Intertexuality and Star Trek: DS9

Intertexuality in Star Trek: Deep Space 9

Star Trek as a franchise belongs to the tradition of those frequently derided, brightly-painted monthly science fiction magazines and their descendants, weekly space opera television shows like Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon. The writers of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, more so than any other Star Trek series, were aware of the pressures of genre and canon on the show and the need to play to the audience to build and sustain success. This was especially true after the writers brought on board characters from earlier series who required careful attention in characterization for the sake of the fans, such as the beloved Lieutenant Worf from The Next Generation, but from the start DS9 catered to its audience of Trekkies, Trekkers, and people who just like sci-fi by providing viewers with “a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world” (Eco, “Casablanca” 199). From the first episode, “The Emissary”, Deep Space 9 displays a close knowledge of Star Trek history and careful attention to detail that gives each major character a role in the recent history of this future. However, no DS9 episode reaches so far into Star Trek and science fiction history as does “Far Beyond the Stars”, which manages to intertextualize science fictional history from the boom of genre magazines in the postwar period onward to the creation of Star Trek itself while still managing to pay homage to ‘traditional’ science fictional tropes such as time travel in the midst of a metanarrative about science fiction.

“Far Beyond the Stars” features the usual cast members of Deep Space 9, albeit in new guises, “to remind the reader that mediation/representation [as] the name of the game [is], in itself, nothing new” (Delany 223). In this case it is the viewer rather than the reader who comes to realize that who and what is present on the screen is infinitely transmutable into new forms and interpretations and that Star Trek is by its science fictional nature open to altering characters and changing actors in order to have them represent whatever it is the story needs. DS9 in particular is exemplary for reusing actors in a multitude of roles. Actor Jeffrey Combs plays a major villain in the series, but reappears under heavy makeup as a number of other characters not only in DS9 but in other areas of the Star Trek franchise such as The Next Generation and Enterprise. He shows up in “Far Beyond the Stars” playing ‘himself’ as Weyoun in addition to portraying a violent, racist police officer who brutalizes Avery Brooks’ Benny Russell. Other actors double their roles in the episode as well, playing both characters fans recognize from the show and new ones created just for the episode’s story. Doubling the actors’ performances like this brings the viewer’s attention sharply into focus on the narrative and highlights not only the natural intertextuality of the episode’s toying with established Star Trek canon, but also jars the viewer into recognizing that what the viewer is seeing is, after all, a televised science fiction show. Samuel R. Delany calls this textual mediation, and claims that “textuality is mediation per se. To experience textuality for moments as invisible is to confirm mediation’s strength—not to deny it” (221). However, the audience never escapes the text, even when as a reader or viewer the text seems most obvious in its rhetoric of self-referencing, nor are they meant to in works like “Far Beyond the Stars”. The self-references are part of the story and an integral element in building the narrative around the idea of the episode being Star Trek as Star Trek and science fiction as science fiction. The audience at some point will begin to recognize the textual building blocks of the episode, regardless of how many viewings it takes, and at that point the episode transforms from a simplistic space adventure to a more complicated story about space adventures and the people who create them.

