The genius of Occupy Wall Street is that it is not a traditional political project. It did not arrive with a set of talking points and an organizing template. Its evolution has already taken it far from where it began, physically or politically. Its alliance with unions and other progressive groups will in all likelihood transform the movement as it spreads across the country, just as the movement has the potential to transform its allies.

—”The 99 Percent Rise Up,” The Nation

There’s more…

Update: From site regular Tim Swann:

And a grittier take from commenter Mark:

[Where will your favorite hero - or villain - show up? Post a link to your own mockups in the comments. We'll add our favorite ones to this page! - Ed.]

Related Posts

• Hell On Workers
• The Overview: They Live
• #OccupyBroadway: “Newsies” and Occupy Wall Street
• New York Comic-Con 2011: #ZombifyWallStreet
• Open Thread for September 2, 2011

I really can’t do a good job–any job–of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you’re more familiar with, because  I don’t understanding it in terms of anything else you’re more familiar with.

This is why science is so maddening for some and so great for others.

-Richard Feynman, Fun to Imagine (1983)

Raison d’être

While we Overthinkers have already spent many a goodly hour dissecting X-Men: First Class and the characters therein, I’d like to take the prominence this film holds in our current collective zeitgeist as an opportunity to voice an issue that’s irked me for years, now. Stated  simply, “how do we solve a problem like Magneto?”

To be clear, I take no umbrage with Magneto’s role as sometimes-hackneyed allegory for postwar Jewish experience, his membership in the brotherhood of superpowered Hebrews (in which I one day hope to hold a rank), nor his place in the pantheon of villains who seem  superfluously haunted by the deaths of their mothers. All of these are, to some degree, excusable literary devices of the sort inevitably used throughout the perpetual re-imagining of such a long-lived character. No, my issues with Herr Lehnsherr, like most of my professional worries (and–now that I think about it–like most of the troubles with my mom) stem from basic physics.  Which is to say, the self-proclaimed “Master of Magnetism:”

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

…has, at best, only a rudimentary control over this awesome fundamental force.

Okay, in this example he’s also a bit of a douche, I guess.

Now, as the quote that opens this post so eloquently states, the physics of magnetism get quite a bit sticky.  It’s not that the math is hard per se (though it can be a bit daunting), nor are the results counter intuitive in the way that many quantum or cosmological phenomena tend to be.  The problem with magnetism is that so many of its aspects are immediately well-known to the common observer, and yet the intrinsic physical phenomena from which they’re borne are best explained in a fundamentally counter-intuitive manner.

"That's right, my friend. Search your feelings; you know it to be true. Wait... Line?"

This has, of course, lead to notorious confusion in the literature. In fact even I, with my obviously formidable scientific prowess, would never be so boastful as to liken my pedagogical skills to those of Professor Feynman. Hence, this post won’t serve as a primer on magnetic theory, just a critique of the way Magneto (under)utilizes it.  Also of note: while OTI has previously featured related analysis that provided an elegant Physical Chemical model for Magneto’s powers, that work attempted to justify the apparent limitations of his abilities. I, on the other hand, recognize that the ability to control magnetism–in all of its forms and contexts–should imbue Magneto with a startling array of powers. I’m just attempting to help him realize his full potential.

Magnetism: Electricity’s Wacky Next-Door Neighbor

Modern physics states that the universe is governed by a set of five basic forces: gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and heart. You’ll note right away that magnetism doesn’t stand on its own right, instead being inextricably tied to the electric force. The discovery that these two seemingly disparate forces are, in reality, just different facets of a single unifying phenomenon was one of the great triumphs of 19th century physics, and in many ways established the foundations of the 20th and 21st century’s electrically-powered society.  Let’s take a look at some salient features of magnetic fields and forces:

I. Changes in electric fields generate accompanying magnetic fields

This is an over-simplified statement of Ampere’s Law.  Most of us are familiar with this principle from an experiment many did in elementary school: generating a magnetic field using a flowing electric current.  Just wrap a copper wire around a pencil a few times, connect its ends to the poles of a battery, and watch in awe as you’ve created an electromagnet! (Bonus: try and do this near the security checkpoint at an international airport. There’s nothing TSA finds funnier than exposed electronic components.)  The law is named for its discoverer, André-Marie Ampère, who used these devices to simultaneously solve 18th century France’s Excess-Pencil and Scattered-Paperclip Crises.  And all while having a girl’s name.  Good hustle.

II. Changes in magnetic fields generate accompanying electric fields

My personal favorite of the classical electrodynamic laws, and it should be yours too if you’re into things like “making electricity from non-electricity.”  This is a grossly over-simplified statement of Faraday’s Law of Induction, the principle underlying the function of nearly every classical electric device: from electric turbines to those adorable hand-crank thingies they used to put on the front of cars.  More on those later.

Michael Faraday, the true "Master of Magnetism," ca. 1845. Not pictured: other members of the "Brotherhood of Evil Natural Philosophers" (later renamed "The Royal Society of London.")

Note that this law brings a kind of symmetry (though not true symmetry in the mathematical sense) to Ampere’s law: by varying the field due to either electricity or magnetism, you simultaneously generate a field of the other component.  In fact, through clever tinkering, one can simultaneously exploit both of these principles as a means of wirelessly transferring power between two circuits.  Imagine an electromagnet of the sort described above, with its coil placed in close proximity to separate coil that’s disconnected from any power source.  A variable current delivered to the electromagnetic coil will (by Ampere’s law) induce a variable magnetic field.  The second coil experiences this changing magnetic field and (due to Faraday’s law)  an electric field that ultimately drives a second electric current.   Devices of this sort should be well known to you: they’re called transformers.

More than meets the eye, indeed.

III. Magnetic Field lines are curved (or infinite)

…A consequence of Gauss’ Law of Magnetism, (not to be confused any of the bajillion other things named for C. F. Gauss.  That guy was a goddamn badass…) which states that the sum of all magnetic field lines entering a closed surface is always equal to the sum of those lines leaving that surface.  This is in stark contrast to electric field lines, which all point away from positive charges and toward negative charges, or to gravitational field lines, which point in the direction of massive objects (at least, in simple cases). Both of these other examples can exert straight lines of force, as well, whereas real magnetic fields have curves. Again, many of you might have already seen an illustration of this principle in high school science classes:

A classic scientific experiment for children, illustrating what it would look like if we put a bar magnet on the floor of a Dickensian child sweatshop.

…whereupon you probably thought, “Wow, my previous experiences of iron filings sure made that demonstration so culturally relevant!”

IV. Putting magnetic and electric fields together

The three laws mentioned above, Ampere’s Law, Faraday’s Law of Induction and Gauss’ Law for Magnetism–taken together with another of Gauss’ Laws (dude was a bad. ass.)–constitute a classic set of differential equations that underlies the entire fields of classical electrodynamics and optics.  They’re termed Maxwell’s laws, after the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. This is widely attributed to an arcane pre-E.U. labor regulation requiring that peaceful collaborations between British (Faraday), French (Ampere) and Prussian (Gauss) citizens be overseen by Scotsmen.  It’s largely believed that this law is to blame for Europe’s eventual focus on non-peaceful collaborations.

Maxwell's laws. Top to bottom: Gauss' Law, Gauss' Law for magnetism, Faraday's Law of Induction and Ampere's Law. They may look difficult, but simultaneously satisfying all four is easier than satisfying all of the laws laid out in Deuteronomy.

No, these equations bear Maxwell’s name because he was the one who initially proved that they’re sufficient in describing the electric/magnetic fields present in essentially any scenario.  Given some input data about a system (the distribution of charges, electric current, &ct) one could, in theory, use these equations to derive a general equation that describes the electric and magnetic fields in the system at any point in space and time. In most cases, this calculation is what we in the science biz call “a colossal brainfuck very challenging,” but a simple, peculiar solution pops up if one considers a system containing no charges or currents. Of course, a trivial solution states that the electric and magnetic fields are each zero. But, Maxwell proved that the Laws could also be satisfied by a traveling wave equation, in which an electric field oscillated parallel to one axis, a magnetic field oscillated along a perpendicular axis, and the whole system moved forward along a third, mutually perpendicular axis.  Check out this animation, which I stole from some website somewhere totally made myself. The blue bars indicate the magnetic field lines; red are the electric field lines:

"Bang, bang Maxwell's Light Equations came down on her head! (Do do do doo doo...)"

This phenomenon, a traveling pair of coupled, oscillating  magnetic and electric fields is termed electromagnetic radiation, or more commonly, light. Maxwell proved that the speed at which these fields propagate in a vacuum is, in fact, c, the speed of light in a vacuum. Furthermore, he could prove that this speed is the same irrespective of the observer’s reference frame.  This last result places c as the absolute speed limit in our universe, and lays the groundwork for Einsteinian relativity.

V. Pretty much everything you care about is magnetic

One last little bit before we return to the comfortable world of Comic Book-Themed Summer Blockbusters. In the world of quantum physics, all particles are defined by a series of fundamental characteristics, many of which defy simple explanation. One of these is the quantum spin, so termed less because scientists actually believe that these tiny particles are spinning about their axes, and more because the math describing them is similar to that describing spinning objects. Depending on its value, a particle’s quantum spin number can imbue the particle with a magnetic dipole moment–i.e., can generate a tiny little magnetic field. This might seem like a bit of a physical curio, were it not for that fact that, many atomic nuclei (a prominent example being hydrogen–the most abundant element in the universe, and ~11% the mass of any given water molecule) and electrons each fall into this category.  Which is to say, nearly all of the particles from which you (and all of your surroundings) are made are, in fact, a tiny little magnets. This phenomenon forms the basis for both NMR spectroscopy, and medical MRI, if not a sizable portion of ill-informed beat poetry.

So, now that your knowledge of basic electrodynamics far exceeds that of the average medical student, what can we infer about Magneto’s powers?  Or rather, of his lack thereof?

Let’s start with two observations into Magneto’s behavior, which shall serve to illustrate the physical bases of his powers.  Note that I’m focusing on the incarnation of Magneto that appears in the X-Men film franchise, and less on the myriad variants that have appeared in comic books throughout the years.  This is in part because I assume the former is known to a larger audience, and in part because I’m too lazy to see if the comic literature corroborates my theory, after a careful reading of the comic literature, I’ve concluded that the powers granted him are absurd. (*Shifty eyes*)

Is it just me, or have this country's Born-again-Masters-of-Magentism taken over our national dialogue? "This country" being Genosha.

1) Magneto can “sense” the presence of magnetic fields, and, as illustrated in the famous prison-escape sequence in X-2, those elements which “respond” to them.  This appears to be an autonomic response: he’s not actively analyzing his surroundings in any sort of conscious way, but instead passively absorbs information through his magnetic “sense” in the way that, say, the thermal-sensing nerves of our skin respond to temperature.

2) Magneto frequently uses his powers to move objects along linear and/or irregular paths.  Or at least, they’re not moving along the curved field lines generated in a simple, static magnetic field (As per Gauss’ Law for Magnetism, see above).  Examples of this phenomenon are ample, and it’s nicely illustrated by each of his character climaxes (Heheheh–Ed.) in X-Men: First Class. In the first of these, Magneto Magneto slowly moves a Nazi coin along a linear path, passing it through Kevin Bacon’s Kevin Bacon’s brain. While such linear motion could be possible either by (a) running the projectile along a topologically fixed track (as in mag-lev trains), or (b) by generating a field over a tremendous distance, such that its north and south poles are essentially “at infinity,” neither really seems within his grasp here.  In the second climax (hurhur), his face-off with the assembled American/Russian flotillas, Magneto stops a barrage of missiles and gunfire mid-arc, and thereafter alters the projectiles’ trajectories numerous times. From each of these events, we can infer that Magneto is fully capable not just of creating simple, static magnetic fields, but also complicated fields that vary with time.

Now, given these, I’d like to propose…

Some Powers That Should Fall Within a “Master of Magnetism’s” Purview

Night Vision. Or rather, the ability to “see” pretty much anything at all, even without eyes. As stated on the previous page, a significant fraction of the universe’s matter generates tiny magnetic fields.  Magneto should be able to sense these fields directly, or to sense their response to his application of a larger external field.  Now, honing this trait to the point where he could make out facial expressions in the dark might take a great degree of work, but in the bare minimum he should be able to know where the walls in of a darkened room are.  This would also relate to his…

Atomic “Vision.” Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy–a technique that exploits the fact that atoms’ magnetic dipoles change based upon their local chemical environment–has become the workhorse application for the determination of chemical compounds‘ structures. Again, turning Erik into a functioning multidimensional NMR apparatus is probably an unreasonable feat to ask, but it should be relatively easy for him to pick out gross details of a compound’s structure (i.e. “This ‘mutation cure’ you’ve developed is rich in aromatic-adjacent alkyne groups, Beast” or, “Look out, Charles! Your wine’s been doped with Indium!”).  Bare minimum: it should be pretty hard to poison his food.

[Author's side note:magnetic fields can be used in the determination of very complex molecular structures, like those of proteins. This depends on the transfer of magnetization between physically colocalized, though nonbonded, groups–a phenomenon termed the Nuclear Overhauser Effect. I bring this up because "Nuclear Overhauser Effect" is, as far as I can tell, the only scientific term used in this post that doubles as a bitchin' superhero and/or band name, but which hasn't been used as such already.]

World’s Greatest Doctor.  Give him a radio gun, and the dude’s a walking MRI.  AND he’s already learned that human life has no intrinsic value.  That’s something you normally pick up during your residency.

…So, these traits, which all stem from Magneto’s ability to sense magnetic fields, are all well and good.  But what can a man with the ability to make his own time-varying magnetic fields do?

