Spinning out of X-Men: Second Coming, 2010's Generation Hope took to focus the first new generation of mutants since the Scarlet Witch, and editorial decree, informed the X-Men of their obsolescence. The line of X-Men titles had been reeled back from its heady heights of 90s popularity, and in-text the mutant population had been severely diminished. This book, and its cast of new characters, set out to define what a modern mutancy could look like. Instead, its post-postmodern superheroes were never permitted the freedom to explore or evolve their unique standing.
Generation Hope #1 By Kieron Gillen and Salvador Espin
The Marvel superhero has been a site of postmodern self-referentiality since its inception, pushing the boundaries of genre and coating itself in a costume, not of spandex, but of ironicism. It's fitting, then, that Generation Hope's attempt to rekindle that same creative spirit went even further into the depths of this self-referentiality. Mutation in the X-Men franchise is the most undiluted, pure realisation of the superhero genre icon of the Power. No complex origin story, no radioactive spiders or enchanted hammers, if you're a mutant you have mutant powers. Rather than delve into the infinite creative potential of this, Generation Hope focused in. choosing instead to pilfer mutations from genre history and develop them towards more traumatic conclusions.
Oya was equal parts Iceman and the Human Torch, taking heat with an ice hand and returning it with a pyrokinetic one. A character based on the two ends of an extreme binary. Velocidad, meanwhile, was functionally a speedster, not unlike Quicksilver or the Flash, differing in that he increases the time around him. The faster he would go, the faster he would age. Transonic's active ability of flight was amplified with shapeshifting characteristics, as her outward appearance invoked the naked blue of Mystique and the blue lips of Apocalypse. Primal spoke to the savage types, the Beasts, the Hulks and the Wolverines, and was particularly concerned with the genre trapping these characters repeatedly find themselves within. The honour of man brought into conflict with the beast within, only this time the beast would win out over the man. Kenji Uedo, codenamed Zero, was perhaps the team's most inventive creation- that is, if you had never seen the film Akira (1988). A unique enough immigration, the character itself nevertheless remained entirely a visual retread of the film's Tetsuo. And then there was the titular Hope, herself a riff on the staple X-Book power manipulators, such as Rogue, Synch and Mimic. Not to mention evoking other cosmically-touched redheads.
Generation Hope #5 By Kieron Gillen and Jaime McKelvie
Where the powers are developed from the base of what went before, they enter into a zone of criticism. Not just of tired, archetypal power-sets and genre imagery, but of character tropes as well. Exemplifying this, a certain aspect of Hope's power set that often goes unremarked upon is her inclination to inspire loyalty and camaraderie between strangers. Rather than a result of charismatic personality, this is inexorably linked with her superhuman abilities; she can awaken and stabilise both the condition of mutancy and the psyches of mutants themselves.
Those following the current X-Men line should note a connection between this unexplored hypnotic element to her powers and the surprisingly close coalition of mutants at the core of Krakoa's state infrastructure, the Five. It also shines a different light on Nightcrawler's Second Coming sacrifice.
But, in the context of Generation Hope, this works more to address practical concerns. It is of little surprise to any follower of comic books when a new team of superheroes debuts, spending the first 6 issues of their series assembling the team and finding themselves cancelled at issue 10. Generation Hope itself would be cancelled at issue 17, albeit with writer Kieron Gillen leaving after 12. With the cast hypnotically under Hope's control, Gillen was able to bypass a lot of the standard storytelling pitfalls in order to deliver his story more efficiently.
Still, however unintentional this may be, the hypnotic aspect nevertheless serves as criticism of the structure and standard of the superhero team more widely; the suggestion being that, if it's happening with Hope's team, who is to say that it is not happening to every cast of superheroes? So often does a superhero team consist not of people who would understandably collaborate for a set goal, or even work against each other as a compelling cast, but of people simply grouped together as alternate sub-franchise mascots. The Avengers come to mind.
That Gillen is never given the opportunity to delve into these concepts further is the series at its most meta. Much like the tragic Velocidad, the story moved faster, burned brighter and ended sooner, with its cast relegated to obscurity almost immediately after cancellation. Touted as the "most important X-Book in years," Generation Hope has, in fact, managed to become little more than a footnote.
New Mutants, in the immediate collective response to its release, has been plagued by one thing above all. Not the oft associated delays, but instead with the question of adaptation. Adaptation is a difficult topic to discuss. Personally, I find that adaptation is a futile lens through which to analyse a film. More often than not, we should look to the meaning of the film as its own text and take it on its own merits. However, especially in the superhero genre, adaptation is also a site which creates meaning. This is not only a film that has caused controversy with its adaptation of the source material, but also one whose meaning lies in this very adaptation.
Trailer for New Mutants.
First, to address the elephant in the room, the films adaptation of race is galling. Discussions surrounding whitewashing in this film are fair, accurate and necessary: Two characters, Dr. Cecilia Reyes and Roberto DaCosta, who are both traditionally depicted as black characters in the source material were portrayed by two decisively non-black actors: Alice Braga and Henry Zaga, respectively. The director, Josh Boone, attempted to address these questions of whitewashing, and chose to opt for the strange strategy of doubling-down on his colorblind casting approach. Boone has since deleted his Instagram account in response to the backlash.
In my view, what makes this whitewashing so necessary to acknowledge and engage with is not merely the erasure of black identities, but that it informs the wider lens from which the film was produced. When we look to Boone's comments, where he suggests that a non-black actor could better deliver a portrayal of a privileged upbringing, we can see that it is in fact little to no different to what presidential candidate Joe Biden has also said. I do not bring Biden up without reason- that their comments are similar matters because it informs us on the film's ideology. It is the post-racial view of the liberal who believes, with so much time removed from the Civil Rights Movement and the election of President Obama, that racial conflict and injustice is a thing of the past. Importantly, the director's post-racial lens seems to have influenced not only casting decisions, but the depiction of mutancy itself.
