Comixtime: “This is a Russian story”

The Winter Men (Six-issue series)
Brett Lewis (Writer), John Paul Leon (Artist), Dave Stewart (Colours), John Workman (Letters)
Publisher: Wildstorm

There’s a P D James quote about how the detective story isn’t really about murder; it’s about the restoration of order. That’s true for a lot of crime stories. But there’s another kind: one that uses the disruption of the established order to lift the lid on what has been accepted as normal, to show the rottenness and insanity of a system that operates from day to day without being questioned. The best thriller writers – Hammet, Le Carre, Ellroy – write stories like this. Crime stories, spy stories – stories about what “order” really means, and what that does to people who know about it.

The Winter Men is a mixture of crime story and spy story, set in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when economic liberalisation created a new capitalist state ruled by criminals and spies. The main character is Kris Kalenov (who seems to spend the whole of the book wearing at least one plaster over his battered face), a veteran of a Soviet super-soldier program who’s fallen on hard times in the new Russia. He and his former comrades are just getting by, working as mercenaries, bodyguards, gangsters. Then he gets entangled in a case involving a missing girl, and becomes caught up in a conspiracy reaching from the mafiyas on the streets to the ex-Soviet spooks and oligarchs who control the levers of power.

The superhero stuff never threatens to overwhelm the story or take the reader out of the narrative, but on the other hand it never becomes a metaphorical gloss on the story. The Winter Menis about what it means for people who served as symbols of Soviet power to keep on living after that system has collapsed.

It’s a dense comic – there is a lot on each page to take in. It doesn’t rely on splash pages or “cool” moments, it doesn’t hold your hand and point out every element. There are significant visual and verbal cues that I completely missed the first time round.

A lot of this density and cohesiveness comes from it being a comic where everyone is working at the top of their game to the benefit of the finished work. Brett Lewis’ writing is excellent, but his collaborators make it work within the comics medium.

John Paul Leon is part of that Sean Phillips/Michael Lark school of pencilly, shadow-heavy art that’s usually used for “gritty” street-level spy/crime comics. He’s seriously good, and in this comic he gets a chance to flex his muscles, staging talky sequences and shootouts and car chases with equal aplomb (and anyone who reads comics should know how hard it is to do a car chase in the medium. Lewis and Leon pull it off brilliantly). It’s because his art isn’t glossy or fantastical. And that means you feel every gunshot, every punch, every instance of shattering glass and spurting blood. And the moments where the characters sit around talking are staged and drawn just as well, the excellent use of body language drawing you in to the noirish atmosphere.

Dave Stewart’s colours help with this, giving the proceedings an appropriately muted tone. And John Workman’s lettering adds so much to the finished package. Where lettering is usually seen as an afterthought in comics, here it’s obvious how essential it is. Russian and English dialogue is rendered differently, leading to some excellently subtle communication of plot points that hinge on knowing who speaks both languages.

There’s a unique quality to the dialogue and narration. It reads like it was originally written in Russian, then translated to English. There are odd moments where English phrases seem to be mistranslated, or metaphors are used without explaining the context. Just as in the wider narrative, you’re thrown in, and have to catch up.

There’s an argument to be made that this series approaches the status of The Wire of comics. I think a comic that matches The Wire in sheer density would be something like From Hell, but The Winter Men, while not as huge and in-depth,  has that Wire-esque look at the structures that maintain a
deeply broken society – from the power players at the top to the foot soldiers at the bottom. Unsparing in its portrayal of how many people suffer, bleed and die to keep the established “order” in place.There’s an issue in the back half of the book where Kris and his gangster pal Nikki spend a day driving around the city, attending to police business and Nikki’s criminal enterprises. It’s a low-key slice of life story, with little to no connection to the main plot. But you’re still riveted, because Lewis, Leon and their collaborators have created an entire world, where the lives of the characters seem to be independent of the demands of the story. That would be great in literature. It’s doubly great in comics.

Chaos Reigns? Technique in modern Hollywood action cinema

A pair of short video essays I watched recently have got me thinking about modern action cinema, what it does, and who does it well.

Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

Chaos Cinema Part 2 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.

They came via Matt Prigge, who rightly says:

except that Paul Greengrass’ Bourne films do this well and aren’t simply about chaos. They’re about lightning fast thinking.

Now action on screen is one of those things I think about a lot. Stuff like fights, chases and shootouts are easy to put on screen, really hard to do well. Cheap thrills are embedded in the DNA of cinema. They’ll always be around. We get a kick out of excitement and violence. Basically, the “Chaos Cinema” thesis isn’t (or shouldn’t) be about modern action cinema being ruined forever by those awful modern techniques. It’s a question of whether these techniques are realised competently or not.

