#they’re all bad and emblematic of a man who treats real life women like this

[junpeijackflash]

I genuinely don’t think some people in the Michael Vey fandom realize that Richard Paul Evans is a conservative Mormon guy, who’s friends with and dedicates his books to other conservative guys, and has also been accused of sexual assault by several women in the past.

Do not support this man. Get your books from a library or a secondhand store. Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know, just use this information to avoid supporting him in the future.

[scarletwitching]

I know you would probably hate this, but, what do you think makes House of M popular? How this comic cloud people's judgement? How it affect new readers/casual fans's views? What are the factors that draw people in and fixed their impression? Just some observation, some people seem to enjoy the touchy family "feels", some may just like heroes snapping(like it's so cool), and sometimes it's Power Parade(it's deemed disrepctful to say she is less powerful than someone else).

It’s popular(ish) in mainstream fandom because its effects lasted a very long time, which makes it seem important, and because it’s a mash-up of a couple of enormously popular and beloved storylines, Dark Phoenix Saga and Infinity Gauntlet, set in a then-new alternate universe. It’s two old things smashed together and combined with a new thing.

That’s the short answer. The long answer is… long, and it’s actually about the underlying reasons people are okay with some offensive stuff (because that’s what I wanted to talk about). I’m putting this under a cut so that, when people who don’t agree with me inevitably read it, I can link them to this.

There really is a country song for everything.

It maybe goes without saying, but this is a House of M post so it mentions, however briefly, the usual HOM-related subject matter: ableism, infertility, people on the internet glorifying genocide.

Everyone likes things that have somewhat unsavory elements or unfortunate implications. With superheroes, the whole thing is – forgive me – problematic. You can find meaning and value in parts of it, but something is rotten at the core. One of the uncomfortable aspects of speculative fiction fandoms is how terrible things become normalized. Because we’re only talking about fiction. That makes it okay, right? It’s tempting to parrot these notions of “good” queens and “rightful” kings or to go along with the canon logic that justifies violence and ignores the sovereignty of nations that aren’t the US.

I bring up that last one because, in modern superhero fandom, buying into the canon logic often means defending US imperialism under the guise of defending a specific character or story. There’s always a justification for it in-universe, so the way it relates to the real world becomes some extraneous detail that only a jerk would mention.

It’s the Thermian Argument. It doesn’t matter what the underlying message or consequences, however (un)intentional, are. It matters that I like Thing and any problems you find with Thing are the result of you not focusing on very specific details that make it “make sense” in the story. Remember the old Tumblr adage that you can like problematic things so long as you acknowledge the problems? I would just say you can like whatever so long as you don’t bury your head in the sand and scream, “It’s fine! You just didn’t pay attention to the story!!”

What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of justifying how bad literally every part of the story is by saying it all “makes sense” and so all criticisms are invalid. If a person is traumatized, it just makes sense that they would [waves at the entire story] do that. It’s very sad when your imaginary kids die, y’know?

The people who like House of M tend to cite its fetishizing gaze on women’s mental illness as a feature and not a bug. The fault in that argument is that, as far as I’ve seen, none of the people making this argument have Schizophrenia. Or Schizoaffective Disorder. Or any personal experience with psychosis whatsoever. At the very least, the vast majority of them don’t, so they’re not part of the group being misrepresented.  

The issue of what is “good” mental illness representation is complex. Sometimes, people who are struggling or have struggled relate to characters who lash out or do destructive things. People can find solace in imperfect places. Everyone’s just trying to get by in this hellscape, and if a comic made you feel understood or just plain better in some way, that’s a good thing. But It’s a very “I got mine” argument to focus on that and ignore how those stories might affect others. You can’t reclaim something that wasn’t insulting you in the first place. I find the claim that there’s something universal about Sad Wanda Crying unconvincing given how emblematic HOM is of media representations of psychosis. If you’re not always being portrayed as a serial killer, the weight of this story will easily fly over your head.  

Then there’s the not-small matter that the people being insulted – really, specifically insulted – by HOM are groups that aren’t a big part of public discourse. The severely mentally ill and people with fertility issues. Not that those are on equal footing, but they both have a certain invisibility and the idea that something might be hurtful to them is treated as a joke. Reproductive issues are intensely personal, and most people want to keep them private. There is a lot wrong with media representations of infertility, but if talking about it means opening up about your experiences, it’s no wonder people don’t want to or are only willing to in a receptive space.

