Jim Taylor

A ponderer with delusions of grandeur...

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Unnatural Creatures’ (edited by Neil Gaiman)

Sep 022013
 

Griff reviews a Neil Gaiman-edited collection of fantastical stories which fails to live up to its promise….

This review must be prefaced with a disclaimer: Unnatural Creatures is an anthology, the contents of which its authors have contributed for free in order to support the charity 826DC.  Dedicated to encouraging the next generation of writers, 826DC deserves far more support than it already gets.  Critiquing such an anthology feels distasteful to a certain extent: none of its failings can possibly eclipse the incredible good it seeks to support with every purchased copy.  In a strange twist, I almost ask readers to ignore what follows after and buy the anthology regardless – I will merely be saying what needs to be said on a professional and artistic level.

Unnatural Creatures is a very strange animal indeed.  It promises a veritable literary zoo of fantastical creatures – many familiar, some not – to amaze the reader and excite his imagination. Werewolves, phoenixes, griffins and transdimensional smudges abound within its pages.

And yet, such amazing specimens did not quite amaze me, nor excite my imagination.  Do not get me wrong, these are all solid stories solidly written, and there are shining examples of singularly wonderful creativity.  The anthology opens on a strong pair: Gahan Wilson’s impossible-to-title story (which I shall refer to as Smudge for ease), and E. Lily Yu’s pleasantly biting The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees.  Smudge is an excellent blend of graphics and words that really delivers on the anthology’s ‘unnatural’ claims, with the former providing enough menace and growing tension to pick up the latter’s slack.  Wasps and Bees on the other hand offers a quietly political insight into our own natural world, twisted ever so slightly.  Both stories raised my expectations of what this anthology was capable of: an imperfect but still marvellous chimera of wildly different stories, each with their own functions, meanings and goals.

My hopes were quickly proven wrong, and things settled into a disappointing routine.  What should have been a chimera was, if you will pardon the mixed metaphors, a horse of an entirely different colour. Many – most, I daresay – of the stories were remarkably uniform in truly unfortunate ways.  Their pacing was breakneck, taking the notion of a short story in its most literal sense as they stumbled and leapt over opportunities to flesh out their narratives, to make themselves come alive in a way that is doubly important when one is dealing with the fantastical.  However, I believe that this was only a symptom of the anthology’s greater, more central problem: the unremitting tone of fable that ran throughout its pages.  Whether this was some submission prerequisite, or a statistically improbably fluke, I shall never know, but the end result is that Unnatural Creatures reads less like a compendium of the wondrously alien, and more like a collection of fairy tales that one would read to a curiously precocious child.  Plots are usually simple and single-track, lacking much complexity beyond signposted complications as matters move from X to Y (if even that).  One even dares to resolve itself with the use of a near-literal deus ex machina, with a divine being descending from on high to resolve every issue the characters face.  There is, at least, a pleasant streak of tragedy and darkness to many of the stories: often baddies (the stories rarely pick up enough morally complex steam to escape that particular fabular notion) avoid their comeuppance, while the more sympathetic characters often end up suffering for their ‘good’ qualities.

The star of the anthology, beyond any doubt, is the late, great Diana Wynne Jones’ The Sage of Theare which, aside from being an exemplar of pacing, plotting and downright writing, subversively showcases that most unnatural of creatures: man.

Ultimately, I think, the greatest disappointment with Unnatural Creatures is that it fails to live up to the love its collector, Neil Gaiman, expresses for the unnatural: namely, its capacity to defy ultimate definition and exist in a realm of infinite possibility.  Having said that, it is then truly a shame when so many of the stories that follow make so little headway into subverting, or outright defying, the most common of received understandings of these creatures.  Perhaps that is the source of my dissatisfaction with this anthology.  Like some wide-eyed Victorian punter promised a mermaid only to be shown some stitched amalgam of person and fish, I can acknowledge the time, effort and care put into its construction, but nevertheless feel only sadness at the unfulfilled promise of the truly fantastical.

