Let Pulp be Pulp

One of the problems I’ve had with a lot of media since the 90s is the table pounding insistence that pulp media is Important and needs to be taken seriously. There has been some strange insistence that all kinds of fantasy tales, hardboiled detective stories, comic books, and really low down pulpy sci-fi needs to be given the same weight as Dickens’ great works or Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

When I mention Sci-Fi there I am not talking about Asimov or some other respectable stuff that might appear in Analog or anything like that. I’m talking about stories about aliens putting women in gelatinous cubes to take them to Mars only to be stopped by square jawed men with laser guns in magazines called Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories. Some of the stories that first appeared in those kinds of magazines are now considered respectable, but sci-fi was really just the first group to rise from merely being pulp garbage to become something respectable.

I’m not saying that these stories are valueless, far from it, but I think we rob them of their greatness when we start to try and attach too much importance to them. We need to remind ourselves that these are disposable entertainment, meant only to excite the reader enough that they’ll buy the next issue. That they are representative of their times in both the thoughts and dreams of their society is something that I think hurts them in the long run, because saying that makes them cultural documents of importance rather than tales of guys with guns. They weren’t ever meant to be school room fodder, and fortunately they still often aren’t because of how the tales are written. You can’t really have 16 year olds reading The Maltese Falcon or Farewell My Lovely, their mothers just wouldn’t approve! When they get to college though, they do teach those and make attempts to drum the importance of these tales into kid’s heads.

That seems to me to be a great disservice, because I would really hate for someone to skip out of The Maltese Falcon thinking it’s going to be some ponderously important book banging you over the head with moral righteousness of an age gone by. That would be a damn shame since Sam Spade has got to be about the least morally righteous character in popular literature that still manages to be the guy on the right side by the end of the story. I’m really quite worried about the idea of any of these pulp stories being lumped in with the ponderous and important stories of the past because I don’t think they can (or even should) hold up under the weight.

I’ll give you an example from the movies. I’d heard about Double Indemnity being the granddaddy of Grand Poobahs of film noir for years. When I bought and watched it, what blew me away was how very average it was. I was annoyed by how fast Walter Neff moved in on Phyllis Dietrichson and started trying to seduce her halfway through telling her his name “Hi, I’m Walter ‘would you like my penis inside you’ Neff” because it destroyed any sense of reality for me. He came on too quickly, even for an insurance sales man. The rest of the movie was then hobbled from that point and didn’t recover well. I wouldn’t have been so annoyed, but this was supposed to be the greatest film noir ever made, and it wasn’t that great. If I hadn’t had it built up to such a degree, I would have thought it was alright, just okay, no big thing. Also, since one of my big interests is how and where films are influenced from, I knew that almost nothing in this movie was new. That also annoyed me. In the end, I gave the movie a seal of approval, but I do not rate it high on any of my lists. I think that being so built up, as it was, hurt it greatly because I was expecting more.

The commentary track just makes things worse, I couldn’t get through more than 5 minutes of the guy telling me how great everything was and how everything was the best thing ever. There are commentary tracks on most the Gangster Movies and Film Noir DVDs I’ve bought lately, from film scholars. Normally I like them, because these guys have studied and can bring in a perspective taking in the rest of the participant’s careers and what else was being produced at the time the movie was being done, however they can also weigh the movie down with a lot of importance that the movie doesn’t aspire to. The movies can be dragged down by the love these guys give them sometimes.

As I say, there have been a lot of scholarly reassessments of pulp style works, and attempts to raise them above the mire from which they were wrought. I think this is a mistake because what really attracts us to these things is their very unacceptability. If you brush them down, give them a shave and put nice clothes on them, they will loose some of that. Also, you’ll look like a damn fool because you’re trying to shave books and put suits on DVDs.

There has been a lot of table banging and demands that these stories and movies are important, that they should be respected as works of art and are still good and relevant to us today. Whenever I hear those people I often mutter that I agree with the last part but as for the first two, they’re crazy. I also tend to ask them to stop banging the damn table because they’re giving me a headache.

