Heroes and Villains

The 1978 film Superman is one I'm always happy to settle down and watch. It's a superhero film from the days before superheroes were the monstrous, all-pervading beefcake-with-psychoses cinematic wallpaper they've become today, every cheap short-run failed comic-book experiment turned into a very expensive failed cinema experiment. I now refuse to watch them: Watchmen was an embarrassing sacrilege and I gather Green Lantern was an insult to the original.

Superman was different. Innocent in many ways: it's a caper without any designs on profundity, which is where our current costumed creations fail: the screenwriters aren't good enough. Superman isn't quite All-American. Yes, he tells Lois that he's there – from another galaxy –  to fight for 'Truth, Justice and the American Way', which you could read as an attempt to recuperate American spirits after having their asses (as they call them) well and truly kicked in Vietnam), but the film's over-riding light-heartedness of tone undercuts this rather implausible claim. He has no political axe to grind nor unresolved Oedipal desires (though his dead father is a Law he breaks, giving rise to the appalling teen-misery of the recent Superman film and Smallville).

The clip above is one of my favourites, and one I show to students when trying to explain semiotics, and cultural studies. Arch-villain Lex Luthor neatly encapsulates the know-nothing reverence for the canon we find in the reactionary newspapers and the views of people forced to read by rote without ever understanding them. He beautifully encapsulates the need to examine all of culture and media – down to the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper – to truly understand our condition. Raymond Williams and Norman Fairclough would be proud.

My other favourite line in the film is towards the end of this clip. Past the glorious geological pun 'We all have our faults: mine's in California' (Lex has launched a nuke to trigger the San Andreas fault so that California slips into the sea, boosting the value of the desert he's bought cheaply), Miss Hackensack points out that the other missile aimed at Hackensack will kill her own mother. Rarely has a shaken head been put to such good use.

Thanks!!

I'm not the only one, it seems, to be suffering from involuntary textual ejaculation. A while ago Mitchell and Webb dramatised a conversation I actually had with more than one person:



and since then I've found myself using 'x' simply to close text messages rather than to convey romantic passion. Then it spread to emails. No doubt soon I'll end conversations by reciting random letters of the alphabet in case my interlocutor is hurt by the omission of some semiotic of which I'm unaware. Though you won't find me saying '#' to signpost sarcasm.

But it's not just the dreaded X marking an emotional spot. It's the ! that's creeping into every electronic sentence. As you know, I get paid for reading and talking about books. I'm good at spotting what the post-structuralists call 'deferral', and the 'trace' and all the other identifiers of the gap between language and meaning. What's that? You think languages communicates meaning? You're so sweet! Language is out of our control. We grope for meaning and never quite get there.

Which brings me to the ubiquitous !. Why is it so prevalent in electronic media, rather than paper? Perhaps it was always there in informal letters, notes and graffiti, just absent in formal communications. Check your teenage diary. For me, it marks the awareness that as writers we're all aware of the gaping chasm of language. We don't trust it to convey – in particular – tone of voice or register. The exclamation mark is made to bear so much. For instance, I find myself over-using it in emails to students. If I thank them for some information, I won't write 'thanks.' It looks cold and flat. So I write 'thanks!' which seems friendlier and more enthusiastic. Then I wonder whether I or we always worried about this gap. After that I wonder whether the ! is a bit creepily over-friendly, 'too cool for school'. I'm 37. I shouldn't need to add !'s to look like somebody's mate, or in the immortal words of David Brent, 'basically a chilled-out entertainer'.

Or am I over-worrying like a sad old man. After all, some of my very respectable friends think it's socially acceptable to add emoticons and smiley-face symbols to text messages and emails, as though they've outsourced the typing – and possible mental process – to a 12 year old who lives on Sherbert Fountains and Coke. Management haven't got that far yet, but it's coming. Perhaps I'll reduce marking to !s and smileys to distinguish between Genius and Plagiarist.

Anyway, I'm not the only one feeling the semiotic gap: here's one suggestion for a punctuation mark which expresses mild pleasure or surprise without going for the nuclear option of the full-on exclamation mark:

All I can say to that is OMG WTF LOL:))

Plodding towards Christmas

It's been a long and hard week, though all my teaching has been fun: Twelfth Night again, discourse analysis with the Research Methods students, semiotics with Comms. students and some shockingly offensive poetry - Rochester, Swift, Spenser and Ol' Dirty Bastard. The class, blessed with resilience and a sense of humour, took it very well!

As a respite, I've been fencing a couple of times (sorted out my habit of constantly renewing rather than parrying and riposting), and advanced yet further in the Anne of Green Gables series. I'm up to book 5, Anne's House of Dreams. In places, the books drag - too many mildly amusing local characters, but the joy and tragedy has returned. Anne's finally married Gilbert (notable mostly for his colourlessness) and there's an interesting tension appearing between Anne's independence and book-learnin', and the propriety which required her not to work. Presumably this, like the constant stream of parental separations and deaths, is autobiographical - L. M. Montgomery was a minister's wife. The solution is a bit weaselly - they both write occasional pieces for magazines which is genteel enough not to count as suffragist nonsense…

Other things are fascinating too - readers are expected to be knowledgeable about the tensions between Presbyterianism and Methodism, though we should be able to rise above such sectarianism - Cornelia's horror at Methodist heresy is clearly meant to be amusingly overplayed. French Canadians are slow, Forrest Gump-like amiable imbeciles, and Americans are loud and showy. England (and perhaps Scotland) is still 'the Old Country'. Most of all though, the series is astonishingly intertextual. Every character in the book, including the narrator, quotes or alludes all the time, usually to Shakespeare, the Bible and nineteenth-century respectable poetry. Longfellow and Tennyson are all over the place, as well as 18th-century bores like Moore. 

Then there's the treatment of love and death. Love is purely Romantic in this novel, and not without its harshnesses. It is certainly coy - the narrative skips two months from the day of Anne's wedding to the couple's new settled life, but she does openly yearn for a child - who lives, like one of Montgomery's children, for only a few hours (don't whinge about spoiling the plot: it's book 5 and none of you are going to read it). Deaths are frequent, especially of children, and the misery is quietly but poignantly expressed. Finally, the books abound with unmarried, independent and resilient women. Some, like Marilla, had their chances at marriage and regret not taking them, but many others find fulfilment in strong female-female relationships, often modelled on homosocial lines. Finally, there are clearly-masculine characters like Cornelia, an open man-hater and devotee of abstract arguments - perhaps there are glimpses of other ways of life in this largely conservative text.