MGS5: Quiet Revulsion

The most controversial figure in video game auteur Hideo Kojima's last installment in the Metal Gear Solid franchise was the scantily clad sniper "Quiet."

It's even more disturbing in the game, with motion, and rain, and dancing, and Kojima's typical "in your face" blocking.

But we need to remember that when something is disturbing in art, that's truth. We need to move towards the discomfort, and find why we are so unsettled. So let's fully investigate this character.

Gender and Class

A while ago some reply asked me to finish my thoughts on the complicated relationship between gender and class in America, since while the Sexism and Objectification essay argues that both men and woman face serious problems with how much agency they are considered to have, it should not be read that those are the only problems people face related to gender, especially under the class structure.

So before this, you might want to read

• Sexism and Objectification
• Class Has Normative Power
• SSC on Celluar Automata

Here, by class, I do not just mean “how much money you make” or even “your socioeconomic group” but the entire ladder by which some people at the top have a scarce resource, and people lower down are consumed with trying to appear like people higher up, in order to get more of that scarce resource (and also just by psychological self-perpetuation at a certain point.) Anyone who’s seen a highly prestigious field (theater, academia, the Inner Ring) knows the ordering I am talking about - and it sometimes has nothing to do with money.

(However money is so incredibly important, that class usually comes to include money as one of its rewards and signifiers eventually. Which is why class and economic status are such conflated subjects.)

***

The simplest model would be to identify women as in a lower class than men when all else is equal, due to their general lack of power and money. While this might capture the unfairness of the situation, it doesn’t seem to work like a class dynamic.

In particular, you don’t have the fashion phenomenon where women try to imitate men so that they might get the same treatment.

(You do, however, get the reverse of this, where men obsess over how to make themselves distinct from women.)

So let’s put that model to the side for a moment.

***

It is a truism of life that Men Want Sex. Those men, they just have one track minds, and all they care about is sex. Not self-respect, not money, not caring about the other person, not being pro-social, they just want that sex.

Okay, among us enlightened liberals we know this is not true for all men. But there’s awareness of a cliche, a model of the default, negative-affect man who “just wants that poontang.” Not you readers men, but those men, who give the gender a bad name. The cliche is that he is so driven by this need that they ignore everything else in their life for it.

Except this makes no sense and doesn’t fit the available data of even these neanderthals.

Conventional Wisdom: Men want sex.

Naive Alien: If they just want to orgasm, they can go masturbate. Or watch a porno.

CW: No, it has to be with a person.

NA: Well they’re set with other men-

CW: A woman person.

NA: Seems like it’s easy enough to get a prostitute on your world.

CW: No they have to want to give it to you. Paying for it doesn’t count.

NA: What do you mean doesn’t count? It’s a primal need. Why does it matter where it comes from. Do humans enjoy food only if the animal wanted you to enjoy it?

CW: Having to pay for sex is only for losers.

NA: Okay, well it might take a while to find a partner, but once you do, you can go at it like rabbits, problem solved.

CW: Monogamy is fine, but it’s not what men “really deep down want.” Not the greedy men. They need lots of different women, even if only briefly.

NA: Fine. Well, there seem to be a lot of very lonely women out there, who don’t seem shy about asking men for sex.

CW: Nah, they’re unattractive. Doesn’t count again. I mean you might sleep with them when bored, but they aren’t really the all-consuming lust men think about.

NA. Sigh. Well what are these particular features a woman needs to be attractive? Big breasts, long hair, what?

CW: You’d think that, but actually it’s a more minimalist thing, looking kind of innocent and hard to get. Kate Upton as the central example. And mostly looking like someone from the same sub-culture as that man. For that sort of woman, a classic bro will do anything to get in her pants.

NA: Yeah this doesn’t sound like a “physical need” this sounds like “a desire to acquire high-status items in a particular way that attests to your value.”

I saw a wonderful example of this in SomethingAwful’s classic “Fashion SWAT,” which like a lot of powerful humor, captures the beliefs of the ideology perfectly.

Dr. Thorpe:He's having sex with all the other goofy assholes in the International Male catalog. They're like the drama kids in high school, they all get laid all the time, but only with their own horrible, horrible kind.

Which is to say “Teens are primally crazy for sex -- but it only counts if it’s with the right group of people. And this is such an intuitive thing we can use it as a simile for other situations.” Talk about submerged class tensions!

Once you see that every time our culture talks about “wanting sex” it’s really talking about “class envy”, you’ll see Marxist sociology all around you.

(To be clear, there seem to be two different desires in regard to sex. Sometimes people do seem happy to take sex in whatever form it comes in: like at a kink party where every body is valued for how they can contribute to a scene. It’s sex as a hobby like anything else.