Light Manipulation. Maxwell’s laws illustrate that light can be thought of as an oscillating magnetic field (which, owing to Faraday’s Law, brings an oscillating electric field along for the ride).  Magneto should be able to do all sorts of funky stuff with light, either by creating new light, or by tinkering with the light around him.  This would include the entry level..

Light Bursts.  De novo creation of light allows him to do everything from Dazzler-style shenanigans to Superman-style eye-laser beams.

Invisibility. Just move any light that’s headed his way around his body, like a springtime mountain river’s water flows around a discarded oil drum.

…or more advanced techniques, like…

Shape-shifting. At least, apparent shape-shifting. Most people only know what you look like based on the light that bounces off you.  SO, Magneto could manipulate that scattered light into portraying something else.  I’d propose this mostly for tactical purposes; given my druthers, I’d be quite happy looking like Michael Fassbender.  Or Ian McKellan.  Or Jordan Stokes.

Holography. If you can manipulate your scattered light into a new image, you could do the same with light originating from/headed towards anywhere else.

[Telekinesis of non-metallic objects? Eh, probably not.  While most everything we commonly think about is a tiny magnet, when placed in an external magnetic field these magnets tend to align themselves in a perfect 50:50 distribution parallel to- and antiparallel (opposed) to- it.  So, if Magneto tried levitate you owing only to your intrinsic magnetism, roughly half of the molecules in your body would align in a direction supporting his lifting field, while half would oppose it.  In NMR we need to apply bursts of radio-frequency light to our samples in order to shift the population balance, and even then, only about 1 in 1,000,000 molecules realigns its orientation...]

Electricity Manipulation. Another fun property of magnetic fields is that they bend the paths of moving charged particles, a phenomenon known as the Lorentz Force. Now, to be fair Magneto does exploit this quite a bit to disrupt electrical equipment. But it also means that electricity is a completely useless weapon against him: any bolt of lightning thrown his way is effectively putty in his hands, and could be deflected or re-directed as he wills.  Electro, you’re useless, here. Storm, lay off the lightning.  Actually, lay off any kind of cloud formation that accumulates charge.  Now that I think of it, it’s probably best if you just sit this one out altogether. Take some time to reevaluate your priorities.

Electricity Manipulation II: Magnetic Boogaloo. You know, the funny thing about charged particles isn’t just that their paths are bent in magnetic fields.  The “bending” of their paths equates to an acceleration–the velocity vector is changing over time, so even if the speed stays unchanged (which it doesn’t have to), the direction is changing.  Charged particles have this funny way of emitting light when they’re accelerated. For electrons, this light typically falls in the spectrum of x-rays.  SO, if  Magneto gains access to some free electrons (either from a failed attempt at hitting him with a lightning bolt… I’m looking your way, Storm… or just from, like, a wall-socket somewhere), it should be trivial for him to turn himself into a Human er…. Mutant Synchotron. Grab some electrons, spin them in a toroidal (read: “doughnut-shaped”) magnetic field, and you’ve got yourself a nearly infinite supply of flesh-searing, DNA-lesion-inducing, x-rays, Mister.  Should be enough to blind anyone in the near vicinity, give cancer to most, boil Colossus alive inside his armor (if that skin’s actually made of steel), and/or use him as a source of Bremsstrahlung radiation. [N.B.: X-rays are themselves electromagnetic waves, so Magneto should be able to make them de novo.  Given an electron source, the synchotron method requires a far lower energy input on his part.  It's more sustainable–and that's a buzzword, these days.]

Electricity Manipulation III: This time, it’s personal. I noted above that Faraday’s law is my favorite of the Maxwell equations*.  Hence, it should probably come as no surprise that Magneto’s failure to exploit this law is the most personally disappointing for me.  The Master of Magnetism should, by creating magnetic fields that change over time, also be the Master of Electricity.  Let’s illustrate this with a simple example (Figure 1., below).  Let’s say Magneto’s faced with an humanoid (mutant) enemy so heinous that, as defined by virtually any moral code, it’s to everyone’s collective benefit that this enemy be extinguished.  I’ve come to call this the “Jubilee Problem” (Fig. 1a). Considering that the average human body has an electrical resistance of (depending on the physical integrity of its skin, and whether it’s wet or dry) ~500–100,000 Ω, we can approximate Jubilee as a simple grounded resistor of this value (Fig. 1b).  Now, for humans the average lethal electrical shock has a current, I, of 0.07–0.1 A; by Ohm’s Law we calculate that it would require  an electrical potential difference (voltage) of ~35–20,000 V to push this current through Jubilee.  (Note: as the current is applied, her skin will probably begin to break down, lowering her resistance and making the whole process easier.)  Proper application of Faraday’s Law (Fig. 1c), via the generation of a variable magnetic field (dΦ/dt) with a rate of change of 35–20,000 Wb/s does the trick.

Figure 1. An electrochemical solution to the "Jubilee Problem." (a) The "Jubilee Problem." (b) Reformulation of the Jubilee Problem as a simple resistor of ~500-100,000 Ω, placed between electric ground (here being the actual ground) and a possible voltage terminus (+). (c) A THING THAT SHOULD HAPPEN.

I want to clarify two points: (1) I oppose capital punishment in all of its forms, save for those expressly stated in the findings of The People vs. Scrappy-Doo (1992), for which my lawyer assures me that Jubilee qualifies.  And, (2) the direction of the current, relative to the applied magnetic field, is determined by Lenz’s law.

*-You know you’re a nerd if you’ve ever said, “…is my favorite of the Maxwell equations.”

Magneto: Where the only limitation… is Yourself!

"Earth's most powerful supervillian!" Take that, StrongNuclear-o.

So, taking into account all that we now know, how can we justify Magneto’s apparently limited scope? It would be easy to explain it non-diegetically, to infer that a character like Magneto is intrinsically limited by the scientific fluency of his writers. However, this kind of thinking relegates our discussion to the realm of literary criticism, and we Overthinkers can hardly tolerate that.  No, for the sake of keeping it zesty, let’s  keep our arguments firmly diegetic, and assume instead that any limitation on Magneto’s powers be self-consistent with the universe in which he lives.

One explanation that has already been put forth on this site simply curtails Magneto’s abilities. If he is not (as he frequently boasts) the Master of Magnetism, but merely, say, A Dude With His G.E.D. in Magnetism, then that explains it.  And yet, I find this kind of argument disappointing. After all, Magneto is the most feared mutant on Earth, the most reviled adversary of the Uncanny X-Men. These characters have encapsulated themes of youth in revolt–against antiquated, entrenched social mores, against the allegorical pubescent confusion surrounding their own forms and abilities–in a way that no comic book characters had done before, and which few have achieved since. To hamstring their most powerful opponent, the man at the center of their most heartbreaking failure, in this manner, hardly seems to do any of the characters justice.

Easy, big fella'.

It’s possible, of course, that Magneto himself doesn’t fully understand the extent of his capabilities.  Of note, he spent a large portion of his youth in a Nazi concentration camp, and likely never received any formal scientific education.  This seems unlikely to me for three reasons.  First, in some regards all mutants’ abilities seem autonomic, i.e. without need for a formal academic understanding. Without training they may manifest in uncontrollable ways, but then so does (for example) our sense of smell. With proper training, one can learn to detect subtle components in a wine’s bouquet, but no one needs to understand the biochemistry of smell just to know that they’re able to detect odor at all.  Hence, while it might not be immediately apparent to him why he’s able to “feel” the magnetic moments of hydrogen atoms, Magneto’d probably be able to do it nonetheless.  Second, I think the cultural connections to his ancestral people probably emphasized self-education in the sciences, even outside the constraints of formal schooling. Hence, he probably picked the stuff up on his own after the war. Third, and most important, there’s this.  It seems unlikely that he’d name himself for a device that uses magnets to generate electricity, without knowing that he’s able to generate electricity.

So why, then, does Erik Lehnsherr find himself limited to the telekinesis of metal objects, the sabotage of electronic devices, and the occasional force-field?  To me, the answer is simple:

Brand management.

Magneto understands that his greatest power–even beyond the awesome might of Maxwell’s Laws–is the power he holds in the public consciousness.  Consider the way that magnets and electricity are commonly thought of in society, and the way that his power subverts this notion. As small children, we’re taught that the electric outlets in our house are wild, horrifyingly dangerous devices that should be respected from a comfortable distance.  We’re rapt in terror by the unbridled power of lightning.  And all the while,  we learn that magnets can hold our crayon drawings to the refrigerator door (N.B.: not if you slam the magnet on the floor a few times.  Then it loses its magnetism.).  Even later, we learn to see magnetism as an afterthought of electricity: we can make an electromagnet from a battery and a wire, assuming we’re not building more useful circuits with them.

Fun Trivia Fact: Photoshopping Magneto's Helmet on Anne Frank's head is NEVER. FUNNY.

Magneto is a man who has taken the familiar, the docile, the seemingly meek, and has transformed it into a weapon to be respected and feared.   Without stretching the analogy too greatly, one can again see a hint of allegory for the Jewish people: they’re a group also once thought to be docile, seemingly meek, and now (for better or for worse) seen as a brawny, militaristic power that’s–if nothing else–feared.

For Magneto, this fear is most effective when his actions play directly to the audience’s preconceived (somewhat ill-informed) notions.  No super villain wants to find himself mid-diatribe, having to explain things.  Consider the following:

***

[Ext. the Franklin Mint, day. MAGNETO hovers triumphantly over a group of subdued X-MEN he's hogtied with steel girders]

MAGNETO: At LAST you puny X-men shall yield to the magnificent might of Magneto: Master of Magnetism! Watch in horror as I raze your precious Humans’ beloved Franklin Mint to its very foundations! From this day forth, NOTHING will ever be guaranteed to increase in value AGAIN!

[MAGNETO lifts his arms towards the Mint's doors, his concentration fixed, unwavering.  His eyes disappear amidst a pale-blue crackle as freakish tendrils of electricity begin to emanate from his fingertips.  With thunderous CRAKOWS, lightning bolts begin to stream freely toward the Mint's metal frame.]

CYCLOPS: Whoa, whoa, whoa!  Hold the phone! Since when can you shoot lightning bolts?

JEAN GREY: Yeah, you’re not the “Master of Electricity,” Magneto! Stick to the script!

MAGNETO: Well, actually, the two properties are intrinsically linked, owing to the physical laws of…

BEAST: Who chatters on about physics while holding up the Franklin Mint? That’s just idle justification if I’ve ever heard it.

MAGNETO: Wha? Hank, you of all people… I figured you’d know about the Faraday Effect…

ICEMAN: Faraday Effect?  He’s in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants now?

MAGNETO: No, it’s…

WOLVERINE:   I think Faraday Effect’s one of the Morlocks. Also, I’m in the X-men now, for some reason.  Hey guys.

OTHER X-MEN: Hey.

MAGNETO: Look, the Faraday Effect is a fundamental law of the universe! It’s not a frackin’ supervillian!

STAN “THE MAN” LEE: Can’t it be both? I mean, Ditko and I’ve done worse…

MAGNETO: (sputters to himself inaudibly)

[THE WATCHER appears, to AUDIBLE GROANS]

THE WATCHER: Perhaps my mystical, all-seeing abilities can shed some light on the matter?

EVERYONE: NOOO!

***

Remember: the goal here is fear, not confusion. And that fear can only remain effective as long as the intended audience understands what they’re supposed to be afraid of.  The sad truth is: as long as the public fails to really understand magnetism, Magneto will be forced to play to their ignorance. And in that regard, I guess, he’ll never truly be free.

Related Posts

• X-Men: Tinker, Xavier, Lensherr, Spy
• Episode 153: Captain Michael Ironside of the USS Ironside
• The Aluminium Conundrum: Magneto’s Powers and Metallic Structure
• Open Thread for September 2, 2011
• Episode 162: The Apes of Wrath

Happy new year, everybody! If anybody knows of a calendar system in which 2011 is a year over 9,000, post in the comments!

(Just in case you need to catch up, since this series hasn’t had an update in more than a year, ON THE LAST EPISODE OF FENZEL ON DRAGON BALL…)

Let’s say I sit you in a room and give you a bouncy ball. Since this is a thought experiment, you don’t have a cell phone or anything, the room has no windows, there is no temperature variation, and I’m protected by a force field, so you can’t bum rush me with your incredible fighting skills and steal my watch – or, better yet, knock me out with an energy blast from your palms and fly out the door (which is of course the answer a lot of us would prefer for such hypothetical quandaries).

Your challenge? I’m going to come back in an unspecified “later” and ask you how long you’ve been there.

Every human being faces challenges of this nature – marking time does not come naturally to humans, despite its usefulness and, perhaps, psychological necessity. Different cultures have approached the question in different ways at different times. Goku, Vegeta and the gang from Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, Akira Toriyama’s sex farce turned kung-fu epic turned sci-fi stakes-raising extravaganza — by way of comic book turned TV show turned endless cavalcade of remakes, remastering spin-offs, and franchise video games — have some interesting things to say about marking the passage of time. Why does the passage of time matter, how do we measure it, and why that also matters.

So, let’s power up, because the barbecue is over and it’s time to find out who is trying to destroy the Earth, and, more importantly, when!

Lest We Forget

Why do I want to talk about a TV show from decades ago? Dragon Ball is one of the most popular and enduring works of fiction of the last 30 years, with unique global cultural influence and ubiquity. Its innovation in character design, structure, motif and pacing have influenced many successors can be found in many places in the popular culture. What Dragon Ball has to say about how we think matters, especially for the generation about my age, give or take, say, ten years.