To experience textuality as visible likewise confirms the strength of textual mediation by giving the audience a significant amount of room to interpret the episode. According to Umberto Eco, audience members can be divided up into two categories- the first level of readers or viewers simply enjoy the episode as it is written and the second level of audience members who get the jokes and bring into their viewing a background which allows them to put the show in context. Eco does not push the idea that either level is necessarily a ‘superior’ method in which to read a text or watch a movie, though he does explain that “the first-level model reader wants to know what happens, while the second-level model reader wants to know how what happens has been narrated” (Eco, “Intertextual Irony” 223). To become a second-level reader one must have been a first-level reader, perhaps for a long time in order to accumulate the sort of knowledgeable background a text may need for a second-level reading. “Far Beyond the Stars” is no exception. It is perfectly possible to watch the episode as merely a progression of plot- aliens make Captain Benjamin Sisko hallucinate he is an African American science fiction writer in post-WWII New York, and in addition to deciding which reality he belongs to he must come to grips with his responsibilities in the ‘real’ world as a space station captain. Taken this way, the plot is rather campy but still an enjoyable watch, even if the viewer fails to recognize Sisko’s fellow writers as being stand-ins for genre greats like Issac Asimov and Leigh Brackett, not to mention that the characters are played by other members of DS9’s main cast, adding another layer of complication and self-awareness for the alert viewer. Eco’s second-level viewer, however, would bring to the table a working knowledge of the early magazine history of science fiction as well as familiarity with Star Trek canon, especially that of the series in question. In theory, this viewer would notice and understand the show’s many references to the shoddy pay and disrespect given to early magazine writers, and perhaps make the jump to thinking about how genre fiction and those who create it are treated now, especially by more mainstream readers and critics. This reader would perhaps recognize the allusions to Bradbury, Sturgeon, and Heinlein and probably the namedropping of W.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright as well. Perhaps some viewers would even have had direct contact with the works of some of these authors and could delve deeper into the literary heritage this episode has to rifle through so quickly. Though these references have little to do with the main storyline of Sisko’s struggle and are not strictly necessary to a viewer’s first-level interaction with the episode, those viewers who do carry with them this body of knowledge will have a very different experience than those who come to the text empty-handed, looking for straight-forward entertainment that involves green alien women, disruptor blasts and warp-core breaches.

In addition to classifying and defining readers, in discussing the fragmentation that often creates cult hits such as Star Trek Eco defines his own breed of modernized intertextual archetypes which some contemporary writers make use of in order “to indicate a preestablished and frequently reappearing narrative situation, cited or in some ways recycled by innumerable other texts” which “can belong to a rather recent textual tradition” (Eco, “Casablanca” 200). Star Trek is a model example of this complex incorporation of a multitude of literary work, including itself. Star Trek: The Original Series calls on famous works ranging from Hamlet to The Bible in order to legitimize its place in storytelling and literature, and every subsequent series has followed suit. The Next Generation turns to Melville’s Moby Dick to explain Jean-Luc Picard’s obsession with the Borg, and DS9 repeatedly calls on poetry from both World Wars to make a case for universal peace. Meanwhile, Captain Benjamin Sisko can no more escape the shadow of one James T. Kirk than Sisko’s analogue Benny Russell can hope to buck the racial and artistic codes of his day. Both characters played by Avery Brooks invoke a particular ‘new’ archetype here. Sisko retains echoes of those Star Trek captains who have gone before him in the canon, namely Kirk and Picard, and hybridizes Kirk’s swaggering captaincy with Picard’s intellectual leadership into his own blend of rough-and-tumble adventurism and thoughtful humanism. Benny Russell epitomizes the ostracized Sensitive Artiste who suffers grandly for his creative vision in a conservative society that is simply not ready for his groundbreaking masterpiece about race relations in a utopian future. Both characters are meant to “[provoke] in the addressee a sort of intense emotion accompanied by the vague feeling of déjà vu” that hopefully keeps the audience coming back for more adventures of Sisko and his crew (Eco, “Casablanca” 200). In Sisko, audience members are supposed to see both the captain they would want to have and the captain they would want to be, while Benny seems to more closely represent the audience members as they are. He’s the quiet nerdy type who likes stories about extraterrestrials and ray guns, and is trying to make a living through writing science fiction. His character is clearly aimed at garnering sympathy from the literate audience member who is presumably well read in science fiction and perhaps interested in producing more of the fiction he or she finds so intriguing. Any of these representations are also generalizations, all of which play off of stock characters, situations, and concepts that can be found in the best and the worst of not just genre fiction but literary works of all stripes. These intertextual archetypes are not meant to be mythic in scale, but are merely intended to characterize a person or situation the audience will recognize and respond to, presumably due to earlier encounters with similar representations in other works. Every audience member who meets DS9’s Captain Sisko will remember his notorious predecessor due to his ubiquitous presence in contemporary pop culture. Watching Star Trek: The Original Series is not a prerequisite to understanding Sisko as a Star Trek captain when Kirk is so well situated in his own archetypical role as The Captain.

