How to Murder Your Wife

How to Murder Your Wife

seen on TV @ TCM

5.11.12

Wow, where to begin with this one?

Let's start with the simple stuff. Folks, most people who choose to become a professional cartoonist do it for love, not money. It is not a career that puts its practitioners on Easy Street, and never has been, at least not without ancillary merchandise. There's a scene in How to Murder Your Wife where Jack Lemmon's character Stanley (Stan Lee?) talks to either his editor or his lawyer (I forget which) about merchandising, but this is long after the movie has established him  - from the opening scene, no less! - as a jet-setting celebrity with a Manhattan town house, fancy clothes, and a friggin' butler. All of that was the result of his work on the strip alone? Are you kidding me?

The hell of it is, Stanley didn't even need to be ridiculously wealthy for this story to work. Charles (as in Schulz?), the butler, could've easily been a next-door neighbor, or a brother. Stanley could still be a successful cartoonist while living in a comfortable apartment or even a small house in the suburbs and it wouldn't affect the story's premise. To suggest that a cartoonist in 1965 could be as affluent as Stanley without the benefit of ancillary merchandise really strains credulity - but let's accept it for now.

Stanley's commitment to fidelity in his "Bash Brannigan" strip is certainly commendable. I'm not certain how common it was for cartoonists in the mid 60s to use photo reference in their work, much less to shoot their own, costumes, props and all, but as someone who has studied commercial illustration, I can vouch for its importance. It's not cheating if you use it the right way; as a supplement, an aid, not as a substitute. (Here's Exhibit A on how not to use it.) Stanley takes his own pictures, so charges of plagiarism wouldn't apply in any case.

Stanley marries off Bash after he himself gets married (accidentally), and the strip radically changes from an action-adventure piece into a semi-autobiographical domestic comedy. This sort of change isn't too far removed from what happened to Blondie (which gets briefly name-checked). Long before she became the prototypical suburban housewife in a domestic family strip, Blondie was a single 20's-style flapper girl, and Dagwood was a rich kid whose parents gave him crap for dating a "lower-class" girl. She used to be the funny one and Dagwood the straight man. After they got married, the strip changed into something closer to the version we know today.


As an artist, you have to be careful how much of your life you put into your work. I've done comics that were either completely or partially autobiographical, and once it came back to bite me - hard. With this blog, I make conscious choices about what to reveal about myself and what not to reveal. It's a fine line to walk.

I don't think Bash Brannigan started out as an avatar for Stanley, but he eventually becomes one. When I created City Mouse while living in Columbus, the reverse happened: he started out as a cartoon version of myself and evolved slightly apart from that into something seperate. He was still grounded in my experiences, however, my perspective as a big-city East Coast dude transplanted into a smaller, Midwestern town. And now, of course, he's crossed over into the film world as a result of this blog. He has a flexibility that Bash seems to have as well, and like City Mouse, Bash's experiences reflect that of his creator. I'm perhaps more willing than Stanley to let my character have more of his own life.


The remarkable thing about this shift in the Bash strip is that not only does it work, it's purely the result of the artist's whim, not subject to audience demands or editorial demands for anything different (e.g., giving a popular supporting character a bigger role). Editorially, Stanley has a great deal of creative control. To exercise such a change without much resistance from his syndicate is unusual. I mean, if you look at the  older strips in your newspaper, you'll see that they tend to rely on predictable patterns, and have for years. It takes an outside perspective, like the "Garfield Minus Garfield" meme, to shake things up. But Stanley initiated the shake-up himself and it worked.


Also, it's unclear how much lead time Stanley provides himself. Usually, strips are made weeks in advance so that the artist has a "cushion" that he can lean on if he gets sick and can't draw for whatever reason. Stanley's Bash strips seem to go to print within days of their creation, which would make him a drawing machine - and that's in addition to shooting his own photo reference AND developing it himself AND still finding time to go to bachelor parties and meeting girls who pop out of cakes!