Back to the bouncy ball

Let’s go back to the timekeeping thought experiment from the intro, where you’re alone in a room with just a bouncy ball trying to keep time. In this little hyperbolic time chamber, how would you mark the interval, with so few external markers — no day, no night, no stars? Maybe you’d try counting Mississippi for a while. Maybe you’d listening to your body’s internal rhythms, probably with limited success, since the environment is so disruptive and your heart rate so variable over time. My guess is you’d eventually realize a repeating external cue is easier and works a lot better. You’d count the bounces of the bouncy ball — not rolling it from one side of the room to the other at constant speed and gauging time from distance, but specifically counting repetitions.

Credit to The Drawing Empiricist

Almost all ways human beings track time involve observing periodic repetitions — things that have happened before with regularity. While I can’t speak for your own subjective experience (as again, marking time and “feeling” the passage of time are difficult things for people to do), I would wager watching the above graphic can open your mind to a cognizance of the passage of time that is much harder to achieve without external indication. “Look at that! Now, look at that again!” — we build our clocks and calendars around this stuff.

This is not just emergent from our use of units of measure either (as Dragon Ball famously teaches us, numerical units can be pretty useless if you never question the assumptions on which they are based) – nor does the desire for a repeating interval cause us to search for corresponding phenomena — the phenomena precede what we decide to do with them; the rising and setting of the sun and the cycle of seasons had schedule-like effects on our perceptions of reality before we articulated a need for such things.

“Timekeeping” isn’t just a practical concern, it’s a fundamental element of how humans relate to and frame reality — and, as many storytellers discover when they eschew repetition because they think it is boring, it is not the only way human existence and relationship with reality might play out. You can write stories in which there is not repetition in people’s lives, in which people do not keep routines that make them cognizant of time. Sometimes you have to. But they feel very different from our reality.

This is for the ladies

One TV show that always exemplified this for me is Sex and the City — part of the point of Sex and the City is the girls were always discovering new things — new men, new outfits, new feelings and thoughts about themselves and each other, new situations. If there’s an event that isn’t fresh for them, it generally either isn’t shown is glossed over or is truncated and made to look as such. While there are of course recurring characters and long-run situations, there isn’t a ton of repetition, with a result that it is very difficult to know in a given scene how much time has passed for the characters.

The relationship that embodied this for me more than any other (other than the way Miranda’s and Steve’s relationship went through a lot of off-screen development and change as they raised Brady) was Carrie and Aidan. How long were they together? How did their relationship progress on a day-to-day basis? Because the show kind of glosses over the boring parts and/or presents them 0nly when they are new or very changed, the sense of familiarity, comfort and routine in the relationship is diminished (which is probably by design, since the characters only connect so much), and you don’t get the sense that these two people spend time together.

Take this scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiV_HcNTL-Q

In real life, the conversation at the beginning of this scene about the dress and the closet would probably happen in shorter sub-conversations spread out over three or four weeks. This could have been shown in a montage of short cuts that would have given the sense of the passage of time, but the writers decided not to handle it this way. The dog eating the shoe, and the comparison between the boxes of stuff, the reveal of the hair tonic are a contraction of a series of arguments that would happen over the first few months of living together. The show goes through all these events on a tear, coming to huge realizations almost instantly — that’s fine, it’s efficient storytelling, it’s what the show is trying to do. But it is cutting out something essential about the human experience doing so.

Of course, any show needs to abridge the actual extent of such events. It can’t show the full duration of five weeks of people living together – the stuff it shows has to fit into the amount of time generally allotted for a TV show. But it’s important that by only showing things as new, the first time they happen, and then moving on makes it feel not just like it is happening quickly, but like it is unmoored from the passage of time – that maybe this scene is showing a day, maybe it is showing a week, maybe it is showing three months. And the timeline of the show reflects this ambiguity – there are lots of timeskips all over the place.

This Sex and the City scene is another example – in real life, this discussion would probably have started much earlier and taken place over months or years, and it certainly would not have finished over such short scenes. But maybe these scenes are standing in for months or years of backstory – just representing them in a more vivid and watchable way. Still, it feels unmoored from time – like we’re in the windowless room without a bouncy ball:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtTzEtNCfrk

Ahem

But we’re not here to talk about television shows that help adults have active sex lives, we’re talking about Dragon Ball. Take a look at these two scenes, which are loaded with motif and very clearly presented in relation to one another – although they ran on TV a couple of years apart. In each of these scenes, the hero of Dragon Ball, Goku (a powerful kung-fu fighter loosely based on the monkey king of the classic Chinese novel Journey into the West) has been incapacitated, and his son, Gohan, steps up to fight a powerful alien who happens to be a distant blood relation with very nasty intentions.

Gohan vs. Raditz:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MApFNNeZhAk

Gohan vs. Vegeta:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qss9df_bSY

Appropriately enough, I’ve written about repetition in Dragon Ball before – my first post in this series was about it. I’m not bringing them up just to point out the motifs (I’ll quickly define motif as “a meme created on purpose and used for a reason”), but some of them are trickier than others. Coming into his battle, Vegeta’s chest plate has been damaged in a very similar way to how Raditz’s chest plate was damaged in the much earlier fight. Gohan ends the second fight in the same position where his father was in the first fight – incapacitated and about to be finished off. The Demon King Piccolo – one of the series’ early antagonists, is a bystander observing both fights, albeit in different capacities.

But the point here isn’t that these repetitions exist, but that they create a palpable sense for the time that has passed between the two encounters. We see how Gohan has changed, and how he hasn’t. We feel how much he has grown up, and how much growing he still has left to go. The show ran in two heavily serialized parts, from 1986 to 1989 and from 1989 to 1996 (and I’m not including the bastard spin-off that ran from 1996 to 1997), with more than one considerable time skip — characters are born, grow up, and die during the series (and are then brought back to life again, die again and brought back to life again, but that’s not important right now).

The passage of time is important — a lot of the show is essentially about the passage of generations — about youth and age; fathers and sons; wives, husbands and children; vigor, wisdom and the imperatives, and values people ascribe to as they try to live their lives well. There is a lot of ground to cover, so it is important that these events feel like they are occurring over years and decades — they can’t just be suspended in space like a fight between Carrie and Aidan. Plus, since it is fundamentally a comedy in which almost every character is capable of flight, it can’t show the passage of time with the heavy-hearted sighs and creaking joints, like a Victorian parlor drama or a Chekhov play.

Moan of Arc

Dragon Ball uses the bouncing ball to show the passage of the time. It repeats motifs and situations, recalling the same basic relationship people have with the rising and setting sun and the passing of the seasons. Speaking of seasons, like people’s relationship with time, the Dragon Ball model for the passage of time has many small cycles and arcs (the days, hours, months, holidays, etc.), but also has what are called sagas - large, sweeping story arcs, each of which (with a few exceptions) are typically named for a villain attempting to destroy the world or universe or do something else similarly nefarious.

In the early years of Dragon Ball, time is marked by the “Tenka’ichi Budōkai” – alternatively translated as the “Greatest Martial Arts Tournament on Earth” or the “Strongest Under the Heavens Tournament.” One Tenka’ichi Budōkai happens first every five years, then every three years, and we watch Goku grow from a child into a man, periodically competing in this tournament against his various friends and rivals. Each tournament arc is pretty similar – the characters realize who they are going to have to fight in the tournament, there is some sort of major problem they have to solve, but they aren’t strong enough to do it, so they have to train or find some other way to get stronger, all while sometimes searching for the mystically eponymous “dragon balls” that have the power to grant wishes for reasons that become more and more of a formality as the seasons progress. Eventually, all roads lead to the tournament, where rivalries are settled and the fate of the world is decided.

Once Dragon Ball takes its giant leap over the shark and becomes about space aliens (although at this point, rather than splash into the water embarrassed, jumping the shark is where Dragon Ball learns to fly – it then jumps the shark in earnest a few years later), the tournament pretty much stops being the way time is marked, and instead time is marked by the emergence of villains who are deliberately similar to one another – they are similar because the similarity reinforces that time is passing and lets the differences show what that means.

The Sagas

The macro arcs of the major Dragon Ball villains, leaving out some minor ones and others that are important, but don’t get fully realized narrative arcs in the same way the major ones do, are as such:

The Red Ribbon Army – These guys – a combination of martial arts masters and highly trained paramilitary special forces soldiers with advanced technology are bumbling, comedic villains at this part in the series, but they set the pace for how the story arcs are going to be conducted. The Red Ribbon Army has a succession of generals named after colors – General Black is, well, appalling (there are parts of Dragon Ball, especially early Dragon Ball, that are very racist by today’s standards – mostly because of culturally insensitive visual character design. But it’s hard to gauge how much you can really hold a Japanese guy in the late 80s to today’s American cultural sensitivity standards).

Tenshinhan and the Crane School – This is a rival kung fu school to the protagonists’ “Turtle School.” The Crane School believes in strength, obedience, being ruthless and killing your enemies, while the Turtle School believes in enjoying your life and drawing strength from your desire to have fun. Tenshinhan starts out as a rival but then becomes a close ally after he is bested in battle by the protagonist but spared and encouraged to get stronger. It is a pattern that will repeat.

Demon King Piccolo – This ancient warrior exists in two halves – the good one is the Guardian of the Earth, a peaceful, contemplative dude who lives in a floating island and watches the planet far below, interceding on its behalf with other, more powerful celestial entities. The bad one is a wicked, sadistic monster who at one point ruled the planet below and begins his story arc by escaping from a magical rice cooker. After he is defeated, he is reborn again as a child. That child grows up quickly, becomes the new villain, and then he becomes a close ally after he is bested in battle by the protagonist but spared and encouraged to get stronger. See? The two halves eventually unite again, just for good measure.

Raditz - This is the hero’s long-lost brother, who reveals the hero is actually a space alien, and has come to recruit the hero into a band of cruel genocidal mercenaries. He is killed by the hero and Piccolo, but the hero dies in the process (he gets better).

Vegeta – This is the prince of the alien planet the hero comes from who comes to Earth to avenge Raditz’s death, find and retrieve the hero, and kill everybody on Earth. He takes over from Piccolo as the hero’s main rival through the series. After he is defeated, he becomes a powerful but vain and often unreliable ally after he is bested in battle by the protagonist but spared and encouraged to get stronger. Vegeta is probably the most interesting character in the series for a whole bunch of reasons – he’s the “Over 9,000 guy,” too, but that’s not why I say it.

Frieza – This guy is basically the Emperor of the Galaxy. He is a horrible, horrible genocidal tyrant and the Big Bad behind many of the bad things that have happened up until this point in the series. In the end, he loses a kung fu fight (yeah, they don’t solve their problems through negotiation or anything), and he is spared, but he refuses mercy and it looks like he dies anyway. Then it turns out he isn’t dead and comes back as a cyborg, and then he is killed one more time, but that whole return thing is kind of silly and not really part of his saga. Frieza’s saga is the most straightforward beginning-middle-end in Dragonball, and probably the best part of the series when considered on its own.

It is amusing that this was in the first page of results in a Google Image Search for the word "Cell."

Cell (and the androids) – Cell is an artificial life form created by the Red Ribbon Army’s remnants based on a combination of genetic material from the heroes and villains of the series. You can add that process to the list of things in fiction that give people super-powers but in real life would probably just give them cancer. There is an initial sort of “half-saga,” in which the heroes fight a series of other powerful androids, but then Cell shows up, absorbs those androids, becomes supremely powerful, and challenges everybody in the world to a martial arts fight, with the intention of exterminating the planet. He is killed, then it turns out he isn’t dead, and then he is killed one more time. Familiar?

Majin Buu - By the time Buu rolls around, Toriyama is kind of tired of Dragon Ball being so serious and has begun to parody himself, leading to some amazingly bizarre story developments and tonal modulations. Buu is a primordial monster from the ancient history of creation — an enemy and destroyer of the Dragon Ball universe’s original and supreme gods. He is also, at least at first, fat, childish and silly. His plotline is ludicrously complicated and goes on for a very long time in lots of twists and turns until he is killed, but then reincarnated, bested at the Strongest Under the Heavens tournament by the protagonist, made an ally, and taken away to train and be made stronger.

The Tangled Web

Why do I mention all these guys? Because the similarities and parallels between them are pretty apparent – except for Raditz (and it’s debatable in a formal sense whether Raditz really has his own story or whether his story is a prologue to the Vegeta story), all the major villains fall into one of two camps – rivals who become allies or truly evil dudes who are offered a second chance but refuse it and are killed anyway (Buu, fittingly for the last bad guy in the series, does both).

And each saga follows the same general pattern:

1. There is some sort of advance tidings of the arrival of the villain or sense that something is wrong while the heroes continue training and doing hero things.
2. Villain shows up (this can sometimes take a while) and does something really bad to make it clear he is a villain.
3. Heroes try to fight the villains but can’t beat them for some reason.
4. Some heroes try to buy time as others go on a quest for what they need to defeat the villain (which often involves doing push-ups).
5. There are a series of escalating battles between various heroic characters and various either henchmen or less powerful verisons of the villain. During this time, characters often go through bodily transformations.
6. Major characters start to die in combat.
7. The hero comes back to save the day, but fails.
8. There’s a scary place in which it seems all is lost and the last few survivors try to hang on.
9. The good guys win.
10. Barbecue!

(Alternatively, you can just watch this classic video from way back in the day – I love the Napster reference at the end)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HpSWFNe748

All these steps can repeat, the story can cycle back on itself at any time (like when Cell shows up and the role of the androids in the story becomes a lot different) and the saga kind of “resets.”

The stories get very repetitive – a lot of scenes get replayed in different ways across the sagas, with new characters stepping into the roles of old characters and various long-held assumptions being challenged and either bearing out or not. But because of repetition, the sweeping, huge story arcs really feel like they take time. That you are seeing the chronicle of people (or kung fu aliens, I guess) going through the challenges and crises of their lives. You expect them to age, you expect there to be consequences to people’s actions (and there are, sort of), and you don’t expect everything to reset at the end of every episode. This is a world that is moving only in one direction – into the future.