I really do think these things are worth reading and watching, but I don’t think most of them are any great works of art. The first year of The Fantastic Four isn’t the greatest work in comic books ever. It can actually be pretty hard to read by today’s standards, since it’s so pat and some of the characters are fairly one-dimensional. Consider The Shadow stories, which are now available in mass market forms again. Most of them are written by one guy, on the quick, to meet a publishing deadline. I remember reading some of them when I was a kid and finding them exciting but tragically flawed. Allan Quatermainwas the same way. That didn’t stop them from being a lot of fun though!

Most pulp works are like that actually. Lots of them can be tough to read because they were written quickly with little editorial input or scientific know how. But they were exciting, imaginative and great fun. It’s the visceral feeling that one gets from them that makes them exciting though. The energy with which they were torn from the type writer and rushed to get them on the magazine page is regularly evident in the works themselves. That energy manages, in most cases, to keep them from being dragged down under the weight of their own flaws.

However, we shouldn’t pretend we’re looking at high art, because we’re not. One or two pieces might rise above the rest and actually get to be art, but that’s entirely an accident in my view. These weren’t trying to be art, they were trying to be semi-popular and disposable entertainment. The pulp magazines weren’t trying to be anything than what they were, and that is noble enough within itself to be admired.

The other problem becomes that people get the idea that this stuff is important and try to make the current stuff as high falutin’ as they think the old stuff was. There are few things more painful than trying to read a comic book author who has gotten an idea of his medium’s importance. I was blown away at how badly Batman Hush was written, what with them mentioning The Purloined Letter twice an issue as if to scream to the reader “HEY! I’ve read a real book once! And it was one of them classic books you read in school and everything!” The sense that they wanted to raise the comic book to a literary level was evident, but it was also impossible because Jeph Loeb just wasn’t up to the challenge. Had he tried to stay low and pulpy, he might have made it. Instead he came off as amazingly pretentious and barely educated. Having tried to read some of his other stuff, I don’t think it’s an isolated incident. After the 400th Godfather direct rip off (it isn’t a reference if you lift it nearly verbatim) in four pages I gave up on The Long Halloween and have never gone back to it. My point here is that trying to tie extra importance to the art form only shows off the very large flaws in having a man dressed up like a flying rodent solving crimes. It’s ridiculous!

Trying to make hero comics into some higher art would really need a steady hand and genuine skill which most people just don’t have. It’s not a failing, not having that skill, only so many people can successfully put lipstick on a pig. Comic books can be raised to a finer art, but they usually have to abandon all pulpy trappings to do it.

We shouldn’t be attaching all this importance to these things anyway, because decoding all the extra meanings behind each phrase, panel and shot only turns consuming these things into work. Also, filling every comic panel with meaning and history only really works if your name is Alan Moore and even then, not always. I don’t want to have to look at viewing movies and reading stories as work, I want them to be fun. I reject the notion of entertainment as competition. I hate it when I hear people comparing books and movies like small indie bands no one has ever heard of or will ever care about. “Oh man, you read Chandler books? He’s so known he’s like, almost mainstream. No, I only read back copies of The Black Mask and Weird Tales. I don’t even get the reprints, you know? It’s more obscure my way.” Now be honest, you’re picturing a fat guy with an eyebrow piercing, an all black wardrobe and bad hygiene aren’t you? Well of course I am, but I know who I’m talk about you and you’ve probably never met him.

So yeah, let the pulp be pulp!

Let the film noir movies, the comic books, the detective stories, the sci-fi, the crime stories, the fantasy tales, the grindhouse movies, and all the other cheap, rough and ready entertainment just be some cheap, rough and ready bit of entertainment, without the artistic pretensions laid upon it. For this I will thank you.

Old Photo

Book Thoughts

Holly suggests that the women from this rant are all dating the men from this rant.

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Fancy, The Ruler of the Universe in repose…

She’s so dignified.