In New Mutants, mutancy is alternatively the condition or gift of superhuman powers. An offshoot of the X-Men franchise, where mutants are a deviant minority who are taught to use their powers at superhero school, the New Mutants shifts the locale from that school to a mental institution instead; focusing primarily on Dani Moonstar, a Native American mutant whose powers bring nightmares to life. Horror genre antics ensue. With regard to adaptation, as it is an adaptation of the New Mutants comic book series, it's worth looking at the film's own perspective on this. When we do so, I think we see that this the loosest of adaptations, one that prioritizes re-imagination and re-invention to create its meaning. Re-imagination, that is, of not just of the New Mutants characters and story, but of the X-Men franchise on the whole. If there is a compelling idea in this movie, it draws itself from this.
One such re-imagining is when we see the comic book Sam Guthrie, whose powers famously made him nigh invulnerable when blastin', inverted in the film- becoming a character who instead knows only hurt. An emotional hurt, sustained from childhood, but repeated, self-inflicted physical pain also. That invulnerability is stripped away as part of the character's journey from page to screen.
Left: Sam Guthrie in New Mutants (1983) Right: Sam Guthrie in New Mutants (2020).
It is indicative of the re-imaginings on the whole. Where Sam is re-imagined as self-destructive, Roberto is re-imagined as an insecure boy fronting as a jock and Rahne Sinclair is re-imagined as a lesbian, facing conflict between her sexuality and fundamentalist Christian beliefs. One rumor that set social media and fan communities aflame was the notion of Storm being originally cast in this film as a jailer role. Whilst that never manifested, the design ethos is clear: gone are the trappings and moralism of traditional superhero fictions. These are not X-Men, mutants hated and feared by humans, but rather teenagers who hate and fear themselves.
The most significant of these imaginings, however, is both the thematic core of the film and something deeply alienating to the fan audience. Rather than take place in the iconic school for mutants most associated with the franchise, this film relocates its cast of characters to a mental institution. A jarring change, for sure, but one vital to the film's meaning. By moving the traditional X-Men coming-of-age story out of a school and into a mental institution, what we actually have is merely the exchange of disciplinary institutions. This change serves to highlight not the differences between the story of the New Mutants and the X-Men characters, but rather the similarities. They are repressed, traumatized individuals, sequestered away from the public, supposedly for their own good. The student is treated to the same institution as the patient or the prisoner; in this film, Dr. Reyes keeps her subjects all under constant, panoptic surveillance. It is a re-imagining of the school setting, a haunted hospital, an asylum and a prison all at once. That the film chooses to reveal that Reyes does not, in fact, work for the X-Men, perhaps helps the film go down easier with hardcore fans, but weakens the text as a whole.
Nevertheless, the school/hospital exists as a site of the return of the repressed, where deviant sexuality and identities inform the condition of mutancy. So far I have neglected to discuss the film's constant delays and unfortunate production cycle. Too easy would it be to fall into the trap of maligning the 'New' in the ever-delayed New Mutants. A witty critique, to appease the readers who look to a film review for a good pun and a reaffirmation of their own opinion. To do so would miss the mark of meaning: the title 'New Mutants' is a reference to two things. The first, Marvel's original name for the X-Men franchise 'The Merry Mutants', and herein we can make whatever joke we like about them not being so new anymore, but the second is all the more compelling and informative. 'New Mutants' was how literary critic Leslie Fielder, in 1965, referred to the new generation of Americans engaging in counter-cultural practice. He lambasted and feared the turn of the new generation from the values of the old, feared the perversion of conservative social norms and could not abide what he referred to as the 'irrationalists'.
The title New Mutants carries with it this weight, twisting it on its head, but retaining that particular association with a thematic generational conflict that has its roots in even the earliest of X-Men comics. Realized in this movie, the rebel youth have to break away from the authority of an older generation who can offer them nothing, but abandonment and abuse. Boone's mutancy no longer possesses a racial or genetic element, present in both source material and the film franchise at large. That this mutancy develops at puberty is highlighted, as is the sexual relationships between the youths. It is not to say that there is an inherent danger to sexuality, be it divergent or normative, but rather professes to explore the dangerous effects that surplus repression can have.
For the men, it is the manifestation of their failure to perform the masculine function. Whilst Roberto embodies a direct, physical emasculation, his powers causing him to become "Too hot" in sexual situations, leaving him unable to adequately perform, Sam's character imperils the social function: not only committing patricide, but collapsing his very source of labor and income also. He has killed his father, but cannot replace him. In both of these cases, the masculine role in the nuclear family model threatens to fall apart. The feminine role in that structure threatens to fall away also, as depicted in Dani and Rahne's relationship with subversive sexuality. It is a lot more pronounced and the relationship that forms between them is depicted quite clearly.
In the background of two scenes, we can see the youths watching episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Apparently the only entertainment afforded to the facilities patients. This inclusion echoes back to the comic book mutants relationship to television (then it was 'Cowboy vs Indian' Westerns distressing Dani, and Magnum P.I. enamoring Roberto). You can also feel the inspiration of Buffy throughout, but this is not only a nod to a preceding, influential text. It serves a narrative purpose, giving Rahne exposure to one of popular cultures most recognized and resonant lesbian relationships. Rahne's sexuality becomes entwined with the abuse she faced from the fundamentalist Reverend Craig, who dealt upon her lasting physical abuse and called the emergence of her mutancy-qua-deviant sexuality that of a witch. Her struggle is then one between the side of her that feels free and the side that feels shame. The re-emergence of Rahne's traumatic upbringing, as Dani's nightmare powers bring the ghost of Rahne's abuser back to brand her as a witch once more, doesn't actually factor into this, however. Rahne is just as happy to explore her newfound relationship with Dani. So whilst Dani's powers, throughout this film, perform a literal return of the repressed, it is only Dani and Illyana who face their returned fears head on, fighting to once more repress their nightmares. The rest of the patients are quite content to allow Dani to vanquish her own fears and perform their repression for them.
Dani and Rahne's relationship as seen in the film.
