2013 in Shit (BONUS): Hello Kitty's Fashion Music Wonderland & Here We Go!

In 2013, Viz Media started a line of comics licensed by Sanrio. Each of them tells a series of short, wordless stories about Kitty and her friends.

For ComicCon this year, a sort of pre-series comic was released, called Hello Kitty's Fashion Music Wonderland. In October, the first of the actual series came out: Hello Kitty: Here We Go!. I had Fashion Music Wonderland long before I started this series, but had kind of forgotten about it; I only recently got Here We Go!. They're both kind of great, as a person who likes Hello Kitty a lot. So I decided that, even though I read no other comics, they were worth talking about.



It seems like it's been ages since I've discussed any specific piece of Hello Kitty visual art; after I initally wrote about Jason Han's "I Haz Mouth," I had kind of planned to talk at length about some of the other paintings or sculptures from the 35th anniversary, collected in the Three Apples book. I never really got around to it, unfortunately, and I'm certainly not going to be going nearly as in depth here, but it'll be a fun little thing to do.

The first image, above, is from the arc in Fashion Music Wonderland in which Kitty White becomes a famous pop star; it specifically is the panel where she receives the gift of a Rock Band-like system from Dear Daniel, her old friend/boyfriend/husband, or something, depending on the line I guess.

It's a weird image, kind of very reminiscent of "I Haz Mouth" in its replication of Kitty's face. Except this time her "primary" face is actually entirely absent; her back is turned, but the speech bubble has her full face inside of it, and there is a "pixelated" version of it on the screen of the television. Plus there is Dear Daniel, whose face is also Kitty's face.

But then, it's also even more complex in its way; the exclamation point this time is not just in the speech bubble, it is dotted with Kitty's face, and surrounded by the Bang!-like color that also goes around the Kitty-whose-"talking"'s self. And instead of mirror Kitty (or Mimmy, but probably not) there's Dear Daniel looking like a smug-ass dad, which just, I don't even know how to.

In the short narrative, this gift leads to the formation of a band, who go to a talent show and win a record deal, and Kitty goes off to travel the world, even as she pines for Dear Daniel back home. The final panel of the arc mirrors this one, as Dear Daniel is lead to retrieve his gift which turns out to be Kitty herself; given the bizarre way in which Kitty is refracted throughout the objects and expressions here, from linguistically to technologically mediated, her own return as a unified individual gift is, well, really really interesting.

Of course, the whole point of Hello Kitty is that she is meant to be a gift, whether for another or to oneself, so this moment is shot through with that knowledge as well. I've not got a ton to say there, although it should remain an open topic, I think.

More immediately relevant is that, if, like I've been endlessly repeating, ghosts are about a becoming-linguistic of space, then this panel suggests a certain ghostliness to Kitty herself, if in no other way than in her persistent refusal to become-linguistic. I've covered this better in the essays linked above, but her tendency to occupy non-linguistic representative spaces through signifiers of language is pretty well established at this point. Here though, there is the addition, in the form of the "pixelated" face, of the sort of necessary abstraction of language as well as its refusal. It's a real neat panel.



It's not until the main story arc of Fashion Music Wonderland, where Kitty stars in a sorta Alice in Wonderland, that we see ghosts again. There's the Cheshire Cat, of course, but there's also this weird moment, where Kitty is chasing after that cat, and runs through this intersection populated by quasi-human forms that, again, seem to be somewhat digitized. In a weird way, it could almost be a scene out of Serial Experiments Lain, Internet ghosts and all.

Kitty is chasing the Cheshire Cat because Dear Daniel, here in the role of the very late rabbit, has asked her about his gloves and top hat, which the Cat is wearing. She entered Wonderland by way of thoughtlessly wandering into an open manhole, where she transformed into Fashion Music Kitty; it's all pretty adorable. This in Wonderland ends at the tea party, where the Red Queen shows up and looks very intimidating but ultimately invites Kitty in, and they all enjoy themselves. Which is all just to say that this scene is not really even remotely important to the story; it's a pure action sequence, devoid of narrative weight or responsibility, an unnecessary conveyance of how she gets from point A to point B. It is, in other words, a sort of visualization of what's usually left in the gutter.

Of course, these are more obviously ghostly than the reaction shot to Kitty's gift, even if it also obvious that they are not meant to be read as ghosts insofar as ghosts are associated with horror. They are, rather, instantiations or embodiments of space; a crosswalk doesn't make sense without both vehicular and pedestrian traffic, but it can only really project the former sufficiently. So it speaks its form through these quasidigital objects.



