COMICS REVIEW: X-FACTOR SPECIAL: PRISONER OF LOVE (1990)

Written by Jim Starlin

Art by Jackson Guice

Colored by Alfred Ramirez

Lettered by Michael Heisler

Edited by Bob Harras

Assistant Edited by Suzanne Gaffney

Editor-in-Chiefed by Tom DeFalco

Published as a 48 page one shot by Marvel Entertainment Group in 1990.

. . .

“Was Synthia nothing more than a hallucination caused by a bad hot dog?”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

You may find yourself walking through the city. You are alone. You are thinking about sex and adventure. Isn’t the city supposed to be a place of sex and adventure? Sure it is. 

And here you are . . .

Here’s something I pretty much always like: a superhero who dons a trenchcoat and a hat and goes trudging around the city, collar turned up, hands deep in their pockets. 

The Ninja Turtles did it in New York City. Ben Grimm did it in New York City. Iron Man did it in a sweltering hot Southeast Asian jungle-over that damn armor, even!

The Beast does it in New York City, too.

Hank McCoy, X-Man, aka the Beast, you know, the brainy blue-furred guy? Sounds like Fraiser Crane in the live action movies?

Hank’s feeling out of sorts with his fellow X-Men. He gets beat up a little bit during a Danger Room sparring match with Archangel and Iceman. Hank’s head isn’t in the game. Hank’s also feeling jealous of fearless leader Cyclops’ marriage to the beautiful psionic Jean Gray. Hank muses on whether he’ll ever have any kids. You know, maybe it’s just lust, but a pretentious intellectual like him needs to dress it all up so it’s more than just a desire to bust nuts. Antsy as hell, Beast pulls on a trenchcoat and a hat and goes for a stroll around NYC.

As he wanders, Beast monologues to himself. Not like a villain. Inside voice. More like a private eye narrating a film noir. Hank takes in the sights and sounds. He sees people of every color, every age, every gender, every class, every degree of wealth and well-being. Stockbrokers. Homeless people. Drug dealers. A kid bouncing a baseball off of a wall. A celebrity arriving at a pricey restaurant in a limousine. A vast and diverse panorama of humanity. Hank takes it in, and feels all alone all over again because he’s a damn mutie. Of course, for all he knows, there’s mutants all over the place, they just don’t show it like he does with his blue fur. Amusingly, Hank, in the depths of his self-pity, chooses to skate across the surface of things. 

The Beast perks up when a blonde bombshell is threatened by a goon squad in an alley armed with knives and a crowbar. This ain’t a friendly training sesh back in the Danger Room. Hank has an opportunity, now, to cut loose on some proper villains. Beast whips their asses, but he takes a blow to the head. He awakes to find himself in an apartment with the blonde bombshell attending to him. Her name is Synthia Naip. And she wants to fuck.

Okay, you know, this is a Marvel Comic from 1990. No crude words are used. Nothing’s explicit. But this story doesn’t shy away from being about lust and fantasy. The Beast is bored with sparring with those other square-ass X-Men. He has a thing for Jean Gray, but she’s already in a relationship. And while he muses about fatherhood, I wasn’t convinced he was looking for commitment so much as he was looking for action. He’s not out in the sticks. He is in New York City which is kinda known for having just about anything and anyone you could desire. Beast is horngry-horny and angry. The city provides. He gets into both a real fight and a quality hump.

Now, if this story was just that, then you could look at it as the X-Men Version of Letters to Penthouse.

Of course, things are not at all what they seem. 

Synthia Naip, as it turns out, is a manifestation of a potent cosmic energy being whose true form scans as a mountain of glowing crystal. Synthia’s on the run from an entity known as the Dark One, a grungy biker-looking dude whose true form is a grody tumor monster whatsit from beyond. Synthia is also a sort of energy vampire who seduces Beast to power herself up to fend off the Dark One. She even fucks with Hank’s mind, causing him to see hallucinations of his teammates as monsters. Their fucking also seems to have a narcotic effect upon Hank, who, in the depths of his lust, can’t bring himself to leave Synthia’s lair. She’s a cosmic femme fatale.

But she’s not necessarily a villain. The comic positions her as a being from another reality. Maybe she sees our world like virtual reality or something. Synthia claims she tried only feeding on those allied with the Dark One, but she just couldn’t resist a blue-furred hunk like him. This doesn’t necessarily make her sympathetic, but it’s hard to dismiss her as totally evil. Hank was looking for some transcendent ass, remember? In hindsight, it all seems to stem from a not-so-careful wish.

That’s X-Factor Special: Prisoner of Love. It’s a 48 page one shot whose story skirts the edges of one of those grandiose interdimensional conflicts common to superhero comics but decides to dwell in the realms of lust and forbidden desire. It’s all rather PG-13 in the visuals department, but the ideas are engaging enough. I especially enjoyed the idea of having a superhero comic which could be interpreted as an off-the-wall sex fantasy that manifests in the protagonist’s mind during a lone wander of the Naked City. 

