Gods and Men

Went to see Suicide Squad, the latest DC comic epic.

No worse than I expected (though not, like the new Ghostbusters, a pleasant surprise),  but pretty crappy,  largely because the plot was offensively self-refuting.  To be fair, though, it’s very very hard to get any working plot in a universe that, like all multicharacter superhero universes, includes people with near-godlike powers (like Superman or, here, the Enchantress) and people with no special qualities except good pecs (like Batman or, here, Harley Quinn). In one scene the god is slicing aircraft carriers in half with his powerbeams, in the next he can’t cut through Deadshot’s armguards and he’s getting hit over the head with a baseball bat. The basic forces of the world have to shift from instant to instant to allow the plot to continue, making it very hard to make sense.  In more or less consistent universes, like Watchmen or Miller’s Dark Knight series, the more powerful creatures kill the less powerful, which can’t happen in superhero movies because you want all the characters still around next movie.

Anther thing that were wrong with Suicide squad (which really doesn’t call for this degree of close reading, but still)  was a misunderstanding of what sub-genre it was.

A superhero movie, yes, but also a caper movie – you assemble the team, each with a particular trick that will be needed in the caper, and then you have the caper where they each show off their thing. The first part was perhaps done, after a fashion, but the second wasn’t; they all fought the hordes of evil in much the same way, by shooting them, which hardly counts as a superpower…. perhaps only for Americans? Will Smith was the lead star in it as Deadshot, a no-miss marksman, but that’s still the most boring superpower ever, and if they had to have him then he should have been the only one to carry a gun…  though without it, Harley Quinn would be very underpowered, which is a difficulty.

And the gun motif was only emphasised again, not to say run into the ground, by having the group overseen by an army bloke, Colonel Flagg, who was supposed to be in there as the token good guy, and he did a shitload of shooting too.  What part of ‘superpower” doesn’t DC understand?

Oh, and at the end Deadshot is with his little daughter, helping her with his maths homework, and she cutely says “Hypotenuse?  That would be like when you’re on a tall building shooting at someone on the street?”

He says “Well, you have to account for wind, bullet weight, etc. etc….” 

A charming vignette, but a good father would have taken the next step and told her that no, a shot to the street wasn’t a hypotenuse because it wasn’t a straight line, being a (fairly flat) parabola. 

There is no force, however great,
Can stretch a cord, however fine,
Into a horizontal line
That shall be absolutely straight.

and the same goes for non-vertical projectiles subject to gravity. 

Octobriana

Another scan from my youth. The Nation, May 13, 1972.

Salted underground?

PETER SADECKY: Octobriana and the Russian Underground. Tom Stacey. $12.45.

PETER SADECKY declares that Octobriana was written and drawn by the Russian underground. Octobriana is a selection of anti-Soviet comic strips purportedly done by the Political Progressive Pornography group, a Russia-wide organisation of pornopoliticians devoted to attacking the state apparatus somewhere below its soft underbelly, presented with some explanatory matter by Sadecky. Octobriana herself is a heroine or anti-heroine who combines rather awkwardly deviltry and benevolence. She is built on more-than Playboy lines and drawn rather in the style of Barbarella, though with none of the latter's wit. The strip is in fact unimaginative in the extreme, boring, and in no way pornographic. It is also wildly expensive. In view of the lack of any other merits the price can only be justified if the book does give us an authentic glimpse of life in the Soviet underground.

This is, unfortunately, more than dubious. It is certainly true that, as Sadecky says, the U.S.S.R. is a very prim society, much of the intellectual life of the nation goes on underground in samizhdat, and the young are reacting to the corruption of socialist ideals they see around them by wallowing in any fragment of western decadence that they can get their hands on. It is also true that in putting forward any of these propositions it would be unwise to place too much stress on the evidence of Octobriana.

Peter Sadecky claims to have run into the P.P.P. in Kiev in 1961, worked with them on and off for the next six years, and smuggled their work out of the country at the end of that time at great personal risk. A rather more convincing theory would have it that the entire thing was cobbled up in Prague and that Octobriana has never seen Mother Russia in her life. Its authenticity rests at present' entirely on Sadecky's word; not one of the countless numbers of suppressed Russians who are claimed to follow her adventures have spoken up. Even A. Anatoli, Anatoli
Kuznetsov before he defected, does not claim in his generally approving introduction to have met any member of the P.P.P. or to have seen their work. These negative points might not be very significant - Sadecky would certainly say that nobody could be prepared to admit membership in an illegal organisation simply to settle the doubts of western sceptics -- except that Sadecky has provided almost no evidence that can be checked. He did not, he said, wish to make the task of the security police any easier, an explanation that rings a little false next to several photos of the Kiev group in which faces are only very imperfectly obscured under small strips of black Truth-style.

The German magazine "Stern" did manage to investigate Sadecky's explanation of how he smuggled the Octobriana drawings out of Russia, and it appears to be false. Two Prague artists called Konecry and Burian have claimed that they were the authors of the drawings that Sadecky later adapted to make the strip. They could be lying, or it could be a Soviet plant, but the question would be difficult to resolve; Sadecky says he destroyed the originals shortly after arriving in the west.

Failure to answer such questions as these satisfactorily meant that Sadecky did not really make the bonanza he was hoping for. Octobriana was turned down by "Playboy" and "The Observer". No German publisher would touch it. "As soon as we heard that pertinent information was being withheld, we got cold feet," one said. Sadecky took two years to find a publisher in England.

It is not as if Octobriana carried much conviction in itself. Proposed members of the P.P.P. must first commit some crime and be photographed in the act, we are told. After this clearance they are allowed to join in the orgies. The whole thing sounds a cross between a wet dream and cold war. In the Soviet Union today pornography has political overtones - granted. So do bluejeans, pop records, and vodka. To suggest that politics has pornographic overtones is something else, and Sadecky hasn't made his case.

Iron Man

Toys for the boys movie, yes. But the only interest for non-boys is its take on the US military.
Stark is of course the most government-friendly Marvel hero (next to Nick Fury), and the film does credit the army for assistance.
After going to Afghanistan and seeing his weapons being used against American soldiers (and civilians) he comes home and says he's getting out of the weapons business.
At the end we know that the Afghan baddies had Stark Inc weaponry because they'd been given it by bigbad Stane - presumably, though this was left a little hazy, as a bribe for killing Tony Stark, since the actual income capacity of Taliban types is presumably rather limited.
Anyway, the point is that he's not shocked by the use of US weapons by the US army, which is the actually frightening thing about US weapons tech.

Anne said "Militarism posing as pacifism" and gave it a 4 out of 10 (but she's not a boy).