The "Deep Clean" short of Hello Kitty: Here We Go! has, incidentally, a panel that almost directly quotes the latter one from Fashion Music Wonderland. In this, Kitty is engaged in spring cleaning when she gets sucked into a deep underground civilization made up of people made of stone who eat gems and drink and smoke lava. As she enters the town, following her new friend, the panel above shows her wonderment and the friendliness of her newfound city's inhabitants.

In this case, the way that the inhabitants function as expressions of the landscape itself; that deep, the folks are made of rocks, of course. There's no crosswalk, because there's probably not a whole lot of need for vehicular travel; the roads are still very much designed for them, though. Here We Go! is very much, as the name suggests, a comic about Kitty's travels; she is depicted variously as a secret agent, an explorer, and a safari-goer throughout the collection. There are a number of vehicles that she drives or rides in, which makes the absence of them here, if not especially pronounced, at least interesting.

This too is why the stone folks inhabitants of this space is interesting on the level of space itself's becoming-linguistic. In conjunction with the quotation of the digitalish ghosts from the earlier collection of stories, here we are dealing with embodiment through possibility; rather, though, than the expression of space through slightly-estranged normative bodies, its through bodies themselves that are expressions of (in that they consist of the same stuff as, abstracted anthropomorphically,) the space. Which again recalls the first pictured panel; when Kitty becomes linguistic, or at least decidedly fails to, its generally through a form of expression which only ever appears as a simple representation of the stuff of which she is made. Her face.

Speaking of Kitty with the gendered pronoun obscures the point here significantly. That is: she herself is not a character. She precedes narrative. Kitty White is neither character nor stuff; she only exists as stuff, but on its periphery, or as a structuring force. Kitty is, that is to say, the way that stuff enters into the realm of representation, that it becomes-linguistic. She is, I suppose, a brand, although I hold some reservations about using that sort of language. Not that it's necessarily wrong, just that I'm not sure it's totally right.

These three panels, across two comics, tell their own story; it's about how Kitty's presence structures the possibility of the stuff which surrounds her. Call it Kitty Correlationism; her worlds are always only epistemological, organizations of being in accordance with the self-image of branded junk without interiority. Without an anchoring subjectivity, space becomes necessarily as expressive as the pseudosubjects which inhabit it. It's the objective correlative writ large; space, in fiction, sure, but mostly in manufactured objects that exist in the world as potentials for exchange-value, is a response to the subjects affective state.



The final image, also from Here We Go!, complicates my tidy little narrative. From one of the one-page shorts with which this title is filled, it is a brief story about Kitty driving around, getting a flat, and using My Melody's unicycle to replace the tire.

The most obvious difference is the style, which is most obviously explicable by way of the little lines that emanate from the characters' eyes. They aren't really expression lines or action lines or anything; they're just kind of there, looking real weird. Especially on My Melo.

But then, here is the vehicle, no longer absent. A car, too, that object which has, perhaps more than any other, totally restructured the way space works in the world for individuals, especially in America. From trucking to suburbs to sprawl, the automobile is sort of the antithesis of the expression of space; it's its silencing, at least in the form of distance. And yet here too is Kitty.

2012 in Film: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

I've disliked Neveldine/Taylor since I walked out of Gamer feeling like it was so desperately close to interesting, so infuriatingly fucking near something really worth watching, and straight into Steve Shaviro's essay about it. I already took exception to Shaviro because of his terrible essay about Southland Tales, that unmitigated boring trainwreck of a movie, but the fact that neither Neveldine/Taylor nor Shaviro seemed even remotely interested in exploring the particularity of games, instead just assuming they could be abstracted into some bullshit about the Modern Condition or the social Real or whatever really kind of inordinately pissed me off. Plus I've never seen the Crank movies and am not very good at watching action films anyway so they didn't really have any leeway for me there.

The original Ghost Rider movie, though, I liked quite a lot; and luckily for me, I didn't realize Neveldine/Taylor had directed Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance before I went in to see it. Plus, they didn't write the script, so that was a blessing.

