The brilliance and boringness of Hawkeye

Matt Fraction's Hawkeye is the sort of comic book that everyone in comics is talking about. It's a superhero comic book--sort of. As the opening lines to each issue tells us, Hawkeye is the non-powered, sharpshooter for the Avengers, and this is what he does when he's not doing Avenger-y things.

As people have pointed out, Hawkeye is less about the wish fulfillment that goes with superheroes, than he is about something like wish bafflement. He's a normal guy, who happens to have a barely epic skill--sharpshooting--whose weapon of choice is the bow and arrow, and who has some trick arrows. (But not like the really awesome toys and gadgets of Batman. Hawkeye is a working-class or low-class character, without any of the Richie Rich fantasies of a Batman or even a Green Arrow.) Who would ever want to be Hawkeye?

Hawkeye may be a hero when he's with the Avengers, but when he's off the clock, we see him as a guy with problems, both emotional and physical. It's the kind of side-story that gains resonance and is only possible as a side story to other stories going on elsewhere. It's like the first "Blink" episode of Doctor Who, where the Doctor is involved in other adventures just on the periphery of the episode; or "The Zeppo" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: because we know what sort of stories are going on off-page, this comic can feel free to go off the usual path.

And it really does, in some great ways. The first issue, for instance, shows Hawkeye dealing with some unscrupulous landlords, who happen to be Eastern European gangsters who wear tracksuits all the time and say "bro" most of the time. (In an interview, Fraction notes that the "bro" joke came out of the fact that we don't really care what the mooks say in a gang fight: we know they're just going to threaten Hawkeye and we know that they're not going to win.) Fraction plays with time here, flipping back and forth between the aftermath of the adventure and how Hawkeye gets involved, which is mostly interesting for how great the transitions are.

For another example of the fireworks brilliance of Hawkeye, there's issue #11, which tells the whole story from the POV of the dog that Hawkeye has adopted. There's a Far Side-level joke where the dog can't understand anything people say except for certain words: "bad dog," "pizza," etc. There's a Chris Ware-esque iconography as the dog smells certain things in certain places. And there's even some advancement of the plot as we see Hawkeye and his brother and Hawkeye's young partner/replacement (also known as Hawkeye).

But for all the critical acclaim of this comic and of issue #11--it's up for and I think will win the 2014 Eisner for best single issue--there's something a little too clever, sometimes, particularly when it comes to time games. I've already mentioned how #1 jumps back and forth, which is fun, and a nice statement of how Fraction will do things differently here. But does it add much? Similarly, issue #6 plays with time, covering several out-of-order days in the lackluster life of a guy with issues; but that out-of-orderness feels like a dodge, a way to gussy up something that isn't very interesting. I can kind of stretch and say that Clint Barton has trouble with cause-and-effect--he hovers between loveable rogue and ne'er-do-well, making people's lives more complicated rather than better--and so that's why the story is told out-of-order. But it feels like a stretch.

And while "Blink" and "The Zeppo" were fun single issue stories parallel to a whole other story, Hawkeye has some trouble as an ongoing comic--which is probably why several of the later issues ditch Clint entirely and follow his protege as she makes a way for herself in L.A.

Why aren't you writing (#2) ... Hollow Earth noir?

A lot of genres get defined by their trappings rather than by the real skeleton going on underneath: it's like defining birds as "things with feathers" and then freaking out over dinosaurs with feathers. Sure the feathers--or ray guns--serve some purpose, but you can't entirely divorce that surface trope from the purpose. So all those cyberpunk stories were people wear leather and chrome for the simple fact of wearing leather and chrome--that's like gluing feathers to your dog. It's kind of pointless and kind of gross.

So: noir. Dark streets. Trenchcoats. PIs with shadowy pasts and hearts of gold. Sure, absolutely, but underneath those feathers, noir is about an uncertain and largely untrustworthy world. The conspiracy goes all the way to the top. The police are in on it. The love of your life will betray you. The noir world is one where the ground under you is uncertain, metaphorically.

