Yeah, I saw the “arc of disenchantment” and on some level was thankful not to have been there daily, as I might have felt the same way. Demonstrations daily must have been so exhausting. Then again, I think Scott’s in better shape than me!

I’m a little wary of how people describe things from within the realm of disenchantment, though. Actually, it puts me in mind of our larger discussion that you’ve launched, about how foreigners talk about Korea. If the disenchantment was actually showing through in Scott’s, or your, or my demeanour, then this would also have coloured how protesters we talked to would have reacted — especially because we’re white “Americans” or at least white “foreigners” in many people’s eyes. Is that unfortunate? Yes, but it’s still often the case.

I’ll be honest, there was a much more mild arc of disenchantment on my side, too. Lime’s arc of disenchantment, I’d even term a “controlled descent.” Even from the first week of protests, she was saying things like, “Oh no! It’s metastasizing!” and, “I don’t think you should be so hopeful about this thing… it’s getting pushed in a weird direction…” even as she was cheering for things like classmates of hers turning up to treat the wounded, and groups on net cafés organizing fundraisers of shocking speed and effectiveness to feed protesters, and to raise cash for treatment of those who were watercannoned by the cops and couldn’t afford the surgery needed for the damage to their tympanic membranes. Which, as usual, no one was bothering bringing up.

But it was that bigger picture — the reactions of the many online whom Scott and I and you couldn’t talk to — that I was often trying to track, and which Lime donated not a little time to conveying to me, from her subjective — but pretty attentive, pretty smart, pretty engaged, and fairly critical experience.

And that’s one reason I was more than a little distrustful of terming bus-towing violence. Water cannons were busted out in the end of May, serious injuries followed immediately.

Serious injuries that were outright denied by authorities at the same time that MDs on the scene were dealing with the the injured were diagnosing and treating those injuries: brain hemorrhage, skull fracture, many with ruptured tympanic membranes, some of whom need surgery to regain their hearing. (Some of whom need to heal because their ears are still too screwed up to even operate on, Lime noted the other day.) Talk about moral bankruptcy, claiming that the cannons couldn’t cause injury — I haven’t seen anything on that scale in terms of that kind of outright savagery on the side of the Gwanghwamun protesters… Fabrications and bullshit? Yes. Outright lies about having caused serious and sometimes life-threatening injuries to human beings? No. (Hell, even the fire-suicide guy in Jeonju only set himself on fire.)

I understand Scott’s frustration, and share some of it. Lime does too, actually — but there’s a much bigger picture I don’t think was coming across, about the effects this thing had socially, psychologically, on a mass of people. I’m not willing to call it a net loss, just because there wasn’t a “full-scale social revolution.” Hell, I wouldn’t have expected anything like that in Seoul for at least a generation or two or really relaxed prosperity, or a total socioeconomic crash, before something like that happened. And it would probably be so much along unexpected lines — especially given the cryptic “national socialist” and “mystical nationalism” formulae that have been encrypted into the education system here that I’d want to be very, very far from Korea if a “full scale social revolution” happened here. Unless the education system did a 90-degree turn for a generation or two first. That, or unless everyone got into SF manga and tried to make a commercially viable space program or something. That’d be cool. But I suspect any revolutions with the current generation or two would not go in a good direction: Korea has too much postcolonial angst and issues to work out.

Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. It’s an eye-opener how well it fits Korean political psychology. (As I briefly, and discomfitedly, mention here and more recently here. Must do up a longer post on that nexus sometime.)

[UPDATE: Not that I think there is a National Socialist revolt coming in Korea or anything. I really don't. I just think Korea's gonna had enough rapid, full-on radical social transformation, and that more right now would not make things more comfortable. The society is already struggling to hold itself together and handle the changes it's undergone already. And I think that a few remaining bruises will definitely have to heal before Korea is ready for anything like a positive radical social change. Time, I suspect, is what is needed. My next post -- going up tonight -- deals with that to some degree, too.]

