Butterfly Hunt

No Exit: Peeters and Lévy’s Sandcastle (SelfMadeHero)

“None of us can leave.”

The wonderful independent British comic book publisher SelfMadeHero has just released the English edition of Sandcastle, a graphic novel written by Pierrer Oscar Lévy and illustrated by Frederik Peeters, winner of the Utopiales Best Science Fiction Graphic Novel 2011 prize. The original French edition, from 2010, was originally published in French by Atrabile, and was nominated for the Grand Prix at the Angoulême International Comics Festival 2011. 

It is not an easy read, and this is precisely what makes it an enjoyable graphic novel. For starters, it is hard to locate its genre. “Psychological drama” would be a possibility, but (as proven by its Nantes award) science fiction and mystery fans will also recognise familiar plot structures. I am inclined to describe it as psychological drama because of its dialogic narrative, the clearly circumscribed setting (a secluded beach surrounded by green cliffs) and the focus on a specific set of characters (a dozen holidaymakers and an Arab immigrant man on the run). The story’s premise is simple: a young woman’s body is found floating in the waters, and the thirteen characters are left face to face with mystery. 

Peeters’s black and white inks play with varying degrees of light/shadow balance, going from clear and delicate lines to baroque, clustered shadings and blocks of black. As the story progresses, white spaces recede, giving place to a darker, silhouetted reality. My first reaction to the way the story evolves was very physical, not unlike a truly uncanny feeling. After I finished it two names came to mind: Camus and Sartre. 

(Peeters and Lévy, Sandcastle, page 29)

I tried reading L’Être et le néant (1943) when I was perhaps too young to understand it. I was 15, and having read L’Etranger (1942) and having made the connection with The Cure’s “Killing an Arab”, I became interested in the term “existentialism.” La Nausée (1938) was a title that had puzzled me for a long time, but I would not read Sartre in school until perhaps ten years later, in university. Not much later I would teach Qu’est-ce que la litérature? (1947) and L’Existentialisme est un humanisme (1946) in my own lectures.

The phrase “Hell is other people” was known to me first of all because my father quoted it constantly; later I would read it quoted all over the place. Huis Clos (published in English as “In Camera”) means literally “closed door”, probably “Without Exit”, or, perhaps, “Dead End” but this last option would have serious interpretive implications) is a short play from 1944, with only four characters, taking place in only one scene, “a drawing room in Second Empire style”, where there are three sofas of different colours. There are no windows, one single door, a “massive bronze group” on a mantelpiece, a pen-knife and an interior doorbell that not always works to contact the exterior. The main characters are two women and a man. The fourth character is a “valet” that introduces one by one each character into the room. It is of this play that Sandcastle reminded me of. 

Stuart Gilbert’s English translation of “In Camera” suggests different things to the contemporary reader, and it can orient different interpretations. It is interesting that the words “camera” and “chamber” (as in “torture chamber”) are indeed related. It will be no spoiler to say that Sartre’s play is about three characters, already dead, facing purgatory. They soon realize there are no torture instruments in this drawing room except the other people they were put together with for eternity. Even the opportunity to escape the room provides no exit, and voluntarily they choose to remain together…

Sartre must have known of course of the surveillance techniques of totalitarian regimes, but the technological developments of his day had not yet allowed the baudrillardian “totalscreen-ness” of the world we live in today. “In Camera” reads like an antecedent of reality shows, especially Big Brother, where strangers are put together in a room and are not allowed to leave. As we all know, the Other in the reality show ethos plays the role of the torturer or at least always-potential punisher.

What makes the situation in that chamber that is Sartre’s stage hellish is the constant observation and judgement of the other characters. It’s not only that the presence of the Other is annoying, but that the Other keeps talking, and not only talking but passing judgement. And, of course, the set-up of two women and only one man makes the situation more than tricky. Somehow the fact that none of them were “innocent,” that the three of them had a reason to be “punished,” guarantees the non-existence of any moral superiority. In other words, judges and judged are all guilty and equally amoral and each of them play both roles. From a contemporary perspective the play suggests that in a perfect totalitarian state of continuous observation there is no need for torturers or judges any more. The ones that will imprison and condemn us will be our neighbours, our lovers, our fellow human beings, and finally our own selves.

“Hell… is other people” sums up this state of total surveillance where the judgement of those nearer to us is permanent and merciless. Furthermore, there is no escape from it, even when there may be a slight possibility for it we may not know what to do with it or how to go about it.

Lars von Trier’s film Dogville (2003) also comes to mind, set in a stage that is nothing but representation and make-believe, a town without walls (“pueblo chico infierno grande” -”small town, big hell”- goes the saying in Spanish). In some way, the roads of “Cyburbia” are potentially not less hellish than Sartre’s drawing room, where nothing goes unnoticed, and where we willingly expose ourselves to our harshest judges, our fellow men and women.

(Peeters and Lévy, Sand Castle, page 65)

Sandcastle belongs, in my view, to this same literary and philosophical tradition. Like Huis Clos (but unlike Dogville), Sandcastle is a narrative based on dialogue and purely graphic narration (in other words, there is no “narrator”, at least not in words). The narrative depends, as in many other comics, on the sequence of still drawn images and the speech balloons containing the characters’ dialogues (rarely do the characters stop talking). The enclosed scene (the beach) works like a stage, where the men and women are merely players (“Why not pretend that all of this is happening in a book that you’re writing right now?!” asks a character in the seventh panel of page 59). 