...And there’s the other kind, where the dude or couple comes in who are only interested in partners who are petite women under thirty. It wants to possess high-value objects. Both drives exist, but it is this second one that is considered the “fundamental desire of thoughtless men.”)

***

When we think of the above-referenced stereotypically feminine traits, the ideals women are encouraged to display, what do they boil down to?

• Elegant, sleek, smooth.
• Youthful looking.
• “Classy”
• Lacking toughness and aggression

This sounds like an upscale pied-a-terre.

And the ideal “rough, rugged, macho” man is the opposite of all of these. It’s a cute binary.

But it’s also an astoundingly class-based binary. Those features women are pushed to attain are basically “look like the local upper class.” This romantic image of the couple is “lower class figure doing the work to care for, protect, and acquire the upper class object.”

None of this is exactly shocking, but it’s important to keep in mind when asking “how do different gender role make us feel about our class position?”

Women trying to fit their gender role, will find it doubles up with class-climbing.

• Pro: That’s one coherent image to try to focus on, that gets a lot of social rewards if you succeed. (This is partly why “upper class women” are a bedrock of conservatism in many societies. Things are working for them.)
• Con: If you can’t present a face of smooth sleekness and classy elegance, you are doubly damned as both unfeminine and lower class. And things that make it harder to look upper class (such as racial stereotypes, aging, lack of aesthetic skills) can produce severe anxiety.

Men trying to fit their gender role, will find it conflicts with normal class signaling.

• Pro: Whether you look dirty and rough, or smooth and refined, there is at least some narrative to see yourself in.
• Con: The desire to look upper-class to society can often conflict with the need to appear as “a real man.” Ie, underclass-associated behavior (violence, aggression, earthyness) may be counterproductive in professional circles, but also be an inextricable part of your male identity (see Dave Chappelle’s “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong.”) Or success at upper class performance can simultaneously make you insecure about your “manhood.”

***

Again, all of the above is just discussion of stereotypes and social constructs. As even the gender binary crumbles, certainly the cliches about it are even more unreliable. But these stereotypes do exist, they are widespread, and they have incredible performative efficacy over us. Much like love exists only because we believe in it but it still is very real, so do these fantasies of all our gender and class obligations.

**********************

Continuing last week’s post, it can seem like the rules of social etiquette for how to appear polite and high class are complicated and ever-changing. In fact, for people trying the low-variance goal of “just get by” most of these rules can be boiled down pretty simply:

• Don’t draw attention to yourself.
• Don’t draw attention to the existence of your body.

The first is an injunction not to be loud or needy, since after all those show desperation and that what you offer is abundant (and therefore low value.)

The second guideline explains a lot of rules that appear to have independent justification.

• Don’t burp, yawn, cough, or make other bodily sounds.
• Don’t smell. (Social rules about bad hygiene are usually more about “reminding people your body exists” than actual ill-health.) 
• Don’t eat in public.
• Cover yourself up and some skin unintentionally showing is embarrassing.
• Slut-shaming focuses on the display of breasts and legs.
• Don’t talk about illnesses or bodily functions.
• Don’t scratch an itch.
• Have less body (be thin) rather than more (fat.)
• Although hair is complicated and highly subject to fashionable changes, on average: more hair -> lower class.

Each of them independently usually get some sort of Miss Manners explanation for why that is considered rude or low-status, but altogether they speak of a deeper fear of the human body. Its very presence is obscene and uncomfortable. The strongest, visceral drives behind both class and ideology are this underlying fear of disease, filth, and corruption. Anything bad is somehow dirty, and anything dirty is somehow bad.

Instead, the upper class ideal is to appear as detached from the worldly body as much as possible. Yoda describes this fantasy in Star Wars: “Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter.”

The positive direction is luminous. The negative direction is crude matter.

Patriarchical ideology sure used this body-based class-shaming as part of its enforcement against women. Promiscuous women are not just denigrated as immoral, but specifically as low-class. They are sluts and whores. Description of them feature lasciviously displayed breasts. They use garish amounts of makeup. And the threat they bring is of icky diseases around your genitals. It’s all designed to trigger our disgust reactions.

When we can identify this vector, we can oppose it. We should be less credible towards body-based-shaming, and understand it as part of defining the class ladder, with people described in bodily terms as “obviously lower down.” It is a fantasy, and even as we understand it better we can also dismiss it.

(As mentioned in “Class is Normative Power”, this sort of fantasy is enormously complicated because by performance it becomes partially true. People with wealth who are concerned about status will then pay a lot of their greater resources to conform with the desired appearance, and they will select other people who also conform to this, so that now upper-class people really do smell different. Though importantly, this is just a trend, and there are always individual exceptions.)