Last note: I don’t trust Lee either. He’s been caught out lying at least once, possibly twice, since taking office. (One was a rather remarkable, if very tiny — but important to the meaning — mistranslation on the government website about beef regulations; another (the case I term possibly) is the conflict between his claim and the Japanese government’s about whether he had any forewarning about the Dokdo thing.

And on that note, let’s hope Dokdo doesn’t reignite the protests, or nobody will have the strength to protest whatever asinine policies Lee cooks up for later on in 2008, or 2009, or… oh, the possibilities.

I read through all this a little while ago — the two most telling moments of the protests, that stick in my head now, are actually:

1. Scott Burgeson himself’s reactions — on Brian’s from Jeollanamdo’s page, he took Brian to task on his negative slant on the protests early on, an apologist himself; the fact he went from an apologist to the kind of critic he was with his “commentary” post and the comment conversation here was quite telling — it seemed like I could follow the arc of his disenchantment as he posted more responses and then added his thoughts on his own blog.

2. meeting a guy, walking around the protests on the candlegirl dance day, bumping into somebody he’s obviously talked with a few times before. Scott said to him, “But LMB DID apologize; he scrapped the canal plan, and the plan to privatize utilities, AND he renegotiated the beef deal. . . you got what you want, so why are you protesting?”
the gentleman answered, “Because I don’t trust LMB. I think he’s lying.”

That gave me two things to think about:

1. it’s a bulletproof objection: if I apologize to you, and you say, “you didn’t mean that” the only thing I can do is get into an “am-not/are-too” argument with you — his reasoning would justify him staying out, like Impeachment ajumma, forever, because NOTHING LMB says could satisfy him. . .

2. But that’s not a problem with LMB; that’s a choice he made, not to believe a single damn thing LMB says. There’s no pleasing this guy, so why should anybody try? if you’re NEVER going to trust ANYTHING a politician says, never going to take ANYTHING in good faith, even when he’s bending over BACKWARDS to placate you, well, the problem no longer lies in the politician’s hands.

seeing Scott go from defending to disillusioned by the protests was very telling to me, as were a number of the conversations I overheard him having (with his much better Korean than mine)

it’s been a fun dialogue to follow.

Your pro–PD-Diary friends, yes, that is sad. Lime isn’t the only person I know who admits the media is distorted on all sides. (And after all that crap about it being 70% children on the first nights, I too have grown extremely distrustful of the media here.) But probably the majority of the society hasn’t grasped the idea that BOTH the left and right-wing media are screwed-up; it’s a jarring idea (not to mention demoralizing), and critical thinking of one’s own aargument or “side” just isn’t a skill education here seems to teach or promote, sadly.

Conrad — oh no, another novel for the pile. I’d heard about it before, but not it intrigues me. Especially since I’m thinking about writing a novel set partly in that time and place. Ah well, I can download it. Yay for public domain!

500 people… yeah, well. It’s funny, last Saturday I was saying to these people hanging around the City Hall, “Don’t you think most people are tired of this yet? Don’t you think they wanna just… go to a movie? Drink a cold beer at home? Go on a date? Do anything BUT protest again?”

One guy wandered off, saddened by the idea, and one glassy-eyed ajumma raised her fist in the air, Black Panther-style and said, “No! We will come everyday until 2MB is impeached! Just, *I* want! I hope!” The rest of them, though, they laughed, nodded, agreed aloud or seemed to mull it over. Maybe Impeachment Ajumma turned up the next day, but I bet the rest of them didn’t. They were tired, too.

I recommend The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad if you want a really dark look at some anarchists in late 19th century London. Good stuff.

BTW, about 500 people were protesting against 2MB Friday night at Ch’onggye Plaza. Now I just feel sorry for them and think they’re rather pathetic.

I’ll ignore the “Gord, Gord, Gord” since I’d prefer think you’re not talking down to me on my own website. :)

I’ve been busily writing about all this myself, and got tired of writing here what I was already writing in my article, hence the gap preceding this response. Now I just have 30-odd words to cut, and a little polishing to do. Wordcount limits! They kill me!

