De-Programme

I can safely say that The Programme Vol. 1 is one of the legitimately worst comics I've read in a long time. It's a mess from start to finish and while the first issue does set-up an intriguing premise it not only fumbles that idea (being that the Nazis developed superhumans, but instead of deploying them in the war, they fell into the hands of the US and the USSR, developing a secret side-game in the Cold War. In a modern generic Middle Eastern country at war, those weapons have been awakened into a world they cannot understand), it obliterate it in a fever of poor art, poor design, and the most facile political points this side of a high schooler's peechee folder.

It's a poor, poor book and I want to make fun of it. Join me, won't you?

(See this cool cover? It's the last good thing you'll see in the book.)

I recently posted that I liked Prometheus because, despite its flaws, there are some really cool things going on. The Programme is the inverse of that where I hate something even more because of how badly it screw up its potentially cool ideas. I'll try to come up with a smart corollary rule for that.

(And besides a successful version of this story already exists, it's called The Winter Men and it was amazing.)

The dialogue and the general themes of the book have all of the relevance of a Human Shield in the months before the Iraq War. There's nothing wrong with a book being political and there's certainly nothing wrong with the kind of angry liberal politics inside of this book (I'm more of a Mort Zuckerman-man myself, but that's just me). What is a problem is when the politics of a work have all of the energy and poignancy of a bumper sticker on an ugly car.

V for Vendetta managed to be a strident attack against the policies of Margaret Thatcher and a statement on the feelings of the time, but it also managed to be a parable about political power in general and, most importantly, be a well-told story. That's an intensely liberal-minded story. It works and people from all over the political spectrum enjoy it because it is much more than a rebuke of a political philosophy that no one can recall in detail.

This book ended its much too long 12 issue run in 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected as President of the United States. Could you think of anything less relevant than the angry hysteria of the Iraq War protest movement in 2008 (and, also, wasn't Obama going to fix that whole mess)? The Programme seems to be written as a reply to an argument long since paved over in light of the forward movement of reality.

The politics are a kind of whiny, rambling dissidence that was annoying during the Bush years, but now has all of the heft a homeless man arguing with a dumpster. Vague anger and political buzzwords isn't a theme. When a forth of a page is taken up by the panel "THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS A DANGEROUS PSYCHOPATH" (is there any other kind of psychopath?) apropos of nothing you can't help but conclude that not only is this book without subtlety, it's a book that values making a statement over creating a story.

Plus, we know the US president is a dangerous psychopath, he just fired off a nuclear warhead. Psychopathy is implicit in the act of firing off a nuclear warhead. We don't need to be told that. . . unless of course you were making an important political point! In which case we should all stop and ruminate on the important things you have to say, oh mighty swami!

The plotting is even worse. It reveals things with such little weight or care that it all feels incidental. Flashbacks come and go with no real context and while they do fill in the background of some of the characters they don't seem to actually be relevant to anything that is happening in the present. It'd be like if Dr. Manhattan's flashbacks were all about him attending physics classes in college. Too be fair, though, the flashbacks are the least agonizing thing about the book because at least stories begin and are concluded in them.

It's one of the only books I can think of that has managed to move both too quickly and still manage to drag everything out. Every opportunity for explanation or intrigue is wasted or tossed away in favor of vague references to imperialism or the worker's republic or whatever else. And they aren't concepts or thoughts, they're just words that people say. They're saying them enough times so they must mean something!

The biggest waste of an opportunity is present in the presumed protagonist, Max. Our boy is a superhuman made by the Nazis and programmed by the US government as a protector of truth, justice, and all of that other fun stuff that has no place in a comic this lifeless. As a protagonist he would make the main character in The Stranger blush with his ineffectualness. Bartleby the scrivener would tell him to get his shit together. Besides super strength and speed, his main power seems to be to make me want to throw a clock radio at him.

When he's told that he was a baby made by the Nazis and brainwashed by the military industrial complex by the CIA he takes it with all of the excitement of being given a pastrami sandwich instead of a Reuben. He doesn't seem to want any documentation on his heritage as a Nazi superman and just takes the spooks that show up at his word.

