“Guys be sending dick pics”, bitch as if between Omegle, Snapchat, and Reddit we can still pretend “welp I’m bored, time to get on the internet and show strangers my genitals” is a male-specific thing
Oh man that reminds me of the most meta- thing I’ve ever seen.
0) World War II happened.
1) In postwar Japanese pop culture, “thinly or completely unveiled reference to nuclear explosion” is rivaled in thematic popularity only by “thinly or completely unveiled alternate-WWII in which Japan wins and is totally the good guys”.
Actually I’m almost afraid they finally got over this in the late-90s with the passing of a generation. I liked that, something somber and elegaic in the culture that wasn’t pure fanservice or third-generation commercial ripoffs. Anno and Miyazaki and remember when Final Fantasy had Cyan and the ghost train instead of a bunch of fucking EZ-Bake popstars?
2) Okay so there was this recent trend, they call “moe anthropomorphism” to represent things and concepts as cute girls, because obviously, Japan. It was particularly popular in terms of military hardware, because obviously, Japan.
3) Manga, etc., etc., so comics are a big thing in Japan, and part of the farm team for that is working on basically fanfic of established properties, they call it doujin, and like all fanfic, like most pulp, a lot of time it’s only good for the sex. Which is often violent and involves 13 year old girls, because obviously, humanity.
OKAY
4) So 1) and 2) combine to create Strike Witches - it was this series about a school/force of teenage girls representing various planes from all the nations of WWII, like they strap on these leg-things to fly around, and because they’re all allied together against an alien force literally representing militarism and war descending on the world even though no one particularly wants this militarism and war oh no, they’re just all brave and innocent warriors, and they might have to put on these leg things and fight the aliens at any time, they never wear pants so you can see their panties all the time, because obviously, Japan.
5) so 4) and 3) combine to make a hentai (“pervy”) doujin of Strike Witches. Which I read, to masturbate to. The first twenty pages of this doujin is mostly lesbian dominance, all of the girls breaking down and raping one of the more innocent characters, who was the Japanese one and I think a Mitsubishi Zero?
6) and then 5) combines with 1) again, which was already baked in, and the last 8 or so pages are the apocalyptic showdown with the aliens as seen from the Zero’s eyes. The American and British girls are out of the picture, dismissed in one panel. The French and Italian girls have surrendered and slunk away because they’re pussies.
The French and Italian girls have surrendered and slunk away because they’re pussies, but the two German girls went boldly into battle and lie bloodied and dying on the ground, this is the thing.
And so finally, the Japanese girl is fighting alone. She’s scared, she’s meek - she was the natural submissive for the first 20 pages, getting hazed by all the older nations^H^H^H^H^H^H^H girls but now it’s just her, now it’s her turn to prove her honor, and she jets out shrieking her vengeance, dodging alien missiles, coming straight out of the page…
And the next page is imitation newsprint, with a period photo-offset litho as the header. It’s an alien aircraft carrier, obviously American in design, with an exhaust trail streaking into one side of the island and a giant explosion blossoming out of the other.
And THAT is the most meta- thing I’ve ever seen.
(UPDATE for incoming 9/15/16: Takotsuboya’s “Witch-tachi no No-Pantsu”
Just came out of a showing of Death to Smoochy. Audience participation for the howl scene, good stuff.
Weird that never became more of a cult movie. I think might be because it represented an apex of several movie trends that didn’t continue on past.
1. the transitional ‘90s urban plot, where American cities were still depicted as playgrounds for white ethnic crime but the plot was kinda about how they were becoming playgrounds for professionals. Get Shorty, Analyze This, The Sopranos
2. Robin Williams’ self-deconstructive period (One Hour Photo, etc.) After he suicided it turns out everyone had always treasured him, but post-Aladdin into the 2000s there was a growing consensus he had always been just a cocaine-sweaty narcissist hack.
3. The Nora Ephron adult romantic comedy revival. Towards the start there’s hints toward the ‘80s/‘90s backlash “jaded businessbitch thaws out and realizes what’s important (nurturing children)” plot but it turns into a neo-screwball tension-between-equals. Even more than The 40 Year Old Virgin - 3 years later as Apatow supplanted Ephron - Catherine Keener’s is a specifically 40something fuckability, and the movie’s refreshingly upfront that the reward for being a good man is eventually a guarded but mature relationship with someone people in your circle used as a toy when she was younger and tighter.