Eco’s idea of intertextual archetypes ties in to his concept of the intertextual frame, which differs from what he calls ‘common frames’ by representing scenes and situations drawn from literary traditions rather than real-life experiences. Naturally, Sisko’s alien-induced hallucination falls more into the science fictional tradition than into what most people would consider reality or realistic fiction. However, it’s not such a strange idea for audience members who are familiar with such science fictional concepts as aliens, time travel, and the role-playing of historical and fictional characters. That isn’t to say that DS9 viewers, even those most thoroughly seeped in Star Trek lore and science fiction history, believe what they are seeing is true or based in some kind of reality outside the text and those texts preceding it. Rather, the episode is tailor made to invoke those earlier literary works, either indirectly by having Sisko ‘time-travel’ to postwar New York or through characters on screen directly referring to H.G. Wells and his science fiction involving time travel. Not only do these invocations amuse and interest viewers who can relate them to their experiences with these earlier texts, but by referencing science fiction’s traditional works the episode actually explains its own plot. The episode’s straight-forward evocation of H.G. Wells is a perfect example of such a draw on literary canon. Even non-readers of science fiction have been exposed to Wells’ socially far-reaching work, either by children’s storybook editions of his more famous tales or through any of the multiple movie adaptations, including several remakes in recent years. Many viewers of DS9, even those who aren’t habitual watchers of science fiction, probably know The War of the Worlds and, here more importantly, The Time Machine. Wells provides the framework to understand one of the trickier parts of the episode’s narrative, that of scientifically improbable time travel, simply by being the H.G. Wells who provided so much literary material for later modern science fiction to build upon. The point viewers are to take home after the episode isn’t that time travel is impossible, it’s that within the tradition of Star Trek and science fiction at large there exists a narrative language that seeks to accomplish and explain the impossible within the texts themselves.

Star Trek comes from a rich background of literary history encompassing a huge range of legitimate speculation and fanciful misapplication of science and reason, and the show itself has used this background to inform its own growth, sometimes even turning to feeding on itself when its storylines demanded it. This maze of self-references and cross-references to other texts have kept fans busy since the show first aired over a quarter of a century ago, and every subsequent series, movie, book or comic adds yet another twist to the labyrinth. Fans have kept the show alive to this day because of their love of Star Trek’s free use of trivia and information. Alternate histories, alternate futures, alternate universes, and holodeck illusions merge with legitimate scientific inquiry and exploration to entertain and inform multi-generational audiences. Episodes such as “Far Beyond the Stars” up the ante on the monster-of-the-week episodes that characterized The Original Series and strive for a more inclusive view not just of overreaching storyline but of the genre as a whole by incorporating the literary traditions that gave rise to the show in the first place. There is no question that Star Trek owes a great deal to the Golden Age science fiction magazines and the writers and editors who built the genre from the basic building blocks of rationalism, modernism, and romanticism, and there’s no doubt that Star Trek has in turn influenced later works of science fiction, not least of all itself. The writers of DS9 would have written a very different show if H.G. Wells, Theodore Sturgeon, and Ray Bradbury had never written science fiction and if Gene Roddenberry had never dreamed of making the world a better place through space exploration. If the goal is to seek out new life, Star Trek has succeeded by giving new life to old and new literary forms alike.

Works Cited

Delany, Samuel R. “Sex, Race, and Science Fiction: The Callaloo Interview.” Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994: 216-229.

Eco, Umberto. “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.” Travels in Hyperreality. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986: 197-211.

---. “Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading.” On Literature. Trans. Martin McLaughlin. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2004: 212-235.

