tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63448973796714318422024-02-07T04:02:28.841-08:00Arcades of HistoryArcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-80106000760018815732019-04-01T17:38:00.001-07:002019-04-02T15:45:28.517-07:00Jordan Peele's "Us" and Contemporary Social Protests<div style="text-align: center;">
by Gabriel Alejandro</div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"><span style="font-size: large;">By now you must have seen or read it: Jordan Peele’s latest cinematic venture is a masterpiece that involves a doppelgänger trope to speak about the darkness within us, allegories of racism, metaphors of unfettered inequality that span through numerous social classes and races, family dynamics, and much more. Nevertheless, there is one aspect that has been, at least to my knowledge, largely unexplored, and that is the film’s commentary on the state of contemporary social protests. If one were to apply the film’s violent-but-ultimately-futile portrayal of a subaltern’s uprising to recent social struggles, one would find parallels in regards to their beginnings, public coverage, and inevitable normalization. And it is precisely this idea, the one that contemporary social protests have been “tethered” to past models which are destined to fail, that the film warns us against repeating.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Through this perspective, <i>Us </i>is a film about the tethered, a group that was made to live <i>under</i>ground in the shadows of an <i>upper</i> society. After a number of decades experiencing subhuman conditions, they decide to make the <i>upper</i> society aware of their existence through violent and then “peaceful” means. The symbolism behind both group’s physical settings are meant to state the obvious: the society that lives above is better off than the one below. This is evidenced when Adelaide’s doppelgänger explains how, when the upper society ate, played, or did anything good, all the lower society had was a degraded version of it. The underground society was deprived of better quality of life because their plight was invisible to the upper-world dwellers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">It is important to note that many —if not, every— cultures have an <i>under</i>ground group or various, depending on the case. These change according to temporal, social, historical, political, and even religious factors. Although the United State’s history has largely involved the African American experience as the subaltern, one should not restrict oneself to that sole interpretation for this film. <i>Us</i>’s portrayal of the disenfranchised can be a representation for many other experiences worldwide. Yet there is one element that still ties the film to the American experience and that is Red’s (Adelaide’s doppelgänger) idealization of Hands Across America, a 1986 fundraising event that intended to help mitigate the rapid growth of homelessness and hunger in the United States. But as with many other initiatives that begin with good intentions, the end result left many with more gaps (pun intended) than the bridges it intended to create. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Recent articles have resurfaced the contrasting opinions of Hands Across America thanks to </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Us</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">. In </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">The New York Times</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">, Erik Piepenburg establishes that “By infusing Hands Across America with malevolent power, Peele is cinematizing one of the main criticism it faced in 1986: that it was a ‘superficial gesture that offered no long-term solution to poverty in the United States.’” Almost as an echo, Corey Plante writes in </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;">Invest</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial;"> that "Hands Across America essentially became a feel-good distraction for America in a time when homelessness was steadily becoming an epidemic thanks to President Ronald Reagan’s policies.” Both articles alude to the consequences of rampant symbolic gestures and superficial attitudes towards a problem that requires concrete action. More often than not, these types of initiatives place the actual problem in an abstract or unattainable plane and focus on the immediate satisfaction brought about the idea of helping others. In the case of Hands Across America, people paid a fee in order to participate and join hands with a person. After the event, there was no push towards policy change by lawmakers or the very same people who participated. Everyone felt they had already done what they could on the matter and even felt good about what little they had contributed.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">So, how does this bode for the tethered and their movement? Well, the fact that Red wished to model their uprising after Hands Across America meant that her uprising would follow some of its ills. In regards to public perception, a similar “superficialization” of the tethered’s wishes was witnessed in the film. Soon after the attack on the surface world begins, Adelaide’s family turns on the news to find that there are other attacks happening nation-wide. While the news anchor speaks, Adelaide’s family notices that the information being shared is inaccurate and that no one else has noticed that these attackers are doppelgängers or much less learned where they come from or what their needs are. This scene can be taken as a allegory for what usually happens during instances where a subaltern or oppressed group decides to turn their concerns into action through protest. The surface-dwelling media can only grasp the shock and violence of the oppressed group’s immediate actions, but fail to deliver more in regards to the substance or needs behind them. If one were to take this into the real world, we would find striking similarities with recent protests such as Ferguson and Baltimore. In both cases, the actual concerns of the people where ultimately muddled by media coverage that decided to focus on the more striking aspects. This, in turn, distorted public perception and furthered the viewers' understanding from reality.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">In addition, one can also find commentary on the longevity or effectiveness of contemporary protests. As we saw before, Hands Across America offered no long-term solutions and served more as a temporary distraction from hunger and homelessness. In that respect, we can infer that the second part of the revolt, the part where the tethered hold hands and spread across the nation, will end in a similar manner. Red’s revolution, although justifiable, seems to have no real concrete goal besides public recognition. Once they begin linking to each other, the violence stops and all that is left is a symbolic gesture for the cameras to see. This is seen in the ending of the movie, as we see miles and miles of tethered joining hands together with helicopters flying above them. These helicopters are not piloted by under-worlders, they are above-world military and, probably, some are even recording the images for others to see. If we continue comparing this to recent events, we notice that, after a protest’s shocking beginnings, what follows is an idealization of the issues that are brought forward. People and policy makers begin discussing the topics in a distanced and idealized fashion, putting off any real talk of solutions. The whole event then becomes swallowed by the 24-hour news cycle until it is replaced with whatever comes next. This will be the sad fate of Red and her tethered’s uprising.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Aside from it all, the film also reflects an over-encompassing notion of what happens when we model our social movements after others from the past. Time after time, we see how, after a protest breaks out, opinions from the right and left sides of the political spectrum race to compare it to past movements. For example, whenever a racial struggle breaks out, the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties is brought forward. People from the right conjure up Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence approach to condemn the initial shock and violence while people from the left remind everyone that, in moments of radical change, violence has made its presence to some degree. This conversation just steers the people’s attention in the wrong direction. The possibility of working towards a solution is replaced with historical debate, another distraction from the actual problem that only benefits a news channel's content. The final result is, again, not that different from what we have seen in recent years. A problem comes, is televised, is normalized, and then quickly forgotten.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Many of you may ask for a resolve to this cycle of indifference. Peele does not really present a definitive answer, but he does offer us a symbol. The pair of scissors, the weapon of choice by the tethered, acquires much more significance in this aspect. While for Red and her movement it represented attaining disconnection from their upper-world counterparts and from the capitalist tradition of subjugated groups, it could also very well mean that we must untether our narratives of social struggle from those of the past in order to create new, more effective ones for the future. Perhaps this would be a first step in ending the cycle of indifference. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Cited articles:</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/movies/us-hands-across-america.html"><span style="font-size: large;">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/movies/us-hands-across-america.html</span></a></div>
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<a href="https://www.inverse.com/article/54329-us-hands-across-america-engages-with-dark-hypocrisy"><span style="font-size: large;">https://www.inverse.com/article/54329-us-hands-across-america-engages-with-dark-hypocrisy</span></a></div>
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Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-11313502096259747062015-02-18T15:56:00.001-08:002019-04-01T17:31:37.749-07:00On a Superhero’s Ideals and Their Reluctance to Change<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">by Gabriel Alejandro</span><b style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </b></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“[But] Are you the Superman that the 21st century needs? Why not use your power to ‘fix’ the world?”</span></i></div>
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<a href="webkit-fake-url://605f6238-5599-445e-8282-aa2d7e8597cd/image.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="webkit-fake-url://8a2c2f73-21ed-4695-b03b-0532f0590e98/image.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="webkit-fake-url://56a17098-6184-4c39-b509-36abf91c6690/image.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>-</i>From<i> </i>Superman Vs. The Elite, 2012</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Superheroes have represented humankind’s limitations ever since their creation. Whether it be the power to fly, x-ray vision, or just super intelligence, their traits often reflect the frustration of a group facing a seemingly impossible challenge. For example, both Superman and Batman were born out of the Great Depression. The economic difficulties and usual questioning of immigrants that comes as a consequence of difficult times were embodied in a alien who arrived on earth seeking refuge and a billionaire (perhaps millionaire, at the time) who used his wealth to help the less fortunate. But super powers did not give them the permission to abuse them. In fact, it just meant that a larger sense of responsibility had to be administered. This came from an ideal perspective of responsibility that echoed American exceptionalism. Later, when Marvel arrived unto the scene, their heroes offered a fresh and optimistic perspective that the Sixties so desperately needed. They applied the same sense of responsibility to a decade marked by Cold War propaganda, Civil Rights movement protests, and Vietnam-conflict bloodshed. By doing so, they cemented countless unwritten superhero rules such as “no killing,” which stemmed from a particular ideal of justice. Now, more than fifty years have passed. Our innocence has faded along with our ideals of responsibility and justice, but superheroes still go by the same standards that they did back when they first arrived. Should they be brought up to modern policies or should they be kept as historic records of past mentalities?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Next I will analyze recent Superman, Batman, and Captain America events that put into question their role and that of their ideals in modern society. I chose these heroes because they are the earliest examples of the superhero archetype and carried an ideal. I know that I left out excellent ones like Wonder Woman (feminist icon) and obvious ones like Spider-Man (“With great power comes great responsibility”) out of the article, but I needed it to be short and concise. If anyone is willing to write one about any other superhero’s adaptability, they are more than welcome to submit it. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Superman </span></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcWOZn9Vi_iLRCtuQu77nKXYbb3xNwT2nKKeVqQvjQzgyc2cPG0ZNL16lKuU7p7lFUIHG56pPuyixLqK1KzgzYgQyDRC8UEzb352GPdMwsIEbBqxB8rCoUItlPTpe4mWODkLKLMfkqiuY/s1600/IMG_0313.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcWOZn9Vi_iLRCtuQu77nKXYbb3xNwT2nKKeVqQvjQzgyc2cPG0ZNL16lKuU7p7lFUIHG56pPuyixLqK1KzgzYgQyDRC8UEzb352GPdMwsIEbBqxB8rCoUItlPTpe4mWODkLKLMfkqiuY/s1600/IMG_0313.PNG" width="217" /></a><br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; font-size: 14px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Superman Vs. The Elite </i>(2012, cover picture)<i> </i>is an adaptation of a Joe Kelly story (by Kelly himself) titled <i>What’s Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?</i>, published in <i>Action Comics </i>#775<i> </i>(March 2001). The story pits Superman against a new group of superheroes called The Elite, led by Manchester Black (a bit stereotypical for an English superhero, no?). But why would Superman go against another superhero team if they are, in fact, superheroes? The answer lies in a matter of principle. Unlike Superman, Manchester Black’s team, The Elite, does not mind getting its hands dirty when it comes to crime fighting. In fact, in the <i>Action Comics</i> version of the story, this is how they introduce themselves to the public: by killing everyone involved in a conflict before Superman could even get to the scene. This strikes a chord with one of Superman’s strongest mandates: thou shall not kill. But much to Kal-El’s surprise, the act is well received among the public opinion who take advantage of the situation to express a growing dislike towards the status quo. This causes Superman to question his place in the modern world: are his ideals still relevant? Is HE still relevant?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; white-space: pre;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The disapproval of the status quo can be taken up outside Superman’s world and into the comic book reader’s world. For years now, big-hero comic book sales have been declining due to readers turning their attention into other no-so-super, grittier titles. This is due, in part I believe, to lack of adaptability. Today’s world is much more in tune with the reality of war and, thanks to social media, can even witness it first-hand from the comfort of their home. The growing cynicism that has come as a result demands its heroes to be more “real” and in par with what audiences see on a daily basis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But the audience’s growing rejection of the status quo is not limited to the fiction they consume. Recent tragedies such as Charlie Hebdo and the Boko Haram kidnappings have stirred debate on how global entities such as the United Nations should deal with extremist opponents. The people who question the old, diplomatic ways favor a more hands-on approach like The Elite. Their argument is that modern, religious-driven “terrorists” do not act on reason and therefore we should not waste time trying to reason with them. They feel that governments are upholding a moral value system that is outdated and will not work against this new threat. In a sense, we see how Superman’s convictions mirror those of our world order (Kelly correlates truth and justice to the “American way” which also happens to be “Superman’s way,” however problematic you may find it) and just as our real world leaders struggle to maintain relevance in the world power stage, Superman struggles to maintain himself relevant in the comic book sphere. It is important to note that the book was published just months before the September 11 attacks, leaving us to question if it would have been any different had it been published after the event.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Batman</span></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8i1tflwNtQVGJ6P-BWiWQBlfEPD1GS9SQmScJ6JBodJM7Ng2vuvrRr78Q9VljrpBwYQda1mFcISRMCd6jtwIJVNXNSXfkW_YYT2GB7SEt1Uf1E7ldVzeZl8rnaicQys-FbPFtuCWQ0es/s1600/nsa-memes-7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8i1tflwNtQVGJ6P-BWiWQBlfEPD1GS9SQmScJ6JBodJM7Ng2vuvrRr78Q9VljrpBwYQda1mFcISRMCd6jtwIJVNXNSXfkW_YYT2GB7SEt1Uf1E7ldVzeZl8rnaicQys-FbPFtuCWQ0es/s1600/nsa-memes-7.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Perhaps the one who has had a better time aging has been Batman. His menacing presence and psychological trauma has allowed for writers to come up with darker storylines that live up to some modern standards. They even stopped calling him superhero in favor of a more believable “detective.” That being said, Batman has got to be one of the stronger maintainers of the status quo. He keeps his rogues gallery not too far (locked in Arkham Asylum) where they are just a sneeze away from breaking out, running amok, and returning after being beaten senselessly. Like Superman, he has been questioned on many occasions about his decision not to kill when it would save him a lot of trouble and his answer always evokes an inmutable concept of justice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A memorable moment was presented in Christopher Nolan’s <i>The Dark Knight </i>(2008) when our caped crusader saw himself crossing over boundaries even he feared. Beginning with the extradition of a Chinese bank accountant who fled the U.S. avoiding trial and then using a highly problematic sonar tracker on the citizens of Gotham, Batman’s actions were just a metaphor of the United States’ internal and external policies after September 11. Many do not remember how, after the attacks, the U.S. struggled to assess its new enemy. On the exterior, they had to justify military intervention in order to “prevent” future attacks and, in the interior, they proposed the highly controversial Patriot Act which included wiretapping the whole nation “for their own safety.” We see again how the nation’s supposed interests match those of our superhero, but this time the hero does not go all in. Even though Batman also struggles with his new enemies, he is fully aware that the means blur moral and ethical lines. Everything sort of ends up in hypocrisy after Batman does agree to do both things “just this once,” giving in to the notion that rules are meant to be broken in the time of war. Still, his questioning of the whole event can give us an idea of what 1939’s Batman would think of 2008’s Batman, as well as what would 1939’s United States would think of post-September 11 United States. The only difference being that Batman went on the record as saying that it was wrong, while we are still waiting for the other to even address it.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Captain America</span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="white-space: pre;"><b> </b></span>Time for a Marvel character to join the list. In my opinion, Captain America is one of the most misunderstood superheroes and it is largely due because of the name he bears. Many believe that the ideal he represents is that of the current U.S.A., when in fact, Captain America’s semiotic object never left the year/moment he was created in, thus making him the perfect emblem of an ideology whose nation has changed, but the character’s did not.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>To begin with a comic book history perspective, Captain America was created to fill the need for a more “physical” superhero during World War II. Previous comic book characters such as Superman and Batman not only did not kill, but they also avoided detailed physical confrontations (it is believed to be because of the artist’s inability to draw “real” fights). That is why on the cover of Captain America’s first issue we saw him punching Hitler square on the face. This was meant to appease the then-modern audience’s thirst for action during the war. Their hatred towards Hitler and the amounting anti-Nazi propaganda the U.S. served had rallied the people into a patriotic frenzy that had to be released. Luckily, Jack Kirby’s experience in the Suffolk Street Gang (Grant Morrison, <i>Supergods </i>38) that he had been a part of when young served as a creative model for his illustrations and they were a hit (no pun intended).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>But it would be only a matter of time before Captain America joined the rest of the “aged” superhero crew. His identity became more problematic as the years passed and the world’s perception of the U.S. changed. The Cap’s name would be forever linked to the nation’s foreign debacles even though Steve Rogers opposed their actions and philosophy in the comics. His return during the Sixties had made him socially aware: he believed Vietnam should end in a peace agreement and later, during the 70s, fought against a government association that was headed by president Nixon himself (Dominic Tierney, <i>Did Captain America Really Sleep Through Vietnam?</i>). He finally ended up hanging the suit in 1974 because of his dislike for the U.S. nation’s actions and distanced himself by becoming Nomad. But, since nothing in the comic book world lasts forever, he was meant to grab the shield once again, but as Tierney states in his article: “When he finally grasps the shield again, Cap <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Captain_America">decides</a> he will fight for American ideals, and not for the administration in Washington. ‘I'm loyal to nothing ... except the [American] Dream.’” The “Dream” mentioned not being the applied version, but the idealized version of it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>During the past decade the Captain has had to endure the same world changes as Superman and Batman. He did not go after Islamist extremists and chase them off the map because, as we have seen, that is not his way. He has rather stayed inside and favored local policies in a time when politics have become extremely polarized and a second wind of the civil rights movement has emerged. I have praised Rick Remender’s <i>Captain America </i>(2012-) a number of times and this is one of the main reasons for doing so. By removing Rogers, sending him to Dimension Z for a number of years and then bringing him back to earth, Remender replayed the Captain’s 1963 return, but for today's standards. Since Remender knew the Captain would not submit the U.S.’ current ideals, he brought the whole media and public opinion against him. Unlike Superman, Captain America did not question his relevancy in modern times, but he did question the United States government decision-making during modern times. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i>Steve Roger’s last bout came at the hands of Zola who drained him of his serum and left him an aged soldier (perfect analogy for this article). And, in a move that seemed logical to some of us, Sam Wilson, The Falcon, was chosen to be the new Captain America. The implications of the move were big. The change came at a time when gay rights are being debated in the political sphere in a way that reminded many of the 1960s civil rights movement. In addition, African Americans across the U.S. were marching on the streets seeking justice for Michael Brown and Eric Garner, two victims of police shootings whose perpetrators were not indicted. The argument of a new America can be established here with Sam Wilson as the face. Steve Rogers could question authority all he wanted, but if there was one thing he could never reflect, it was the diversity of the American people. Nevertheless, a costume or physical change does not suppose a change in ideal. Sam Wilson upholds the same concept of justice as Rogers before him. And even though it is still too early to say in the series with Wilson at the helm, it would be interesting to see if this becomes a point of discussion. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Closing</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I do realize that, at this point, both DC and Marvel establish limits for their characters when a new writer is hired. This certainly does prevent the creative team from moving away of what has already been established. The audience is also a key factor in accepting or rejecting new material. Zack Snyder’s heavily-derided Superman film <i>Man of Steel </i>showed him killing General Zod and the audience did not approve. Many other stories where our characters have bent or simply broken their rules have been written, but they are always discarded as “Elseworlds” or “What If?” This article centers around a canon that includes comic book storyline and the public acknowledgment of said canon. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Still, it is interesting to trace a character’s immutability for more than five decades. Even more when the nation their ideals were based on has changed so much. Superman will always be the boy scout of America, upholding the chain of command for as long as it exists even though he may know that it is not completely right. His devotion to preserving order and a form of central power belong in his ideal. It is why Frank Miller easily wrote him as a government puppet in <i>The Dark Knight Returns </i>(1986). Batman will be Superman’s opposite in style of achieving things, but they will still share the same principles. Finally, Captain America has been the one to question things from early on. This has produced many changes in esthetic, but nothing at the core. You can say that the Captain is a symbol whose referent is stuck in time. But for the three, the ideal stays the same even though the times keep moving forward and the standard of what a superhero is moves along with it. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Bibliography</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Morrison, Grant. <i>Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human</i>. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Tierney, Dominic. </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Did Captain America Really Sleep Through Vietnam?. </i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Atlantic, 26 July. 2011. Web. Feb. 2015. <</span><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/07/did-captain-america-really-sleep-through-vietnam/242573/" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/07/did-captain-america-really-sleep-through-vietnam/242573/</a><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">></span><br />