This is different from Sex and the City relationships, where you tend only to see scenes if they represent something new, or, say, Sopranos story arcs, where it is often not clear who is the villain or why at any given moment, because events blend into each other as life grinds on for Tony and crew, and the passage of time becomes a bit more ambiguous. It feels a bit more like a show like Six Feet Under, which has a repetitive framing device, but it’s not quite the same. It’s also not the same as the repetition in a sit-com, because of the cycles that stack within each other – the connections and repetitions aren’t just across individual episodes, they sometimes recur with years in between.

Time, Why You Punish Me?

So, what does this all mean? First, it means that repetition is important to “feeling” the progression of time, and if you want to give people a sense that meaningful changes are happening over time in your story (like growing up or having kids or dying), you probably want to build a superstructure into your story that includes that bouncy ball.

Second, recurrence matters more than measurement. Dragon Ball only rarely comes out and says how much time has passed between two events, but it never has that unmoored sense that the passage of time has been ambiguous. Just saying “three years later” isn’t going to be nearly as effective in communicating the passage of three years than the repetition of a key element with some evidence that about three years have passed.

Third, what recurs matters. Phenomena that inspire calendars tend also to inspire reverence. The things that recur are important. In a piece as heavily thematic as Dragon Ball, this means you should look to the things that repeat as clues into what matters to the story. In Dragon Ball, actions tend to recur, but the agency for those actions tends to pass around to various characters, and eventually from parents to children. This sets up and reinforces a metaphysics and a worldview in which the individual isn’t that important – things change, but the world goes on.

Fourth, what changes matters. In any endeavor, whenever one thing is held stable and something else is changed, not only are both those things important, but the distinction between them is important. The list of saga villains is a key example of this – they all share a number of qualities (the most notable being megalomania, sadism, and a lack of concern for the survival or welfare of other living things, as well as connections to the “legacy” of the heroes – there are lots of relationships involving previous generations, the past, and actions taken in the past – these aren’t just random people showing up wanting to fight). However, their differences are what define the story.

The Vegeta saga is about social class — about the assumptions we make about people based on their birth and upbringing versus their character and industry. The Frieza saga is about change — the difference between the established power of the hegemony that maintains dominance and always wins, versus the dynamic power of experience that tries and fails and tries and fails. The Cell saga is about genetic relationships versus family relationships and in what ways people can be said to have come from the same body, and what that means. These things can all be seen in the differences between the villains.

And fifth, it doesn’t come free. Dragon Ball is frequently criticized for being too repetitive and time-consuming – this is mostly because the TV show was trying to keep pace with the comic book (which is, by the way, tons better than the TV show), and the recent Dragonball Z Kai, which I have not yet seen, purports to fix this problem – but I doubt it can be fixed entirely. When you take out repetitions and steamline plots, the sense of time can drop away, removing a fundamental element of human experience. As is evidenced by many plastic-looking dramas where people never seem to experience what an actual week’s worth of days is like can show, this isn’t quite the same as when you can feel the time pass as events roll on, and the bouncing ball keeps tapping against the concrete wall of the imaginary cell.

Or Cell, as it were.

Any thoughts on the passage of time with this new year just starting to power up? What does time mean to you, and how do you measure it? Sound off in the comments?

Related Posts

• Fenzel on Dragon Ball #1: Why Overthink Dragon Ball?
• Fenzel on Dragon Ball #3: Metonymy and Metaphor
• Overthinking the New Fall Season: American Horror Story vs. The Walking Dead
• Game of Thrones: To Read or Not to Read? [Think Tank]
• Episode 98: Get to the Chopper

The Walking Dead marketing materials advertise a pretty cool zombie show, and the Walking Dead comic book is a pretty cool zombie comic book. But the first six episodes of The Walking Dead, didn’t constitute a pretty cool zombie show. Partly, the show wasn’t cool enough (the finale would have been terrible even if the show were called The Walking Room That Arbitrarily Kills You With Napalm After You Argue About It For Twenty Minutes). More importantly, it wasn’t zombie enough.

The marketing material for The Walking Dead looks like this:

Bleak and gray, with rotten, scary zombies.

And the early Walking Dead comic book looks like this (although the artist is replaced shortly after the part of the story portrayed so far in the TV show, which is just a few issues):

Bleak and gray, with rotten, scary zombies.

While The Walking Dead the TV show looks more like this:

Plucky adventurers in a bright place with lots of color.

Or this:

Plucky family fighting to survive and stay together.

After I while, I got to thinking that the show is really a lot less like this:

Terrified, hopeless human in bleak, apocalyptic reality.

And a lot more like this:

Plucky family of adventurers fighting to survive and stay together in a bright place with lots of color.

The pants are no longer pleated and the monsters look less like lizards, but The Walking Dead the TV show seemed to be modeled much less on zombie/survival culture and much more on adventure/monster/survival culture – specifically safari-ish stories like Jurassic Park.

This is a weightier, more complex issue than just the art direction, costumes, photography and set design (which are of course not clearly defined or conclusive across genres) — it speaks to the heart of what zombie stories are about and why they captivate the way they do. More on this, and on why shambling corpses and carnivorous lizards aren’t always that different, after the jump –

Tell it to the Giant Snakes

Okay, so, thought experiment time. Let’s say we wanted to put the following scene  in The Walking Dead. What parts of it would we have to change?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H6q7F1jnR0

As you can probably tell because you are a connoisseur of fine film, this scene is from Anaconda 3: The Offspring, a made-for-TV monster movie starring David Hasselhoff (subtitled in German, ‘natch, because Germans love David Hasselhoff). And the answer to the question is – everything except the shots of the giant snake would fit right in an episode of The Walking Dead. This is unfortunate, because the cast of Anaconda 3 looks ridiculous:

Good thing there’s nobody on The Walking Dead who looks as silly and patently cliche as David Hasselhoff.

Well, crap.

Actually, no, it turns out that there is a guy on The Walking Dead who looks and acts quite a bit like David Hasselhoff (though the ‘Hoff has gone back and forth on chest shaving).

The pictures illustrates the underlying point: this is a generic scene about surviving in a place where you think you ought to be safe, but you aren’t, because you are relatively isolated and there is a monster. There is nothing in the scene that specifically dictates the monster has to be a snake. You could take the monster out and replace it with any number of other monsters, and the story would function the same way.

Think of the times the people in The Walking Dead come upon or fight zombies. Usually it’s a supply raid, a rescue party, or a defense of the home base.

For people whose world has fallen apart and are supposed to be "mismatched," they are awfully great at keeping a level head while running complex urban tactical combat operations.

The relationship between the camp and the city of Atlanta are even similar to the situation in Jurassic Park – you have a place that’s perceived to be safe, but is only sort of safe, and people have to go to some sort-of-faraway place that would normally be easy to get to, but is dangerous because there are monsters. The challenge is to get there, do what you need to do, and get back whilst not being taken down, and before the monsters overwhelm home base.

This isn’t the apocalypse, it’s capture the flag.

Pocket Monsters

Certain kinds of monsters tend to be interchangeable. Wild animals, fantasy monsters, various beasts, creeps, robots — there are a lot of monsters that don’t impose a specific form on the stories in which they appear. Godzilla can fight a giant version of pretty much anything (and pretty much did). Ninjas can fight pirates and it doesn’t matter. You can collect more than 151 Pokemon and use any of them you want in most fights, whether they are ducks or dragons or boxing things or whatever.

But zombies generally don’t work this way. Zombies come with specific sorts of stories, because they relay a form that tends to influence the way stories function. The Walking Dead chooses to ignore this and frame a zombie fight as a monster fight, missing out on the chance to get more closely involved with the broader artistic project and tropes of zombie stories.

Take this scene from Episode 3 (by the way, it’s worth noting that, in rewatching episode 3 looking for examples, there are many surprisingly long stretches of The Walking Dead that are totally devoid of any relation to the zombie apocalypse, either directly or thematically. “Thank you for washing my clothes” was a big one.).

RICK: “I’ve been thinking about the man we left behind.”

LORI: “You’re not serious.”

SHANE: “Water’s here, y’all. Just a reminder to boil before use.”

LORI: “Are you asking me or telling me?”

RICK: “Asking”

LORI: “Well, I think it’s crazy. I think it’s just the stupidest way to break your son’s–”

(SCREAMS!!!)

CARL: Mom!

(Various yelling as people run into the woods.)

LORI: “Noting bit you? Nothing scratched you?”

(Gang of men with guns and cudgels come upon a zombie eating a deer. The zombie is slow and methodical, savoring the deer flesh. When it feels threatened, it gets up, yells at everybody, and rushes at Rick. Rick hits it in the face with a stick. The men beat the crap out of it until Dale chops its head off.)

DALE: “This is the first one we’ve had up here. They never come this far up the mountain.”

JIM: “Well, they’re running out of food in the city, that’s what.”

(Everybody hears noises. SHANE gets tense, raises his gun, looks out into the woods. DARYL appears.)

SHANE: “Eh, Jesus.”

DARYL: “Son of a bitch! That’s my deer! Look at it, all gnawed on by this filthy, disease-bearing, motherless, toxic bastard!”

There is then more talk of deer tracking, trying to save the deer and eat venison, and a reference to On Golden Pond. The decapitated zombie head lurches, and DARYL shoots it in the eye with an arrow.

DARYL: “C’mon people! It’s gotta be the brain. Don’t you know nothin’?”

The zombies act, and are treated, like animals. They have basic intelligence and awareness and clearly want things (mostly to eat). They are dangerous, but people can generally best them if they get the upper hand and have the right weapons. The really dangerous circumstance is to meet them alone. But the people have a settlement that is more or less free of them, except for occasional attacks, and in that space, as long as they take care of their basic needs, they’re pretty much okay.

Dead Man Walking

It’s worth noting for the sake of fandom that this isn’t how the subject is treated in the comic books. The full events of the show go by in just a few issues of the comic books. People die a lot more frequently. The despair of it all is a lot more crushing. People’s arrogance against the persistence of the zombies is a lot more apparent and fragile. All the characters much more quickly become unhinged by the insanity of their situation. The zombies have an effect on people characteristic of zombies – the world has fallen apart, and the mockery the zombies make of humanity calls into question the humanity of the characters themselves.

Because zombies have the bodies of humans, in most zombie stories, they draw a comparison between themselves and the survivors. In every zombie story that embraces this tradition, from Dawn of the Dead with its shopping mall and anticonsumerist message to Shaun of the Dead and its thirtysomething electronics store clerk who shuffles every day through his commute dead to the world, such that he doesn’t recognize when the zombie apocalypse has happened, the surviving characters are compared to zombies, and the zombies are compared to human beings in some way.

In Dawn of the Dead, the zombies keep going to the mall as they did as people. Are we that different? Has our taste in shirts improved that much since 1978?

In most zombie movies, the “walking dead” are, in some way, us. The people of the earth, especially of its cities and privileged developed areas are the zombies – we are the mindless hordes who destroy the earth and feed on each other. We are the ones who shamble about blindly following our appetites, without the vibrancy and immediacy of meaningful life. We are the doomed ones. The zombie apocalypse has already happened.

This is what zombie stories are about and how zombies function uniquely as monsters.

Now of course, this isn’t exhaustive. We can get into an endless debate of semantics and exceptions. But the general form of it comes through. And there are certainly scenes in The Walking Dead that are zombie-specific (like the man holed up in the house who can’t shoot his zombie wife). But they are pretty few and far between, compared to the scenes about surviving without the comforts of modern civilization or fighting generic monsters.

Another One for the Fire

Now, take this scene, from the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead (special bonus for Babylon 5 fans!). How much of this scene would work if you replaced the zombies with giant snakes?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ04zLXc1TQ

The answer? Pretty much none of it. The human form of the zombies is essential for the comparisons here, which say a lot about savage human nature, about race and racial violence in America, and about the primitive roots of contemporary execution of physical violence. This is classic Romero style – these kinds of comparisons are not the only way to make a zombie movie, but they’re one of the best and most influential.

How about this scene, from 2007′s 28 Weeks Later (I’m picking somewhat lesser-known properties because the clips are slower to get taken down from YouTube, even though we are using them for educational purposes, after a fashion). What parts of this scene work if the monsters are bears, or giant snakes, or mutant bats?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHf6Th-E3kE

None of them. This scene is about family and trust. The girl sees the boyfriend as part of the family, but her family sees him as an outsider. The boyfriend’s leaving constitutes an act of betrayal they won’t forgive. You get the sense that, even if he weren’t a zombie, he’d be treated much the same by all parties.

Then, the young boy comes in as a counterpoint. His family is trying to kill him. He’s searching for outsiders to help him. But the family’s fear of trusting outsiders turns out to be justified when the kid brings zombies in tow toward the house.

None of this works if the monsters are bears, because it’s not about the survivors living through the movie. It’s about their relationships to each other and the world they live in.

That’s another unique point about zombie stories – more than any other kind of monster story except for very similar alien body snatcher stories, zombie stories are totally fine ending with a TPK – a Total Party Kill, or Wipe, where the good guys lose and everybody dies.

This is not the case with, say, movies about genetically engineered dinosaurs. In those movies, we usually need to see somebody survive and the dinosaurs, because the point is the threat to our own lives. In zombie movies, survival isn’t the goal. The goal is remaining an individual, finding oneself or preserving the relationships that matter in an alienating world, and the fact that this is hard and sometimes doesn’t work is part of the point.