So let's make that metaphor real, yay! (I love making metaphors real. If someone says, "Her world exploded," I want to see chunks of world flying off into space.) We don't see a lot of Hollow Earth stories these days, stories that aren't just "Let's go underground," but "Let's go underground and find a whole civilization there." In the past, we had Edward Bulwer-Lytton had The Coming Race in 1871; and Edgar Rice Burroughs had At the Earth's Core in 1914; and most famously(?) Richard Sharpe Shaver had the Shaver Mystery starting in 1943, which hovered uncomfortably between fiction and non-fiction, since he claimed the evil underground civilization was real. (Also, you could reach this world through several secret elevators, though considering the underground "dero" liked to rape and murder people, I'm not sure why you would want to go there.) But that's all old; it's well worth revisiting this subgenre of Hollow Earth stories (or "subterranean fiction").

Ergo: hollow world noir is a world where the ground under your feet is uncertain--because under the ground are a group of people who have a hidden agenda. (Plus: you get the fun of having someone say "This goes all the way to the top!" and then having to go all the way to the bottom.) Now there are a lot of ways to approach this: perhaps a noir LA detective discovers a murder that eventually leads him to the underground conspiracy. Or some people in your town are collaborating with the Hollow Earth gangsters. Or a man without options starts working for a mysterious man who just might not be from the Surface World.

Why aren't you writing... Hollow Earth noir?

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 225: Thornton Wilder, The Drunken Sisters (#225)

Thornton Wilder, "The Drunken Sisters" (1957) from Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater:

If all you know of Thornton Wilder is Our Town--which is all I know of him, besides the other LoA pieces of his I've read--"The Drunken Sisters" may seem a little odd: it's a Greek tragedy about Apollo trying to save the life of King Admetus, mostly (it seems) because of his affection for Queen Alcestis. He tricks the Fates by getting them drunk and then tricks them into a riddle contest, which is itself a trick since the riddle's answer is impossible without knowing who the riddler is.

There's some echo of the Wilder "just a stage" writing: the Fates throw invisible strings to lasso Apollo, in a scene that might be funny; while Apollo comments to the audience directly.

It's a fine short play, but I wonder more about the background here, as hinted at by the headnote: Wilder was always interested in Greek mythology and wanted to write a satyr play (the short play that followed the longer tragedy, often playing for laughs the earlier tragedy). Which means that this is Wilder's idea of comedy? Clearly not, but it's interesting to imagine him starting out comedic and ending up tragic, if that's what happened. (It happens to all of us at some time.)

Get Shorty vs. Wanted

By now I hope you'd have faith that I could use enough tortured logic to connect these two films: one, a mobbed-up showbiz comedy about a loan shark following the money when he really would rather be in the movie business; the other about a sad-sack office drone who discovers he's really one of the secret masters/caretakers of the world and then discovers that the group is really villainous. One is from a book by Elmore Leonard, one of the masters of the underworld comedy; the other is from a comic book written by Mark Miller, an author who has rapidly fallen down the hole of self-parody and empty spectacle at the best of times. (At the worst of times, his spectacle is actually reprehensible rather than empty.)

So, two radically different films that are connected by... the fact that I watched them both this week. Sure, we could notice other similarities and telling differences: both Chili Palmer (Get Shorty) and Wesley Gibson (Wanted) are people in new worlds, with Chili learning about the high life and low-lives of Hollywood and Wesley learning about the secret assassin conspiracy that keeps the world balanced. And maybe each has some bit of moral ambiguity, with bad people who might be good.

But really, what sets them apart is more interesting and more instructive. Get Shorty is fun and funny, with well-structured transitions between scenes; Wanted is an adenoidal mess, that revels in disconnected and dumb set-pieces--train crash, car flipping assassination, naked Angelina Jolie--rather than giving us any character or reason to care. The humor of Wanted is spiteful in those few scenes that could actually be said to be funny, which results in that oddest of combinations: the popcorn spectacle that takes itself too seriously.

And worse than all that: it's boring.

Part of that boredom is baked into the premise, if you're a nihilistic jerkoff: Wesley Gibson is a sad-sack loser who has to learn that he matters and also where he comes from--which means that his triumph looks a lot like beating up other people and getting awesome revenge, bro, because he matters. And so the movie moves predictably through the numbers: Wesley is victimized, Wesley learns the truth, Wesley won't take it anymore, blah blah blah. It's the cinematic equivalent of a toddler throwing a tantrum: I MATTER! Sure, fine, but you're not the only one.