Of the directors whose work is shown in the videos, the ones best at using the jittery, verité aesthetic are Paul Greengrass, Kathryn Bigelow and Christopher Nolan. (I’d put Neil Blomkampf on this list too for the terrific District 9, but I don’t want to judge him based solely on one feature film.)

Greengrass is known as the guy who brought shaky-cam into the mainstream, after importing it from his docudramas such as Bloody Sunday. As a former director for World In Action, he’s interested in blending a feeling of the factual into Hollywood.

His Bourne films require the jittery, quick-cutting pace because they need to reflect Damon’s Bourne reacting almost instantaneously to the threats ranged against him as his super-spy training kicks in. In United 93, the hand-held docudrama format takes you inside the horrifying situations better than a more conventional style could. Likewise, Green Zone (as with Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker) uses that same style to evoke the reportage and amatuer footage from chatotic war zones that has spilled across our screens in recent years. Form informs content, and vice versa; I don’t see why a director should be pilloried for taking a stylistic decision that unambiguously works for the film he/she’s making.

Consider Nolan. He’s a director whose action chops have steadily improved with each film; the fights in Batman Begins were fairly awful, over-edited and confusing. The Dark Knight caught a fair bit of flak on the editing front, but on the big set-pieces he excels. I mean, tell me there isn’t some of the visual grammar of the big car chase in Bullitt (quoted admiringly in the the first video) in the Bat-pod chase sequence.

By the time he made Inception, he’s come on in leaps and bounds. There’s something of the low-key style of 70s actioners in the controlled, lengthy mid-shots during the van chase and hotel fight scene – he even built a costly and complicated revolving set to get around having to cut away during the latter sequence. Claiming him as part of the “Chaos Cinema” phenomenon doesn’t hold weight for me.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s definitely a move towards louder and more incoherent blockbusters. Aside from mere incompetent attempts to ape Greengrass-style verité, there’s also a cynical deliberate attempt by some directors to bludgeon the audience into submission, to not so much distract them as wear them down so they become accepting of ever more grimly mediocre Hollywood product.

The “anti-style” of directors like Michael Bay and Tony Scott is still an auteur’s style – in that it is recognisably their own – but contrary to classic auteur theory, which talked about the director’s control of style, it reflects the auteur’s lack of control. And in tandem with their films’ content and worldview, it’s a gleefully teenage celebration of base impulses.

And this is the problem with the wide net cast by the “Chaos Cinema” thesis – it mistakes a technique for a malaise, and ignores whether its practitioners exercise judgement, taste and competence or not. Those make all the difference.

Game-changing: plotting in Breaking Bad and Game Of Thrones

Following on from my previous post about Breaking Bad, I want to talk about its approach to plotting and the similarities it shares with George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire series of novels, which I started reading recently.

A Game Of Thrones, the first book in the series (and the recent HBO TV adaptation based on it), begins with a clear setup; despite having several POV characters, we know our hero is meant to be, and we know what form the primary conflict of the story will take. At first, that is, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. As this blog post puts it:

Much of that, I think, goes to Martin’s playing around with different ways to deal with rising action than simply resolve it in a climax. In Game of Thrones, Martin initially does give us a hero in Ned Stark, antagonists in the Lannister clan, and the sharply-defined conflict of the eponymous “game of thrones” they play against each other. The action rises traditionally enough at first, but then, instead of resolving, the arc disintegrates.

Martin delights in defying expectations and delivering some genuinely shocking moments to the reader. By the end of A Game Of Thrones, the central dynamic that was set up within the established order of his world has broken apart: we are now presented with a number of different noble families and assorted individuals moving against each other in a vast array of shifting alliances.

Breaking Badfeatures a number of differences in its storytelling. The very clear preoccupation of the series is whether Walt (and his family) will stay alive and ensure the same for his partner and family. Vince Gilligan isn’t as kill-happy with his characters as Martin is; but he is still fond of subverting the traditional instigation-rising action-climax-denouement storytelling model.The third season, for example, begins with the appearance of a clear threat to Walt. He remains unaware of the menace bearing down on him for almost half the season — until a shocking explosion of violence shatters the previous directions the characters had taken. Reactions to this break inform everything that happens, right up until another threat emerges at the very end of the season, creating a terrific cliffhanger.