Then he proceeds to do nothing for the entire comic. He escapes from a CIA holding facility, but instead of going on the run like a normal plot would make him, he ends up running. . . right back to the bar where we found him in the first place where he proceeds to do. . . even more nothing. His personal problems are then explained away in one line of dialogue and he goes back to having a non-debate with himself for three issues. Because, again, if people like anything in their stories it is for comflict to present itself, however stupidly, then be instantly swept away with a declarative sentence.

Eventually another superhuman named Senator Joe, who is woken up and convinced that the US government is overrun by commies and pinkos, is sent to retrieve the reluctant superhuman.

But, of course, that character is wasted as well. He goes from being a super-powered Red-baiter to a being a guy who just wears a hat (Max, importantly, does not wear a hat). His change of heart happens off panel and is explained away in the next scene he appears in. So what you have is a super-powered right-wing nut job and a psycho-out-of-time changed into a guy who just kind of hassles Max ineffectually for half of an isse. Good. Great. That's the kind of crack story-telling people come to comics for!

At some point Max has a crisis of character, which is that he's a weapon of mass destruction that hates destroying things. At no point does anyone state the obvious which would be "Then don't fucking blow up anyone, you jackass" or "Good, because blowing up things for fun would make you a fucking asshole and everybody hates assholes." No, the scene is about. .  . I don't even know. There's nothing I can tell you factually that would be more interesting than whatever you imagine the scene is actually about.

Here's the writing prompt: Timothy Lehery and Superman are in a bar. They are talking about brainwashing. Go.

Alright, good work everybody.

Anyways, the scene drags on and, again, nobody states the other incredibly obvious point about how his mind has been messed with, which would be "It's called a conscience, you dingus. You're welcome for not being a soulless monster." Milligan doesn't seem to understand the difference between a revelation and a premise.

Then again having any motivation at all in our heroes puts the villains into sharp relief since they have all of the depth of a henchman in a Die Hard fanfic. They're Soviets! And they're evil! And they're attacking a faceless composite of Middle Eastern nations! And these Soviet guys are. . . doing bad stuff! Why? Because they are going to destroy American imperialism! Why? Because they're good Soviets and good Soviets murder Americans! Apparently!

There's no motivation, there's no plot, there's just a vague set-up that never really goes anywhere. They're plot is cardboard thin. They keep on referencing Joseph Stalin, but thinking on that mass murderer I can't help but feel he was a far more rational actor than these group of weirdos. If you made them Nazis or Christian fundamentalists or Martians or irrate mathematicians literally nothing would change in their motivations or actions.

Strangely the first Soviet super villain introduced seems to be intensely concerned with killing American soldiers, but doesn't even seem to be aware of the concept of there being people living in the country they're invading. Milligan doesn't seem to be either. He seems to want to bristle at the hubris of the American empire invading a country, but doesn't seem to be interested at all in the people they are presumably conquering and killing. He also seems perfectly fine in lumping the entire Middle East together into one big ball and calling it "Talibanistan." Real progressive work you're doing there, buddy.

Questions are all I have for this book. Angry questions. Is this an important moment? Is this a side character? Why is this happening? Who the hell is that? Do I give a shit? Questions like this pop into my mind at such frequency that I have to wonder whether Mr. Milligan ever asked "What the hell am I doing here?" It would have been a more constructive question to ask instead of what exactly we're doing in Iraq. At the very least there'd be an answer and my pain would end.

Then there's the art.It's a hideous neon-soaked nightmare that is so garish and blown-out that it would make Andy Warhol vomit in rage.There is really nothing redeemable about it. At its best it's merely competent. It is on a page, it is of people, and the word balloons correspond to those.

The coloring is an obnoxious mess. It reminds me of how Jae Lee's artwork is handled, which is it is very flat with maybe a few textures thrown in, but overall the colorist (Richard Isanove, especially) let's Lee's sparse line work and heavy shadows do the heavy lifting. Jae Lee (and Richard Isanove who seems to work with Lee most often) are talented artists though and CP Smith and Johnny Rench don't seem to know what a comic book is or even how to draw.