“Far Beyond the Stars.” Star Trek: Deep Space 9.Writ. Ira Stephen Behr and Hans Beimler. Dir. Avery Brooks. Paramount, 1998. DVD.

Cory Doctorow, New Arrivals

This entry was originally going to be my paper on Rousseau and Matthew G. Lewis' The Monk, but Blogger freaks out every time I try to transfer the text from my Word document. Maybe I'll upload it somewhere and post the link instead...I had the same problem with a post on mythology I went through the trouble of typing, only to find out I couldn't put it up here. Grr.

So instead of posting my paper, which probably no one wants to see anyway, I decided that today's entry would be a review of Cory Doctorow's YA novel Little Brother. This book was up for this year's Hugo Award, and deservedly so, I think. As you can probably tell by the title, Little Brother pulls heavily (and quite beautifully) on George Orwell's 1984, and would probably be an awesome follow-up to any teen reading Orwell's masterpiece.

I've been on a major kick with this whole "classics-updated-for-the-new-age-of-politics" thing (just ask me how I feel about the incredible Gundam Wing revamp that is Gundam 00) and Little Brother does not disappoint on that front. I just wish Doctorow had written this novel a few years earlier, while I was still in high school and growing up in the shadow of 9/11 inspired domestic fear-mongering legislation like the Patriot Act. I can just imagine the uproar his book would have caused in my little reading circle! I've already been advocating it to several of my friends, many of whom went to high school with me.

Honestly, at first I was a little put off by Doctorow's use of 'hip slang', which occasionally...wasn't that hip. I got a good snicker or two (at at least one moment of "WTF, srsly?") but after a few chapters I didn't even realize I was listening to a 17 year old techie geek speak. All I was aware of was how rocking awesome the book had become once it started really taking off. Doctorow's knowledge and use of technology is both frightening and seriously cool, and kind of makes me want to pick up a computer programming book or two so I can learn how to actually do some of the bad-ass tricks Marcus pulls off in the novel. Also, he managed to piss me off all over again about the U.S. running rough-shod over MY personal rights and privacy. Ooh, I felt 16 and angry again!

The plot summary on Amazon covers everything else you probably want to know. I simply felt the need to share my exciting discovery with the world! If you see a copy of this book, at least pick it up and look it over. It may be one of the best books you read this year.

---

In addition to Last Drink Bird Head, I have a copy of Richard K. Morgan's fantasy The Steel Remains on its way to my doorstep. It's shipping all the way from London though (isn't it sad when directly importing something is cheaper that buying it used from a middle man?) so it may be a few weeks before it arrives.

Next review- possibly Max Brooks' World War Z? Seriously, it totally rocks. Or perhaps Greg Pak's and Carmine Di Giandomenico's X-Men: Magneto Testament. Guys, when a graphic novel is good, it's really, really good, and Magneto Testament is AWESOME.

"Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard"?

Ok, I respect Levi Grossman. However, I have to call bullshit on his article in the Wall Street Journal. Catherynne Valente (my hero) beat me to the punch here, and in fact brought Grossman's wrong-headed meandering to my attention. However, I still need to grouch a little bit.

Grossman seems to think there is some sort of vast intellectual conspiracy, which looks down upon contemporary literature and plot and calls it 'popular fiction', 'entertainment', 'escapist', and not at all literary. The crap he spews on the 'evils' of Modernist literature stands on its own.*

I'd spend more time on this, but I need to go home and write my book. Read his article, Valente's response, and if you have a few dozen hours to kill read Hal Duncan's blog. All of it. (I tried to skim through really fast and locate a few of Duncan's posts on genre and on literary fiction vs. popular fiction, but of course since I'm actually looking for them they are nowhere to be found. But, they are there, and they are excellent, so I encourage you to go on the hunt.)

Also, on a completely unrelated note, I want this book- Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn. Fuck yeah.

*All the words in quotes are mine, not his.

