Mind Buck Main

Andrew Gallix on the Offbeat Generation

Read Andrew Gallix's "I'll Be Your Mirror: Andy Warhol's Writing Degree (Less Than) Zero."

The Satan Burger Controversy

Read this thread over at the Bizarro forum about the legal nightmare behind Carlton Mellick III's novel, Satan Burger.

Sandman Mystery Theatre: Sleep of Reason

Sandman Mystery Theatre: Sleep of Reason

John Ney Rieber, writer

Eric Nguyen, artist

DC Comics, 2007

Reviewed by Kristian Williams

"The sleep of reason," Goya said, "breeds monsters." But reason is not what is at stake here. The more fitting quote would be Nietzsche's: "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

Alan Moore drew from the latter quote for the title of the sixth chapter of Watchmen. In it, Rorschach recalls investigating the abduction of a young girl. He finds that the kidnapper murdered her and fed her to his dogs. Up until that point, he says, "I was just Kovacs. Kovacs pretending to be Rorschach. . . . It was Kovacs who closed his eyes. It was Rorschach who opened them again."

Rorschach exacts his revenge in Mad Max fashion, chaining the guilty party inside a burning house and leaving him a hacksaw. "Shouldn't bother trying to saw through handcuffs," he advises. "Never make it in time."

Rorschach's moral universe is all black and white, but he has, in some respects, given up on his own goodness. "Can't all keep hands clean," he says.

It's a classic dilemma, inextricably tied to our idea of the hero: Heroism requires sacrifice. But must the hero sacrifice his humanity?

The Sleep of Reason offers a kind of answer to the problem of Rorschach.

It's 1997. Wesley Dodds, the Sandman, has grown old, and Dian Belmont, his sweetheart, is dying of cancer. As they travel together through Afghanistan, Dian is kidnapped and Wesley is tempted, more than he's ever been before, to resort to wicked means in his rescue:

"The frail old man was once a hero. Haunted by nightmares that were not his own, he was compelled to stalk the evils that haunted his sleep -- to their source. More times than he'll let himself remember, what he saw threatened his sanity. But never his heart.

This nightmare, though. This nightmare is his own. And his heart has just been torn from him.

There's a word for a hero without a heart. Monster."

Dian stops Wesley's amoral descent, just short of murder. But his actions set into motion a series of events that later produce an apocalyptic madman -- and a new hero.

Kieran Marshall, the new Sandman, is not like Dodds. He's arrogant and selfish, disconnected from the world around him, unmoved by the misery he sees. He comes to Afghanistan almost a decade after Dodds' last adventure, working as a photojournalist:

"He takes pictures of victims. He doesn't bleed with them. Their nightmares don't touch him. That's the gig. Get in, get the shot, get out. But don't get dirty. Don't get involved."

Kieran has already lost his humanity -- to the marketplace, to war, to his selfish ambition. He has made himself a permanent observer; he has denied his responsibility, cut himself off. He stared into the abyss, and the abyss into him. But he did not do battle with monsters, and this refusal to fight compromised him. He became a monster anyway. His failure to take sides made him complicit with evil. "In the dark sleepless hours of the morning, who you are looks back at who you were and wonders: How could you have fallen so far when you felt like you were climbing?"

So heroism does not jeopardize what is best in Kieran. It allows him to rediscover it.

For Dodds it is different. He also looks into the abyss; and the abyss certainly looks into him. And Dodds does fight monsters, but he does not become a monster in the process. Wesley manages to hold onto his humanity by holding onto Dian. It is his love for her that keeps him human. Of all the DC heroes, he is perhaps the most human, with human weaknesses and human fears, but human sympathy and human love as well.

On the last page, Dodds finally leaves his alter ego behind, and addresses the Sandman directly:

"I know I never chose my path. The dreams chose for me. And I know they weren't my dreams. They were yours. I could have been a thousand things. But you made me a nightmare.

Sometimes I wonder. . . did you know I'd have Dian here to keep me human, too? Or did I just get lucky?

But I wanted to thank you once before I die -- whoever you are. Whatever you are. When a world can turn this dark, sometimes it takes a nightmare to keep the dreams alive."

There's a discomforting political aspect to the story as well. How could there not be, given the setting and the presence of a bin Laden-style terrorist mastermind? (Not to mention Kieran's nightmare of a bombed and ruined American city.) Yet here, too, the answers are elusive. It is Western -- specifically, Dodds' -- influence that elevated Masad from a local thug to a global threat to humanity. The Americans destroy villages and massacre civilians in their efforts to capture him. Both sides respond to terror with increasing terror. Suicide bombings on the one side, missile strikes on the other.

But those aren't the sides that matter. One isn't with "America" or with "the terrorists" -- one is either with the victims or with the killers. Devon, an old soldier, tells Marshall: "Masad's got a little bit of everybody in his pocket, Kieran. Muslims, Jews, Christians. . . he doesn't give a damn. If you've got a good hate on for some other poor bastard, he can use you." He echoes the words of an Afghan girl, earlier in the story: "The Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols, the British and the Russians. . . . They come here and break their teeth on us. When they go, the tribes and warlords fight each other."