Where 2019's X-Men: Dark Phoenix is a not-so-subtle depiction of the dangers of surplus repression and the necessity of dealing with your trauma, New Mutants follows this legacy, albeit never in such a clear cut manner. Whilst it is the dominant theme throughout the film, the re-imagining of one character particularly dives into this question of repression and living with trauma. Many criticisms have been levied at a sequence of scenes having Illyana Rasputin, perhaps the closest this film has to a conventional action movie protagonist, espouse prejudice against the Native American lead. To many fans, transforming this character into what appears to be a racist bully is the far greater adaptational sin than the whitewashing of other characters. In my view, these criticisms come across as commentators either not fully engaging with the text or expecting these characters to adhere to some traditional superhero morality: something the film simply is not interested in. The comments that Illyana makes, being dismissive of Dani's Native American identity, bringing up crude, childish stereotypes and especially referring to Dani as 'Pocahontas', a preferred insult of not the most mature man in the world, are not simply to characterize her as a dominant, mean girl, but instead are part of this wider thematic exploration of repressed trauma.
Vital here is that Dani herself recognizes and calls out these insults and attempts at dominance for what they are. She specifically mentions that she heard them as a schoolgirl. It is a turning point in the film for Illyana, the deliverer of these petty, racial insults, who is then subsequently shown to be an eternal child; trapped in her traumatic past and incapable of moving forwards. Her coping methods are an abrasive personality and a puppet dragon named Lockheed, who doubles up as an imaginary friend. It is not to say that the cycle of abuse will inevitably turn us into racists, but illuminates instead the film's view of racism; that prejudice such as this is petty, childish, and a flaw in someone's individualized personality, rather than relating to any kind of structural oppression.
Recounting her story, Illyana talks about the abuse she suffered as a child, under what she refers to as the Smiling Men. She would later kill these men, 'one by one'. During the abuse, however, the child would recede into an imaginary world called Limbo- a 'special place' where the Smiling Men could not harm her. In concert with her mutant abilities, this place became real. No longer merely receding to Limbo, she would physically go there and can do so at will. Dani's power to return the repressed has a distinctly opposite effect to Illyana's own power. Where Illyana's 'special place' is made real, what Dani makes real are Illyana's nightmares; the abuse she created Limbo to escape from. As Dani receives a story-line about making peace with her repressed fears, Illyana too finds her source of power from repression itself. Both characters have engaged with their nightmares and resolved to once more push them out of view. The fight that ensues is then one against a child's horrific imaginings of her abusers. Disappearing into her Limbo world once more, Illyana will soon triumphantly emerge, empowered with sword in hand and an actual, realized dragon replacing her puppet. She slays these monstrous imaginings, going on to fight alongside Dani against the manifestation of her own repressed fear: the demon bear.
Their earlier clash, the scene that sparked such controversy, when seen in full and taken in the context of the film is in fact an important connection between the two. A relationship that may not adhere to conventional morality, but nevertheless is mutually beneficial. In true coming-of-age story fashion, their very exposure to new identities better equip them for the trials ahead. For that reason, I can't get behind the outrage at the mere depiction of bigotry. Certainly, it seems strange to watch a film that purports to have horror elements and influences, to only shirk away when the film dares to make you feel uncomfortable.
Importantly, there is a far more egregious instance of Dani's indigenous portrayal, that the proverb oft referred to in the film has more Christian roots than Native American, which demonstrates that Native American identity was poorly researched in the writing of the script. Manifesting on screen in a less than satisfactory way, the identity is nevertheless present and the portrayal of bigotry is not gratuitous, but informative. This is a sticking point, because I would argue that the depiction of Illyana's bigotry is simply not rooted in the same kind of racism that the casting of Reyes and Roberto was. I think it is crass to make such a comparison. If we are to be clear, I don't think this movie is blanket racist so much as it is specifically anti-black in its racism. There is a view, it seems, that the very presence of blackness will impede or supersede the story being told. Because, of course, there are no black stories to be told about trauma, repression or disciplinary institutions.
The New Mutants look to a future that will never come.
In this film, the New Mutants franchise has been re-imagined through the lens of post-racialism; where casting is colorblind, prejudice is a personal character flaw and indigenous belief systems are fictional sources to be adapted as if they were a comic book. The wider X-Men franchise has also been re-imagined to not only explore repression, but to highlight the roles that speciously beneficial disciplinary institutions, like schools and hospitals, play in said repression. But by never diving fully into its horror influences, it gives us a flaccid ending, wherein which the nightmares pull back, our characters neatly repress their fears once more and promptly walk off into a new day.
To ask what happens when we die is a fundamentally narcissistic question. It is this moment, often disguising itself as philosophical query, that we are engaging directly with our inherent existential dread, with the abject fear of ceasing to be and with the futility of interpreting an unintelligible universe. "What happens when we die?" is almost always "What happens when I die? Will the self that exists now persist, in some form?" and so on. It certainly doesn't help that the best medication to prescribe for death anxiety is just basic repression. It is, after all, the one most logical fear. So, try your best not to think about it (Try it out now! Try not to think about dying). And once we retreat from our questions of death, we inevitably switch over to its counterpart, asking "Well, what's the point of life then?", which, of course is always also "What's the point of my life?"
That the anime Angel Beats! leans so heavily into comedic territory makes this all a peculiar segue yet, in its 13 episode run, the series nevertheless sets about confronting these questions; arriving at answers that are, at first, comforting, that subsequently grow more unsettling as the story unfolds, before finally reaching its conclusion. Angel Beats! is an 'isekai' series; one which concerns the transport of characters from 'our' world into a secondary fantasy world. Here, the answer to "What happens when you die?" is that you are transported to the aforementioned secondary world: a world where this particular afterlife takes the form of a purgatorial high school. If your youth was an unhappy one, you may find yourself here. Attend classes, score well in tests and appropriately exhaust yourself with extracurricular activities and you will be able to find contentment in the quotidian nature of an idealised school life. Upon finding this satisfaction, you will then 'move on' from this barrier between worlds, completing the journey from primary world, to secondary world, to the abstract, unknowable next.
That is unless you happen to be a particular kind of student, a student unwilling to fade away, who instead seeks recompense from the cruel, malevolent higher being who foisted an unjust life upon you. Such a group of (un)dead students are the main characters of the series, the "Afterlife Battlefront", and are united by common purpose: to invoke the presence of God and seek their revenge. In doing so, they also desire not to be 'obliterated', as resolving their issues would mean a pass onto the next world and the uncertainty of what lies ahead. Together they defy that which seems the very purpose of this school for the dead.