Also, it’s a pretty good example of a 5 (as vs. the standard 3) act plot structure.
So it’s canonical that the CIA was shaping art trends for national advantage in the Cold War. And, of course, in both the peace and war periods of the FDR era, the government had entwined with the domestic cultural apparatus, to mutual delight.
Which makes me wonder about all the Hawaiiana - tiki style, theElvismovies - in American culture around the time of Hawaii’s accession to statehood.
Basically, to use the Europa Universalis metaphor, was that America spending culture points to make core on Hawaii?
So for the record, even to the extent that The Good Olde Days Of Moral Uprightness were a real thing
(and in some ways they were, moving part being the instrumental fact that your reputation mattered when your social world would consist of the same 200 people your whole life, in which standing waves of morality could be maintained)
people never waited for marriage to have sex
they waited for ENGAGEMENT
which is why in 19th century novels rakes making false promises of marriage are such a thing
So if I told you someone was using century-old hand-crafted artisanal methods to adapt traditional folk tales into a quaintly obsolete art form from the American Golden Age that would sound like the most twee, precious, non-normie thing ever and I just described Disney animation.
Disney’s pretty weird like that. Like, take the parks. They’re combinations of Coney Island and World’s Fairs with this undisguisable midcentury earnestness. These are places that get seriously psyched about the potential of noveltransitmodalities.
And the theming - “Let’s look forward to the wonderful future of space exploration, celebrate our roots in farm towns and the frontier west, AND enjoy the exotic charm of the South Pacific and Old Dixie!”
THERE IS A PAGEANT WHERE ROBOTS PAY TRIBUTE TO EXECUTIVE-DRIVEN WHIG HISTORY.
Oh. Oh. And. “The rides aren’t very thrilling, but your kids will love the chance to explore the worlds of all their favorite authors - A.A. Milne, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, Mark Twain, AND Lewis Carroll - while you’ll marvel at the exquisite background design.”
(Sun-dappled Edwardian neoteny and obsessive set decoration. Wes Anderson makes movies like Walt Disney made parks.)
And we’d recognize this all as a weird thing to exist in 2015 if we weren’t just used to it as the background noise of America. Like, I don’t really watch TV so I don’t see commercials much these days.
Oh man, they’re a trip in their own right if you’ve stopped taking them for granted. Like, “oh hey, for the next 30 seconds some of our best artists are going to use all their techniques and leverage all your emotions and desires and every social value in a masterful, unapologetic, and unforgettable bid for you to give us money, and then everyone will move on and no one will acknowledge this even happened.”
But the Disney World commercials in particular - you notice they don’t really make a case for going to Disney World, or even really explain what Disney World is. Because they’re not pitching Disney World, they’re reminding you of Disney World. It’s not “hey, Disney World is a thing you could go to”, it’s “hey, maybe it’s time for this generation’s pilgrimage”.
Disney’s weird. It’s kind of a company, but also custodian of some of the cultic functions of American culture, something like the priestly colleges of ancient Rome.
Like, they maintain sites of pilgrimage. I’m not saying that as a joke. Back of the envelope calculation, Americans go to Disney parks at a rate 7 times higher than Muslims go to Mecca. (The line between “tourist trap” and “religious site” has always been thin.)
And they’re custodians of the national narrative. Like I’ve said, they pitch “continuity with prewar small town and earlier frontier culture” as a fundamental, almost taken-for-granted aspect of Americanness with a confidence and charm you don’t often see these days. And I mean, hell, the Disney animated canon itself basically is to America what Grimm’s was to Germany.
And as custodians, they curate that narrative - like, we joke about “you know your identity group’s made it in America when you get your own Disney princess”, and laugh at the people reediting Disney character designs to look like their specific subgroup, but that only works because it’s fucking true, your identity group’s made it in America when you get your own Disney princess. I’ve worked with Disney Channel casting, and they mix ethnicities with the same care, precision, and scale that Pfizer mixes drugs.