Dodds despairs of the possibility for justice. He recalls his confrontation with a serial killer decades before, a moment much like the one that turned Kovacs into Rorschach:

"Before that night, I'd been content in the belief that the Sandman was an agent of justice -- that a trial and an asylum cell or a trial and an execution would somehow balance the atrocities that the monsters I fought had inflicted on the world. But that night. . . I stopped believing. That night, I knew that nothing I or any other man could ever do could bring justice to the monsters of this world."

Kieran has a similar moment, watching Jerusalem burn:

"That feeling -- staring down the bore of Devon's colt, into the black, feeling the cold shock in his belly -- suddenly knowing what Devon has known for years, and the inhabitants of this land have known for centuries. There's no question so difficult, no dilemma so complex -- that it can't be answered by a single bullet to the skull. Not solved, or resolved. But answered."

Yet neither Dodds nor Marshall will kill. Not even when deliberately provoked to do so. Not even to save their friends. Both come close, and each time there is someone else there -- someone they love, the very person they mean to protect -- who stops them.

Wesley mercilessly beats a kidnapper, and Dian -- still in chains -- cries out:

"Wesley, stop it! You're killing him."

"One less animal in the world -- " he says. "What does it matter? He chose this."

"One more animal in the world -- " she retorts. "That's not what I chose when I chose you!"

Alia, the Afghan girl, likewise pleads with Kieran: "No! Please -- this is not the face I dreamed. I saw a hero under this mask. A man who brought peace. . . . Not a monster."

I'm reminded of a passage from Albert Camus' conclusion to The Rebel:

"[T]he rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value that supports him is never given to him once and for all; he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly. . . . His only virtue will lie in never yielding to the impulse to allow himself to be engulfed in the shadows that surround him and in obstinately dragging the chains of evil, with which he is bound, toward the light of good."

Bio

Kristian Williams is the author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination (South End Press, 2006) and Confrontations: Selected Journalism (Tarantula, 2007). He has written about other Sandman Mystery Theater stories for The Comics Journal, and about Watchmen for the "Is It A Book?" website.

Christina Dietz

Visit the Christina Dietz MySpace page.

Fancie: Only You Depardieu (Playing in Portland)

May 25- Tony's House 3501 NE Simpson st. Portland, OR
May 26- Towne Lounge 714 Sw 20th Pl Portland, OR

Carla Bruni Sings Michel Houellebecq

Carla Bruni's next album, Comme si de rien n'était, has a song co-written with Michel Houellebecq. And she will be donating all of the royalties to charity.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (review by Mick Mangold)

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) 2007.
Director: Julian Schnabel (Before Night Falls 2000, Basquiat 1996).
Writer (memoir): Jean-Dominique Bauby(1952-1997). Cinematography: Janusz Kaminski. Editing: Juliette Welfling

The Brevity of Life
by
Mick Mangold

The film eloquently depicts the point of view of Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Almeric), a well-known editor/journalist for Elle magazine who suffers a stroke, leaving him paralyzed with the exception of his left eye. We wake with him to the initial maddening realization of a full cognitive awareness inside a limp body.

Jean-do is left with the inability to express his thoughts. We continue down a path of empathy for him and those around him, enduring the frustration of loss. From the shame in his initial refusal to allow his kids to see him, to his son weeping over his father's state. Even the "exquisite" therapists (Marie-Josée Croze' and Olatz Lopez Garmendia) struggle with their emotions as they help him. All the while their beauty only tortures him now, in a life he wants to reject. Henriette's (Croze') thoughtful persistence eventually guides him out of self pity, and to the realization "Other than my eye, two things aren't paralyzed, my imagination and my memory." Claude (Anne Consigny), a lovely and very patient transcriber, aids him to literally spell out his life story with his blinking eyelid.

We follow the unraveling tale of his past, scattered through his day to day existence. You can feel the loneliness as his literary monologue reveals the horror of Sundays, the most isolated day of his clinical environment. No visitors, no therapy, the only comfort he can hope for is if the skeleton crew remembers to turn on the TV.

We go from his humility of being manhandled like an overgrown infant, to the poignant memories, and even prose fantasies rolling through his mind. After months of waiting to see the love of his life she phones at last. Circumstances leave only one person there to translate, the abandoned mother of his children (Emmanuelle Seigner). The melancholy of her devotion is revealed, for even now she stays by his side to translate in this excruciating situation. Through his eye we see the tears flow as this woman, whom he most longs to see, says she is too reluctant to see him in this condition.

The strong bond of he and an aging father (Max Von Sydow) is created in in just a few minutes of screen time. Another moment of deep sorrow, among many, is when his feeble father is unable to visit.

Instead of leaving the viewer in a state of despair and depression, the Diving Bell guides us through an inspirational feat of self realization. It's rare to find emotion of this magnitude portrayed in a film with such a seemingly authentic impact.

Bauby's book is the backbone of all the well handled elements in this picture. Cinematically we are woven into Jean-Do's perspective through camera techniques (skewed perspective, blurs, distortion), seamless editing, and brilliant performances. Hand cranked camera sequences conjure up a nostalgic essence that brilliantly adds detail to this well executed 'pov' film.

The film has won international acclaim, 35 awards, and 29 nominations. Most notably it won Schnabel the best director prize at Cannes.