The setting is an absurd one, a world of no meaning or consequence, which often manifests itself with the invocation of features and terminology from video games: in this world, non-main characters are NPCs, hit counters tally acts of violence and people don't die, they just respawn. From here derives much of the humour, where undying teenagers wage war with increasingly sophisticated weaponry crafted from dirt. But the absurd ultraviolence is not the premier nihilism of such a setting. Rather the series' true villain, beyond angels, shadows and malevolent student body presidents is in fact the inherent lack of a higher purpose. The search for God is always a failure: the students cannot kill God, because he is already dead.
In his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus retells the eponymous Sisyphean myth as a parable for human existence. In the original myth, Sisyphus is cursed to perennially rolling a rock up a hill. Once reaching the summit, the rock would always return to its starting point, and Sisyphus would have to take up his endeavour once again. It is Camus' existentialist declaration, that "One must imagine Sisyphus happy!", that hits at the core of our shared experience. Our lives are too often monotonous, at times they are capricious and cruel, and as such we look to higher authorities for the reassurance that there is some greater plan, or inherent meaning to the universe. And, of course, there is none. There is instead only the struggle to look for meaning.
Imagining Sisyphus happy.
There is much in common between Sisyphus and the cast of Angel Beats! as characters, particularly in their respective denials of death. Sisyphus, whose guile afforded him to cheat death twice over, in one story is said to have kidnapped the very personification of Death itself. So, for a while, humans lived as immortal. With their constant revivals, it would not be a far cry to believe that Angel Beats! took place in such a world where Sisyphus had done precisely that. However, there is one specific aspect of the myth that Angel Beats! places itself in. This purgatory setting is exactly Sisyphus atop the mountain, watching the rock tumble back down, and anticipating his descent. This is someone who, having finished living a life of abstract, unjust pain is being told to get back to the bottom of the hill and start pushing again.
The premier example of this is the case of Yui: the cat-girl singer who makes up for a life confined to bed, reliant on care, with effervescent energy in the afterlife. At four years old, this character was left paralysed after a car accident, the kind of random, injury that is so abstractly cruel we can only call it an "act of God". Yet, in the end, Yui doesn't resolve any lingering emotion by performing those things she couldn't do whilst alive (her post-life bucket list containing playing in a band, performing wrestling moves and sporting feats, alongside getting married). It is instead the fantasy, the capacity to imagine a meaningful life for herself, which allows her to find peace and the resolve to live out a new life. That new life may well consist of the exact same trauma as before, but she will face it regardless. The lesson is not that their lives secretly had meaning all along, nor was it that they were given a space wherein which meaning could be inscribed for them, instead each of these characters required to find meaning for themselves.
Yui resolves to push her rock up the hill once more.
What is important is that, the student-rebels against God did in fact succeed in their purpose: in the Nietzschean sense, God is dead and they killed him. There is no higher power with which they must live their lives genuflecting towards, there is no ethereal mandate to live in accordance to. But the anti-theist trend of Angel Beats!, and the student's mantra of "There is no God, Buddha or Angel", is only the first half of the equation: after the battle is won, and the shackles of a higher power cast off, we are then burdened with absolute, terrifying freedom. In a world where no sense or purpose is given to us, the onus is on us to find whatever sense we can in the abstract. In friendship, in art or in love. In the tiny facets of life that seems so petty in the face of total cosmic annihilation. It is a bloodcurdling prospect, but it needn't be. Because, is it not true that however scary the thought of succumbing to the void is, it is that much worse to have lived a life unfulfilled? It is only ever we, ourselves, who can delineate our own reason for being, and even though we may never quite figure it out, we can find meaning in the very struggle for it.
Camus, A. (2013). "The Myth of Sisyphus" in The Myth Of Sisyphus. New York: Random House.
Both emerging from the Italian film industry, albeit at different epochal contexts, the neorealist movement and the cinema of horror/giallo auteur Dario Argento begs comparison. Whilst they ostensibly seem worlds apart, these two distinct perspectives on film exist in dialectical conversation with one another, with Argento clearly decrying the foundational ethos of the preceding generation of Italian cinema.
Where film critic and theorist Andre Bazin saw realism and immersion as film's ultimate goal (1967a), Argento is far more interested in providing a cinema of spectacle and whilst Argento's early films in the giallo sub-genre (the proto-slasher films that often invoke the works of Agatha Christie) are certainly more tame than his later experimentation with technicolor intensity and supernatural storytelling, they possess a disregard for stern realism all the same. For example, the passage of time, which in Bazin's formulation should be continuous and naturalistic (1967a), is played with particularly in Tenebre (1982). Scenes play out of order as flashbacks disguised as dream sequences slowly unveil the film's secret.
The flashback-qua-dream sequence in Tenebre (1982). This is perhaps the most transgressive instance of that giallo trope which emerges perennially throughout Argento's films, wherein which an element shown early in the narrative becomes pivotal to solving the core mystery. This is more obvious elsewhere in the film, particularly when the young Gianni attempts to remember the telling detail he had repressed from viewing one of the murders, but in the flashback-qua-dream sequence particularly the flow of naturalistic time is disrupted.
This echoes similar moments in Argento's directorial debut, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (Argento, 1970), and his wider oeuvre, even playing a role in the supernatural gialliSuspiria (Argento, 1977) and Inferno (Argento, 1980). In Suspiria though, Argento disrupts normative time in another way: by utilising the soundtrack. Goblin's prog-rock accompaniment blares out "Witch" for the audience, long before the story the character's suspect the secret of the Tanzakademie, ensuring that Suspiria presents itself as a non-chronological experience. I think we can say that the use of music in Argento's cinema is also decidedly anti-realist in its implementation, as often the line is blurred between diegetic and non-diegetic sound (notably in Tenebre's use of classical music).