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Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-71968949142705922442014-11-22T14:45:00.000-08:002014-11-29T06:42:59.696-08:00Grant Morrison's Pax Americana, the JFK Assassination, and Comic Book Storytelling<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b> By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis</b></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Multiversity: Pax Americana. </i>Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Kennedy's death has been a fascination of the pop culture kind. The actual aesthetics of it make the event all the more iconic. It brings us back to the infamous "back and to the left" scene in Oliver Stone's <i>JFK</i> (1991) movie where District Attorney Jim Garrison replays the video of Kennedy's head bursting after the kill shot, over and over again, to an audience gripped by horror. The video came courtesy of Abraham Zapruder, an American manufacturer of women's clothing, and a Democrat, who got to Dealey Plaza early in order to get a good spot to take pictures of Kennedy's motorcade. Kennedy was going to ride through the plaza on his way to the Dallas Trade Mart where he was going to give a speech. Zapruder's video footage is often used to argue the existence of a second or even third gunman at the plaza that day (November 22nd, 1963), possibly located in the Grassy Knoll area (situated at the northwest side of it). It had a very clear view of the motorcade as it turned close to the Book Depository, where the official version has Oswald readying his rifle. But the film also gave us the final images of the assassination. In doing so Abraham Zapruder gave American culture an universal template for political assassinations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Zapruder's home movie is basically an incomplete anatomy of the assassination. It gave investigators visual entry into the crime scene, if only in part. It also gave comic book writers, cinematographers, and artists a visual point of reference from which to work from. Artists, writers, and comic book creators usually explore the actual trajectory of the bullets, the ones that end in kill shots in particular, in order to better sell an action or an assassination sequence. This opens up new storytelling possibilities and makes for a sense of authenticity when representing or recreating a political assassination. President Kennedy's assassination can still be argued as the visual standard for this.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stracynsky's <i>Sidekick</i> is an example of the<br />
JFK assassination as visual template.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> For example, the angle of the shot that produced Kennedy's fatal head wound, as Zapruder's video shows, suggests not all shots could have come from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building, where it was said Lee Harvey Oswald positioned himself to shoot at the President. Officially, Oswald fired three shots that produced 7 wounds between Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally in addition to the head shot. And one of the bullets missed. That bullet, according to the Warren Report, hit concrete a little farther up the motorcade. This caused the concrete to splinter and hit James Tague, a Dallas car dealer </span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">who was standing a few feet east of the eastern edge of the triple underpass railroad bridge. The final shot would come shortly after. And with that, history gave popular culture a spectacular yet problematic set of images to play with.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Perhaps one of the most recent reimaginings of the Kennedy assassination comes in Grant Morrison's <i>Multiversity: Pax Americana</i>. Illustrated by Frank Quitely, the comic book's opening pages see an American president getting murdered, while on a motorcade, in reverse sequencing. The President is seen to be grabbing a flag with the peace sign over his head, serving more as a bullseye than a symbol of more ideological connotations, while smiling to an unseen crowd. We are immediately reminded of Kennedy here, setting himself up as a reference point for <i>Pax Americana</i>'s opening scene. The fact the president is holding a peace flag reminds the reader of Kennedy's 'ultimate diplomat' myth. Kennedy's death, it was quickly concluded, meant peace was off the table (at least in terms of public debate). It was as if Kennedy was peace's last resort, the answer to John Lennon's "Give Peace A Chance" plea. In a twist of historical fate, but mostly because of the Kennedy Administration's own foreign policy decisions, Vietnam started for real shortly after the assassination. There was an air of reinvigorated militarism in Lyndon B. Johnson's White House (the Vice-President who took over Kennedy's administration) and America was slowly being taken farther away from the mythic and utopic ideals of Kennedy's own version of peace (which historians are still unsure as to how it would have looked like).</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The shooter is falling from the sky.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> <i>Pax Americana</i>'s assassination scene, then, captures this highly problematic set of historic circumstances. The fact the assassination is played backwards here leaves the reader with a sense of historical revision that further adds to the mystery behind the actual shooting. We are shown the dynamics of the president's movements, his reaction to the kill shot first. As the opening panels pull back, we see the President has been shot from above, the bullet entering through the base of his head going straight down, shattering his jaw. It is an inversion of Kennedy's kill shot, where the final bullet (whose trajectory is inferred from Zapruder's home movie) comes from the President's right (some argue from the Grassy Knoll) and blows out the back of his head, leaving a gaping wound. Kennedy's death is bloody, shocking, and definite. So it goes with <i>Pax Americana</i>'s American President in the opening scenes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> The Kennedy assassination parallels do not stop with the head wound or the trajectory of the kill shot. In fact, it is in relation to the kill shot's trajectory that we see what can be best argued as an attempt at historical satire, done in a very subtle way. The shooter, which looks like a rogue superhero, is revealed as falling from the sky while aiming down the scope of a rather large silenced sniper rifle (or high-powered rifle). The shot actually comes from sky. At a simple glance, this can be taken as a ridiculing of the official version of Kennedy's assassination, which explains that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman responsible for 7 bullet wounds between the President and Governor Connally and the final head shot that culminated the killing. It is as if Morrison equates Oswald's sharp shooting skills with that of a superhero falling from the sky while hitting a perfect head shot. Reality's doubt makes for great comic book storytelling.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> The killer is eventually captured and his motives questioned. But we are left in the dark as to the true intentions behind the assassination. Instead, the comic turns inwards and explores the narrative mechanics of a post-Kennedy world trying to recapture lost American counterculture ideals</span> <span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">as reimagined by a very problematic group of superheroes. And it is all set up by an opening sequence that invites us to revisit President Kennedy's death down to the last gory detail, even if it is meant as a very subtle critique on the controversies surrounding the death America's 35th president.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> It might be easier, more psychologically manageable to believe that a lone gunman can kill the President of the United States, especially if he is falling from the sky equipped with nothing but a high-powered rifle and a parachute. But there is something oddly spectacular about imagining and reimagining the assassination of an American president. It captures an historic sense of controversy and mystery while reflecting on the death of an utopian dream. That we automatically resort to Kennedy when thinking of such things speaks to the power of historical memory as a referent for creating fiction, especially when we want to get the violence right.</span></div>
Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-10322443776139905132014-09-28T04:55:00.001-07:002014-09-28T07:01:39.317-07:00Batman is a Horror Comic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Frank Miller’s <i>The Dark Knight Returns</i>, Grant Morrison’s <i>Arkham Asylum</i>, Scott Snyder's <i>The Court of the Owls</i>, all stories featuring an iconic character that is one step behind Dracula, Batman. Bruce Wayne, a gallant attraction that plays down his alter ego as an entity entirely detached from himself, is two fangs away from giving into the vices of the classic monster. But he is much more than just a variation of the vampire character. He is something else entirely. Batman is another type of monster, a creature that fights crime with something much worse than it, madness (the very thing that leads to it). This makes <i>Batman </i>a horror comic.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizKegvdffYDFM2pYEWRvrXH2lJ7ZB3jzMeg0HQUMRWmsCNphGuhyphenhyphenM01Xwm0_cBhucL-sH2bf0umzytgVZQd7ahgwwuOXD-84xIrdgxaxWPtTJuuI472iVdYypUkWQCqYtHmcqwpm95o7c/s1600/batman-and-dracula.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizKegvdffYDFM2pYEWRvrXH2lJ7ZB3jzMeg0HQUMRWmsCNphGuhyphenhyphenM01Xwm0_cBhucL-sH2bf0umzytgVZQd7ahgwwuOXD-84xIrdgxaxWPtTJuuI472iVdYypUkWQCqYtHmcqwpm95o7c/s1600/batman-and-dracula.jpg" height="400" width="260" /></a></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> When Doug Moench and Kelly Jones turned Batman into a bloodsucker, in<i> Batman & Dracula: Red Rain </i>(1991), the vampire metaphor seemed to hit too close to the chest. In fact, Moench and Jones played exactly into what we expected from a vampire Batman: Bruce Wayne finally becomes the Bat. He submits his last bits of humanity to it, letting the costume become the new skin. But he remains a crusader. The lust for blood only adds to the challenge of keeping justice and order under his control. There is no letting loose on Gotham’s innocent bystanders, his rules are never tested, and he remains a superhero, just with added powers. What he does do is embrace the death of Bruce Wayne, telling Alfred he has truly become the Batman. Gotham’s nights are now entirely his, regardless of him becoming a slave to them in the process. The character truly reveals himself as a weary knight in black armor, shedding any trace of the identity that could lead him back to his human form. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> And yet, his dark knighthood holds itself truer to horror when we realize his becoming a bat was no accident. It was a choice. The murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents was quite simply the waking up of a demon, willed into existence. It plays into the origin story of a man that could either embrace a Superman-like light or a darkness-induced decent into something worse. He chose the latter. And the terror that comes with that darkness is even more frightening when Bruce is accepted as the real mask, the actual suit. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> There is no batsuit. There is only a monster over a man. Bruce is secondary to the Batman, a walking alibi that enables Gotham’s monster crusader. Villains like the Joker, Two-Face, Penguin, and the Riddler stop being darker reflections of the Batman once we accept this. Instead they are the keepers of the bat faith. Their terrorizing the city can be seen as an act of adoration, a penance to be paid to be granted presence with the bat-lord. Alternately, these villains turn Batman into an aspiration, the standard for the horror they can impart. Again, their villainy becomes an act of worship, a pledge of allegiance to the Bat King, the night stalker, the victim the city spewed out as the hero it deserved. A monster built in its own image. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Gotham City adds to the horror by playing to the hero’s bleakness. Its buildings are more protrusions than man-made structures. They reach for the sky as if a gun is pointed at them. But it is Batman who holds the gun, the virus that creates the lesser monsters that terrorize it. Gotham may have created the monster, but the monster brought with it its admirers. It is a cycle that keeps the city under siege. Every new villain must be blessed by the Bat King as worthy of being one of his monsters. And to be blessed is to be admitted into Arkham Asylum, the temple of the bat-faith. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> But the Bat King is a complicated creature. He needs to submit one of his identities to the other in order to truly transform into the bat. In order to accomplish this, Batman turns Bruce Wayne in a protective shell, a cave, if you will, that serves the purpose of sheltering the monster during the daytime. In other words, Bruce Wayne becomes Batman's lair.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Now, the fact Wayne surrendered himself to the bat to root out evil might keep the bat-monster in check, but it is in the darkness that surrounds his concept of justice that we find the true horror of Batman. For Batman, justice is horror (out of fear) turned into a weapon, a thing that plays to the strengths of its nature. Fear becomes a voice, terror a trap, horror the purpose. Batman’s history never falters on these principles. They turn the bat into a hero that demands the city remain dark, like a price to be paid for its safety. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Fear becomes Gotham, it keeps it alive. Batman’s idea of justice means keeping the city hostage, his hostage. It is of no wonder, then, that so many worshipers, Batman’s rogues gallery, gravitate towards it. It is their home, a place that accepts them for who they really are. It has to. It would be unbecoming to reject those that so faithfully follow in the footsteps of the bat. They become acolytes, servants to the Bat King that pay their respects in pain. One must consider that every one of the Joker’s transgressions to Batman’s rule of law is done in the hopes of receiving the bat-monster’s blessings, manifested in the form of bruises and broken bones. And that is why <i>Batman</i> is a horror comic. Because its hero wants us to be afraid of him. </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-35624251842649021322014-09-01T13:35:00.000-07:002019-04-01T17:31:52.588-07:00The Semiotics of Alan Moore <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Fashion Beast #6, </i>Alan Moore, Malcom McLaren, & Antony Johnston</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><b>By: Gabriel Alejandro</b><br /> <br /> Alan Moore, one of the most recognizable names in comics, is known for taking the medium to a whole new plateau. Whether you love him for his work or hate him for his rants, everyone can agree that his stories differ from others in the way they incorporate elements of myth, sexuality, and mysticism, to name a few. At the bottom of each instant lies a constant variable which is Moore’s understanding of language. In his 2005 documentary, <i>The Mindscape of Alan Moore</i>, he tells an anecdote of a bard who writes a satire as revenge instead of placing a curse. The satire’s strength and longevity on the victim depended on how “skillful” the bard was, meaning how well he worded it. Here, we get a glimpse of Moore’s working philosophy: a story’s power (or message) relies on the mastery and use of language by its bard (or author). But mastering a language does not stop at having proper syntax and grammar. No. It also implies having a commanding knowledge of language’s structural role in “magic” and story-making throughout recorded history. Thus, new stories acquire past symbols and experiences that make it relevant to the human experience and, on a more personal level, memorable to the reader. <br /><br /><b>Semiotics </b><br /><br /> Every tale, epic, and legend since the early civilizations has survived in contemporary cultures with modifications by the different language structures around the world. These adaptations are possible due to “equivalents” in each language, words that point to more or less the same meaning. For the sake of argument and keeping this article short, I will not dabble into the untranslatability of language or the precision (or lack of) with which symbols approach their semiotic objects. These arguments, although real and worthy of hearing, would divert the article from the main subject and could extend it to dissertation-like lengths. Now, without getting too much into translation or linguistic theory, language itself is a system of symbols (letters) that, when put together, form other symbols (words) that stand for a thing, idea or concept. For example, the word “pencil” does not look or smell like an actual pencil, but it points to the physical object. It bears no similarity to the word <i>lápiz </i>in Spanish, except for the fact that they both point to the same object. The same applies to a logo that stands for a religious, political, or general belief. The image has no real connection to the ideal besides the one that has been bestowed upon it by people, history, tradition; you choose. This is one of the basic principles of Semiotics, the study of symbols (something that stands in for something else) and the relationship with their meaning. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> <i>Promethea</i> issue 17, page 22</span></td></tr>
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</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><b>Comics </b> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOewRpmwGCZMDVS2WduKe_wG0blqiFfqj34QKBgacpGk_fU6CEPgph2DpWyOO_J6mv2HEqdtonZwxDvenv2wByQ2lapJNAA5ViL4o8uHO8iDw6FCkbAVUFQBxzWJYnsne5AHNTqn-Dphg/s1600/3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOewRpmwGCZMDVS2WduKe_wG0blqiFfqj34QKBgacpGk_fU6CEPgph2DpWyOO_J6mv2HEqdtonZwxDvenv2wByQ2lapJNAA5ViL4o8uHO8iDw6FCkbAVUFQBxzWJYnsne5AHNTqn-Dphg/s1600/3.jpg" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /> Comics are an art form that feature both images and words. A Semiotical analysis can be applied to the dialogue and to the scenario in the panels of a book. Like films, which start as a script full of text, comic books start as a script that often detail the colors, objects, and symbols to be drawn. <span id="goog_227533315"></span><span id="goog_227533316"></span>This is where Alan Moore’s knowledge of past tales and rituals has been evident. The names, themes, and imagery in his work often range from Hebrew, Greek, modern, and even occult iconography. His <i>League of Extraordinary Gentlemen</i> (1999-present) series teams up science fiction characters from various renowned 19th-century authors such as Jules Verne, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and more, to fight a common enemy. One of his most famous characters (if not THE most famous), simply named “V” from<i> V for Vendetta</i> (1982-1989), is a revolutionary hero who wears a Guy Fawkes’ mask, a member of the Gunpowder Plot attempt in 1605 London. The purpose behind never seeing V’s face is explained in a panel where he states that he (and his actions) is only meant to be taken as an idea of uprise and revolution. The meaning behind using a Guy Fawkes’ mask is also semiotical, since it points to another moment in British history when a group of people stood up for their beliefs. More recently, in our reality, the Guy Fawkes’ mask has become the official logo of hacktivist group Anonymous and the short-lived Occupy Wall Street movement. <br /><br /><b>More than Meets the Eye </b><br /><br /> Beyond the visual realm, Alan Moore has also woven symbols of the past into the structure of his stories seamlessly. Although he often tells you what they mean or gives you a key to understand it, many do not follow because they see it as part of the fiction. These stories follow a path where the sequence of events emulate the structure of an ancient myth or ritual. Since it is better to show you than to just explain it, I will mention three scenarios that I consider most memorable where Moore applied this structural semiotic as I have come to call it. <br /><br /><b>I. Death of Baldur, <i>Top Ten</i> issue #7 </b> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /> <i>Top Ten</i> is a series about a police precinct in a world where everyone has a superpower. They answer the call of duty just as any regular police force would and in issue #7 of the first series, they receive a call from a bar named “Godz” about a homicide. Upon arrival, a man in white whose words are depicted in Nordic font explains the situation: moments before, a party had taken place at the bar, but was halted when the man’s son was murdered. Once inside they identify the body as Baldur Wodenson, the god of beauty, and an investigation ensues. Now, if you are not familiar with who Baldur is (or was), the events that follow will completely go over your head. But if you are familiar with this deity, then you would have figured out that the man, his father, is Woden (Odin), the all-father from the Norse mythology (which explains the font). <br /><br /> The sequence of events that follow are just as if you were to insert yourself in the middle of an ancient story. Smax, the hot-headed member of the <i>Top Ten</i> crew, clashes with the egos of other deities before we see Baldur’s brother, who confesses to the murder and admits that the weapon, a mistletoe, was given to him by Lokk (Loki), the god of mischief. In the myth, Baldur and his mother, Frigg, had dreamt of the death and understood it as a prophecy. To avoid the prophecy from realization, Frigg persuades every object in the realm to vow not to harm Baldur. Every object makes the vow except, you got it, the mistletoe. The death of Baldur is also considered as the first step in a chain of events that lead to Ragnarök, the end and rebirth of mankind. In the comic, when Woden speaks of bringing about Ragnarok as a result of his son’s death, Smax is filled with rage and they both engage in an argument. Luckily, Peacock, another member of the <i>Top Ten</i> squad who is well versed in mythology, enters the scene and begins laughing after learning of the situation. When asked about the purpose of his laughter, he responds that gods, as semiotic symbols, are always present and that their stories are always happening. In that moment, Baldur wakes up and the party resumes only to end in his death over and over again. This circular time notion is common both in mythology and in Moore’s work</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWWlTFE94fy0zlDfFlg0UP6dqWctK1u4f2MWmvYSMgn4vJ04e7u79JaYwWh1YiAT1m6u_lDiQ5W4dNuKA4ENzDA4Gvt0iGmUMSfIDMD1DRmIgxO8S9F_zTCvZ0Obld1am2n_-UHNNg9Uw/s1600/5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="329" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWWlTFE94fy0zlDfFlg0UP6dqWctK1u4f2MWmvYSMgn4vJ04e7u79JaYwWh1YiAT1m6u_lDiQ5W4dNuKA4ENzDA4Gvt0iGmUMSfIDMD1DRmIgxO8S9F_zTCvZ0Obld1am2n_-UHNNg9Uw/s1600/5.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“Well, gods are
eternally recurring symbols, Syn. They’re stories. The death of Baldur’s
been going on since before time… and it will happen again tomorrow.”</span></td></tr>