Griff Williams

Grant Morrison: “Dan Dare was a fascist!” (EIBF 2013)

Aug 282013
 

Grant Morrison began his talk at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last Friday by praising another giant of the comics industry, namely writer/artist Bryan Talbot.  In particular, he insisted that Talbot deserves greater recognition for the early work he did on Near Myths, a “weird and trippy” sci-fi magazine published in Edinburgh in the late 1970s.  It was this magazine that gave Morrison his start in comics, launching a career that has seen him create some of the most innovative and mind-bending superhero comics ever written, as well as original creations like Flex Mentallo, The Invisibles and The Filth.

Without a specific book to promote (his new Wonder Woman project won’t be released until next year), the content of Morrison’s talk was pleasingly diverse.  From his own approach to writing superheroes (“I never pretend that these people could be real”) to what he thinks is great about the comic book medium (“it activates BOTH sides of the brain!”), his comics recommendations (mainly Scott Snyder’s recent run on Batman), his experience of receiving a MBE (“Charles said he used to read The Eagle….I always told you Dan Dare was a fascist!”) and his time as a Hollywood consultant (“we spent two years at Warner Bros. explaining superheroes to people in suits”), Morrison held forth on a range of subjects in his usual warm and witty manner.  His most compelling insight, though, was about the current state of superhero comics and movies.  Superheroes, he said, have been soldiers for too long.  Our post-9/11 world has seen comic book characters become part of the military-industrial complex, almost as an artistic response to overwhelming trauma, Morrison suggested.  As far as he’s concerned, superheroes should get back to stopping bank robberies!  As is often the case with Grant Morrison, his apparent flippancy disguised an astute observation.

So what’s next for Glasgow’s greatest comics writer, apart from his desire to play Lex Luthor in the upcoming Batman/Superman film (“NOW you’re fucked, Superman!”)?  His new Wonder Woman comic, The Trial of Diana Prince, seeks to put the sexuality back into the character without being sleazy (only time will tell if he’s succeeded), but in addition to this he’s been working on a 9-issue series of ‘parallel worlds’ stories for DC, one of which will apparently be a “haunted comic”.  Morrison refused to elaborate further on what that actually means, except to say that readers will think they’ve been possessed!  His ambition to write more Flash stories remains, as yet, unfulfilled, but the third and final book in his Seaguy series, Morrison’s tragicomic labour of love, will be published in the very near future, he claims.  Here’s hoping that it’ll be just as bleak, beautiful and bizarre as its two predecessors!

Paul Gravett’s History of Comic Books (EIBF 2013)

Aug 262013
 

Veteran comics editor Paul Gravett enthralled the audience at Edinburgh’s International Book Festival on Friday with his passionate presentation on the history of comic books.  Gravett, who recently edited the mammoth 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die compilation, appeared as part of the festival’s ‘Stripped‘ theme, and spoke of the amazing leaps and bounds that comics have made recently in becoming accepted as a legitimate art-form.  Starting, he claimed, with Chris Ware winning the Guardian First Book Award in 2001 for Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, comics have slowly started to gain a measure of respect amongst the literary establishment, a respect further cemented last year when Mary & Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes won the Costa Award for Biography.

Such respect has been a long time coming; Wordsworth was an early detractor of graphic storytelling, and his haughty dismissal of the medium set the literary establishment’s tone for much of the following two centuries.  Goethe was reputedly a fan, though, and in 1967 Salvador Dali said that, “comics will be the culture of the year 3794.”  Actually, argued Gravett, it’s happened a little earlier than that, but it’s still only in the last 30 years or so that the medium has really “woken up” to the storytelling possibilities of the comic book format.  This has been seen in the postmodern superhero stories of Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Grant Morrison, but also in the innovative work of writers and artists like Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes and Alison Bechdel.

While everyone, Gravett said, has their own personal history of comic books, he has put together a list of undeniable “geniuses” whose work has shaped and transformed the art-form over the last two centuries.  It ranges from familiar luminaries like Hergé, Charles M. Schulz, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Osamu Tezuka and Alan Moore to more obscure (but no less influential) auteurs like Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Leo Baxendale, Milton Caniff and Hector Oesterheld.  Gravett also briefly mentioned rising star Jason Shiga, whose work in the digital realm, he suggests, represents “the future of comics.”  Many of these writers and artists will be featured in the first ever exhibition on the history of comic books at the British Museum next year, an event in which Gravett is personally involved and about which he is clearly hugely excited.  With comics making such cultural inroads, he said, they are getting closer and closer to being recognised as a legitimate art-form in their own right.