Rose is attacked in Inferno (1980). Whilst Suspiria and Inferno are both anti-realist in their supernatural subject matter, I think that's less relevant to the Argento rejection of the neorealist tendency than a wholesale commitment to "simultaneous cohesion and incoherence" (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 19) that permeates the giallo and its supernatural counterparts alike. That being said, the supernatural subject matter, and the intention to cultivate a Gothic fairytale aesthetic, accommodated a space for Argento to push against realism in fiercer ways, with Suspiria arguably being the zenith: "Every facet of Suspiria is laced with a knowing self-awareness that not only shuns but also aggressively mocks any attempt at realism" (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 14).
Reflecting on the "pure" cinema of De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Bazin highlighted that there was "[n]o more actors, no more story, no more sets, which is to say that in the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality there is no more cinema" (Bazin, 1967b: 60). Suspiria doesn't cast non-actors, in fact it casts actors with a subtextual specificity. Arguably bringing an audience out of the immersion, but operating in a sphere of recognisable consciousness and signifying meta-narrative traits, Argento cast Jessica Harper as Suzy Bannion, who has become known for presenting "characters that straddled innocence and experience" (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 33), a relative neophyte to co-stars and cinematic icons Joan Bennett and Alida Valli. There is potentially something to be said about the resemblance between Harper and a young Joan Bennett, but both of the older women are utilised to play homage to the noir genre and their roles within it (Schulte-Sasse, 2002).
However, interestingly, Argento doesn't seem to reject the realist ethos with regards to location shooting so vehemently. He utilises some shots on location, notably Berlin's Königsplatz, but it's important to note that even here the reality we see is distorted and warped, akin to the meticulous set design that elsewhere invokes surreal, dreamlike qualities.
The iconic line in Suspiria, suggesting that "bad luck isn’t brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds" (Argento, 1977), is considered by Heller-Nicholas to be rendered totally false by the subsequent discussion with an occult expert and the 'reality' of the film's witches (2015); I would disagree, as I think the line instead operates as one face of the film's duality, and a key component in the blurring of the fantastical realm and the real one. That the witch of Suspiria appears to be real belies how fundamentally unreal the rest of the film is designed and, from her first steps into Berlin, protagonist Suzy Bannion is confronted with a warped fairytale world of artifice. Meticulously designed sets and non-naturalistic lighting choices can be read as eschewing the idea that any of this is really happening.
Meticulously constructed set design delivering an eerie, dreamlike visage in Suspiria (1977).
As the film delivers an eerie effect of the nightmarish unconscious brought violently to the forefront, Professor Milius, who seeks to disprove his cynical colleague Mandel, does not go against the earlier statement, but rather aligns himself with the broken mirror, rather than the broken mind. Suzy is trapped in a nightmarish hellscape, caught in the battle between philosophies of the real and the fantastical; she is free from the nightmare only once she synthesises both viewpoints, that it may well be the case that nothing is real, but she must act as if it's real nonetheless.
If Argento's films are concerned with making sense of that which cannot be understood then they are in direct conflict with the neorealist desire to be immersive and its dealings with understandable, even universal, experiences. In fact, in Tenebre (Argento, 1982), Arthur Conan-Doyle is invoked to this effect: "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth". This, perhaps, is Argento's manifesto, his guiding principle, in his surrealist approach. If the approaches differ, I think we should look to where the contexts converge, particularly with the politics of fascism. To the neorealists, fascism was pertinently present, always only slightly out of view. For Argento though, enough time had passed for a Europe in thrall to fascist fervour to transition into history and, then, into fantasy. Where neorealism sought to explore societal redefinitions in fascism's wake, Argento invokes fascistic (both Italian and German) historical context to blur the lines of the actual and the macabre. In the aforementioned Königsplatz, the fantastical invocation of history turns a blind man's dog upon him, murdering him brutally. Witchcraft is linked to the natural in Argento's two supernatural classics, with the possessed dog and maggot-infestation in Suspiria and murderous cats and rats in Inferno; it is the consigning of fascism to regrettable, but naturalised, history that is at the core of its re-emergence in violent form. This elucidates a key difference in the two cinematic portrayals of fascism: neorealism is concerned with the structural violence committed on the subject of (post-)fascism and the scars it leaves behind, where as Argento invokes it as a fearsome return of the repressed.
"[I]t is clear that if we wish to remain on the level of art, we must stay in the realm of imagination. I ought to be able to look upon what takes place on the screen as a simple story, an evocation which never touches the level of reality, at least unless I am to be made an accomplice after the fact of an action or at least of an emotion which demands secrecy for its realisation. This means that the cinema can say everything, but not show everything. There are no sex situations-moral or immoral, shocking or banal, normal or pathological-whose expression is a priori prohibited on the screen, but only on condition that one resorts to the capacity for abstraction in the language of cinema, so that the image never takes on a documentary quality."
(Bazin, 1967b: 174)
Berlin's Königsplatz in Suspiria (1977).
Bazin decried the making visual of sexuality and violence, if films were to possess the qualities of art. I'm sure Argento would disagree. The differences and divergent points continue: where the neorealists looked towards new, post-war configurations of masculinity, Argento seems more concerned with femininity. Neorealism took its inspiration from the streets, embodying documentary quality, and Argento took his inspiration from literary works and high art. "Argento's narrative universe is one where logic and reason are destabilised and subverted," (Heller-Nicholas, 2015: 32), where as neorealist filmmakers, such as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, had depicted the logical, sequential consequences to actions. Through all the minutia, Argento has placed primacy on the spectacle, an act that any neorealist would consider perverse.
Works Cited:
Bazin, A. (1967). What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bazin, A. (1967). What is Cinema? Volume 2. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Heller-Nicholas, A. (2015) Devil's Advocates: Suspiria. Great Britain: Auteur.
Schulte-Sasse, L. (2002). The "mother" of all horror movies. [Online] kinoeye. Available at: http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/schultesasse11.php [Accessed on: 07/04/2019]
Films Cited:
Suspiria (1977) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: SEDA Spettacoli.
L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo (1970) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: SEDA Spettacoli.
Inferno (1980) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: Produzioni Intersound.
Tenebre (1982) [film] Directed by D. Argento. Italy: Sigma Cinematografica.