Gilligan has explicitly stated his intention to keep changing the status quo:

“Television is historically good at keeping its characters in a self-imposed stasis so that shows can go on for years or even decades,” saysBreaking Bad’s creator, Vince Gilligan. “When I realized this, the logical next step was to think, how can I do a show in which the fundamental drive is toward change?” So Gilligan designed Breaking Bad to transform its hero into a villain…

and this can be seen in the way he keeps pulling the rug out from under our established view of the characters and the situations they find themselves in.

Martin’s novels and Breaking Bad both keep their audiences on their toes using this technique. Instead of a slow build to a climax, shocking twists hit you from out of nowhere, leaving existing subplots to spin off into their own stories, which in turn crash into each other to be obliterated or continue on a new course. It’s not an approach for every narrative, but it’s a wonderful way to blindside the audience and keep a story innovative.

Horror and crime: Breaking Bad vs. The Shadow Line

There are a couple of TV shows I’ve been watching recently. One’s British, the other’s American. One’s a limited series, the other’s currently on its fourth season. I like one far more than the other, but they’ve both taught me a lot about a certain kind of crime show, and when an examination of morality ultimately fades into a horror story.

“…Because you’re wearing gloves.”

 The Shadow Line is a seven-part drama series aired on the BBC recently. Written and directed by Hugo Blick, it follows the dual investigations of the police and criminals into the murder of a gangster.

While it’s byzantine, over-stylised and unafraid of being pretentious and self-indulgent, it’s also well-worth watching despite its flaws. Its creation of a specific and absorbing atmosphere is second to none. And this atmosphere is not entirely related to the crime or even noir genres. As this excellent blog post put it:

the monster of the show– and I very much use the word monster instead of villain on purpose to distinguish it from THE WIRE… That monster is very real and very much a part of our world– the monster is corruption.

The Shadow Line specialises in a kind of despairing, existential horror, the sort that features in HP Lovecraft stories. The characters can struggle all they want, but this is The Way The World Is – the good are crushed and the bad triumph in the end. It’s a worldview common to the conspiracy thriller sub-genre, particularly the ones the BBC did so well back in the 1970s and 80s (and to which The Shadow Line is explicitly harking back).

Breaking Bad, on the other hand, offers up a moral horror. It’s the horror that comes from watching an at-first sympathetic character becoming more and more irredeemable. Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a nebbishy high-school chemistry teacher and the series’ protagonist, is diagnosed with terminal cancer and makes the decision to start cooking crystal meth to provide for his family after his death.

It began as a (seeming) act of desperation taken by a dying man. But as the series has gone on, we’ve seen Walt take ever more ruthless measures to keep himself alive. We see him cause huge amounts of pain, suffering and death. And as the bodies pile up around him, he never falters in his constant efforts to justify himself. It’s not just Walt; all the characters know right and wrong. But they do the wrong thing anyway.

“A man provides. And he does it even when he’s not appreciated, or respected, or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it … because he’s a man.”

The message of The Shadow Line is “don’t go there/do that or the monster will get you”. Breaking Bad’s power comes from watching the hero become the monster. Walt has a lifetime of rage and resentment built up inside him, and his pride, along with the opportunity to excel at the work involved in his deadly business and unleash his id in the guise of his Heisenberg persona, create a deadly mixture.

(Brief aside: a regular featureof the Audio Assault podcast, named Lab Notes, specialises in discussing each episode of Breaking Bad’s current fourth season, and comes highly recommended by yours truly.)

The word “hauntology” has been applied to The Shadow Line before, and the surreal, often-nightmarish atmosphere it evokes suggest a kind of TV reality that is fuzzy at the edges. The figure of Gatehouse (Stephen Rea), in particular, appears as an echo from the wave of secret-state thrillers produced by British TV in the 70s and 80s.

They too, specialised in buried secrets, where knowledge was the real danger. Often the theme is of Britainas a small country packed full of history. Layers pile upon layers, the past granting the present more meaning – as with the ancient stone circle, resembling a target, where the climactic sequence of The Shadow Line takes place.

Breaking Bad offers a different geography. The show’s mileu is retail parks, fast-food joints and identical subdivisions, where horrific events take place hidden in plain sight. An alternate landscape of crime, horror and death is mapped onto suburbia – the meth lab under the industrial laundry, the shoot-out in the shopping centre’s car park.

At the same time, the series sketches in the background the disintegration of the middle-class American dream. Pre-diagnosis, Walt was forced to take a second job at a car wash to supplement his income as a teacher. The inability to meet medical bills, for Walt and others, is a recurring plotline in the show. The ghost haunting at the edges of Breaking Bad is the suggestion that this very middle-American nightmare, minus the meth-dealing, is now a fact for millions of people.

