Tag Archives: violence

If you’re going to have an epic showdown, try to do it in Texas.

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I decided to take a day off this week to read comics. Yeah, I know. I’ve got shit to do and the comics will wait patiently on the shelf for me to read them later. But I just really needed a day off and it was either comics or more Star Trek. I chose comics. Preacher by Garth Ennis, to be specific. Which is one of the best comic series ever EVER EVER! If you don’t know Preacher, get thee to a comic shop posthaste, friends. Because it is fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that I’m putting off reading the final issue so as to increase the deliciousness of the conclusion. Which is sort of pointless, seeing as how I’ve read this series before. But you see where I’m coming from.

There’s too much going on to sum up the series well. But, briefly, you’ve got your alcoholic vampire, your classic love story with an angry gun-crazy woman, your crazed inbred mutants, your church-run global nuclear apocalypse conspiracy, your badass German hitman and his merry band of psychos, your immortal murderous gunslinging cowboy, your illegitimate angel/demon lovechild run amok, and your hero ex-preacher who’s been endowed with the power of the word of God and is hunting Him down to make Him answer for abandoning humanity in our time of need. It’s a smorgasbord of fucked-up, irreverent awesome. Plus, the art is amazing. Which, with so many ethereal, conceptual things going on, is pretty impressive. Steve Dillon takes the unimaginable and makes it gory and dynamic and wonderfully funny. Genius.

Like I said, I’ve read these before. But I was much younger and I think that, at the time, I liked them for different reasons. I was in high school (and maybe my first year of college – that whole period is really fuzzy), which as we all know is a tremendously weird time. Why does adolescence have to suck so much? Stupid brains, being all soaked in hormones and new sociocultural constructs and tears and shitty marijuana. Anyway. There are a lot of religious questions raised in Preacher. It’s a pretty basic good vs evil kind of story, but the sides are unclear and the players are sometimes ambivalent about which side they’re on, both to each other and to the reader. And I can’t think of another story, off the top of my head, where the author made not only the church but God himself the bad guy. Not in a bitchy, whiny way, either. It’s completely logical within the context of our hero’s morality. “I believed in you and gave you everything and you still disappeared and left us all hanging so fuck you.” But where most of us would let it go at “fuck you,” the Reverend Jesse Custer takes it upon himself to hunt the bastard down and make him answer for his behavior. Brilliant. Point is, when I first read these comics, I was having a huge crisis of mind about religion and my own beliefs. You know, like most people do at around sixteen or so. “What do I believe and why?” is a new and exciting (and occasionally painful) question at that age when we’re just learning how to ask those questions subjectively and how to stand by our answers. Sixteen is about the age when we stop just repeating what we’ve always heard or been told. Ideally. I mean, if one just keeps doing that forever, that regurgitation, one becomes a tremendous waste of space and electricity. I sympathized only with Custer’s anger at the time, whereas now I feel like I sympathize more with his logic and steadfast dedication to an ideal. It’s interesting to revisit those moral and ethical conundra as an adult. A kind of intellectual nostalgia.

Something else I find weirdly intriguing that I probably wouldn’t have taken much notice of as an angry teenager: Preacher is unabashedly patriotic. Not in a hamfisted all-the-bad-guys-are-foreigners kind of way. But in subtle ways, and some really beautiful ones. Having John Wayne be Custer’s spirit guide. His leaving his father’s Congressional Medal of Honor at the Vietnam Memorial. Blowing up Monument Valley with an atomic bomb (if only to later point out that there were millions of native Americans murdered there and hundreds of atomic bomb tests happened nearby so it could’ve been worse). There are a lot of flashbacks from the characters’ lives, so their travels all over the country are also, oddly, all over time. They show the Empire State building as it’s being finished, New Orleans in several different decades, the western frontier at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as soldiers in Vietnam and World War II. It’s a love song to America and Americans, cheesy as that may sound. And not the sort of homogenized strip-mall America where every city in every state looks exactly the same. Dillon’s done a great job of making each locale have its own personality, even if it’s as simple as changing the color of the sky or the types of trees in the background. Excellent work. And don’t even get me started on Texas. There is a drooling appreciation for Texas here that I didn’t know could exist (that is, without riding a horse through dusty streets, naked and covered in barbeque, shooting Colt revolvers into the air, and screaming “Yeehaw”). But it’s not one-sided, blind faith-type Texas love. Ennis takes great care to point out the racism, classism, redneckery, and utter madness that also make Texas the wonderfully weird place that it is. You take the good with the bad. That’s America.