People who denigrate women for how much skin they have showing, or how much hair and where they have it, or whether they follow manners like how to eat and how to dress, we understand are both performing sexism and classism. They are intertwined, and you can’t really take down one boss without the other.

***

This is what’s behind the complaint that so much of current social justice ideology is classist. It’s not just about using a few wrong words about people with less money or education, or even the privilege that most social justice activists seem to not know what life is like for people who didn’t go to four-year selective colleges.

The complaint of classism is about the logic of their ideological judgment. Instead of saying “we will no longer use class and body-shaming to humiliate our out-group” it’s “class is an excellent tool, so long as used against the right groups.”

So we see the same emphasis on the body-presence when describing men. Mockery focuses on their beards, and their odors, and their whole physical existence.

@prudencepaccard described the campaign against “man-spreading” as Kafkaesque. The criticism is that men “take up too much space.” And you can easily imagine that accusation some Russian existential novel “Your crime is taking up space.” Which is not to say it’s meaningless, it’s actually something that once you are aware of, you feel incredibly guilty about. Is your volume or your smell or your skin an affront to someone, has it made you an exile from society?

There is of course polite behavior, regarding making room for other people on your seat or most of the above-class criticisms, but intense focus on your body will lead to paranoia well beyond the polite requirements of society. Drilling into them is a rich vein of power, but it’s exactly the power we must forswear.

Superheroes and Art

[Thing I wrote when Marvel was first promising a “woman Thor”]

I admit I was a little bothered by an article I saw bemoaning recent trends in science fiction and other genre movies. I don’t argue with it’s data, so much as the tilt of its conclusions. The article complains that scifi movies these days aren’t really about the future, but rather about a different vision of now. They’re not about tomorrow, they’re about today.

Of course they are about today. Science fiction in all forms is always about today. Because today is all we know. We can talk about the future but it’s almost entirely commentary on the current world, and the current truths we live in. None of us are from tomorrow, how could we write to it?

This is a good thing. It means science fiction (and other work) can tell us lessons for our current lives.

The other trend this article laments is the too many superheroes. A movie about superheroes isn’t really a movie about us.

But much like “writing about the future” is really talking about today, then writing about “superheroes” can really be talking about everyone. When Spiderman recalls “with great power comes great responsibility”, our reaction should not be “wow sounds like such a burden I’m glad I’m not him.”

So I wanted to write about superheroes some. What are they telling us?

And first off, we need to distinguish a Super Hero movie from… well, a vigilante movie. A superhero is about a symbol that inspires the general populace. It’s not that they do great things, but they proclaim “great things can be done.”

A vigilante is just a dude who hits things pretty hard and solves the problem themselves.

What is Superman’s power in one term? His power is to do the impossible. It’s why they kept adding new powers all the time until cannon froze around Crisis on Infinite Earths (and why the end of Superman the movie wasn’t shocking). It’s all about thinking something is impossible, and then doing it! In an unexpected, garish, and often fairly public way. This is why the most famous line about him is “Up in the air, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman!” He is all about us, the public, witnessing and being in awe of his impossibleness. (And his second most famous line, about truth, justice and the American way, is also meant to be inspiring.)

Superman’s secret identity is a nebbish reporter who is almost offensively normal. This isn’t a subtle disdain on his part, but rather a promise. Anyone could secretly be Superman. Why, even *you* could secretly be Superman. Any day you could rip off your shirt, fly over the moon, and save the city.

Superman is hope. Kryptonite represents, well, cynicism.

Batman, is like the opposite of this in all ways. He lurks in the shadows, and really does intend to fix all the problems himself. Batman is well known for inspiring an emotion – and that emotion is fear, in his enemies. (The yellow lanterns admit he is the greatest of them.) He’s not a symbol for us to be in awe of, he’s a symbol for others to cower before.

Populist fans admire Batman because he’s human whereas Superman “cheats” by being an alien with superpowers. But well, I can be Clark Kent. We can’t be Bruce Wayne. He’s born a billionaire and has psychological fixtures we can never replicate. There’s nothing populist about lionizing a obsessive billionaire.

(This is part of why The Dark Knight is such a morally bankrupt movie. People are inspired by Batman to be like him – and they are depicted as objects of pathetic ridicule who need to be stopped for their own safety. Gotham does need a hero to look up to, and so Batman and Gordon invent one out of a lie. It’s basically saying “inspiration is for suckers.”)

Who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman? That’s really asking “Who would win in a fight between hope and fear?”

(Maybe if fear wore a ring of cynicism… See how these symbols work?)

***

Which brings me to the other goliath that’s dominating the public imagination vis a vis superheroes and vigilantes: the Avengers. What do each of them stand for? By and large, they’re not vigilantes.

Captain America is very, very obviously a superhero. His meek background is used to emphasize that anyone of us could become the symbol of idealism he currently is.