Now about that marriage. The movie goes out of its way to sell us the idea that marriage in general is not all it's cracked up to be, framing this notion within the context of the eternal battle of the sexes. Well, if marriage ain't so great, then why do we as a society place so much value on it? Can it really be as simple as women hoodwinking men into it? God knows we men go to absurd lengths to impress women, but Murder would have you believe that we men value our freedom even more. Nothing in the film addresses this paradox head-on; it prefers to dance around the issue, or side-step it altogether. We never see Stanley struggle with his feelings for the Italian girl he marries. We never see him doubt his commitment to the bachelor life, which he upholds so stridently.


The misogynism gets packed on in such big heaping doses (funny doses, it must be said) that it's easy to write it all off as satire, a wild exaggeration of reality. But look at this: it's a recent article from the humor site Cracked called "5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women." Does this movie still seem like an exaggeration?


The Italian girl is never named. She conveniently starts off speaking only Italian. We never get inside her head. She leaves Stanley after she thinks he wants to kill her (he only did a storyline in the strip about it), but then mysteriously returns to him for no stated reason. And the one assertive female character gets publicly humiliated by her own husband in the film's climax. Non-PC humor is fine, but this is really pushing it!


There's a point in the climax where I thought Stanley would tear down the concept of marriage altogether and say that it's not and should not be for everyone, but it never happens. Too bad, because it's a message worth saying. Still, the question remains: is marriage worth all the trouble we go through for it?

There's an acquaintance of mine who's about to get married, but if her Twitter feed is any indication, the preparation for the wedding itself seems to be driving her nuts. I wonder: if she could choose to live with her man (whom she absolutely loves and adores) forever, without going through the motions of the marriage ceremony and the wedding and all that, would she? I suspect I already know the answer.


I think about the gay civil rights movement and the struggle for marriage equality (which President Obama has proudly shown his support for). There are legal benefits that come from  marriage that are a vital part of this fight, but more than that, gays want the right to marry because they see that straight society places a high value on it and it's one that they're being systematically denied due to discrimination - and that makes them feel like second-class citizens. Again, we ascribed marriage with such a value, yet if Murder is any indication, it's almost as if we don't really believe in it ourselves.


And the movie doesn't even have the courage of its own convictions. In the end, Stanley gives in to married life right after making a big public speech denouncing it. I'd rather he remained unrepentant in his attitude than cop out so meekly, him and Charles both. (I looked for some sign of Ho Yay between the two of them - it would explain SOOOOO much - but didn't quite find any.) What would Will Ferrell or Zack Galifianakis do with this material, I wonder?

The Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties
seen on TV @ TCM
5.7.12


I've never thought of the drinking of alcohol as a vice. I remember my father letting me have a sip of his beer as a kid, every once in awhile. I thought it made me feel grown-up. (I think he drank Michelob, but I don't recall for sure.) My beer of choice is Heineken (sorry, Frank Booth), but I usually only drink on special occasions. I'm not a prude, I'm just not that into beer, which also means I'm not a regular bar-goer. Hand me a beer, though, I won't turn it down (especially after spending twenty hours on a train).


Same goes for wine and other spirits. When I traveled to Barcelona for a summer, I was only 21 and still learning about the rest of the world, so it took me a bit by surprise when I saw how commonly people over there drink wine. Either my first or my second night there, I tried some of the local vino. I can't say with any authority whether it was good or not because I was unused to the taste of wine in general. Suffice it to say it wasn't to my liking. I stuck to Coke and bottled water for the remainder of the vacation. And of course, I've had champagne on New Year's Eve, but that tastes even weirder.

I'm certain I've never been falling down drunk - and no, it's not a matter of "if I have been, I wouldn't remember," either. It takes longer for someone as big and tall as I am to get drunk. I have a few friends who are recovering alcoholics. Once, I was at a comics convention and I was crashing with one of those friends. We had come from a party in the hotel and were walking across the parking lot to her car. I was finishing off a beer. As we got into her car, she said to me, "Please don't drink that in my place," and I was quickly reminded that she was, indeed, still clean and sober. I hurriedly drained the bottle dry and stuffed it into my backpack, out of sight.


In thinking about Prohibition, I can't help but be reminded of the so-called "war" on drugs. Without getting into a big political debate, let me just say that curtailing vice through legislation seems to create more problems than it solves. I think the most you can do is make it harder for people to engage in, as opposed to eliminating it altogether. Here in New York, laws have recently been passed banning smoking not only from bars, but also from parks, beaches and pedestrian plazas. I still see people lighting up, though - and cigarettes haven't gotten any cheaper either.

