CW: Discussion of Pedophilia
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1/8: You are sleeping off your demons when I come home.
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There are many ways I could
approach this one. The most obvious would be to look at it through the lens of
JM DeMatteis’ belief system, though that would require a knowledge of said
belief system that I neither have nor have the time to research. Alternatively,
I could look at it from the perspective of Spider-Man and point out that, much
like the main character Lucas Hart, Peter Parker has some… experience with
being sexually abused as a kid. But that would be a bit too miserable of an
ending for this project. Another possibility would be to point out that the
T-shirt Lucas wears from his film “Rocket Starfield” is akin to the shirt
Steven Universe wears, but that doesn’t really say much beyond “Oh, look. They
wear the same shirt. Isn’t that interesting?”
In the end though, what I’m
focusing on is the fact that somehow, someone from 1987 was able to predict the
existence of Quentin Tarantino. The obvious answer would be to point out that
this was not a story written in 1987, so DeMatteis most likely forgot (or was
unaware that) Tarantino wasn’t a thing until 1992 (though My Best Friend’s
Birthday did come out in ’87). However, there are mystical implications to
invoking Tarantino in a mystical work. For starters, Alan Moore is apparently a
fan of his. Or, at the very least, the movie Reservoir Dogs, which is
referenced and invoked in his two most personal and mystical works: Promethea
and Jerusalem.
I’m not going to go into the
Jerusalem reference, as that would require rereading that book, and I frankly
don’t have the time, energy, or coping mechanisms to do so. Suffice it to say,
there are two, one of which is in the chapter narrated by Alma Warren, Moore’s
author insert character, so there’s some importance there. Promethea meanwhile
tells the story of a hybrid between Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel being
lectured and lecturing about the mystical implications of the universe. In the
third issue, she enters the land of Fiction and meets up with her imaginary
friend, a machine gun toting version of Little Red Riding Hood. Somehow, she
got the idea for this character after watching Reservoir Dogs.
Out of all of Tarantino’s films
released at the time the issue came out, that is perhaps the most ill fitting
option Moore could have picked. Not just because the film isn’t all that
violent (it has the infamous ear scene, sure, but the majority of the film is a
group of angry men talking about who fucked them over), but also because men
exclusively dominate the film, with the sole female character (a minor police
researcher who I don’t think was given a name) being cut out of the film
entirely. Tarantino would certainly improve on the roles female character would
have in his films (in that he would give them actual roles), but that doesn’t
change the fact that Reservoir Dogs is brimming with testosterone (and I’m
saying this as someone who views Reservoir Dogs to be one of his three favorite
films).
Given this, the most likely
explanation for Promethea to create such a character after watching such a film
is either a) She was so bored by the lack of violence implied by the statement
“Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino” that she created a character who
inverts all that film stood for or b) Alan Moore has never seen Reservoir Dogs
and is basing the character off of his assumptions of the phrase “Written and
Directed by Quentin Tarantino.” (Indeed the aspects of Jerusalem that invoke
Reservoir Dogs are very much the aesthetics of the film rather than the
narrative, or so I recall.) Both are equally likely.
But of course Seekers into the
Mystery predates both texts, and its invocation of Tarantino is extremely
interesting. In the penultimate issue (drawn exquisitely by Jill Thompson), Lucas
is offered the possibility to abandon his reality in favor of one where his
father didn’t rape him, his brother didn’t die as a kid, he isn’t divorced, and
is in fact a successful screenwriter. To highlight the absurdity of this false
reality, it postulates that the fourth film of a science fiction film series
seeped in the works of Joseph Campbell and has characters with the name
“Obidiah Crater” can win Oscars in categories like “Best Original Screenplay.”
(Not that the film is inherently bad, but rather the Oscars are notorious for
their refusal to let even the barest bones genre piece get recognized.) Suffice
it to say, it’s too good to be true.
Which in many ways is the point. If
we were put into Lucas’ position, we would want to believe the lie. That life
isn’t a series of painful events that often ends in anticlimaxes and despair; that
you can be successful if you set your mind to it; that your father’s love will
be enough to not make him want to rape you as a child and those complicated
feelings of love won’t be around once he’s dead. Lying has its uses, certainly
but lying to that degree is delusional at best. It only hurts us in the end.
Which brings us back to the work of
Quentin Tarantino. As a storyteller, Tarantino has an extreme investment in the
concept of lying. His films are full of liars attempting to one up each other
in their lies. Existence within a Tarantino film is performative (fitting as
his films are invested in the implications of movies, but that’s a different
matter entirely). But at the same time, he is keenly aware that one can easily
fall into delusions of grandeur. For example, let’s take a look at the film
that came out the same year the final issue of Seekers into the Mystery came
out: Jackie Brown. Not so much the main character herself, but rather the
central antagonist: Ordell Robbie. Robbie believes himself to be this bad
mother fucker who no one should fuck with, less they end up with a bullet in the
head. But in reality, he’s a fuck up who gets conned out of his money twice,
gets all his sales pitches from crappy infomercials, and he puts way too much
trust in someone whose been in prison for 20 years because he’s played by
Robert DeNiro. He needs to play the role of a bad mother fucker because it’s
expected of a drug dealing gun runner to be as such. But he’s not good at it,
and it kills him in the end.