Whereas Get Shorty particularly excels because everyone is given their moment in the spotlight. Sure, some people are dumb, some are venal, some are violent--but they all come across like real people. In fact, Chili Palmer's secret weapon is that he cares about people: he'll get a tip from a "widow" because he's a good guy, he'll get extra help from a stuntman-turned-enforcer-and-dad by treating him like a human being, etc.

So in a way, Chili Palmer succeeds for the same reason that Get Shorty succeeds: because he and it accepts that other people matter, too.

Why aren't you writing (#1) ... Modern airship boys tales?

Welcome to my new and hopefully batshit new series on genres that you should be writing. Why should you be writing these new genres? I don't know, really--largely these are genre mash-ups that fit together really well; or, as in today's entry, it's a rediscovery and update of a forgotten subgenre.

Airship boys. It wasn't that much a subgenre and it's pretty much what it says on the tin: these are the boys' own adventure stories of a group of adventurous boys who adventure in airships. Of course, Thomas Pynchon got here before us, since his Against the Day features a hilarious and accurate depiction of a group of chums going on adventures. (Naturally, they have a dog mascot.)

If you must have some self-improvement from this post, here it is:

1. airship tales clearly come out of the Edisonade tradition in American dime novels, where (for instance) some young boy creates a cool invention (often a deadly vehicle) and goes on an adventure with some other people (mostly boys, occasionally with some man or two, occasionally an uneducated and folksy black servant);
2. these adventures often take the form of going into the wilderness and fighting with outlaws or with dangerously savage native people;
3. and there weren't actually a lot of airship boys stories, probably because the Wright Bros. invented the cooler heavier-than-air plane. 
1. So Harry Lincoln Sayler wrote a series called The Airship Boys and the first title was The Airship Boys; or, The quest of the Aztec Treasure (1909)..., but the second title was The Airship Boys adrift; or, Saved by an aeroplane (1910).

So let's take this central premise--a group of chums with an airship get into various adventures--and let's give it a modern update. Why should the chums be all dudes? Why should the helper adult be a folksy black man? Why should the adventures be largely around treasure hunts into "savage" native territory? Why should the plundering, almost piratical boys be the heroes of the stories?

Why aren't you writing a modern update to airship boys tales?

Update: As friend of the blog Summer points out, there is a tradition of girls aviation stories, as seen here (largely from the 1930s, though there's at least one series from the 1910s, the same time as Harry Lincoln Sayler is writing The Airship Boys stories). (Bonus: the early stuff is out of copyright and easily available online.) So, when you're writing modern airship girl stories, you have the double pleasure of pushing against the out-dated boys' Edisonade; and updating a pre-existing girl aviator genre.

Reference: "Airship Boys," The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 224: Zora Neale Hurston, The Fire and the Cloud (#224)

Zora Neale Hurston, "The Fire and the Cloud" (1934) from Zora Neale Hurston: Novels & Stories:

Just the other day--probably because it was Passover--I thought about how the African-American community during the 19th century adopted both the story of the Exodus (slaves traveling to God-granted freedom) and an inverse American Revolution whereby British Canada became a land of freedom rather than the oppression of taxes).

(And here let's have a timely note about the bullshit "patriotism" of Cliven Bundy: a man who certain conservative forces have raised up because of his denial of the Federal government and his refusal to pay taxes, as if that was all it took to replay the Revolution. Of course, the Founding Fathers revolted against taxation without representation; and we all know how Washington handled the Whiskey Rebellion, where another white guy refused to pay his taxes. (Short version: Washington used the army to intimidate the rebellion.) As someone who has read a bunch of 19th- and 20th-century conservative tracts, I enjoy the repeated trope of "opposing the Feds to uphold the real American government/dream.")

That's all prologue to this piece, where Zora Neale Hurston examines Moses in dialogue with a speaking lizard. (Somewhat reminiscent of her speaking vulture scene from Their Eyes Were Watching God.) But... I'd rather talk prologue since I have nothing much to say about this short piece. Apparently Hurston gave it Dorothy West for the new magazine Challenge and anecdotal evidence reports that West wasn't thrilled with it. (For one thing, a letter from Hurston tells West that she can get another story instead of this one.)

I can't blame West for feeling a little ambivalent about this. You can kind of squint and see it as a commentary on the growing power of African-Americans in America, but you might pull a muscle squinting so hard. Sure, there's talk of the generational shift, but... it's a pretty distant story, with not much to excite the reader.