And that robot pageant, the Hall of Presidents? Look at this history. It started out in the ‘70s as a celebration of consensus history and popular triumph, with character actors playing great men and Civil War tensions understood as a challenge to national unity. In 1993 it was reworked by Eric Foner to be narrated by Maya Angelou, use “regular people” unknowns to portray more vulnerable takes on historic figures and re-frame the Civil War in terms of slavery as a moral challenge. In 2009 they redid it again, mostly keeping the changes but bringing back some of the old Hollywood charm and putting Morgan Freeman as the voice of civic authority.
And like, as a representation of how America understands itself and its history, correct. That is absolutely, in every way, 100% correct.
(In the other direction, Walt Disney originally wanted to call it “One Nation Under God”, which yikes)
They say American copyright terms keep getting extended under pressure from Disney who wants to keep hold of all their founding properties, I almost wonder if it wouldn’t be less of a corruption of the civic system to just carve out special protections for Disney in recognition of their distinct role in America.
I used to be a lot more libertarian than I am now, and one of their tribal boogiemen, the idea of a “Ministry of Culture” - a government that sees the national culture as its domain, to shape as it will, “as it will” meaning as it always does with governments “through the instrument of bureaucracy” - that still rankles.
But what’s the alternative, though? You think about it and you realize it’s this - the national mythos rests in the hands of a publicly traded corporation.
(And then you maybe start to appreciate WHY having your king as the head of your church once made sense as a symbol of liberty and self-determination.)
Is there a collective term for small polities just outside the border of a larger polity that make their name off of, I guess, legal arbitrage? Providing things that are outlawed in the larger polity?
I mean what Monaco and its casinos are to France, or Macau and Singapore to China and southeast Asia, or Amsterdam and its drugging and whoring are to northern Europe. (Or maybe Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, but I’m not that clear on the specifics.)
I’m thinking mostly in terms of vice, but I suppose there’s major overlap with offshore banking, and there’s often a bit of smuggling based in the area.
America used to have Tijuana on the West Coast, and Cuba on the east. In the early 20th century Havana was a major American mafia town; the Cuban revolution and the need to create a replacement is a big part of how Las Vegas developed. Lonely desert Nevada was plenty willing to make a buck off legal arbitrage with looser gambling, prostitution, and marriage laws - offering no-fault divorce when other states didn’t, but also offering quick and easy marriage when other states required minimum ages, or parental permission, or waiting times and announcement, all intended to prop up family/patriarchal control of courtship in the face of the stability-undermining effect of frontier mobility. (Nevada here represents the solvent effect of frontier mobility. ‘Merica!) All the goofy Elvis instant-marriage chapels now are a relic of this, back when “elopement” was more of a real, actual thing. Just like Gretna Green.
You know, in an alternate timeline it could have been Hot Springs, Arkansas instead. For a while it was. Look at that page. “In 1944, the Army began redeploying returning overseas soldiers; officials inspected hotels in 20 cities before selecting Hot Springs as a redistribution center for returning soldiers… The soldiers had time to enjoy the baths at a reduced rate and other recreational activities.” Hmm.
Look at this official National Parks Service history: “Bathhouses [treating venereal diseases] employed special attendants, mercury rubbers, to administer the mercury ointment. The patient gave the prescribed mercury to the rubber who administered the ointment with either bare hands, a bath mitt, or a brush; later the rubbers wore gloves.” “[Attendants] took monthly physical examinations to make sure that patrons were not exposed to contagious diseases.” Hmmm.
Getting back to Havana, in other aspects, Miami picked up the slack. And Tijuana, I guess you can still go for prescription drugs, and San Diego teenagers down to drink, but Las Vegas stole a lot of its thunder too.
Of course now that we’ve got air transport some of that stuff’s moved even further offshore to, say, Thailand. But then, I’d be surprised if that region ever didn’t have that stuff. It’s right at the nexus of the Chinese and Indian Ocean coastal and the Asian archipelago trade routes, which means sailors; you’ve got mouths of the the Mekong and Chao Phraya systems, which means you’ve got the guys moving trade goods along inland routes (You know what we call guys moving trade goods along inland routes today? Truckers.); plus it’s been on the borderlands of various land empires, which means expats, functionaries and soldiers posted away from home.