The color palette is a clear stylistic choice, which is fine. Had it worked it would have been a bold and striking style for the comic. Unfortunately the coloring seems to be barely competent, more reminiscent of something out of the late 90's when people started figuring out this art on computers business. The texture work is quite transparently just a texture out of Photoshop and the actual artwork itself is so reliant on tracing photos that its hard to tell when the shitty coloring stops and where the crappy drawings begin.

Most egregiously there are some pages that are digitized and chopped up to the point of actually being pixelated. I'm reading a comic book made in 2008 and I am looking at textures that seem to have fallen out of Kid Pix. It makes me ask another question which is whether somebody intended for it to look this lackluster or if this was a plan all along?

It's all made worst with a sickeningly dull layout. Every page seems to consists entirely of "Digitally traced people covered in too much shadow making weird faces at each other.While those silly faces aren't crammed with too many word balloons or caption boxes, the story's glacial pace makes me think that even the meager potential of these panels is being wasted on a poorly paced story.

The book is filled cover to cover with pictures of people standing with the odd addition of somebody maybe flying. The backgrounds are few and far between and what we do get, like the people in the comic, are clearly just photos of ugly places made uglier with Photoshop filters. Brian Lee O'Malley made it work. This CP Smith is no Brian Lee O'Malley.

You look at the artwork of Tony Harris and you realize that tracing and heavy photo referencing can be done and done to great effect. I'm fairly certain even Darick Robertson used photo references for characters in Transmetropolitan and that book looks amazing. So, in both the case of the flat, digital coloring and the tracing there are excellent examples of that work.

(To be fair, though, this Wolverine cover by CP Smith is pretty killer. I also seem to vaguely remember the issue being competently drawn.)

Fuck this book. If I wanted to read a half-assed and hideous version of Watchmen I'd vomit into my Absolute edition and shut it. This is a book without redeeming qualities. I let you know this because not only is it great fun to inflict retribution on this book, but it also presents a pause for us to reflect upon how great some of the comic books in our lives are. While not every superhero book is All-Star Superman or Powers at least there are also very few books like The Programme.

(Alright. That's enough of that. I promise to write about something good in the future)

A Failed Essay About "Come and See"

The following is an essay (an incompletely unedited essay, I realize) on the 1985 Russian film, Come and See.

(Just skimming over it, I realize that this is a very-- VERY-- film schooly approach to film, but I'm still pretty happy with the results. It certainly is not my best essay, but I'll put it up against a thousand other joyless criticisms on film. I might be an idiot, but at least I'm an ecstatic idiot.)

(Note: I have edited nothing in this essay. It is exactly the same as it was in late 2008. It probably should be fixed, but that strikes me as unfair and vain. I'm not so good of a writer that I have gained the ability to revise my own history. The following stands as my final essay for Cinema of Fascism, Communism, and Resistance, for better or for worse.)



Atrocity Exhibition:
Come and See A Subversion of Soviet History

(I could have done much better on the title. Lord know I have. I wrote an essay on Alien that's title was a joke about ejaculation. I earned $250 with that one. Obviously, my lesson was not learned.)

Come and See is a directed by Elem Klimov and was co-written by Ales Adamovich with the director. It was released in 1985, the fortieth anniversary of the ending of World War II (for the Soviet Union, anyways) and was a time which could accurately be seen as the dusk of the Soviet Union. During this time the USSR was embroiled in a vicious and costly war in Afghanistan and it would be another four years before the Soviets conceded the war to the Afghans. Another important action during this time were Mikhail Gorbachev’s duel policies, the perestroika, which sought to reform the state-run economy, and glasnost, the policy of “openness” of both the USSR’s citizenry and government. All of these events were a part of a sea change occurring in the Soviet Union that would end with the perforation of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Come and See was created at a time where history was visibly changing and, appropriately, it is a film that deliberately changes a vision of history. Klimov’s final film is an interpretation that radically subverts history while at the same time depicts it with atrocious realism.