Credit where it is due, though; there were some good directorial choices here. Little moments like seeing Idris Elba frantically putting on his motorcycle gloves in the opening sequence when he goes to chase Danny and Nadya, certain jerky camera moves and pans during the chase scenes, and a general decision to continually remind the viewers that Ghost Rider isn't even so much an "antihero" as a purely nihilistic force were all very welcome. And, of course, letting Cage do his thing is always a good decision. The only part of the movie that really drags is the sequence with the monks toward the end, where they take Danny for safeguarding and Blaze to exorcise his demon, and even that bit has the fucking wonderful scene with Blaze and the Rider splitting ways, and with Blackout mummifying the monks. Both of those moments, along with when the Rider pisses fire and when he spins around floating for no discernible reason after a grenade goes off sort of near him, are an absolute joy to watch in 3D, too. Not only that, but they are significantly less interesting to watch in 2D, which I think is interesting in itself; that the use of 3D isn’t purely ornamental is saying something neat about this movie, I think, and its ability to engage with its own visual economy.

Which, basically, is the one thing that Neveldine/Taylor are good at. They have a very strong sense of the screen as a space of managed scarcity, which is why they tend to be accused of excess; there is, of course, a lot going on onscreen in their films, but the sense of excess is much more tied to the way that they distribute the visual resources of the screen in a way roughly opposite to, say, John Carpenter in Halloween. Where Carpenter innovated by turning the blank spots of the frame into sites of focus by drawing the viewer’s attention to the dark corners with anticipation, Neveldine/Taylor do everything in their power to impart a hyperkinetic garishness to a visual landscape which is almost always some shade of grey. In this way they occupy the space of the ordinary (or "Symbolic" if you want to play Lacanian about it, as it is the accepted language of the form) while curating the viewer’s gaze in the direction of the apparent irruptions (the "Real," y’all) which generally take the form of the absolutely excessive. Which I guess is just to say that Neveldine/Taylor do as directors is more or less identical to what Cage does as an actor, and while I admire Cage and think that the fact that they paired up for this film is pretty brilliant, I still think Shaviro’s basically dead wrong. Enough sniping though.

The critical reaction to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance was more or less identical to the reaction to Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, albeit with slightly less rancor; unfortunately, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance hasn’t got shit for materialism, even the fantastical variety, about it, so I’m not really going to try to argue its merits on the same terms. Maybe that’s a good thing; maybe you’re bored of me harping on about that shit already. Probably not though.

There were two moments in the film that, when I first watched it, struck me politically as wonderful. The first was in one of the animated infodump moments, in which Johnny Blaze informs the audience that the devil is weak when he walks the earth. He tells us that the devil needs “emissaries” on earth to do his bidding, and that the devil’s most powerful tool is “the deal.” The second is when, just after the Rider is returned to Blaze, he rears up and whips out and slaughters a bunch of robed folks who were described as “politicians, murderers, men of influence,” -- a fairly clear bit of revenge fantasy on “the 1%,” I thought at the time.

The second point is cheap, of course, and not really worth lingering on. It is wonderful to watch though. The first one, on the other hand, is worth taking a moment on, I think. This movie is very, very insistent on playing up the angle of the Faustian bargain, which is one bit of Ghost Rider which generally gets left to the backstory in favor of exploring some sort of variation on his being an allegorical struggle with inner demons. But from the very early voiceover where Blaze (speaking to the audience) mocks himself for being the guy who made a deal with the devil, to the at least half dozen flashbacks to the deal being made that are peppered throughout the movie, to the way that any time the plot advances in an even insignificant way Blaze grabs his palm that is scarred from the bottle he smashed to be able to sign the deal, the contract is obviously not just an incidental thing here. So when the movie not only says that the devil makes nasty deals, but that deals are the devil’s most powerful tool, the slippage seems to indicate that the Faustian bits are not so much played as a way of characterizing the devil as they are forming an incipient ethical position against contracts.

Of course, even Goethe’s Faust tends to be read along the lines of claims of authenticity, with Faust himself seeking, in the first book at least, what we might call (because fuck “enough sniping,” I guess) unmitigated access to the Real. His contract with the devil is less about personal demons than attempting to slice through the social forces that dominate in his time. Faust comes to terms with this in Scene I, Act I of Part II, with the lines:

The rainbow’s arch of colour, bending brightly,
Is clearly marked, and then dissolved in air,
Around it the cool showers, falling lightly.
There the efforts of mankind they mirror.
Reflect on it, you’ll understand precisely:
We live our life amongst refracted colour.

By Scene IV of Act I, we have this:

‘To whom it concerns, may you all know,
This paper’s worth a thousand crowns, or so.
As a secure pledge, it will underwrite,
All buried treasure, our Emperor’s right.
Now, as soon as the treasure’s excavated,
It’s taken care of, and well compensated.’