Iron Man is a billionaire yes, but at least he’s a superhero for libertarians. He flaunts his power and oblivious do-gooder spirit, and encourages everyone else to be as smart as him and show up Uncle Sam who wants to horde all the cool toys to themselves. He’s a fairly amoral superhero, but still it’s something.

The Hulk is more primal than any of the above. It’s not necessarily a pleasant inspiration to see him trampling through a metropolis, but it promises a sort of chaotic, undifferentiated power. There’s more things than dreamt of in our philosophies.

Thor. And then there’s Thor.

***

Oh my goodness, a woman Thor is such a bad idea. Why? Well lets go through the above Avengers and see what sort of inspiration they stand for. Then we can ask, how would a woman version of that character change the interpretation?

Captain America stands for America of course, but he also stands for idealism itself. He believes in people, and not out of naivete. He sees the fallen world and still believes in the best.  He never compromises, but also never loses faith in the people he cares about. A woman filling that role… is actually a radical departure AND an unambiguously good statement. I don’t even know what it would mean, but I’d like to see it.

A woman Iron Man means like, nothing. You can be rich and smart and make things and generally disdainful of other people AND a woman. Iron Man is not a good person, he just happens to tag along for good things. There’s nothing inherently revolutionary about a woman filling that role instead. It would work pretty smoothly and we might not even notice the difference. It would be Ayn Rand, but less edgy.

(Perhaps the best joke in that comic would be that when she’s inside the suit of armor, no one can tell the difference between her and Tony Stark at all.)

The Hulk? The Hulk is basically phallic power. The woman version of the Hulk… is already a really popular comic called She-Hulk. And any fan of that series knows that she mostly solves her problems without or going beyond the use of brute force. She’s clever and has personal skills besides her super powers (Note: superscience is a superpower. Itisn’t really a skill any of us can develop. Her organizational skills are.) The entire comic is basically a joke “What would a woman do with a phallus? Not much, she doesn’t need it.” Consequently, it’s a pretty good comic.

So what is Thor. Thor stands for worthiness. He didn’t create or climb to his power, it was just given to him for who he is (son of Odin). But on the other hand, it necessitates an incredible standard that he must always maintain. He’s good-hearted, loyal, determined, and many other generically good moral traits. Whenever he goes against Asgardian-morality, he loses his powers. The chief feature of his hammer is that no one else can lift it – Mjolnir is a worthiness symbol just as much as the sword in the stone. He doesn’t even want his future kingship, which is contrasted with his very UNworthy brother.

I don’t really like this, even though I like Thor. He’s generally a liberal superhero arguing on the liberal side of things when politics comes up. And he dearly loves his brother, even as he’s a pathetic snake. These are great things, but are largely treated as inconvenient biproducts of his essential worthiness. Like “Oh yeah, Thor is very generous because he’s worthy, which means he will never give up on Loki, but that’s just Thor, that’s not at all a sign that *we* shouldn’t give up on Loki.” (This contrasts with Captain America. When Cap never gives up on Bucky, we understand that *we* should never give up on Bucky either. Faith in Bucky is *why* we admire Cap. For Thor, it’s just a side-effect.) And worthiness… is not a good meta-virtue. Judging that people can only have certain power if they meet a standard of personality, is a fairly destructive moral heuristics. I could give plenty of examples of groups where this goes more wrong than right.

You know what group *really* doesn’t need more of the message of worthiness? Women. A woman Thor would basically redouble on his inherent message that you can only participate if you meet certain unwritten standards. That you have no inherent value, but you have to prove your value every day. Ugh ugh ugh. How many times are women already told this? Too many.

This would be bad. So bad.

Now, one comic reinforcing sexism isn’t going to be the dowfall of western civilization, obviously. But here’s what will happen. The very people excited for “A Big Name Woman Superhero!” are going to find themselves… surprised. Upset. Woman Thor will be trying to live up to impossible standards, and only praised when she does (or punished when she strays from the arbitrarily chosen moral path) and holy shit will that look uncomfortable to readers. And Thor will meekly accept that and continue to try to retain the good graces of Odin.

Imagine the first scene where woman Thor can’t lift Mjolnir for whatever stupid reason it is this week.

They’ll wonder why, and they’ll conclude “latent sexism by the writers” which was half true, but was inevitable from the word go because of what Thor stands for. And since no one will be happy from this, it counts as a bad idea.

There is of course, one way this could be redeemed, but it would be the end of the comic. Thor could go before Odin, after she has strayed, and say “My time as a woman has taught me what utter bullshit all these rules and moral standards are. Fuck worthiness. Fuck you. I am done with all this. Me and Loki are out.”

That would be rad.