Criticism of the slasher genre often emerges from feminist framework, which often sees them as little more than gratuitous displays of power over the bodies of women, culminating in the approval of a 'good' femininity in the unsullied Final Girl trope. I would argue that there is more to the portrayal of youth in these films than merely the opportunity for some fetishistic titillation. If horror films are truly concerned, at least primarily, with a psychological return of the repressed, then it is no wonder that their focus has come onto increasingly younger casts of characters.
This youth is a transgressive one; one which emerged in a bastard world of their parent's making and responded to it with disdain. The subsequent generation would eschew the normality of their parents Americana, with the war in Vietnam putting a clear conclusion to any post-war optimism left for that generation's youth.
"The seams of American identity began to give way. Growing numbers in the civil rights and antiwar movements began by rejecting American practices, went on to reject American ideals, and soon, since America was its ideals, rejected the conventional versions of American identity altogether." (Gitlin, 1995: 68)
Wes Craven's Last House On The Left (1972) provided a critical lens of the end of the preceding generation, but the genre's development past that (moving closer to, and into, the 1980s) set out a series of horrors that didn't just mediate the violence committed by one generation unto another, but gave that generation an opportunity to fight back. It is in light of this that I want to propose the Final Girl not as a misogynistic trapping, but a performance of the genre's moral ambiguities. Particularly, moral ambiguities in line with, not only the sociopolitical context around the production of these films, but those which also mediate particularly intergenerational anxieties.
"What the previous generation repressed in us, we, in turn, repress in our children, seeking to mold them into replicas of ourselves, perpetrators of a discredited tradition." (Wood, 2003: 66).
The horror films of the 80s are similarly concerned with the repression of previous generations, but they develop this towards its next logical step, by freeing the upcoming generation from the shackles of that repression and casting them as the leads, rather than as tragic victims. When John Carpenter defies readings of Halloween's (Carpenter, 1980) female victims as reaping what their sexuality has sewn, he is positioning them alongside his main character, not against her. Within this pantheon of youth. he even claims to not recognise the non-sexual, purely virginal Laurie Stode that critics have read her as:
"They [the critics] completely missed the boat there, I think. Because if you turn it around, the one girl who is the most sexually uptight just keeps stabbing this guy with a long knife. She's the most sexually frustrated. She's the one that killed him. Not because she's a virgin, but because all that repressed energy starts coming out. She uses all those phallic symbols on the guy... She and the killer have a certain link: sexual repression." (Carpenter qtd. in Clover, 1992: 48-49)
Laurie Strode from Halloween (1978).Concurrent to this, Carol Clover also suggests that a shared masculinity also links the Monster with the Final Girl (1992: 49) and both these facets are instances of a repressed, returned. Outside of the parameters of a reactionary, judicial killing of sexual women, the Victims of the Monster express their own repression in taboo female sexuality and in refusing to perform their sexual femininity in the expectedly docile way. They do not fear men in a way they may have been expected to. This isn't a sign of youthful idiocies, of shallow, air-headed women whose lack of awareness of the danger around them signify them as ripe for retribution, but is rather a signifier for how these character's defy generational expectations. They no longer engage in acts of repression.
While the Monster seems to police the bodies of these transgressive women, the Monster himself fits into this formulation of the repressed, returned. This has tended to be the focus of writing on Horror cinema, discussions around how each Monster exists outside of normative hetero-patriarchy, how he is often a materialisation of that which we, the audience, have repressed, and so on. Repression of child sexuality, for example comes to the forefront in Halloween (1978). Repressed female sexual energy, or creativity, is positioned directly against the legitimated female labour in the film, as sex always seems to get in the way of babysitting. In the childlike perspective of Meyers, it is the abdication of babysitting duty that seems to be what antagonises the most.
What I'm interested in, however, is the convergence of these aspects. It is important to note that the Final Girl is similarly transgressive, insofar that her performances of masculinity (the tomboyish nature that the Final Girl's have in common, to varying degrees) and bisexuality, have been hitherto repressed. Once denied "drives culturally associated with masculinity" (Wood, 2003: 64), these are now brought to the forefront by the Monster. So the Victims, Monster and Final Girl all exist outside of conventional normality. The actions of the Monster, for example, are not merely those of an agent of the repressed arriving as arbiter of punishment, nor is it simply the revenge of a societal outcast. Instead, in these films, we see an entire sphere of societal transgressions played out against the previous generation's normative safe space: white suburbia. Heroes and villains alike are cast as separate from the normative order, which is presented as ignorant and ineffective.
The reveal at the end of Prom Night (1980) takes a meta approach to this, but delivers a flaccid, irresponsible parental order nonetheless. Engaged with our knowledge of Michael Meyers, escaped mental patient and horror villain, the film shows the police in search for the danger they (and the audience) expect. When he is found, not anywhere near the location of the titular high-school prom night, the police believe the danger to be averted and drop their guard. Of course, the threat is located elsewhere and the police have proved themselves to be no more adept at protecting the younger generation than that generation is at protecting itself. The identity of the killer, Kim's brother, further blurs the line between the Victims, Final Girl and Monster: in the slasher follow up to Halloween (1978) the Monster is no longer clearly Othered (the general plot of a covered up murder coming back to haunt people also fits nicely with the idea of the return of the repressed).
The killer attacks the prom in Prom Night (1980).So it is particularly the police force and the nuclear family model which are shown incapable of providing moral authority or physical safety, with these two artefacts coalescing neatly in Nightmare on Elm Street's (1984) police family unit. Whilst Nancy's father cannot mobilise the police force to protect the street's youth, Nancy's mother's moral authority is stripped away by alcohol abuse and the part she played in her neighbourhood's original sin, in the creation of Freddy Krueger. In one reading, we can see the parental generation's failings as the reason that the film has no happy ending, when Freddy's final scare is to take his revenge on Nancy's mother, but I think the loss of the 'happy' ending actually occurs earlier- precisely, it happens when Nancy rejects any of the power and dominance that the nightmarish Freddy may have over her. Robin Wood describes the 'happy ending' as a "restoration of repression" (2003: 66). By sheer power of will, it is this which Nancy can not allow to happen. She takes her transgressive bisexuality out of the hands of an abusive force and restores, not repression, but transgression, by returning her youthful, sexual friends alongside her banishment of her harasser. The reneging of Horror films, since Night Of The Living Dead (1968), to provide such a 'Hollywood'-style, conventionally happy ending, is where I read a progressive tendency in the genre: the refusal to restore the repression transforms the film-viewing experience away from something fleeting and escapist, becoming a more tactile text.