The “Anarchy in the UK!” moment in the film is interesting, but as I remember it, in the movie, that upwelling of radical “freedom” (devoid of self-control, really) is a phase people have to pass through in order to come together in solidarity as protesters. (Something which never happens in the book, by the way.) So, in other words, in the movie, just as in mainstream thinking, anarchism is “just a phase” through which the society passes, before it self-organizes to come up against its government.

I understand that when you watched the movie, you saw a murderous anarchist killing people and blowing shit up. (And Moore would be happy, as he sees V that way too — the character’s even introduced as a villain in the book.)

But in the film, I saw what looked much more like a classic romantic avenger who went about punishing evildoers in the government for their crimes. The cartoon-fascist government — yes, fascist, but in a way that evokes the accusations among American leftists at the “fascism” of Bush & co., and undoubtedly for Koreans brings to mind the dictatorships of the past, with whom they obviously link Lee’s party is a government that happens to include a Dick Cheney lookalike, a solid tendency toward Christian fundamentalism, close ties to crooked right-wing media, explicitly homophobic policies (much more than in the book), and a great love of chucking about the word “terrorist.” There are far too many parallels for the literalist reading (ie. that its a British fascist government) to blot out the screamingly obvious subtext. Sutler may not be Bush, but Sutler’s government is very clearly funhouse-mirror image of the American right as seen by the left. The movie is transparently a fantasy about America, and apparently discussions of the script in early stages reveal just how little the project was supposed to represent Britain from the get-go.

So the climax of the film, by the way, is the image that Koreans (not just the protesters, but the people who’ve been mentioning the film in online discussions of the protests) seem to have seized upon: the moment when the apathetic, numbed citizens finally wake up and go out to protest against their government. It’s important to note that they weren’t engaging in cosplay of V himself, so much as playing the roles of those citizens who went out together into the streets in the film. Citizens who didn’t, in those masks and costumes, commit murder or blow stuff up.

Like I said, the anti-Bush subtext, the anti-authoritarian/dictator subtext (which links neatly, in many minds, one imagines, with the GNP and its clear genealogical link to the dictatorships) seems to have resonated more for these people, as it did for many American viewers.

You and I are perhaps more sophisticated film viewers. We can bet that the Village Voice wouldn’t hire someone who failed to mention anarchism in a review of the film. But many, many people saw the film this way, an it resonated for them in that way, and I have to think th Wachowski Brothers constructed the film to have that effect on purpose. Throw in enoguh anarchy for the fans, but not so much that it overwhelms the more mainstream, contemporary, and overt American analogies.

It’s funny you point out the idea that it was fears of a virus that fueled the protests — trust me, the irony is not lost on me, I’d thought about it since I first heard aout online discussions of the film linked to these protests in late May. (I’m also less dismissive of it; I choose to accentuate the positive.) I think it’s also unfair to suggest that this irony was lost on all the protesters, too, masked or otherwise. I know you were there every night and I wasn’t, and you talked to a lot of people, but plenty of protest-sympathizers I’ve talked to in the last couple of months have agreed with me that the beef hysteria was way overblown, that eventually the protesters as a whole seemed to have no real agenda or achievable goals. Not everyone remained in a beef panic, though definitely some did. Very few were of the people I talked to seemed to believe that impeachment was a possibility, and likely that sentiment was widespread, hence the diminishing turnouts.

There’s a further irony you didn’t mention (here, anyway), too: in protesting one form of American import, they relied on another form of American import — an American SF movie — to articulate their stance. That’s just odd, and I’d have expected all the Kwangju-references to drown out V completely. But they didn’t.