Shapeshifting and Themes in X-Men

I wrote before about how good the class revolutionary themes in X-Men: Apocalypse were, but it's still only second to the first X-Men prequel "First Class." (Sadly "Days of Future Past" is both terrible and forgettable, which is a dismal combination, with the exception of its Quicksilver scene.)

Fine, fine, we can watch the DoFP scene again. And turn the sound back on.

On a pure "convince your buddies to watch this" level, this is arguably the best Marvel movie to date. Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, and James McAvoy are some of the best actors and actresses in any Marvel movie, and they're used well in places where they can showcase their emotional talents, rather than a) spout sarcastic dialogue or b) deliver lots of weighted exposition.

The Xavier/Magneto split is one of the better origin stories for major comic book characters. It's got the pathos of grown men making decisions that are both terrible, and understandable from both sides. Okay, it goes all in for that liberal ideology of "everyone's trying for good in their own way" and Xavier's "peaceful gradual change will win the day," but this is still a lot more interesting than the fascism inherent in "street scum killed my parents so now I will haunt them."

Apply the best actors, to the best origin story, and you unsurprisingly have a pretty good movie, just so long as you don't mess anything else up. But the purpose of this blog is not to convince your buddies to watch the movies you like. The purpose of this blog is to figure out what is seriously going on in these works of art. And while First Class could have rested on its laurels with the cast and story it made the much better decision to do something interesting.



The promise inherent in this prequel trilogy, which FC pulls off best, is to set each of these movies a decade apart, and make them into period pieces and pastiches of the genre we associate with that decade. Since the sixties movie is somewhat about the "discovery" of mutants, it's easier to make this into an espionage filled Bond movie, complete with Cold War tension cliches. At the same time it deals with X-men's most fundamental metaphor, which is that these mutants are akin to "discovering" sexual minorities live all around us.

Combine that, and you get a Bond movie about sexual liberation. And yes that is as fantastic as it sounds. You've got the surreal scene starting in Shaw's decadent office with him asking (the powerful telekinetic and telepath) Emma Frost to get him some ice, pulling out to the war-station computer banks of his military craft, pulling out to the submarine touching the surface to let Emma out, where she can carve some ice off a glacier. It's just a great throwback to the ostentatious spy-porn of yesteryear.

Speaking of Emma, she's just such a great character emblematic of the whole movie and symbolic identity politics' attempt to be post-material and post-political. She is naturally one of the most powerful mutants, but has no trouble being a subordinate (both professionally and romantically) to Shaw. She wears the sixties bombshell villainess outfit. She deals with this by telling herself it doesn't really matter, and this sort of subordination isn't really "her" - which is best epitomized in the scene with the Russian General, where she allows her body to be sold as the goods for a transaction that gets Shaw the missile codes he wants (or whatever.) Of course she cynically watches the whole encounter, because it's not "really" her being molested, but a psychic projection she is creating. Exploitation is okay if you can detach yourself from the experience, she tells her self. (And how different is that from the intro scene where Moira Taggart strips down to infiltrate a gentleman's club on behalf of the CIA?)

Way to make this thematically fit with a mutant whose body is literally a precious gemstone. (A side effect of which is that she thinks she is utterly immune to attack, but she forgets that she can still be constricted.)

And at the other end of the exploitation spectrum, we have a lower-class stripper who Charles and Eric find on their adorable cross country road trip of mutant awareness. As they tell the all-too-young-for-this girl "You show us yours, and we'll show you ours."

Xavier and Magneto are the source of a lot of homoerotic tension and fan-writing, of course. The movie keeps it at the subtext, with Eric trying to show off that he can stop a bullet point blank from hitting his head, but Charles redirecting him to greater displays of power. It's all very flustering.

Sleazeball Xavier though may be the best addition. As the world's greatest telepath, Xavier is famously humanist, wanting to share his liberal love with everyone. Which is great in theory, but when denuded of revolutionary fervor - love in the universal abstract - it can focus on the specific and be more like... a pansexual Lothario who wants to get in everyone's bed, and uses his deep understanding of people to do that.

And then they bring in Mystique as the correct revolutionary who sees through this. Early on she pretty clearly wants Xavier's attention, and try to cuddle-flirt with him, hoping to replace all these women he is going through with herself, throwing in some troubling sibling-confusion themes. But that doesn't really work.

Let's go back a second and reiterate how awesome it is that the shapeshifter is made the proper revolutionary figure for this trilogy (again, see the Apocalypse review.) As a shifter, one would expect her to be in the more accomodationist faction (like Charles), because she can seamlessly slip into the existing power structure no matter what it is. Zizek describes this as the post-human ideal.