Best Twilight Review Ever

From respected fantasy writer Elizabeth Hand, published in the Washington Post. (And thanks to Hal Duncan for posting a link on his blog, where I found it.)

Christopher Barzak's The Love We Share Without Knowing

I have my first contender for 2009's top five books.

Christopher Barzak's The Love We Share Without Knowing is a collection of interlinked short stories which explore the concepts of identity and nationality, namely Japanese and American. The stories follow a varying cast of characters, some of whom meet at various points of the book and some of whom vanish altogether after one fateful event. Each character, however, is linked to the others by a twisting thread of love (some would say fate, others chance), giving the collection its name. Not every character gets a chance to tell his or her story before vanishing from the overall storyline, which makes me wonder if maybe, just maybe, there will be a sequel volume of a sort. (I especially wanted to read the story of the man who spends hours alone in a Japanese love hotel and writes in the love hotel's diary, expressing his views on the heartbreak and joy that other patrons, and humans in general, all share.)

I'd read "In Between Dreams" in The Solaris Book of New Fantasy (which is included in this volume as well), and was at first very intrigued by Barzak's use and re-interpretation of Japanese myth in a contemporary (Japanese) urban setting. It helps, of course, that this particular story deals with the kitsune, or fox spirit, which is probably my favorite aspect of Japanese mythology. Barzak uses the kitsune in several of the stories, tying the stories together by playing off of the spirit's mischievous and rather untrustworthy cleverness. I was also very curious to see if The Love We Share Without Knowing delved into the past of the gay American character, Danny, who is trapped in a supernatural coma by his jealous Japanese lover, Kenji. To my delight, Danny got his very own story, though sadly Kenji's side of the tale remains untold.

Overall, I was very impressed with the collection, and I've been thinking about picking up Barzak's other book, One For Sorrow. I've also ordered a short story collection that happens to have one of Barzak's stories, but I haven't read it yet. (It's still in the mail, actually.) I'm looking forward to what else Christopher Barzak comes up with.

Wolverine: Origins

I'm rather disappointed with the new Wolverine movie.

I haven't heard what other people have said about the film (other than the group I went to the release with, but we were all pretty much on the same page) so maybe someone out there had a slightly more positive experience...but I don't see how. I don't think there was a single aspect of the storyline that caught me off guard or made me think. Oh no- my friends and I were crowing about "ooh, that's *spoiler's* dad! I betcha it is!", "oh, that guy is so going to die" and "she's really a traitor! Five bucks says she turns on him!" and in every single case, we turned out to be right (sadly) except for the time I said "oh, the elevator is going to be empty when it arrives on the floor" and Deadpool (err...just Wade, actually. They weren't calling him Deadpool yet, I think) was still in plain view when the elevator landed. That may have been the only surprise in the entire movie- and I haven't even read the Origins comics, so it's not like I was cheating! (That also means I don't know how close the movie followed the comics, or indeed if they follow them at all, so don't take this review of the movie as a commentary on the comics.)

As if the transparent plot wasn't insult enough, the special effects wound up leaving the same acidic aftertaste in my mouth as the cheap-as-fuck special effects employed by none other than the SciFi (SyFy now) channel. Granted, they weren't as God-fucking-awful as the SciFi/SyFy effects are, but they were way below par for a movie with the kind of history and fanbase (and one would think with the funding!) usually associated with the X-Men movie franchise. Granted, this is a prequel, and we all know how much those suck, but I still find it difficult to believe no one somewhere along the line of production said to his friend "hmm...do Wolverine's claws look a bit... I don't know, flat? Unfinished, maybe?" because the first thing I thought when Wolvie unsheathed his newly-minted adamantium claws was "those look totally fucking fake", especially in the farmhouse bathroom scene where Wolvie examines his funky snow-white claws in excruciating detail. (Also- am I the only person who asked "when and how the hell did we wind up in Smallville?" when Wolvie showed up at that farmhouse? Seriously- what the fuck?) The explotions and most of the fighting was so-so in quality, pretty much what you'd expect in any typical action flick, though I really dug the one awesome scene torward the end when Sabertooth and Wolvie teamed up against a teleporting Deadpool (for reasons that I'm choosing now to spoil).

