Far From Heaven is about the most apt title I can imagine

Jackie Stacey's 1988 essay "Desperately Seeking Difference" is in clear contrast to Laura Mulvey's theories in her 1973 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Stacey uses her essay as a critique of Mulvey's theories of psychoanalysis and voyeurism. I believe the different time periods and films of their time explain these differences in view.

Todd Haynes' 2002 film Far From Heaven tells the story of three main characters: Cathy and Frank the white married couple, and Raymond their black gardener. They live in idyllic Hartford, Connecticut town circa 1957. On the surface, Cathy and Frank have the perfect marriage, perfect kids, perfect job, perfect house, and perfect community. Instead, Frank (Dennis Quaid) harbors a secret attraction to men, and Cathy (Julianne Moore) is drawn to her new friend Raymond (Dennis Haysbert, better known as the president on 24). As the title implies, the true existence is far from it. The film was nominated for several Academy Awards: for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Julianne Moore), Best Original Screenplay (Todd Haynes), Best Cinematography (Edward Lachman), and Best Original Score (Elmer Bernstein).

What is the significance of the gaze in Far From Heaven? Frank still possesses the male gaze, although his gaze is now fixated on other men. In fact, the film offers no other content to the male lovers of Frank. They are image only. They have no dialogue or meaningful scenes. They only serve as an device of physical attraction for Frank, which create conflict between characters. During the scenes of Frank's encounters, visually the camera is set at odd angles and the scenes take place in shadows.

Cathy is the protagonist but, in tune with Mulvey's theory, Frank pushes the narrative along. At the same time, the local magazine columnist and photographer snap photos of Cathy at home and abroad, surprising her. This too is a type of gaze, but it is a gaze on the surface image of the person, not the reality. Modern audiences sympathize with Cathy but at first may not relate to her because of her initial robotic, Stepford Wife personality. In other scenes, the white status quo characters gawk at Cathy as she speaks on a coeval basis with Raymond, and black characters stare at Raymond dancing with Cathy. Even in a state without legal segregation, the people do not rub elbows.

Mulvey's essay cites the concept of the buddy movie (p. 384), which dispenses with the problem of erotic contemplation in the characters by having homosexual eroticism of the central male figures carry the story without distraction. In Far From Heaven the "buddies" could be twofold: Cathy and Raymond, or Frank and his lover(s). Either way the homosexual relationships are not under the surface at all. Frank has more than one sexual encounter with men and eventually leaves his wife and children to be with a man and the film does not shy away from showing the encounters. Stacey, writing 15 years later, claims that gender and sexuality should be separated (p. 394). This is a more modern view and is slowly being adapted to the media depictions of people. Notice that Far From Heaven is a mainstream Hollywood film produced by Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney, and starring multiple major actors. It was not an underground art film.

The differences between Douglas Sirk in 1955, Mulvey in 1973, Stacey in 1988, and Todd Haynes in 2002, shows a clear progression of social views. Stacey's article references Desperately Seeking Susan, a possible homosexual buddy movie starring two women in which one is asked outright if she is a lesbian. An essay written in 2009 may be different still. On that note, what films about unconventional relationships could Mulvey have considered in 1973? I can cite two off the top of my head, neither of which are particularly controversial today: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967 and Harold and Maude in 1971. The most shocking thing about Guess Who's Coming to Dinner today is not that Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton are an interracial couple, it's that Poitier is 20 years older than his young fiancee. In Harold and Maude the age difference is closer to 60 years.

What is the significance of the role reversals in Far From Heaven? The film seems to be inspired by Douglas Sirk's 1955 film All That Heaven Allows. That movie starred Jane Wyman as an upper-class widow and Rock Hudson as her gardener, two people from opposite sides of the tracks. Hudson is now known to be a closeted gay star and he died of AIDS related illness in 1985. Todd Haynes is an openly gay director, and you can see why he was interested in "remaking" the 1955 film with race and sexuality as the themes rather than class differences. His sensibilities as a gay white man may present a different style than another director with a different background.