What I think is that today’s capitalism thrives on differences. I mean even naïve positivist psychologists propose to describe today’s subjectivity in terms like multiple subject, fixed-identity subject, a subject who constantly reinvents itself, and so on. So my big problem with this is the painting of the enemy as some kind of self-identified stable substantial patriarch to which these multiple identities and constant reinventing should be opposed. I think that this is a false problem; I am not impressed by this problem. I think that this is a certain logic, totally within the framework of today’s capitalism, where again, capitalism, in order to reproduce itself, to function in today’s condition of consumption society, the crazy dynamics of the market, no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed patriarchal subject. It needs a subject constantly reinventing himself.

Mystique could fit into a capitalist world so well, and profit from it remarkably. Instead she is the one who most actively wants to tear stuff up. Why? Because she suffers this question of identity - is she the skin she crafts herself to be (which Charles encourages her to wear), or is she the monstrous blue scales she is by default (which Eric specifically calls out as the true her, and as more sexually attractive to him)? This purely emotional struggles leads her to identify with all mutants in terms of rescuing them from being caught in the same trap of self-abnegation, that Xavier for all his mind-reading can never really appreciate.

***

It's possible in covering all the good things about First Class, Wednesday's post went through fairly quickly what was so extremely interesting about the depiction of Mystique, who is a fantastic subversion of a concept most viewers do not even have a name for.

So let's start with shapeshifters in film. The most memorable shapeshifter in modern cinema has to be Terminator 2's T-1000, who not only bring a sense of dread that he can become anyone you know or trust, but also the beautiful liquid-metallic morphing that emphasized that everything was on the surface and there was no real internality. (The obvious feminine aspect of the shapeshifter was exaggerated to almost satirical degrees in Terminator 3, and the theme is explored more interestingly in the underrated Terminator Genisys.) But they're a favorite of many genre movies: Loki in the MCU, the mysterious assassin in Phantom Menace, various Star Trek creatures, the face masks in Mission Impossible, etc. Filmmakers love playing with this fluidity of appearance.

 

And logically, what does the shapeshifter usually do? Well usually they are some sort of trickster figure (since they can fool naive mortals) but not a full on anarchist, since they generally derive their power from the authority system they can imitate. They think they are above the oppressive system, and undoubtedly can take advantage of it, but they are still very much a part of it.

Critical theorists call this sort of thing the "posthuman."

In critical theory, the posthuman is a speculative being that represents or seeks to enact a re-writing of what is generally conceived of as human. It is the object of posthumanist criticism, which critically questions Renaissance humanism, a branch of humanist philosophy which claims that human nature is a universal state from which the human being emerges; human nature is autonomous, rational, capable of free will, and unified in itself as the apex of existence. Thus, the posthuman recognizes imperfectability and disunity within him or herself, instead understanding the world through context and heterogeneous perspectives while maintaining intellectual rigour and a dedication to objective observations of the world. Key to this posthuman practice is the ability to fluidly change perspectives and manifest oneself through different identities. The posthuman, for critical theorists of the subject, has an emergent ontology rather than a stable one; in other words, the posthuman is not a singular, defined individual, but rather one who can "become" or embody different identities and understand the world from multiple, heterogeneous perspectives.

In ways that are familiar to any queer theorist, this can be very subversive. A patriarchical order demands that everyone have some single fixed identity, that the system can easily classify you by. Think about the obsession X-men villains have with establishing registries where every mutant puts their name and power in a database.

And yet, to a more advanced capitalist system, this sort of subversion is absolutely fine. That's the wonderful thing about capitalism after all, it responds to demand and is infinitely adaptable. If one of its cogs also wants to be adaptable, that's great, no problem there. Hence the Zizek quote from my previous post:

What I think is that today’s capitalism thrives on differences. I mean even naïve positivist psychologists propose to describe today’s subjectivity in terms like multiple subject, fixed-identity subject, a subject who constantly reinvents itself, and so on. So my big problem with this is the painting of the enemy as some kind of self-identified stable substantial patriarch to which these multiple identities and constant reinventing should be opposed. I think that this is a false problem; I am not impressed by this problem. I think that this is a certain logic, totally within the framework of today’s capitalism, where again, capitalism, in order to reproduce itself, to function in today’s condition of consumption society, the crazy dynamics of the market, no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed patriarchal subject. It needs a subject constantly reinventing himself.

An excellent example of this would be the Mystique from the first non-prequel X-men movie. After Magneto is imprisoned, and a homophobic mutantphobic Senator dies, she impersonates the Senator, thus taking his power. We root for what sort of sabotage she can accomplish, but really, how much can she do? She really has done the conservative government a favor - rather than having to acknowledge the traumatic disruption of one of their own having been kidnapped, turned into a mutant, and killed, it can proceed as if nothing happened (and indeed, nothing does happen to the US government except that it continues its anti-mutant drift.)