(You know where in American history inland and coastal shipping met at the borderland of multiple empires? New Orleans.)
Look at all thetemples, you’ll see how far the tourist trade goes back. Religious complexes are and always have been tourist sites. A lot of smaller ones, boasting the foot of St. Whoever or the largest statue of Buddha of this particular material in this particular pose, are like Wall Drug or the world’s largest ball of whatever - tourist traps located just off an otherwise featureless segment of major trade and transit routes, surviving by drawing in travelers eager for distraction. While the bigger ones become destinations of pilgrimage in their own right - the statistics I can find seem pretty speculative, but I hear around 10% of Muslims make Hajj in their lifetimes, while 70% of Americans visit one of the Disney parks.
(You know what’s a famous story about the coexistence of prostitutes and religious tourist destinations? The Hunchback of Notre Dame.)
So if I told you someone was using century-old hand-crafted artisanal methods to adapt traditional folk tales into a quaintly obsolete art form from the American Golden Age that would sound like the most twee, precious, non-normie thing ever and I just described Disney animation.
Disney’s pretty weird like that. Like, take the parks. They’re combinations of Coney Island and World’s Fairs with this undisguisable midcentury earnestness. These are places that get seriously psyched about the potential of noveltransitmodalities.
And the theming - “Let’s look forward to the wonderful future of space exploration, celebrate our roots in farm towns and the frontier west, AND enjoy the exotic charm of the South Pacific and Old Dixie!”
THERE IS A PAGEANT WHERE ROBOTS PAY TRIBUTE TO EXECUTIVE-DRIVEN WHIG HISTORY.
Oh. Oh. And. “The rides aren’t very thrilling, but your kids will love the chance to explore the worlds of all their favorite authors - A.A. Milne, J.M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, Mark Twain, AND Lewis Carroll - while you’ll marvel at the exquisite background design.”
(Sun-dappled Edwardian neoteny and obsessive set decoration. Wes Anderson makes movies like Walt Disney made parks.)
And we’d recognize this all as a weird thing to exist in 2015 if we weren’t just used to it as the background noise of America. Like, I don’t really watch TV so I don’t see commercials much these days.
Oh man, they’re a trip in their own right if you’ve stopped taking them for granted. Like, “oh hey, for the next 30 seconds some of our best artists are going to use all their techniques and leverage all your emotions and desires and every social value in a masterful, unapologetic, and unforgettable bid for you to give us money, and then everyone will move on and no one will acknowledge this even happened.”
But the Disney World commercials in particular - you notice they don’t really make a case for going to Disney World, or even really explain what Disney World is. Because they’re not pitching Disney World, they’re reminding you of Disney World. It’s not “hey, Disney World is a thing you could go to”, it’s “hey, maybe it’s time for this generation’s pilgrimage”.
Disney’s weird. It’s kind of a company, but also custodian of some of the cultic functions of American culture, something like the priestly colleges of ancient Rome.
Like, they maintain sites of pilgrimage. I’m not saying that as a joke. Back of the envelope calculation, Americans go to Disney parks at a rate 7 times higher than Muslims go to Mecca. (The line between “tourist trap” and “religious site” has always been thin.)
And they’re custodians of the national narrative. Like I’ve said, they pitch “continuity with prewar small town and earlier frontier culture” as a fundamental, almost taken-for-granted aspect of Americanness with a confidence and charm you don’t often see these days. And I mean, hell, the Disney animated canon itself basically is to America what Grimm’s was to Germany.
And as custodians, they curate that narrative - like, we joke about “you know your identity group’s made it in America when you get your own Disney princess”, and laugh at the people reediting Disney character designs to look like their specific subgroup, but that only works because it’s fucking true, your identity group’s made it in America when you get your own Disney princess. I’ve worked with Disney Channel casting, and they mix ethnicities with the same care, precision, and scale that Pfizer mixes drugs.
And that robot pageant, the Hall of Presidents? Look at this history. It started out in the ‘70s as a celebration of consensus history and popular triumph, with character actors playing great men and Civil War tensions understood as a challenge to national unity. In 1993 it was reworked by Eric Foner to be narrated by Maya Angelou, use “regular people” unknowns to portray more vulnerable takes on historic figures and re-frame the Civil War in terms of slavery as a moral challenge. In 2009 they redid it again, mostly keeping the changes but bringing back some of the old Hollywood charm and putting Morgan Freeman as the voice of civic authority.