That’s a big part of what makes zombie stories so scary. Zombie stories are heavy with futility. As one of my dearest friends always says, “Think about it. You can’t kill them; they’re already dead.” The individual zombies usually aren’t hard to kill, but in a large group, they are unstoppable. You think there is going to be help, and there probably isn’t. You think the government can do something, but it probably can’t. You think your own group of survivors will hold together, but it probably won’t. The worst acts in zombie stories are usually committed by surviving human beings against each other.

That’s why The Walking Dead the comic book is so bleak. It follows these characters over the long haul, keeping up a tone of futility for much of the journey. And it’s why the marketing material for the show is so bleak – because this is the gray, dusty world, fallen and given over to the zombies.

But the show isn’t like this at all. Even with the various attempted rapes and acts of intrahuman violence, there is still plenty of hope for the protagonists to end up okay, and that idea is woven into the very fabric of the show, from its acting to production design to dialogue. And this is kind of disappointing, because it makes the show so much more common and less interesting than it could have been. But it leaves open the possibility that things may change quite a bit in the future…

Or maybe, as William H. Macy and Tea Leone found out in Jurassic Park 3, they'll make more of the same, only worse.

Related Posts

• Zombie Miscellany: Music and Post-Apocalyptic Racism
• Overthinking Zombies
• Overthinking the New Fall Season: American Horror Story vs. The Walking Dead
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT) started as a black-and-white indie comic that lovingly satirized the era’s predominant superhero tropes – teenage mutants (X-Men) and ninjas (Ronin, Daredevil). TMNT’s dominant theme, inherited from postmodern literature in general, is transformation. Typically used to symbolize alienation (think of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” or Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses), TMNT takes a surprisingly complex tack. It’s actually an exploration and critique of “double consciousness,” the identity theories of philosopher Frantz Fanon, and what it means to be a minority in America.

“Double-consciousness,” coined by W.E.B. Du Bois, is cognitive dissonance from living as a marginalized group, wherein a person identifies, paradoxically, both with his own group and the dominant group oppressing him. Franz Fanon elucidates a similar idea (in Black Faces, White Masks), from a post-colonial perspective. Fanon says “violence is man re-creating himself,” i.e., a marginalized person reclaims his authentic identity through revolution, upsetting dominant social orders.

In TMNT, re-creation of self is symbolized by physical transformation, but attempts to refute Fanon by having heroes be those whose bodies/identities are transformed accidentally or involuntarily. Those who actively transform themselves to upset the power dynamics of the status quo are villains.

The Shredder

Oroku Saki was a member of the Foot, a Japanese ninja clan. He pursues his enemy, Hamato Yoshi (and Yoshi’s pet rat, Splinter), to New York. After murdering Yoshi, Saki remains in America and builds a U.S.-branch of the Foot, with himself as leader, recasting it as a criminal organization. In an interesting twist on the immigrant narrative, the refugee Yoshi flees to America to escape persecution, but the persecution follows him to finish him off. Saki comes to America for revenge, then, in typical capitalist fashion, realizes he can grab power by starting a Foot Clan “franchise.”

But Saki doesn’t just make himself leader, he forges a whole new identity, cutting off ties with the Japanese Foot and re-creating himself as The Shredder. Shredder is known for wearing head-to-toe metal armour, covered in bladed gauntlets, and concealing nearly his entire face with a mask. This way he attempts to overthrow his original external identity. Hiding his face, he can’t even be identified by his ethnic/national origin, which he’s attempting to transcend. In America, that masked man is simply The Shredder, a figure of power and awe.

cartoon c/o Cyanide Happiness

Later, Shredder is transformed and re-created even more literally. After his death at the Turtles’ hands (in the comics), the Foot use a combination of ancient mystical wisdom and alien technology to regenerate Shredder from his remains, with memories, personality and skills intact. Here is the ultimate re-invention of the self. Saki literally dies, his body is destroyed and recreated into a form that has only ever been The Shredder.

Baxter Stockman

Stockman is a brilliant scientist and robotics engineer, but also a greedy, power-hungry egomaniac. In the original comic he’s African-American, which speaks to the double-consciousness of Du Bois. His race is never referred to, but it’s easy to read Stockman as a genius in a society where black men are stereotypically not “supposed to be” intelligent. His greed overcompensates for this internalized racism. He boasts about his brain-power and uses his robotic creations to steal rather than using his abilities to acquire money legitimately. He publicly subverts American law and capitalism just to show how easy it is for him.

Ultimately, Stockman discards his body completely, building a robot into which he transplants his brain. Like Shredder, Stockman reinvents himself through concealment within metal; he keeps the only part he identifies with (his brain) and throws the rest away.

The cartoon Baxter (portrayed as a stereotypical – and white – mad scientist), also undergoes a transformation, but it’s involuntary. A botched execution mutates him into an anthropomorphic fly. Interestingly, while Baxter-Fly is portrayed as villainous, he’s much more sympathetic than before his transformation. Cartoon-Baxter, never having suffered double-consciousness as a minority as comic-Baxter did, spends the rest of his life trying to become human again, i.e., to reclaim his privileged position as educated, white male.

The Turtles and Splinter

In contrast, our heroes the Turtles are transformed organically and involuntarily. The Turtles and Splinter begin their lives in America as ordinary animals but become “humanized” through unintentional exposure to mutagen (i.e., environmental factors). They accept their new identity but did not seek it out. It’s no accident that TMNT takes place in New York City: representative of the melting-pot, immigrant society where disparate identities meld together into a new whole.

The Turtles are unambiguously American heroes. They transcend

• Race (neither black nor white but green);

• Culture (Japanese fighting style / Italian names);

• Species (human/turtle);

• And even planet (they were born in a bucket in the back of a Woolworth’s in Manhattan, but the substance that transformed them was an accidental byproduct of extraterrestrial experimentation)

And though the Turtles and Splinter are marginalized far more than Oroku Saki or Baxter Stockman ever were, they don’t attempt to overthrow society. On the contrary, they fight against those forces that seek to overturn the status quo, forces symbolizing the conscious re-creation of self.

Heroes In A Half Mask

Whereas Fanon advocated that members of marginalized groups reclaim their identity through violent revolution, TMNT characterizes those who remake their identity to upset the social order as villains. Those who uphold the dominant social order are characterized as heroes, even as they are aware that this status quo oppresses them. In TMNT the good guys are those who don’t seek out self-transformation, but accept their hybridized identity.

TMNT shows Fanon’s link between violence and the active re-creation of self as negative. It argues ultimately that manufactured identity is inauthentic, inevitably based upon opposition to some perceived Other, and only leads to destruction. In America (and by extension the globalized world), identity is never a pure element in and of itself, but always a synthesis. Only by accepting the paradoxical confluence of forces that came together to create you do you become a hero.

TMNT says: don’t try to re-create yourself. Just be yourself. Your identity is bound to evolve no matter what. Unlike their enemies The Shredder and Baxter Stockman, the Turtles and Splinter use their unique gifts to work for a just society, not simply one in which they wield the hegemonic power. The Turtles are marginalized, yet they still find the strength to do what’s right. They didn’t choose to be the way they are, but they accept their hybrid identity and make the best of it. At its core, that is the quintessential substance of Turtle Power.

[Have the Ninja Turtles been co-opted by the existing social order to defend its power structures? Or are they reforming it from within? And is Krang a symbol of colonial hegemony? Sound off in the comments! - Ed.]

Richard Rosenbaum is Associate Fiction Editor for Incongruous Quarterly and Broken Pencil Magazine, as well as their recently released anthology “Can’tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine.” He just completed his Master’s Degree in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University, and thinks about Ninja Turtles more than is probably healthy.

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Magneto is the pseudonym of one Erik Lehnsherr, a man with the ability to create magnetic fields and control metals. It’s one hell of a useful mutation to have, but it presents us with a bit of a problem that must be considered. Namely: what is it about metals that Magneto can control and why can he not control the other elements? We’ll have to look at several properties of metals. It might be useful to have your periodic table close by.

First thing to clarify is what exactly we mean when we say “a metal”. Defining it specifically, a metal is a substance which conducts more than 10,000 Siemens per meter. Metal has the ability to conduct electricity this well because of its structure when “in the bulk” i.e. when lots of the metal’s atoms are grouped together. Unlike non-metals which form strict chemical bonds where the atoms are positioned specifically, a metal features all its nuclei (central part of the atom) arranged in a lattice while the electrons (outer parts of the atom) are free to swim all over the structure.

It’s a bit like a bowl of Rice Krispies where the Krispies are the nuclei and the electrons are the milk. The electrons are free to move everywhere: they’re not fixed to one specific atom, which helps them to conduct electricity better because they can move so well (electricity being the property of moving electrons). At first we might think this is the property Magneto is exploiting, because it’s the only property that all metals have, perhaps he can control these delocalized “electron seas”? But this can’t be true because of one rather inventive scene in X-2 where Magneto escapes his plastic prison by sucking the Iron out of a prison guard’s blood after Mystique has injected him with it.

Apparently, Magneto required a certain amount of metal for him to use. Normal human bodies only contain 4.5g of metal, which we must assume Magneto could manipulate normally but which would not have been enough for him to build his floating platform as well as two bullets. (Although it does suggest that anyone suffering from Beta-Thalassaemia, a condition in which excessive iron uptake leads to an amount closer to 70 grams, shoudln’t be allowed to guard Magneto.) More importantly however, what it tells us is that he doesn’t need the metal to be “in bulk”; he doesn’t need a solid lump of metal for him to manipulate.

Sir Ian needs no help picking up a man.

In the body, iron is stored in four main proteins: Hemoglobin, Myoglobin, Cytochrome-C-Oxidase and Transferrin. All of them contain Iron as an atom. Iron in the blood (mostly Hemoglobin) is held in place via what’s called the Weiss model and involves a single atom of Iron having three of its electrons removed (a process called ionization) and bound in place by nearby Nitrogen atoms.

In other words, Magneto can control single atoms of metals—even metals that have been ionised. He doesn’t require metals to be in the bulk, so it’s apparently not their conductivity he’s exploiting, because iron in the blood doesn’t conduct. So it must be something else.

The first property worth considering is the metal’s magnetic properties. His name is Magneto, after all.

There are five main types of magnetism which elements can display, based on the arrangement of their electrons. Diamagnetism for instance is a property displayed by all solid materials, so it can’t be this or Magneto would be able to control lumps of coal (solid carbon).

The most obvious and familiar type of magnetism is called ferromagnetism (ferrum meaning iron in Latin) and arises from electrons all pointing the same way. But there are only five elements in this category (Iron, Cobalt, Nickel, Gadolinium & Terbium) and Magneto can control bullets which are usually a combination of Lead, Copper, Nickel, Antimony and sometimes Tungsten. So it’s not Ferromagnetism he’s using.

Ferrimagnetism and antiferrogmanetism are two other types, but they can be ruled out as they require atoms to be “in bulk”. Paramagnetism (the fifth kind) is temperature dependent and we have seen that Magneto can easily control metals on a warm day as well as in the coldness of Alkali Lake in winter. So although Magneto has the ability to create what are deemed “magnetic” fields, this must be a simplified explanation of what he can actually do because he’s creating some kind of field that all metals are affected by, irrespective of their magnetic characteristics.

If we rule out magnetic and conductive properties there are only two remaining parameters that generally distinguish metals from non-metals.

The first is ionization (the ability to remove electrons from the atoms). Metals are generally easy to ionize, but if this were the source of his power, Magneto would build up an enormous static charge every time he manipulated metals, and furthermore the metals themselves would become electrically charged. So when Magneto floats up the side of the Statue of Liberty, if he were ionising the metal around him somehow, he should be creating enormous static charges which would cause the metal to interact with other metal objects, not just him. We can thus rule out ionisation, leaving only one other property: the atomic shape.

If you look at a periodic table you can see it’s grouped into four “blocks” named the s, p, d and f blocks. These four blocks denote what type of shape the atom is (more specifically, it tells us what type of orbital the outer-electron is in, and the four different orbitals have different shapes so, it’s essentially the same thing). Most of the metals in the world are in the s, d and f blocks. This leaves the p block, made of all the “non-metals”, the “semi-metals” and 8 metals…which we’ll get to a bit later.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-jNgq16jEY

[NB: Hydrogen (the one electron atom) is sometimes placed in the s block, but it really doesn’t belong there as it shares none of the other s block properties. So we’ll assume that Magneto’s power requires there to be more than one electron in the atom he’s controlling (there are certain properties that >1 electron atoms gain which we don’t need to go into, but apparently Magneto’s powers are limited by them).]

Atoms in the s block are spherical, so whatever Magneto’s power is, it can manipulate spherical atoms. The d and f blocks unfortunately have two opposite types of shape however. The d block elements have what are called “gerade” shapes, which means if we turn the atom completely inside out, we have an identical shape. While the f blocks are “ungerade” meaning they cannot be pulled inside out to create the same shape. But nevertheless, if we look at the s, d and f atoms we have got most of the metals covered and we can actually distinguish them from the p block using group theory.

Group theory is a mathematical tool that puts collections of numbers (or physical shapes) into groups based on their collective properties. It’s commonly used in chemistry to classify molecules or atoms in terms of their symmetry (by symmetry, we aren’t just referring to whether they are mirror images of each other—we also need to consider things like rotational symmetry, i.e., can we rotate a shape around to give us an identical shape). If we consider the s, d and f blocks then we can classify them into different symmetry categories and using group theory, predict what geometrical features the p atoms have which the others don’t.

It can get a bit confusing, as the shapes in atoms aren’t always exact because they can distort and mix with each other upon bonding (as indeed iron does when it binds in Hemoglobin) but if we take this as our basis then the various p-orbitals can still be put into the groups that are separate from the s, d and f groups. This gets us as close as possible to accounting for Magneto’s metal controlling ability.