The film doesn’t seem to directly or even allegorically reflect these events, but it more than likely did directly benefit from Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. Without these moves towards reformation and openness it’s hard to imagine that a film which depicts the Great Patriotic War with so little romanticism or joy could be made. This film was made in a country where, not too long before, political dissenters can be thrown into prison and where the shelving of controversial movies was common place. In fact it’s hard to image a film that imagine that a film like this could be made anywhere.

The film’s point of view comes from that of a young, Belorussian teenager named Florian*. The narrative follows Florian as he is conscripted (or perhaps volunteers) into the Soviet partisans, who are at war with Hitler’s Germany. Over the course of the film the young Florian bares witness to the worst kinds of atrocities that World War II gave birth to. He is struck deaf temporarily, his entire family is murdered, his scavenger friends are killed one by one, he witnesses an entire village slaughtered by German soldiers, and eventually finds the walking wreckage of his friend Glasha who has been brutalized and rendered barren. Yet, the worst of all of these things comes in the last scene, where he accepts these horrors and joins into the faceless mob of Soviet partisans.

As a child, director Elem Klimov saw many of the same kind of horrors that Florian does. Klimov was born in the city Stalingrad, which was the sight of one of the longest and bloodiest battles in one of the longest and bloodiest wars in world history. Stalingrad (now Volgograd), like many Soviet cities and regions during World War II was the sight of a concerted effort by the German government to wipe out the Slavic race from the face of the earth.

(Since the interim period of my writing this essay, I've read a lot more into the Ostfront/Eastern Front/That Thing the Ruskies Did for Us. I kind of wish that guy could go back and edit this essay-- something I've refused to do here. I'd like to think it'd be a more well rounded essay, if not a better written essay, but I wish it'd just be more fun. That's my whole theory about film criticism. It should be EXCITING. It should be FUN. You should WANT TO READ THIS ESSAY. I know I don't do that with this essay. It's bean counting. It is me trying to pass a class. I'd like to think that I'm better than that, but I don't have proof. So, here I am, playing Mystery Science Theater 3000 to my own paper. Someone come and kill me, please.)

On the surface, Come and See, shares many characteristics with the Realist school of film-making. It’s Soviet characters consist only of the proletariat, the camera prefers to linger for certain scenes and moves around in long, eye-level takes instead of quick cuts. The entirety of the film also seems to have been shot on location, not in a studio, and there doesn’t seem to be any source of light present besides natural light. Many of the people that appear on screen are either amateurs (as with the case of Florian) or non-professionals (which would be a necessity for many scenes). While the film does have the appearance of a Realist film, it by no means should it be seen as a realistic film. Come and See is fraught with symbolism, montage, and clear departures from reality. The events in the film are steeped with the blood of history, but much of this particular vision comes from the mind of its director.



To view this as an entirely literal recreation of history would miss the point of the film. Even though Come and See does not flinch from the genocidal policies of the Nazi Party, it does play with the context of these events. It will show these scenes in all of their harrowing [glory], but the film often either precedes or follows these events with something that gives the scene an ironic or exaggerated slant.

This is enumerated in the first scene of the film. In this scene a middle-aged man threatens some children, who are in hiding, with a switch for digging for a rifle. The children do not respond to the man’s threats and having made no gains with the children, he departs. Immediately after he disappears, one of the kids he warned enters the scene with the same stick and starts making the same speech. The only difference is that this kid, with a voice far older than his body, is mocking the old man and his authority. The impressionist’s friend Florian laughs at the lampooning of the adult, and with it the rules and society the man is trying to impose. This scene then takes another reversal when the two children try to find a rifle so they can enter into the same world as the man they were just laughing at. This whole sequence lays out the tone for the film to follow. It introduces the film’s first contradicting images and it also introduces the film’s first satirizing of authority.