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<br /><b>II. Occult and Masonic Architecture of London, <i>From Hell</i> Chapter 4 </b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /> In <i>From Hell</i>, Alan Moore gives a backstory to the legend of Jack the Ripper, a serial killer in 1888 London. By establishing that his alter ego was a physician and that the murders were linked to a royal conspiracy, Moore built a myth of his own over an already-existing one. William Gull (the Ripper) sees himself as doing a service to humanity. His acts serve to remind the populace of mankind’s fading knowledge of symbols and rituals. The fact that his victims were all women was attributed to the character’s misogynist beliefs and wish to destroy the symbol of the woman, which was acquiring power at the time (with women’s suffrage). By completing his work, his murders, he was certain that the symbol of the Ripper would be immortalized in the pages of history; and he succeeded. In reality, Jack the Ripper is known as the first “pop” serial killer. He wrote letters to the police which were published in local newspapers but was never apprehended. Many confessed to the crimes but were later released because of insufficient evidence. The legend inspired so many other copy-killings at the time that they blurred his trace and cops never found him. <br /><br /> <br /><br /> In Chapter 4 of<i> From Hell</i>, Gull asks his carman, John Netley, to drive him around the city of London. Netley did, in fact, exist, and is known for being accused of aiding the real Ripper by author Stephen Knight in a book titled <i>Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution</i> (1976). The purpose of the stroll is to show how the history of London reflects itself on the architecture of the city. Among the many, many historical facts, he pinpoints the location of events such as the death of Boudica, queen of the British Iceni who rebelled against the Romans, the pagan tribes that once lived in Hackney, and narrates the evolution of architecture from early Cretan and Mycenaean culture. Aside from the visual symbols of the building, the ride itself follows the path of a star which they draw upon a map after the ride. The star is the seventeenth card in a Tarot deck. It is interpreted as the integration of two opposite sides: the material and the subconscious worlds. The character of William Gull alludes to this during his dialogue with Netley: “All human brains, yours own included, Netley, have two sides: the left is Reason, Logic, Science […] The Right is Magic, Art and Madness.” Gull’s obsession with the ritual of symbols eventually leads him to madness after having a vision of the future and seeing what humanity becomes. <br /> <br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">“… symbols have
POWER, Netley… Power enough to turn even a stomach such as yours… or to
deliver half this planet’s population into slavery.” (<i>From Hell</i> Chapter 4, page 23) </span></td></tr>
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<br /><b>III. All 32 issues of <i>Promethea</i> </b> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /> <i>Promethea</i> is, without a doubt, the most semiotically-conscious book I have ever read. Everything from the characters, plots, events, and even the settings stand as a reference to something else. Promethea is an Egyptian deity that dwells in the realm of “Inmateria” (non-material): dreams, stories, fiction, art, etc. In order to summon her and to become her, one only needs to manifest her in some artistic form like writing a short poem or drawing a sketch. Moore basically made a story about his views on writing. The author as the magician who casts spells or stories in order to create magic; the worlds, inhabitants, and situations in his stories. The plot thickens when Sophie Bangs, the new Promethea, leaves the material world to look for Barbara, the previous Promethea. Before she sets on her journey, she meets up with a magician called Jack Faust who trains her in the art of magic so she does not get lost. As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, Moore’s perspective of magic is mostly in a linguistic sense. Training Sophie in magic meant that she learned of a great number of myths since the beginning of recorded history and their meanings. <br /><br /> The journey through “Inmateria” follows the structure and symbology of the Tarot deck. Moore dedicated issue 12 of the series to explaining the Tarot card by card so the readers would know where to stand in the story. Since the realm of “Inmateria” is the same as imagination, we get to see visual representations of mythological, science-fiction, and religious figures. We also see concepts such as death, language, salvation, and spirituality, among many more. The art is also key in every issue. J .H. Williams III explored different esthetics in each issue, giving every level of “Inmateria” a different feel through visual means. After the journey through “Inmateria,” the references continue to pour in different ways. My most memorable moment was right after the journey, when Sophie’s friend Stacie takes her to court over custody of the Promethea role (Stacie had filled in for Sophie while she was away). The court’s judge is King Solomon from the bible and he references it often by suggesting they cut Promethea in half so each girl could have a share. This is a direct quote from 1 Kings 3:16-28, in which Solomon judges a situation between two women; two harlots. The problem was that the two women lived in the same house and each gave birth a couple of days apart. The baby of one of the women died and the other survived. The mother of the baby who died claimed the living baby from her mother and thus the latter took her to court. The King then suggests they cut the baby in half in order to smoke out the real mother, who would object to it and prefer the baby stayed alive even if it was not with her. And it is exactly what happens, both in the bible and in <i>Promethea</i>. After the judge suggests it for about the third time, Sophie’s friend agrees to it but Sophie does not, citing that she would rather not be Promethea if it would mean so much trouble. Solomon declares Sophie as the sole Promethea after uttering “Every time. it works like a charm!”<br /> <br /> </span><br />
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<br /> There are so many things that I may have left out from the books, Semiotics, and even Alan Moore. But the real joy in this is to experience it for yourself. When you approach a book, do more than just read it. Research every nook and cranny that appears in it, all the way from the names to the backgrounds. That is one of the perks of comic books. Many are quick to judge Alan Moore for his beliefs and how he portrays them in his work, but they do not see that every author does this. The late literary critic Terrece Hawkes once said that “All writing takes place in the light of other writing, and represents a response to the ‘world’ of writing that pre-exists…” (<i>Structuralism and Semiotics </i>101). In other words, every author’s influences are present in his work, whether they be political or philosophical. Moore’s “world” of writing is that which constantly and eternally points to the past, seeking equivalents in different cultures and languages. If you want to know how he and other authors do it, or would like to do some of your own, then all you need is to learn magic and all will become clear. </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-45475742846906993492014-08-25T15:37:00.001-07:002014-10-10T15:06:39.882-07:00War Talk: a short essay on the Vietnam War and its language<br />
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By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis <br />
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Nightmare. Bloodbath. Massacre. Quagmire. Four words that not only sum up the American experience in Southeast Asia but also characterize the language of defeat in American military history. The Vietnam War turned these four concepts into synonyms of failure, adding them to the long list of consequences that engulf that war’s legacy. <br />
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We refer to ‘nightmare’ when acknowledging the death of the American Dream in Vietnam. We turn to ‘bloodbath’ when discussing My Lai as a metaphor for the brutality of the Vietnam War. ‘Massacre’ we summon when we discuss the picture of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a shackled Vietcong suspect in the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive in 1968. And ‘quagmire,’ perhaps the most interesting of the lot, we reserve for those times we are asked to summarize the Vietnam War in a single word. Quagmire means to sink, “a bog having a surface that yields when stepped on.” In other words, quicksand (ironically enough, both words start with the letter Q).<br />
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Tom Engelhardt, in his book <i>The End of Victory Culture</i>, calls ‘quagmire’ a “withdrawal word,” a sinkhole that could do little else other than suck American troops into the depths of perpetual combat with no favorable resolution in sight. To get to the point of saying the war has turned into a quagmire is to start thinking of calling the troops back home. Engelhardt tells us that in 1965, Clark Clifford (unofficial adviser to President Johnson) warned that Vietnam “could be a quagmire. It could turn into an open ended commitment on our part that would take more and more ground troops, without a realistic hope of ultimate victory.” To sink in war is to accept the inevitability of defeat, that victory cannot be a reasonable scenario given a quagmire situation. Victory, on the other hand, came to Vietnam as a word that Washington desperately wanted to include in its war talk. But victory belonged to another war: World War II. Different war. Different results. Different language. <br />
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That Vietnam became the quicksand of American military history turned that war into an universal metaphor for war done the wrong way. It also made every other American war keep its vocabulary close-by, under heavy guard against Vietnam, hoping not to get infected with its linguistics of failure. <br />
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American history textbooks (like<i> The Americans</i>, published by McDougal Littell for high school use) made sure not to mix Vietnam war talk with other American war talks. The Spanish-American War is still referred to as the “Splendid Little War,” World War I keeps its claims to being the “The Great War,” and the Second World War continues being remembered as the ultimate example of ‘victory’ and ‘liberty,’ as safeguarded by America’s “greatest generation.” <br />
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The First World War’s case is interesting because, while ‘bloodbath’ flies around it more frequently than desired, it is mostly associated with the language of industrialism and empire. I refer, of course, to more popular interpretations of the war, mainly those found in survey books and high school textbooks. The same cannot be said of Vietnam. It only knows the language of death, defeat, and moral corruption, and history books have made sure it stays that way, on its own corner. <br />
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The First World War had a clear resolution. The allies won and the combined forces of the ‘evil empires’ perished. That World War I industrialized killing and that around one million men were either killed or wounded in the Battle of the Somme alone did little to change the linguistics of that war. The allies didn’t sink or fall through a bottomless pit of combat with no end in sight. They won. Quagmire averted. Vietnam ended with people flying away in overcrowded helicopters off American embassies. The Americans left behind a destroyed countryside, crop burnings, a history of rape and civil rights violations, and a very public withdrawal of American forces. World War I? Victory. Vietnam? Quagmire. History, so it seems, forgets more than it remembers. And it has a worrying obsession with endings. They do more to structure the enduring meaning of a war’s language than any other event within the history of the war itself. <br />
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Much like the Korean War, which stays ‘forgotten,’ Vietnam came up with a language, a war dialect, that no one else was interested in speaking. But the wars that came after it had no choice but to fall in place with it. The current War Against Terrorism certainly did, with both The New York Times and The Washington Post adding ‘quagmire’ to the long list of words that fed their skepticism against Operation Iraqi Freedom. Eight days into the war and both newspapers were already comparing Iraqi fighters to the resilient North Vietnamese. That Saddam Hussein was overthrown just eighteen days later did little to no effect in shifting the linguistics Vietnam had firmly set in place. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiYEmX3A6KA4S4LjGxSt440hRdaWHLrbcZ7iNsQzYNsZYNRW6sNHO1G-3rtiMzXO_z-5_LCBO3PO0R08rHwVwMAC_IaRPYJ8js7tJUO4z11v8PoAbOAYD_Hbr0XjD6A2tNLxrJYGZ0pSA/s1600/lastHeloVienam1975.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiYEmX3A6KA4S4LjGxSt440hRdaWHLrbcZ7iNsQzYNsZYNRW6sNHO1G-3rtiMzXO_z-5_LCBO3PO0R08rHwVwMAC_IaRPYJ8js7tJUO4z11v8PoAbOAYD_Hbr0XjD6A2tNLxrJYGZ0pSA/s1600/lastHeloVienam1975.jpg" height="260" width="400" /></a></div>
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Vietnam spoke a harsh language, of strange realities and of the moral implications behind them. After the war, victory was to be a concept locked in between quotation marks (except in the case of the Second World War), and horror could not escape being set as the Vietnam standard. No war has been able to skip over its linguistics after it. To be labeled as a war turning into a quagmire not only means losing public approval, it means channeling the memory of the Vietnam War and its linguistics of defeat. And this speaks to the legacy of the Vietnam War: the quagmire. Vietnam turned war into quicksand, a swamp, a very deep bog. And in the process it changed the official definition of the concept, for quagmire now truly means “a war having a surface that yields when waged wrong.” Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-66270363704225959322014-06-13T19:53:00.000-07:002014-06-13T19:57:32.907-07:00The Sacrament: Movie Review<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm1JVxXbd8El34s3PFFOiquZZ0yQXvdl7BJpBvIBBSdPd1kJ3Hv14tDgzUJ8QN9BUhZBZhJ5Xl-2gZ4KMNT2s2UUBiLj3Z-b1YLDPyORG-_PBBfiR4MgaEQvp5eFxFRH6PtflZJPYnLJo/s1600/the-sacrament-image-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm1JVxXbd8El34s3PFFOiquZZ0yQXvdl7BJpBvIBBSdPd1kJ3Hv14tDgzUJ8QN9BUhZBZhJ5Xl-2gZ4KMNT2s2UUBiLj3Z-b1YLDPyORG-_PBBfiR4MgaEQvp5eFxFRH6PtflZJPYnLJo/s1600/the-sacrament-image-3.jpg" height="304" width="640" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> by: Gabriel Serrano Denis</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Well, I got something to say</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I killed your baby today</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">And it doesn't matter much to me</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">As long as it's dead </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> -Misfits, Last Caress </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Economic crisis, religious fundamentalism, political corruption and social unrest have always been the source from which the deformed manifestations of horror cinema feed and nourish themselves. From Don Siegel’s “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956), through George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), to David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” (1986), paranoia and fear (of communism, counterculture, and AIDS) acted as the catalysts for the iconic creatures that still haunt and remind us of the political and emotional turmoil of their times. These “real” horrors, like the teenagers running from the monsters with chainsaws and knives of the 1980s, have forced American citizens to make terrifying decisions at their own peril decade after decade. Most recently, in 2011, a man called Richard Beasley posted a job advert on Craigslist in search for a watchman for his Ohio farm, offering $300 a week and a trailer home for free. Dozens of desperate workers suddenly stripped of their comfortable middle-class status applied for the job, only to be shot dead upon arrival by Beasley and 16-year-old Brogan Rafferty. An American Dream shattered, characters in search of betterment, a flash of hope, and the sudden, arbitrary destruction of life in the guise of salvation; the fundamentals of horror filmmaking. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Following this tradition, contemporary horror auteur Ti West has successfully bred horror narratives from the initial conflicts of economic struggle and social detachment. In both “The House of the Devil” (2009) and “The Innkeepers” (2011), it’s the phantom of capitalism that leads the way into an inescapable menace, slowly building to a supernatural explosion of terror and hopelessness. The former presents a penniless college student accepting the eerie request to babysit an old couple’s ailing mother for $400 only to be sucked into a satanic ritual at the end of the night. The latter takes us into the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a haunted hotel at the end of its run, and its two remaining employees (about to be made redundant, futureless) who are desperate to capture some actual paranormal phenomena before the hotel closes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> As with the classics of horror mentioned before, West taps into basic social and economic distress to pit his characters against oppressive forces all too familiar to the working class people (a wealthy couple taking advantage of a poor college student; the inability to escape from the confines of financial crisis). However, West is not interested in making larger points about American society with these films, despite the pertinence of his characters’ inciting conflicts. Though forced to act within such culturally significant situations, West’s characters experience their horrifying ordeals on a more personal and emotional level. With his new film, “The Sacrament” (2013), West not only delves into a fact-based narrative, but he grounds the horror in reality, directly addressing everything wrong with the current cultural zeitgeist in the process. Unfortunately, the biting social consciousness and the hollow characters through which it’s supposed to materialize don’t seem to have much of a point. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> In “The Sacrament”, produced by horror filmmaker Eli Roth, a Vice magazine journalist and his cameraman (AJ Bowen and Joe Swanberg) travel with fashion photographer and co-worker Patrick (Kentucker Audley) to an undisclosed country in search of his sister (Amy Seimetz), now living in a commune known as Eden Parish and run by a mysterious figure only referred to as “Father”. Based largely on the Jonestown Massacre of 1978, the film follows the newsteam as they are welcomed into Eden Parish, despite some minor altercations with armed guards at first, and slowly discover the true nature of “Father’s” paradise. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> The first miscalculation on behalf of the filmmakers comes in the form of its found footage aesthetic. Though more a “faux documentary” than an actual found footage film, the approach to the material nonetheless feels wrong and distracting. By striving for an extreme sense of reality, the film does well to justify its beautiful cinematography through its suggestion that an actual, professional journalistic photographer is at the helm. However, this does not justify the fact that the footage is so calculated and logically edited. With films like “Rec” and “Cloverfield”, though obviously constructed to a point where the narrative makes sense, the jumbled and chaotic nature of capturing live footage remains intact, and thus adds immediacy to an already tense situation. With “The Sacrament”, one can’t help but feel that it should’ve been shot conventionally. In a scene where Sam (AJ Bowen) sits down to interview “Father” (Gene Jones, ironically), his cameraman Jake frames up on Father and then goes to Patrick (with his handy DSLR hanging by his neck) and asks him to film Sam’s reactions from the opposite side. This totally unnecessary scene only serves to distance us from the sense of reality the film has worked so hard to achieve. It merely justifies the opportunity for West to play with the shot/reverse shot in the edit and thus only stays in the mind as a necessity of the filmmakers rather than a natural occurrence within the world of the film. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaAQAU-6TKqVzzAkb2hITAFpdlD60n6_KdoUL133V9LFWJhe8bBoIiW4mZsV8zIKH0L9px-5Cymnp3kejCPPJ8XP5UnaLMde79f-CVvD3XzMa_08Y3CiHlXPmtwZHQkJgH2AuQmk2fFrw/s1600/the_sacrament_pic.jpg.size.xxlarge.letterbox.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaAQAU-6TKqVzzAkb2hITAFpdlD60n6_KdoUL133V9LFWJhe8bBoIiW4mZsV8zIKH0L9px-5Cymnp3kejCPPJ8XP5UnaLMde79f-CVvD3XzMa_08Y3CiHlXPmtwZHQkJgH2AuQmk2fFrw/s1600/the_sacrament_pic.jpg.size.xxlarge.letterbox.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Tyler Bates’ score also works against the filmmakers’ intentions as it permeates the entire film, leaving no doubt that something terrible and ominous is lurking within the commune. Since the film is presenting itself as a fake documentary, it makes sense to have a score, but then what does constructing the film as a documentary add to the overall impact of the story? It seems to me like it detracts from the overall experience as it is pretending to document something so similar to an actual controversial event. As such, the filmmaker’s distinct vision and take on the subject remains lost in the attempt to comment on reality and horror. With a subject and approach like this, where the story unfolds in less than two days time and the veracity of the horror is central, a bolder approach would’ve perhaps been ideal. As I was viewing the film I couldn’t help but think how certain moments would’ve felt had the score been entirely removed, if the camera had not captured many of the horrific moments, if we had heard or imagined more than what we actually see, if the camera wasn’t always on and thus harder and more jagged cuts would’ve signaled the passage of time and would’ve created immediacy. But then, it’s obvious that West wanted to experiment with the found-footage aesthetic by blending it with his particular, dreadful approach to horror. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> West’s films unfold with the slow burn of a bad decision coming into the foreground of consciousness, and this ties neatly into his care and attention to character and context. His films’ elegant and composed unraveling emphasizes mood and tension, very different from the commercial horror fare of visceral scares and buckets of gore. This elegance and careful planning of camera and blocking are present in “The Sacrament”, but it lacks the characters to sustain it. With “The House of the Devil” and “The Innkeepers”, West can withhold on the terror and the emotional payoff because we are following engaging characters with real, grounded stakes. Even as he sets up the conflict, the sense of dread is already present and building: something very bad is going to happen, it’s only a matter of “how” and “when”. But the “who” is already well established even before the dread starts to sink in. With “The Sacrament” all we have to invest in is the fact that Sam is a journalist and he wants a story. As he arrives at the commune, he suspects and doubts the validity of Eden Parish, confounded by the people’s complete willingness to live in such stripped conditions. Not only is this clichéd and contrived, but it also brings attention to Sam’s lack of personality. We don’t know what kind of journalist he is or aspires to be, only that he is a journalist and it’s his job to expose or find a story. We know that he has a wife and that she is soon to give birth, but this is a mere plot device that never heightens the emotional stakes. One even wonders why the film wasn’t centered on his friend Patrick, who has greater stakes in the matter and a conflict to resolve with his sister. As it is, West’s slow and calculated build-up to terror is wasted in the film, as we have no one to fear for. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNsFliPuyR1Vc-yUlZUi0gqGpFSfulLq-YQJGJ3X6MGMmnOcDjJQ1QZPe1D8OD_wl-kJzF-I_m8yBc8ww1SmGqx4V6rM0dfwX_vcXmvPJ1dI_OLfbyhOdIQE-fo3jDIXqMRytum5zW4SI/s1600/Sacrament-Eden-Parish-Sign.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNsFliPuyR1Vc-yUlZUi0gqGpFSfulLq-YQJGJ3X6MGMmnOcDjJQ1QZPe1D8OD_wl-kJzF-I_m8yBc8ww1SmGqx4V6rM0dfwX_vcXmvPJ1dI_OLfbyhOdIQE-fo3jDIXqMRytum5zW4SI/s1600/Sacrament-Eden-Parish-Sign.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Despite all its flaws, the film is a natural product of its time. However, this relevance comes through in the sense that it explores the dangers of blind faith and extreme religious fundamentalism, and the untrustworthy American society from which it stems. Thus, the subject matter and realistic approach bring forth a film that speaks to a contemporary audience asphyxiated with school shootings, racism, homophobia, unemployment, poverty, international turmoil, mass murders, etc. All in all, “real” horror, not dependent on monsters or otherworldly manifestations to instill fear and shock. Sadly, the film fails to sustain its intent due to the lack of a distinct and personal vision concerning the idiosyncrasies of its subject matter. Though horrifying and shocking, anyone with a vague knowledge of Jonestown knows what’s coming. West structures his film smartly, withholding information and creating an atmosphere of uncertainty that leaves the audience anxious to know what it’s all building up to. But as the story progresses and every predictable beat is reached, it’s clear that West did not intend to alter or defy our expectations but rather to expose us to a “real” horrific event. And though horrific it is once it hits the screen (and it allows for some striking imagery), one can’t help but feel the lack of original thought, of a new lens through which to view the horror. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Ti West has always been interested in people stumbling into horrifying situations. His characters enter unknown spaces in the hopes of finding something and end up being part of a grander, more sinister scheme. As an extension of his aesthetic and thematic interests, “The Sacrament” feels, in parts, like a genuine Ti West film. However, as a meaningful and powerful piece of horror filmmaking, West undoubtedly lost his way. In “The House of the Devil”, West opens his film with text detailing the influence of Satanic cults in the 1980s, where the film is set, finishing off with: “The following is based on true unexplained events.” So, as we follow the main character as she hears strange sounds in the house and slowly realizes what she’s gotten herself into, we know she’s the prey of a Satanic cult. In a Ti West film, the “what” is always spelled out for the audience. The “how” and the “when” are prolonged, withheld, manipulated, built up until they can’t contain themselves much longer. What’s missing from “The Sacrament” is the relevance of this build-up, the reason why we stick until the orgasm of terror pops up, the point of it all. This is partly because the “how” is as obvious as the “what”. We know what the characters are dealing with, how it’s going to end, who is going to die and who is going to survive; there is nothing for West to play with. And without a strong central character for the ordeal to matter, we are left in the cold watching as the “reality” unfolds.</span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-42941108104102388912014-05-06T19:11:00.000-07:002014-05-06T19:16:28.560-07:00A Marvelous Identity: Ms. Marvel and the importance of comic books<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b>By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Storytelling, no matter how much it indulges in its fiction, can never truly escape reality. Social tensions, cultural anxieties, historical continuity, all of these things cling to fiction and demand that their presence be felt in comic books, film, and video games. The same goes with different genres. During the Cold War, Westerns dominated pop culture because they resonated most, in discourse and representation, with the ideological battle that the United States waged against Soviet Russia. The good guys (cowboys) were American bred, morally righteous, and white. The bad guys (Native Americans) were foreign to the ways of the good guys, antagonistic to American expansion, and red (labeled as such by the good guys and ironically compatible with the Soviet enemy). Who knew Native Americans could so easily fit into a metaphor for Cold War Communists? After Westerns, different genres took the mantle of Cold War politics and created stories that best reflected the different phases of said conflict (see Cold War science fiction and horror for some of the best examples), taking into account new developments and their wavering meanings. What was interesting was that each genre had its hero. Westerns had cowboys, combat films had soldiers, noirs had broken detectives, and thrillers had their spies. So, in a sense, one can say that genres define heroes the same way heroes define genres. But what of the heroes that stray from the classic formulas of Golden Age comics? What of those heroes of the post-9/11 world that are not a part of the Avengers or the Justice League? What of heroes that are Muslim, Latino, or Asian? What do they make of their genre, the superhero genre? And what does the genre make of them and their identities? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Like a direct answer to these questions comes <i>Ms. Marvel</i>, written by G. Willow Wilson and illustrated by Adrian Alphona. <i>Ms. Marvel</i> tells the story of Kamala Khan, a 16 year-old Pakistani-American from New Jersey who idolizes Carol Danvers, the first Ms. Marvel from the comic book world. Kamala Khan is the fourth character to take the name of Ms. Marvel, inserting herself into Marvel’s current <i>Marvel NOW!</i> series—a semi-reboot of the Marvel universe intended to pull in new readers. Kamala is young, of color, and a minority, two elements that not only dictate identity in a very fierce manner but also inform the social tensions that define the post-9/11 world. She is also Muslim, a character trait (come 9/11) that automatically communicates persecution and antagonism. This does not even have to be alluded to textually for the reader to comprehend the character’s current state of affairs. Kamala’s religion is inherently added into the mix of components that makes her identity so reactive. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Now, being a comic that deals in identity so directly, it is important we recognize the elements that make that topic drive the character into being a superhero. Those elements come out of Carol Danvers, the first female character to take up the name of Ms. Marvel. Kamala Khan idolizes Carol Danvers. This idolization comes through her fan fiction writings in the comic. Kamala’s characters are all supreme metaphors for American values. Captain America, Iron Man, and Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel all make their appearances in her fantasy superhero stories. Captain America represents American war, Iron Man represents American freedom through economical gain and freedom, and Danvers represents a very traditional female image built into American conceptions of beauty and its power. She stands for a sort of female normalcy that plays second fiddle to male predominance in heroic deeds. It is of no wonder, then, that Kamala finds refuge in Danvers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Danvers is a white, blond bombshell that dresses in a skimpy black outfit with a yellow thunderbolt symbol across her chest. She was usually drawn the traditionally sexist way Marvel and DC drew (and continues to draw) their female characters, breasts bigger than her head and barely covered by a modified swimsuit (see most iterations of Wonder Woman and Elektra). This image extends well into the comic book culture of the 90s and early 2000s and makes up a sort of sexually misguided tradition that kept female superhero characters a step behind their male counterparts. They were objects readers could drool over instead of idols and examples they could follow or wish to become. Kamala falls under the second tier of followers by wanting to be Danvers in image, spectacularly sexualized though it may be. But Kamala’s intentions are far from sexual. They are cultural. They speak to identity, American identity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> <i> Ms. Marvel</i> #1 opens with Kamala coveting, as she says, “delicious, delicious infidel meat.” She’s in a convenience store with friends when two, American, classmates come in and go through the now customary passive-aggressive culture bashing. We immediately meet a Kamala that desperately wants to fit in, to be “normal”. Of course, being normal means going out to parties and drinking with boys. The comic never directly associates normalcy with being American, but it is heavily implied. Kamala’s obsession with Carol Danvers further hits the nail on the proverbial coffin. Consider Kamala’s claim to normalcy after her very traditional father prohibits her from going out to an outdoor party: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> It’s just one party. It’s not like I’m asking their </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> permission to snort cocaine…Why am I the only one who </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> gets signed out of health class? Why do I have to bring </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Pakoras to school for lunch?...Everybody else gets to be normal. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Why can’t I? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The discourses are simple enough: foreign girl wants to fit in. Her culture and the traditions that define her family’s identity hold her back. That she resists them is not only logical but expected given Kamala’s family is far away from home, and that sense of home cannot be expected to fully migrate into American soil intact. Kamala’s discursive rebellion follows an actual act of rebellion when she escapes to the party her father forbade her from going. At the party Kamala drinks, throws up, and is made fun of by the same classmates that teased her in the convenience store scene. She is ridiculed, making her identity stand out all the more. The stage is set for the transformation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> As Kamala walks back to her house Terrigen mists descend upon Jersey City, swallowing up Kamala into a cocoon that transforms her into an Inhuman. The Terrigen mists are part of Marvel’s Infinity event, where the Inhumans and Thanos unleash a force that seeks out beings with Inhuman genes to encase them in cocoons that awaken their powers. Inside the cocoon Kamala is visited by three superhero hallucinations: Captain America, Iron Man, and Carol Danvers (now as Captain Marvel). They are the same characters that appear in her fan fiction. They question her intentions, her drive to be normal. They look like gods, speaking to their universal traits rather than their nationalistic ones. This is important considering the three heroes represent Americanism in one of its most intense forms. They are heroes we aspire to be. But they are heroes that never stray from their nationalities. Danvers asks the ultimate question: “What do you want to be?” To which Kamala answers: “I want to be you. Except I would wear the classic, politically incorrect costume and kick butt in giant wedge heels.” Kamala challenges her identity, reasserts her right to make up her identity as she pleases (a very American ideal should it stick to its utopic underpinnings), and makes the decision. Danvers answers, in a very wise manner, “It is not going to turn out the way you think.” Kamala wakes up, breaks out of the cocoon, and stands into the light a blond superhero in a skimpy black outfit, the same one she wanted. She became an American superhero.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">According to Thomas Schatz, in his book<i> Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System</i> (1981), genres are privileged story forms in which social tensions are brought to life in narratives and are ritualistically resolved. But popular genres, he explains, are those that can best animate and resolve social tensions through their metaphors. Comic books are popular culture products carrying within their pages iconic characters that proudly represent, and define, the superhero genre. Their power, the thing that makes comics matter, comes from the fact that the superheroes that live in the comic book pages can convincingly resolve social tensions, suppressing, if only marginally, the things that feed off of them. Superheroes are metaphors for a better way of life, for a way to do things the right way. That is why we want to be them, just like Kamala. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> <i>Ms. Marvel</i> is a powerful comic for various reasons, many of which I have explored here. But in the end, we find that Kamala is not so different from the average comic book reader. She wanted to be something different and she succeeded in doing so. Her reasons are complex, not too alien from things we have felt more than once in our lives. She becomes a superhero to fit in, to be a part of something that does not understand her. In looking for normalcy she further distanced herself from it. Her metaphor is one of change, of acceptance, and of diversity. She contemplates the possibility that equality is too naïve an aspiration. Instead she represents an alternative. In a world where identity can label heroes and villains too freely, Kamala speaks for diversity as a superpower rather than a weakness. For Kamala the word Muslim does not mean terrorist or not-normal, it means superhero.</span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-68654375150227958862014-05-06T17:33:00.001-07:002019-04-01T17:32:06.599-07:00Language and Myth in Comic Books<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">By: Gabriel Alejandro</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">"And in spite of current evidence to the contrary, actions do not rule the world... words do." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">-Jonathan Hickman, East of West issue 11 </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /> Whenever we hear the word “myth” being used, it often conveys one of two things: a negative charge against another’s basis for an argument or belief; or as a reference to the Greek gods that once inhabited Mount Olympus. We often forget that at the core of every myth lies a reality which, after the process of “mythification,” acquires new dimensions for its target audience. What distinguishes myth from fiction is that its elements (characters, setting, events, etc.) often resonate with the audience’s life experience and thus can become a valid explanation for that which cannot be easily understood or explained. Myths began as oral traditions, with each narrator adding something from their own personal undergoing to the general mythos. This was and still is possible due to language (either oral or written) and its conventions, which allows for different versions to deviate from the standard and still be accepted as part of a whole. Today, the same language mechanisms that allowed for the dissemination of classical myths are alive and well in the comic book medium, thus granting them a special place in modern culture</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><b>Language theory</b><br /><br /> In order to proceed, we must begin with the late literary critic Terrence Hawkes’ take on myth: “All myths, that is, have their grounding in the actual generalized experience of [ancient] peoples, and represent their attempts to impose a satisfactory, graspable, humanizing shape on it” (<i>Structuralism and Semiotics</i> 13). This refers to a tendency in human history to <i>bricolage</i> or, in other words, use a familiar word for something alien. Just try to remember those bad movies where a native from some jungle is taken to a city for the first time and refers to a car as a “metal horse.” The native, taken from his setting (and language), employs a defense mechanism of sorts, in which he tries to understand the new world by means of his own language. This mechanism, also used in myth-making, is a way of coping with unknown events through metaphorical language, or “... to deal with the world, that is, not directly but at a remove” (Hawkes 15). For a while it was also referred to as “the primitive mind” by language scholars and thus underestimated its historical value. It was not until the French anthropologist Claude Lévi‑Strauss’ study, which took myths beyond “child-like play” and into a more “sophisticated relationship with the world,” that scholars began to view myths as portals into the past. <br /><br /><b>Comic book mythos</b> <br /><br /> Lévi-Strauss study focused on how myths, and the language they are built upon, echo a particular point in time’s surroundings. His concern was “… ultimately with the extent to which the structures of myths prove actually formative as well as reflective of men’s minds...” (Hawkes 41). In this aspect, we can witness how the language –dialogue, names, and imagery– of myths reflect a particular social and/or historic context, depending on their moment of conception. Furthermore, we can also make the jump into comic books, where some of our most beloved characters were created out of historic events. In<i> With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story</i> documentary, Stan Lee explains the birth of many of Marvel’s superheroes. In all of these instances, the character’s<i> raison d'être</i> mirrored a particular language from the times: In the early sixties (1962), the Hulk was born amid nuclear fears and proliferation of words such as “atomic,” and “radiation,” elements with which Bruce Banner worked with and suffered from respectively. A year later (1963), Iron Man was first published among the hatred for the U.S. military industrial complex. The name itself, Iron, being a clear signifier of the struggle. A few more years down the road, The Silver Surfer (1966) was the answer to the flower power movement. A pacifist alien who mediates between a destroyer of worlds and its victims. The list goes on and on. <br /><br /> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It must be said that language is not limited to the written word. Images and symbols also figure into what is known as <i>semiology</i>, or the study of meaning-making. In one of the clearest examples, Captain America’s name stands for an infinite set of ideals of the North American nation. Moreover, his appearance in 1940, during the lead-up years to the U.S.’s involvement in World War II, made him a symbol for the inevitable. The first issue, which showed the Captain punching Adolf Hitler in the face, sold out immediately and was met with patriotic fervor. Beyond Hitler, the Captain battled enemies such as the “Red” Skull, shown with a swastika in the above picture. The Red Skull’s name is not only a literary reminder of the red scare that spanned almost four decades (from 1919 to 1954), but it is also a visual reminder of it. </span><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Modern Times</span> </b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> This language recourse is still very much present in comic books today. Recently, Rick Remender’s run of Captain America introduced a new villain called Dr. Mindbubbles, another post-Captain America super-soldier failed experiment with the particularity that the serum used on him was laced with the drug known as LSD. On this occasion, the semiology transports us to a time when drugs were not perceived as entirely evil and the U.S. government studied its benefits for personal gain. One may ask then: Is Remender fifty years too late with the character? The answer is no. Remender’s character comes at a time when the legality of some drugs is being contested in the U.S., and the language used in the arguments both for and against echoes the language of the past. The character is then validated by the previous and current historical contexts, or as Roland Barthes notes in his book <i>Mythologies</i>, “…the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth” (113). This tool of language then allows for the myth to be accepted by contemporaries for its factual background and passed on to future generations for its historical value. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Popular acceptance</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> The acceptance of these comic book myths also lies within the realm of language. Two basic concepts, the <i>langue</i> and <i>parole</i>, establish the glass through which these myths must be seen. In language, <i>langue</i> stands for language as-is, its rules and “correctness.” On the other hand, the <i>parole</i> stands for its everyday use, filled with mistakes, variations, and alterations. As with language, these myths stem out of a reality that can be seen as a <i>langue</i>. Thus, the variations, reinterpretations, and reimagining of past or current events lie within the <i>parole</i>. The public’s acceptance then comes of how close the myth can come to the reality without it actually being the reality. The more elements of reality the myth has, the better. If it has less, then it is just fantasy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> Nowadays it is not even necessary to even purchase a comic book in order to know who Superman is, or how Captain America came to be. These characters have withstood the test of time, but they have not done it on their own. Every couple of years a new voice comes to carry the superhero myth in the form of writers. The “magicians” as Alan Moore would say, are tasked with the duty of breathing life into the characters and often take from personal experiences to shape their contributions. As with myths and their oral counterparts, comic book writers take from an established tradition to which they must answer to, but can also add to the story with some restrictions. The parameters are established by the language of each character at its moment of creation, which define its nature and myth. Writers then provide readers with a more updated language, one that reflects his or her contextual setting, and the public decides whether to accept it or not into the mythos. This, again, is possible due to language conventions and concepts such as <i>langue</i> and <i>parole</i>, which allow for an immovable canon to exist under unlimited variations of it. As time passes, the origins of our characters are questioned less and the focus shifts to where they are situated in the now. As long as there is a language to fill the pages with stories, comic book characters will continue to exist as an alternative to our reality. </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-25536168100547082142014-04-08T17:11:00.000-07:002014-04-08T17:32:44.900-07:00Captain America: The Winter Soldier- Endorsing Good Wars<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis <br /><br /> Is World War II still the Good War? This was the title of an Adam Kirsch <i>New York Times</i> article exploring just that, the goodness of the Second World War. It came out in March 2011, when Iraq and Afghanistan had pushed Americans to question the extent of confidence a country could extended towards military might and strategy in the twenty first century. Militarism as a virtue, as a primary national value, seemed to be dwindling in representational prowess. The distance breached between morality on the home front and morality on the battlefield had broadened much to the disadvantage of war as an American ideal. Fighting in the Middle East made military conflict an impersonal experience, much detached from the cohesiveness of the American experience. More importantly, it became its own entity, with its own politics and its own history. In other words, it went opposite the Second World War’s route, that of war as the defining principle of American society. Kirsch will conclude that World War II will stay “good” so long as it stays living history. Living history, in turn, can instruct, it can still impart teachings of its own and tell people that there actually <i>is</i> a right way to conduct war. Of course, Kirsch explains that such histories need to take into account ambiguities and morally gray areas. But when memory is so highly elevated as to be considered near mythical, then, we have another thing entirely. War was “good” back then. Therefore, war can still be “good”. And <i>Captain America: The Winter Soldier</i> (2014) endorses just that idea. <br /><br /> Captain America means many things, but most of them rely on his war to make sense. The Second World War lives through Steve Rogers the same way Steve Rogers lives through it. It might make the character unstuck in time and it might keep him from being a more universal metaphor for war in America, but it keeps the war’s memory fairly grounded in what Kirsch referred to as living history. The character’s many discourses have been touched upon before. He upholds conservative politics, endorses a continued state of war, exalts ultra-patriotism, and survives as a testament to the goodness of the Second World War. These things hold true in the movie. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, <i>Captain America: The Winter Soldier</i> keeps with Captain America’s longstanding character conventions and gives us a fairly safe war movie. Rogers is now a part of SHIELD, just in time to watch it fall into the hands of HYDRA. In true sequel fashion, old enemies continue to haunt Rogers. HYDRA remains the Nazi stand-in par excellence (if HYDRA is not an offshoot of Nazism then nothing is), and is the main villain of the story. Captain America favorites such as Arnim Zola and obscure villains such as The Leaper pop up to keep true followers anxious for more. But it is the Winter Soldier that makes the movie stand above standard superhero fare. The character contrasts so starkly with Rogers that the whole HYDRA plot could have been scrapped so as to focus entirely on the Winter Soldier. In fact, the Winter Soldier is more a secondary story arc playing to the overarching plot that deals with war on a more general level. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /> The inclusion of the Winter Soldier could have been an interesting counterweight to the discourses of old residing in Rogers. The Winter Soldier, created by Ed Brubaker (who makes a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it cameo in the film) is revealed as Roger’s lost sidekick, Bucky. Brubaker broke one of the only rules Marvel comics resisted touching (only Bucky stays dead) to make Captain America face his war with an added sense of ambiguity that judges his sense of being as superficial and overtly simplistic. In the comics, when the long lost sidekick returns as a Soviet-trained super-soldier Rogers knows he not only faces Bucky but the war that turned him against America. <br /><br /> Bucky’s Cold War turns history into a lesson that descends upon Rogers and lectures him on the darkness American history carried out of the Second World War. He distorts the idea of goodness in war by ridding himself of the conflict that grounded him in a bygone era that barely resonated later on. Captain America slept through the Cold War, conveniently frozen at the bottom of the ocean so as not to witness the United States fall into hysteria, anti-communist paranoia, and proxy wars that strayed farther still from the mythic principles of World War II. It was a time Rogers could very well find war to be at its most un-American. But the fact he slept through it meant his example, and that of the Second World War, did not shine bright enough to keep America from derailing into morally ambiguous territories. The Cold War could not be saved by the Good War because it was frozen in time, a memory that sought shelter rather than facing the realities of a world dictated by nuclear politics. So why not right that wrong with Captain America and a big silver screen production that pits him against a villain borne out of the Cold War? <br /><br /> That Rogers faces the Winter Soldier can be seen as just that, an attempt to save the Cold War after the fact. Captain America, unfrozen, looks back into the history that pushes the Winter Soldier into the will of HYDRA and sees an opportunity to once again prove his war’s might can save all wars, turn them good. All throughout the movie the audience is subjected to scenes of Rogers visiting museum exhibits dedicated to himself, his old uniform in display. Once we see the old uniform standing above a display of the Howling Commandos, we know that, in the end, Captain America will revert to that uniform (not a suit) and go into battle as a World War II soldier first and a superhero second. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> It is never clear which war weighs more on the Winter Soldier throughout the movie. Arnim Zola is the Winter Soldier’s creator in the film, more a Nazi than a Soviet, but the movie does stress his secret Soviet assassin past. The fact Zola plays Winter Soldier’s Frankenstein keeps the character between wars. He is the darkness between. The thing war is capable of but should not be. Either way, it falls to Captain America to prove that his war, one no one questions as being his, can save both the day and the idea that war can still be a virtue if not a moral responsibility. And keeping to our expectations, the day and war is saved, and very convincingly. Captain America in his old uniform explodes on scene as a war god, the ultimate authority on militarism and how Americans should interact with its war powers. So, is World War II still the Good War? The answer is obvious if you are Captain America. Can War, in all its dimensions, be Good forevermore? Yes, but only if it follows in the footsteps of the Second World War. </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-25487687000898453002014-03-17T17:24:00.000-07:002014-04-02T16:44:22.122-07:00Batman #29: The Dark Knight Rises Again and Meets Gotham City<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Retelling old tales means, up to a point, updating myths. Making them make sense in the present. But it does not mean they stopped making sense in the first place. New generations deserve to know their heroes' origin stories. In them we find elements that bring us closer to the hero, fictional paths that coincide with real life, and personal parallels that speak to the similarities between us and the men and women whose feats we read about. Joseph Campbell, in his book <i>The Hero with a Thousand Faces</i>, says, “the effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world.” Following Campbell’s words, a hero’s birth can be argued as the beginning of life, provided we acknowledge that a hero’s origin is not necessarily expected to begin at the actual biological birth of the character. Instead it most often comes out of a traumatic event that obliterates what the character previously believed was the absolute definition of life. Trauma in the world of the comic book separates the normal from the spectacular. But it also establishes that the spectacular has a price. So, from the ashes of the previous life the hero is expected to rise like a phoenix, carrying the original trauma and converting it into the new origin, the thing that gives the hero’s life purpose.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s <i>Batman</i> run seems to have a deep understanding of what it means to carry trauma as a symbol close to the hero’s chest. In <i>Batman</i> #29 Snyder brings the second part of the <i>Zero Year</i> storyline, Dark City, to a close. After Snyder retells the origin of the Joker and Gotham blacks out after the Riddler turns the city into an actual riddle, Batman must face the possibility his humanity can truly interfere with his success as a superhero. And a superhero he is, although readers often forget the man behind the mask is no more super than the people he has sworn to protect. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> What is interesting with <i>Batman</i> #29 is that Batman is improvising. The road Snyder’s Dark Knight traverses is paved with mistakes. And those mistakes are never made by Bruce Wayne, the all too human alter ego of the Batman. Snyder goes lengths to show that the hero’s failures and mistakes belong entirely to the costume and not the man beneath it. As the Riddler plans to cripple Gotham and let an impending hurricane flood the city with no functioning security measures due to the blackout, Batman is seen catching up rather than meeting his opponent on an equal state of affairs. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> <i>Zero Year</i>, DC Comic’s reinterpretation of Batman’s origin, is framed up to this point as a set of circumstances that force a young Bruce Wayne to choose between two identities. One supposes a very limited approach to crime fighting (meaning staying as Bruce Wayne), and the other entails becoming an eternal symbol that haunts Gotham into submission and forces it to embrace order (becoming Batman). Now, what will shape this new identity is how Batman/Bruce Wayne relates to Gotham City. DC’s current run keeps Batman’s official origin mostly intact. Martha and Thomas Wayne are murdered in Crime Alley after a mugging gone wrong leaves Bruce a rich orphan. Crime Alley is the “birth place” of the Batman, the place the new life begins and where its traumas make Bruce become a Bat. In this new life Gotham City is Batman’s new father, creating the hero it needed out of the violence the city itself enabled.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Snyder’s Gotham is a dangerous victim as opposed to being another criminal keeping its citizens under the influence of its vices. Frank Miller’s <i>The Dark Knight Returns</i> (1986) falls towards the latter. More directly resembling New York (Twin Towers included), Miller’s Gotham is an accomplice to crime. It reminds an old Bruce Wayne that it needs Batman’s supervision or it will relapse into chaos (which is what happens in the book). Miller’s Batman accepts his responsibility as a psychological necessity that feeds both him and the city. Gotham’s rain, Miller’s Batman says, “is a baptism.” And with it he is born again. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> On the other hand, Snyder’s Batman becomes the city’s savior. He still cannot claim Gotham as his, a thing Miller’s Batman does, but saving it means it will be in his debt. Snyder’s Gotham delves into crime just enough to create the hero it needs and not the other way around. Saving the city, then, becomes a rite of passage that turns Batman into Gotham’s sole keeper. Accepting responsibility for it is one of the ways Snyder’s Batman will soon possess Gotham the same way Superman possesses Metropolis. When the Riddler succeeds at exploding Gotham’s retaining walls, for example, and the ocean’s water floods the city in the middle of a hurricane Batman lays the blame on himself. He let the bomb’s signal jammer get lost in a fight against another villain called Doctor Death. He was too late to solve the riddle. But most importantly, he failed to live up to the symbol, to the bat. Being Batman meant Gotham City would be safe. Failing keeps Batman further away from his connection to Gotham. While destroying the machinery that boosts the explosives’ signal Batman says, “I should’ve listened, Gordon! I should’ve taken the call! There’d be no death! There’d be none of this! It’s my fault Gordon! I saw it wrong! You hear me!” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> In the frenzy of Gotham’s imminent destruction it is important that Batman accept the consequences of his initial failures. They are not final yet. For when he saves Gotham, and Gotham will be saved, his failures will become that which brings Batman and the City closer to each other, creating a sense of dependency that both defines and gives each a sense of belonging. In the end, Gotham will be Batman just as Batman will be Gotham. Gotham created the Batman so it could survive. Batman, when he earns the city, will reshape it in his image so that his new reality, the beginning of the new life, can find everlasting purpose, a justification for continued existence. One cannot exist without the other now. And Batman knows that his life ends when Gotham falls. </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-19313138628108305492014-03-05T15:51:00.000-08:002014-03-15T07:14:29.017-07:00El héroe post-9/11: Ex Machina, superhéroes sin capas y el lamento por la caída de las Torres Gemelas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br />Por: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis<br /><br /> Todo evento traumático conlleva un periodo de lamentación, de luto y de confusión. Cuando las Torres Gemelas cayeron el 11 de septiembre de 2001 el lamento fue inmediato y vino acompañado de interrogantes dirigidas al porqué del ataque. Una de las preguntas más interesantes que nació de ese lamento, que también surgió tras el ataque japonés a Pearl Harbor, fue el siguiente: ¿cómo se permitió que esto ocurriera? La pregunta sugiere una acusación de negligencia militar. Estados Unidos tenía la tecnología, la malicia, para contrarrestar no solo ese ataque pero cualquier otro que se dirigiera contra la nación. Sin entrar en mucho detalle, la respuesta más o menos corrió por antiguas avenidas discursivas de guerras pasadas. Estados Unidos era un gigante durmiente que el Medio Oriente acababa de despertar. Pero llegar a esa respuesta (la misma que se dio en la Segunda Guerra Mundial) conllevó un tiempo prolongado de lamentación y de luto. Lo mismo pasó en el mundo de los comics. <br /><br /> Un mes después de la caída de las Torres, Dark Horse, Image, DC y Marvel publican una serie de libros conmemorativos donde sus héroes explican el por qué no pudieron parar el ataque contra las Torres Gemelas. Lo hicieron porque sabían que no podían engañar al lector o ignorar el evento, mucho menos cambiarlo. La mayoría de los héroes de Marvel viven en Nueva York. Spider-Man sólo podía parar el ataque sin mencionar que los Fantastic Four también viven en la ciudad. Pero no ocurrió, y los comics no podían pedir una suspensión tan aguda de la credibilidad de sus historias al hacer que sus héroes interviniesen en los ataques. No quedaba más que lamentar. <br /><br /> En Amazing Spider-Man #36, escrito por Michael Straczynski, Spider-Man presencia la caída de las Torres. Al bajar a las ruinas, Spider-Man encuentra ciudadanos perdidos, dados al rencor de lo sucedido. De ese enojo nace el cuestionamiento del héroe, de su ignorancia. Spider-Man, contemplativo y derrotado, solo puede decir <i>We didn’t know</i>. Como única alternativa, Spider-Man pasa a ayudar a los policías y a los bomberos. En el proceso se da cuenta de que los héroes reales del evento no son seres con capas ni semi-dioses americanos. Son seres humanos que simplemente hacían su trabajo. Esta va a ser la fórmula de la gran mayoría de las historias conmemorativas del evento. Un héroe clásico reconoce, valida, el heroísmo del hombre común después de lamentar su incapacidad de no poder haber previsto el ataque a las Torres. De la falla del mito sale la validación del nuevo héroe. <br /><br /> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Ahora, quizás una de las historias más interesante suscrita a la fórmula le pertenece a Superman. Unreal, escrito por Steven T. Seagle, empieza de forma sencilla: recordándole al lector las habilidades de Superman. Puede ignorar los principios de la física, respirar en el vacío del espacio, volar contra todo sentido de lógica aeronáutica e inspirar a personas comunes a ser más de lo que son. Pero, en sus palabras, “<i>the one thing I cannot do is break free from the fictional pages I live and breath…become real in times of crisis…and right the wrongs of an unjust world</i>”. Estas líneas parecen reafirmar que el destino del héroe americano recae en un acto absoluto de lamentación, sin espacio para la acción o incluso venganza contra aquellos que hicieron de la nación una víctima. <br /><br /> Es en este contexto que entra Ex Machina (2004-2010) de Brian K. Vaughan y Tony Harris, la historia de un héroe que repensó los límites de su trauma y los convirtió en una reacción de responsabilidad legal. La historia de un héroe que decidió asumir la responsabilidad que Superman nunca se atrevió tocar, la de ser alcalde de su ciudad. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Según Jeff Geers, “<i>the post-9/11 hero is stuck within the disaster (of the Twin Towers), working within the limitations of the system to rebuild and repair it</i>”. De tal forma comienza Ex Machina. El comic cuenta la historia de Mitchell Hundred, un superhéroe que tiene la habilidad de hablar y controlar todo tipo de máquinas. Adquiere el poder tras encontrar un mecanismo extradimensional debajo del Brooklyn Bridge. El mecanismo explota y le da el poder a Hundred. Su <i>origin story</i> se atiene a lo real. Hundred se llama a sí mismo The Great Machine y su disfraz lo hace ver como un piloto. Usa un <i>jetpack</i> para volar. Su presencia en Manhattan crea el mismo debate que persigue a Batman, el de la necesidad de un vigilante que trabaje fuera de los parámetros legales del estado. Pero todo cambia cuando rescata una de las Torres Gemelas el 11 de septiembre de 2001. The Great Machine se convierte en el héroe que el 11 de septiembre nunca tuvo. Antes del evento, en julio 4 de 2001, Hundred se había revelado como The Great Machine y había anunciado su candidatura para alcalde de Nueva York. Los ataques hacen que Hundred regrese a su disfraz. Su intervención eleva su campaña y en noviembre de 2001 es electo alcalde de Nueva York. <br /><br /> Regresando a Geers, el héroe post-desastre es esencialmente impotente: es incapaz de prevenir el desastre pero tampoco puede corregirlo del todo. En efecto, el héroe se rinde ante las limitaciones reales del ser humano. La narración de Hundred afirma este punto. Hundred dice: <br /> </span><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> I made it back to Ground Zero ninety minutes after I diverted the second plane…I tried </span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> to help everyone who was trapped by the fire. I tried to convince the jumpers to hold </span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> on, but…but people don’t listen to the goddamn “Great Machine” the way…Whatever, I </span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> tried to catch them, but there were so many. I’m not that fast, not that strong. </span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /> Hundred prefiere recordar su intervención como una fallida en vez de una digna de la figura que representa. El que rescató una de las Torres no importa. El lamento por la que calló es más importante. Por eso Ex Machina sugiere que después de 9/11 parece irresponsable esperar que el superhéroe lo arregle todo. El héroe post-desastre no puede reparar una cultura traumatizada. Su ideal utópico cae ante la realidad de su humanidad. Matthew Wolf-Meyer dice, “<i>superpowered attempts at utopia fail not due to a weakness of the superhero, but because the superhero is basically a representative of conservative social order</i>”. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Siguiendo lo expuesto por Wolf-Meyer, Ex Machina supone el reconocimiento de un superhéroe que no puede seguir representando el ideal utópico de seguridad continua al que se adscriben los héroes clásicos de Marvel y DC. Al representar un orden social conservador, el héroe tiene que subyugarse a una representatividad mayor encontrada en los mecanismos del estado y en los puestos que lo mantienen funcionando. En efecto, el gobierno es la única máquina fuera del alcance de los poderes de The Great Machine. Por eso el personaje acoge el puesto de alcalde como su nuevo alter ego. Sin él es un ciudadano más y como The Great Machine no puede realizar los cambios que la ciudad requiere. (Por eso, por ejemplo, la guerra que declara Batman contra el crimen es eterna, porque Batman solo reacciona ante el problema, no lo intenta cambiar a un nivel fundamental. Atacar el problema de raíz implicaría que Bruce Wayne se insertara en una posición de poder político. Significaría el fin de Batman.) <br /><br /> Ahora, Hundred tiene una relación bastante problemática con sus poderes después de ser electo. En uno de los story arcs del comic, Hundred contempla cancelar una protesta anti-guerra convocada para el área Downtown de Manhattan. Después de 9/11 congregaciones sustanciales de gente en un lugar determinado se consideran una situación de riesgo, un posible blanco para un ataque terrorista. Hundred decide no cancelar el permiso. Cabe destacar que Hundred es pintado como un centrista bastante inclinada hacia la Izquierda. Entre las situaciones que desata encuentra el matrimonio de una pareja de bomberos gay, la legalización de la marihuana (que acaba de forma ambigua pero revela que Hundred la fuma) y la censura de una obra de arte que tiene la palabra “nigger” sobreimpuesta sobre la figura de Abraham Lincoln. Cada controversia resulta en una victoria liberal, pero los discursos desenterrados del diálogo gravitan más hacia el centro. Hundred mantendrá que todo es cuestión de balances. Unas libertades no pueden atentar contra otras. <br /><br /> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> En el caso de la manifestación anti-guerra Hundred sufre la consecuencia de ser un liberal muy utópico. Una bomba de gas tóxico explota en la demostración y muere una cantidad preocupante de manifestantes. El ataque hace eco en las ansiedades que salieron del 11 de septiembre y Hundred ahora tiene que pensar como gobernante en vez de superhéroe. De ese pensar sale el que la ciudad, bajo órdenes de su alcalde, adopte una política limitada de <i>surveillance</i>. Cada estación de tren contiene una cámara digital que identifica posibles sospechosos. Pero el esfuerzo no rinde fruto. Hundred decide retornar a sus poderes como excepción a la regla que él mismo se impuso al ser electo, la de no intervenir como The Great Machine mientras esté en poder. Hundred atrapa al responsable, un residente legal de la ciudad que declara sus intenciones de culminar lo que Hundred interrumpió el 11 de septiembre. Pero el arresto del terrorista resulta en una victoria vacía, una repetición a menor escala del 11 de septiembre. Hundred no previene el ataque, su reacción viene después de la violencia. Tal parece que el espectro de la Torre que no rescató aun persigue a Hundred, estableciendo paralelos entre su incapacidad de prevenir otro ataque y la mentalidad que hizo posible la falta de acción que caracterizó los eventos del 11 de septiembre. La moral de la historia parece ser que después de 9/11 cada acción heroica es seguida por una reacción inversamente destructiva. El comic reafirma la impotencia del héroe y valida su decisión de abandonar el disfraz por uno que más fielmente representa los límites de nuestra humanidad. <br /> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> En fin, Ex Machina termina siendo la historia de un héroe que sale del lamento post-traumático de la caída de las Torres Gemelas. Sus acciones son medidas por traumas y ansiedades culturales que hicieron del superhéroe americano una víctima más del ataque terrorista del 11 de septiembre de 2001. The Great Machine fue un héroe más que fracasó. Un héroe que aunque responde al lamento de Superman de no poder salir de las páginas a rescatar a su lector reacciona ante la ficción de su condición al elevar su lamento a un nivel de autoridad más problemático. El héroe post-9/11 no tiene capa. Usa corbata y chaleco y es electo por el pueblo. Ahora es parte del gobierno y nace de un mito nuevo que exige que sus héroes sean víctimas perseguidas por las sombras de las Torres Gemelas. </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-3519500842961293902014-02-19T15:02:00.000-08:002014-03-15T07:15:20.329-07:0012 Years a Slave: Solomon Northup y la esclavitud en retrospectiva<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Por: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Hijo de un esclavo libre. Tal fue la condición de vida de Solomon Northup, hijo de un esclavo libre. La frase parece suscribirse a una idea cruel basada en la suerte. O naces hijo o hija de un esclavo libre, o naces hijo o hija de un esclavo. Todo concepto de libertad, para la población negra de los Estados Unidos en el siglo XIX, parecía recaer en caprichos de buena o mala fortuna. La suerte, entonces, se tornó geográfica en los Estados Unidos del siglo XIX. El Norte estadounidense practicaba una filosofía anti-esclavista problemática, ya que no todo norteño pensaba que el gobierno debía intervenir en los asuntos económicos del Sur. Incluso, el Norte prefería una relación indirecta con el gobierno, delegando por niveles bajos de intervención en el desarrollo de la economía en general. El Norte, a su propia manera, era señalado como engendrador de su propia clase de esclavitud: la del trabajador industrial. Hombre que laboraba en fábricas, moviendo máquinas y empacando mercancía que apenas podía costear. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> El Sur, entonces, se convirtió en el villano de la historia. Esclavista y conservador, el Sur sufrió de muy poca aceptación entre estados dados a la industria ya que suponían una alternativa rudimentaria al capitalismo, una expresión menor. Su carácter conservador mantenía concepciones raciales anticuadas que mantuvieron a miles de hombre y mujeres de tez negra bajo el régimen de la labor forzada. Este es el contexto en el cual se inserta Solomon Northup. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Proveniente de Nueva York, Northup era un violinista y un granjero de familia con propiedades. Era cercano a ser un ciudadano más entre muchos que no pesaban el valor de su persona dado su color de piel. Nueva York era bastante progresivo en asuntos raciales. Quizás de forma forzada ya que la ciudad de Nueva York nació de una diversidad humana potente que gravitó al área donde se encuentra la ciudad por necesidad, su cultura portuaria responsable por la gravedad de su heterogeneidad. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> En 1841, Northup fue solicitado como violinista por un dúo de músicos de camino a Washington D.C. para seguir su gira musical. Pero los músicos resultaron ser esclavistas en búsqueda de mercancía. Los músicos endrogaron a Northup en D.C. y lo vendieron como esclavo. Fue enviado a New Orleans como mercancía humana donde fue comprado por un dueño de plantación en la región de Red River en Luisiana. Solomon Northup fue esclavo por 12 años. Northup intentó escapar, intentó contactar a su familia por cartas y hasta arriesgó su vida clamando por la simpatía de hombres de influencia en el Sur con la esperanza de que se apiadaran de él y abogaran por su caso de venta como uno ilegal. En efecto lo era. La ley mantenía que ningún hombre negro documentado como libre podía ser esclavizado. Pero los prejuicios de la época y las paradojas del momento aun en el Norte hicieron posible doce años de esclavitud para un hombre libre.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Northup logró regresar a su familia de forma legal, rescatado por funcionarios del gobierno de Nueva York que abogaron por su caso. Todos eran blancos. Northup pasó a ser una voz paradigmática en la lucha contra la esclavitud y publicó su historia para que futuras generaciones no olvidaran las crueldades infrahumanas de la esclavitud. Bajo otro juego de suerte, en este caso echada en contra de Northup, Harriet Beecher Stowe ya había publicado Uncle Tom’s Cabin, en 1852 (un año antes que la narración de Northup). El libro pasó a ser la narración más leída sobre la esclavitud y hasta eclipsó las memorias de Northup, 12 Years a Slave, que vinieron un año después. Añadiendo sal a la herida, la novela de Stowe era basada en personajes creados por ella. La narración de Northup es verídica y basada en él. Pero fue Uncle Tom’s Cabin el libro que, según Will Kaufman, “sentó las bases de la Guerra Civil”. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> 12 Years a Slave se convirtió en una película, estrenada en el 2013. Ha sido nominada para varios premios aparte de los que ya ha ganado. El filme presenta imágenes ya conocidas sobre el trato injusto hacia los esclavos y la mentalidad conservadora del momento que se convirtió en metáfora casi absoluta de la maldad. Madres separadas de hijos comprados por esclavistas, secuencias de latigazos por no cumplir las labores del día a niveles requeridos de casi perfección y tensiones sexuales entre esclavistas y sus esclavas componen la experiencia cinematográfica. Hacen de la esclavitud una memoria entretejida con la identidad de la nación, de su proceso de crecimiento y madurez. Pero más interesante aun, mantienen que las ideas que dieron forma a esa industria permanecen y contemplan la maleabilidad del racismo, su capacidad para adaptarse y seguir relevante como pensamiento. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> La historia de Northup no es de gran conocimiento. No se ha insertado en la cultura popular de la nación. No es de conocimiento común y el filme no parece ser lo impactante que pudo haber sido para la promulgación de sus memorias. Quizás es un caso muy extraño. Muy inusual para ser entendido fuera de lo que conocemos como justicia o derecho humano. Quizás da muy cerca a las heridas cuyo dolor la nación ha intentado suprimir. En todo caso, la historia de Solomon Northup invita a re-contemplar las industria de la esclavitud como una más siniestra de lo ya pensada. Y quizás es en esa contemplación donde nos debemos preguntar en qué medida debemos seguir recordando la esclavitud, y si en efecto es simplemente una memoria lejana o el recuento de un proceso que aún persiste, adaptándose a nuestros tiempos bajo otros pretextos. </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-70822366167475600532014-01-14T16:48:00.000-08:002014-03-15T07:16:40.835-07:00Hero Making: A Quick Note on History and Captain America<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Ricardo A. Serrano Denis </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Much of the history of the Second World War rests on the idea that goodness prevailed as its moral drive. It came naturally, part of the political package that guided American soldiers to the beaches of Normandy and the treacherous geography of Japan. Rooting out evil was the main objective—evil being the exact opposite of what America stood for. In a sense, the Second World War became a mirror through which Americans could see themselves reflected as the fairest nation of them all. Sure, historical accuracy calls for a reexamination of the Great Depression as the official instigator of intervention in foreign affairs (sometimes overriding Pearl Harbor as the obvious spark to that war), but pick any popular history book on World War II and you’ll be hard pressed to think of any other reason for America stepping up to the Germans other than pure goodness. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> It is of no wonder (and up to this point a meek point to think otherwise) that comic book readers became enamored with superheroes baptized in the fires of World War II as the supreme representatives of their fantastic alternate realities. Of the many that came, it was the one dressed in the colors of the American flag that captured the imagination of readers, Captain America. If we accept the Second World War as iconic in scope regarding World History then we must recognize that it also has the capacity to create icons and legends in its own right, both real and fictional. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Captain America came out of that war as such an icon. He punched Hitler square in the jaw and might just have well sealed the victory for those who escaped to the pulpy pages of the comic book to find the endings they so intensely desired. Captain America’s war with the Germans was quick, clean, and righteous. But what really made a mark on comic book history was that Captain America set the standard on what heroism should actually be. Most importantly (and most dangerously), it made war experience the absolute standard on what makes a hero, well, a hero. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> It is perhaps in Jason Aaron’s <i>Ultimate Captain America</i> #2 that we get a true look at the psyche of the hero that made war the event that turned men into heroes. Deep inside the jungles of Vietnam, Captain America looks for Frank Simpson, the Captain America of the Vietnam War. Simpson was turned super-soldier for Vietnam in the absence of Steve Rogers (Captain America’s civilian name). But like many, he receded into the madness of his war. He deserts only to resurface as an enemy of the state in 21st century, carrying the full weight of his war to the present.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> The mission becomes an opportunity for introspection, for making sense of a war Rogers did not participate in. Contemplating the jungle and its complicity in keeping Americans away from victory, Captain America dwells on what his country should mean for the men that fight for it. He says: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>Looking around this godforsaken place, I could almost understand if Simpson had just snapped. I saw plenty during the war. Good men who just reached their breaking point. I’ve been there myself. I’ve looked that fear in the face. I remember 1944, waking up one morning in the Ardennes forest, freezing cold, knowing we were surrounded on all sides by Nazi Tiger tanks, and I couldn’t move. It took me hours to get out of bed. I could’ve broken then. Like the men I saw eat bullets from their own guns. At the time, I felt like I could almost understand why they were doing it. But flipping sides…Frank Simpson betrayed his country. He said he wanted to show me what America really stands for. But he’s the one who’ll be getting the lesson. America doesn’t stand for cowards and turncoats. Not my America. The America I know’s always been worth fighting for. Even dying for. And sometimes killing for. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> It is brilliantly simple and easy to digest. Captain America lays the blueprint for heroism in pure black and white. It is devotion, with honor, to one’s country and the disposition to kill and die for its safety that makes men heroes. Stray from these guidelines and you will most probably end up being an enemy, a lost citizen fallen from the grace of his country’s innate disposition for goodness. This is but a simple metaphor for how the history of war is digested in popular culture. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> In History, we fight and debate over the origins of war, on the degrees of justness and righteousness in them. We forget that the men that fight them, the ones that become heroes, sacrifice so much that only outsiders get to enjoy the excitement of their heroics in the aftermath. Tom Brokaw’s oral history <i>The Greatest Generation</i>, for example, proves this by going to such lengths as too delve straight into hero making. Brokaw will say the Second World War bred the greatest generation of Americans the history of the country had ever seen. And probably will see, if Brokaw is concerned. The sacrifices of the soldier are secondary to the story because, in the end, they were heroes. Spielberg adds his line with <i>Saving Private Ryan</i> and many other directors, authors, comic book writers and artists followed suit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> And so it goes with history. We seem to unconsciously regard war and its heroics as if they were mythical feats of greatness. They become innocent rites of passage that turn men into Captain Americas. Scars are expected while ugliness and extreme violence are accepted as realities that make men heroes. History, then, becomes the notary. An entity with the authority to make official the transformation of men into heroes. But it also becomes the thing men at war strive to. There is no force as powerful as a people’s expectations. There may be warnings on the dangers of history repeating itself, but that is precisely what people seem to want most of the time. We want more wars because we want more heroes. We want to imagine a world of Captain Americas because without them, well, what’s the point of history? </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-34778774214026475602013-11-20T15:52:00.000-08:002014-03-15T07:18:19.810-07:00Camelot in Wonderland: Kennedy, Death, and the Myth of a Better America<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis <br /><br /> Political assassinations often turn complex and imperfect men into saints. Immediately after the killing, the assassin’s victim is purged of his sins and every form of controversy surrounding his foreign and domestic polices become misunderstood attempts at peace and prosperity. An assassination’s anniversary, then, plunges the public down a rabbit hole of memory that leads to a fantasy land where the victim’s lost vision of the future becomes reality. The nation’s current state of affairs is temporarily accepted as a consequence of the figure’s death, no other type of history weighing in on it. Of course it is all imagination, a wish things were the way the deceased leader wanted them to be: better. This is the case of John F. Kennedy, a man taken from the American public as perhaps the greatest president the country had ever seen. <br /><br /> As the anniversary of Kennedy’s death approaches, American television churns out its traditional barrage of documentaries that portray America as a fatherless nation come November 22nd, 1963. We are reminded that Kennedy was here to save the world and that he signified the last hope for peace to prosper, anywhere. Post-Kennedy America, so it seems, became a nightmare version of itself, nearly post-apocalyptic in scope. Vietnam, segregation, the counterculture, the sexual revolution, and hippies were all things that could have been avoided had Kennedy lived. And all throughout we are left without much space to question whether his presidency was really destined to become the epitome of democracy, the true example of freedom in the world. To this day, it is thought Kennedy left before he could fix everything. That his unfinished presidency meant the country’s destiny was severed from greatness. But history shows that the Kennedy administration, while fashionable and charismatic, meant business as usual. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /> Before that fateful November day, Kennedy had amassed a considerable amount of criticism that came from all sides of the political spectrum. The Civil Rights movement regarded Kennedy an opportunist keeping desegregation on the sidelines for his second term, when it couldn’t hurt his chances of securing another term. Washington hardliners considered Kennedy’s foreign policy as soft after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and weak when Cuba resurfaced as a potential military target come the missile crisis. The argument was Soviet Russia would never have made Cuba a nuclear site had Kennedy taken it during the invasion. <br /><br /> Others blamed Kennedy for Vietnam and warned that sending military advisors and economic aid to Southeast Asia would be interpreted as intervention and could land America in a war it could not easily win. Kennedy had agreed with Eisenhower’s labeling of Laos as “the cork in the bottle” in regards to it being the instigator of threat in the region. Kennedy partnered with Diem in South Vietnam and went ahead with a policy of limited military action. But all of that dissipated after Dallas, when either a lone gunman from the Dallas Book Depository or a team of assassins shooting from the Grassy Knoll made John F. Kennedy the fourth President to be assassinated while in office. <br /><br /> As the nation mourned it also began to forget. Kennedy became an idea that should live on as an example future presidents should aspire to, future generations even. His criticisms faded into visions of an incomplete experiment yielding results on American Freedom being the standard of living worldwide. Vietnam no longer became a war Kennedy began in the early years of his presidency. The fact he kept intervention limited meant Kennedy was really just laying the international framework for diplomacy to take over. Instead Vietnam became Lyndon Johnson’s fault, the Southern Vice President turned President after the assassination (maybe landing the role after he had conspired with the assassins to stage a coup d'état should conspiracy theorists have their way). Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) bases its main argument on this contention. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /> According to the film, the authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. Stone’s Kennedy, painted as a complete pacifist, wanted to end the war and bring the Cold War to its knees through diplomacy. Assuming war is the organizing principle of American society, a dark government wing set between the military and the White House began to form, to question Kennedy’s commitment to Southeast Asia. Of course, we have to accept war is also the backbone of the country’s economy, the Military-Industrial-Complex Eisenhower warned about. No war meant no economic prosperity and so Kennedy had to be replaced with someone committed to war. Vietnam became the force that pulled the rifle’s trigger. Blame the assassination on war and those who court it. Forget Kennedy escalated intervention in 1962 and approved the Strategic Hamlet Program which involved village internment and the forced relocation of Vietnamese peasantry so Communist insurgents could remain isolated from possible sympathizers. It was only after April 1963 that Kennedy started to voice a desire to extract American forces from Vietnam. He was quoted as saying: “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point.” <br /><br /> Meanwhile, race relations became another experiment left unfinished. We remember Kennedy signing Executive Order 10925, which required government contractors employ or treat employees equally without regard of race, creed, color or national origin. We forget Martin Luther King, Jr. and his associates (who accused the President of being slow paced with domestic reform) drafted a document that called on Kennedy to enact a sort of Second Emancipation Proclamation that would deal the final blow to segregation, nation-wide, in 1962. Kennedy did not execute that order. The path towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended up being a long and violent one and it was ultimately signed by Lyndon Johnson. <br /><br /> And yet, Kennedy has captured the hearts and minds of the American public, being that he became what hearts and minds ought to be. Annually, we go down the rabbit hole to a place called Camelot, where royalty is synonymous with the Kennedy name and peace is an idea original to it. Where the United States of America can revel in the make-believe that it was once close to reaching perfection, of being the moral weight on which the world could balance. But once down there, we should ask ourselves whether those visions of a near perfect America are given too freely to a man who was so far from it. John F. Kennedy has become a man out of time. Unstuck in it. He became universal, the light we still hope can shine on darker days. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Perhaps it is unfair to judge a man with the full weight of history. Kennedy’s legacy is no doubt unquestionable. He most publicly aided the fight for Civil Rights, prevented a nuclear confrontation with Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis, initially approved an overhaul of American immigration policy reuniting many foreign families and dismantling the selection of immigrants based on country of origin, and funded NASA’s space program with the intention of putting a man on the moon (in truth this last one came out of a sense of national prestige after the Soviets wounded it by being the first to fly in space, but still). His accomplishments are admirable and deserve remembrance, but they do not constitute an example of political flawlessness. John F. Kennedy is much more complex than he is permitted to be. A man that knew J. Edgar Hoover was wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr. based on rocky evidence some of his associates were communist sympathizers. A strategist that contemplated pulling out of Southeast Asia only after the Communists acquired the upper hand over the political fate of the region. A politician that can be accused of postponing Civil Rights reform for fear of losing a re-election. In a sense, Kennedy is the great enigma. A figure, a symbol, that guarded his secrets well by hiding them in plain sight. An American icon that should be remembered for every decision he took as Commander in Chief of the United States, so long as he is remembered as an imperfect man. </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-91062643578042187072013-11-05T19:58:00.001-08:002014-03-15T07:19:20.898-07:00Because It's Fun: Comics, History, and Knowledge<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis<br /><br /> Imagine you are writing your Master’s dissertation on comic book superheroes and how they uphold the righteousness of the current war against terrorism. You argue that superheroes like Captain America and Nick Fury (apparently his superpower is never growing old) return to their war metaphors, the ones they upheld as heroes of the Second World War and the Cold War respectively, to ask readers to view the present, the contemporary, through their wars. You would say post-9/11 America is too much a grey area of contention and meaning and that superheroes could ease that shade of thought into a simpler yet more dangerous vision of an America still defined by the idea that war is good, fair, and necessary…just like World War II. <br /><br /> In the process you read comics, a couple of books on historical theory, and actual history books on the wars your superheroes act through. All throughout you constantly feel like an innovator and you realize that in writing history through comic books you are actually having fun! You connect the popular to the academic and it feels like the topic can really resonate within a discipline that holds too dear to traditional primary sources. The kind of history that is being produced cannot be so specifically defined, if anything it might resemble something close to a history of mentalities rooted in the world of 9/11, but it is still an analytical record of what comic book creators and people could have thought on upon reading the comics of that era. Who said old documents and newspapers were the only ways one could reconstruct the past? Aren’t comic books, film, literature, and other works of art representative of their time periods and the things that were contemplated in them? <br /><br /> So, the dissertation written, you prepare to present your investigation and in comes another realization: what if the academic universe accepts your findings as anything but history? You panic and reread. It comes down to double checking you punched the academic ticket by establishing historiographical precedence, gave your shout out to the classics in cultural theory and discourse and ideology, and included the ever necessary justification on comic books being an actual historical source. Neglecting one of these points can land you in a tough spot when presenting the dissertation, leaving yourself wide open for criticisms that can derail the discussion into areas more traditional than you expected, and sometimes unrelated to the nature of your work. Then you go back to square one and that sense that you created something necessary and spectacular dives into frustration. It becomes an insisting needle in the eye that keeps the investigation outside of academia’s limelight while also questioning its degree of accessibility to a more general public. You wrote this for a university, remember? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> All of a sudden everything seems far away from fun. Instead the feeling is more akin to being stuck in a sort of limbo that keeps you far from actually contributing to the creation of knowledge, much less it being useful and helpful in understanding the contemporary. Relentlessly, the following question arises: why did you write this? But the answer is simple. Because it was fun. <br /><br /> The answer is valid. It is also deceiving. Fun is necessary for keeping interest alive in producing any kind of work, but it must be met with the assurance that knowledge can be extracted from the endeavor fun is to reside in. Comic books can balance this necessity just fine. They keep us enthralled in the fantasy that goes with reading about gods and super beings fending off alien invasions, especially if they do so with the force of American history backing them up. In their simplicity we find ideologies that seem innocent but that dig deeper in creating ideas that keep war a rational and often just and necessary action. And it seems to come casually, not imbued in the seriousness of academic writing. This, evidently, should be studied. <br /><br /> Matthew Pustz, in his anthology Comic Books and American Cultural History, argues that casual learning (meaning that knowledge can be extracted from more popular productions of fiction given a wider exposure of the product and its appeal) can bring about something we cannot lose sight of: “that the past is worth knowing about and that doing history can be fun.” This is where academic history has trouble keeping up. Somewhere along the road, academic historians lost touch with the possibility of knowledge being popular and common (in the best possible way). And it comes down to a matter of accessibility, something the academic culture is short on. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Consider the following situation: the current price for a Captain America or Nick Fury comic book stands between $2.99 and $3.99, much less than the $19.99 and up price range set upon books and academic journals and magazines. The American Historical Review journal, for example, requires paid membership to the American Historical Association which costs $40.00 if you are a student. If you are not a student then prices go up. The journal, as it stands, is published five times a year while comic books publish their continuing stories either biweekly or monthly (almost never outside that timeframe). Accessibility is key in terms of relevance and interest and it seems that comic books here have the upper hand. Academic historians cannot compete in attractiveness and persuasion with beings draped in the colors of the American flag wielding unbreakable shields or beings camouflaged in military fatigues aiming down sights trained on Third World dictators (labeled as such by the characters themselves). <br /><br /> This is one of those ‘for better and worse’ scenarios. On the one hand we have academic journals too detached from the common reader to become appealing or even be considered as necessary readings in a more general and popular sense. On the other we have comics that too freely justify war (in the cases of Captain America and Nick Fury more intently) and do so in spectacular fashion. The good here is that both are capable of shedding much light on our current military and political predicament. Now, they can do better to up accessibility for a wider range of readers or to be more mindful of the symbols their stories uphold. It can be argued that fiction is not bound to the responsibility of being either pedagogical or informative on the history it uses. And yet readers expect certain degrees of faithfulness to the past and are quite eager to accept it at face value. And writers know this all too well. If anything, it should be noted that with much fun comes great responsibility. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /> In the end it is all a matter of balance, something the academic world is severely lacking. Comic books might use history too loosely, but academic history is too serious about it. And that takes away from its appeal and the possibility of being integrated into the popular arena of the common reader. Academic history cannot remain within the consensus of its tradition in terms of sources and methodology. It will lose readers and remain a thing restricted to the college world, whereas comics are rising in popularity. Superhero stories often become gateways to history much like war movies and historical dramas do. Movies such as <i>Saving Private Ryan</i> became for the history of the Second World War what <i>Gangs of New York</i> became for the history of the city of New York, gateways to common knowledge. <i>Forrest Gump</i>, a favorite amongst history teachers, became the equivalent of a general American history book, over in 142 minutes. The reason why they stay within popular culture and cycle through repeat viewings? Because they are fun to watch. Because, whether we like it or not, we learn from them, casual though the knowledge in them may be. Comic books do the same thing. They introduce readers to history, become gateways to the past. And they let us know that history, while important, can also be fun. </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-82030254240227063712013-09-10T18:18:00.002-07:002014-03-15T07:20:10.797-07:00When Supermen Lament not Being Real: the demise of the superhero in the wake of 9/11<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">by: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">When the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, 2001, Superman was nowhere to be found. Spider Man’s senses failed to tingle, the Fantastic Four explored other dimensions, and Captain America was too invested, perhaps, in other threats more immediate and less secretive than the one that descended upon New York on that day. The Hulk had no other option than to get angry after the fact. The case could weigh more profoundly on Spider Man given his actual residency in the city, being that Superman lives in the fictional city of Metropolis (evident though it may be that said city was originally modeled after Manhattan in both scope and character to the point of it being labeled in the comics themselves as “The Big Apricot”). And yet, the fact still remained that neither one of them could even conceive such a likelihood so as to later explain the attack in fictional form. <br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Writing for <i>SF Weekly</i>, Robert Wilonsky noted perceptively that, “In a post-Sept 11 world, even the phrase, ‘Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!’ sounds different; its awe has been replaced by shock and repulsion” (see <i>Comic Book Nation</i> by Bradford Wright). Comic books as an expression in escapism could no longer be recognized as such when the comic book world itself had to explain the absence of the Twin Towers and why their heroes were incapable of stopping the terrorist attacks when they had been able to fend off countless other threats more intense and dangerous in scope when contrasted with the reality of the the comic world. Battling Galactus, the giant world-eating alien, pales in comparison to two planes that should’ve been easily swatted from the sky by a single superhero, much less by a group of them such as the Avengers or the Justice League, each with their own god-like heroes any one of which could’ve single-handedly stopped the attacks. But that quite simply did not happen. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> In their absence, the public chose to confide their expected heroics to real men and women who served as firemen, police officers, congressmen, senators, vice presidents and presidents. Men and women that actually existed. This still didn’t ease the pain of explaining the attacks within the logic of a superhero world. The immediate comic book response was <i>Heroes</i> by Marvel Comics. Published in December 2001, <i>Heroes </i>was particularly interesting in its effort to unite icons old and new—or rather, in its ambition to establish new icons while simultaneously reintroducing old ones, as writer Stefanie Diekmann states in the <i>Guardian</i> article “Hero and Superhero.” Many of Marvel's famous characters, such as Spider Man, the Silver Surfer and Captain America, were resurrected and represented alongside the ‘protagonists’ of 9/11: firemen, police officers and other rescue workers immortalized visually as covered in the black dust of the broken towers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> The front page of <i>Heroes</i> is subtitled: “The world's greatest superhero creators honor the world's greatest heroes.” The idea within the book is that fiction should bow to reality in the immediate aftermath of an event so catastrophic in proportions so as to actually establish an historic time-frame or era (remember, American life after the attacks is now considered as the post-9/11 era). DC Comics followed in releasing <i>9/11: The Worlds’s Finest Comics Book Writers & Artists Tell Stories to Remember</i> with short stories and single page artwork by the industry’s top talents. The book’s cover sees an Alex Ross drawn Superman standing before a mural littered with policemen, firefighters, nurses, and rescue workers. Above and to the left of Superman is a small word balloon saying “Wow.” Again, fiction recognizing reality’s place in the aftermath, or not intentionally seeking a spotlight it can’t honestly and sincerely fill at the moment. <br /><br /> This passing of the baton, if only for a moment, is interesting if not a bit deceptive. Superheroes do recognize true heroics in the men and women of 9/11, but they do so with an authority bestowed upon them by readers that accept their judgment as sound in recognizing heroics in other people. In other words, they seem to be grading the true protagonists of 9/11 by superhero standards, the same ones expected by comic book readers. If such is the case, the superhero’s lament is one of not being real enough to save the day. But their saving grace is being able to guide the coronation of everyday rescue workers, policemen, nurses, and firemen as real-life superheroes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Perhaps one of the most striking expressions of the superhero’s lament is found in <i>Amazing Spider Man #36</i>, released October 31st, 2001. Within the opening pages of the comic book we see Spider Man almost lost in the color of fire and explosions of the collapsed towers saying, ever so subtly in tone, “God.” His only expression amidst the unknowable in a single word, collecting public sentiment and becoming one with New York in a day where all shared the same feeling, calling to the same being. “God.” The pages pass and we come to New Yorkers fleeing from the destruction, looking at Spider Man, and asking: “Where were you? How could you let this happen?” Spider Man’s only response, in the form of narration and not dialogue, is: “How do you say we didn’t know? We couldn’t know. We couldn’t imagine.” The lament of the superhero, best expressed in this Spider Man issue, rests on 9/11 laying bare the limits of fiction in its wake. When the unimaginable happens, one cannot expect the imagined to act on our behalf. In the wake of 9/11 it was up to superheroes to recognize heroics in the men and women of the real world. It wasn’t up to superheroes, at that moment, to save the day but to comfort loss and let real men and women don the capes of heroes, if only for a short while. </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-47980249301334600162013-08-06T19:40:00.001-07:002019-04-01T17:32:27.417-07:00El filme como lenguaje y el remake como traducción<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Por Gabriel Alejandro</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">El ser humano traduce porque es un ser finito pero con deseos infinitos; traduce porque dispone, al mismo tiempo, de una ubicación concreta y móvil (espacio y tiempo) y de libertad; traduce porque, a pesar de la presencia constante de la muerte, está poseído por el deseo inextinguible de empezar siempre de nuevo: traducir es nacer de nuevo, es,como quería el rabí Nahman de Braslav, negarse a ser viejo. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">-Lluís Duch </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"> ¿Remake? ¿Por qué? O, mejor dicho, ¿para qué? ¿Para qué alterar algo que ya funciona (o que no funcionó)? Sin duda muchos nos hemos planteado una de estas preguntas en algún momento. Una respuesta inmediata y sencilla puede ser el dinero, y la necesidad de generar cantidades copiosas por parte de la industria de cine. Otra solución menos verde pero más gris puede ser lo que argumenta Alan Moore, autor de novelas gráficas como Watchmen, V for Vendetta y From Hell. Moore, en una entrevista con el portal Co.Create, arguyó que como las mentes creativas no confían en las grandes empresas con su propiedad intelectual, estos últimos optan por acudir al refrito: </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>There's been a growing dissatisfaction and distrust with the conventional publishing industry, in that you tend to have a lot of formerly reputable imprints now owned by big conglomerates. As a result, there's a growing number of professional writers now going to small presses, self-publishing, or trying other kinds of [distribution] strategies. The same is true of music and cinema. It seems that every movie is a remake of something that was better when it was first released in a foreign language, as a 1960s TV show, or even as a comic book. Now you've got theme park rides as the source material of movies. The only things left are breakfast cereal mascots. In our lifetime, we will see Johnny Depp playing Captain Crunch. </i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /> Sea cual sea, cual más les guste, la realidad es que cada año vemos más y más propuestas para remakes. Pero, ¿alguna vez se han preguntado a qué convenciones concierne rehacer un filme? Por un lado, las diferencias socioculturales actuales son las que requieren de una traducción para las películas extranjeras. Eso va sin decir. Pero por el otro, el cambio constante de nuestras propias prácticas e ideologías socioculturales sugiere que ciertos filmes sean revisitados con una nueva perspectiva después de cierto tiempo. Estos son como una traducción de Shakespeare del inglés isabelino al inglés moderno. Y, al igual que un libro, el acto de traducir un filme se hace posible gracias a que el cine también contiene y es un lenguaje. <br /><br /> La idea del filme como lenguaje surgió durante la gestación de la teoría del cine en Francia para la década de los sesenta. En aquél tiempo, los teóricos se anclaron en la lingüística estructuralista y la semiología como punto de referencia para su razonamiento. Concluyeron que, como una obra cinematográfica involucra un guion o texto, el lenguaje escrito responde a una serie de relaciones particulares o “underlining” (contexto o “fondo”) y debería estudiarse sincrónicamente. Un par de años después, un crítico de cine llamado Christian Metz comparó la metáfora de “cine-escritura” con la relación entre langue y parole de Saussure y sostuvo que el cine, como manifestación visual de un escrito, comparte la semejante característica sistemática de un lenguaje y, por ende, es uno (Robert Stam, The Political Companion to American Film. “Contemporary Film Theory”, 2000, 74-77). En resumidas cuentas: El guion o texto de una película se compone de un lenguaje pertinente al entorno social y temporal en el cual fue escrito; y que el proceso de realización de un guion o texto a la imagen en pantalla comparte grados sistemáticos semejantes a esos que existen entre el lenguaje escrito y su manifestación verbal. <br /><br /> La traducción, contrario a lo que muchos creerán, no es la mera búsqueda de equivalencias de un texto en otro idioma; es mucho más. Conlleva a un intercambio intercultural donde el mediador (o traductor) se rinde ante la negociación infinita con el texto fuente para así procrear un texto meta “conveniente” para su público. Y, de misma forma en que no existe tal cosa como un escrito inocente, las traducciones tampoco lo son. Estas también van de la mano con lo que el teórico André Lefevere llamó el <<universo del discurso>>; o sea, “el conjunto de objetos, conceptos, conocimientos, creencias y costumbres que comparte una cultura en una época determinada” (Moya, 2007, 157). Por lo tanto, la traducción como acto de reescritura conlleva la intención de elevar el lenguaje (y sus convenciones) del texto fuente hacia un estado moderno, sincrónico; de domesticar un universo extranjero. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /> Tomemos como ejemplo el filme Red Dawn, originalmente del 1984 y reescrita para el 2012. En la versión del ‘84, debutada durante plena Guerra Fría, la nación norteamericana es invadida por una coalición entre rusos, cubanos y nicaragüenses (las naciones “rojas” en aquél entonces). El preámbulo establece que la invasión fue posible debido una serie de eventos hipotéticos como la expansión de la Unión Soviética y un golpe de estado en México, lo cual resulta en el abandono de los Estados Unidos ante la OTAN. En el reescrito, los invasores fueron canjeados por los norcoreanos y el preámbulo se basa en eventos que ocurrieron en la vida real como las amenazas de Corea del Norte, la recesión económica y el aumento en tropas norteamericanas en el Oriente Medio. Sin embargo, el factor que más distingue ambas películas son los lugares donde se realizan las escenas de acción. Mientras que la primera basa sus explosiones y tiroteos lejos de la ciudad, entre montañas y bosques, la nueva versión gira alrededor de la infraestructura urbana y su destrucción. Y es que aunque la intención del primer filme fue de “traer la guerra a casa” como establece (cosa que nunca se había dado), tal cosa no fue posible visualizar hasta después del 11 de septiembre de 2001. Desde entonces, la industria de entretenimiento se ha lucrado del tema a través de todos sus medios, particularmente con videojuegos como Call of Duty. Como dato curioso, en el remake, un joven expresa lo mucho que extraña jugar estos juegos y otro le responde: “Dude, we ARE living Call of Duty, and it sucks.” (Hermano, estamos VIVIENDO el juego, y apesta) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /> Sin embargo, no todos los cambios que se hacen son perceptibles u obvios. Ese es el caso de la comedia inglesa Death at a Funeral (2007), que tuvo múltiples adaptaciones como Daddy Cool (2009, Bollywood) y de nuevo Death at a Funeral (2010, en Estados Unidos). Esta vez, el tema de la película que gira alrededor de los problemas familiares y el tabú de la homosexualidad hicieron eco en culturas (y subculturas) donde el elemento de la familia prevalece socialmente. Entonces la adaptabilidad del tema y la característica común de los públicos meta permitió que el escrito no sufriera cambios mayores excepto por la localización del escenario y sus actores; hecho que aún es parte de la traducción. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /> Terrence Hawkes, resumiendo el postulado sobre escritura de Tzvetan Todorov, escribió que “All writing takes place in the light of other writing, and represents a response to the ‘world’ of writing that pre-exists…” (1977, 101) Todo escrito toma de o se inspira en otros textos y responde a una experiencia particular. Para el traductor, esto brinda una cantidad innumerable de opciones cuando le toca fungir como mediador intercultural y le permite crear un texto como cualquier escritor. Tanto la visión del autor del texto fuente como del traductor quedan plasmadas en los resultados porque, como dijo Moya, “… tanto el escritor que cuenta una historia como el reescritor que la traduce ponen algo de su propia cosecha…” (2007, 157) Y es esta “contaminación” bidireccional lo que hace que un escrito perdure y evolucione al pasar de los tiempos. Un escrito necesita la reescritura de misma forma en que la traducción requiere a un texto fuente si desea sobrevivir. Sin embargo, a diferencia del punto de partida, el meta tiene que al menos reflejar algo de la esencia del trabajo de partida y en ese sentido el cine no es muy distinto. El elemento visual permite que ciertas cosas se digan o expliquen sin usar palabras pero como quiera se realiza a través de (un) lenguaje. El remake, como la reescritura, es y será, una herramienta necesaria del sistema lingüístico. </span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-62917713926867236642013-07-24T18:34:00.000-07:002019-04-01T17:32:54.096-07:00The Twilight Zone and Kennedy-era Optimism: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sixties<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">by Gabriel Alejandro</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"<i>Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself</i>."<br />-John F. Kennedy inaugural address (January 20, 1961) </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /> The fifties’ last couple of years witnessed a shift in perspective that contrasted with the doom and gloom that had plagued the U.S. since the end of World War II and its subsequent lead-up to the Cold War. The transition peaked when a young Irish Catholic was nominated for the presidential ticket by the Democratic Party and later won the 1960 elections. A Harvard graduate, John F. Kennedy represented a “warmer” alternative to a nation whose domestic dispute resembled its foreign one; cold. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /> One of the main objectives in Kennedy’s domestic agenda involved the reconciliation between the arts and politics, a relationship that the past decade had thoroughly tarnished. Hollywood Blacklisting and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt had pushed many entertainment workers into exile during the forties and early fifties, leaving those who stayed behind without stable employment and in fear of persecution. But now, gone were the days McCarthyism and the House of Un-American Activities Committee, and in their stead were Kennedy’s youthful and progressive prospects. This meant that every writer, actor, director, producer and composer could venture freely into their craft without worry of whiplash by the government which, in turn, had set a precedent for the American audience: <br /><br /> He [Kennedy] was…the first presidential candidate to mount both a literary and a television </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> [emphasis added] campaign for the office, the only one comfortable in both media, and </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> the perfect man for a time when Americans were teetering on a balance point between image and</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> word. (Thurston Clarke, Ask Not, 2010; P. 115) </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Television, a medium that had been persecuted for its then-rapid widespread and informative capabilities, was becoming more and more common in every household. This, along with a young president’s embrace of the medium, catapulted the industry’s creativity into experimenting with never-seen-before themes and techniques. <br /><br /> One program in particular that emerged during this era was Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Originally presented as a fantasy/science fiction anthology series, The Twilight Zone constantly touched on subjects that reflected the worries and aspirations of the times. The show’s first episode aired on October 2, 1959, three months before Kennedy began campaigning for the primary elections (January 2, 1960) and was cancelled in late January 1964, less than three months after his assassination (November 22, 1963). But the program’s five-year-run would be enough for it to leave its mark in television history. By exploring different aspects of the human psyche such as that of a soldier’s during war, the possibility of life in other planets, and giving new angles to historical events, The Twilight Zone ventured into territory that would have been deemed unsuitable for television would it have aired some years earlier.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> <br /> In “Where Is Everybody?,” the first episode that formally aired under The Twilight Zone brand name, we meet an amnesiac Air Force pilot roaming in a deserted town. After much scavenging and self-questioning, the man finally collapses after running from a shop and into a street crossing pole. We then see that the man is not really in a desolated town but in a test chamber, and a group of military personnel observes the unfolding of his delusion. He is a test subject in a moon trip simulator, completely isolated in a town was just an illusion. After being carried out by medics, he gets a glimpse of the real moon and says, “Hey! Don’t go away up there! Next time it won’t be a dream or a nightmare. Next time it’ll be for real. So don’t go away. We’ll be up there in a little while.” <br /><br /> Aside from the nuclear tension that characterized the Cold War, the space race against the Soviet Union comes in close second. This competition would not have only granted technological supremacy to its victor, but it would have also awarded ideological superiority to the winning nation. The U.S. audience had been fantasizing about space travel since the early years of film and television. But for a while any public “space talk” was avoided amid fears of Russian spies acquiring classified information. That lasted until May 25, 1961, when Kennedy, before a joint session of Congress, gave his "Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs” speech in which he urged the Nation to set the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” A year later, on September 12, 1962, he gave another speech, later known as the “Moon Speech,” at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas. This time he expressed how the trip to the moon would spur an aftermath of technological innovations similar to previous achievements such as the printing press and the steam engine. Even though the goal was set to be long-term (before the end of the decade) and the Russians had the advantage, the Nation had been rallied up and felt that the task at hand was within grasp for the first time.<br /><br /> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> <br /> Other well-known episodes from the first season such as “Time Enough at Last” and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (both airing between November 1959 and March 1960) also carried the spirit of the epoch in more than one form. In the first one we meet Henry Bemis, an avid reader surrounded by uncultured people. He is an admirer of Robert Frost (who, coincidentally, recited a poem during Kennedy’s inaugural) and is mocked by both his boss and wife for his passion for literature. The subject of anti-intellectualism was well-known at the Kennedy camp. A lover of words and history, Kennedy believed past administrations had strayed from establishing an intellectual core and compensated by opening the doors to intellectuals in his administration. Furthermore, in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” the topic veers from current or future events into the near-past. Maple Street is your typical 1950s portrait of an American neighborhood until bizarre incidences take place after a shining object is seen in the sky. Since the residents do not know the cause of these occurrences, they begin to single out each other by creating conspiracies fueling the idea that a monster dwells among them. It is a clever reimagining of Communist paranoia and its blind fervor that stalked the government under Senator McCarthy. The episode ends with a conversation between the culprits, two extra-terrestrial beings who observe the events from afar, when one says: “… I take it this place –This ‘Maple Street,’ is not unique?” To which the other one responds: “By no means. The world is full of Maple Streets. And we'll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other...One to the other...One to the other...” (The “monsters” in the title referring to human beings instead of actual monsters or aliens).<br /><br /> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> <br /> In conclusion, one could spend countless pages and ink counting the parallels between history<br />and fiction in every Twilight Zone episode. For many, Kennedy embodied the spirit of the people which sought to distance itself from the practices and ideologies of the past. This resulted in a large manifestation of arts and academic work in government affairs and vice versa. The constant mirroring and exposure of political subjects in television and movies resulted in the “de-stigmatization” of some elements but also in the further expansion of others. In one hand, the possibility of reaching the moon and its advances was tangible; but on the other, the bomb and other scare-tactic representatives were still ever-present in every household. Nonetheless, this did not halt the television and film industries from maintaining the flux of interesting proposals throughout the decade. And even though creativity persisted, the early sixties’ optimism, along with Kennedy, ceased on November 22, 1963. </span></span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-1473115552444405712013-07-24T08:29:00.000-07:002014-03-15T07:21:30.210-07:00Playing 9/11: or how video games redeem American history in the twenty-first century<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Ricardo
A. Serrano Denis</span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbezxmZCXkT1WVeFVRu3uAmWxO0MV30DJNUQvgr-1Av305pParXqiWdj5Da3NNbqDcLmVyQeE32PUk1Q0fst7QO7r5FYH-CjkwsgB4VJCe7P-XqXieN2jfmOb00EUJs8NQYulgnGkTcjk/s1600/Modern-Warfare-3-chopper.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbezxmZCXkT1WVeFVRu3uAmWxO0MV30DJNUQvgr-1Av305pParXqiWdj5Da3NNbqDcLmVyQeE32PUk1Q0fst7QO7r5FYH-CjkwsgB4VJCe7P-XqXieN2jfmOb00EUJs8NQYulgnGkTcjk/s1600/Modern-Warfare-3-chopper.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
is September 11<sup>th</sup>, 2012, and I have just led a select team of
American Special Forces through Wall Street and into the New York Stock
Exchange in an attempt to disable a Russian jamming tower that keeps the city’s
skies under foreign control. The conflict? The Russo-American War of 2016. The
battlefield? A Sony Playstation 3 console holding one of the most successful
video game franchises in recent history on its disc drive, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3</i> (2011). </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Whether
we like it or not, the struggle between history, myth, and remembrance has now
acquired a new front of discursive contention, video games. Jeremy K. Saucier,
in his article <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Playing the Past: The
Video Game Simulation as Recent American History</i>, speaks to this by stating
the following:</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Driven by new research,
new technologies, and new markets at the end of the twentieth century, video
games, with their ever-growing narrative and visual sophistication, stand posed
to rival the art forms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like other
cultural products, such as film, literature, or music, video games express
cultural tensions and anxieties. Their subjects and narratives speak to a
particular society’s place and time and are thus important sources for
historical work. Video games are potentially the most powerful storytelling medium
of the twenty-first century.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The narrative power of video games stems from an
already established popular culture that accepts the consuming of history in
uncontroversial packets of memory as filtered through myth. In other words, we
like our reality mythically cooked. And what better way to cook reality than
with a simulated work of fiction whose control rests in the actual daily
consumer of history, video gamers. This contention makes sense once we realize
that 9/11 quite simply exposed mainstreamed conceptions of the world we live in
as being governed by the politics of film and its representation. What was the
fall of the Twin Towers if not a real life repeat of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Independence Day</i> or countless other end-of-the-world scenarios put
in celluloid form. This is not to reduce the September 11<sup>th</sup>
terrorist attacks to an event solely popular in visual culture. But one can
argue that Americans, movie-goers par excellence, were subjected to imagery not
unfamiliar to them when the towers collapsed. In effect, September 11<sup>th</sup>
proved we live in a movie-made world. A quick glance at video games after the
event contributes to the understanding of such an idea.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>According
to Tom Engelhardt, in his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The World
According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire</i>, Americans “were
already imagining versions of September 11 soon after the dropping of the first
atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.” With the advent of Hollywood through
the newly popularized genre of the war film, post-1945 America became enthralled
in a visual culture that gave sense to an event that only a select part of
their society experienced. Values and morals in wartime became universal
because film mass produced images accepted as war truths. Consequently, war as
we know it today had to be re-experienced through film first in order for its
meanings to be fully encrusted into the official national narrative. It can be
argued that war is a movie experience first when it comes to the common
knowledge of it for people that didn’t experience the conflict first-hand.
Which brings us to twenty-first century gaming.</span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUiCcusk97s-UuKjTVrExLTiQ04vAr3scaQ-8T02FTZgMFgkBb4qfWolpzf5Wqp5pI-olVn-OcGUA7rMWDNgQwf3WDnqm79tNssJSs_8lf-W7q9yWHR6P7UY6NGUEqwJG6BGQNsFIvTm0/s1600/56739063920fe6bf401c626ea8aa58a3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUiCcusk97s-UuKjTVrExLTiQ04vAr3scaQ-8T02FTZgMFgkBb4qfWolpzf5Wqp5pI-olVn-OcGUA7rMWDNgQwf3WDnqm79tNssJSs_8lf-W7q9yWHR6P7UY6NGUEqwJG6BGQNsFIvTm0/s1600/56739063920fe6bf401c626ea8aa58a3.jpg" height="200" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Experiencing
war outside of itself remains an endeavor of imagination mediated by popular
culture. Now, what is interesting about imagination today is that it has become
resoundingly dangerous in representing the past and its present tensions, and
repercussions, given the expansion of mediums that play out fiction. And within
those mediums, video game consoles are amongst the more powerful. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Popular
culture finds enduring meaning in analogies that employ simple metaphors that
mirror reality in an effort to make fiction easily recognizable. Take, for
instance, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3</i>.