In Sandcastle Peeters and Lévy offer a truly unsettling and profoundly moving experiment in psychological dramatic graphic narrative, and as such it is a book which (if I’m allowed a stereotype) reads as eminently European. The sense of uncanniness and eroticism developed through its exploration of the physical nature of the naked, fragile, ageing human body within a seaside setting is not without echoes to Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1954) or even Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-End (1967). 

In the end, Sandcastle is both an exploration of the medium of comics to convey time and narrative and a reflection on time passing. It is also the staging, in graphic narrative form, of the dialectics between Eros and Thanatos, family and society, freedom and destiny. In Sandcastle hell is other people, and the only way to discover if there’s an exit one has to read the book. 

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The following independent stores have limited stock of Sandcastle, which include a limited edition art print created especially for SelfMadeHero by Fredrik Peeters:

Gosh! Comics, Soho
Mega City Comics, Camden
Orbital Comics, Charing Cross
Forbidden Planet Megastore, London
Travelling Man, Leeds & Manchester
OK Comics, Leeds
Plan B Books, Glasgow
Dave’s Comics, Brighton

The Dark Knight Redux

Given the recent tragic events in Norway, it becomes once again unavoidably urgent to critically (intelligently) reassess the political and ethical implications of dominant superhero narratives.  

The trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is online. A conversation with Allan Haverholm on Twitter inspired me to dig out this commentary I posted on 31 July 2008. 

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I sat in the movie theatre with so many great expectations. But it was just one long, relentless, chase-and-explosions flick. There is nothing in the film that I liked that was not a reference to comic book visuals and dialogues. Even the best lines, the supposedly profound discussion of heroism, good and evil and chance are taken from the comic books. Gary Oldman’s fantastic performance as Gordon is, even more than Ledger’s Joker, the one that is more cartoony. The sequence when Gordon comes home after faking his death are direct translations from Year One:

Batman: Year One, page 30 (2005 trade paperback edition), art by David Mazzucchelli, script by Frank Miller

I found profoundly unsettling how single-handedly the Joker is called a “terrorist”. Out of the blue, he is not a criminal, not a psychopathic ex-inmate of the Arkham Asylum for the Mentally Insane, but a terrorist. No one can deny that the adjective cannot be used literally anymore. The film’s political message seems to be thus: we people of Gotham (we, America) are good people and will not tolerate terrorism, which is just a form of irrational madness. As exemplified by Alfred’s conversation with Bruce, the film justifies the destruction of a whole city just to get one man (sounds familiar?):

Bruce Wayne: That man in Burma, did you ever catch him?
Alfred Pennyworth: Oh yes.
Bruce Wayne: How?
Alfred Pennyworth: We burned the forest down.

There is no attempt to understand the Joker’s traumatic past or the reasons for his actions, and physical violence seems to be the only way to “negotiate” with him. The whole film reads like a justification of torture in order to obtain what the good guys want.

I loved the way Chicago and London are merged to offer a very realistic view of Gotham as a crime-infested city that, nevertheless, seems to be inhabited by cuddly carebear inhabitants who are forced to flee the city by one single dynamite-loving psycho. The notion that Two Face’s turn to the “dark side” is the Joker’s triumph (balanced by the failure of his “little social experiment” when both ferries do not blow each other) aptly illustrates Nolan’s humorless, grim view of Gotham: everything is so simply bi-polar that one side can very clearly become the other. Beware of those terrorists, because they want us to become like them.

I think that The Dark Knight is an excellent example of what I have called “the triumph of the Corporate over Individual talent”. There is no doubt about Nolan’s cinematic quality, but he is forced to come up with a pastiche of referents (from James Bond to Bourne to Heat to the Godfather to Ghost in the Shell to The Silence of the Lambs to previous Batmans (including his own). Especially towards the end, when the Batman’s eyes become an all-seeing sonar, the film becomes (annoyingly) a first-person shooter video game (the set not unlike Donkey Kong’s) but without the privilege of interactivity (through POV and conative angles, we become him without being able to control his actions). 

A non-stop, loud spectacle of an eternal chase defined by the glorification of violence: in Nolan’s world good and evil, reason and insanity, the terrorist and the good guys, the hero and the villain, the outcast and the politician are all on each side of a one-sided coin.

Unlike No Country for Old Men, The Dark Knight is contaminated with a masked morality that, once again, falls into the simplistic, Bush-era rhetoric of good and evil (and evil being terrorism, and terrorism being irrational and with no traceable cause). Where No Country presents a wasteland of the soul, the alienated, motivated, unstoppable and uncontrollable human evil incarnate that defies understanding, The Dark Knight works as an apology for the violence against the enemy, without any attempt of understanding its causes in order to stop a vicious circle of madness. Unlike the Joker of Elizabethan theatre, Ledger’s Joker says no painful truths, but the lies imposed by the powers-that-be. Like the Batman and Bruce Wayne himself, he is a puppet whose purpose is to allow the order that chaos has established. Left literally hanging from a rope, The Puppet-Joker says to the Batman:

“You just couldn’t let me go could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible aren’t you? You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness, and I won’t kill you, because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.”

This all could be very well if it were only fiction. Russian formalism works well for traditional fiction, but not for world politics. Whereas the Batman and the Joker may need to keep fighting each other eternally to allow a fictional universe to exist, this cannot and should not be transferred to the way the ‘good guys’ are dealing with ‘the terrorists’.

Whereas it could be argued that Nolan’s film is precisely pointing out that good and evil are not so different from each other, the conclusion is that we always know who the good guys are. In the world outside fiction, in the world of real men and women who die every day, there is no justification for terror on either “side”. Hollywood is becoming, again, the best strategy to subtly (and not so subtly) make violence seem not only justified, but, even more worryingly, “cool”.