The other thing that I find cool about Preacher is how well its early 90′s cultural references hold up. There’s a whole Vietnam/Desert Storm analogy between Custer’s timeline and his father’s timeline. Another character has a fucked up face because he tried to shoot himself in the head following the death of Kurt Cobain, a sad but real phenomenon that happened worldwide in ’94. There’s a group of pathetic pseudo-vampiric goth kids who hit particularly close to home for me. Bleh. I don’t want to talk about my black fingernails and heavy eyeliner phase. Double bleh. And, probably my favorite, Custer says at one point that he started out on his quest because of the death of Bill Hicks. One of the best descriptions of Hicks I’ve ever heard: “Guy kept goin’, kept performin’, with the license granted a dyin’ man to say what he likes without fear…An’ a guy who’ll tell the truth in this bullshit world, he’s worth his weight in gold.” I should really do a blog post about old Bill. I’ll do that soon. He’s amazing, and it made me really happy to see this nod to him, especially since it was done well. The 90′s may seem like a cultural wasteland to the outside observer, but to those of us who were teenagers (read: sociopaths) during that time, I think it means a lot to see the things we thought were important treated properly. That’s not just the 90′s, obviously. That’s anybody’s view on their own youth. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting to an age that demands I look back with positivity instead of angst. And I’m sure these sorts of culturally reliant things would read differently if they were written now, rather than in the thick of it, what with the wealth of irony that hindsight affords us.

So, yeah. Go check out Preacher if you haven’t already. It’s totally worth the read. I will offer a disclaimer (“disclaim”? Is that a real verb?), and tell you that if you hold religion, particularly Christianity, dear enough to say that it shouldn’t be satirized or criticized or even closely examined, this is not the comic for you. It turns dogma on its head and shakes the shit out of it. Which is fearless and hilarious and awesome, but I can see how it would offend. It’s also bloody and violent and overtly sexual (often in twisted ways) and uses a lot of fuck words. But still, awesome. I can’t recommend it highly enough to those of you with a dark sense of humor and a thick skin for controversy.

And liberty and Soma for all

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I think it’s about time I made a heartfelt confession to you people.

I live in constant fear of being forced to watch martial arts movies.

There, I said it. I really do feel much better.

The Husband is a bit of an obsessive and loves all things Japanese (and most things that are otherwise Asian-flavored). The history, the language, the philosophy. The man builds swords and armor. Real, working ones. And I love that he loves all that stuff. It’s one of the things that makes him interesting. And while I don’t dismiss all martial arts-centric movies out of hand, when I watch them with The Husband they are rarely as awesome as I want them to be. They’re very beautiful and very slow between the fighty bits and very complicated and I tend to sleep through the last hour of them about 95% of the time.

There are a few that I really enjoy, but those aren’t considered “martial arts” movies per se. The Matrix. Ran. Both the Kill Bills. Bunraku. Hell, even the three newer Star Wars are more martial artsy than the original trilogy (wherein the lightsaber fighting was much more in the European style and those bitches didn’t have a Darth Maul). The fact of the matter is that I like movies that contain martial arts but aren’t necessarily about martial arts, dig? (And please, no commentary about how all but one of the movies I just listed are full of English-speaking white people. I am aware. It’s neither intentional nor exclusionary. I’m not a racist. Keep it to yourself.)

What’s the point?

The point is that I watched Equilibrium the other day for the first time in forever and I’m kind of disappointed in myself for having forgotten how much I love this fucking movie. Briefly (sort of): it’s a post-World War Three near future where the newfound peace is kept by citizens voluntarily taking multiple daily doses of an emotion-killing drug. People who buck this system are hunted down and eradicated by a legion of highly trained warrior priests who are also tasked with destroying anything that could cause an emotional response (books, music, art, etc). One of these guys (played by Christian Bale) misses a dose and goes off his meds and starts having all kinds of pesky feels and (cue action movie trailer voice) the hunter becomes the hunted.

Let me put it another way: If Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 had a baby raised by Nazis and ninjas, it would be Equilibrium.