GAME REVIEW: ‘Amnesia: The Dark Descent’ (2010)

Aug 242013
 

Jonny looks back at the scariest game he’s ever played….and looks forward to its sequel.

You would think that having seen the sequel to one of my favourite games finally advertised and available as close as September 10th, I would be as giddy as a kid at Christmas.  However, when the pre-order for Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs flashed up on my screen, the dominant feeling in my gut was that of dread.  I knew right away that I would buy it; I would put myself through the terror of playing it, and just as I did with the first game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I would constantly be asking “why am I doing this to myself?”

I first heard about The Dark Descent through YouTube, where a multitude of ‘Let’s Plays’ showed up, seemingly overnight, in which nobody could last more than an hour or two.  Dozens of videos piled up, of grown men screaming like little girls, and whimpering that they’d had enough, and wouldn’t be playing any more.

I’ll admit I was sceptical.

All of this stank of a publicity stunt, but whether that was truly the case or not, I obediently scampered out and bought myself a copy, like the good consumer I am.  Thankfully my money was well spent, and no game I’ve played has come close to The Dark Descent for sheer and absolute terror.  The game achieves this by forcing you to adhere to a simple set of conflicting rules to stay alive.

Dark Descent 3

For the majority of the game, there is one threat, and if it catches you, you will die.  If you let it see you in the light, it will catch you, and if you stare directly at it for too long, it will sense you, know where you are and it will catch you.  If you don’t look at it, it won’t be able to sense you, and if you hide in shadow it won’t know where you are at all.  However, remaining in darkness eats away at your sanity until your vision becomes blurred and you’ll eventually collapse, paralysed with fear.

Essentially, you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Light too many torches along the way and you’ll leave nowhere to hide, but be too frivolous with your hand-lamp and you’ll quickly run out of fuel; similarly if you don’t keep moving you’ll go insane, but get caught in the open, and you’re finished.

What really makes this game special is that you have absolutely no way to defend yourself.  Unlike so many other games, you’re not scared because you might not be able to kill whatever it is that’s chasing you, but because you simply can’t, and you know you couldn’t even try.  You never have access to any form of attack, so your only option is to hide, and even then this isn’t hiding like in a stealth game where sneaking offers the path of least resistance; this is hiding because there is no other path.  Pair this with the fact that a dooming sound fills the air when the threat is near, and you’ll find yourself jumping at every shadow, creaky floorboard and tolling bell.

That reminds me: there’s only one way you should play The Dark Descent, and that is with earphones….in the dark….and alone.

Dark Descent 2The atmosphere in this game is phenomenal.  The entire game is built around a beautifully sleek physics engine, which allows you to slide open desk drawers and push barrels to get at much-needed supplies.  And it’s clear that the engine’s been developed with this exact game in mind; rather than simply clicking to open doors or cupboards, it forces you to drag your mouse to swing each door on its creaking hinges.  It’s entirely up to you how slowly you want to peek into the next room, edging the door open bit by bit, unless you’d prefer to fling it wide open and face whatever’s on the other side.

It’s not often I can describe something as breathtaking and mean it literally, but The Dark Descent left me holding my breath in terror on more than one occasion.  So powerful is it, you’ll be hard pressed to play for more than an hour or two at a time without yearning for some natural light and a hug.

I’m hoping A Machine For Pigs doesn’t change any of the ingredients intrinsic to the success of the first game, but instead builds on the simplicity that makes it such an effective series.

Jonny West

‘Only God Forgives’ (18): the Geekzine interpretation….

Aug 222013
 

As this is an interpretation/analysis of the film Only God Forgives rather than a review, it goes without saying that it’ll be chock full of SPOILERS….