Also, I suspect a lot of people didn’t read the X-Men stories that came after and are viewing this entirely from Wanda’s perspective. There’s something narcissistic about sad, sad, sad characters being sad about their sad, sad, sad life. It invites the audience to focus on that one person’s struggles – often as a stand-in for their own problems – and ignore everything else going on. This is one of the critiques of “manpain” storylines. There’s a layer of self-involvement built in. Killed a bunch of people? But they were sad! Sad, sad, sad! We’ve all got problems, man. The world breaks everyone. Not everyone kills Hawkeye two different times.

This is particularly true in spec fic where every backstory is a trauma conga line. Your fave may have suffered, but realistically, so did everyone else.

Redemption arcs can have that air of narcissism too. Woe is me, I have done bad. If they get really self-obsessed, you get The Very Worst Kind of Story, the one where the villain is someone who has been wronged by the “redeemed” character and they want revenge. It’s a way of appearing to confront the damage done while actually minimizing it and discrediting the victims. Protagonist-centered morality to the extreme. Only Good Victims™ matter, and therefore, the redemption seeker is exonerated. All charges dropped on account of the victim turned out to be a jerk!

(That’s not what this post is about. I watched a movie the other day that had this problem, and it gave me a lot of feelings. It was Power Rangers. Leave me alone.)

Getting back to what I said at the beginning, the thing that bothers me isn’t so much that people like something I don’t like. I agree with Grant Morrison’s assessment that HOM is lukewarm at best, but I can still see why someone might like it. The bigger problem is how people like quote-unquote problematic things.

Which is to say oh my god, you guys have to stop acting like genocide is cool and badass. Finding a story valuable is one thing. Claiming that Wanda is so awesome because she can warp reality and wipe out all the mutants and “when will your fave” is another thing entirely. It is not okay to brag about genocide. Ever.

EVER.

Not even when you’re talking about fiction.

I know that saying a character is more powerful is the unquestioned trump card of comics fandom, but 1) that’s iffy in the first place and 2) it’s especially bad in this case. I used to think of the “my fave is more powerful than yours” dick-measuring contest solely as an expression of Boys Club thinking, something juvenile that celebrates physical strength above all else. But there is something more insidious to this logic. Saying that having more power – by which you mean a greater ability to commit acts of violence and hurt others – is the same thing as having more value is disturbing logic. The way that superhero comics equate power with goodness is part of why they’re considered fascist. Every time you indulge this fantasy that having more power makes something better, that power is virtue, the spectral form of Alan Moore appears and hurls copies of Watchmen at your head.

Buying into this furthers one of the worst messages in the genre. I’m not saying anyone who argues over which character is more powerful is a fascist, but this logic should not go unexamined. Why does it matter so much which character is the better at inflicting harm than all the other harm inflicters? You can use the cheap argument that they’re heroes and they’re doing good, but superheroes are, to a worrying degree, used as avatars of the US military. They’re only unblemished, pure-hearted Social Justice Warriors™ if you don’t pay attention to any stories featuring them.

And when you’re not just arguing that being powerful is better, but that the act of committing genocide is a key part of that superiority?? That’s beyond disturbing. How can people not notice how terrible that sounds? Outside of the narrative and the twisted reasoning of superhero comics, what are you really saying when you say that? Might makes right is questionable enough, but when the expression of “might” is ethnic cleansing?

Someone, please explain the thinking that leads to these posts. I’m lost in a flurry of question marks. What compels a person to declare, openly, that what’s cool about Wanda is that she got rid of all the mutants? How does someone conclude that glorifying genocide is okay because it’s a fantasy genocide? Why do thousands of people reblog these horrifying posts?

Why?

Why?

WHYWHYWHY?

On second thought, don’t explain it to me. I don’t want to know.

[its-just-like-the-movies]

Rampart (11, B+)

Why this film?: Natural Born Killers and The Edge of Seventeen were tempting choices, but everything I’d heard about Rampart’s politically rich storyline and ambitious execution made this an easy choice right off the bat. Plus, a character actor like Woody Harrelson in a lead role feels like the kind of treat more films should offer, especially when they’re as chameleonic as him.