And like, as a representation of how America understands itself and its history, correct. That is absolutely, in every way, 100% correct.
(In the other direction, Walt Disney originally wanted to call it “One Nation Under God”, which yikes)
They say American copyright terms keep getting extended under pressure from Disney who wants to keep hold of all their founding properties, I almost wonder if it wouldn’t be less of a corruption of the civic system to just carve out special protections for Disney in recognition of their distinct role in America.
I used to be a lot more libertarian than I am now, and one of their tribal boogiemen, the idea of a “Ministry of Culture” - a government that sees the national culture as its domain, to shape as it will, “as it will” meaning as it always does with governments “through the instrument of bureaucracy” - that still rankles.
But what’s the alternative, though? You think about it and you realize it’s this - the national mythos rests in the hands of a publicly traded corporation.
(And then you maybe start to appreciate WHY having your king as the head of your church once made sense as a symbol of liberty and self-determination.)
Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse, and Hooters represent the four thematic seasons of suburban life: winter (New England), spring (Italy), summer (Australia), and fall (heterosexuality).
It’s weird that for so long the prestige, “prime time” model of TV was basically character types in disconnected but formulaic vignette plots and “multi-episode plot arcs driven by changing character dynamics as plotted by a coherent creative team” was the degraded, low-status daytime “soap” form
People date the “Golden Age of TV” to The Sopranos but I think the key was reversing this and that started in the decade prior. By the time it debuted in 1999, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess already had a real reputation for that (and for playful writing with self- and genre-awareness, which was impressive when you consider they were both based around fight scenes); the X-Files was famous for balancing monster-of-the-week and broader series mythology.
You can see the progression in the Star Trek serieses - TOS was barely consistent from episode to episode; TNG had the Borg arc and recurring Q episodes but also the entirely abandoned Season 1 arc about corruption and betrayal in Starfleet; by DS9 they kicked off the series by plopping the station next to a blob of long-term plot and introducing elements – Sisko as Emissary of the Prophets – that didn’t resolve for seasons.
Maybe further back to the 80s, when this even became possible as shows staffed up their writers’ rooms enough to produce consistent work in-house rather than just taking freelance pitches and polishing them. Miami Vice was a breakthrough not just for the cinematic style and contemporary pop score but that it had elements of overarching plot – the hunt for Calderone, Sonny’s amnesia (how soapy!) – at all
Reblogging at a more reasonable hour because I originally woke up and wrote it down in order to get it out of my head and fall back asleep
Oh, something else important on the way was thirtysomething, clear progenitor to relationship dramedies like This Is Us, that was basically a 1987 My So-Called Life for adults, or at least Boomer yuppies
Also interesting are the false starts - the miniseries boom after 1977’s Roots revealed an audience for multi-episode narratives; the 80s “prime-time soaps” Dallas and Dynasty that didn’t have much episodic drive aside from the overarching plots.
I suppose we should also consider the soapy 90s youth dramas on Fox and the WB - 90210, Melrose Place, Dawson’s Creek. I’d say you really see some of the seeds of modern TV here – the shipping-bait plotting that seeped into action genres through things like Buffy, Smallville, and Supernatural; soliciting pop soundtracks from bands looking for breakthrough opportunities; The OC as a revival of the Dallas/Dynasty style prime time soap
I can’t believe I didn’t comment on this at the time. I agree with the thrust but would choose a slightly different set of things to focus on.
TV is heterogeneous, but the main thing that characterizes the “golden age” that is regarded as starting with the Sopranos is TV being able to beat “higher” narrative art forms (there’s a reason that the terms “novelic” and cinematic” were so often used in the 2000s) at their own game. In order to do this, the prestige show needed a way to handle theme that wasn’t “operative” theme implicit in the setting or drama (i.e. cop shows being about Law and Order) on an ongoing basis. The one neat trick is the development of a structure that allowed episodes to revolve around thematic cores where the threaded plots would weave in and out and characters (always the center of TV) could show the (mostly illusion of) progress necessary to support the “theme story.”