Likewise, I think you’re being a little too generous in assuming the “misappriopriation” is knowing among members of Anonymous. Online culture, all the way back to its murky BBS beginnings, has a long tradition of teenagers (especially boys, of course) bandying about anarchist-themed group names and handles, and spouting muddled rhetoric that has way more to do with the Hacker’s Declaration than with Proudhon or Kropotkin. (This book is full of wonderful examples.) Anonymous seems quite aware of that tradition, more than of any authentic anarchist tradition, from what I’ve seen, and I imagine that’s about as far as their sense of “anarchism” entered into their appropriation of the V-masks from the same climactic scene in the film. Which again makes the “ethnocentric” criticism questionable, since anarchism is oft-invoked, and little understood, in Western youth culture too.

Anyway, I think that when a misappropriation becomes a widely understood symbolic language, it’s more like 1337Z0l2Z: it seems to me it crosses the line into something else, something interesting. Personally, I’m more interested in looking at why and how those symbols get appropriated and put to different uses. I think it’s fascinating, and a much better use of my time and energy that dismissing them or chucking somewhat academic accusations at them. By the way, it’s not the name-calling so much as the casual dismissal of all the masked kids (and, elsewhere, of the whole “movement” in general) on the basis of the actions of a few, that rubs me the wrong way. You live in Korea. You know that once one person says, “Don’t talk to us,” most everyone else is likely to just go along, especially when it’s a white person being talked to. That sucks, it pisses me off to no end too, its a negative in so many ways we could both enumerate, but that is the culture, just as surely as almost nobody will stand up and contradict the businessman ajeoshi in a classroom.

So to declare everyone involved an ignorant retard, a poseur, strikes me as a wrong note, just like calling a whole movement bankrupt because a minority of those involved — yeah, organizers, but who pretty clearly had more illusions of gradeur than actual control of this thing, by the end anyway — resorted to crappy tactics. Yes, those are crappy tactics. Yes, there was a clear moral panic that makes one think of books like this one. There was an upwelling of human stupidity, nobody denies that — but that’s par for the course with any human group, including those involved in the Summer of Love, as many have pointed out (also here is some interesting commentary). But I have trouble thinking that’s all that happened this summer. Bankruptcy? Yes, but the whole world is bankrupt. If we can see two sides of that summer in 1967, why not two (or more) sides to this summer?

But I should confess, I havn’t seen everything you’ve written about it. You just seem so very down on the whole thing these days, and I’d like to see some good in this, even if it’s just, you know, that all the moderates out there who didn’t use violence, who were manipulated but finally recognized it, who saw though the urban legendry to issues that concerned them, and re-realized what masses of people can do — like those concessions wrung from Lee — learn from the experience. Maybe you’ve highlighted that somewhere, and I just haven’t seen it. You’re free to disagree with me and see none of that, too, of course. But I see it.

Right, I think I’m done with this too. I, too, am ready to move on to just about anything else! Georgian England’s moral panics over hard liquor! Local ghost stories of Bucheon. The Taiping Rebellion! How to brew wheat beer in your own home! Korean SF! Reading some of the books in this growing stack of mine!

Oh, but, by the way, speaking of reading books — I do think you would like the Alan Moore book, if you’re ever curious. It’s a lot more up your alley than I imagine the the film was, even if it is a mite muddled in places. Way better pacing, way more solid argument, a more interesting sense of how an “anarchist consciousness” can be developed, and much more interesting nuance on both sides of the conflict. (V’s a bad guy, the government people are bad, but they are all doing what they believe in, or for a reason.And Evey actually has some, you know, choice about, and power t choose, what path she thinks things should take.) It’s quite an interesting graphic novel. Probably easy to get here, too, since the film came out.

God, I’m sick of all this mad-cow shit!

The main character in the movie runs around killing people and blowing up buildings. He is repeatedly called a “terrorist” by the state and on the news. To then conclude that he is some cuddly-wuddly model “democrat” as those demonstrators I met seemed to do is just ludicrous. He is an anarchist. All the controversy surrounding the book and the film involved how faithful or not the movie was to the original’s anarchist message. Thus, it is simply amazing to me that someone basing their movement on the movie and dressing up as the main character at major anti-government demonstrations somehow missed that crucial point — especially when they were basically enacting the final scene of the movie when Parliament is blown up and an army of masked anarchists is standing in formation to witness it, and in front of a huge riot police line, no less!