Nancy turns her back on her abuser, denying him his power, in A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984).That the Final Girl heroines rarely seem able to totally restore the normative, repressive status quo positions their role as transgressive characters as a progressive moment; in spite of their intent and desire towards a world where the repressed is restored, they can never go home again. It is here that I refer back to this post's title: The Final Monster. In my view, the Final Girl may be a heroic trope, but she should be read to be just as transgressive as any Monster she comes up against. The film language itself tells us this, when “we are linked, [with a first person camera perspective], with the killer in the early part of the film, usually before we have seen him directly and before we have come to know the Final Girl in any detail” (Clover, 1992: 45) and when our perspective switches over to the Final Girl entirely by the film's conclusion. She is inextricably linked to monster-hood. Not a bastion of purity and conservatism, she is seen rejecting the values and beliefs of previous generations and their halcyon views of youth. She also exists on the other side of trauma, often with no satisfying conclusion to her story, offering a nebulous fictional zone wherein which she can be doomed and liberated simultaneously.
And, of course, that's why I have no interest in watching any of the sequels to these films.
Works Cited:
Clover, C. (1992). Men women and chainsaws: Gender in the modern horror film. London: British Film Institute.
Gitlin, T. (1995). The Twilight of Common Dreams. New York: Henry Holt.
Wood, R. (2003). Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan ...and beyond(Expanded and rev. ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Films Cited: Halloween (1978) [film] Directed by J. Carpenter. United States: Compass International Pictures.
Last House On The Left (1972) [film] Directed by W. Craven. United States: Sean S. Cunningham Films.
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) [film] Directed by W. Craven. United States: New Line Cinema.
Night Of The Living Dead (1968) [film] Directed by G. A. Romero. United States: Image Ten.
Prom Night (1980) [film] Directed by P. Lynch. Canada: AVCO Embassy Pictures.
The Universal Monster version of the werewolf seen in The Wolfman (1941) may not have been the first cinematic werewolf, but it certainly remains one of our foremost visions of lycanthropy on the silver screen. Or it did, until Michael J. Fox taped hair to basketball shorts and changed our view of the horror mainstay forever.
Teen Wolf (1985) was not the first film to greet the horror icons with humour and flippancy, as it was with drive-in theatre B-movies that first brought those horror tropes into a recognisable teen movie formulation. AIP films, such as I Was A Teenage Werewolf (1957)/Frankenstein (1957) and Blood of Dracula (1957), were released to tap into the drive-in zeitgeist and brought the phenomenon of a monster hunting angsty teenagers to the exploitation scene.
The teenager, as a subculture, has been intrinsically tied to the development of modern capitalism, particularly being read as an emergent feature of America's post-war economic boom. These teen-horror films appealed to the newly economically liberated teenager subculture, sympathising particularly with the angst of their self-declaration. In I Was A Teenage Werewolf, it is the sentiments of teen peers which motivates the protagonist to seek psychiatric help, rather than any adult attempt in coercing him to 'adjust' (and it is the very adult institution of psychotherapy which inevitably betrays him). The film proved a success for this portrayal of teens who teens themselves could relate to, but the film was in a way quite cynical: it may have sympathised with the teenager, but it also saw the subculture as an unfortunate byproduct of the development of modernity.
In the conflict between the futurist scientist and the nostalgic suburbia that his experiment-gone-awry (the titular Werewolf) wreaks havoc on, the film professes a strong cautionary tale against progress: "It's not for man to interfere with the ways of God." The adolescence that the new teenager is exposed to is depicted as the unfortunate offspring of the modern society/depravity that emerged alongside America's new primacy as a global power.
This struggle with modernity and the conditions of hedonistic capitalism would persist for as long as viable alternatives made themselves clear: naturally, it was the era of Reaganism, neoliberalism and late capitalism that would transform I Was A Teenage Werewolf into Teen Wolf, a film where there is no longer an alternative, no deviant or subversive element left to be feared. As yesterday's fears dissipated, so too did yesterday's monsters.
Where I Was A Teenage Werewolf ends with its teen wolf shot dead, and a lament over man's hubris in interfering with the territory of God, Teen Wolf straight up transforms into a basketball film for its final fifteen minutes. This was the journey that the supernatural film had taken: from the indisputable, pre-modern fear of the supernatural in The Wolfman, to a more nebulous fear of a modern degenerative, delinquent tendency in I Was A Teenage Werewolf, culminating in Teen Wolf's post-modern absence of fear. The subversive element, the monster, is no longer to be feared, since it can so easily be subsumed into the normative order. Michael J. Fox's wolf form causes no existential crisis for his fellow students or for his community, rather they prefer the wolf to his human form. The wolf is cool, adorned on t-shirts and becomes the school's new mascot. Does this not perfectly mediate the way in which late-capitalism has proven to assimilate all counter-cultural forces into its hegemonic block?
And Teen Wolf was not the only Horror-Comedy to demonstrate this inefficacy of outdated myth. The unrepentantly silly and absurdist 1993 RomZomCom My Boyfriend's Back, fits nicely into this frame. This RomZomCom, a term attributed to and popularised by Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead (2004) simply meaning Romantic-Zombie-Comedy, is unlike much of its peers; there is no modicum of fear to be found in its depictions of zombieism. It rarely, if ever, feels like a film actually about zombies. There's no slow, intense walk of the newly awakened dead, nor the frenzy rush of infected runners, but rather a diffident, inoffensive teenager (who just so happens to have a craving for flesh, but who are we to judge?). As such, I find the film makes for much more interesting comparison when placed alongside a more optimistic film like Teen Wolf than to any other comedic zombie affair.