Far From Heaven functions as a parody of the stereotypical depiction of the post-WW2 ideal as seen in Leave it to Beaver and the Donna Reed Show. The most realistic, down to earth, and honest character in the film is Raymond. He graduated from college with a degree in business and is raising a daughter alone. He is the only character who not only knows direct hardship but he has faced it head on and is a better person for it. He is less sheltered and more worldly. The white residents of Hartford all seem to live in a little pampered bubble.

Myopia and Naiveté: Dancer in the Dark

Lars von Trier's 2000 film Dancer in the Dark is the story of Selma Jezkova, a Czech immigrant who works in a factory in the state of Washington circa 1964. Selma suffers from severe myopia, to the point that she will soon be totally blind. Selma secretly hoards cash from her job in order to pay for an operation for her son Gene who has the same affliction.

Selma is a perpetually innocent person, loyal to her dying breath, despite others not being loyal to her. She doesn't even testify on her own behalf in court during her own murder trial, lest that break her oath to Bill, the murder victim. She works in a dead end job for little pay, occasionally taking on double shifts to earn more money for her son. She doesn't argue or make a fuss and is always polite, to a fault. This is in contrast to Laura Mulvey's assertion that female protagonists always behave like men. In other words, Selma is pretty naive.

The film is structured as a dark homage to Hollywood musicals. Selma's sunny personality could have been lifted right from a 1940s song and dance film like Ziegfeld Follies or a Busby Berkeley movie. Throughout the film, the drama is interrupted with musical numbers that take place in Selma's imagination. However, von Trier turns the old Hollywood optimism on its head with Dancer's realistic depiction of poverty, hardship and injustice.

Karl Marx's theory of alienation fits into certain aspects of the plot of Dancer in the Dark. Marx believed that capitalism deliberately alienated people from one another, particularly laborers, in order to take advantage of them (Reader in Marxist Philosophy p. 297). Human nature is manipulated to turn peers against each other for the sake of profit.

First, what is the significance of this alienation in the film? First, due to her daydreaming, naiveté and near blindness, Selma is already alienated from much of society. Her employer takes advantage of her (and its other employees) by the hard labor and low pay. Bill, the police officer killed by Selma, represents the government or bourgeois class in society (those with the power). Bill is in a bad spot with his wife and house because he is behind on payments to the bank, which serves as another indictment to capitalism and the status quo. Bill takes advantage of his police position by bullying Selma and taking her money to solve his own problems. She "defeats" this power, but reluctantly and at her own peril. The rest of the law establishment responds by arresting, imprisoning, trying, and convicting her. Her friends from the proletariat want to help her but their own ability is limited. Ultimately she is hanged and justice is not served.

Secondly, what is the significance of Selma's blindness? I think this establishes two things: why she is so innocent and why she is so in love with musicals. She cannot clearly see all the problems and dreariness around her, so she retains a friendly, charming demeanor, perhaps even childish. It also explains why she enjoys her daydreams so much. She may not be able to enjoy standard Hollywood movies, but musicals have so much movement and audio stimulation that she can still get some enjoyment from it. With her eyesight more or less cut off, her mind can take over and take her into her own musical numbers.


Lastly, what is the significance of those musical numbers interspersed among the dramatic scenes? These serve a few purposes. They are levity to break up the heavy, sad scenes of oppression in Selma's life. They also provide a window into Selma's imagination. She has a genuine personality to the audience. The scenes show that Selma is the most human of the characters because of her unwillingness to feel sorry for herself or give up. During her tedious, rough job at the factory she can escape temporarily into a dance routine. During the musical sequences, the film (actually digital video tape) is brighter and more colorful, and not so drab as in the "real life" scenes. Therefore the songs are more real to the audience than the main plot. The film seems to be saying that life may be hard, but your attitude matters too. It isn't quite so hard if you're creative and have something fun to keep you company.

Hitchcock and Sigmund, strange bedfellows

Freud or Fraud? I am dismayed that this section of the class leans so heavily on the theories of Sigmund Freud. His writings, particularly on developmental psychology and sex, are something of a minor embarrassment to modern psychologists and psychiatrists. Psychoanalysis has come a long way since 1910 Vienna. I will give him his due: he was the icon of psychoanalysis and popularized the study of mind and emotion. However, he was evidently not a fan of Occam's Razor. Instead of looking for simple explanations, he delved into convoluted roundabout answers, almost always involving sexual events or abuse.

