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Fabio Barbieri on Frank Miller: the Smile of the Beast

Historian Fabio P. Barbieri condemns the work of comic book artist Frank Miller with a clear-eyed and cutting-tongued detestation.

The money quote:

In both ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, Miller’s moral is: the brutes are right. To cope with the world as it is, you have to be brutal. The way to deal with the Russian bastards (ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN was created when there still was a Soviet Union) is to scare them to death. (And consider the significnce of the fact that this story, which implicitly suggested that America was losing to Russia because democratically elected politicians were either gutless or in league with the Devil, was created and published under Ronald Reagan.) By the same token, the way to deal with social disaster is to organize a vigilante committee led by the Batman. Everybody else loses: psychologists are pap-minded incompetents, big business is corrupt (one characteristic of the genuine Fascist and Nazi is his intense distaste for big business) and elected politicians – well, in Frank Miller’s ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN, elected politicians are the Devil. Quite literally the Devil. The Devil enters the world through the electoral process, and the country and the world are saved by a Strong Man with a military background, who insinuates himself into a position of supreme power without anybody voting for him, and proceeds to strong-arm everybody else into doing what’s good for them under threat of machine-guns. It is impossible to miss the tone of exultation in the last page of the maxi-series – damn straight!

It becomes clear that Miller resents all the slow work of compromise, negotiation, backtracking, law enforcement, discussion, opposition and sheer bloody-mindedness that is a fundamental part of democracy. He has no patience with civilized measures. Behind the work of conviction that any elected politician must carry out to take the masses with him, there is only the smile of the Beast.

Read, as they say, the whole thing: http://fpb.livejournal.com/237337.html 

 My opinion: Mr. Barbieri and I will have to disagree about the ‘300’ movie, which I decided to like, despite its flaws: I honestly did not see any relation to modern politics, and I dismiss thosewho see a pro-Bush message in it as crackpots. It was pro-West, which is rare enough these days. I saw a strong relation to Herodotus, which Victor Hanson also saw, and Mr. Barbieri is being unfair to Mr. Hanson, merely imagining a condescension not present in Hanson’s writing. All the best lines from Herodotus are present in the movie, and it is as visually splendid as a well-done anime
If someone out there wants to argue that any pro-Sparta film might come across as pro-Fascist, well, that is not a hard argument to make. The Nazis were mere greenhorns compared to the Spartans when it came to running a brutal and soulless military dictatorship. The weird admiration that Plato had for these inhuman killers (Plato’s REPUBLIC is basically a love-poem to Sparta) is reflected in later ages: intellectuals tend for some reason to love socialists and mass-murderers, Stalin and Che and Castro, whose first act upon taking power is to kill all the intellectuals.
 
But the Spartans were still a freer people than the Persians, and they saved Western Civilization at Thermopylae, and the act was heroic.  Let us give credit where credit is due: Leonidas sacrificed himself and his men in an awe-inspiring example of personal fortitude. By all means, let us make movies about him.

Nowhere else do I have strong cause to argue against Mr. Barbieri’s position. Like him, I am no great fan of Mr. Miller and his work. Mr. Miller delights in soiling the work of his betters: he takes iconic heroes and makes them grotesque antiheroes. The whole gritty and sinister movement in the eighties comics, the love of darkness, was prompted mostly by Miller. Miller is the one who broke up the Superman-Batman friendship, one of the most longstanding and wholesome friendships in comicdom. A bitter and bloodyminded hatred of normalcy and democracy and the free market breathes from his later work. What he might have accomplished had he only used his powers for good, rather than Evil! 

Yes, I said Evil: the glorification of the brutal, the ugly, the demeaning, the abnormal, the distorted. If you think I am being harsh on Mr. Miller compare the visuals and the world view depicted in, say, RONIN with that in NAUSICAA AND THE VALLEY OF THE WIND by the great Hyao Miyazaki, or the shallowness of  THE DARK KNIGHT compared to the insight of PRINCESS MONONOKO. Miyazaki sees with eyes unclouded by hate. 

About

John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.

May 1, 2007 @ 12:08 pm
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