Dystopian post-apocalyptica has kind of come to the forefront lately here in America (figure that one out – I’m looking at you, politicians). I can’t honestly say that it surprises me. But a lot of these books and movies are just an excuse to make a pretty simple underdog story with a big budget or a lot of flashy distractions piled on top. It’s lazy use of a good trope. And while that’s largely the case here, what Equilibrium does in its amalgamation of a bunch of old ideas is present all of this nightmare world stuff in a way that makes perfect sense. It’s shown from the inside and not the outside, right? From the perspective of those who already accept the logic, and not from that of the people who have yet to be convinced: Let’s not get rid of guns. Let’s use them in an optimized way, to kill as many people as mathematically possible at one time. Let’s not get rid of sociological undesirable people. Let’s make them want to make themselves like the rest of us. Let’s not even try to fix the whole world. Let’s just wall ourselves in here in our nice modern city where everything works and make it a stronghold for a civilization that will spread out along with the inevitable brainwashing. It’s clean and it’s methodical and it would probably work, given the right set of variables. So much dystopian stuff is just…messy. (I enjoy it, though, and feel like I could talk about it for quite a while, but I’d have to make a bunch of comparisons that are irrelevant to this particular conversation. Let’s save it. We’ll do it right another time.)

The movie was filmed in Berlin, which has the whiff of irony about it, but I’ll let it go. So there’s this wonderful juxtaposition of clean, utilitarian architecture and complete ruin. A lot of very straight edges and crumbling grey concrete and glowering cloudy skies. A perfect backdrop, really. And the martial arts bits are amazing. It’s all based on this weird gun kata style that the director came up with for his own use (what does that say about angry Hollywood guys with too much time on their hands?). I’m not a trigger-happy American, y’all. I appreciate being able to use weapons safely and effectively and only when contextually necessary. But what they’ve done with guns in Equilibrium is gorgeous. Terrifying, but gorgeous. It’s like they’re dancing and shooting people and blowing shit up all at the same time. I mean, come on. It’s worth watching just for that. Maybe keep your remote handy, though, because there are a lot of parts when it’s just quiet dialogue followed by twenty minutes of steady gunfire, and you’ll have to turn the volume up and down quite a bit.

It is far from a perfect movie. There are plot holes. There are gaffes. Taye Diggs (who plays Bale’s partner) seems to approach acting as simply saying every line like he’s doing a college coffee shop poetry reading. If you asked a physicist, I’m sure the math is all bullshit. And it’s largely derivative. So my explanation of why I love it might seem trite (has that ever stopped me from telling you to watch something awesome? No. And it won’t now.) It’s a movie with a point bigger than “the bad guys lose,” which is more than I can say for a lot of action movies. And I’m something of an emotional aesthete, being book and writing obsessed, so that whole destroying art thing is anathema to me. It’s rarely done well. When it is, it’s hypnotic, somehow. My worst nightmares all come true. Plus, bonus, you get to see Christian Bale cry a lot and shoot like fifty guys in the face. You can’t beat that with the spiky butt of a .45.

Aurora.

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Fair warning: as you can probably tell from the title, this isn’t going to be as funny a post as I’d usually go for. We live in a world where serious shit happens and I can’t get by with just talking about books and movies and my stupid feelings about them all the time. Just so you know.

We all heard about the shooting in Aurora, Colorado this past week. It’s hideous. I don’t want to talk about it because it makes me feel sick. But I think I should talk about it precisely because it makes me feel sick.

Here’s the thing: Batman is a big deal. The newest of the Nolan movies is a huge deal. But only because it’s American media hype. This gun-toting bullshit has nothing to do with Batman. And I won’t give wackadoo shooter guy the satisfaction of discussing his connection with an iconic superhero. I just won’t. Fans are fans, whatever they’re fans of, and really all that means is groups of innocent people in one place at one time. Happens every day.

As a side note, the other thing I’m not going to discuss is my view on gun laws, so if you leave something in the comments and it doesn’t make it through please don’t be offended. This is hardly the time or the place for politics. Feel free to send me an email and I’ll get back to you, but I don’t want to talk about it here.

But I do want to talk about crazy.

I’m a child of the Columbine generation. In April of 1999 I was a junior in high school. It’s really strange to talk about this in such a timeline kind of way, but those couple of years between the school shootings of the late 1990′s and the complete global madness of 9/11 were, frankly, a tremendously fucked up period of history to have to live through. It was fear before there was fear on such a blown-out scale. And it was limited to a very specific group. High school kids went to school every day terrified while everyone else got to walk around mostly unaffected (at least that was how it seemed to me and all my friends and classmates). Before we all talked about “terrorism” like it was a normal state of being. Before that word lost its meaning. Like the plan was to grow a whole group of adults who were already afraid for their lives. That’s a bit of a conspiracy theory thing to say. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t work, right?