So what about the 8 metals in the p block? There are eight elements in the p block which are metals “in bulk” but in the atomic form have no magical properties. So these are metals, which Magneto should have no control over…so why was his prison not made of these metals? (Surely simpler than building a plastic facility)

Well, seven of them can be accounted for. Thallium, Lead and Bismuth are all highly toxic, so you can’t build a prison out of them; after a few months of touching the walls or breathing the air, he’d build up a high concentration in his blood and would die horribly (fair for a super-villain perhaps, but a breach of his mutant rights). Indium and Tin are both quite soft metals that can be pushed around quite easily, so not really ideal for making a prison. Gallium has the property of melting in the palm of your hand (melting point similar to that of chocolate) and so to escape Magneto could press against the walls and liquefy the cell.

Thanking her lucky stars she's not made of gallium. Though she did melt anyway.

Which leaves one element. It’s cheap, very common, can be made quite strong and is not particularly toxic that is also in the p block. Aluminium. Of course if we assume that there is some other property of Aluminium’s shape that allows him to control it, then we must remember that Boron (not a metal) has an identical shape and very similar chemical and physical properties. So if there’s something we’ve missed, Magneto should be able to control Boron as well. How can we account for this?

Thankfully we do have an escape clause. Nowadays, very little is actually made from pure Aluminium. Usually we use an alloy of Aluminium and another metal. (An alloy is a colloid of one metal suspended in another, like hot chocolate, where the milk is one metal and the chocolate powder is another—apparenlty milk is my go-to analogy in this article.) So when Magneto appears to be controlling aluminium, he must actually be controlling the other metal in the alloy. Even Aluminium foil is at best 99% Aluminium, so he must be controlling the 1% other metal! In fact, this could get us out of a lot of holes, because if he is ever shown controlling Lead pipes (sounds like something we’d see him do) then we can just claim it’s the other metal impurities. Magneto’s powers are demonstrably not magnitude dependent because he can extract one atom at a time from a person’s bloodstream, so a 1% impurity would be all he needs (far less in fact) to control pieces of aluminium.

Other interesting implications of this are that it tells us at least one property of Adamantium (the metal of Wolverine’s body). If we go with the comic canon it’s an alloy of steel and fictional metal Vibranium. The steel is mostly Iron so that’s how he can manipulate it. If we follow the film canon, then Vibranium is a metal found in meteorites and is in fact an element. We know from the foregoing analysis that it can’t be a p block element. Its minimum atomic weight must therefore be 119 (as all the other undiscovered metals are in the p block) making it very heavy and highly radioactive—but of course radioactivity wouldn’t bother Wolverine’s constant re-healing ability.

Another important implication: Magneto should be able to control Biothene, a naturally degrading plastic that contains Cobalt Stearate in a tiny amount. So while the government wants to fight Magneto, they’d better use environmentally unfriendly plastic to mold their guns. Otherwise there could be trouble!

Recall that Magneto cannot control Tin. This man may be our only hope of defeating him.

Whatever magnetic force you’re feeling—attraction or repulsion—sound off in the comments!

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Today, enjoy this post from guest writer Trevor Seigler. —Ed.

The Sorrows of Young Charles

In modern literature and film, there exists the concept of the “anti-hero,” a figure upon whom greatness is not so much thrust as it stampedes over the poor fellow, leaving him with little option but to rise to the occasion. It is within his failings as a conventional hero that we as the audience find our connection with him, a “just like us” quality that either helps elevate him to the heights of heroism (Han Solo) or sends him screaming off in the other direction entirely (Yossarian). Many figures, both great and small (and small-minded) make up the panoply of “anti-hero,” and it’s a long and distinguished list. If a particular list is missing a certain bald-headed young boy who loses more often then he wins and lusts after an elusive red-headed girl, however, it cannot said to be complete.

Charlie Brown is one of the unlikeliest of figures around which to center your artistic endeavors, yet Charles Schulz chose to do just that over the course of almost fifty years. Beginning in October of 1950 and ending one day after Schulz’s death in early 2000, the comic strip “Peanuts” revolutionized not just comic strips in terms of what they did, but also in what they said. Much of the biographical work done on the creator of this strip centers on how his theological impulses colored the strip in moralistic overtones that might make some of the strips seem a little passé in our more modern and jaded times. But I think that to dismiss “Peanuts” as merely a dogmatically religious artwork that doesn’t address the real issues of young children is a mistake, especially when you discount the possible existential influence of the main character.

Now, existentialism is one of those fancy-sounding phrases that are thrown around a lot by people who went to college who tend not to really know what it means, but like to sound like they do. That would include people like me. I’ve never delved into the fundamental text concerning existentialism, Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” but I’m guessing not a lot of people reading this article have either, unless you just want to torture yourself. But the basics of existentialism, as I understand them from “The Stranger” and listening to Joy Division, are that a.) there is nothing beyond this life, and therefore no rules such as those laid down by religion really apply because let’s face it, there is no reward or punishment for our behavior, and b.) you’re free to do as you please, which can be a great thing or a harrowing version of Hell in its own right, depending on who you ask. It’s the “get out of jail” card of modern philosophy, a double-edged freedom that might actually enslave you more when you think about it.

In “Peanuts,” we have the template for an existential hero (or anti-hero) established with the framework of one Charles “Charlie” Brown, whose hapless blundering through life reflects less the course of an apostle for Christ than the progression of Mersault from one meaningless experience to the next, except that Brown isn’t lucky enough to be guillotined in the end. He has to get up out of bed every morning and go through the same hell, over and over again. Lucy will always pull the ball back right before he goes to kick it (the textbook definition of insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” certainly applies here). He will always pitch his way to a losing season, with the occasional run hit his way knocking him off the mound and stripping him of his clothes in the process. He will always be at the mercy of his more imaginative friend Linus, whose boundless optimism is tempered by his reliance on his security blanket to get through the day. Indeed, if not for Linus, one could argue that Charlie Brown doesn’t really have friends or meaningful relationships. He is alone, standing on a beach not with a gun in his hand but with a pitcher’s glove, at the whim of an uncaring or nonexistent deity as he stumbles through life. For Charlie, hell truly is other people.

Charles Schulz, at least according the biography “Schulz and Peanuts,” wasn’t too much more cheerful than his singular creation, a fact that raised eyebrows upon the book’s publication some years back. The only child of a barber and a homemaker, “Sparky” grew up in the Minnesota of the Great Depression, where times were tough. Schulz didn’t make friends easily, and a sense of loneliness pervades each “Peanuts” product made for mass consumption over the years. Yes, Charlie Brown has friends, but he is unique in that his is the barometer by which the other characters can compare their own lives favorably. It’s no accident that Charlie continually makes the mistake of turning to Lucy when he needs counseling, he really has no one else to confide in. Much like going for the ball when Lucy sets it down, however, Charlie sets himself up merely to fail, as his usual diagnosis seems to be “chronic blockhead syndrome.”

Without delving too much into the potential darkness in Charles Schulz’s life, then, I’d like to try and get at the root of what makes Charlie Brown so much more than some superficial mouthpiece for Christian piety (as those who are critics of Schulz might suggest). Charles Brown, to paraphrase “A Few Good Men,” stands on the line separating us from mediocrity even as we use him as a punchline when we’re at cocktail parties.

There But for the Grace of Snoopy Go I

All creative art comes not from a place of happiness, or at least not too much art of any lasting worth. This isn’t to say that all creative geniuses are miserable Goth kids, just that a lot of them have to go through some sort of emotional turmoil in order to perfect their craft. For Charles Schulz, the death of his mother followed by the isolation of basic training and service during the closing years of WWII gave gravitas to his desire to be a comic strip artist, and it’s interesting that “Peanuts” characters never really grow up but also rarely have a parental figure around (except in the form of the ridiculously-voiced teachers in the animated specials). The sense of failure and rejection that colors every interaction Charlie has with his peers comes from Schulz’s own insecurity, and anxiety is a powerful motivator for artistic creation because it is fueled by self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness unless one produces something of lasting value.

In the very first of the “Peanuts” strips, we are introduced to Charlie Brown memorably: two kids (a boy and a girl) are sitting on the curb of a street when the boy notices a confidant-looking child walking their way. He tells us this is Charlie Brown, yessir, good ole Charlie Brown, and you begin to think that this is yet another character whose dimensions are more heroic than a normal child’s would be. Charlie Brown, so far, seems to be the most popular guy in his world, and he just saunters on by with a wide smile on his face as his peers talk him up. It’s only in the last frame that we realize what’s really going on: the little boy who was saying what a great fellow Charlie is ends with the punchline “how I hate him!”

In that one moment, we know everything we need to not just about Charlie but about the world around him, the world of children who, in the case of the anonymous hater, look down upon him either because he inspires their wrath or because, more frequently with Lucy and anyone not named “Linus,” Charlie Brown is a figure of ridicule and a good figure by which to measure yourself, because you always come off looking better. It’s as powerful a staantement of a creator’s intent as any that I can think of in the postwar world, an exercise in black comedy that predates Vonnegut by a decade at least.

Charlie Brown suffers in almost every strip devoted to his exploits ever since (in order for “Peanuts” to survive, Schulz had to occasionally focus on another character, such as Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, or Charlie’s sister Sally, in order to keep from running low on ideas). He is not the master of his world so much as its pawn, and the relentless assaults on his dignity and self-worth suggest a Kafkaesque existence where the forces of some nameless bureaucracy have aligned against him almost at birth. His cry of anguish, “augh!,” is his only way to voice his frustration, and Linus serves as his source of inspiration to keep the last panel of any strip from being a silhouette of a bald-headed kid with a noose around his neck or a shotgun in his mouth. To get perfectly blasphemous about it, Charlie Brown suffers for us, so that we won’t have to. If he wins, we lose as readers. What if Wile Coyote actually catches the Roadrunner, or the Trix Rabbit finally gets to eat the cereal that lies at the heart of his gnawing need? We lose interest in their pain, and so it goes with Charlie Brown.

The World War I Ace vs. Camus

If Charlie Brown is not always the star of his own life story, he has a great co-star to pick up the slack. Snoopy the Dog is my favorite anthropomorphic character because he inhabits a world most of us can only hope to glimpse, where pure imagination is let loose and no restrictions are in place to prevent his doghouse/Sopwith Camel from being riddled with bullets. Charlie and Snoopy, far from being totally different, are actually complimentary, because Snoopy is the positive expression of “no rules” in existentialism that Charlie represents on the negative side. For every blunder and missed opportunity for Charlie, his dog can transcend the dullest of postwar suburban conventions and experience a full and rich fantasy life that his owner can only look on with wonder and regret. Snoopy might make for a better existential hero, in that he is bound to no one save Charlie and Woodstock, and really even then it’s only by the slimmest of threads. Snoopy, however, chooses to be Charlie’s constant pick-me-up, leading his pals in dance and constantly one-upping Lucy by kissing her. If Charlie Brown can’t stand up to what the world throws at him, Snoopy will; it’s no coincidence that the first “Peanuts” book was entitled “Happiness Is a Warm Puppy.”

Good Grief

“A Charlie Brown Christmas,” the 1965 animated film that established the “Peanuts” characters in popular culture as more than one-dimensional figures, could be said to “cop out” on the overriding statement made by the strip to that point. Charlie Brown, of course, cannot win, nor can he have the satisfaction of knowing that he’s right even if he’s outnumbered; the minute he becomes less neurotic, he loses his everyman quality. “Christmas,” on the other hand, not only rewards Charlie’s effort to find a home for the small, pathetic-looking Christmas tree, it also validates Linus’s position as the voice of reason in a sermon that would ring patently false if it were handled without the dexterity of someone well-versed in the pain as well as the pleasure of life.

With all that being said, is it necessarily a bad thing for Charlie to get one in the win column? Life would be unbearable for anyone if they were not granted the occasional high point, and Charlie Brown would end the film despondent if Linus didn’t intervene. Charlie’s real-life counterpart in pop culture, Woody Allen, occasionally gets the girl, even if he doesn’t know how to handle it. For Charlie, the acceptance of his tree signals the acceptance of his humanity into the community that hitherto has mocked it or bruised it with repeated pulls on the football just before it is within his reach. The pain and agony of Charlie’s existence isn’t just because he can’t throw a strike or talk to the little red-headed girl; its roots lie in the absence of a sense of self-worth, as he is not validated by those whose approval he seeks.

In life, you learn more from your failures than from your successes, even if you keep trying to kick that damn football. It’s the abiding faith that someday, somehow, you will connect and make that kick that keeps you going, no matter how often you fall down. Perhaps it’s fair to ask what is the point, but to do that would negate Charlie Brown not just as a figure for sorrow and pity but also as a human being (albeit one who has been preserved in amber as a child with male-pattern baldness and an unyielding wardrobe of yellow-and-brown shirts and oversized baseball caps). Charlie Brown is us, he embodies the parts of us that we’re not proud of, but they’re essential to any understanding of ourselves.

Is Charlie Brown a Christian martyr, then, who “dies” in a sense so that we might live? Or is he an existential figure of shame and scorn, a Mersault or the lead character in any Godard film, whose greatest crime against humanity is simply that he exists and continues to do so in spite of our repeated efforts to negate his worth? I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle and it depends on your perspective. To me, he’s the literary character I identify with the most, and I’m guessing by the continued popularity of “Peanuts” in all incarnations that I’m not alone. He’s Gatsby, Holden Caulfield, and every character Woody Allen has ever played, and he’s never going away so long as lonely boys look out the window at a game going on across the street and wonder why they weren’t invited. Charlie Brown might not smoke thick French cigarettes and rail against the bourgeoisie, but he’s just as existential as Camus and Sartre. You might not agree with me, but I’m guessing you’ll find it harder to look at a “Peanuts” strip again without feeling a little more in touch with Charlie’s hell. Art that makes you feel as well as think has an infinite shelf life, and “Peanuts” might just outlast us all.