But at the same time, there’s the
Tarantino film DeMatteis inadvertently predicts. In the aforementioned Oscar
win, the other films nominated include films by Mitchell Rose (a short film
director whose short film “Helicopter” was somehow good enough to get
nominated), Jeff Maguire (the screenwriter of Timeline), Chris Columbus (who
for some reason was pinched to direct a remake of a 1972 Hammer Studios piece),
and Quentin Tarantino for a film called “Little Men.” Within the filmography of
Tarantino, the term “Little Man” appears in his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds
as the inexplicable derogatory nickname used for BJ Novak’s character, a
character so minor you don’t even remember him being in the film at all.
It’s at this point that I realize
that I don’t really have much to say about Seekers into the Mystery. It’s not a
text that inspired a lot of weird and interesting ideas in me; it’s not
Moonshadow, what DeMatteis followed Kraven’s Last Hunt up with and the other
“piece about the nature of the universe from a mystical lens” that Seekers is a
complement to. It’s a wonderful book, full of ideas and implications that
someone far more interesting than I should write about. But at the same time,
the book left me a bit cold after reading it. Not in the “I hated this book” or
“I missed something within the text” but rather in the “I have nothing to say about
this book beyond the technical aspects, which make for terrible analysis.”
There are some moments of charm, dangling themes and threads that could make
entire books on their own.
At its heart though is a somber
story of a man coming to terms with being sexually abused as a child by his
father by falling in love with a magician. I use the term somber not in the
humorless sense one would expect (there are a lot of jokes made in regards to
the [in both the academic and literal sense] magical negro’s bodily fluids),
but rather in the stark look it takes at the history of repression and abuse
Lucas has gone through and how its affected his ability to be in committed
relationships. Even worse is the fact that he comes to this revelation shortly
before his father dies. So there’s no moment of confrontation between the two.
No point of closure for Lucas. Just complicated feelings of love, disgust,
hatred, and compassion towards his father.
I suppose, since I talked at length
about Alan Moore, I should discuss a work by his opposite, Grant Morrison (I
need another 500 words or so, so why not). In his major piece about the nature
of the universe via a mystical lens, The Invisibles, Morrison centralizes the
narrative around the character of Audrey Murray, a minor character who only
appears in two issues and never as the main character. Her husband, both
through gas lighting Audrey in front of her friends and physically assaulting
her, abused her. But in the end, he dies at the hands of the Grant Morrison
self insert character not for her sake, but because he was just another faceless
mook in the army of the enemy.
And yet, for all the pain she’s
gone through, all the trauma and torment, she doesn’t let this make her a
shitty person. Likewise Lucas Hart, for all his shittyness (there’s a reason
why he got divorced), doesn’t let his trauma turn him into a shitty person.
It’s only when he acknowledges the trauma as something that happened rather
than repressing it that he becomes a better person (with the occasional relapses
into shittyness). (Alternatively, there’s Dean Trippe’s autobiographical comic
Something Terrible, which deals in these same themes as well as the constant
worry that his abusive past will make him want to hurt his kid the way he was
hurt.)
For some, trauma is the “be all/end
all” of existence. It’s the moment where life stops making sense and everything
just hurts. For others, it might be too much to handle and thus needs to be
repressed until such a time they’re ready to cope with it. But it comes out
eventually and the fact is no one is ever truly ready. But people have their
way of trying to find their true self, to seek the answer to the mystery of
existence. And the answers aren’t always pleasant.
But we seek anyways because we are
a species that can’t handle not knowing. We want to know about why we’re here,
if we have free will, and what other people are keeping from us. We don’t like
being left in the dark, so we go out and try to find out why. Even if the
methodology is weird like looking at a work of fiction from the perspective of
the historical context it comes out in or by making a movie critiquing another
movie. Nonetheless, we seek the answers to the problems we face as if there’s
one coherent answer that’ll explain everything to everyone.
But that’s rarely if ever the case.
The answers tend to lead to more questions, which lead to further questions and
so forth. We’re never going to have all the answers to the meaning of life, be
it personal or mystical. Not because there is no correct answer, but because
the correct answers contradict each other. Seekers into the Mystery and
Promethea and The Invisibles are all contradictions. But then-- aren’t we all?
“And now that I’ve lost everything… now that everyone I love
is gone, all I have left is everything. The river carries me on, though every
fear is facing me. And I do not know what next will be, and I cannot know what
next I’ll see. I’m running forward anyway. I’m not afraid to meet the day! The
world is filled with everything. I’m a boy who could be anything. And now, I
will do everything! The whole world unfurls before me; a great adventure lies
before me. I’m reaching out for anything. I’m calling out to everything.
There’s nothing I’m afraid to be: the world is new and glittery. I run to meet
it, hopefully! Love never dies in memory and I will meet life gloriously.”
-Anne Washburn, 2014
The End.
07/13/2017-03/22/2018
[Photo: Praying Directed by Ross Shuman Script by Dino Stamatopoulos]
Long ago in an American autumn.
