"Waiting for Gadot," scene two

Hello there.

Long time no see! Well, I guess a few months doesn't hold up to even more years like my previous gap in blogging. So what's happened in the interim? Wonder Woman was very successful. I went to Italy for a week over the summer. Brand New recently released their last album. Some other stuff I don't want to get into here because other people have discussed it better than I can. In some ways, ironically, it was because I knew how this scene opened that I think I was able to put it off for so long. I can't explain it! But now it's written and I know the next interlude and then a weird bit in the middle that I don't have a name for yet... Some of the interlude is written, so I might have that up this weekend too. I'm actually going to complete a play! Can you believe it? (Pompo can. In some ways, he's from my earliest completed play--a comedic short story I wrote in middle school that I later re-imagined as a play, which was largely just a collection of inside jokes between me and a friend of mine.) Also, if you've been here before, you'll have noticed the blog design has changed (and might again)--this is because pasting into Blogger has been very irritating with the original formatting and rather than become a coder and breakdown all the issues in the HTML that makes things look different than I want, I just changed the blog color to shove all those problems under the rug.

Open Scene

Curtain up on a book store. Carl sits at a chair with a foot stool he has used as a small table, stacked high with various comic book collections. He is reading one, holding it carefully in his hands perhaps a little too close to shut to be able to effectively see the artwork. He appears afraid of damaging the spine of the book and turns pages in an awkward, yet meticulous way.

Carl: I still damage some books so much that I actually buy them. [He looks at the stack in front of him.] Some. You can see with how many I read that cutting it down to some certainly helps the wallet. It allows me to keep those fat stacks. [Carl mimes sitting on a big wallet by raising one side of his body from his seat and patting his lower back.] It doesn’t help the ass though! I’ve always been a fan of the thin wallet, even with what that means as far as making ends meet. But… I’m rambling…

You know, it’s not really my fault that I don’t pay for everything! [He looks down at the book he is reading. We cannot quite make out what it is, but perhaps can see Wonder Woman or her colors in different panels.] You know, DC has released what is it, four different origins of Wonder Woman in the last few years? And that isn’t counting a comic about the Amazons before she was around and a change to her very creation in yet another book! Not exactly that I’m complaining, I just can’t afford it all. I mean, do you ever see me doing anything for work these days? Two female cartoonists did stories of Diana’s youth that are both quite intriguing in their own ways, but the men who redid Wonder Woman did what men do: they got into a pissing contest.

[A door behind Carl opens and Pompo enters the room with the four men who joined him from the audience. They sit at a table with chairs positioned around it which they all move in order to view Carl as he speaks to the air around him.]

Carl: The problem with comics is so much just the problems with the world: capitalism, egos, people to bitumen, my dad always says “Another day, another fifty cents,” something he blames on inflation, only wouldn’t that be deflation?

Andrew: What is he on about?

Pompo: He’s making about as much sense as usual.

Carl: In response to Ultimate Marvel, a popular set of comics at DC’s rival that imagined their heroes as new characters without long stories varied in quality over decades that must be read to understand them, DC created two of their own imprints: All-Star and Earth One. All-Star Wonder Woman was discussed and never did quite get made, while Earth One is where the measuring of manhood began. Greg Rucka, a comics writer known for his work with female characters including Wonder Woman herself, was promised the book, only to find it given to popular, trippy rockstar writer Grant Morrison. [Pompo feels his head, running his hand over his hair.] Greg walks out on DC, probably vowing never to work for them again, in a Taylor Swift-like way. Obviously he comes back in the end. [Carl looks down at the book in his hands.] Grant isn’t a horrible fit for Wonder Woman, but his version of feminism is, let’s say, very showy.

Pandrio: Feminism.

Carl: [Carl is still looking down at the comic in his hands.] Wonder Woman’s invisible plane is supposedly yonic in Morrison’s book, a literal interpretation of female-focused comic, she flies around in a woman’s genitals. It’s a bit odd… You know, when I’m driving, even though I always name my car after a woman, I can’t help but think of the phallic nature of the gear shift, the turn signal, the wipers dial… Inside my car almost feels like what’s outside myself… [Carl coughs.]