Obviously this is a dodge as the golden age contained lots of shows less focused on theme that nonetheless leaned on movie and book competitive elements like more elevated production, complex structures, metatextual elements, isolated episodes meant to function differently as a specific statement, and star performances. Remember, Supernatural is still on. But we are talking about this we tend to focus on the model of HBO, Lost and the ilk. The Petri dish experiment on this begins (as much as an ongoing process has a beginning) in the early 80s.
Swinging into the 80s, the nighttime soap format was the only serialized drama in existence. It contained threaded plotting but only bold genre based themes which weren’t exactly nuanced. Note: please take into account, as an influence, the idea that comic books at the time were getting pretty sophisticated at nurturing ongoing plot lines (see Claremont’s X-Men and Levtz’s Legion of Super-Heroes). There was also a 70′s TV, new-Hollywood influenced tradition at this time of “gritty” (scare quotes in this post means not really but trying to look like) procedurals. The first contributing recombination of the era was 1981′s Hill Street Blues followed quickly by 1982s St Elsewhere, both of which (HSB moreso) contained the differed plotting structure where elements would be introduced with less screen time, then nurtured into larger stories which could then become the A plot 2 months later. This is essentially the sentinel event for what would happen to TV over the next 20 odd years.
Miami Vice played with cinematic stylization as an addition to this formula, and several semi-serialized shows reverted back to more “standard” styles but at least tried to stay above the status level of nighttime soaps (most significantly LA Law, but you had your Thirtysomethings - tracing out all the recombining lines is beyond the scope, here). They were finding new formats, etc, but the airwaves were still dominated by well made episodic genre fluff (not a slam, Equalizer, sir, and Jessica Fletcher, mam).
There were several things that kicked things into the next developmental phase, the true pre-Golden, including Fox trying more daring counter programming and the opening up of syndicated markets with the increase of product hungry cable stations, but the biggest flashpoint was certainly when a guy who won an Emmy for his story work on Hill Street Blues met the man who is now the greatest living Film director to do a nighttime soap opera about the abject terror at the heart of America.
Twin Peaks is the clear breakpoint. The show was on for only 1.4 seasons, but it hit like an asteroid. Some of its impact was just opening up TV aesthetically and in terms of character type, tone, and subject matter, but the seismic shifts were in long game structure and robust subtext. It made a bunch of working TV writers realize they could do something like this and was a formative experience on the next generation. The X-Files is a significant mediator of this effect, but look at what happened to syndicated genre shows starting in 1993 or so - Babylon 5, Deep Space 9, even the Hercules affiliated shows. And there’s the lasting legacy of Homicide, maybe the first “novelic” approach to a TV procedural.
Buffy was crucial in learning how to Matryoshka-nest ongoing stories for periodic increasing payoff that matched the TV seasonal benchmarks. There was a lot going on rolling into 1999, even on HBO itself (we aren’t focusing on comedy, but as far as threaded stories/episodic thematics, Sex. and the City figured out how to upgrade the Dougie Howser model nicely). The Sopranos getting “credit” for starting the Golden Age is probably part Bloomian “strong misreading” (it simply hit people’s consciousness the hardest in therms of “this new thing is a thing”) and partly timing (the big eruption of good new network programming the rise of basic cable networks spending real money on original programming would start soon).
My timeline is 1981-90 - the classic network twilight years, with experimentation in mainstream channels forming interesting strains, but safe shows still dominant; 1990-9 - the pre-golden age, with explosive proliferation of ideas with a severe Darwinian load; 1999-2010 - the high Golden age dominated by the main networks, HBO, and individual basic cable shows (the Shield, BSG), ends with the last episode of Lost; 2010-2019 - the “prestige” era, dominated by a few big shows, and destruction of the monoculture, ends with the end of Game of Thrones; 2019-present - peak TV, characterized by glut and increased experimentation/niche servicing as a knockoff effect of the rise of streaming services needing content.
Like, in the 20th century the mainline Protestant churches tried to
deal with the romantic drift of “spouse as soulmate” from “spouse as
partner in household as institution” by introducing mandatory classes in
their colleges to teach the students how to fuck each other better.
Oh and you know what I just remembered? Marriage manuals.