Gambit. Oh, for the love of God, why? I spent way too freaking long to see my dear Remy in a movie for THAT to be all I get. Weak accent, not a word of French, very little screen presence and 90% of his fighting techniques were annoying rather than awesome. And, to add insult to injury, he had normal eyes. That's right, not the infamous red-on-black- he had normal eyes. They glowed a wee bit when he used his powers (and only when he used his powers during a closeup), but generally he had normal pupils, normal irises, the whole works. I am PISSED. First they screw up Rogue, now they've gone off and screwed up Gambit, too.

Cheap cheap cheap fucking cheap.

On the plus side, I loved Ryan Renolds as Wade (for the all of five minutes he was actually on the screen), and Liev Schreiber's performance as Sabertooth was excellent- much, much better than the stuntman they had play his part in the X-Men films. And what's more is I've heard there's an extra scene at the end were Deadpool shows up, breaks the forth wall (his trademark in the comics) and shushes the audience, after his *spoilers!* decapitation in the film. Healing powers for the win! The scene I saw at the end of the credits in the particular theater I attended just showed Wolvie drinking at a Japanese bar and being mopey. *end of spoilers*

Vintage: A Ghost Story by Steve Berman

Does this make the third post in a row that mentions Steve Berman? It does, it does! Berman gets a gold star!

So after spending the last two or three months waiting to come across a copy of any Berman book (I don't know why, but I had a huge aversion to ordering one used off of Amazon) I finally located a copy of Vintage: A Ghost Story. I've already complained in a previous post about how I feel about finding his YOUNG ADULT novel in the literature section- it's not that I don't feel young adult books can be literature, but rather that I have a horrible sneaking suspicion it was shelved among more 'adult' literature to avoid scandalizing anyone (parents, namely) since it is a gay ghost/love story. To make things worse, I found it there after hearing about the Amazonfail controversy. The whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way.

At any rate, I bought the book Friday night, started reading it Saturday morning, and had it finished by midnight Saturday. It's a fairly slim book and an easy read, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was a great book to help me recover from my hellish day at class and work- it's a very sweet love story between two boys (and between one boy and a ghost boy) that refrains from becoming too sappy and saccharine to stand. The main character and Mike, one of the main love interests, are simply too cute with one another, especially in the very early stages of their budding relationship when neither of them are too terribly sure of what is expected of them. I was not, however, too fond of Josh (the ghost and the main character's other potential love interest) and found him to be selfish and controlling. My reaction to him may be a complement though- I'm not totally sure Berman made him in order to be liked (or perhaps Josh just isn't my type). Forget the pig-headed jock, guys- the cute little artist boy is way, way better for you.

The story itself is fairly predictable. Goth boy meets ghost boy, falls in love, and realizes ghost boy may not be quite as good for his health as perhaps he'd like. Then goth boy meets (or actually realizes he's been there all along) the artistic little brother of his best friend, starts falling for him, and realizes that a relationship with a living person who can't kill you with a mere touch may be a much better thing overall. Did I mention this was a gay teen love story? In the 'grown-up' fiction section? Anyway. Cute, refreshing story, if a little simple.

What made the book was Berman's portrayal of what it's like to grow up gay in a small town. I'm not talking about all that coming-out, woe-is-me shit that every gay teen movie ever produced has tried to pass off as a tear-jerking story, I'm talking about how it feels to live in a constant state of anxiety and hope. Did that cute guy waiting on your table at dinner pay a little more attention to you than the diners in the next booth? Was that pretty girl looking at your shirt, or your...well, I'm sure we all have imaginations. Was that sharp look you got from the customer you just helped a disdainful glance because of your youth, or do they know and are they planning on waiting for you outside with a lynch mob? Maybe your parents know, maybe they don't, and wouldn't we all like to have an aunt like the main character's, who takes him in after he runs away from home and his angry parents? I have an aunt I like to think would have done so, if I had asked, and as a consequence whenever the character appeared in the book I pictured her as my own aunt.