Florian’s survival is probably the most clearly ironic symbol in the entire film. The first time he comes under enemy attack he simultaneously escapes death in two ways. He escapes it once, by not being hit by the blasts of the Luftwaffe’s aerial bombardment, and he escapes it a second time, by not staying home with his mother and sisters. When Florian first joins the Soviet resistance, the conclusion his mother (and which the audience likely reaches) is that going off to war will not only kill him, but kill his family. It’s a perfectly logical conclusion to believe that fighting in a war is a higher risk job than staying at home, but death does not follow any pattern or logic in this film. In this movie death is a capricious character that can only be counted on to do the opposite of what you expect it to do. Florian goes on to defy death several more times by walking through a mine field (which kills two of his partisan partners) and avoiding machine gun fire (which kills the last of his partners as well as a cow). The teenager continues to throw himself into the line of fire time and time again and yet, he defies the odds every single time.

The last time Florian should have been done away with comes at the climax of the movie, the barn scene. When one man sticks his head out of the window he is instantly shot by a sub-machinegun, but when Florian sticks his head out, he is treated to a view of an entire army pointing their weapons at him. The Germans offer amnesty to all those inside without children, though they explicitly state that the “children have to stay.”

The occupants and the audience is unsure if this is a trick on the Nazi’s part. By all indications Florian takes them up on their offer and despite being a child (and the Germans having no real reason to spare a teenager like Florian), he is allowed to live. An entire village of innocent children and adults are put to the stake, save for the partisan Florian. His constant avoidance of death flies completely in the face of logical decision making and, even, mathematical probability. In the world of a history book, Florian would have been just another statistic.



The miraculous survival skills of Florian is foiled in the death of the German/Russian translator late in the film. Florian rarely ever actively saves himself. He only seems to avoid being killed through sheer coincidence. This isn’t true with the translator. Every time this captured soldier with a scarf sees an opportunity to distance himself from his Nazi bosses, he takes the opportunity. Of course by doing the smart and logical thing and by following orders he, in turn, damns himself. The irony is that Florian seems to drift through the movie on luck contravening bad decisions, where as the translator actually makes a solid argument for himself ends up being executed for his labors.

Even Florian’s name is completely out of place in this drama that is so full of death and despair. His name comes from the Latin word “flor,” which means flower, and his name, in full, means “flowering.” If there was a movie more diametrically opposed to flowering it would be Come and See. Again, only in a film would a child with the name of a flower bare witness to the attempted murder of an entire nation.

Another prime example of these contradictions occurs in the same sequence as the barn scene. For a few seconds, between flamethrowers firing off and children dying, Florian lays his eyes on a beautiful woman in a Mercedes eating a lobster. This brief shot isn’t supposed to literally demonstrate how luxuriously the Germans lived (in fact, the opposite was true, ineffective supply lines and the Soviet’s “scorched earth” strategy were two of the biggest reasons the Germans lost the Eastern Front), but rather it exists as a symbol of the atrocities the Nazis inflicted upon the peasantry of the Soviet Union. It also exists simply to amplify the disparity between the two side of this conflict. A dainty Aryan lady is, more or less, the exact opposite of proletariat elders and youths being burnt alive.

These contradicting and seemingly illogical images constantly reoccur in the film. These clashing images come from one of the oldest Russian film techniques and requires intention on the part of the filmmaker. These images by being placed against each other create a dialog with the audience and create an ambiguity. With a straight recital of history there wouldn’t be this same kind of leeway. Simply put, painted ladies eating lobster during a holocaust do not exist in the wild. Klimov’s film is not a recreation of history as it happened, but it is history as he wants to show it.

These juxtapositions undermine the traditional, authoritarian interpretations of history. This loose vision of 1943 forces the audience to determine where the truth lies. On the one hand it is an accepted fact that the German government was responsible for the deaths of millions of people and on the other hand, the way in which these Germans do it is so completely over the top that it would be funny in any other context.