I am vaguely aware of the Scientology thing but to me that is irrelevant because in this case two wrongs do not make a right. In any case, if V for Vendetta is somehow being used to attack Scientology in the West, then it is likely that it is done while knowing about the movie’s/novel’s anarchist themes. In that case, it would be knowing misappropriation, rather than unknowing misappropriation. An important distinction, I would argue.

The ironic thing is that in the movie, the fascist Chanceller (to be clear, he is an English fascist, not an American “neo-con”) uses fear of a deadly virus to take over the country. Gee, sound familiar? Except in the South Korea, this scenario is reversed: It is not the conservative Lee who tried to use fears of a deadly virus to lock down the local citizenry, but rather liberal, so-called “democratic” forces here who used artificial fears of a virus in a cynical power grab. Yet another irony no doubt lost on those protesters I spoke with.

It is all fine and well to quote Colin Patrick Barth, but that kind of grad-school seminar parsing is not what puts asses in seats at the movie theater. Jean Baudrillard famously said that the Wachowski brothers had gotten his notion of simulation wrong in The Matrix, but at least they used the concept in a way that offered a radical critique of our society for millions of moviegoers. In the same way, their movie version of V for Vendetta may by a Cliff’s Notes version of anarchism, but at least it was trying to get the idea out there for mainstream audiences, and who knows, maybe it even inspired some moviegoers to then go out on their own and look more deeply into the subject.

Or perhaps it just inspired certain people to be rather clueless “radical chic” posers, or as Baudrillard would no doubt say, “refugees adrift in the 4th stage of simulation.” You seem to be particularly offended by my usage of the word “retards,” but I can assure you that if they can handle calling 2MB a “rat bastard” and countless other nasty epithets, they can certainly handle an offhand “retard” written in English and which they will probably never, ever read anyway.

And really, I am done with this for now. When we meet in person in the future, we can talk about it as much as you like, but I’ve just got too much work to do.

Peace and anarchy!

Yeah, there’s lots of crossover between pulpy and meaty, I agree. Hell, if you’ve read my story in Asimov’s, you’ll know I’m all for mixing and matching the two, and having the story work on both a “rollicky weirdness” and “subtextual meaning” level.

As for comics — well, Y: The Last Man has been on my list for a few years, since I ran across a copy in a Korean bookstore. Didn’t buy it as it was a few books in, but it looked interesting. I too wouldn’t buy “floppies.” I just remember you being a collector of Booster’s Gold when we were in middle school. Though I think old Sklar was more of a collector, with the boxes of bagged, mint condition issues in his closet.

I too am not really all about the Men in Tights. Though you might enjoy the superhero story I’ve got coming out in the Canadian SF anthology Tesseracts this year — again, gleefully (if quirkily) pulp but also literally about Korean salaryman work and allegorically all about Northeast Asian politics.

Of course, you could utterly hate it, too…

Just as a quick addendum to to my comments about comic books, I’m not a collector, just a casual reader now. I never buy floppies (single issues) – if I hear of something new and interesting, I’ll wait for the TPB 95% of the time, haven’t followed a regular series or character for years. Black Kiss and Y: The Last Man are in fact, adult themed comic books, sans men in tights, and much better attempts than Moore’s efforts to introduce adult themes into the medium.

Well, it’s fine that the Village Voice reviewer caught the few remaining references — though, you know, reviewers (me included, when I review things) often like to throw stuff in that they know because it makes them seem smart and knowledgeable, since after all, reviewers need to appear knowledgeable. It’s likely most fair to say that there was some small amount of arguably anarchist content included in the film, in such a way that those who know what to look for (or who love the original and want to find it intact) will find it. Maybe Alan Moore overstated how much was removed, but having read the comic and spent time teaching the film, I don’t think he overstated his opinion much. What I mean is, a reading bereft of anarchist ideas is not just possible, but the easiest thing in the world for someone who doesn’t know better.