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Iron Man 2 came out this weekend and the critical reaction has been mixed.  While most agree that the film is fun to watch, few seem to think that it was a good film.  One of their key questions, posed also by Matt Wrather on the latest Overthinking It Podcast, is “What is this movie about?”

Numerous plotlines about a Russian scientist’s revenge, a rival’s attempt to take control of the Iron Man suit, Tony’s failing health and his relationship with his father were a little convoluted.  Layered on top of that, Samuel Jackson, Scarlett Johansson and the setup for future Marvel Comics movies Captain America, Thor and the Avengers seemed weird and extraneous (though I really like the idea of building a cinematic continuity across a number of different properties and defended it on the podcast).

But beneath all of those plots, the Iron Man movies are ultimately about technological transition and the Ages of Man.

The ancient Greeks believed that history could be divided into five ages: Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic and Iron.   Ovid and the Romans had a similar demarcation, omitting the Heroic Age of the Illiad and Odyssey.  Both cultures believed that they lived in the Iron Age, an age of warfare, strife, suffering and greed.

Modern archaeologists, always living in the past, borrowed the idea of Ages when discussing prehistoric civilizations.  The earliest tool users, as much as 100,000 years ago, started making weapons out of stone, hence, the Stone Age

The nuclear weapons of 1200 BCE.

Then, 5,000 ago, some genius discovered that if you melted copper and added arsenic or tin, you got a strong, durable weapon that would last longer and hold an edge better than the stone weapons he was used to.  Tin and copper were hard to come by and involved massive trading networks from Britain to Babylon, but at that point, nothing beat a sharp bronze sword and suddenly you had the Bronze Age.  Early smiths in the Caucasus Mountains in southern Russia were probably the first to forge bronze using the locally available copper and arsenic and it’s likely that many of them went to a painful and early death from contact with that arsenic.  Progress is not without a price.

3,000 years ago, another genius figured out a way to generate enough heat to melt the much more prevalent iron ore that was sitting around all over the place.  Iron wasn’t as strong as bronze, but at 5% of the Earth’s crust it was and is the cheapest metal around.   Suddenly, everyone could afford a really shiny, sharp metal sword.  It was the Iron Age and its technologies led directly into the Historical Age (when they started writing stuff down and we don’t have to rely solely on archaeology to know what went on) and world we live in today.

Early iron armor from the Middle East. Or, what happens to Iron Man if he stays out in the rain too long.

From out of a dark, cave-like building of mud bricks belching smoke and fire came these huge, magical, Age changing feats of ingenuity that shaped the world for the next millennium.   The early smiths were the first scientists, the first engineers, the people who brought humanity out of the cave of the past and into the modern age of technology.  For some perspective, the Stone Age lasted 100,000 years and has only been over for about 5,000.   Some historians believe that its early monopoly on iron forging helped the Hittite Empire, based in modern-day Turkey, destroy Babylon and maintain a massive empire.

The men and, potentially, women who made this magic were seen as something above the rest of humanity, holding a secretive, mysterious power that was passed from father to son.  In some cases, they even served as priests.  In Jenne-jano, an Iron Age city in what is now Sudan, archeological evidence suggests that blacksmiths also served as diviners, rainmakers, healers and (gulp) performed rituals like circumcision.  Their powers were so respected that even after the region converted to Islam, the blacksmiths held on to the respect of their communities.

Vulcan at his forge.

Smiths not only served as priests and seers, they were the only profession that actually had their own god.  The only Greek or Roman god with a real job was Hephaestus (Rome’s Vulcan), the God of Fire and of Smiths.  Other professions may have had patron gods, but even the Greek musicians would have admitted that Apollo’s lute playing was only a side gig to the whole driving-the-sun-chariot-across-the-sky thing.   Hephaestus was the blacksmith of the gods, creating theirs weapons and armor, even building Apollo’s solar chariot.

He even married the Goddess of Love.   Sure, Aphrodite cheated on him with Ares, but still, you’ve got to be pretty important to merit the actual Love Goddess.  In addition, Hephaestus builds a number of automata, metal beings with personality and agency that help him in his work, arguably the world’s first fictional robots.  Hephaestus had some serious parental issues, with his mother Hera tossing him off Olympus for being so ugly, crippling him.  He only comes back to Olympus when they realize that they like his creations and send Dionysus to get him drunk.

Since then, iron and the people who deal in it have had a special place.  In the stories of fairies and supernatural beings that were told throughout Medieval Europe, only the touch of cold iron can defeat the villainous beasties.  That tradition survived into the last century, with iron horseshoes nailed above our doors for good luck.

Which brings us back to Iron Man.

The Iron Man films follow the transitions from one of these ages to another, with Tony Stark standing in for the smiths who perfected bronze and iron.  The crucial scene in the first Iron Man movie has Tony Stark, wounded and imprisoned by an Afghani warlord, in the darkness of a cave.  His only chance of escape and survival: using his superior technology.  There’s a whole montage of building the suit of armor that he’ll use to escape, but the seminal image is of a man hammering out iron in cave lit by fire.

Tony Stark at his.

He succeeds, fighting his way from the darkness of the cave back to the light of civilization, not through his skill as a warrior but through his skill at the forge.  His first weapon?  His hands, the most important tool in any smithy.  His second?  Fire, which gives the smith the ability to turn ore into power.

Tony Stark has discovered a new kind of weapon that gives him an advantage over everyone else, and like those first iron swords of the Hittites, it’s a weapon that’s too expensive to go around.  While the American fighter jets he inadvertently takes on may pose some threat to him, Iron Man can take one of the world’s most advanced weapons systems out just by flying through its wing.  Like the first humans to move from rock to bronze, he has an advantage over his contemporaries that sets him apart, gives him power and allows him to, as we learn in the beginning of the second film, “privatize world peace.”  Like those early bronzesmiths, Tony Stark comes across as a sort of god, wielding mysterious powers that others can’t really comprehend.

The second film takes us into the second phase of any age, the period of proliferation.  As the recording industry continues to misunderstand, once a good idea has been made public, people are going to copy it.   The first American nuke went off in 1945.  By 1949, the Russians had one too.  Similarly, the Hittites couldn’t hold on to iron forever and within 200-300 years, most of the Mediterranean world and the Middle East had entered the Iron Age.

Congress is worried that soon, the Iron Man technology will spread, giving the whole world access to this powerful destructive force.  And so it happens.  Within months, a unusually badass scientist, Ivan Vanko, has perfected his own Arc reactor, weaponized it (in a potentially very self-destructive way – whips?  really?  Don’t you remember how Indiana Jones got that scar?) and gone up against Iron Man.   With the help of a Rolls Royce and an aggressive chauffeur, Iron Man beats Vanko’s ass down.

But by the end of the film, Vanko has teamed up with a rival military contractor (the modern equivalent of a rival empire?) to create a whole army of iron men, ready to take over the world.  He and Don Cheadle manage to take them down, but though the movie doesn’t discuss it, the plans are out there, the government wants them and there’s nothing that can be done to put the genii back in the bottle.  Sam Rockwell’s parting threats to Pepper Pots suggest that he and his technology will be back.

Inside sources say that Robert Downey Jr. turned down an offer to play the Son of Vulcan, another smith god based character.

In Iron Man 2, Tony echoes the plight of those first arsenic-riddled bronzesmiths, poisoned by the same element that gives him his power.  Like those ancients, his only solution is to find a new element – tin in their case, mcguffinium in his.  Power comes with a price, but it’s a price that can be paid with hard work and ingenuity.

Like the ancient smiths, he is a conduit to the primal powers of earth and fire from which the modern age is born.   And like the smith god Hephaestus, Stark lives on a mountaintop looking down on the world, surrounded by beautiful women and automatons that help him shape the technologies of the future.  Like Hephaestus, he has deep parental issues that he can only solve through the act of creation and the generous application of booze.  If you waited until after the credits, you know that pretty soon, he’ll be hanging out with an actual god who also likes big hammers.

Ultimately, there’s not a single answer to “What is Iron Man 2 about?” because Iron Man 2 can’t be taken on its own.   When put in the context of Iron Man and the future Avengers films, it’s a second act in a story that’s an allegory of how we got out the cave and into the movie theater in the first place.

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Anyhoo, one of these things I really love about Dragon Ball is that its elegant, elemental narrative style and clear characterization make it easy to notice the wide variety of tropes, motifs and other devices that Toriyama uses to guide and develop his storylines. It has the epic Brechtian quality of a theatrical production where you can see the wires and the lighting equipment, without breaking the emotional identification and welcoming effortlessness of Stanislavski’s “Magic If.”

So, taking a bit of a break from using everything else I know to try to explain Dragon Ball, today I will use what I know about Dragon Ball to explain something else. Namely, one of the most useful and interesting distinction in parts of speech across poetical and literary systems, and also one of the most neglected in the casual enjoyment of art.

Today’s battle in the expansive desert, full of its elaborate rock formations that all produce prodigious dust clouds upon their destruction?

Metonymy and Metaphor. If these are things you’re not 100% solid on, read on, increase your literary power level, and actually learn something pretty simple that will help you enjoy art and lesser things you already like all the more. Because they’re certainly using it . . .

(Oh, and if you’re 100% solid on them, you’re clearly an enthusiast, so that is no excuse to turn away from the “Read More” button)

Today’s discussion starts with two fairly intuitive Dragon Ball special moves, the Kaioken (Fist of the Kais or Fist of the Worlds) and the Taio-ken (Fist of the Suns) — keep in mind that, despite my choice of video clips, here I must rely on what I get out of the English — this is not a canonical discussion of the original Japanese, because I DON’T SPEAK JAPANESE!

This is the Taio-ken. The taio-ken is an example of Metaphor.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkO24eAQuBM

The taio-ken converts life energy into a bright flash of light that blinds the opponent.

This is the Kaio-ken. Kaio-ken is an example of Metonymy.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuYrvWPmyj0&feature=related

The kaio-ken puts one’s body under tremendous strain in order to multiply one’s strength.

Metaphorical comparisons are similar, whereas metonymical comparisons are contiguous.

The Fist of the Suns is so named because it produces an effect that is like the sun — it’s really bright and blinding. Tenshinhan, the guy who first uses the move, isn’t associated with the sun. He never went to the sun. Nobody lives on the sun in Dragon Ball, and the sun doesn’t get referenced much in Toriyama’s work (the moon, on the other hand . . .). He just happens to have a move that’s like the sun, so it has a metaphorical name that reflects that relationship.

Conversely, Goku learns the Fist of the Worlds from King Kai, one Dragon Ball’s wacky deities, in the afterlife. At the cost of giving up his body for a time, Goku is put under tremendous strain on a planet with ten times normal gravity and learns how to multiply his strength.

Now, King Kai never gets in any fights, he isn’t nearly as physically strong as the protagonists, and he looks like this:

So, the kaio-ken doesn’t make you similar to King Kai. It’s his move, so it’s named after him, but he’s also a diety, and its name implies godlike power that isn’t natural in the human world (thus, mortals can’t easily handle it).

And the Fist of the Worlds doesn’t make you similar to a world. But it reflects both the extraterrestrial scope of the power levels involve, and it reminds you that this is the kind of move you don’t get to learn if you stick around on your own planet. It talks a bit about the history of the move, the things that are associated with it.

These two explanations fall within a close range of ideas that would be grouped together under the umbrella of “King Kai and his stuff.”

Other things that would be contiguous with King Kai would be Bubbles the chimp, Gregory the cricket, his little house and his classic car.

It’s notable that King Kai is not the only Kaio in Dragonball (far from it) – otherwise, the Kaio-Ken would lose some of its metonymical quality. Being a Kaio isn’t just a namesake, it’s another quality that is contiguous with being King Kai.

It seems pretty intuitive by this example; the word contiguous is what gets in the way of understanding it most of the time. But people refer to things that are part of the set of “so and so and his stuff” all the time, and it feels a lot different from a metaphor.

For example, if you compare Randy Moss to Gisele Bundchen, that isn’t metaphor, it’s metonymy, because these are both people who are contiguous with Tom Brady. You could even compare Gisele to Kate Moss and in turn to Randy Moss, but that sort of fleaflicker trick play only works in the movies.

Metonymy: "This is one randy reciever."

And if you compare Tony Soprano and Tonya Harding, it might be a metaphor, because they’re both criminals, but it’s more likely metonymy, contiguous with the set of “stuff associated with hitting people in the kneecaps.”

It’s easy to write this off, but I think it’s an important, useful distinction, and I think Dragon Ball highlights it. In Dragon Ball, metonymy tends to beat metaphor. Things that boast similarity carry less of a weight of legitimacy than things that are contiguous. The kaio-ken is just plan stronger than the taio-ken. Cell, who is actually engineered from the genes of the heroes, is stronger than the androids, who are simply programmed to have similar powers. When Gohan uses attacks that remind him of his father in the end of the Cell Saga, he’s much more effective than when he dresses in his father’s costume, as in near the end of the interminable Majin Buu Saga.

What, do you think I’d leave you with just that? Oh, wait, there’s more!

Synecdoche and simile

Scholars.

Not all contiguous renamings are best described as metonymy, and not all discontiguous ones are best described as metaphor. Synecdoche and simile are, depending on who you ask, either subsets of or slight variations on metonymy and metaphor.

When a character is referred to by power level (again, an arbitrary measure of strength used as a stakes-raising device), as when Nappa smugly refers to Goku as “a 5,000,” that’s synechdoche. “A power level of 5,000″ is part of the set of things that are “stuff related to Goku at this point in the story.” But more specifically, it’s one part or aspect of Goku. This becomes increasingly silly and eventually stops — moving away from understanding or referring to people by their power levels — moving away from synechdoche as a mode of comparison, to judge people by more than the sum of their parts — is one of the big idea-driven arcs of the Frieza saga.