The good bits from World's End

The Pegg/Wright/Frost Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy all marry some big genre with some smaller personal story and comedy: zombies and growing up in Shaun of the Dead, buddy cop and odd couple in Hot Fuzz, and now, alien invasion and growing up in The World's End.

And maybe that's why the film doesn't seem to work all that much for me, despite it getting good reviews and having some fun moments: didn't they already do this film before? I mean, the alien/robot angle is just that--an angle, a trope, a premise. Thematically speaking, the idea of a crisis forcing a character to grow up isn't all that new to this crew.

There's some interesting and good bits to this movie, including the recognizable and almost anti-heroic protagonist in Gary King, an addict and nostalgia junkie who feels his best days are behind him and is willing to lie and trick his friends to get back to his self-centered vision of the ideal world.

There's also the opening section, where Gary's voice-over about the best drunken day is revealed as a support group; and his assembly of the team scenes, which all cut out right before the person agrees to go with his crazy plan because (a) they really have no reason to say "yes" and (b) it's unimaginable that they'd say "no" given the premise of the film. And each person asks about Andy, which builds up anticipation for Andy's recruitment--which is the only one we see the end of and the only reasonable end: this person has no reason to want to go back in time, since he's built an adult life for himself, so of course he says no.

The film also nicely balances--at the beginning--the weirdness of the situation and the discomfort of these ex-friends. So, right before Andy confronts Gary about a terrible lie Gary told, Gary discovers the alien/robot invasion; which distracts us from the interpersonal tension, but only for a moment, so now these guys have two problems to deal with.

And there is something thematically appropriate about these alien/robots--the "blanks"--being preserved forms of younger selves, since that's Gary's problem: he needs to let go of his younger self.

Yet, the film also has a very shaggy elements, not helped by the ensemble cast where we clearly aren't meant to care too much about anyone but Gary and Andy. By the time we get to the aliens who are part of a network, part of Starbucking (buying up places with local color and turning them into chains), it feels less like a coherent movie about the dangers of holding on to the past. After all, Gary's problem is that he hasn't changed, but the town of Newton Haven's problem is a mix of "not changed, still terrible" and "changed to become ordinary."

And while it's fun to see a large man like Nick Frost turned into an action hero, tearing through alien/robots, his hatred of the town isn't really explored or explained. In fact, the more I think about it, the less I understand the character of Andy, which is really a shame, as he's the one whose anger really drives much of the film.

The Wild Bunch's flashbacks and other structural issues

Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch is known as one of those late Westerns that shows the encroachment of the future--the running out of land and time for a bunch of old outlaws--and as a very violent film. It reminds me a lot of Blood Meridian on both counts: a revisionist Western where all our usual ideas are twisted by age and by the dirty reality of what these guys live through.

That said, and before I split the movie up into beats, I want to talk about two interesting things. First, you could easily tell this as the story of the outlaw leader; or of the ex-outlaw who is hunting the outlaw group. But Peckinpah cuts back and forth between Pike Bishop, aging outlaw with a tenuous grasp of his outlaw group and Deke Thornton, ex-range rover who has been co-opted by the railroad to hunt Bishop down. (I'm a little unclear, but it seems like Deke is working with the law to obtain pardon for his past misdeeds.)

Now, this doesn't make them co-protagonists: a film could easily show the protagonist running and then the antagonist chasing as a way to ramp up tension. And a film could parallel the two characters' journeys and stories: as here, both Pike and Deke are leading groups of unruly men, looking to get out of the game through one big score. Peckinpah also gives Pike and Deke both their own flashbacks, where we see some part of what motivates them: Deke's capture and terrible experience of jail, Pike's failure to settle down.

The film is also curious because with so many people, it might be hard to figure out who to look out or care about. Do we care about Pike or Deke? Do we care about Dutch or the German consultant? Or the Mexican general or etc., etc. The flashbacks help with that, as do some of the monologues: Pike and Deke are the only ones with flashbacks, the only ones working off some debt, the only ones whose ambitions we know about. So we know that Dutch wants to make money, but what for? We never really get a sense of what he considers the good life. So the flashbacks--which might be clumsy--help to focus our attention on what we should be watching.