The Film: What’s the right way to describe the impactful but imperfectly stitched way that Rampart holds itself together? “Raggedy” seems like a good option, given how the film bounces from character to character and plot strand to plot strand with little to suggest which direction it’s going to take from one scene to the next. “Rabid” might be a better descriptor of how comes across, its risky stylization and mangy narrative informed by an odious protagonist doing his damndest to hold onto a way of life he’s taken advantage of for his entire life and keeps relentlessly sabotaging, and one it frequently seems would be happy to get rid of him. The seams always appear to be showing, and not always in productive ways, though its unpredictable trajectory, ferocious acting and direction, and fascinating decisions about its lensing, editing, and sound mixing are so bracing and frequently impressive that it’s impossible not to notice them. A-list actors orbit Woody Harrelson’s central role as a deranged cop playing the kinds of bit roles that would be just as well served by far less recognizable names, the fact of their celebrity compared to the size of their roles and their whack-a-mole reappearances in the story as disorienting as the in-monologue editing and whiplash narrative turns. Rampart’s ability to disorient its audience is nicely synchronized with the downfall of a character who refusal to accept his defeat is frequently upending, his paranoid inability to grasp the consequences of his violent and prejudiced behavior too ensconced in decades of social acceptability for him to even compute the speed at which he’s being thrown in the trash.

As much as Rampart’s experimental design and pronounced assets are on display at all times, the film is even more confrontational with its politics. In this case, those politics are the tearing open of Dave Brown’s psychology of entitlement and bigotry, and the process by which a man of an era that seemed so alive a second ago is suddenly forced to reckon with his latest crimes, which somehow aren’t the worst things he’s ever done, and must reckon even more so with how changing tides have made what was once durigur behavior now completely unacceptable. His virulent bigotry and the safety he feels wielding it as a members of the LAPD’s Rampart division - even in the middle of a scandal that implicated over seventy officers in everything from bribery to murder - is realized in his very first dialogue scene, as regales tales of former glories with another cop while menacing a female trainee into finishing all of her fries at a lunch stop, asking her invasive questions as he and writer/director Oren Moverman boldly assert that this is the man who emblematizes what the police looked like in late-90’s LA. This is only further emphasized as he joy-rides his police cruiser through a group of Mexican mechanics in the parking lot of their cop and beats a suspect through the cheap, plastic windows of a drug store office to get information out of him, not just certain that he will suffer no consequences for this but even telling this trainee so as if it was an unspoken regulation. The grounded performances, observant shaky-cam and spry editing keep these sequences from becoming cartoonishly over-the-top, depicting Brown’s violent behavior as wholly mundane and completely corrosive at the same time. His teaching that his behavior is the norm of the LAPD to this woman points to a Training Day setup but wholly avoids it by refusing the idea that Brown is in any way a “bad apple” corrupting an otherwise decent system the way that Alonzo Harris was depicted as in his film. Everyone is like this, and there’s no indication a different cop would’ve shown her the ropes any differently.

This sense of entitlement bleeds into his home life, a precarious situation where Dave seems to co-habitat with his two ex-wives - who’re sisters - and the daughter apiece he had with each of them. The women don’t live in the same house, and Dave seems to find out whether he’ll spend the night with either of them or go bar-hopping to find some woman to share a hotel room with when he asks them if they want to have sex. Again, it’s a tribute to the actors for putting over such an unconventional scenario that could’ve died on arrival, but Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche make the scenario completely credible as the make warm conversation and perry around his advances. Oldest daughter Helen, her hair messy dyed with blue streaks while wearing a 90’s art punk getup, is the only person in Dave’s life who’s openly antagonistic towards him, and the youngest is intuitive and happy to see her dad even if she’s clearly not too keyed in to the tensions around her family.

These establishing scenes of domestic and workplace tension, ones that will evolve and mutate as the story progresses, are just as impactful to watch as the moments where Brown enacts physical violence against an undeserving party or use his power as a cop to threaten some unfortunate employee into giving him a hotel room or pills. Jay Rabinowitz’s editing is so lean yet so spiky that we’re able to feel every shift of mood in Dave’s conversations or confrontations, sometimes cutting scenes as though leaving out bits of a conversation or monologue but more often than not finding unexpected angles to spy on sequences that appear to be playing out in real time. These choices dislodge a scene from any predictable beats as much as the performances do, and the vantage points that show us these sequences alternate between intimately close to the characters or at such a distance that it feeds into the overall mood of paranoia. Even if Dave’s eventual theory that he’s being used as a putz by such an unfathomable web of players from the LAPD higher-ups to family members, hookups, and ostensible allies, feels like nothing more than a right-wing conspiracy theory, the editing expertly plays into these delusions without santifying them. The plot-starting scene of him beating a Hispanic motorist to the brink of death for T-boning his police cruiser and trying to flee the scene is executed with brutal economy, by Dave and the storytellers, and it’s perfectly in tandem with their presentation of non-violent scenes and control of mood throughout the film.