Based on the sheer spread of reviews and reactions, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives must be the most divisive cinematic release in recent memory.  When the film’s end credits rolled at Cannes, half the audience booed and the other half rose to their feet cheering; the breakdown of reviews on aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes confirms a thoroughly mixed reaction on the part of critics everywhere.  Watching the film, it’s not hard to see why it might confound and frustrate many viewers; nominally a revenge drama about American drug dealers and vigilante cops on the streets of Bangkok, Only God Forgives moves at a glacial pace and has a hazy, dreamlike quality which frequently forces the audience to question whether what they’re seeing is really happening.  Add to this its stomach-churning violence and oblique religious symbolism, and you’re left with a film that’s bound to alienate a great many viewers.  People who went in expecting a stylistic sequel to Drive (Refn’s previous collaboration with lead actor Ryan Gosling) will have been disappointed, although both films at least share an unflinching approach to violence that appears to be making a deeper philosophical point.  Many reviewers have argued that Refn intends Only God Forgives to be interpreted as a religious allegory, while others have suggested that there’s no deeper meaning at all to be found in the film’s beautifully shot but ultimately vacuous scenes.  Refn’s own insistence that he merely wanted to make a “western set in the far east” doesn’t really wash when he seems to have put so much effort into packing his scenes with symbolism, although how much of this falls into ‘red herring’ territory is up for debate.  So, what is Only God Forgives really about?  Ultimately, like most abstract movies, it could be about anything….or nothing.  But with this in mind, I tentatively propose the following interpretation:

I believe that a number of critics are right; Only God Forgives is a film about religion, but not necessarily in the way that has been widely suggested.  The film is clearly inspired by both Judeo-Christian and Buddhist philosophy, but is less an allegory than a meditation on the nature of evil, and a chronicle of its main character’s spiritual journey.

The devil is made mention of in one of the film’s first lines of dialogue, and this is fitting, since the devil has a major part to play in subsequent story developments.  This line does not initiate the allegorical descent into hell which has proved a popular interpretation amongst critics, but rather indicates that what we’re about to see is one of the three representations of the devil (or Satan) explored in Only God Forgives: (1) the personification of evil, (2) the accuser and (3) the arch-manipulator.  At the beginning of the film, Billy (Tom Burke), brother of Julian (Ryan Gosling), utters the line, “time to meet the devil” – but who does he go to meet after leaving the boxing club?  No-one.  He proceeds to start a fight at a local brothel, and then brutally rapes and murders a young prostitute, seemingly for no reason.  Whatever Billy meant by his line about the devil in the context of the story, its deeper meaning is clear: in the brutal acts of a cruel man we find the personification of evil; in other words, we have just met the devil.  The potential for such evil is in Julian, too; late in the story we’re told of how he murdered his father (in uncertain circumstances), and many times throughout the film Julian is seen regarding his hands (the instruments of this evil) as though they are alien appendages somehow beyond his control.  He, too, has a devil in him.

The second face of the devil is represented in the film by Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), a police officer who has seemingly taken the law into his own hands to deal out Old Testament-style, “eye for an eye” justice on the streets of Bangkok.  The Old Testament is actually crucial to understanding Chang’s role in Only God Forgives, as his character represents the true biblical reading of Satan, that of the accuser.  Jacques Ellul and other theologians have remarked that the popular conception of Satan as a malevolent, manipulative force of evil is quite at odds with the Old Testament’s portrayal of Satan, where he appears rather as the accuser, the one who points out where guilt lies and where the evil of mankind can be seen.  He is not, therefore, the source of evil in the world, but merely the one who points to it.  In the film, this function of accusation can be seen when Chang brings a father to see his murdered daughter while her killer (Billy) is still in the room, and then leaves to let him do as he likes.  Later, he points out the father’s own sin of letting his daughter walk the streets, and takes the man’s arm in retribution for this negligence.  Chang is bringing to light (and then punishing) the evil deeds of men, as he continues to do throughout the film, and thus represents Satan the accuser.  Later in the story, as he tortures and kills everyone involved in the attempt on his life, his actions can be read simply as those of a vigilante cop pursuing a vendetta against those who tried to kill him, but can also be seen as the biblical Satan performing his duty of sniffing out evil and bringing punishment to the wicked.  In a way, the second devil (the accuser) spends the whole of the film hunting down the first devil (the evil that men do).