Pandrio: I think all of my writing, all of my stories, are about sex.

Carl: There’s a bad joke that driving, working all these knobs, is just practice for another kind of work.

Pandrio: I once wrote in a story that the only thing the narrator loved anymore was his car. And then I realized that that might be true for me.

Pasha: If only…

Carl: Steve Trevor, Wonder Woman’s love interest, is a black man in Morrison’s book. I think the character is written well and the added diversity is interesting, but it still seems like a way to be hip and make a stir and it plays on a Morrison-ian flaw. Black and white, man and woman--Morrison seems to play too much into these dualities. Another character he wrote in the previous century is a mixture of a white man and a black woman, as if in this combination we have the all of human existence… [Andrew yawns.] If you put it like that, you see his flaw pretty cleanly.

Pandrio: Not that my stories were pornography. There’s very little sex in… Just, it’s all fantasies. It’s all fetish. It was a way of finding myself. There’s almost always a couple at the center--the moral is almost always “stay together.”

Carl: Years pass, DC brings Rucka back by offering him Wonder Woman after a line-wide revamp. Now he gets to tell his Earth One story in the actual comic. In the interim, another character has been revised; Etta Candy, rather than Steve Trevor, is black in Rucka’s book. This seems odd if only because he uses the established black female character Amanda Waller. Both women are shapely, could be seen as positive body image models, and, unfortunately, at times come across as interchangeable.

Rucka’s book also seems to make a claim of ego: this new origin is tied with a story that recounts how all previous origins were false. This one must stand in as the true origin. It seems a weird claim, a 24 issue story that rejects a thousand other comics and seventy-five years of history. It includes a number of Rucka characters and becomes a celebration of his work in a sense. Throwing a bunch of different pieces together from his various DC works to see how they all work in one place.

Fred [in a ghostly voice]: Sounds familiar.

Carl: The book ultimately redeems itself, at least in my eyes. My eyes? [He looks up from the book. For the first time Carl seems aware of the audience. Suddenly he seems uncertain. He is like a paranoid man speaking to himself who learns that there have been people listening in all along.] What does it matter what I think? [He looks back down at the comic.]

Pasha: He looks back down at the comic. Hm… My work is often devoid of characters, or at least names, shadowy figures lie at the corner of the eye, the edge of vision, in the outskirts and far reaches of the campfire. My stories occur in the early morning, during staticky commercial breaks on the radio or illegal television stations. They end with the alarm clock, launching us out of nightmares.

[Carl fidgets in his seat like someone attempting to read with too much noise around or too much thoughts on the mind.]

Pandrio: So much of it was an expression of my hatred of a certain type of masculinity and use a romanticization of a certain type of woman.

Pasha: Woman…

Pandrio: I try to imagine writing a story that isn’t about desire. Lovecraft-ian terror. Like there’s an emotional necessity, take out the sex, plagued by the giant monsters of life, and our characters must go insane and hope for death.

Andrew [lighting a cigarette]: Bull shit. [Carl turns a page.] It’s all bullshit. Samuel R. Delany wrote a Wonder Woman issue once. Think about that, a gay black sci-fi writer wrote Wonder Woman in the early seventies. Ron Silliman would be proud.

Fred [ghostly but also groggily, speaking over Andrew]: Not making sense. Knot. May. King. Cents.

Andrew: It asks certain questions. Should Diana have powers? Doesn’t giving her powers make her not of this world?

Pasha: Not of this world, the point of fiction.

Carl [looking up at the audience, a new clarity in his eyes]: Wonder Woman, like Marvel’s Thor, frequently includes gods as characters. Of course pagan gods don’t really draw up the same stirring of emotions. And yet, the odd feeling of reading a character interacting with deities of immense power. Of creative potential. The superb oddity of meeting your maker.

Pandrio: When I created Carl he was a stand-in for me in a lot of ways. [Carl looks particularly uncomfortable.] Selena was a dream of a common language, one which I could actually use to talk to women.