Unless you were in that situation, though, you don’t really know what that was like, spending every single day petrified that someone would freak out in a classroom and blow you up. Or worse. Out of nowhere. Someone you’d known your whole life, someone you’d never expect. Which was especially scary for me because I’m from a small country town where coming to school straight from going hunting at sunrise wasn’t uncommon. Until Columbine, it was totally legal to come to school with a gun in your car if you had a hunting license. I’m sure it’s still like that in a lot of remote places. I don’t have a fundamental problem with guns. They’re a useful tool in the hands of people who know what they’re doing. But there’s a time and a place. And I was taught the hard way (although, admittedly, not the hardest way) that school is not the place. Sorry, I don’t mean to go on and on about a completely unrelated tragedy.

So now I’m having horrible flashbacks. Perhaps because those two words “Colorado” and “shooting” are in the same sentence again. A conditioned response, maybe, I don’t know. But that’s out of my control.

What pisses me off is that this crazy jackass dragged everyone else in that theater into his delusion. I understand crazy. Believe me, I’ve been at the bottom of several different crazy barrels, other peoples’ and my own. I get it. Reality sways, occasionally. I understand fully how people can…what? Get lost, maybe. Or forget. I’m not saying I sympathize, just for the record. I understand that some folks need serious help to keep their shit together, but that impulse to hurt people is totally beyond me. It just doesn’t seem fair when people pull others down with them when they’re drowning like that.

But it doesn’t surprise me that Americans tend to go on shooting rampages, honestly. Think about the way that we’re desensitized in our culture. We’ve accepted violence. We see death all the time and it seems painless. We shoot people in video games and they just disappear. Tv shows are full of rape and murder and death and home invasions and people beating the shit out of each other – all of which is way more graphic than the news. But censors are more concerned with seeing a nipple onscreen than someone’s guts all spilled out. And I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t mind a bit of blood and guts and gore in my movies/games/books/tv/etc. But I have the mental acuity (now, at 30, probably not so much during my more formative years) to deal with it as a fiction, as a tool to move the story forward. It probably helps that my mother is a trauma nurse (full disclosure: a badass trauma nurse) and brought home real-world horror stories all the time. You get used to it. But that’s just it: we shouldn’t get used to it. Unless you’re a cop or a fireman or a nurse or a doctor or a coroner or whatever, there’s no reason to be so cut off from how horrible these things are. Isn’t it a fucked up symptom of our media-fed culture that we can rationalize actual violence as just something that happens to someone else somewhere else, as long as we see it on a screen? The media treats war like infotainment and death like statistics. They’ve got no problem showing us starving babies in another country and then immediately following those horrendous images with a multi-million-dollar commercial for some overpriced restaurant whose food could probably kill us all. We shouldn’t be so ok with that juxtaposition, that hypocrisy.

I guess my point here, if I really have one besides just using this as a ranty outlet, is that we shouldn’t give this guy in Colorado a spot in our minds, in our history, in our hearts. Let’s remember the victims, the injured and the dead, the people who were just trying to have a night out like we all need occasionally because our lives are shit because we live in America and consuming something makes us feel happy for a minute. They were just people. It was just a movie. And they died. It’s tragic. It’s tremendously sad. The ripples that go out into the world from that event are incalculable.

But we can’t let fear take over. Take just a second, just one, and maybe think about those things that you do in your everyday little life that you don’t ever fathom could ever, ever hurt you. You go to the bank. You get a cup of coffee. You go to the grocery store. You go to the movies. At any given moment any of us could get shot or blown up or whatever. We’re vulnerable all the time to someone else’s crazy. And that’s not our fault. And that’s not society’s fault. And that’s not even necessarily a crazy guy’s fault. Shit, I could get eaten by a bear walking through my backyard, you know? Sad, ridiculous, fucked up things happen all the time. Don’t let those things that might maybe someday happen and that can’t possibly be predicted make you cower. Don’t let the possible make you hide away from the definite. Because trite as it may sound, life is fucking short. Do what you love. Live to the fullest. Tell the people you love that you love them. Smile. Laugh. Spread joy and love and light. Be good to each other. That’s all we can do. To do any less than that is a waste of time, a wasted opportunity, something lost forever that we can’t get back and might regret. And what a shame it is to regret, my friends. What a complete shame. Don’t let the bad guys win.