Elem Klimov doesn’t portray these men as Germans or even as Nazis, he makes them into vampires and into frankensteins and into “cannibals” as a collaborator calls them. These men don’t just rape women, they drag them by the hair like cavemen and entire truckloads of soldiers chase after just one of them. They don’t just flood a crowd with grenades, they blow them up, set fire to them (with flamethrowers, bottles of gasoline, and pillows soaked in petrol), and they shoot them—all the while drinking, playing grab ass with each other, and putting their BMW motorcycles on autopilot.

Even those present during the carnage have a viewpoint not in keeping with reality. The German SS major, when questioned about the massacre in the barn states that “He would never hurt a fly” and that in this war “No one is responsible.” He says this even as his own men tell their captors that this “sick, old man” with a bush baby on his shoulder gave the orders to destroy the village. This major tells his partisan captors this with a straight face. He truly believes that he is innocent of these charges of murder and that he is completely uninvolved with what happened in the barn. The audience knows that he was present at the massacre and that he appeared to be the ranking officer when it burned. Yet, despite having the same set of information that he has, the major reaches a completely different conclusion from what the audience reaches (and what the partisans reach).

(Are you still reading? Good, thanks. Don't worry, there's only a bit more of torture of you. It's all grass after this. Also-- there is one thing I edited into this essay, which is the ending. The original file I had ended at the last paragraph and what I found there was completely different from the essay that got graded. There's a vain hope in me that the final version of this. . . thing is a decent paper, but that is probably just that-- as vain, decadent hope. If nothing, I'd like this to serve as an example regarding things you should not do in graded papers. You aren't dumb, whoever you are. You can do better. For me, it's been barely two years and I know I can!)

In the concluding scenes of the film Klimov states the fact that 658 Belorussian villages were destroyed by these invaders with a single title card that includes no numbers or analysis beyond those 658 villages. The purpose of this is to reassert one particular element of the story. This title card seems to say that, while much of the film came from the imagination of the film makers, the fact Soviet Russia suffered horrifically desecrated by the Nazi-led German government needs to be understood. This fact of the war should not be cast aside simply because the film played around with certain imagery. It says that if there is one thing to be believed in this movie is that this war cost a great deal of lives, though even that is left up to the audience to interpret. It gives the audience one region and one set of numbers and then it cuts them lose to research this history for themselves.

In 2001 Klimov described his film in this manner, “In Come and See, what I ended up filming was a lightened-up version of the truth. Had I included everything I know and shown the whole truth, even I could not have watched it.”*** The events in Come and See are not the reality of Belorussian in World War II, but it is a reality--a fantastic one. It is the reality that seeks to show as many atrocities as possible, while at the same time making a film that is still watchable. The primary means of making the movie palatable and creatively interpreting reality is by the use of contrapuntal images. What Come and See leaves the audience with is not history as told in an encyclopedia. Come and See is an atrocity exhibition, it is a universal history of human suffering that goes well beyond WWII. If Klimov had stuck to a strict, objective history of German war crimes, it wouldn't have the same impact or the same relevance.

(Jeepers H. Crackers, who the hell ends a paper with the word "relevance?" It's like ending sexual intercourse with fucking an ice chest. It's stupid, it's pointless, and I'm surprised that I recieved as got of a grade as I did. If I had the time or amibition, I'd petiton my professor to give me a lower grade.)



*As I think about this essay two years after I wrote it, I realized another irony: Florian is an incredibly Teutonic-- if not, at least, a classical, heroic-- name. It adds to the sort of fucked up, toss away irony that this movie is full of. I guess this all sort of adds to my general theory that Klimov is kind of fucking with us in a high-art sort of way.

**I kind of want to slap myself two years ago. It isn't necessary, but it might prevent me from becoming myself.

***Even tipsy, I realize that not having a CITATION PAGE is incredibly tacky. My professor Dr. Jerry Mosier called me on it at the time and he's absoluetly right. I've always written with my gut and added citations later (because I had to). I don't think that's a terrible way to write a piece of criticism, but living off of it-- as I am doing here-- makes me look like a tacky fucker-- which I am.