Now, for the beats and scenes:

1. Bank robbery: we meet Pike's group in the midst of a robbery (which is at least half a heist, as they've dressed in army uniforms as disguise); we meet Deke's posse trying to stop the robbery 
2. Aftermath: we see the posse being rather terrible bounty hunters, arguing over who killed whom and not caring about the town getting shot to hell; we also see Pike's team deal with the fact that their robbery is all scrap metal, not silver--which strains the group.
1. The aftermath sequence is actually a few scenes, with Deke's men being terrible and the townsfolk yelling at the railroad man; Deke yelling at his men and the railroad man reminding him of the deal; and with Pike killing a wounded man and then the team resting at their rendezvous place
3. Matched memories: Deke notes that Pike is the best and he knows since he rode with Pike; Pike remembers how Deke got caught and he didn't; Pike comments on the old feller (Sykes) who sticks around them.
4. Trouble and triumph on the trail: There's some hard travels and Pike is getting older. But he gives a speech that keeps them together, all the way to Mexico, where fellow robber Angel's village gives them a warm welcome--even though they've got problems: the crooked federales, led by Mapache, who lured away Angel's sweetheart.
5. The general, the deal: Which brings us to Mapache, the general who needs good American rifles to defeat Pancho Villa, and who agrees to pay Pike a great deal of money. These scene ends well for the Americans, though it begins with danger as Angel confronts his sweetheart and then shoots her. Which brings us to a big party scene and a discussion of what they'll do with the money--and how much Angel hates Mapache, which launches the plan to give Angel's people one of the cases of guns.
6. The hunter: We get some info on Deke and his hunters, who suspect Pike of trying to rob the very train full of guns that we know Pike will rob. Ruh-roh.
7. The robbery: another fun heist/shootout as Pike robs the train, Deke's posse chases, and the green US Army chases them.
8. Mapache's problem: We see Pancho Villa's men kick the hell out of Mapache, which reminds us that he needs the guns.
9. The two gun transfer problem: Pike gives guns to Angel's friends. To make sure they get paid, Pike's men first wire up the guns to explode, then plan to transfer them in small shipments, while getting paid each time. The only problem is that Angel is fingered as the guy who stole the missing shipment of guns--the mother of the woman he killed told on him. So Mapache takes him.
10. Deke on the trail: Pike doesn't want to go rescue Angel, but with Deke men on their trail, he decides to go visit the general for save haven. (One of Deke's men shoots Sykes in the leg; wounded Sykes eventually is found by an Indian.)
11. Disgusting party: Just as we had a party at 5, we see Mapache celebrate his guns, and also celebrating by torturing Angel. Pike doesn't like it, but can't do anything.
12. On Deke's trail: meanwhile, Deke is being hunted by US Army, since some of his men shot at them in 7. His only hope is to take down Pike.
13. Endgame: Next morning, Pike is disgusted with himself and gathers his men to take back Angel, which leads to the massacre when Mapache slits Angel's throat and they shoot Mapache and then the German consultant.
1. Notable: Deke looks on as Pike and the federales fight it out.
2. Pike shoots a woman, reminiscent of his memory of his lover getting shot by her husband.
3. Pike gets shot by a child soldier.
14. Deke's reckoning: Deke's posse comes on the scene, acting as loutish as usual; Deke grabs Pike's gun and decides to stay behind. He runs into Sykes and the Indians who offer him a place: "It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do."

One other thing I want to say about this film is that it's very long, partly because many scenes follow people from one situation to another--for instance, 13 features the men getting dressed, armed, and walking down the street before we get to the next bit of action. We get lots of other similar scenes of travel, usually as a means to build up tension. But there's also some extra length to many scenes that are just talking scenes. So when the robbers find that their treasure is worthless, we get lots of Tarantino-esque chatting.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 223: J. Sterling Morton, About Trees (#223)

J. Sterling Morton, "About Trees" (1893) from American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau:

J. Sterling Morton was a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, an evangelist for trees as both beautiful and useful--which is the sort of position that comes to one on the empty plains of Nebraska. He's become known as the originator of America's Arbor Day; and while he started it in Nebraska in 1872, by the 1890s, it was widely spread in the US. The US Forestry Service put out a pamphlet of information and fun, child-friendly activities--tree propaganda, essentially--and Morton included this essay in that pamphlet.

It's a short essay, and it starts off with a pretty common paean to trees: they don't care if you're rich or not, they'll shade you anyway. But Morton goes on from there, noting how trees basically power our world:

There is no light coming from your wood, corncob, or coal fire which some vegetable Prometheus did not, in its days of growth, steal from the sun and secrete in the mysteries of a vegetable organism.