The main character isn't ashamed of his sexuality- his reluctance to be open about his gayness stems rather from a fear of reprisal. He fears being attacked and targeted, though he doesn't at all feel that he deserves such treatment. The issue of being completely out in high school is also examined through one of Berman's lesbian characters- she's upfront about her sexual orientation from the start, and while she doesn't receive any shit about it from other characters she does unnerve the main character with her frankness. She lives on the edge of what he perceives as dangerous territory, and while he respects her for it and desires that level of honesty for himself he can't help but measure the costs against the benefits. His own experiences have taught him that other people don't always accept homosexuals- he told one student at his previous school about his sexual orientation, and within a week was turned into a victim of harassment and verbal assaults from a number of people in his community, including his own parents (every gay teen's worst fear- that Mom and Dad won't understand). At the same time, is slightly oddball aunt loves him no matter what he does or who he loves, and while she makes him agree to basic ground rules of behavior (his boyfriend is not allowed to spend the night- which is the same rule she would impose if he had a girlfriend instead) the rules are made in love, not for punishment. She parents and guides him, without trying to change something that is very integral to his nature.

Berman also explores teenage drug and alcohol use in a manner that neither vilifies nor glorifies getting drunk, huffing, or even trying out Ecstasy. That is to say he doesn't condemn kids for experimenting with things they really shouldn't experiment with, but he does look at the consequences of careless actions, from mild ones like hangovers to much more serious ones such as cheating on a partner while drunk or the tragedy of accidentally killing oneself while huffing. Parents probably wouldn't like this aspect of the book, but it's a more honest look at drugs and teenagers than the majority of young adult books I've seen would dare try. There are no scare tactics here, only a calm pointing out of the potential risks and an acknowledgement that kids will be kids, no matter what parents think.

I will be awaiting the next arrival of a Steve Berman book on my shelf now. He's edited several titles that intrigue me as well, and we all know what a whore I am for short story collections! I'll be sure to keep posting. (Also, my apologies if any of this isn't terribly logical. I'm rather tired at the moment and it's all I can do to keep my spelling somewhat accurate.)

Millennium Actress

Millennium Actress is an animated feature film by the creator of Tokyo Godfathers and Perfect Blue, Satoshi Kon. Released in 2001, the film quickly established itself as a cult classic here in America as one of the highest quality full-length anime films ever translated- in fact, the Chicago Tribune declared it as "[a] piece of cinematic art. It's modern day Japanese animation at its best..." (and yes, I feel a bit like I'm typing an essay for a class) . Its reception in its homeland of Japan was even more supportive- it freaking TIED with Miyazaki's Spirited Away for the Grand Prize of Japan Agency of Cultural Affairs Media Arts Festival.

Personally, I have to say it's one of the most amazing films I've ever seen. The story follows the life of a young actress as it simultaneously follows her last interview as an old woman, and as the plot progresses it becomes increasingly challenging to tell her life apart from her roles in the movies- every part she ever played seems to have a personal resonance with her character, and often the only way you can be sure if she's playing herself versus one of her characters is to keep track of who is in what costume!

Every character in the movie plays a 'role' in her life- even the interviewer and his cameraman show up to rescue her several times over the course of the movie. Of course, it helps that he really did save her once when he was a young man and she as a much younger woman! The border between what happened in her tumultuous life and what the women she played experienced in their lives is deliciously blurred.

Her personal story of heartache and lost love is echoed across the lives of her characters- every lovesick teenager and heartbroken geisha, every abandoned young ninja (kunoichi, for those in the know) and unsatisfied housewife has one obvious, beautiful factor in common.

