Alexx's Journal

Went to see the Watchmen movie last night, along with kestrell and her MIT film class. Afterwards, most of the people ended up going straight home, but Kes & I went out to dinner with Henry Jenkins, and had an enjoyable time geeking out and comparing reactions to the film.

( spoilers for book and film )

PC Gamer Magazine DeathWatch starting now. Latest issue is distressingly thin. Masthead has noticeably fewer names on it. They've dropped all their columnists. Two of their big features this month are non-content fluff: "What MMOs are out there besides WoW" and "49 Top Developers". A whole lot of content with no bylines, or bylined by in-house editors. None of this is necessarily catastrophic in the short term, but it all indicates declining revenues and declining quality, which to me spells death spiral. Wouldn't surprise me at all if they're gone by this time next year. They outlasted all the other PC game print periodicals, but the clock is ticking on that entire medium.

In more amusing news, the Onion has some excellent video reportage on the topic Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?.

The entire photo archives of LIFE magazine have been scanned, and are now hosted by Google. http://images.google.com/hosted/life shows a selection of some of them, but you can search the whole archive by using the keyword "source:life".

cvirtue, you and the twins might enjoy searching the archive for specific years and keywords like "children", as a sort of impromptu history lesson. The first photo in this search reminded me of Arthur and Eliza :-)

Frank Miller, talking about his new "Spirit" movie:

Among those changes to the story was Miller’s decision to have the character return from the dead with a Looney Tunes-esque level of invulnerability and a special pheromone that makes him irresistible to women — two elements that didn’t exist in the original Eisner stories.

“The old Eisner comics were loaded with romance, beautiful and dangerous women, and that was a way to explain the sparks flying between the Spirit and every woman he meets,” Miller explained.

Having your lead male character survive brutal fights and having women fall in love with him is not something that needed "explanation" in 99% of all action movies ever, including the ones that influenced Eisner so much in the 40s and 50s.

I'm definitely not paying theater prices to experience that degree of pain. But I may end up NetFlixing it, in the "unable to avoid looking at the train wreck" mode.

I've been following the work of Gareth Hinds for several years now. We were briefly colleagues, but then he left his job in the games industry to pursue his dream of being a graphic novelist, a brave move which I have always admired.

His latest book is an adaptation of William Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice". I am sad to report that I found it rather disappointing. Not actually *bad*, mind you, just sort of... pointless.

It's a straight-up rendition of the story, albeit in modern costumes. But this story, while entertaining, doesn't in and of itself make very good *comics*. There is very little action, and vast quantities of talking heads.

Hinds draws his actors with faces and postures which are both expressive and effective, making them good 'actors'. But they have very little *room* to act, with an average density of around two to three sentences per panel. The two most famous speeches, "Do we not bleed?" and "The quality of mercy" each are consigned to a mere two panels. While this is not *quite* as bad as the infamous Classics Illustrated placement of "To be or not to be" in a single, indigestible panel, it isn't that much better. (In one of his books about creating comics, Will Eisner drew a version of "To be or not to be" which ran, if memory serves, over 8 pages, with rarely more than one clause per panel. This technique would obviously lead to extremely lengthy adaptations, but I'd still like to see someone try it for a full play some day.)

The rendering is almost entirely realistic, which again strikes me as playing to the weaknesses of the medium, not its strengths. There are a few moments of graphical whimsy with Shylock, such as a delightful panel where he has a huge metaphorical tornado/raincloud above his head, but the vast majority of the shots might have been stills from any community theater production of the play. This was especially disappointing after the book started with some truly imaginative endpapers: a map of Venice reimagined as a fish with a hook through its mouth. I wish the story itself had contained graphic play on that level of inventiveness.

As regards the text, Hinds takes some surface liberties, such as updating the servants' prose dialogue, but he leaves most of the poetry intact. He trims for space, but all the relevant story beats are present. His afterword comments briefly on the racist themes and the homosexual overtones, but he takes no stand on them, either in the afterword or his telling of the story itself.

I am left wondering why Hinds undertook this project. He imposes no personal vision on the play. The story is told competently enough, but this telling brings nothing new to the table. If this were a lesser-known work that he was trying to make more accessible, that would be a good reason -- but there's a good recent film of this story which is, frankly, a far more succesful adaptation, not least because it plays to the strengths of its medium.