And yet... Mystique in the X-men mythos is not a T-1000 or Loki or some selfish capitalist who uses her ability to fit in and constantly reinvent herself for further benefit. Nor is she a compassionate, feminine figure working alongside Xavier who thinks everyone can get along, because she doesn't have any trouble getting along with either human or mutant. Instead she is pretty consistently a terrorist/freedom-fighter on behalf of the extremist Magneto, always fighting for mutant rights she herself doesn't really need. That's interesting. Why?

For whatever reason, First Class chose to devote a huge amount of time to this question, placing it within the context of sixties sexual politics (while freely departing canon with inventions like "Mystique as Xavier's adoptive sister.") And so their answer was that Mystique (or Raven) was a posthuman torn between different aspects of her identity, in a very classic feminine narrative.

On one hand, the accommodationist Charles, who has undoubtedly read his Foucalt, thinks her true identity is the appearance she crafts for herself, much like a woman whose self image includes her makeup, does not need to worry if her "true self" is really just the naked face. On the other hand, Eric respects her both as a sexual being and for her default monstrous appearance. Mystique is not simply seduced by his appreciation of that face, but rather, it is the question of that identity that continues to torment her. Which leads her to desiring a much more fundamental revolution of social relations than Xavier can offer.

It doesn't end at this movie of course, with Mystique continuing to explore the path of the revolutionary through the next two movies, developing violent skills, choosing to thwart an assassination, and training Xavier's shock troops.

Hancock: Asshole and Crazy

When we’re talking “uncomfortable class imagery” there’s nothing more direct than the pervasive use of profanity. The defining word of the entire movie of Hancock is…

Asshole.

From the very first shot of the movie, Hancock is woken up off a park bench, by a kid wanting him to stop bad guys. When Hancock responds harshly, the little six year old walks off and calls him an asshole. The point of an early morning wake up scene in the beginning of a movie is to say “every day is like this for the character.”

The film uses the word asshole 15 times in the first half. Everyone, including the two other main characters, call him an asshole.

And it’s such a banal insult. Everyone knows he isn’t a supervillain knocking off banks or kidnapping the president. In fact he’s usually saving the day. But he’s being a callous rude jerk while doing it, and that’s just as upsetting.

Instead of picking up a guy off the train tracks, he stops a train and derails the cargo. To catch some fleeing robbers he picks up their truck and pins it on a record company building’s ostentatious spire. He is almost always drunk, and drinking more. He’s unshaven and sleeps on park benches. He uses just as much foul language at others that they gave him in the first place.

It’s hard to tell the line here between what’s “genuinely destructive behavior” and what is just failing to present the polite appearance society wants. And, when you’re basically an unaccountable invincible god, there might not be much of a difference from society’s perspective.

But there’s a cycle here. We are simultaneously shown Hancock acting like an asshole, and people calling him an asshole. And being called an asshole really hurts him. Even though none of these humans present any threat to him, he is always shown to really care and be hurt when someone insults him. That’s some really solid understanding of social abjection there. The threat behind the slur isn’t where the power comes from, but the social reality of the slur in of itself. (Perhaps even more impressively, all of these characters are so sure that Hancock is a neutered dog that they don’t hesitate to call a walking wrecking ball “asshole”.)

This is best reflected in what we call the Routine, a series of lines that happens four times in the movie.

1.     Hancock on his best behavior, tries to talk someone down.
2.     The aggressive human calls him an asshole.
3.     Hancock says he doesn’t like that word.
4.     Aggressive human snidely says something like “What word? Asshole.”
5.     Hancock grimaces. “Call me asshole. One more time.”
6.     Human does.
7.     Hancock does something extremely violent to them.

Hancock, as the infinitely more powerful person in these scenes, has more responsibility.  So this is not to excuse his behavior or say that is was good to get vengeance like that (and the comedic stylings of Routine in jail are supposed to disturb us at the violation that follows.) They epitomize “Call me a monster, and a monster I shall be.”

Oh right, quick check. Hancock is often identified with Frankenstein. His current identity was created after seeing the first movie of Frankenstein in 1930, and his only piece of evidence from that past life is two ticket stubs to it. We’ll talk about how important the 1930’s are later.

So on one level, you have this parable of the gentle giant who wants to help, but because he’s reviled by society, becomes increasingly isolated and violent. But the movie doesn’t make it easy on us. His behavior is not just “sorta misguided”, but genuinely abhorrent. We can very easily see why people find him irresponsible and disgusting. He exchanges racist slurs with Asian crooks, he traumatizes a kid, and he literally shoves a man’s head up another man’s ass (one of the great things about this movie is it shows the after effects of that “joke” on those two men for the rest of the movie.)