"Vegetable Prometheus" is pretty amazing, both as metaphor and truth, as he points out: trees really do take sunlight and make usable energy for us (if we're still in a wood-burning society, as opposed to a directly solar-powered society). But he goes on, noting how society needs trees, and how, without proper tree planting, a society will soon be treeless and doomed, much like in the Middle East. (If you're a climatologist or a historian of colonialism, here's your time to say, "What?") For Morton, the story of the Orient is that

where the olive and the pomegranate and the vine once held up their luscious fruit for the sun to kiss, all is now infertility, desolation, desert, and solitude. The orient is dead to civilization, dead to commerce, dead to intellectual development. The orient died of treelessness.

OK, so maybe his sense of history is a little narrow, but damn, that's some fine use of imagery to get his message across: trees are important, so plant one already!

Captain America 2, fourth (and hopefully final) thoughts

As an action film, Captain America 2 was... OK. This is really the make-or-break aspect for a film like this. (That and box office--and I think the film is doing fine at the box office. We saw it on opening day at 2:40 and the theater was pretty packed, though not sold out.) And it delivers on a few scales. Let's try to break this down (because I love breaking things down. Not such a fan of putting things together afterward. Oh well).

Was the action exciting as action? Sure. It was fun to see an old-fashioned car chase and a brawl in an elevator and so on. I especially thought it was smart to keep the action sort of low-key: when it's just Captain punching a guy, we don't wonder why they don't call in Thor and everyone else on the Avengers. That said, my girlfriend thought that some of the action scenes went on a little long, and I have to agree, because--

Was the action exciting as story? Not really always. In fact, the action almost always was spectacle that didn't move the story forward and had no more narrative weight than "Will Captain defeat his enemy?" The most interesting fight scene occurred with the Winter Soldier, but almost everything else was clearing the level to get to the boss. And when the fight is between Black Widow and Robert Redford, well, la, you'll excuse me for checking my watch. (In fact, I keep thinking how much more awesome and fun it would've been if the SHIELD council had actually done something to save themselves. No offense, but in a film where we see how fallible the institution is, what sort of message does it send to make us normal people wait for the superheroes to save us?)

Was there anything that slowed down the action? For me, the film has a lot of "people staring out windows giving big speeches" moments. It might only have two of those scenes, but they stick out like a sore thumb to me. When there's nothing happening on the screen and all the info is being delivered verbally, I feel like we might as well have a flashing light declaring this "Theme discussion" or "Background exposition." In a film that has a bunch of clever and well-done scenes, these few hiccups stick out.

Uh, well, I thought I had more issues to break down, but now I'm not so sure. So, after all those posts, I would probably sum up Captain America 2 by saying that it was mistitled in the subtitle: the Winter Soldier is such a minor part of the story, though he is the best and most interesting. It was fun, but not as exhilarating as the first Captain America. And not as topical and interesting as it could be.

Captain America 2, third thoughts

Previously on this blog:

• Everyone seems to love Captain America 2.
• It hits Captain's melancholy hard.
• It doesn't really play with paranoia, political thrills, or surprise in any meaningful way.
• It doesn't really have anything serious to say about contemporary issues.

(Oh, I forgot to mention another big-swing-and-a-miss surprise, which is the putative death of Nick Fury. Yeah, I don't think they're going to kill Nick Fury--at least, not outside of an Avengers movie.)

In a way, the last was the most disappointing. Learning that SHIELD was actually sheltering a secret cabal of Hydra deflected all of the serious ethical issues that we have. Which is fine for an action movie--maybe in a movie about a super-soldier who always does the right thing, you don't want to say "sometimes our military-security complex makes the wrong decision." But the way that this film puts all the blame on Hydra makes the moral issues more melodrama than drama. Particularly in a movie featuring lots of shoot-outs in crowded areas, this "the bad guys do bad things, the good guys are always good" morality rang as hollowly as a fist on Captain's shield.

So, Captain America 2 was a serious film when it looked at Steve Rogers's sadness and out-of-time quality; but it undercut that when it portrayed his enemies as completely evil and (worse) dumb. So, how was it as an action film?