The nightmarishness of both series comes not only from the subject matter, but also from the pacing. They revel in the clenched-knuckle slowness of a car crash, of knowing something horrible is going to happen but being powerless to stop it. Breaking Bad specialises in “bottle episodes”; self-contained, single-location stories that show the characters trapped physically, as well as metaphorically (plenty of TV shows do this, but BB does it better than almost anyone else), drawing out the tension to almost unbearable levels.

Both The Shadow Line and Breaking Bad are horror masquerading as crime. They are perfect series for a world where we have ever more information, but less idea of what to do with it. We know of the myriad dangers lurking in the shadows, or about to meet us up ahead, but we simply remain glued to the screen, eyes open.

My current digs

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Gil Scott-Heron (1949 – 2011)

I’ve tried and failed to write something about Gil Scott-Heron’s life and career since I heard the news of his death. It’s been hard, simply because I want to do his story justice, even if I don’t command a huge audience. I want everyone to know what his music meant.

The first time I heard his music was his early recording “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” A cliché, I know, but listen to a best-of compilation and that’s what you’ll get. It was angry and funny all at the same time. Looking at Scott-Heron’s career, that’s what stands out to me – his wit, his forceful intelligence, and his ability to find humour in the darkest of places.

He did not by any account have an easy life, and even in the latter phase of his career as an elder statesman of music, there was every indication that his demons were still with him. Nevertheless, just last year he produced a stunning comeback album. I’m New Here is a document, a record from a man who has been through hardship and despair, and has come out of it hardened, but still sensitive. In its fusing of plaintive blues vocals with minimalist hip-hop beats, it becomes a synthesis of black music through American history.

There is also the irony of an artist whose early spoken-word work is credited with influencing the birth of hip-hop sampling a hip-hop track for the opening and closing tracks of I’m New Here. The spoken-word segments of the album become as important as the songs: Gil Scott-Heron switches effortlessly between talking, singing and declaiming. His message is primary, the manner in which he gets it across is secondary.

And he remains a wonderful storyteller, able to come up with turns of phrase that leave you stunned or smiling. I saw him perform at London’s Royal Festival Hall in the spring of 2010, on one of his late-period world tours. With a band of three, and that voice of his, he kept a packed venue enthralled. He had a comedian’s gift for the well-placed joke, and a preacher’s gift for making a congregation hang on his every word. It was a privilege to see him in person.

He’s gone, but his music and writing remains. If it inspires one more person to look at the world they live in, and decide to make it a better place, then he will have achieved his goals. And if this piece of writing inspires one more person to listen to his work, then I will have achieved mine.

On having opinions

I’m currently helping to shortlist submissions for a local short film festival. Watching films and having to instantly mark them out of ten has thrown the odd processes of the art appreciating part of my brain into the light. I constantly worry that I rate everything too highly, and then try to force myself to be less lenient in my opinions. The reason is that while I enjoy debating with the other jurors, my final judgement is made with one simple criterion in mind: is it worth the audience’s time?

I’ve been in the audience of enough short film showings to know how long (or short) a film can be before it outstays its welcome. I feel it’s an immense privilege to be able to see all these wonderful works that I would otherwise never hear of, and I owe it to the potential audience members to select a programme that is worth every minute they spend looking at the screen.

At the moment, my writing on art (such as films, books, and television) is only a hobby. And as such, I prefer to spend my spare time talking about things I like. However, learning to be harsh on bad films as well as rhapsodising about good ones has revealed something to me about why I love the arts, why I love good criticism and why bad criticism pains me so much.

A critic’s job is to offer his opinion, when possible backed up by a degree of knowledge in their chosen field. It offers a chance to show people something magical, to explain the response it provoked in them and bring the most subjective of responses to the outside world, and offer a chance for people to share a communal experience in appreciation of a creative work.

Whether criticism is good or bad depends not on positive or negative attitudes to an individual work of art, but on the critic’s attitude towards their job. A high-handed or self-satisfied approach to the act of criticism can result in the critic judging the people who disagree with the critic’s opinion, rather than the work itself.

I want to be unflinchingly honest in my writing. I want to warn people off bad things as well as recommend good things. But I never want to be the kind of person, whether famous or obscure, who mocks and tears down other people for the opinions they hold. We identify ourselves by the art we love, and a good critic should always forgo personal insults in favour of a genuine airing of their emotional and intellectual reactions to art.

Because I feel that, in the end, it’s the greatest privilege to have the chance to introduce someone to a book, or film, or something else that changes the way they see the world. Short of creating art myself, there’s nothing that brings me more satisfaction.