Pasha: Women…

Pompo [removing a short pencil and notebook and turning to Pandrio]: Selena now is simply paper, like pages in a book. What does that mean?

Pandrio: Selena was fantasy that I found in fear. The original story involved some form of devotion Carl had… An over-devotion. I flirted with his end…

Andrew: That scene in The Omen where the woman says how much she cares for Damian as she kills herself…

Fred: That’s chilling, even for a ghost!

Carl: We think we understand this. It’s a common turn of phrase. So familiar that we refuse to acknowledge the true metaphysics of it. The grasp of such thought… and sure, comics never have to be self-serious, but the connections to mythology are obvious. We don’t consider the change in tense--the way that mythologies are never written in the present except as fictions… [Carl looks musingly down again. He removes from his bag a tape recorder, a baggie with marijuana, and a small bowl pipe.] But how vehemently atheist do I sound?

Pandrio: That’s the spirit! Exterminate the brutes of belief!

Pasha: Only a soulless person deals in absolutes.

Pandrio: Fuck you, Obi Wan! [turning to Pompo] In some ways, Selena was the most recent step in a constant walking off of my early stories. The vague misogyny of them, when I knew nothing of women, but rather of what men thought they knew of women. The disparaging inaccuracies that they were delighted to share of women… Growing up I… [he pauses, seems to look like a person unsure of continuing…]

Pasha: Growing up, once I realized it, I almost always identified with women. And not only that, but I hated men. I hated their humor, their toxicity, their complicity, their lack of multiplicity, the double standards that were always subliminally viewed in their logic. I hated the way men constantly felt progressive movements as a sort of loss. ...

Fred [interrupting, but Pasha does not react and keeps speaking]: You know...

Pasha: The way jokes about women voting were considered funny and not deeply disturbing.

It was a way to come to whiteness as well, as this was the masculinity I knew as a white man and as an observer of white men.

Fred: You know...

Pasha: The way no one seemed to remember that their fathers hung black men from trees. It was impossible not to hate your gender and race--they were easily, and simply toxic. And are. And unfortunately likely will be… [Pasha looks wistfully towards Pandrio who seems vaguely discomforted by his words.]

Fred [loudly, as if to speak over Pasha, who coincidentally has stopped speaking]: You know, that is why I killed myself!

Pandrio: Because you were one of us or one of them?

Andrew: Because he was always talked over and interrupted.

Carl [crinkling the bag as if to signal to the audience that he is about to partake in drugs]: Have you ever thought about how “You can’t smoke here” lines in television and movies are almost always presented simply to be walked back immediately? It’s like progress in America. We create these beautiful images of heaven, and then we walk back into hell. [He begins to pack the bowl and reaches in a pocket for a lighter.] Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence, but doesn’t have the forethought to keep his lover and children from being sold at the block when he dies. So much of the work of Lincoln’s country already undone within little more of a decade, when Hayes gives it all up--back to the Democrats it goes. Which then meant plantation owners trying to hold onto what was left of slavery any way they could. How the world changes; Republicans had won the war!

Andrew [audibly sighs, loudly]: Politics.

Carl [speaking intermittently while hitting the pipe]: Women go to work in the 1940s only to be thrown out of jobs in the ‘50s. As if just to show that a step forward need not be permanent. And it’s a joke of a transition, sure, but Wonder Woman stands as this empowered female utopian thinker from a place without where, Themyscira, a place which, in some versions, exists in a perpetual stalemate against the very god of war. As if we were always so close to the end of conflict--makes you think of the forthcoming movie and Gal Gadot marching around a world fighting the very war to end all wars… Wonder Woman is ripped from this mythological utopia which should be probably Greek or Mediterranean above anything else, and she’s thrown into this international conflict, and inevitably draped in the colors of America, once again pulled back to the American mean, the dark reality after we wake up from the country’s dream. [Carl hits the tape recorder, but we cannot see if he is hitting stop or start.]

Andrew: This is not an exit.

End Scene