What of the third face of the devil, the arch-manipulator?  This role is played by Julian and Billy’s mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas), the terrifying matriarch of their drug smuggling operation who insists upon violent retribution for the death of her son.  She commits no violence herself, but threatens, bribes, insults and cajoles others around her until they do her bidding.  She thus represents the most popular conception of the devil in Judeo-Christian tradition, that of a manipulative force of evil which bends human beings to its will.  It’s fitting then that she’s ultimately killed by Chang – the ‘real’ devil striking down its counterfeit counterpart – but Crystal’s peculiar relationship with Julian is also loaded with meaning.  Julian rarely seems to agree with his mother, but is in thrall to her nonetheless, always lighting her cigarettes and taking her insults.  In light of her devilish nature, this is hugely significant because of who or what the character of Julian represents in the movie.

We’ve now looked at all three versions of the devil portrayed in Only God Forgives, but one other key element to understanding the film is the character of Julian.  The journey he undertakes in the film has a spiritual quality to it, but is also rather meandering.  After having strange visions of Chang chopping his arm off, Julian decides not to kill his brother’s murderer, randomly beats up two men in a club, tries to follow Chang and then challenges him to a fight (foolishly, as it turns out), saves Chang’s daughter from his fellow would-be assassin, and finally seems to submit to punishment at the hands (and blade) of Chang – all the while repeatedly regarding his own hands in a strange fashion.  What are we to make of such a bizarre array of occurrences?  The answer is that, taken together, this series of incidents seems to suggest that Julian’s journey in the film actually symbolises the spiritual progression of mankind as a whole.

This interpretation is not as outlandish as it sounds.  Julian (like all humanity) has the capacity for both good and evil, and Only God Forgives chronicles his struggle in determining the right way to live his life, all while interacting with the various guises of the devil.  This internal struggle is seen early on in the film, when Julian seemingly forgives his brother’s killer in a move quite out of character for a violent criminal, but soon after randomly assaults the two men he encounters in a club.  His pursuit of Chang through Bangkok seems more to be born of a fascination with him (possibly because of his earlier visions), than of a desire to cause him harm.  His mother is continually trying to manipulate him and bring out his dark side, first through professions of love, then through insults, and finally through begging.  This dark side is represented by Julian’s hands, the hands that killed his own father, on which the camera lingers several times throughout the film.  His repeated clenching of his fists hints at an overwhelming destructive drive, and throughout the film Julian is struggling against the temptation to give in to this side of his personality.  He doesn’t always succeed, but that early act of forgiveness suggests a possibility of redemption.  Despite the film’s title, God is conspicuously absent throughout, but humanity is supposedly made in God’s image and to forgive, said Alexander Pope, is divine.  This spark of divinity is therefore within Julian (and indeed humanity).

Refn has been accused of glorifying violence in his films, but I think he actually does quite the opposite.  The unflinching depiction of brutal violence in films like Drive and Only God Forgives exposes the audience to its full horror; violence, Refn is saying, is inherently evil.  It can perhaps be used in the service of a good cause (one of the morally troublesome things about Drive is that the Driver’s acts of monstrous violence actually help to keep his innocent friends safe), but always represents an act of evil to some degree.  With this in mind, there are a couple of ways to interpret the fight scene between Julian and Chang.  Julian challenges Chang to a fight, but is this because he thinks he can beat him, or because he thinks it’s a fair way of settling the dispute between Chang and his mother?  Julian is soundly beaten in the end, but has he let Chang win, in an attempt to pay the price for his mother’s sins?  If so, it doesn’t work; Chang still goes after her.  But even if Julian went into the fight intending to win (a lapse back to his violent, dark side), the message here is ultimately the same; evil cannot win out.  Violence is not the way.  Julian’s ultimate acceptance of this fact and renouncement of evil still doesn’t come until he saves Chang’s daughter from assassination; his mother’s hooks are still in him up to this point.  It is of course no accident that this moment of clarity comes just as she dies, almost as if a spell has been lifted.

