earthx.org blog

Lots of boingboing links related to digital games, desire, pleasure:

Virtual Girlfriend

Emotional Doom 3 teenagers

Rayne in Playboy

During my preparatory meetings for the dissertation defense, and during the defense itself, my committee and I spent a lot of time talking about affect, desire, cathexis, fun: the emotional components of games.

The past year replayed, Usual Suspects-like, for me as I realized that, in an attempt to legitimize these popular entertainment forms, to make an argument for their complexity and sophistication, I had foreclosed much commentary on their pleasure, the mobilizations of desire that make them compelling. I touch on aesthetics in the last chapter of the dissertation, and I have talked about affect here, but in the big paper it’s a big silence: I-as-theorist have stepped on me-as-fanboy.

Worth mentioning that Bob Rehak and Mia Consalvo both have good essays addressing related topics of pleasure and identification in the Video Game Theory Reader.

This is something I’ll be exploring in revisions for publication (and here, I imagine).

Call me a dope, but I like Crisis puns. Also (I never thought I’d say this in a dissertation research weblog, talk about “Crises of Infinite Discourses”), this post contains spoilers.

Tim Burke cites the last Identity Crisis post and adds some cogent analysis of his own, confronting the events I kind of danced around: the rape and murder of Sue Dibny, the wife of the Elongated Man, followed by the apparent killing of the Atom’s ex-wife. The discussion has extended to the Cliopatra group blog, where it takes place within a larger question about realism and the definition of fictional characters and worlds in comics.

Tim responds to a question regarding the portrayal of rape in comics with a spot-on observation about pornography and comics, and he raises a good point about how mainstream superhero comics work. Since they must maintain dynamism and interest without having the luxury of ever ending, they tend to bring in new elements and then reiterate those new elements until they become routinized. And, I hate to say it, but despite the new specifics of the event — this hasn’t happened before to these particular characters, nor in this particular context — these notes of violation, shock, and darkness are very much routinized in mainstream superhero comics.

Rape was portrayed in several “mature readers” comics in the 1980’s: Watchmen, Miracleman, Green Arrow (as Tim notes). Generally it was portrayed with more complexity and subtlety than Identity Crisis has given it so far, though you could definitely find less thoughtful portrayals of rape, child abuse, drug pushing, or any other shocking, “mature” crime of your choice. I remember in particular Vigilante, the story of Adrian Chase, a former district attorney who (I’m going from memory here, so forgive me for inaccuracies) went over the edge and began killing all the deviants and psychotics in the DC Universe after his family was murdered. Vigilante was introduced in the Teen Titans’ comic book but soon moved to his own “mature readers” comic, where gore, degeneracy and nudity could be explored without pause. (Of course, my brother and I had an uninterrupted run of this comic, even though we were 12 and 14 respectively. In fact, I think we had a subscription.)

Anyway, my point is that human atrocities are fairly well represented in the social memory of superhero comics. In fact, like most representations in the genre soup of a comics universe, they have to some extent (to debase the poststructuralists) become decoupled from what they represent. I would argue they deliver much less of the affect than they should, like bullet-riddled bodies in a Schwarzenegger flick. Because the comics universe is persistent and fantastic — because characters always get cloned, have robot duplicates, and come back from the dead, not just because they can but because, in a persistent system, you can’t afford to let them go — human atrocities tend to have less of a punch.

Enter Identity Crisis. Again, the term Crisis has specific meanings in the history of the DC Universe: Crisis on Infinite Earths was a radical revision of the universe as a structure, and I would argue the generic expectation of a Crisis event is that it has global, revisionary consequences for the universe as a system. In other words, when violation, shock and darkness are presented here, they are done so with the implication that, for the next several years at least, we are to understand violation, shock and darkness as parameters under which the universe will operate, even to the detriment of characters who have survived unscathed by violation, shock and darkness in the past, and whose milieux are particularly poorly suited for it. This awkwardness is visible in the very phrase “the rape and murder of the wife of the Elongated Man,” and this awkwardness bears not only upon “Elongated Man” but “rape and murder.”

Sue Dibny and the Elongated Man are kicked from Eden; they’ll never be funny again. But rape and murder don’t get out of the association unscathed. Smart people from Terry Eagleton to Grant Morrison have observed that “realism” is one mode of representation among others, but that, unlike other modes, “realism” tries to hide its cards and pass itself off as reality. When “reality” is placed in relief with obvious unreality in this way, the contingency of “realism” is fairly well highlighted, and we are encouraged to question what these bits of “reality” mean in an unreal environment. And we are encouraged to ask this question systemically: How well does the DC Universe work with rape and murder as a dominant mode? And we are encouraged to ask this question with a sense of historicity: How well does the DC Universe work with rape and murder as a dominant mode, considering that rape and murder have been presented — and interrogated as representations — at points in this universe before? My response is: “not so well.”