Rather than spending a good deal of time observing and studying children (even his own - he had six) he preferred to create his ideas alone with his cigar and cocaine addictions. If people's problems are attributable to sexual mis-development, did Freud believe his own children were perfect? Or, if they had psychological issues, were they instead abused, either by him or without his knowledge? You can see the problem with this lack of logic. He reduced the human mind to the drive of a bacterium, perpetually focused on procreation with no possible altruism or higher thought. Today's patients are disgusted at the Oedipus Complex and most women are rightly offended by Penis Envy.


Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, was an early critic of Freud and was often himself a target of derision in those days for not praising Freud as a genius as most others did.

From the New York Times, January 30, 1966:

Mr. Nabokov, would you tell us why it is that you detest Dr. Freud?

Nabokov: I think he's crude, I think he's medieval, and I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don't have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don't see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.

From the Wisconsin Studies, 1967:

Interviewer: Speaking of ideology, you have often expressed your hostility to Freud, most noticeably in the forewords to your translated novels. Some readers have wondered which of Freud's works or theories you were most offended by and why. The parodies of Freud in Lolita and Pale Fire suggest a wider familiarity with the good doctor than you have ever publicly granted. Would you comment on this?

Nabokov: Oh, I am not up to discussing again that figure of fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.

From Strong Opinions, pages 23-24: Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods appears to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick.

Of course, this blog is ultimately about Hitchcock, his 1954 film Rear Window, and the concept of the Gaze.

Hitchcock... interesting name. And why is he holding a phallic symbol in his mouth? Does he have an oral fixation? Lack of development at the genital stage? What does the bird represent? A bird resting on the phallic symbol...

Oh sorry, I was channeling Freud for a moment.

Laura Mulvey, in her article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, analyzes the inherent pleasure in looking at people and the human form. If people did not have this fascination, visual artwork would be nothing but landscape paintings and portraits of animals. We would have no Greco-Roman statues or photography or movies. Scopophilia is defined as the pleasure in looking, which differs slightly from voyeurism, which is the pleasure is viewing private or forbidden activity. Mulvey writes that there is also a reverse pleasure, that in being looked at (381).

This significance is the basis of Hitchcock's Rear Window, wherein the main character LB is stuck in a wheelchair after an accident at a racing event. Notably, LB is a photographer, which in itself implies a fascination with looking. LB watches the neighbors in his apartment complex across the courtyard through their windows. In particular, he becomes obsessed with a salesman in the opposite building, who LB believes has killed his wife and shipped her body off in a crate. Later, LB draws his nurse and girlfriend into the intrigue. Hitchcock knew very well that the audience would relate to this story, because all of us have been curious about what goes on in another person's home, or glanced (although probably not stared through binoculars) into a window.

Smartly, the film is shot from mainly one location, LB's apartment looking out, and many of the camera shots are from LB's point of view. We, as a viewer of the cinema screen, are a participant. And indeed, what is cinema, but a chance to openly engage in viewing a private world? The screen is a window crafted for the audience. Freud's concept of the gaze, which has a sexual connotation, is not paramount to Rear Window, because LB is mainly trying to solve a murder. There are some scenes, though, where LB watches Miss Torso the pretty dancer or a married couple. You will notice that, inexplicably, the windows in the apartment complex seem to be open and uncovered at all times. As a plot device, the story takes place in a heat wave, justifying this fabricated opportunity to view others at all hours.

Later in her article, Mulvey cites the concept of woman as image and man as bearer of the look. "What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance" (384). Here Mulvey is quoting Budd Boetticher, a noted director of Westerns in the 1940s and 50s.

