, and more recent work such as "Bush Soul #3" (no, not that Bush), where clever science fictional extrapolation manages to overcome the overall new age-y aura.
This is the third in an informal series of posts called "Wireframe Aesthetics." Part 1 (John Carpenter, Tron, Stephen Hendee) is here and and Part 2 (all Tron, all the time) is here.
The following are character descriptions from the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents website. The comic book series, developed by old EC hand Wally Wood, ran in the mid-60s under the obscure Tower comics imprint. A strange synthesis of the DC and Marvel styles with the pervasive acronymania of period espionage stories (U.N.C.L.E., S.H.I.E.L.D., et al) the strip was perhaps too thoughtful and melancholic to survive long. The writing below--Stan Lee meets Hemingway by way of Thurber minus the humor--gives a good sense of the dilemmas of morality and mortality Wood & Co. posed. Here's the setup: "A United Nations team counterattacks the assault on Professor Jennings' lab. Although the enemy is driven off, the man with the greatest mind in the world is found dead. In the wreckage of the famous scientists' lab, however, are several one-of-a-kind inventions," which are worn by the series characters, turning them into flawed superheroes:
THE BELT
What was it about that belt? It was truly amazing. It had powers. It would make the wearer incredibly dense, the density of hardened steel. Muscle power far greater than ten of the strongest men on the planet rolled into one. But only on a temporary basis. And at a cost. The life force of the wearer would be strained. The strongest man could only wear it for thirty minutes before complete exhaustion. Len Brown was the agent of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. who got that belt. Every evil organization wanted that belt...or wanted the one wearing it destroyed.
THE CLOAK
A cloak that imparted complete invisibility with a turn of a switch. But it was more than just the cloak. It was what the cloak hid underneath. To give legs to his aging body, NoMan was actually an android with the brain signature of Professor Dunn. But not just one android. Many expensive androids were made, and the mind of Professor Dunn could transfer into any one of those android bodies in a moment's notice - but only one android at a time. NoMan was human.
NoMan was machine. Torn between the two, perhaps forever.
Androids are machines first, and capable of failure. If NoMan, the combination of man and machine, were to fail without Professor Dunn transferring his mind out, his mind would be lost forever.
THE SUIT
Guy Gilbert makes that suit work. Its mechanism, triggered by the dial on his chest, speeds up everything for Guy. Lightning in a bottle. His top speed is really unknown. While the suit multiplies his speed, it also has a deadly drawback: It also multiplies his metabolism. Every time Guy uses the suit and becomes Lightning, the suit ages every cell in his body. Some people shorten their lifespan by smoking tobacco. Guy has shortened his by wearing the suit. The fastest man on Earth. Running away from his own demise. The faster he runs, the faster his doom chases him.
THE HELMET
The helmet created Menthor. T.H.U.N.D.E.R. was riddled with a variety of enemy agents. John Janus was one of them. Putting on the helmet was a major triumph of espionage, and it was just as great a failure of that same spying. Besides the apparent incredible telekinetic and telepathic powers of the helmet, there were the changes to the wearer to consider. As the helmet is used, the wearer's personality is affected. At first, it only happened when the helmet is worn. But the effects eventually lasted longer. Janus had planned to do great damage to T.H.U.N.D.E.R.; he was an agent for S.P.I.D.E.R., an evil organization. But for some reason, while wearing the helmet, his evil side was suppressed. Good. Bad. How deep inside a man's brain lies the human soul? The helmet can transmit the powers of the mind into action. The helmet seems to also transmute the human soul as well. The wearer can be converted from evil to good. And that has to be the strongest power of all.
Goff alludes to the Twilight Years of the Gasoline Economy we're currently living through (how long will it take Gaia recover after we've burned all the fuel?), and James Howard Kunstler eloquently indicts the unbalanced cities we've built for ourselves in such an economy. A constant theme of his Architectural Eyesore of the Month (page back through all of them--it's worth it) is how the automobile dominates planning priorities, giving us ugly homes, parks, and workplaces. I lived in the Washington DC 'burbs for a few years and it got to be heartbreaking watching developers tear out yet another chunk of forest to make room for some crap-ass subdivision, with big fuel-guzzling houses accessible only by fuel-guzzling autos. I flew over Atlanta recently and felt like crying for the same reason. Our slash-and-burn lifestyle is just nuts.
Nothwithstanding the above (and apropos of the bloodsucking theme in the upper left corner), the most potent issue in the coming campaign should be so-called outsourcing of jobs. Here's an article about CPA firms sending tax-preparation work to India. One might argue that the trend makes sense economically if it weren't for the record salaries upper managers are paying themselves. Keep pushing it, guys, you're really gonna enjoy the view from the lampposts you'll be swinging from in a few years.
Announcing the "Young Methuselah" Award for Longest Documented Period of Emergence by an Artist (This isn't a cynical category, but a hopeful one; because of the art world's perennial boneheadedness, you can still be a "new artist" for a very, very long time.)
And the winner is:
Scott Grodesky, who was the subject of an "Openings" column in Artforum in 1992 (which "introduced the work of artists at the beginning of their careers"), and is included this month (Jan. 2004) in "First Take: 12 New Artists" in the same magazine. "First Take" selector Carroll Dunham tries to account for this absurdity by explaining that Grodesky's work has "evolved" over the past 12 years, so he needs to be reevaluated as a new artist. Go figure.
Runner-up: Judith Eisler, whose first one-person show in NY was in the Luhring Augustine viewing room in 1995. She is also included in "First Take: 12 New Artists" in the January 2004 Artforum. I'm afraid to even look at the resumes of the other 10.
And as long as we're handing out awards, the Sixth Day Award for the Shortest Documented Period of Emergence by an Artist goes (somewhat belatedly) to Jennifer Pastor, the subject of an 1996 "Openings" column in Artforum. She was included in the Whitney Biennial (for many artists a career milestone) exactly one year later. Just keep working, people, none of this makes any sense.
UPDATE: A second runner-up for the Young Methuselah Award, Gareth James, has been named. Please see the comments to this post for a real laugh.
UPDATE 2: A friend of Gareth's says he's still emerging so I guess it's not so funny. The intimidating-sounding blurb for the architecture course he teaches at Cooper Union fooled me into thinking he was already there.
Between Christmas and New Year's Jim Bassett went to LA and environs and kept everyone visually informed on his photolog. All the pictures were taken with one of those cell phone/camera/internet browser combos, and even better, Jim worked out a way to resize and upload them directly to the website from the camera. The picture above is super lush and proves (along with many others) that this method is completely "there" as a photographic medium. Nice work, Jim! The California trip pictures start roughly halfway down this page. Click "older posts" at the bottom of that page to view more. |
At Belvedere Castle we had an excellent vantage point for the fireworks that blew off when '03 changed to '04. The police helicopters keeping us all safe from terror had an even better view of the show. After the Castle several of us rode down the newly-completed bike path that runs along the Hudson, and watched the moon set over New Jersey. Great night. Happy New Year to all.
UPDATE: An animated .GIF with pics of the event, by Kristin Lucas, is in the comments to this post.