Johnny really IS a homicidal maniac…

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I got a nerd bug up my ass and bought a bunch of comics the other day. I reread Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. It’s still awesome. I had the individual comics once upon a time, but I’m not sure what ever happened to them. One of those growing up and moving all your stuff out of your parents’ house things, probably. Kind of sad, really. The trade paperback version is basically the same, with one extra Happy Noodle Boy. Also, I feel like the subliminal messages are different, but I have no way to prove that. It might just mean that they’re not as easy to read since I’m not stoned all the time anymore. But whatever. I realized, too, that Johnny looks like me in high school. Stupid 90′s. Urgh. Fucking mortifying, that. Moving on.

It’s trippy comic book art at its finest. Vasquez has a really great, super simple, pen-and-ink-meets-woodcut kind of style. The characters are somewhat bobble-headed and the perspective is skewed or off-kilter most of the time. All done in black and white, which makes the blood splattery bits even more striking. There are a lot of fun, subtle details in the background of each panel, too. Little treats for the very close observer. It does date itself with all the goth jokes, but having been there I think it holds up pretty well (nostalgia counts for a lot there, for some reason). And all the girls have undercuts. Remember undercuts? What the hell was that about?

Living up to his name, Johnny’s fucking twisted. He’s such a psycho. Page after page of the most creative, interesting ways to kill people. It’s hilarious. I love it. For the same reason I love zombie and slasher flicks, I guess. There’s something really purgative and awesome about watching people do abhorrent stuff that we’ve thought about but would never do. It’s just an outlet. A pressure valve. It appeals to our baser instincts. JTHM is the oh-so-very deliciously gory result of that idea. I honestly don’t know if the intention is satire or pure shock value. Could legitimately be both. I’m ok with that. I love me some hyperbole. I’m also (on a seemingly unrelated note) a rabid Tarantino fan, so I don’t mind a bit of violence if it’s done with some finesse, you know? Some style, some class. Yeah, the book is awful damn bloody, but there’s a point to it. Or, at least, one could read into it and find a point, were one so inclined.

Cue the violence in the media conversation: apparently it impacts the weak minds of our stupid children, making them into murder robots because they can’t think for themselves and we can’t, obviously, as busy adults, be bothered to parent them (but they turn around and cut school funding – whaa?). Then these heathen brats who are somehow trained killers lose their shit and lash out and kill a bunch of people who have wronged them in a gruesome cloud of vengeance! And it’s all society’s fault. Can we just grow up a little bit here, talk about this like adults? Seeing gore on a screen or a page doesn’t mean that you should think it’s ok and go out and do it. Here’s my theory. We tend to forget what we absorb pretty quickly in our soundbite (soundbyte?) culture, right? So if you watch a lot of horror movies or read a lot of gory books (especially comics), you become desensitized. It all  becomes cartoonish, almost. You end up thinking in more realistic terms when it comes to your own actions and reactions. You know, if your brain is healthy and all. This is just me talking out of my ass about anger management, though. Shrinks would probably disagree with me. They have, actually. But I stand by my statement. I also love that wacky heavy metal, so maybe don’t take my word on this stuff. (Disclaimer: Horror movies are not therapy. Ass covered.)

But why is it always just violence that gets all the blame? Other things don’t seem to come up as often in our “bad influences in the media” discussions. Theft, fraud, lying, cheating, drug use. Or sex. Jesus, don’t even get me started on sex in the media. That’s not a blog, it’s a goddamn dissertation. Maybe the real problem is that we don’t intellectualize or rationalize violence. Too visceral. Our culture has to account for the lowest common denominator and assume that monkey-see-monkey-do will be a pretty typical reaction. Which is fucking pathetic, but I won’t say it’s invalid.

Bottom line, if you don’t mind a lot of blood in black and white, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is fan-freakin’-tastic in a sick, snarky way. I highly recommend. Get thee to a comic shop.

(To give credit where credit is due, the version I have is: JTHM: the Director’s Cut by Jhonen Vasquez, Slave Labor Graphics, 1997, ISBN 9780943151168)