I’m more sympathetic with what Colin Patrick Barth had to say, which is that the film contained, if anything, “vaguely libertarian-anarchist” ideas. Since he makes the point more clearly than I’ve apparently done:

I find it ironic that this movie receives such praise from anarchist and libertarian circles. I attribute this to how few glowing reviewers have read the original, and to their desire to “read into” the movie, if you will, their entire education in freedom philosophy. The fact is that the movie considerably alters and waters down the unapologetic anarchism and individuality in the book. The Wachowskis, too poorly versed in anarchistic theory to handle it in their screenplay or unwilling to preserve it, made V into a circumstantial oppression fighter instead of a universal anarchist. The distinction is important. The book’s V understands that government’s attempts to stabilize and control tend towards fascism and oppression, and promotes the generation of spontaneous order instead. The movie’s V seems to be fighting because a particular party perpetrated a heinous conspiracy, thereby corrupting the nation’s government.

The screenplay excises the vast majority of references to anarchism besides the “blow things up” definition. The book has pages and pages of delightful, quotable, well-written, thought-provoking dialogue on subjects such as voluntary order versus chaos, the poverty of justice without freedom, society as creative collaboration, prisons of mind as well as body, and most of all, uncompromising self-expression. We don’t often see such a happy union of unadulterated liberating philosophy and persuasive artistic talent. Much of it could have fit rather neatly into a faithful movie version. The filmmakers wouldn’t touch it without a ten-foot pole — a trace here, a hint there — and a great opportunity was lost.

I’m not trying to demonstrate how clear or unclear the anarchy theme was: I’m saying that different people seem to grasp it with different degrees of clarity. People who were looking for it found it, or walked away disappointed that there wasn’t more of it, like there was in the book. But those who didn’t know enough to catch the references, or hadn’t read the book, were much likelier to walk away from the film with a sense that the story was about a guy leading the citizens in a dystopian nation to rise up in solidarity against a bad, Bush-Admin-like government. And I think it’s arguable that the commercial success of the film hinges on the way it invites itself to be read, by average viewers, in that way.

It’s at least unarguable that on its release, much of the popular discussion focused on whether it was anarchist at all — that discussion probably accounting for the majority of the mentions in what I mentioned before was the tiny of almost 3.6 million English-language web pages that even bother with that theme at all.

(By the way, my search today is turning up about 80,000 of those 3.66 million websites, so that’s closer to 2%, but either way, it’s a small fraction of the discussion.)

Barth notes how far from the original anarchist rebel story the scene is when the citizens of London turn up in a crowd, in V costumes and masks, and march in solidarity. It’s a powerful scene, and obviously the climax of the film — the scene, as I’ve mentioned, appears on the cover of the DVD edition I have. Significantly, it’s precisely that image that people seem to have picked up on, and, not by chance, surely, it’s the very image on the cover of my copy of DVD — the Londoners, en masse, in V’s disguise.

And that particular image — unique to the decidedly liberal narrative of the film, and absent in the original — is a bigger part of the proverbial story than has been mentioned in this discussion. But it’s pretty clear that the mythology of V began to be transformed into an anti-whatever figure long before anyone in Korea thought of it. I don’t know what the ultimately hip-and-cool kids in Japan have done with it, but the most dramatic example of all is that of Anonymous, the online network who protested the Church of Scientology recently in Guy Fawkes masks of the sort used in the movie. Those protests happened in all over the English-speaking world: in Canada, the US, and Britain (and perhaps elsewhere too), and received a lot of publicity online. (Other, smaller groups have done the same, back as far as late 2006 at least.)

While people went to great lengths discussing Anonymous — the weirdness of their anti-Scientology “Project Chanology” campaign, the risks involved in protesting Scientology, mocking them as “script kiddies,” arguing whether the Church of Scientology is really worse than any other form of organized religion, I didn’t once see anyone accuse Anonymous of “ethnocentric cultural misappropriation,” … even though they were using the symbol to protest a cult religious organization.