Which is to say, the introduction of paper money. And so the the mediation goes round and round, moving inexorably between the universal and the particular.

To say that Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance’s focus on the contractual even makes the same move is overstating things a bit, of course, but there is a resonance there that is well worth acknowledging. And to say that there are strong parallels between Goethe’s Faust Part I and Part II, and Ghost Rider and its sequel, well that would just be stretching, wouldn’t it; totally beyond the ambit of something so lowly as a review on a stupid blog.

It isn’t the act of comparative criticism that matters nearly as much as it is its consequences, and the way that Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance takes a more Faust Part II approach to its working through mediation by way of economic forms means that its thematic economy (Faustian Bargain), its visual economy (Neveldine/Taylor’s direction), and its performance economy (Cage) all collapse nicely into each other.

The narrative economy, of course, is nowhere to be seen here, and thus the critics begin to snarl: without the proper establishment of motivation for characters, without the plot’s advancing properly, without arcs and structured acts, how is the viewer to be immersed? How are they to change their slip of paper for the coinage they were promised, when the exchange rate to which we’ve agreed is nowhere in sight?

Of course, the production of value occurs outside of the narrative economy as well. But it looks suspiciously more like reproduction, and we all know that’s no good. It’s derivative or tired or lazy; it’s histrionic or melodramatic or ironic; it’s, well, just not worth your time.

But then, in the relationship between the critic and the reader, only one member actually needs to understand viewing a film as a straightforward exchange of labor time for wages, and it obviously isn’t the reader. The reader obviously isn’t “outside” of capital, but neither are they implicated in the most obvious labor relationship with what they watch. In fact, the reader of reviews who watches a film is much more likely to view it analogously to the reproduction of labor than productive labor (which, in a literal sense, as recreation time, it is).

Of course, this is all just me footworking around saying fuck critics, and not saying much of anything at all about the movie. Which I’m okay with, although on the other hand I also kind of totally adored Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and would like to talk about it specifically too. So I’ll try to do that, to wrap this whole thing up. And what better place to end a review of Ghost Rider than with burning vehicles?

I mean, come on, the fucking crane sequence. What an absolute beauty of visual filmmaking, of pure awesome excess, of fidelity to character by stretching the limits of believability, of fucking film. Better even than the burning trestle of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the Rider’s flaming crane isn’t just any old toy, it’s the whole chest. From the Rider’s maniacal glee in operating it to the car that gets launched into space, from the bunker busters pointed at it to the fucking bizarre decision to actually view the paramedics cleaning it up afterward, that sequence alone is more than worth your fucking time, no matter what economic rubric you privilege. And just like the other peaks of the movie, from the Rider’s initial defeat to his triumphant slaughtering of the ruling class and that glorious final pun, it collapses its own filmic economies so elegantly, with such beautiful disregard for narrative, that you’ll feel like you’ve been offered a slip of paper for a fortune you could never imagine. And if any libertarian fucks try to tell you that it isn’t worth anything because it isn’t properly backed, let them know that they’re stupid assholes who can politely fuck off.

Oh, and if anyone ever tries to talk shit on Nic Cage or Idris Elba (especially Idris Elba), that goes double.

2012 in Film: The Amazing Spider-Man

The Amazing Spider-Man finally gave us an accurate version of the shittiest of all super heroes. Batman, especially after Frank Miller got his hands on him, might be a fascist or whatever, but he doesn't hold a candle to the nasty geek wish-fulfilment and entitled prickishness known to the world as Peter Parker. And finally, free of the curse of Toby Maguire's charisma and Sam Raimi's kitsch sentimentality, the reboot unveils the kid in his full glory.

Everything about this movie screams wish-fulfilment for a specific set of those entitled self-proclaimed victims known as white dudes who were "bullied." Not just the high-flying heroism and getting the girl, not just the fact that the webslinging is back to its bootstrapsish origin; not even just the Uncomplicated Moral Righteousness. More than anything Spidey is the wet dream of the self-identified nerd who loves to imagine lunchroom encounters with jocks where his debate skills debilitate their underdeveloped brains, with a nice little helping of ultraviolence to cap off the encounter with their "oppressor."

Obviously this fantasy is bullshit down to its very premise. But then, the film itself is informed by it down to its very structure, so. And much better to have the fantasy shown for how it would actually play out, with the fantasist coming off as a snarky, entitled prick, than to mask it with cheap sentimental hooks. Because even when the movie isn't letting Parker spout grating one-liners, it is fetishizing technology (occasionally masked as science) at the level of both plot -- it being the only thing that can actually impact anything, for good or ill -- and form -- the fucking 3D, man, my god.