Which I think even still existed in the 1980s as a degenerate genre of erotica, but early in the 20th century, that was a serious earnest concern of mainstream bourgeois WASP culture in say the 1920s-30s, that young people get on birth control and be good at sex.
There was a concern that marriage was under threat from Romantic ideals, and people were neglecting spouses in favor of lovers, and that this had to do with Christians being sexually repressed and unpracticed and being totally incompetent at getting each other off
(especially with America’s rural homestead culture leaving people so isolated without partners to practice on. Except relatives and barnyard animals, which is absolutely a thing in isolated rural cultures!)
Like in the immediate postwar when the whole “going steady” teenage culture came up, journals of upper-middlebrow tradition were seriously fretting that teenagers were getting too sexually exclusive too soon, and that this boded poorly for the formation of their mature character. And when you think of the divorce wave of the 60s-70s, well…?
(really, a lot of postwar teenage culture was about how the car changed rural life by giving kids the range and mobility to find each other to fuck)
Mind you this was going on while the churches were still in their great missionary boom. In fact, it was kind of related. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928. A lot of period linguistics, anthropology, archaeology was handmaiden to Protestant missionary evangelism, and the churches invested heavily in them. (The rest was a handmaiden to European nationalisms.)
And half a century before Club Med, before the hippie ‘60s, the mainline Protestant churches sent the cream of their young elite off to spend a few years living with tropical islanders and other brown people and one of the bigger things they brought back was “Oh yeah, they’re a lot less uptight about sex, premarital, extramarital, teenage casual, it’s all good. We should try that.”
“As a significant “feminised” category of mental illness, however, HPD
was superseded in the DSM-III by the introduction of the controversial BPD, a label which has been increasingly applied to women, with around 75 per cent of all cases estimated to be female (Becker 1997 : xxii–xxiii). Seen as a milder form of schizophrenia and lying on the “borderline” between neuroses and psychoses, the concept has been used in psychiatry since 1938 (Decker 2013 : 196). Like other personality disorders, BPD has a notoriously low reliability level even by the generally poor standards of the DSM, and even within the profession is considered by many as yet another “wastebasket” category (though as Bourne ( 2011 : 76) ruefully remarks, the ambiguity of such personality disorders makes them particularly useful in policing deviance in the new century). One member of the DSM-III task force stated at the time of constructing BPD that “in my opinion, the borderline syndrome stands for everything that is wrong with psychiatry [and] the category should be eliminated” (cited in Decker 2013 :199). The chair of the task force, Robert Spitzer, admitted with the publication of DSM-III that BPD was only included in the manual due to pressures from psychoanalytically oriented clinicians who found it useful in their practices (Spitzer 1980 : 31–32). Such practices have been documented by Luhrmann ( 2000 : 113) who describes psychiatrists’ typical view of the BPD patient as “an angry, difficult woman—almost always a woman—given to intense, unstable relationships and a tendency to make suicide attempts as a call for help.” Bearing significant similarities to the feelings of nineteenth century psychiatrists towards hysterics, Luhrmann’s ( 2000 : 115) study reveals psychiatrists’ revulsion of those they label with a personality disorder: they are “patients you don’t like, don’t trust, don’t want … One of the reasons you dislike them is an expungable sense that they are morally at fault because they choose to be different.” Becker ( 1997 : xv) reinforces this general view of the BPD label when she states that “[t]here is no other diagnosis currently in use that has the intense pejorative connotations that have been attached to the borderline personality disorder diagnosis.” A bitter irony for those labelled with BPD is that many are known to have experienced sexual abuse in childhood (Ussher 2011 : 81), something they share in common with many of those Freud labelled as hysterical a century earlier; a psychiatric pattern of depoliticising sexual abuse by ignoring the (usually) male perpetrator, and instead pathologising the survival mechanisms of the victim as abnormal”
Notice that cost on the left margin means it costs 7 more unless you have the Politics resource (land), which unlike the other 4 resources (colours) had no game effects other than making celebrity pilots and “orbital bombing” direct damage cheaper
Somehow at the time this was not obvious as a metaphor for the post-Cold War “New World Order”, because the comparison set was like On The Edge and Illuminati and Netrunner and Illuminati and the X-Files CCG
The ‘90s were paranoid conspiratorial as hell, just like the ‘50s shit doesn’t make sense without that
I do have some objections - I don’t know how you can write a history that goes “In recent decades, in competing with Marvel DC found strength in mining their legacy, eliminated their multiverse and then immediately brought the same ideas back, introduced themes of cosmic myth, and became obsessed with recapturing ‘80s Miller/Moore-era magic and aiming at ‘mature’ audiences” and not ONCE mention Sandman and the Vertigo stuff - but it’s pretty solid.