I don’t think you’d go so far as to accuse Anonymousall just “retards.”

(Whatever you may think of me at this moment aside, you’d almost certainly have considered me politically a retard if you’d met me at a demonstration at age 22 or 23, too; I might not have donned a mask, but I bet my grasp on V wouldn’t have been much clearer than these kids, and I had no idea about anarchy beyond the circle-A sign that some buddy of mine happened to have on one of his t-shirts. But there are other barriers to “getting it” than just laziness, is what I’m saying, and the film is definitely one. So the insistence on the “original meaning of the text” seems a little misplaced, to me. I frankly don’t feel I’m the one bending over backwards here, especially since nothing I’ve written is actually an endorsement of any of this: I’m just pointing out things ain’t so simple and straightforward as all that.)

As I said, there are all kinds of things about the protests that exasperated you and me alike, and I think there are tons of places where criticism is warranted and deeply needed. But the kids with the V masks, it seems like a cheap shot to me, and people have been repeating your description of them, which is why I’m addressing this.

Ah, I see. Well, I have to say that I prefer graphic novels to individual comics anyway, but then, I actually kind of prefer ebooks to paper books, now. (Well, or would, if only I could rig a few more function into my Cybook’s firmware.) I’d like to think there’s enough room in the industry for me to get the comics with adult themes, and you to get the more adventurous or, dare I say pulpy sort of stories.

(And I don’t mean pulp as a pejorative. I have friends who are exuberantly pulp writers. I mean in the Gernsbackian sense.)

http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-03-07/film/anarchy-in-the-u-k/

There are multiple references to anarchy in it:

1. “Anarchy in the U.K.” (title of review)

2. “You can bet there won’t be many other movies at the multiplex extolling anarchist terror.”

3. “V’s full-face disguise recalls the ski masks of the Italian Red Brigades; his slashing trademark is a recognizable permutation on the anarchist “A.” ”

4. “…he paraphrases Emma Goldman on the revolutionary importance of dancing.”

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

Reception theory is all fine and well, but sometimes one must insist on the original meanings of a text. I’ve been looking at the reception of Hollywood movies in Korea myself over the years, and often they are reviewed in the local press in wildly narcissitic and ethnoccentric fashion, to the point of completely missing the point and intent of the filmmakers. If local audiences are missing the key point of a film or text from the West, I consider it my job as a critic to make sure those meanings are known to them when I am making any sort of commentary on them myself. That is not to ignore how they are understood locally, which is often interesting, but in many cases that’s only part of the proverbial story.

While Moore’s approach was innovative, in the wake of a thousand and one imitators, it’s become less so, and I think the law of diminishing returns kicked in a long time ago. Moore was able to deconstruct superheroes and create dysfunctional anti-heroes, because at one point he did a good job of delivering basic superhero stories. Now everybody is trying to imitate “Moore the glam Stadium Rocker” without having done their “Moore playing dives as they pay their dues” period.

I think a lot of lousy editorial decisions can be laid at Moore’s feet as well. I don’t know if you’ve ever read The Killing Joke, but crippling and maiming the Batgirl might have goosed sales in the short term, but I think they turned away from trying to reach a general audience to selling books to a narrower and narrower base of fans.

I’m not culturally conservative, but when I pick up a book with Batman or the Justice League in it, I’m not really looking for adult themes. If I wanted that, I’d read James Ellroy or watch a P.T. Anderson film. If comic books publishers really want to break out of the ghetto, they need to take more risks and publish more books like Y: The Last Man or The Black Kiss, and fewer TPB’s featuring men and tights.

I already know why you don’t like Moore personally — you made that clear elsewhere, but I am curious as to why do you think Watchmen has been disastrous for the comics industry? I’m not so into comics as you are (or used to be) — Watchmen was maybe the 2nd or 3rd graphic novel I’d ever read — but my impression was he was the first to have superheroes whose lives were, well, more like our lives. Screwed up, troubled… in other words, human. Or do you mean now superheroes are stuck in what seems to be permanently hokey origins-stories, like that TV show Heroes? (Which, though it got better episode by episode in Season 1, never quite became good.)