For one, it seems quaint and cheesy in the face of modern successes, like Warm Bodies (2013),which it seems to have much in common with, and Zombieland (2009),which deliver their humour without compromising their status as a clear zombie film. More than this though, My Boyfriend's Back, like Teen Wolf before it, utilises the classic genre trope as a universal sign of misunderstanding. Werewolves and zombies (and later, vampires and ogres) are the deviant sexuality, or the radical communist, who we used to fear before capitalism made it clear that it would not be toppled. We now instead freely embrace them as part of the cultural salad bowl.
The film is unique in just how deftly it delivers its absurd everyday as part of its eschewal of the classic horror trope. Johnny Dingle's return from the dead is only ever met with slight surprise, as if he had gotten out of school an hour early rather than emerged from the grave and each line of dialogue is lent a pitch perfect deadpan that stuns you into bewilderment; watch the film and tell me that it doesn't leave you speechless, mouth agape, as you wonder just how on earth this got made. It doesn't do this by being shocking, but by being so unshocking that you can't help but be bemused.
Whenever it seems like Johnny Dingle might face consequences for his cannibalistic tendencies, he is swiftly forgiven after a polite apology or a romantic declaration. As his longstanding crush falls increasingly and illogically further in love with a gradually decaying corpse, she fetishises his very undead quality to a point where you have to question whether their relationship as two living people could actually work out, since the living appear to be so much more dysfunctional than the dead.
Its dream sequences operate for the sake of a gag or two and little else, proving to us that there are no hidden, psychic demons haunting the film. Yet, the film itself nevertheless has an almost constant dreamlike quality- where the most peculiar of things may happen, yet they persist as if they are normal, everyday occurrences. For some inexplicable reason, the majority of the films exposition is done through comic book panel sequences. It is never made clear why! I have no idea why! But this film defies such mundane questions as 'why'?
Much like Teen Wolf, the horror trope is burrowed deep under quirk and a comedic, consumerist optimism; an optimism wherein which the features of the horror movie are neatly resolved by its conclusion. In the post-modern revisitation of horror icons and tropes, there is nothing to fear. The second chance at real life that Johnny Dingle receives in the film's happy Hollywood ending is a negation of any of the preceding zombie deviancy: not just in the film proper, but across the genre as a whole. Sorry for the misunderstanding, we used to be afraid of zombies, but we know better now.
My Boyfriend's Back may be an incredibly dated film, but it is also a film that seems strangely ahead of its time and in need of immediate reappraisal. Watching it is a genuine experience: it's vapid, yet deeply funny; it is speciously a black comedy, but without any blackness; it is plain and inoffensive, yet, at the same time, incredibly surreal. It's also perfect as a Halloween movie for people who are too easily spooked.
Panned at release and more or less forgotten by the majority of audiences, I can safely say that this is the only film I will be recommending to people for the foreseeable future.
Convenience Store Boyfriends is the anime adaptation of the B's-Log Comic mixed-media project, having first been realised in prose and audio drama. It is this cynical, detached approach to storytelling that I think has caused the production to concern itself with the modern sensibilities of its audience. It is a series that appears to have been designed by committee, looking to utilise its high school genre, setting and character, to best appeal to, not only the romance anime fan, but a younger, more socially aware generation. It is in the conflict between these two demographics that we see the failure of Convenience Store Boyfriends' reconciliation. In one of the focal romantic relationships, between the character Honda, a popular soccer player, and Mihashi, the stalwart "Class Rep", we see the struggle between playing into safe generic tropes and appealing to an audience that has long moved past them.
As it has been said that Japan is still some time away from its "#MeToo" moment, it is noteworthy that, at least for a little while, Convenience Store Boyfriends put issues of consent and harassment right at the forefront of its depiction of this relationship. Honda is berated for his retrograde attempts to impress and romance the Class Rep, who often makes it clear that these are unwanted advances. It is in the return to trope where this all falls apart. Due to its nature as a romance anime, and its unwillingness to make any major diversions from its tropes, the Class Rep soon gains the confidence to accept the previously undesired advances. Issues of consent abound in the discussion of the anime trope, "tsundere", used to refer to female characters who disguise their true feelings behind layers of animosity, that the male protagonist must strip back in order to pursue the desired relationship. It's a female character seen across not just anime, but throughout all of literature, but it is the anime tsundere who is most well-known for their predictable behaviours and for promoting morally dubious wish fulfilment narratives. This is the character archetype that the Class Rep is forced to become because of Convenience Store Boyfriends' need to fall back on trope.
Yet those early moments, where it does seem like the series wants to offer us something interesting, were extremely exciting. Not just as viewers of television, but as citizens; for its, otherwise unimpressive, early episodes seemed to suggest that serious social change was taking hold and that the dangerous romantic tropes of yesteryear were being cast-aside for a new look at how modern relationships can, and should, be formed. So when this was done away with, Convenience Store Boyfriends' actually yielded from me its biggest emotional response. My sense of disappointment was palpable.
So, what does the failed reconciliation of trope then tell us? Is the failure to reconcile the tsundere trope with modern sensibilities down to the quality of this production or is it due to the irreconcilable nature of these tropes? I would argue that it is a little of both. Certainly Convenience Store Boyfriends' is no major piece of revisionary work. For example, the tsundere is not the only trope to be promised subversion and then remain unchanged in Convenience Store Boyfriends' (though it is certainly the most prominent and worthy of inspection). The step-sister romance, the strict household impeding romance, the school festival, the one that got away and so on, all make an appearance in this series that wants to play it by the numbers that no one uses anymore. The series has some very weak, uninspired storytelling, that means they can never get across their new perspective on tired tropes. More than that though, I would say that the attempt was doomed from the start. Even if the studio behind Convenience Store Boyfriends' wanted to pursue a new approach to the romance genre, they could never do so while still attached to tropes like the tsundere. I'd like to see an expectation-subverting story, where the person who thinks they are the romantic lead is shut down for misogynistic behaviour, but that show simply wouldn't be a romance show any longer. The tropes and genre effects are simply not fit for use when it comes to creating romantic stories for modern sensibilities.
The show does have one really nice song though. And a plot twist that I'm sure the whole board room were patting themselves on the back for.