The Roaring Twenties plays kinda like a documentary in that the narrative is sprinkled with voice-over montages describing what Prohibition was like in the 1920s, how people profited from the liquor bootlegging business, and how the law combated it. I'm sure this movie was meant to be as much cautionary tale as entertainment; after all, Prohibition was still within recent memory. It's unsubtle, yet interesting to watch, and doesn't detract much from the main narrative.


Jimmy Cagney's in fine form, as always. I really felt for his character as he goes through his rise and fall. It was odd at first to see Humphrey Bogart in a supporting role, but there's no mistaking his presence - and he shares some great scenes with Cagney.

Bully

Bully
seen @ Kew Gardens Cinemas, Kew Gardens, Queens, NY
4.24.12


For what it's worth, I saw the PG-13 version of Bully and I'm convinced that the big rating hoo-hah that preceded this film's release was a whole lotta nothing in the end. Say what you will about the film's uber-producer Harvey Weinstein, but at the very least, I can see why he chose to champion this film. It's moving and powerful, and the bullied children, along with their families and friends, eloquently lay bare the narratives of their lives. It's tough to sit through at times, but it's worth the effort.


That said, I don't think Bully was as comprehensive a film as it could have been. Why? No one talked to any actual bullies! As harrowing and at times even inspiring, the stories of the bullied children are, after awhile one gets the feeling of preaching to the choir. We all agree that bullying children is wrong and that something should be done about it, but in order to do that, I feel it's necessary to first ask: why does it happen?

Bullying is not an inherent act; it must be learned. It's an act that transcends gender, race, environment and generation. Without getting too deep into psychology and sociology, I think it's safe to say that it's learned from being around other peers, and is the result of a variety of societal pressures and fears. But talking to actual bullies and finding out straight from them why they harass other kids would've been as enlightening as hearing from the bullied - not to lay blame, not to antagonize, but simply to understand. The more I watched Bully, the more I felt that it was a little bit one-sided.


Still, when you see these stories unfold, you can hardly blame director Lee Hirsch for wanting to give as much time to them as possible. A few highlights: the town meeting held by the parents of the teenager who killed himself, in which an entire community bares its pain over the effects of bullying; the mother of the girl who faced her tormentors with a stolen gun, hugging and singing to her daughter; the father of the small-town lesbian teen, saying how he never truly understood what it meant to walk in another's shoes until he raised a gay child in an intolerant town. These are only a few of the images that linger long after seeing this film.

From a different angle, I was quite curious as to how they filmed the scenes on the school bus with Alex, the Iowa tween who is shockingly blase about the amount of bullying he gets. It looked like there was an actual cameraman on the bus and not a hidden camera, so if that was the case, how did they get the kids to act normally and not mug for the camera?


Reality television has challenged our perception of filmed, intimate (read: unscripted) moments, and while this is certainly not unique to Bully, there were a few scenes where I couldn't help but wonder at the level of veracity. I'm talking about any scene meant to be spontaneous, but filmed from more than one angle, such as the bus scenes. Seeing cuts in such scenes make me think there's a "jump" in time implied. While it's possible that there was more than one camera on that bus, how likely is it - especially when one is specifically after naturalism uninhibited by the presence of cameras? Like I said, this is not something unique to this film, but I couldn't help but think about it as I watched.

Regrettably, I had to take action against a chronic cell phone user while watching Bully. I was in Theater 6 of the Kew Gardens, a small screening room, half of which has stadium seating. I was in the front left side of the first row of stadium-seating, and in a corner in the far rear, right side, was a middle-aged (I think) couple. There were perhaps a half-dozen other people in the room when the film started.


The woman's cell went off early. I didn't see her at first because she and her companion were so far back, but after the second time it went off, I spotted her. The movie was just loud enough at first that I could pay her yapping on the phone no mind, but I was getting irritated. The third time her cell went off, however, during a quieter moment, I got out of my seat, walked halfway up the stairs, pointed straight at her and demanded she get off the phone. (I even remembered to say please.) Surprisingly, she didn't put up a fight - and I was ready for one. I didn't hear her cell for the remainder of the flick.