From here Rampart bunny-hops between different plotlines and characters seemingly at random. It’s hard to pinpoint a coherent logic to how these scenes connect to one another - either they do or they don’t, and this disorganization might be Rampart’s most significant hurdle to overcome for viewers to get into the film. Individual plotlines are picked up in bursts and dropped for extended periods of time, creating evocative moods that leave the actors to fill in the gaps between individual characters while the plot moves ever onwards. Even as the methodology behind how these stories scrape against each other is never quite clear on a scene-by-scene level, the cumulative portrait of a man going off the deep end in order to keep his dying way of life intact still hits. The film is merciless in picking apart how Dave is propped up by the status given to him as a white male police officer, his bigotry and paranoia so acidic that the background context of the Rampart scandal almost doesn’t matter in informing who this man is. He’s an endemic source of misogyny and racism, propagating his ideologies with the assurance of systemic cooperation that calling them delusions of grandeur gives them too little credit. His biggest calling card as a police officer, the one that earned him the moniker “Date-Rape” Dave, comes from the fact that he’s all but admitted to having executed an accused serial date-rapist rather than taking the man into custody, fabricating a story that he feared for his life trying to arrest him. An older white cop suggests that Dave facing any consequences is so out of the norm that the whole thing must’ve been a set-up, from the driver he beat to the person who filmed the incident to the government officials seeking to see him punished for his actions. Feeding in to Dave’s already-existing paranoia and neuroses about women and people of color, of any non-cop in any job who disrespects his authority, this conspiracy web soon encompasses his ex-wives, his current fuck buddy, the old man himself, as Dave turns to blackmail and criminal actions to keep himself afloat. Rampart balances a tricky line between objectivity and subjectivity, many of its choices seemingly influenced by the paranoia of its protagonist even as the film is able to stand apart from his rancor and hold it up to a microscope, dissecting his bullshit for all it’s worth.

It helps tremendously that these characters are written and directed so sharply, and that their interpreters make so many specific and charismatic decisions in bringing them to life while avoiding cliche or cartooning. Woody Harrelson, sporting a skinhead-lite haircut and a wiry, muscular physicality, emanates the size and danger of his character’s bigotry while keeping him scaled to uncomfortably human size. Brie Larson’s righteously pissed-off daughter and Robin Wright’s sad, carnal, and increasingly suspect friend with benefits may very well be the most startling performances after Harrelson’s, though Nixon, Heche, Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty, Ben Foster, Ice Cube, Steve Buscemi, and Audra McDonald are just as inspiring for evoking such sharp personalities with minimal screen time and unexpected entrances and exits. Everyone is able to keep a firm grip on their characters while connecting threads over gaps in appearance and in information, their relationships to Dave changing dramatically over the course of the film without ever seeming forced. Whatever can be said about Moverman and James Ellroy’s script in terms of its scene-by-scene structure, the trajectory of their story is so powerful and unpredictable that its secrets are worth keeping.

If the preceding paragraphs have repeatedly illustrated how essential Moverman’s direction is in making the script’s shifts of attention in to something potent and coherent and how commendable his negotiation of ensemble is, his dissection of Dave Brown and everything he represents is still feels like the film’s crowning glory. Rampart is not a message film that reduces its characters and scenarios to pandering stereotype or secretly condones the horrific behavior and bigoted mindset it’s supposed to be critiquing. Moverman and Harrelson make Dave Brown a fascinating and rancid character to be attached to for almost two hours, and Rampart proves itself to be a riveting character study that’s able to rip apart everything its lead man represents without dismissing him out of hand. It’s an invaluable study of white male toxicity as enabled by a police uniform, one that surely would have gotten more traction if it had a bigger distribution in 2011, but perhaps even more so if it had come out a few years later. It’s crucial to mention that the beating of the driver is not, ultimately, the crime that brings down Dave Brown, nor is the crime he confesses near the film’s climax to the FBI in the hopes of going out on his own terms what does him in. Rampart’s study of the cops who would almost kill a motorist and bully a fellow officer into eating something she didn’t want to doesn’t say that these are the actions that will cause their betters to kick them out, instead positing that these men will implode from so much internal and external pressure to keep from sinking. The actual ending plays like a leading up to a horror film, as Brown and Helen lock eyes before he slinks off into the unknown with the knowledge he could be arrested at any moment. It’s open-ended to the point of becoming an ellipses, unresolved while suggesting a whole film of possibilities lies on the other side of this scene. So, Rampart ends as it began, messy and unclean and dangerous, its ideologies unimpeachable, its execution so ambitious that what leaves something to be desired can even be construed into a productive part. Technically, Dave Brown ends the film still out in the world. But his clock is ticking faster.