So what is the significance of the woman-as-object in Hitchcock's work? I don't agree that Rear Window embodies this quote exactly. LB's girlfriend, Lisa, is not a one-dimensional character. She does drive the plot and assist the man, but she is not the reason LB acts the way he does. She chastises him at first for snooping and being so fixated on the theory of murder. LB does have concern for Lisa when she is in danger, but being confined to a wheelchair, he is unable to fight back. In Hitchcock's other films, such as The Birds, women take the central role of strong yet not-masculine figures. Then again, in the case of Rear Window, Hitchcock did cast one the most beautiful starlets of the day, Grace Kelly, later Princess of Monaco. Again, we the audience are able to view their private moments and appreciate aesthetically the image on the screen: the beautiful actress. The woman is not merely an image to drive the male character, but to inspire the viewer as well.

Identity Crisis: Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and David B.'s Epileptic

I couldn't narrow down my post to just one comic, since both of them are so realistic, well made, and deeply personal. For those reasons, the two books have a similar ancestry. They are autobiographical tales, in high contrast black and white, that portray the pain and confusion of adolescence. Hopefully I can include enough analysis of both to do them justice.

I think they also share a kinship in their confusion with identity. Purposefully or not, both stories seem to be saying that a person is basically a product of his or her environment and influences. It may be inescapable, as the character Abellio in Epileptic claims.

Both Marji and Pierre-Francois (who later renames himself David), the main characters, are faced with terrible events surrounding them. Marji's problems are on a large scale (political unrest, social uprising, war, government oppression) while Pierre-Francois' are closer to home (turmoil within his family and friends). Both experiences occur during their formative years, and I think this is why the stories are so vivid and powerful in their memories all these years later.

The concept and development of identity is significant in both works. Hayden White's article Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation states that the purpose of narrative is to reflect on culture and humanity itself. Persepolis and Epileptic have very different cultures but the humanity is the same. White also points out that narrative is made up of a person's story, edited down to what they decide to include or exclude. Marjane Satrapi and David B. both cut down their narratives to the essentials of their experience developing as a person around very tough times.

Marji seems to be a bit more malleable than David and his siblings, but both imagine greatness for themselves. Already at age 6, Marji decided, apparently on her own, that she would be a great prophet. However, her ideals and views change from one period of life to the next. At first, she loves the Shah and believes he is appointed by God. Later, Marji strives for greatness by association. She is enthralled with the stories of her ancestors who were persecuted by the old regime. Quickly her love of the Shah disappears. When her uncle Anoosh arrives and relates tales of his communist past, Marji suddenly admires Karl Marx. She even sneaks out to attend demonstrations.

She is very proud of her uncle, not just because of his politics, but because he has suffered. After Anoosh is imprisoned and executed, she rejects God as her friend (a great departure from her earlier childhood) and declares that she is lost and without bearings (p. 70). When the war with Iraq begins, however, she is ready to fight the Arab invaders, and Marji draws herself wearing a military cap (p. 79). In this way, Marjane Satrapi seems to portray herself as always changing and a bit confused as she grows up.

Similar to Marji, at an early age Jean-Christophe (David's older brother) sees greatness in himself, but as an imaginary dictator like Hitler or Stalin. David himself wants to partake in bloody, historical battles and be a conquering hero like Genghis Khan. When the two brothers play with their sister, they treat her as Joan of Arc. War intrigues the two, but they never partake in one. The Beauchard family has a great many soldiers in it, but David and Jean-Christophe are relegated to childish fantasies about it. Marji has to see war up close, and eventually escape it by moving to Austria.

I suppose these are archetypes of adolescent fantasy. After all, nobody daydreams about being ordinary. But it is clear their fantasies, and thus their identities are created by the culture and events surrounding them. In Epileptic, Abellio claims that most people only utilize 1% of their free will (p. 139). Jean-Christophe is the perfect example, because his demonic illness, portrayed as a Meso-American serpent, is controlling him. It is ever present, and cannot be exorcised, despite all the efforts of doctors, faith healers, and other gurus.

That brings me to the alienation of character. What is the significance of alienation in both stories? In both, it can be an empowering device, and one that brings unexpected freedom. Jean-Christophe is first alienated from his friends (the "gang") because they are afraid of his seizures. Marji is alienated from her Iranian society because she wants to be an ordinary, educated, Westernized girl, but the new religious regime forbids such behavior.