I admire Gareth for having given up his day job to pursue more creative endeavors. I hope his next one has moreactual creativity involved.

http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home

Came across this link while looking for something else. The good parts: They are first digitizing, then scanning and OCRing, ALL of the major collections of Early English books, previously only available on cumbersome microfilm. When complete, this will be of incomparable value to any medieval or renaissance scholar. On the IP side, the intend to "Convey robust rights of use to scholars; Protect the public domain rights of the larger society to access out-of-copyright materials".

The bad part: It's currently only accessible to institutional partners that have paid a five-figure buy-in fee.

The mitigating parts: Those institutions include most US state universities, and many other large universities, so one should be able to wangle access somehow, though it probably means some physical trips to university libraries to set up an account. Also, "After a contractually agreed upon date, the rights of partnership also permits Partner libraries to distribute the textfile beyond its campus community to support other constituencies to whom the Partner seeks to provide service (e.g., alumni, high school students, state residents, or the world at large)." So it sounds like this will likely end up on the public web eventually, though not real soon.

ETA: Locking comments due to robo-spam :(

I don't read a lot of Marvel superhero comics any more. Actually, I don't *regularly* read any of them, now that I think on it. But I still go through the Marvel section of the comic book catalog, because I live in hope of something interesting coming along. Just read the first issue of something that, while the jury is still out on whether or not it is *good*, is decidedly interesting.

"Fantastic Four: True Story" is a 4-issue miniseries by Paul Cornell (he of the excellent "Human Nature" Doctor Who 2-parter from last year). It posits that something has gone wrong with the relationship between people and books, and that the FF have to enter the "Fictoverse" to find out what is making books so depressing lately. A cool author and a meta premise were enough to make me check it out.

The first issue concludes in a place I would never have expected to see the FF. They are coming to the rescue of some damsels in distress menaced by a horde of monsters, which is typical enough. The damsels in question, however, are the protagonists of _Sense and Sensibility_. Yes, we now have the world's first-ever Fantastic Four/Jane Austen crossover. (Well, someone may have done it in a fanfic, I suppose.)

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that IT'S CLOBBERING TIME!"
"Ben, that's from _Pride and Prejudice_!"

NEXT ISSUE: "Reader, I clobbered him."

kestrell and I recently watched an old favorite of mine, Harold and Maude. Does it pass the Bechdel test?

Harold's mom has conversations with three other named female characters over the course of the movie. They discuss careers and schooling, among other issues. So on a purely literal level, it's a clear pass.

On the other hand, all of these other women have entered the story through a computer dating service that Harold's mother made him join, and she is evaluating them in terms of their suitability as potential mates for him. So even when they aren't explicitly discussing Harold, he remains, in some sense, the focus of their conversations.

Opinions?

I alluded to this briefly in my last book review, but wanted to discuss it at a bit more length here. Originally proposed as a humorous criterion for picking what movie to watch (if any), it states (approximately, from memory):
1) It must have at least two women in it.
2) ...who, at some point, talk to each other.
3) ...about something other than a man.

Apply this test to the last several movies you've seen, and you may be surprised at how few pass this test. Even many movies that are lauded for strong female characters or pro-feminist viewpoints often fail the Bechdel Test.

Recently autopope dexided to try applying the Bechdel Test to his own written work, and was distressed at the relatively high failure rate. He then made a mini-manifesto out of it, stating that there was no good excuse for *not* passing the test in this context, and that he would make a point of doing so in future. While movies often have to make compromises to please a large audience of producers and marketers, a solo medium like prose really ought to succeed more often.

He did make the point that short stories, being so short, are exempt. But a novella is roughly the same size as a movie, so anything novella-and-up counts. I think similar length criteria can be extended to other media. A single episode of a TV show, or a single issue of a serialized comic book need feel no shame if they fail. On the other hand, there's no general excuse for *not* succeeding at least once every few episodes.