I’m curious to see Watchmen too, but not holding my breath in the hopes it’ll be done justice.

I’m not really a big fan of Moore – I think he is a victim of his own success. His Swamp Thing and Superman stories are really underrated, but I think The Watchmen has had a disasterous effect on the industry, despite the impressive sales it has racked up over the years.

That said, I can’t wait to see what Zack Snyder does with The Watchmen, which I’ve posted about on my blog. I think it’ll equal or surpass what Favreau and Nolan have done.

(Though now I kind of wonder what kind of comedy the Coen Bros. would have turned V for Vendetta into…)

UPDATE: I’m updating the comment here because I don’t want to post another comment. The brief discussion over in the LJ thread for this post touches on cosplay and youth movement garb a bit more, but also reminded me of an ironic fact: the swastika itself was what we could call a “cultural misappropriation” of an older holy symbol.

I’m sure it’s going too far to say that the Wachowski Brothers retooled V to the extent that the swastika was retooled by the Nazis, or to draw other analogies like that — but it’s just another example of the messiness of symbols when they pass from one culture to another, when someone takes them up and consciously alters their meaning and then people consume it in that retooled form. In pop cultures, it seems to me, all of this is even messier.

The line between appropriation, misappropriation, and reception of pop culture figures and narratives is fascinating to me, anyway. I’ll be touching on it again in a week or two when I turn to Natural City and how it is — but also emphatically really isn’t — simply a retelling of Blade Runner for Korean audiences. (And for that matter, on reception of The Host among Western audiences.)

Well, I picked up the anarchism having only read a little bit of the graphic novel (I read it in full afterward) but I’m saying that the film was designed so people could watch it and never have an inkling of that theme. Clever that way, very profitable too. But I do think Graeber, despite being an apparently wonderful anthropologist overestimates how much of the anarchist theme is present in the movie, for the average viewer. Moore bangs you over the head with it; you need to know what to look for to catch it in the movie. Probably you (and I) knew enough to catch it when seeing the circle-V sign, but I’m sorry to say I don’t think the majority of most audiences anywhere would really make much of that image’s brief appearance.

Anyway, I do understand a desire to move on. I’m going to write up my article and move on, too… back to Gin Lane and Korean SF films, methinks.

“David Graeber, an anarchist scholar and professor at Yale, doesn’t consider the movie a travesty of the anarchist reality.

“‘It didn’t upset me much,” Graeber said. ‘I thought the message of anarchy got out in spite of Hollywood.’”

From this article:

http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2006-05-02/launder-anarchistfight

I was always more partial to the Beats myself, and the hippies were essentially a mainstream manifestation of the Beat ethos. I was mainly interested in the Summer of Love insofar as the energy of eros was utilized in it (and elsewhere) as a broader social force, and then comparing with Korea and seeing how sex has been drained of any revolutionary potential by the market system here.

I’ve enjoyed the discussion but it’s time for me to move on to other stuff now. This whole mad-cow movement seems to have driven itself into a dead end, and I’ve had enough.

“David Graeber, an anarchist scholar and professor at Yale, doesn’t consider the movie a travesty of the anarchist reality.

“‘It didn’t upset me much,” Graeber said. ‘I thought the message of anarchy got out in spite of Hollywood.’”

From this article:

http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2006-05-02/launder-anarchistfight

I was always more partial to the Beats myself, and the hippies were essentially a mainstream manifestation of the Beat ethos. I was mainly interested in the Summer of Love insofar as the energy of eros was utilized in it (and elsewhere) as a broader social force, and then comparing with Korea and seeing how sex has been drained of any revolutionary potential by the market system here.

I’ve enjoyed the discussion but it’s time for me to move on to other stuff now. This whole mad-cow movement seems to have driven itself into a dead end, and I’ve had enough.