Eventually Jean-Christophe goes away to a school for disabled kids and finds freedom from his family, from macrobiotic diets, and from mad scientist doctors. He rejects his family and tries to stuff the demon serpent into his locker. Marji, by contrast, is sent away by her parents to a foreign nation and is sad at the departure. They are both faced with a pivotal time in their lives, where independence is sudden and hard to deal with. However, this alienation means a freedom from oppression, and a freedom to be yourself on your own terms, in a new stage of life.

These two aspects of storytelling (identity as a result of environment and alienation from that environment) may seem to be contradictory, and perhaps it is, but that's life.

I've always said, if there's one thing Star Trek needs, it's more lens flares

And Beastie Boys music.

Interesting Excerpts from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars

De vita Caesarum is a set of twelve biographies of Julius Caesar and the first 11 emperors of the Roman Empire written by Suetonius.

Robert Graves translation.


Tiberius: Once, as a funeral procession was passing, a humorist hailed the corpse and asked him to tell Augustus' ghost that his bequests to the commons had not yet been duly paid. Tiberius ordered the man to be arrested and brought before him. 'I will give you your due at once,' he said, and ordered his execution with 'why not go to my father yourself and tell him the truth about those legacies?'

A few days after he came to Capreae, a fisherman suddenly intruded on his solitude by presenting him with an enormous mullet, which he had lugged up the trackless cliffs at the rear of the island. Tiberius was so scared that he ordered his guards to rub the fisherman's face with the mullet. The scales skinned it raw, and the poor fellow shouted in his agony 'thank Heaven I did not bring Caesar that huge crab I also caught!' Tiberius sent for the crab and had it used in the same way.


Claudius: These honours [consulship, presidency of the Games] did not protect him from frequent insults... When he took his usual after-dinner nap the company would pelt him with olives and date stones. Some jokers exercised their wit by putting slippers on his hands as he lay snoring, and then gave him a sudden blow of a whip or cane to wake him, so that he rubbed his face with them.

A woman once refused to admit she was the mother of a young man produced in court, and a conflict of evidence arose; but the truth came out when Claudius ordered her to marry the man... After a man was found guilty of forgery, the crowd shouted: 'He ought to have his hands cut off!' Claudius immediately sent for an executioner, with block and cleaver, to act on this suggestion.

While still a boy Claudius had started work on a Roman history, encouraged by Livy, and assisted by Sulpicius Flavus. But when he gave his first public reading to a packed audience he found it difficult to finish because he constantly threw cold water upon his own performance. As he started to read, a very fat man came in, sat down, and broke several benches, which excited considerable merriment. Even when silence had been restored Claudius could not help recalling the sight and going off into peals of laughter.


Nero: It might have been possible to excuse his insolent, lustful, extravagant, greedy, or cruel early practices (which were furtive and increased only gradually) by saying that boys will be boys; yet at the same time, this was clearly the true Nero, not merely Nero in his adolescence. As soon as night fell he would snatch a cap or wig and make a round of the taverns, or prowl the streets in search of mischief - and not always innocent mischief either, because one of his games was to attack men on their way home from dinner, stab them if they offered resistance, and then drop their bodies down the sewers.

He would also break into shops and rob them, afterwards opening a market at the Palace with the stolen goods, dividing them up into lots, auctioning them himself, and squandering the proceeds. During these escapades he often risked being blinded or killed - once he was beaten almost to death by a senator whose wife he had molested, which taught him never to go out after dark unless an escort of colonels was following him at a distance unobserved.

He tried to poison [his mother] three times, but she had always taken the antidote in advance; so he rigged up a machine in the ceiling of her bedroom which would dislodge the panels and drop them on her while she slept. However, one of the people involved in the plot gave the secret away. Then he had a collapsible boat designed which would either sink or have its cabin fall in on top of her... On discovering that everything had gone wrong and she had escaped by swimming, when Lucius Agerinus, her freedman, entered joyfully to report that she was safe and sound, Nero, in desperation, ordered one of his men to drop a dagger surreptitiously beside Agerinus, whom he arrested at once on a charge of having been hired to murder the Emperor.

Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: Style Over Substance?