Every single one of them spends her life hunting for her one, true, long lost love- and find more pleasure in the chasing of this love than they ever do in reaching it.

Her tale is sorrowful and yet also full of hope and loyalty. She falls in love with a man who is an artist and a revolutionary, only to come home one day and find out that he has been forced to flee the country to avoid capture and execution. Before he leaves, he gives her a little trinket- the key to "the most important thing". She takes the key and swears to return it to him one day, and on that day she will tell him what that most important thing is. She follows him to Manchuria, acting in more and more movies in the hope that one day, he will see her and return to her. She keeps the key for most of her life, barring a few periods when it was either lost or taken from her. Not once during the course of the movie does she say what "the most important thing" is.

The movie is visually stunning in addition to being a emotional voyage. Satoshi Kon's talent for beautiful character design and selection of background animation is evident in full force throughout the course of Millennium Actress. The animation itself is graceful and flows elegantly from scene to scene, which isn't an easy task considering how jarring some of the switches between time periods, costumes, and environments could have been, given the structure of the movie. Every scene displays a vibrant array of colors that enhance the mood of the film, either by illustrating the joy and exhilaration of the actress' first love, or by sharply countering the lovers' heart-rending separation.

I've personally recommended this movie to several people and advocate watching it to anyone who enjoys either anime or those really, really rare love stories that mean something far deeper than boy-meets-girl.

Comic Books are Eating my Soul!

This is a re-post of one of my work-related blogs. I took out the really work-related stuff, but you can find the original post (and others put up by myself and my co-workers) at the Recycled Book Blog. Anyway, enjoy-

New (Actually Old) Discovery- I just picked up Preacher...and I'm so mad at myself for putting off reading it until now! If you are unfamiliar with the series, it's a story starring a (very) wayward Texas preacher named Jesse, his ex-girlfriend, Tulip, who hunts him down for abandoning her, and an Irish vampire called Cassidy who has a habit of getting into barroom brawls. In the first issue, Jesse is bestowed with 'the voice of God' by Genesis, a creature born from the so-called union of an angel and a demon. With this 'voice', Jesse has the power to command people to do his will...which results in various interesting and rather entertaining situations that I would rather not divulge and spoil for potential readers. Suffice to say that between Jesse's 'voice' and Cassidy's classic one-liners, I was laughing through both of the volumes I've so far read.

It's a great series, and very deserving of its popularity. Preacher is intelligent but accessible, clever but never cutesy, and above all a great read. Vertigo has struck gold once again with this series.

I've also picked up an older Marvel title, Universe X. What's fascinating about this one is that it's an alternate future epic, which not only projects new and terrifying ideas about what could happen to people we grew up thinking of as heroes. Some, like Warren Worthington III (X-Men's Angel) and Steve Rogers (Captain America) simply face age and their own faded glory. Others like Susan Storm Richards (the Invisible Woman) and Professor Xavier (if you don't know who he is, why are you reading a blog about comic books?) are no longer alive, and still others face a perversion of their powers that makes day to day life an unprecedented challenge (Namor the Submariner has been infused with the Human Torch's powers, meaning he can't leave his home under the sea without half of his body bursting into flames. Also, Daredevil is no longer the Man Without Fear- he is the Man Who Cannot Die, who performs outrageous stunts such as literally eating grenades in vain attempts to take his own life). Captain Marvel, on the other hand, returns from the dead (sort of...again) to save this universe from itself... only, he is reborn in the form of a golden-haired child, the son of Adam and Eve (both of whom are perfect constructed beings...and I'm sure you caught the reference behind the names). All in all, it's a heavy read, being two volumes (and each volume averaging 350 pages of illustrated greatness) of a dark, somewhat depressing revision of Marvel Universe history, but it's nonetheless a fascinating and thought-provoking look at our favorite, long-standing superheroes...and the ravages of time.

Universe X is part of a series of revised Marvel history which also includes Paradise X and Earth X.