In the ensuing discussion, a few variations cropped up. Autopope himself suggested that rule 3 be extended so that conversations of marriage and/or babies would also not count. Personally, I think that's a bit over-broad. While some such conversations are patriarchy-reinforcing, others are not. I think that the objectionable ones can easily be identified as failing based solely on the original rule. One simple example, compare "This is how I am raising my child" with "This is how my husband thinks we should raise our child."

Many commenters have suggested that tight single-viewpoint narratives with a male viewpoint character should be exempt. I'm not so sure. If you relax rule 2 slightly, then a conversation between the viewpoint character and two women might qualify. He could observe such a conversation (covertly or not). He could have the contents of such a conversation reported to him as indirect speech. There are plenty of possibilities here.

So, I've had all that sitting in my head recently while reading fiction. Which brings us to the recent reprint of Scott McCloud's _Zot!_ from the late 80s and early 90s. It's an excellent book, full of adventure, humor, and humanism; y'all should go out and buy it if you haven't already. And yet...it *utterly* fails the Bechdel Test.

It doesn't have the excuse (however weak) of a tight viewpoint male protagonist. Jenny is arguably as much of a central viewpoint character as Zot is. Later in the book, we see the viewpoint of several different characters, almost half of whom are female.

It passes rule 1 easily: lots of female characters, even distinct and interesting ones. Rule 2 also passes, though less smoothly. The women do talk to each other sometimes. But they almost never do so when there are males present; multi-person conversations are typically centered on a male. The one clear counter-example, Brandy's outburst at the lunch table, is seen as a disruptive breach of normalcy, perhaps as much for its form (a girl taking center stage) as for its content. And that content -- "I've decided my boyfriend is too jealous, so I'm going to date *all* the boys here!" -- is clearly male-centered, if unconventional.

Rule 3 is a complete washout, though. Jenny and Terry have several conversations, but they are all about boys. There is a brief two-panel exchange about school, but it's just the capper to a multi-page conversation about Zot, so I don't think it counts.

Jenny has some brief conversations with her mother, but again, all male-focused; her mother mostly discusses Jenny's boyfriends or her own marriage. There are some digressions to her childhood, but even these are dominated by her relationship with her own father, her mother is a phantom presence, offstage and unheard.

Curiously, aside from her mother and Terry, we never see Jenny talk to *any* of the other women in her social circle. Nor do we see them interact much with each other. Almost all the relationships are male-mediated: Elizabeth is 'Spike's brother', Brandy is 'Ronnie's girlfriend'. Jenny herself is perceived as 'Woody's girlfriend' by several of the boys.

Terry is the one woman who isn't male-defined. She is 'Jenny's best friend'. And she turns out to be a lesbian, which you'd think would lead to some fulfillment of rule 3. But no. She *imagines* many conversations with her love-object, but these conversations are clearly presented as both factually false and emotionally unsatisfying. When she finally does approach her crush in real life, and there seems the possibility of a conversation -- the story ends there. We rarely hear either of them speak for the rest of the book, and never to each other.

There's one scene between minor characters that almost qualifies. A young girl, targeted for assassination, has a conversation with a female professional soldier assigned to guard her -- and who is also the young girl's older cousin. On one level, the conversation is about politics and courage. But on another, it's entirely about men. The girl is targetes for assassination because her father )already killed) was ruler of the planet. Her cousin tries to shame her into being more courageous by saying (approx.) "What would your uncle think!". Even the assassin they are fleeing from is male.

(Come to think of it, *all* the Zot! villains are male. There is the occasional female conspirator, but they are always minor side characters, never rising to the level of the great, focal supervillains.)

Zot! was, for its time, very politically progressive and liberal-minded. McCloud took a lot of chances that other storytellers would not have. Yet while he managed to challenge many of the cultural assumptions about his chosen storytelling form, other aspects of the cultural deep structure retained a firm grip on his story.

This is why I like the Bechdel Test; it shines a light on previously unconscious tendencies.

And though I've spent a lot of time talking about its failings, I don't want to wnd on that note. Zot! has many wonderful successes as well. I do recommend it unreservedly.

Including me, or how else did I find this link.

A chart showing Dr. Who's "waxing and waning revolutionary tendencies over time". Also including real-world events that might have had an influence on the political tone of the show.