I think a visible contingent of fans have recognized this, and have rejected this portrayal; there are many comments (some of which are fairly offensive: take warning) on the Web that mock the events in Identity Crisis. Such responses aren’t unexpected. We parody and satirize all sorts of representations; it’s one of the ways we show that we have a mastery over representations, that we understand how they work. But this troubles me about Identity Crisis: not only that it portrays rape, but that by portraying rape in this context, so awkward and inappropriate, it robs it of the gravity and human consequence it should have. What bothers me is that it’s not shocking, that it lacks the affect I think Meltzer intends it to carry.

More writing about comics.

I bought the first issue of Identity Crisis out of a general interest, the second because the clerk persuaded me to do so. This week, I bought the third with a mix of shame and fascination and schadenfreude.

I could go on for pages about it, but I’ll try to be brief. It’s the effort of a popular mystery-thriller writer, Brad Meltzer, to make sense of the DC Universe through the mystery-thriller genre. The story he’s constructed would be just fine if it were in one of his novels, a closed system where he controls the physics and milieu, and where the variant of realism that characterizes the mystery genre can be presented and read in ecological safety, like a terrarium.

However, it occurs instead in the DC Universe, a large-scale persistent fiction based on that least realistic of genres, superheroes. This fiction has, in its 60+ years (to debase Bakhtin with the vernacular) eaten and partially digested every genre from science fiction to fantasy to westerns to teen coming-of-age narratives. It ate mystery-thriller realism in the seventies, ate modernism in the eighties and began generating in-world parodies of both not long after. In an open ecology like this, mystery realism is immediately put in relief with offbeat pseudoscience, spooky magic and metafictional play, and tends to look a little silly in the crowd if it doesn’t have a healthy sense of self-deprecation.

But the story would, I think, still get by if it were just an everyday serialized story that could play nicely in the overwrought playground of genres the DC Universe has going. Gotham Central, after all, is a realist crime drama set in the DC Universe, and it’s one of the best comics they put out. But Identity Crisis is an universe-wide event, a “crisis” that is meant to dramatically revise “continuity,” the collective understanding of what the DC Universe means as a structure. In its attempt to re-read the large-scale persistent serial of the DC Universe through its own lens, it is trying to not only situate these unreal characters — who exceed the speed of time and dance through worlds of quantum indeterminacy — within mystery realism, but also explain them using mystery realism as a dominant mode. Among other things, it’s trying to use something like forensic psychology to explain the character inconsistencies of supervillains across appearances between the seventies and now. Actually, it’s forensic psychology involving magic spells. Does that give you a sense of what I’m getting at?

The mystery genre relies on patterns of resolution; when a detective solves a crime, it’s an implicit argument that reality is a legible structure, which can be deciphered if you just assemble the right template. That’s very much a construct — see Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell for an eloquent critique of it — but that’s fine, it’s worked for mysteries for a long time now. But attempting to read this proprietary, persistent, large-scale fiction system, in all its heterogeneous, inconsistent, overdetermined, fantastic glory, as something that can be explained with some poker-faced, in-diegesis interventionary sleuthing? Can one really generate a logical causal argument explaining the psychology of Doctor Light as it has been interpreted by dozens of writers, artists, and editors since the 1960’s? How about explaining why he doesn’t age normally, instead?

The DC Universe is fundamentally illogical. It is subject to many forces that work against it being unitary or literally coherent. That doesn’t mean it defies explanation, but it does mean that the meta-story of it, continuity, is a contingent social construct, held together with lots of time travel and duct tape, and understood by its readers and producers as exigent. But Identity Crisis, on many levels, fails to get that, and its attempt to say No, all of this really does make sense on a human level, you just need a good detective to decipher it is earnest, and as professionally executed as it can be, and feels really, really off.

The series isn’t even half-finished, so it might surprise me. And it’s not poorly done — Meltzer’s work shows a lot of attention to detail and understanding of what makes for dramatic tension in other media. It’s just, I think, operating on some misguided assumptions that make it feel more Quixotic than dramatic.

On a less critical and snarky note, I also bought Paul Grist’s Jack Staff: Everything Used to Be Black and White, which is really good.

Read Michael Chabon’s keynote address at the 2004 Eisner awards. Much of what he says can be applied to story design outside of comics, especially the idea of repetition with variation. More on that later.