Which isn't to say that the 3D is any good, of course. Both Silent Hill and Ghost Rider did it way better this year, which was kind of a dissappointment given that Spidey is probably the single most 3D friendly film character who ever was born. But it not being particularly well utilized doesn't stop it from being fetishized just like every other technology in and of the film, presented with all the mystical reverence that nerds show for their toys. In fact it even ends up being more apt for its incompetence, expecting you to coo at it just because it is so clearly cooing at itself; a better description of this movie I cannot imagine, and sort of charming in its infuriating, loathsome way.

The fact that all of this is perfectly internally consistent is kind of marvellous, ultimately. Every thread collapses in on itself, each apparent misstep an even more accurate portrayal of itself than a more technically accomplished or politically or psychologically robust alternative could have possibly been. The barks of laughter that came from the audience when Stan Lee showed up were such a perfect response I was floored; it was the opposite of the Hitchock self-insert, whose pleasure is for the quiet collector or self-described cinephile. Lee instead parades himself as a librarian listening to classical music as Spidey and Lizard smash up his library, while he is totally oblivious. There is nothing to be said about this. Every single aspect is so self-aggrandizing, so narcissistic, so utterly fucking thrilled with its own vapid power that the only possible reaction is to laugh.

And, y'know, laughing can be fun.

A Noncomprehensive, Unordered, and Totally Useless Compendium of Some Major Newspaper Comics From September Tenth, Two Thousand and One

Unified (Gar)Field Theory

(at garfield.com, starting here, with a hat tip to Grant for sharing it)

The clear implication, at the end of the bizarre arc from October 23rd to the 28th, 1989, is that the entirety of the Garfield comic strip is, in some way, an elaborate hallucination, a paranoid delusion, or an extended meditation on a stage of grief. The comic itself is utterly explicit about this, and, strangely, doesn't even bother to shoot a snide sideways grin; there's no wink at the end, nothing but the tiny "End" insert to indicate that what has happened is at all out of the ordinary in the universe of the strip. And of course that it is there is important. But the final panel itself is strange; it takes the tone of a moral, that part of the fiction which tells you that the fiction is being exceeded, that there is a remainder here that you are supposed to recognize and use. The problem, though, is that what it actually says is totally fucking incoherent as a moral; it's, really, just a description of the preceding comic. Which means, I take it, that the arc itself is the didactic footnote to the fable of the comic.

Which, of course, means that Garfield itself is the story of a cat who does not exist, fantasizing about a life which is not real. And if Garfield is an absence, then he is an absence that dreams in a particular, dilapidated house.

Two days after the end of that arc, came this comic

Which is, of course, exactly your ordinary Garfield comic strip. It happens to be the Halloween edition, so there's a bit of a prepackaged theme to the joke. But, coming as it does just so soon after the arc, and especially the comic from the 27th, where we watch Garfield's delusions dematerialize and see the truth of his surroundings, there's something extra eery about this comic from the 30th of October, 1989. Because Garfield is no longer just a sort of apathetic, sardonic cat - he is in fact the absence of a cat, a nocat, subjected to time. Garfield becomes the structuring principle, the ability to imagine of that which is absent. And the truth of his absence, what makes it comprehensible, is, of course, the dissipation of his dream-world; and what signifies that dissipation is the dilapidated house.

The Garfield Minus Garfield webcomic actually gets Garfield, then, both totally right, and totally wrong. Garfield is, apparently, by its own admission, the comic depiction of loneliness and denial that Garfield Minus Garfield supposedly detourns it into. The way that Garfield Minus Garfield could be said to get Garfield exactly right, though, is that, as that arc showed us, Garfield himself is an absence - "But that means I haven't lived here for years." But it seems to assume that because he is an absence, he is erasable, whereas this seems to be the exact opposite of the truth. Because his absence is a structuring absence, not a simple lack of presence. Jon and Odie are, and perhaps always been, mere projections of this absence, figures formed to fill up space.

Garfield is a ghost. And a real ghost, not some bullshit about a lingering soul trying to finish up his business. Ghosts are space. They are, particularly, a becoming-consciousness of space. Ghosts are not embodied, or if they are, it is a function of narrative and not ghost-ness; ghosts are absences of space, absences within space, that structure the space. And so, apparently, is Garfield.