All part-to-whole relationships are contiguous, but the mental leap to contiguity is not as illustrative; it doesn’t carry as much information. We have to make a bigger leap of contiguity to understand “The First of the Worlds” than to understand “a 5,000,” so the tropes, while related and perhaps subordinated, have different names.

Simile: Frieza is _like_ the beast at Tanagra.

Simile is the form of comparative renaming that is most frequently taught in schools, because it is the most systematic. The best example of it in Dragonball is when Frieza says to the unlikely team of Gohan, Krillin and Vegeta before the arrival of Piccolo or Goku, in reference to the three minor characters defeating him, that “Sure you can, just like three ants can beat a dinosaur.”

Of course, Frieza has nothing to do with dinosaurs, he is just very strong and imposing. So it’s a relationship of similarity, not contiguity.

And, of course, there aren’t a lot of good examples of this in Dragon Ball, because it’s an English trope and Dragon Ball was written in Japanese — and also because Dragon Ball characters don’t tend to themselves speak in metaphor as much as they tend to represent metaphors.

It’s a very “show, don’t tell” kind of story. Sometimes.

Oh, you’re not going to quit now! You’ll miss the extra-super bonus feature on the next page!

The Many Flavors of Vegeta-related Irony

Proud.

Ah, irony, that finest of tropes: When things happen in a way opposite to your expectations.

Dragon Ball is great at helping us understand irony, because it gives us a character who is thoroughly incapable of coping with it. So, whenever irony, you get a lot of screaming and big flashing lights and arrows pointing to it.

Of course, I am talking about Vegeta, Prince of All Saiyans who is kind of an ornery homeless drifter with bad clothes. Over 24 volumes of manga, ther super-powered alien who insists he is the strongest being in the universe never wins any fights except against his own paraplegic sidekick, Frieza’s weakest henchmen, a lot of innocent civilians on several occasions, and a random fat robot.

Yeah, he gets his ass kicked a lot, and he makes a lot of really stupid mistakes.

He also insists that he is a villain for most of the story, despite the fact that it is very obvious that he’s going to turn out to be a hero.

He is also relentlessly hubristic to the point of parody.

Here, as a fun little memory tool, are many of the different kinds of irony, each of which Vegeta blasts out loud and clear at one point or the other.

Dramatic irony (the audience knows something the character does not) — When Vegeta comes across Gohan on Planet Namek, the young boy is hiding a stolen dragon ball behind him. In a rare moment of mercy, thinking he has all seven dragon balls and doesn’t need to, Vegeta decides not to kill Gohan. Thus, he loses the dragon ball and is eventually killed.

Situational irony (causes have the opposite of their expected effects) — In his urge to fight someone who will truly challenge him and prove his superior strength, Vegeta lets Imperfect Cell merge with Android 18 and thus transform into Perfect Cell. The resultant Perfect Cell is so far out of Vegeta’s league that he doesn’t even get to fight him at the Cell Games.

It's like rain . . .

Verbal irony — Vegeta is a self-important, sarcastic jackass for about ten years of cartoons and comic books. “What happened to the great and mighty X? Come on, X, fight me! Show me how GREAT you are. REALLY.”

Tragic irony — Vegeta kills himself to kill Majin Buu and save his family, not knowing that by killing himself and removing the possibility of fusing with Goku to fight Buu together, he has removed one of the world’s only hopes for survival. This leads directly to the death of his wife, son and rest of the human race.

Irony of fate or cosmic irony (destiny is predestined to be the opposite of expectations) — Vegeta constantly harps on how it is his fate and destiny to be the strongest fighter in the universe and the strongest member of the Saiyan race. But Toriyama’s plots are pretty well telegraphed, and by the time Vegeta rolls around, Goku is the protagonist who is pretty much guaranteed to always be the strongest character in the story, with only a few exceptions. So Vegeta’s destiny is actually always to be the weaker one.

Historical irony (real world events play out in the opposite of historical expectations) — Despite hating most people most of the time, including the heroes, the human race, and his own family, despite being hostile and antisocial, despite insisting on living in seclusion and anonymity, despite trying to destroy the earth and killing the spectators at his fights, and despite never touching his wife in the comic book or show and being entirely devoid of affection or tenderness — in the real world, Vegeta is a fan favorite and the subject of a great deal of erotic fanfiction.

See, Vegeta, it isn't impossible, because it just happened. That's how you know it isn't impossible. Because it happened.

More types of irony? Favorite parts of speech? I know I haven’t done chiasmus or zeugma yet, but there are 45 more parts to this series I have to get to! If I did everything in a timely manner, it wouldn’t be Dragon Ball, now would it?

Oh, and this clip has like five or six different examples of Vegeta-related irony.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJzH1Lu5wbo

Can you find them all? Sound off in the comments!

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In tribute to this weekend’s release of Up, the latest sure-fire hit from Pixar, we’ve asked our Think Tankers about one of the modern world’s most enduring and picturesque fantasies:

“What is your favorite instance of somebody or bodies getting carried away by a balloon or balloons?”

And they have been, dare I say it, Up to the task. Make sure you weigh in with your choice in our poll or the comments — careful, not too much!

Hey! 5th Dimension! Play us to the article!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAQf1uAHaXM&feature=related

The Chipmunk Adventure, by Mlawski.

Los Angeles, California: 1987.

Ross Bagdasarian: Okay, Janice.  It’s 1987, and the Chipmunks are HUGE right now.  We need to release a Chipmunk movie, ASAP.

Janice Karman: You’re right, Ross.  What America needs right now is a huge, epic, sprawling musical.

RB: It’ll have action.

JK: Adventure!

RB: Drug smuggling!

JK: Drug smugg– wait, what?

RB: I know it sounds crazy, Janice, but hear me out.  We want an epic musical, right?  What better way to make an epic than to have the Chipmunks and the Chipettes travel around the world?

JK (realizing the possibilities): We could have them sing songs about whatever country they’re in!

RB: Exactly!  Like in Mexico, they can sing “Cuanto le Gusta,” and in Fiji they can sing “I Told the Witch Doctor.”

JK: That’s not racist at all!

RB: I know!  But the problem is, how do we get the Chipmunks around the world?

JK: How about they go on a rock tour?

RB: Eh, too “Jem.”  Anyway, where’s the excitement?  The suspense.  No.  I have a much better idea.  Janice, who regularly travels around the world on business?

JK: Investment bankers?

RB: Think more exciting.

JK: Spies?  Couriers?

RB: Getting closer.

JK: Oh, Ross, I give up.

RB: Drug smugglers.

JK (sighing): This again?

RB: Think about it.  Some sketchy foreigners from Colombia or Austria or something are trying to smuggle cocaine around the world, but INTERPOL is on their trail.  Then they have a genius idea.  Who better to bring their coke across the border than a group of innocent chipmunk children?

JK: The Chipmunks and the Chipettes!

RB: Now you’ve got it!

JK: I didn’t see it before, but this is a brilliant idea for a children’s movie!  But…

RB: But?

JK: My only worry is that we’ll spend a lot of time watching the Chipmunks in airports, waiting in security lines, that sort of thing.  It’s kind of boring.

RB: I’ve got it.  They smuggle the drugs… wait for it… in hot air balloons.

JK: Brilliant!  Change the drugs into diamonds and you’ve got a deal.

RB: I don’t know…  The Chipmunks singing and dancing while smuggling diamonds around the world in hot air balloons?  Isn’t that a little unbelievable?

Doug, by Fenzel

It’s brief, but it’s perfect: light-hearted, metaphorical, elegant, swift and sweet. My favorite instance of somebody getting carried away by a balloon (other than all those crazy folks in Roswell who got all gussied up in alien outfits over a weather balloon, of course), is a brief moment in the title sequence to Nickelodeon’s Doug. It’s hard to find the actual clip online (the far inferior title sequence from Disney’s Doug is much more ubiquitous), but there are a frightening number of videos of people dubbing it a capella, including this one:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qj6J7RG4HsM&feature=related

A  benevolent, metacartoonic line wakes up little Porkchop, forms a curtain that Doug lifts and passes under, immediately becomes a tightrope across which walks the apple of Doug’s eye, Miss Pattie Mayonnaise. The line twirls into a heart balloon to lift Doug off the ground before it is pulled down by the nefarious Roger Klotz and Stinky, only to become a hole that the villains slip through before Doug tosses it to his friend Skeeter, swinging in from offscreen.

It’s such a wonderful way of describing how the stories in the series are told, from the spare use of line to create minimalistic but expressive characters to the seamless ups and downs of the mental life and kind-and-gentle travails of its protagonist.

“Lifted away by balloon” fantasies are all about sweetness, and Doug’s infatuation with Patti is so sweet and touching (I always found her to be a smart, classy dame, with few of the character flaws that always seem to burden “the girl the main guy is infatuated with” in stories like this. She’s also not hypersexualized, which is rare and welcome.) that the balloon motif fits it perfectly.

Even in the context of the opening sequence, the balloon is more suggestion than representation, heightening the sense of fantasy – that the lightness expressed is the lightness of mind and heart, not really of helium and latex (or mylar if you’re fancy).

As a side note, while looking for the Doug theme song on video, I found a whole lot of Doug fan videos, and I wanted to close by sharing two of them with you. First, this rather compelling interpretation that looks as if it took a long time:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jfs6pk91v4&feature=related

And this one, which looks as if it took a lot less, but still does the trick (warning, a little bad language).

Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, by Lee

Strange that this article features two instances of chipmunks carried away by balloons, but no story of balloon-powered flight is complete without Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers. In case you need a refresher:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2e5q6ubDlZE

(Do you have that theme song stuck firmly in your head? Good. You can thank me later.)

Admittedly, the Rescue Rangers aren’t really “carried away” by a balloon; rather, they fly in a plane that prominently features an oblong red balloon. But this is perhaps the most extraordinary balloon you’ve ever seen. According to The Ranger Wiki, the internet’s most reliable source of Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers knowledge:

[The Ranger Plane] is supposed to apply most of the lift to the Ranger Plane and help it hover in the air, so the gas in it has to be lighter than air. However, in Ghost of a Chance, the Rescue Rangers rode the detached balloon as they descended to the ground without the Ranger Plane, and afterwards, the balloon stayed on the ground. Another explanation may be that the balloon is more of a safety device in case the wings fail. Three Men and a Booby is a good example for the Ranger Plane being able to fly without it after it had been released to distract the falcons.

It’s not filled with hot air or helium. Instead, it’s filled with a mysterious gas that changes density depending on the circumstance. Remarkable? Unbelievable? Not when you consider its extraordinary inventor and pilot Gadget Hackwrench. Very little was outside of the realm of possibility for this genius inventor, engineer, scientist…and warrior:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XsHr5wwgrU&start=483

If she could invent a steel-armored tank that balances on a rotating ring of plungers and an electromagnetic projectile shield, then why not invent a special gas for the Ranger Plane balloon?

The other Rescue Rangers held aloft by this red balloon make up quite the motley crew. The thinly veiled Indiana Jones ripoff. The candy addict.  The cheese addict. The green housefly that doesn’t speak English. On top of it all, rampant sexual tension between Chip, Dale and Gadget threatened to tear the group apart. But in spite of it all,

No, No, it never fails
Once they’re involved
Somehow whatever’s wrong gets solved

And they fly off into the sunset in a bleach bottle held aloft by a red balloon filled with a mysterious gas.

Calvin and Hobbes, by Belinkie

Whenever I imagine Bill Watterson – and I do, quite often – I think of him fishing. I don’t know why – that’s just an image that seems somehow fitting. Guy standing in a stream, big rubber pants dangling from suspenders, pole curved back over his shoulder, mid-cast, the line and hook spiraling into the sky. In other words, I imagine him as one of his drawings.

Sometimes I’m angry at him, for letting all that talent go to waste. By now, he could have started and finished a whole other strip, and if it was even half as good as Calvin and Hobbes, it would still be the best excuse to read the comics page. But mostly, I kind of admire his disappearing act. He’s like J.D. Salinger. But honestly, if I had the choice of having dinner with Salinger or Watterson, it would be an easy choice.

On July 4, 1988, Calvin and Hobbes started an 11-strip story about Calvin being inexplicably lifted skywards by a single balloon. At first it’s just an annoyance: Calvin has to contend with an angry flock of ducks, and dangles humiliatingly from his pants when he ties the string to his belt loop.

Then, in the fifth strip, the whole thing transitions from whimsical to terrifying. Calvin worries about getting sucked into a jet intake. Instead, the balloon pops and he plummets towards Earth, vainly trying to wake up. In the face of certain death, he muses about his life flashing before his eyes. But then he discovers his handy transmogrifier gun in his pocket. Just as he’s falling low enough to see the telephone wires, he transforms into a “light particle,” and races home to tell his parents why he’s late for dinner.

As usual, Watterson’s art is wonderful. As Calvin gets higher, the ground becomes this crazy diagonal patchwork. Each cloud has a shadow. Compare this to, let’s say, Garfield. But what I love about the story is how straightforward it is. When Gonzo floats away in The Muppet Movie, or Curious George floats away, they move largely horizontally without gaining a lot of altitude. Calvin pretty much goes straight up, until the balloon pops. No one on the ground is trying to rescue him.

I feel like in most cases, the image of someone getting carried away by balloon is supposed to be, well, uplifting. Exhilarating. You’re grabbing hold of something simple, colorful, and fun, and taking flight with it. But Calvin doesn’t seem empowered. He’s a little boy lost in a giant sky. Alone. Watterson makes the balloon into something menacing, which is impressive.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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