Chris Ware's comic Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth strikes me as a great guide to retro art design. I feel it is an amalgamation or picture gallery of different art styles of the late 19th through mid 20th Centuries.

Ware is an admitted fanatic of ragtime music and the fashions of that era. Ragtime was popular from the mid 1890s to around 1920, when Jazz began to supersede it. Around that time, Art Nouveau (1890-1905), American Modernism (late 19th to mid 20th Centuries), and Art Deco (1920s-1940s) were the dominant styles.

Art Deco could be described as a less ornate Art Nouveau. Whereas Art Nouveau had very Rococo style ostentation and curved lines, Art Deco was more streamlined with straighter lines. Art Deco, at least in print, can be summed up as using heavy lines, warped text, and bold contrasting colors. In architecture, the Chrysler Building in New York City is a good example. Art Deco style remained very popular in Eastern Europe right up until the present day. Many modern movie posters from that region still have obvious art deco influence. There has been an on-and-off resurgence in modern America of Art Deco too. One example is the 1991 superhero movie The Rocketeer. More recently there was the beautiful 2007 videogame BioShock.

The purposes and effects of this style in Jimmy Corrigan are quite simple. First, they are very eye-catching and make the comic unique. It stands out from the crowd. The fake letterheads, advertisements, synopses, and introductions in Jimmy Corrigan are dynamic and antique looking. The old, clunky robots and airships could be right out of an early sci-fi publication.

Second, Ware is updating a retro style with a modern story which includes cursing, nudity, etc. In fact it is a pretty mundane story. Jimmy is lonely, has no friends or girlfriend, talks to his mother on the phone every day, has a dead-end job, and eventually flies to meet the father he's never known. All in all it is pretty straightforward and a bit depressing. However, over the course of the story, Ware interjects surreal memories, flashbacks, and dream (or daydream) sequences. Ware may be saying that, despite the passage of time, people are inherently the same. Relationships between people, particularly children and parents, follow the same path. Jimmy's ancestors in 1893 Chicago have the same issues he has today.

Ware brilliantly adapts his drawing to the era it depicts. The Civil War scenes are drawn very realistically like sepia tone photographs, with detailed trees and explosions. Later, in 1890s Chicago, the art changes to evoke the early "color" photographs that actually were black-and-white prints diligently colored in by hand. On another page, a hospital transforms to Doctor Linn's Pharmacy, back to a smaller St. Mary's hospital, and finally to a Medlife Clinicare. Ware nails each architectural style perfectly. The reader is immediately drawn into that time period without having to be told where or when it is.

In Thomas A. Bredehoft's article "Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time" (p. 3), Ware mentions his compositional style. At first he compares the eye taking in a page as the ear listens to music, but then also compares it to a building. "Another way is to pull back and consider the composition all at once, as you would the façade of a building. You can look at a comic as you would look at a structure that you could turn around in your mind and see all sides of at once."

The effect of Ware's widely-varied composition seems to imply a musical sensation. Many pages are uneven, with alternating large and small panels. Others switch between tall and short. Still others have panels that don't have a clear flow from one to the next. Oftentimes the characters take an entire page to get out one sentence of dialogue. In those cases, the panels and drawings themselves provide the beat rather than the words. Some panels may have such little differentiation between the pictorial action that they could be frames of film or pages in a flipbook. Ware apparently wants the audience to be as much a viewer as a reader. The art should be used to create mood and tell the story just as much as the plot and characters.


For more Art Deco content, check out http://artdecoblog.blogspot.com/index.html

Gaiman, Goya, Dringenberg, and Jones

I noticed a possible homage to Francisco Goya in Sandman, on page 205 of the Preludes and Nocturnes collection.

The character of John Dee is a withered husk of a man, completely insane and homicidal. The artists Mike Dringenberg and Malcolm Jones III draw him much like Goya's painting Saturn Devouring His Son.

Saturn is one of Goya's Black Paintings, which depict themes of turmoil and despair. Goya began these paintings at the age of 72 after becoming deaf and disillusioned with humanity after the Napoleonic Wars.

Goya did 14 of these paintings, directly onto the walls of his home. They were never meant for public display.