As explained above, this video game pits players against a Russian invasion of
the Western World. The plot is intricately interwoven with ideas such as home
grown terrorism, foreign invasion concepts mediated by Cold War history, and
destruction imagery specific to a post-9/11 world (meaning city warfare, a
heavy emphasis on building destruction by large scale objects like missiles or
planes, and dust covered streets littered with civilian casualties). Players
get lost in the detail of faithfully recreated weaponry and military lingo,
weapons have their official real-world name and technical designation and they
are modeled after their newest incarnations. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">While this type of
information is an interesting phenomenon in itself, it is the conscious attempt
at an uncontroversial plot line that stands out as dangerous. Creating a global
state of war (the main marketing line for the game was that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modern Warfare 3</i> waged World War III on
consoles) meant for the game’s developers (Infinity Ward) creating an enemy
that was both easily recognizable and safe enough to shoot without disrupting
socio-political sensibilities. In doing so, they reverted to Cold War enemy
stereotypes that actually rescue the Soviet enemy from the recent past and
dresses them up in combat fatigues that shy away from Communist red in favor of
a more complex shade of gray that projects a sort of historical vendetta, a
return to unfinished business that requires an American foreign policy of
constant military awareness so as not to repeat new Pearl Harbors.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In essence, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modern Warfare 3</i>’s most dangerous
discursive component rests in the fact that they relive historical discourses
by fighting specific Cold War battles and situations that remember Soviet
enemies and old antagonisms. What is interesting here is that those ideas are
still grounded on the 20<sup>th</sup> century mindset of war being a stable
sphere of American identity. It is here that Tom Engelhardt’s American war
story argument comes into play.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The American war story
(as explained in Engelhardt’s book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation</i>)
posits itself, in the 21<sup>st</sup> century, as a reminder of moral clarity
and responsibility inherent in American identity (catering to a sense of
military duty after the Second World War). According to Engelhardt, the American
war story propels the idea of national innocence in times of war. America is
always standing guard at the watchtowers of freedom, seeking out international
injustices to squash so long as war never answers to the politics of a
first-strike policy (meaning that the United States should never take the
offensive initiative). In other words, American war is always a defensive
reaction to foreign, and thus evil, aggression suffered on American soil or
threatening United States’ national security (see Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of
Tonkin, the September 11<sup>th</sup> 2001 Terrorist Attacks).</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modern Warfare 3</i>, the American war story
is upheld through the idea that the enemy struck first, as seen in the very
first chapter of the video game when Russians invade New York City, pushing
American forces to take to the streets and take out Russian signal jammers that
keep the American air cavalry blind. September 11<sup>th</sup> is converted
into the appropriate setting for the American war story to manifest itself
through given recent memory’s pull to the terrorist attacks. In other words,
the war story becomes more potent because it fuses twentieth century history
discourses with the aesthetic of the post-9/11 world. In fact, it makes the war
story more powerful given that the enemy’s first strike is quite literally on
American soil, as opposed to Pearl Harbor when one contemplates the meanings of
geographic and cultural distances within codes of identity in American
politics. When the Pearl Harbor attack occurred certain sectors of the American
public did not know what Pearl Harbor was or where it was located (see John
Dower’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">War Without Mercy</i>). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Modern Warfare 3</i> skips the possibility
of confusion or ignorance by making the warzone easily recognizable. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVHa1XQr5P4QrekI7RBQbd02LV8scrAEFi4OXKhfuqo8frZsFG07ciDyNXON78gMBXVJRYnbkM7W83F1b4Ngl2KBSySX-gFhIOFY7CwYC_AdSXum4vUPh_ZHDcaH20tj_zHEKG1IrEdDA/s1600/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-3-pc-ps3-xbox-360-preview-screenshots-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVHa1XQr5P4QrekI7RBQbd02LV8scrAEFi4OXKhfuqo8frZsFG07ciDyNXON78gMBXVJRYnbkM7W83F1b4Ngl2KBSySX-gFhIOFY7CwYC_AdSXum4vUPh_ZHDcaH20tj_zHEKG1IrEdDA/s1600/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-3-pc-ps3-xbox-360-preview-screenshots-2.jpg" height="170" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">What is interesting,
and dangerous, is that in making it recognizable, the game’s developer dipped
fiction into the ink of trauma. New York becomes a symbol of continued defense
with the possibility of redemption given the Americans effectively repel the
Russian invasion, a responsibility entrusted to the player. Consequently,
American gamers are bestowed with the opportunity to redeem 9/11 by the dictum
of ‘Never again’, a call of duty for the twenty-first century. And so, upon
completing the game by achieving military victory over the Russians, America
ushers the age of the virtual veteran, a veteran untouched by the trauma of
killing.</span></span></div>
Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-88804842440759432042013-07-24T07:12:00.000-07:002014-03-15T07:22:25.775-07:00Is Yesterday too Recent?: An attempt at explaining Recent History without heavy theory<div style="text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">by: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> This is not a conventional academic contemplation on history. This is an attempt to explain something made very complex in a, hopefully, simple way. The presence of recent history in our more specific dwellings on historical knowledge today makes necessary a sort of comment that tries to elevate its inner debates onto a broader stage. My definition of it goes like this: recent history refers to a past that still bears meaningful impact upon the activities and social configurations that make up identity today. Now, if the memory of the Second World War continues to bear meaningful impact on identity today, can it still be considered recent? What about the Civil War? Is its memory still recent if the nature of contemporary American politics continues to hold true to the North/South division that was initially defined in the 19th century? Or is it just better to scrap the whole idea of ‘recent’ and just accept everything now in past form as history so long as it is put into narrative? The point is to accept that nothing is out of bounds when it comes to creating knowledge, when its purpose is to inform people on the present problems that take up their experience. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> One cannot assume that temporal distance eases the passions of study and renders a more secure objective reasoning behind the making of history. Just look at the examples mentioned above: World War II and the Civil War. These two stories continue to inspire pop culture into using their history and infusing them into contemporary meanings of war and society. World War II has become most predominantly the main topic in the History Channel’s programming when it decides (and it is doing so less these days) to run historical documentaries. Its variations range from Hitler’s link to alien beings and how Nazis tried to use alien technology to win the war to reviving old videos in high definition form and broadcasting them as the ‘definitive’ way to experience the war.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> In the Civil War’s case we come to a crossroads that seems to be less pop in cultural terms than World War II but still manages to seep into the common knowledge areas through other motives. Take Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012). More a film about the abolition of slavery as a means to end the war, Lincoln makes the Civil War a more political source of historical activism that the memory of it originally catered to. The Civil War is most often set in a narrative that exposes the futility of conflict when it is waged between brothers, a metaphor that speaks to the war’s senseless slaughter of Americans by Americans. Spielberg’s signature close-ups (done to death in this film) pushed by the strings of an overtly sentimental John William’s score makes Lincoln appeal to movie-goers through nostalgia and a sense that politics had more moral weight in the past rather than today. By the end of a very long film, Lincoln has already made audiences care about the past as an example of what politics should be today, even if the presence of slavery is quite merely a tool ordered around to make sense out of politics first and slavery itself second.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> And yet, audiences supported the film. Lincoln’s domestic haul, according to boxofficemojo.com, steadied at $182,027,677. For a film without Captain America or Batman in it, Lincoln became its own superhero event movie. And this is relevant because it reveals just how much pull the Civil War and its main players still hold with cinema goers, for people who pay for entertainment in the hopes of getting educated, informed, in the process. We cannot kid ourselves with these types of movies. They are there to entertain and tell a story just as much as they are there to provide information about a past that still makes sense today, that strives to impact the contemporary experience. Does this make the Civil War recent history? Does a scene between the mythical President and his son arguing about war service too distant or too close (as is the case when Lincoln confronts his son Robert about not giving his life away to the probability of death in the battlefield)?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Identity can be a tricky subject. We make up ourselves by that we think identifies us most with a shared past. Film can be too dangerous an agent in providing this. According to J. Hoberman, “a movie would be an idea successfully transformed into an industrially produced collective experience.” If we accept Hoberman’s argument, collective experiences that employ history as a narrative tool make temporal distance irrelevant when contemplating the recentness of the past, for no matter how close or distant the past may be it becomes almost entirely relevant to the way we view ourselves in the present time. It is like Eric Hobsbawm states, “Most human beings operate like historians: they only recognize the nature of their experience in retrospect.” But Hobsbawm never specifies how distant in time said exercise in retrospection should be. In fact, it can be argued that, so long as retrospection is taking place, distance becomes close to irrelevant so long as it is consumed as a legitimate part of historic experience. That is what makes history recent, when it becomes relevant in the process of making sense of the present.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> The situation in North Korea makes an excellent example in this final stretch of the argument. The most interesting thing about the whole North Korean situation still playing itself out (regardless of downsized media coverage…now ceded to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden) rests on the idea that its nuclear contingency is still functioning as a Cold War strategy that mistakenly thinks it is still effective. Kim Jong-Un, the son of previous North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, has intensified his antagonism with South Korea and the United States in what appears to be a random display of power he does not have. Claiming a strangling on North Korean economy through U.N. sanctions, the situation escalated when Kim Jong-Un ordered military exercises too close for comfort to South Korea, with instances of missiles flying close to specific zones of both civilian and military spaces.</span><br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Now, the threat of nuclear destruction is what makes the situation so imbedded in mass media as newsworthy. Continued coverage has exposed North Korea as a nation looking for legitimacy in the context of a divided land that shares its narrative beginnings with South Korea in the historical playground of the Cold War. In fact, threats of nuclear annihilation seem out of place in today’s world, where drone strikes can be called upon in a matter of minutes and military superiority rests on technological readiness instead of mass mobilizations of military personnel as a reaction to aggression. As of April 5th, 2013, the United States’ stance on North Korea has been one of “strategic patience,” according to the Obama Administration as reported by The Guardian. By the end of March, defense secretary Chuck Hagel ordered America's most advanced plane, the B-2, known as the Stealth bomber, to fly over the Korean peninsula. The Stealth is invisible to radar and has nuclear capacity. The message to North Korea was intended by the Pentagon to be one not of provocation but deterrence: attack South Korea at your peril. The key word here might be deterrence given it being part of the Cold War jargon, but the focus should be that a single plane, almost imperceptible to the technological eye should it choose to be, can end the situation with the flick of a switch.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> Maybe the Cold War didn’t end for North Korea. The 38th parallel still stands as a reminder of that time and territorial disputes maintain their identity through it. In a sense, the Cold War is still recent history for the Koreas, as it can be for the United States (even if the Korean War, known as the forgotten war, came across as diminished in significance for American history). Still, North Korea just made its Cold War history recent. It gave meaning to conflict and inserted it in the 21st century sense of historical continuity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"> The whole point of history is to show, through the telling of researched stories, how humanity has lived throughout time and how it makes us the species we are today. Having said that, isn’t all history recent then? If we take the idea that recent history is that which still holds sway on the way we make up our identities contemporarily, does it not then make most of the past recent? Maybe it’s better to make away with these kinds of classifications and just stick with history as an outlet of knowledge that helps us understand, well, us, without regard on how far or how close the past really is.</span>Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-32471585097860260512013-06-11T17:57:00.000-07:002014-03-15T07:24:56.187-07:00Indiana Jones and the Labyrinths of Academia<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">by Andrés López Román</span></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"> As he laid down his
fedora and whip he entered a labyrinth much deeper than any archaeological
site. Once Indiana Jones recovered the Cross of Coronado, Academia awaited him
at Marshall College, a quiet institution where routine came to be the norm and
where he transformed himself from Indy the adventurer to Dr. Henry Jones,
Professor of Archaeology. As if the classroom had a filter, change was
inevitable, draining his sense of adventure in exchange for cultural shock.
This sentiment would quickly catch up to him, finding him at the University;
where the journey of learning becomes a red tape process, funding comes to be
as dangerous as a gun and the quest goes as far as the paycheck. Still, Indiana
Jones wasn’t willing to surrender his passion for History, past cultures or
artifacts. The window from his office remained open, and the world wasn’t going
to wait forever.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"> If one opens a book on
History, or more specifically Archaeology, the encounter with a disclaimer
separating reality from the character of Indiana Jones would not be rare.
Fantasy takes a center role in his movies regarding the way archaeologists work
and how history is perceived. Nevertheless, you’ll see many students, writers
and professors rooting for the main character in the Lucas and Spielberg
franchise. The reason for this is that even though they are able to pinpoint
myth from reality, they get to be entertained by these films as they identify
themselves with certain circumstances surrounding the Indiana Jones world.
Academics are not often chased by giant crushing boulders, Nazis or the occult,
but then again, Indy becomes a metaphor of something lost within academia:
passion for one’s field.</span></span></span>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6344897379671431842" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"> As we become closer to
the activities inside the walls of <i>knowledge institutions, </i>we find
ourselves with a sad reality: The university community has become a drained
place full of frustrations. We’ve become so absorbed by routines and financial
survival that our fields of study are not what they should be, what they could
be. We start pacing through comfortable zones, evading the search for higher
questioning, and avoiding risks. Dullness becomes the norm and the hope of
changes brought by newcomers becomes a scarce expectation since the newer
generations quickly demotivate themselves as they step into an already ill
environment.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Universities were once an
elite within society since they represented a space of intellectual exchange
related to knowledge and information. Lately this reality has come to be the
symptom of a problem that rose quite some time ago: knowledge wasn’t accessible
to the world outside of academia. We kept writing to ourselves, debating and
destroying the work of others as if we were in a campaign for an absolute truth.
In the meantime, society stopped caring about us, preferring the much faster
and more accessible outlets of information: movies, video games and the
Internet.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;"> The uncertainty within
institutions and the frustrations related to the relevance of our work
surrounds us with the sense of calling it quits. “When hysteria reaches
academia, I guess it’s time to call it a career” (see Kingdom of the Crystal
Skull...[its not that bad]). Popular culture has taken care of things while
academics try to survive in a world of “You can but you may not.” However, that
doesn’t mean that Academia doesn’t have a place in society. What it actually
means is that it’s time to escape the claustrophobic and fungus-‐ridden walls
of our offices and go out, through the window, to connect once again with the
world that we, in effect, inhabit.</span></span></span></div>
Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6344897379671431842.post-50333493024646637632013-06-11T17:18:00.000-07:002014-03-15T07:23:49.801-07:00Negotiating the Past: The Rise of History as a Pop Culture Phenomenon<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJPnY76on22dJE-DEpZWlcgPk_aFJenE7CrSLzPaV2y3PkUjGLHFxzTDwbUMcI8h1rh-tVmQ_V9vHN5SnblzXmLuJ03ACt730LhvPWvevebx_2ASJSViHCcTPrpBzyCfQ3zUZ0nyzDaNY/s1600/captain-america-hitler.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJPnY76on22dJE-DEpZWlcgPk_aFJenE7CrSLzPaV2y3PkUjGLHFxzTDwbUMcI8h1rh-tVmQ_V9vHN5SnblzXmLuJ03ACt730LhvPWvevebx_2ASJSViHCcTPrpBzyCfQ3zUZ0nyzDaNY/s1600/captain-america-hitler.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>History
has often been accused of being footnoted fiction. It has been the subject of
cross-disciplinary name calling that ends in inconsequential academic ramblings
that do not further serious debates on the nature, meaning, and consequence of
studying the past. One is easily jaded by such accusations in that they keep
with a narrow frame of thought that restrains knowledge from evolving into an
agent of human understanding. Instead, they make the production of knowledge a
process of exclusive infighting amongst professional thinkers (meaning men and
women trained for the academic world) that deviate from the original purpose of
knowledge creation, making sense out of humanity. And this brings up questions.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
History is fiction, then why is it not consistently studied in Literature
courses as legitimate works of fiction? Why reduce the impact of its findings
by relegating such works to the space of interpretation (a dirty word in the
world of classic academia)? When did cataloguing something as fiction demean
the subject matter of any kind of study? It is here that the whole point of
pedagogical research collapses. History is nothing more than one of many outlets
that produce information, in league with Sociology, Anthropology, Biology,
Physics, Psychology, and many other disciplines tasked with the same thing.
History produces information on a debatable platform (and I mean this in the
most pedagogically productive of ways), subject to any and all kinds of
discussion so long as its purpose stays within the sphere of understanding what
it means, and has meant, to be human. Now, if anything, if we are to consider
History fiction, then it should be feared as an academic phenomenon, and here’s
why: History can be the most dangerous kind of fiction in the written world.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
year 2012 saw America threatened by two atomic bombings, a violent middle-class
revolution, and a foreign invasion dooming the city of New York to a repeat of
9/11-like destruction. These threats have two very distinctive things in
common. First, they are conceptually configured in a language very much rooted
in historical discourse. Revolution screams 19<sup>th</sup> century French
history and Cold War fears of Soviet dominion on a global scale; foreign
invasion jettisons the sounds of revolution with a clash of ideologies and ways
of life again rooted in Cold War bursts of paranoia; and atom bombs cloud
reason by ringing the bells of past fears not lost but rescued for further
political terror. And secondly, they were all represented as legitimate 21<sup>st</sup>
century dangers through superhero films.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPAKpuipnu5iqwsdkoTq7P2LDA3k_5bz2_7cYLMJtcR3B7fgWS8WByucdcy31YxDZ7VnXd8ZVOmIHsonvGQDubMZNQzI3Z4-sHsJ9mxDlUvBCSt5S2wocPmLsdMWvipPU88pYH_Hk1eZg/s1600/dark-knight-rises1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPAKpuipnu5iqwsdkoTq7P2LDA3k_5bz2_7cYLMJtcR3B7fgWS8WByucdcy31YxDZ7VnXd8ZVOmIHsonvGQDubMZNQzI3Z4-sHsJ9mxDlUvBCSt5S2wocPmLsdMWvipPU88pYH_Hk1eZg/s1600/dark-knight-rises1.jpg" height="182" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Dark Knight Rises</i>, Batman faces his toughest challenge yet: a popular
uprising of Gotham City’s people against the city of Gotham itself. This, of
course, set upon the imminent danger of atomic destruction through an unstable
reactor politically infused with meaning by Bane, the 99% personified in a man
with a scary mask. Revolution, here, is framed as stable as history permits it
to be, which means it is pretty unstable. Its disorganized structure resonates
with mid-20<sup>th</sup> century stereotypes of revolution painted Soviet red. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Dark Knight Rises</i> updates said
stereotype with contemporary imagery, positing the now infamous Occupy movement
as a ‘natural’ continuation of an historic tradition (see Soviet Communism)
already vanquished in what is slowly being considered ‘a long ago’ (back when
history ended in 1991, according to Francis Fukuyama. The Free World had won
and, hence, history reached its apex). This gives ‘Recent History’ a whole new
meaning. The contemporary merges with the past in an attempt to establish
continuity in humanity’s political struggle.</span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcTehx7bZTWpD-DE92ZapLDK6K_LTDDsS36I-iq39lWIInVhzR4g95SSvJz_y7FTN-hdWp2oEUvkopuiiArHgZQJjj2Q3T699jeQW5IeKsT_dtveICs27TT8jiB62TsTnJQzDzufgfKj8/s1600/the-avengers-marvel-movie-image-412-11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcTehx7bZTWpD-DE92ZapLDK6K_LTDDsS36I-iq39lWIInVhzR4g95SSvJz_y7FTN-hdWp2oEUvkopuiiArHgZQJjj2Q3T699jeQW5IeKsT_dtveICs27TT8jiB62TsTnJQzDzufgfKj8/s1600/the-avengers-marvel-movie-image-412-11.jpg" height="180" width="320" /></a></div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Marvel’s The Avengers</i>, on the other
hand, rescues recent despair in an attempt at redeeming the past through
current American foreign policy. As a race of space aliens threaten New York
with their own brand of 9/11, Captain America (a World War II vet) leads a unit
of heavily militarized superheroes ever watchful for enemy infiltrations
inherently bent on disrupting the American way of life first, and later the
world by consequence of the first objective. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Avengers</i> rescues the ‘sleeping giant’ metaphor made famous by
the Pearl Harbor incident of 1941 and inserts it into the American military
experience of the 21<sup>st</sup> century (this metaphor supposes the argument
that the United State fell asleep on the war intelligence job and that it could
have intercepted the Japanese surprise attack). The Avengers fend of the alien
invasion but with heavy casualties. New York City, the film’s set piece
battleground, is forcefully thrust into the still fresh echo of 9/11 in
spectacular glory. In a sudden twist of fate, America’s heroes avert the
invasion by saving the city from a prematurely launched atomic missile diverted
by Iron Man into the alien ship that coordinates the original invasion, avenging heavy
loss and giving America military triumph. The atom bomb, a Cold War symbol of
fear, is revived as a supporting character in a grander narrative looking to
make war make sense in the 21<sup>st</sup> century. It evidently needs the past
for that.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
so, we are subjected to a revival of History through an effort rooted in
fiction. A negotiation of past meanings is taking place in that the present
looks to acquire new meaning in old symbols of fear and action. Popular culture
is rapidly becoming a primary supplier of informational authority in all things
considered political and historical. As a result, the validation of information is
exponentially relying on its exposure on silver screens, video games, and comic
books. Alan Moore (the author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchmen</i>,
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">V for Vendetta</i>) once wrote:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> <i> </i></span><i>History,
unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes
hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a fiction we must inhabit. Lacking any
territory that is not subjective, we can
only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world’s
insistent texts or else replace them with a strong language of our own</i>. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After
the Fire</i>, 1996)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
calling History the most dangerous kind of fiction, we must acknowledge that it
is dangerous precisely because it wears the cowl of ‘truth’, one which historians
insist on wearing forevermore. We must remember that what historians consider
secondary sources can quickly become primary sources for the general public.
This is why I comment on superhero narratives, because the history that travels
through them can end up teaching audiences more about the past than history
books in general. A serious attempt at lighting History under continued debate
can help by lessening the weight authority bears upon the discipline. It may
lead researchers and thinkers to the realization that classifications only dampen
the labor of information production, to the point of keeping knowledge bound to
the chains of exclusivity. In the end, it doesn’t really matter if History is
fiction or not. Either way, History continues to walk down the path of a
regulator, trying to keep facts in check, even if fiction ends being more
convincing in doing so.</span></div>
Arcades of Historyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14974418490349947467noreply@blogger.com0