Captain America 2, second thoughts

Captain America 2 takes Captain America, removes his clear enemies (Nazis, Hydra, Chitauri), and emphasizes how he's all alone, out of his own time. (The Avengers did the out-of-time shtick more superficially and amusingly, emphasizing that Steve Rogers doesn't know popular movies or that he's the subject of collectible cards.) This ramps up the uncertainty... or at least it should.

But when a film casts Robert Redford as a previously unknown but powerful character, and when we suspect that someone is really a traitor, it's like when Law & Order has a famous person: we know who the bad guy is. Similarly, when Captain America is alone romantically and ends up kissing Scarlett Johansson, I don't really wonder if maybe they'll become an item; or when Captain America attempts to reform his friend-turned-brainwashed killer, there's not much anxiety about whether it'll work.

So while Captain America 2 poses itself as something of a paranoiac political thriller, dealing with contemporary issues of the security state and over-surveillance and big data, it doesn't really land any of those punches. Critics and friends lauded that commentary on contemporary issues, but it felt pretty flat to me: "How much is security worth?" is an interesting question. "Can we morally kill an innocent if our big data analysis says this person will be a problem?" is a less interesting question. "Can we sacrifice freedom if it insures security--and, oh yeah, Hydra will be in charge?" isn't even a question at all--it's a call to arms.

Part of the failure of this film for me is encapsulated in the hostile takeover of SHIELD headquarters during the launch of the three new super-helicarriers: if your super-secret society is a few minutes away from taking over control through manipulation and subterfuge, why bring out the guys with the guns? Instead of ramping up tension, all that does is replace uncertainty with certainty. Which turns paranoia into a boxing match and clears up any problems that Captain had. After all, more than friends, Captain America needs a clear enemy.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 222: Bernard Malamud, Idiots First (#222)

Bernard Malamud, "Idiots First" (1961) from Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1960s:

I have several responses to works that really amaze me: occasionally I may want to take some aspect of the story out for a drive myself--what else does this character do, what else could happen in this setting, what happens to the premise if we look at this this way; I may want to take the story apart to see how it works; or I may want to transform the work into some other medium, to hear the characters speak in a radio play or see the action in a comic book.

Malamud's "Idiots First" feels like a puppet show, a sort of twisted Punch-and-Judy or morality play without any clear message. Part of this response is due to the irreality of the world, despite the reality of the situation.

Mendel is a dying man with a handicapped adult son named Isaac; and Mendel--who knows that he has only this one last night--needs to raise the money necessary to send Isaac to his uncle in California. What can he pawn? Who can he ask? What dangers does he have to avoid?

In many ways, the story is predictable: the pawnbroker will take the gold watch, but not for what Mendel would want; the rich man can offer dinner, but doesn't give money; the park where they would rest has some odd goings-on, with a policeman searching for a man. So far, so O. Henry, right? I mean, there's no irony, but there's the steady sense of failure dogging the hero here, just as in an O. Henry story.

But we're not in an O. Henry world, as the language of the story repeatedly reminds us. When Mendel wakes up.,"He drew on his cold embittered clothing..." How can clothing be embittered?

But what really sets this story apart and makes it amazing and troubling is that irreality, that strangeness that suffuses so many of the scenes. When they go to a park, Mendel notes that the leafless tree has a thick branch going up and a thin branch hanging down--until they walk away and the thick branch is hanging down and the thing branch points up. When Mendel finally gets an item to pawn, they are followed by a shadowy figure named Ginzburg (7). Is Ginzburg the pawnbroker? No, Ginzburg is the character that Mendel warned Isaac of at the beginning. So who is he?

That's never clear, though after following Mendel, it seems like Ginzburg works at the train station, since he's in charge of the gate that will stop Isaac from getting on the train. And when Mendel begs for kindness, Ginzburg gives an almost satanic response:

“What then is your responsibility?”
“To create conditions. To make happen what happens. I ain’t in the anthropomorphic business.”

That "anthropomorphic business" might be a mis-statement for something like "philanthropic" but it keeps bringing me back to those embittered clothes and that moving tree. As if Ginzburg is exactly part of that anthropomorphic business: a satanic author figure who controls Mendel's sadness.

So it's doubly interesting that Mendel wins through no greatness of his own. It's just that during their scuffle, Ginzburg see himself in Mendel's eye and sees that he is a monster. What author hasn't felt that in describing their characters' hardships?