V For Vendetta: Fascism, Anarchism, Brit slang and silly masks

In a mere 265 pages, Alan Moore's V For Vendetta manages to introduce the reader to such disparate concepts as Justice, Liberty, Anarchy, Chaos, Fascism, Order, Freedom, and Equality. Naturally, being a comic, all of the philosophy and politics are surrounded by dingy panels and violence. Nevertheless, don't let the subtext pass by unnoticed.

So, what is the significance of V's Guy Fawkes mask? Ostensibly it serves a common purpose for comic superheroes: to make them mysterious and hide their identity. However, the real Guy Fawkes was a Catholic in 17th Century England who tried to overthrow (or dismantle) the oppressive Protestant English government. V, in comparison, is fighting an English fascist regime that oppresses non-whites, homosexuals, leftists, and counter-culture types.

Today in England, Guy Fawkes is a popular villain icon, and the uncovering of his Gunpowder Plot is remembered as a victory for the English status quo power structure. Alan Moore turns this celebration on its head because V fights a government that modern people would find repugnant. It's all a matter of the audience's perception and the times in which they live.

The purpose of masks in modern comics, according to Scott McCloud (p. 34), is one of appealing to the reader by making the hero (or antihero) out to be the everyman. We can imagine what is behind the mask by inserting our own personality. We, as the reader, have an easier time associating with the subject of the comic the less we see or know of them. Our imagination fills in the rest. Your appearance to the outside world (face, hairstyle, clothing, etc.) does not convey everything about us to another human being. Our thoughts and personality have to come out in other ways. There is a mind behind the mask. In the same way, V's mask tells us he has some admiration for Guy Fawkes, but his full character has yet to be seen.

On another note, what is the significance of the comic's fascist head of government, Adam Susan, being called "Leader"? Why is he not identified as President or Prime Minister? This is undoubtedly a reference to the Nazi government. Hitler's official title was Reichskanzler (Chancellor) but his informal title was Führer (Leader). Furthermore, President and Prime Minister are title used in democratic countries, whereas the new English government is trying to do away with all of the old systems and reinvent the nation.

Deckard is a replicant

You heard me.

Art Spiegelman's work in Hayden White's view

Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus, first published in serial form starting in 1980, is the story of Spiegelman's father Vladek as he tries to survive under Nazi persecution from 1939 to 1945. Maus is notable for using a cartoonish style rather than a realistic style, in which different ethnicities are represented by different types of animals. The two main people, Germans and Jews, are drawn as cats and mice, respectively. The setting of the comic is Poland, and the Poles are drawn as pigs.

Hayden White, historian, professor, and literary critic, has made some bold claims about the nature of man and his need to create narrative. He believed storytelling was universal among all humans, and that mankind had an inherent need to create stories. I think Maus is a perfect example of why this is so. Art Spiegelman sat down with his father over the course of many days, writing and recording the family history. Art felt a need to understand how and why he came to be and the trouble his descendants went through to reach their point in modern New York City. People have a desire to understand the past, and storytelling, or historical narrativizing, fulfills this role.

Narrativized history appeals to us because it relates the story to the reader; it adds a personal touch. It cannot reproduce reality, which has no tangible substance, but it can relay the information to someone who was not a witness to help them understand what happened. The reader or listener can recreate the reality for themselves mentally. This understanding of history, from one event to the next, influences the reality of today. Remember the old phrase from George Santayana: "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Maus's style, with the cartoon characters, simple arrangements, and black-and-white art, creates a reality with the reader that is even more compelling than a closer reproduction would. We create a continuity in our minds as we read that may not be there 100% on the page. Also, readers are better able to associate themselves with the characters the less similar we are to them. The artwork on page 86, for example, is deceptively simple. The 90 year old grandparents are being taken away by the Nazis, given up by their own family. The art is straightforward and the mouse characters look essentially the same. However, it is a heartbreaking scene for the reader. We sympathize with these people/animals, despite them being small ink drawings on a page. We can drop our preconceived notions about the actual events of the Holocaust and instead pay closer attention to the story as presented by the author. It is an unorthodox but effective means of storytelling.

Whatever happened to great movie posters?