The battle between good and evil rages within Julian throughout the film, but from the very beginning he knows what he has to do to renounce evil and violence.  His early visions of Chang and his repeated staring at his hands signpost the way, but it’s not until the death of his mother and his decision to save Chang’s daughter that he submits himself to the blade of the accuser.  How should we interpret this submission?  A Christian interpretation (in line with much of the rest of the film) suggests that Julian allowing Chang to take his hands is the ultimate renouncement of violence, a refusal to engage any longer in acts of evil.  But there is an additional significance to this scene if we look at it through the prism of Theravada Buddhism, the dominant religion of Thailand (the film’s setting is not, I believe, incidental).  Like other forms of Buddhism, Theravada is centrally concerned with the elimination of temptation, and consequently the suffering which comes from that temptation.  Julian’s hands, his instruments of destruction, are what draw him towards his dark side; they represent his temptation to do violence.  By offering them up to Chang’s blade, he indicates his desire to eliminate that temptation and its associated suffering, and leave his dark side behind (from Chang’s perspective, he identifies the root of Julian’s evil and purges it).  Ultimately, the ending is a happy one; despite the machinations of his mother and his own divided nature, Julian chooses good over evil, but it takes a lot of suffering to get there.

This is not a perfect interpretation of Only God Forgives.  It takes no account, for instance, of Julian’s strange relationship with Mai, or his gruesome fascination with his dead mother’s womb (although this latter scene could represent humanity’s constant drive to understand where we come from).  It also doesn’t speculate too much (as might be necessary) about which people and locations in the movie might only exist within Julian’s mind, or indeed about the extent to which Julian might be somehow mentally impaired (something hinted at by both his mother’s words and the strange way in which he sometimes conducts himself).  In the end, there are many aspects of the film which won’t fit comfortably into any model of interpretation, and this is doubtless what Refn intended when he made it.  But to think that means the film is meaningless would be a mistake; there is enough potent symbolism in Only God Forgives to support the argument that it’s all about the three faces of the devil and mankind’s spiritual development.  Maybe.

James Kakalios: “Quite often, comic books get the science right!” (EIBF 2013)

Aug 222013
 

Celebrated physicist and comic book geek James Kakalios was at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday night to give a talk about some of the scientific ideas explored in his two books, The Physics of Superheroes and The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics.  Appearing as part of the festival’s ‘Stripped‘ theme – celebrating the world of comic books and graphic storytelling – he explained that, once you get past the physically impossible powers, superhero comics through the years have actually proven to be very good at teaching science accurately.

According to Kakalios, his official job title is “Condensed Matter Experimentalist”, a role in which he’s been researching solid state physics for 25 years (although he’s also recently done work as a consultant in Hollywood).  In 2001, however, he also began teaching a freshman class at the University of Minnesota called “Everything I Know About Science I Learned from Reading Comic Books”.  During an engaging and very funny presentation, he outlined some examples of comic books getting the science right, including an attempt by the Flash to stop a speeding bullet and Superman’s surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of electrical current.  But they don’t always do such a good job, as Kakalios demonstrated with an example from one of Spider-Man’s fights with Electro, where Peter Parker’s misunderstanding of electricity would likely have gotten him killed in the real world!  Comic books frequently deal with science because, he said, they’re always envisioning the world of tomorrow; a world where science can either lead to “lasers or death-rays”.  His brief overview of the history of comics also revealed that scientists were often the heroes of pulp sci-fi in the ’30s and ’40s, before being superseded (he noted ruefully) by superheroes.

Kakalios’ unconventional use of comic books to teach science has, he said, garnered him far more media attention than the average physics professor, and has even led to his being included in a Trivial Pursuit question.  But he is, first and foremost, a physicist, and the final part of his presentation was spent trying to school the audience in basic quantum mechanics.  The attempt was a mixed success, but his demonstration of how quantum mechanics led to the develop of CDs and DVDs proved fascinating.  Although we don’t fully understand how things work at the quantum level, said Kakalios, the fact is that they do work, and so he favours the “shut up and calculate” interpretation of quantum mechanics.  It was, all in all, a truly heroic presentation.

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