It’s true, Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns marked the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of whatever the ‘90 to today are. On the one hand grim antiheroes with Liefield pouches everywhere, but more thematically (and respectably) comics about comics with a sense of “okay, what if this shit were real”.
I’ve said before, the basic conceit of Watchmen was “okay, say there were superheroes, and they followed trends where there was a Golden Age of pulpy musclemen, and a Silver Age of scientific wonders, and a Bronze Age of social tension and self-questioning how and why would that have happened?” And then they explore how actual people might feasibly have behaved under those conditions.
The omnipitent, omnipresent figure associated with America would have been used as a Cold War superweapon, and also would have had a distant relationship to petty mortals. ‘70s disillusion with power would have redounded against superheroes as tools of the man, excoriated them as unchecked authorities, prompted calls for government control, and celebrated them as free men and vigilantes, even though these things are all in complete conflict. The woman who wore a skintight bodysuit and worked with a bunch of macho types would have been harassed and treated as a sexual object, the kind of woman who would decide to wear a skin-tight bodysuit and chase fame going on well-publicized adventures with a bunch of macho types would probably have a complex relationship to this fact, the daughter she raised in loose post-60s fashion into the shoulderpadded ‘80s would have a complex relationship to THAT fact, etc., etc.
And that was revolutionary! And around the same time, Dark Knight Returns made the point, “if Batman was real, he’d basically be a psychologically damaged para-fascist”. Which is almost conventional wisdom now, but that was revolutionary!
Of course before all that was Crisis on Infinite Earths which even established the idea “what if all this mythology was part of one coherent world”, and it was more mainstream and had an accordingly pulpy definition of “coherent”, but it was still a stab in this new direction, and set up the idea of a “generational” progression of heroes.
Sandman was, for all the goth brooding, not all that psychologically introspective or realist, but it was all in on attempting to tie stories in together. Dream was basically the embodiment of Story, and the Sandman universe was basically a meta-story for telling stories about storytellers and the stories they tell, which managed to weave into one coherent universe not only a bunch of early pulp-era comic books but basically the entire sum of Western and Near-Eastern history and mythology.
Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did the same stuff with the Victorian literature from which the pulp tradition originated, then Grant Morrison and The Invisibles, and then if that wasn’t enough The Filth, which was kind of a riff on the very act of maintaining a comics continuity, only written with the subtle grace of a fucking sledgehammer - it literally features the characters gazing upon the giant hand of the (dead) Author/God holding a pen towards the end - with all sorts of juvenile-“mature” vulgarity along the way, basically a 13-issue adventure in crawling up his own asshole. I hear his recent run on Batman did an admirable job of integrating the character’s mythology, even the silly ‘60s stuff, into a respectable whole though.
One thing you rarely hear of these days is Marvel’s 1994 Marvels series, even though the “superpowers at street level” stuff presaged the feel of Powers, Astro City, and Top 10.
You know, it’s kind of funny when people invoke Moloch in an attempt to infuse the power of Christianity into whatever “think of the children”-of-the-day, because when you think about it it’s not like the Christian tradition is all that down on child sacrifice as such.
I mean, God called off Abraham before he went through with killing Isaac, but the takeaway message of that was that the willingness to sacrifice your child is Right And Good and will be rewarded. (As long as it’s to, you know, the right god - the Moloch slagging strikes me as more part of Jehovah’s well-established jealousy than anything.)
Hell, it’s literally the most canonical thing ever that God sacrificed his own only son. To himself. As the price for his forgiving humanity for violating the strictures that he had insisted on. Because I guess he was always kind of OCD like that.
Anyway, the next time you hear of someone who said that God told them to kill their children, keep an open mind, because that’s well within character.