But underneath all that, he motivation clearly is to do good and be loved. There are a series of youtubes that have defined his public perception, such as when butt-naked in disintegrating clothes, he pushes aside some kids and climbs into an ice cream truck to take the ice cream. It’s appalling. Of course, the reason he did this was he had just rescued people from an apartment building on fire, and he wanted something to cool down.

There’s an interesting note about superhero costumes here. Hancock is mostly naked in this clip because his clothes burnt off while saving people. This is such a great contrast from 99% of other superheroes who somehow always manage to have a costume that stays in one piece, while they shrug off explosions, superspeed, clawing menaces, and extreme heat. We don’t want their nakedness. We want them to save us and look good for the cameras afterwards.

Hancock does the first but not the second. So he gets called an asshole. So he gets worse and worse at both parts.

***

So Hancock the movie spends the first hour establishing how systemic racism (primarily through class signals, and not explicit antipathy towards blackness) degrades black men who become depicted as angry and slovenly and thus not worthwhile members of society, even when they have so much to contribute.

Having done that, Peter Berg goes for the hat trick by applying the same lens to feminism and intersectionality too. It's so great.


A convincing feminist argument is not one that conveys to someone who's already feminist "yup I agree with this", but one that can demonstrate to someone who's not already on board what's difficult about life as a woman in modern America and how they can help fix it. Mary does that in about 20 minutes of screen time in her second mask - that of a parallel to Hancock's black-malehood-as superhero.

She goes immediately from being the helpful housewife, to someone who is angry, violent, and dressed to kill. She goes on at length about the long history she's had with Hancock and how it's ruined her life, holding him responsible for things he knows nothing about, expecting him to follow her train of thought. It's not productive and it leaves both us and Hancock mystified.

MARY: It always end the same way Persia, Greece, Brooklyn.
HANCOCK: Brooklyn? I’ve never been to Brooklyn.
MARY: I have put up with your bullshit for the last 3000 years and I’m done.
HANCOCK: I don’t know what you are talking about?
MARY: Done! You Listening?
HANCOCK: I don’t know what you are talking about!
MARY: I am happy, okay, finally I’m happy! You are not going to mess it up.
HANCOCK: Look at me… I don’t know what you are talking about? I hate to burst your little crazy lady bubble but it must not have been all that great ‘cause I don’t remember you.
[Pause.]
MARY: Call me crazy…. one more time.
HANCOCK: Coo coo!

And then she hits him with a truck! It's so great. We've seen this interaction three times before from Hancock's side, and now the film is explicitly telling us that the same dynamic has plagued women, just with a different twist.

Just imagine what Mary's life must have been like. When Hancock shows his powers, people are afraid of him and demean him. When Mary tried to tell people about hers ("my husband just got mugged by these men who attacked us for no reason and he's losing his superpowers") people must have dismissed her as crazy, denied her, and refused to help her. Hell she probably got the Sarah Connor treatment. After enough times of this, she just gave up. She started living a normal life as a normal human who pretended she was weak and would never bend steel bars, and when no one's looking, she'd sneak out and save the world from the Cuban missile crisis.

The morning after we see her reveal, she asks Ray to open a jar of sauce for her because "you're so strong," and we know all about the double life she's forced herself to lead. It's more comfortable than Hancock's abnegation, but it's still a mental prison.

***

It's important to remember that the movie isn't saying assholish and crazy behavior do not exist. Hancock does act like an asshole. Mary's rant to Hancock does (to him and us) sound absolutely crazy. The core lesson of this movie is that it is wrong to call people those terms anyway because they dehumanize the target.

***

To return to discussions of intentionality in art. I think it's likely that director Peter Berg thought about and purposefully included most of the elements we are discussing here. He's done a lot of very class conscious work (most notably Friday Night Lights, which you should watch.)

But even if he didn't mean it, so what? What would the conversation have been like that led to this scene?

HOLLYWOOD DOUCHEBRO 1: Okay, so he's arguing with Mary, what if we took that same funny interaction where he says "Call me asshole. One more time" and then kicks their ass, but now she gets to say it.
HOLLYWOOD DOUCHEBRO 2: That's great that's great, but is she even an asshole? Would he call her that?
HD1: Right. Well let's just call her crazy instead.
HD2: Oh yeah! And you gotta really sell it. Make the whole scene a "Brittany Spears breaking down in the streets of Santa Monica" type feel.
HD1: Brilliant. Aren't women and black people hilarious. What next? I'm thinking brewskies.

Now oops, you've stumbled upon important elements of how the power structure views minorities. It's still good art, worth analyzing why it made sense to these random douchebros. Which is to say, everyone knows about how our society oppresses people, and good art helps express that directly.

***

If you want more analysis of Hancock, you should watch the movie, and read the series of posts at Prequels Redeemed about this movie.