You can’t be fighting Thanos every damn issue.

Why not spend a day fantasizing about a cosmically potent fuck?

COMIC STRIP COMIC BOOKIZATION REVIEW: THE ORIGINAL DICK TRACY #1 (1943, 1990)

Written and Drawn by Chester Gould

Color by Summer Hamilton

Published in September of 1990 by Gladstone Publishing.

Dick Tracy vs Mrs. Pruneface storyline was originally serialized in the Chicago Tribune July 16, 1943 through September 30, 1943.

. . .

“He must not choke to death.-Not now.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

You ever read the comic strips? Like they publish in the papers?

Do they still do those?

Do they still print comic strips in the papers?

Do they still publish newspapers?

I confess that even though I’ve always read comic books I never liked comic strips. Especially when I was a kid. Nowadays, I get the appeal. There are hardback book length collections of strips printed on high quality paper which gather entire story arcs into one place. You can read the storylines in sequence. You can appreciate the craft and ingenuity of artists working on deadline and within the strict limits of a few panels on the page. Peanuts. Doonesbury. Flash Gordon. Calvin and Hobbes. The Boondocks. Prince Valiant. 

Dick Tracy is the one I’m talking about right now. It was created in 1931 by Chester Gould. Gould drew it from 1931 until 1977. 

Think about that.

1931 to 1977.

Think about doing one job for 46 years. 

I’m thinking about it . . . and, well, I can’t really get my head around it. 

So, I’ll move on.

Now, strictly speaking, I’m not talking here about the Dick Tracy strip as its own thing. I’m talking about a 64 page comic book titled The Original Dick Tracy #1 published in September of 1990 which reprints one of the storylines which originally ran in the Chicago Tribune in four panel increments from July of 1943 through the end of September of that same year. The storyline is titled Dick Tracy vs Mrs. Pruneface. So, this comic book reprint is not starting from the first strip published in 1931 but is jumping ahead to 1943 for whatever reason. In an earlier strip, supercop Dick Tracy-who tends to be tough on crooks-killed a villain called Pruneface. Mrs. Pruneface is his vengeful widow. She’s determined to murder Tracy in a most gruesome fashion. Storm and stress ensue.

I dug The Original Dick Tracy #1 out of a completely non-organized longbox at a comic book store that seemed to be making more money off of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh than comics. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a dollar book. It was three bucks plus applicable sales tax. I clenched up. I worried that this was going to be twenty-some pages plus ads-a ripoff, in other words. I gave in to temptation. I paid the money. I liberated the comic from its bag and board prison, which went directly into the trash. I opened the book itself and read 64 pages of pictures’n’words with not a single advertisement to interrupt the flow which constituted a story with a beginning, middle, and end. I was not ripped off.

The story is mostly told from Mrs. Pruneface’s perspective. She’s a huge, strong woman with a ghoul’s face. She stalks, kidnaps, and tortures Dick Tracy. She leaves him pinned down by an innovative, if somewhat unlikely, deathtrap. She takes on a new identity as a French chef. Soon, she’s employed at a fancy hotel. In a fit of anger over having her belongings tampered with she bashes a man’s head in with a lamp. Her life is one of disguises and barely suppressed homicidal rage. This is not the Disney Version. This is a creepy trip into a psychopath’s inner hellscape. The cops aren’t even the ones who save the day. Mrs. Pruneface’s timebomb psychology collides with some civilians forced to defend themselves, and her ultimate end is kinda pathetic, really. Supercop Dick Tracy is basically a victimized onlooker in his own strip. When you lay the four panel increments end-to-end across 64 pages the whole thing has a relentless momentum to it. I was not ripped off.

So, I bought a comic book.

But it wasn’t really a comic book.

It was, in actuality, a run of comic strips extracted from the more than a decade old soap opera of Dick Tracy reprinted and recolored to fit into a comic book format as a complete story that you can read and enjoy.

And it was better than most actual new single issues of comics titles I’ve read in recent years which tend to be incremental hustles of never-to-be-resolved pseudostories that are, themselves, subaltern to ancillary movie, streaming, and videogame derivatives.

What a world.

MOVIE REVIEW: BOILING POINT (1990)

Written and directed by Takeshi Kitano 

Produced by Kazuyoshi Okuyama

Cinematography by Katsumi  Yanagishima 

Edited by Toshio Taniguchi 

Starring 

Yurei Yanagi as Masaki

Beat Takeshi as Uehara

. . .

"You should've swung your bat at least once. "

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Boiling Point is about a man who struggles to live up to the expectations of being a vengeful protagonist in a violent, harrowing crime movie. 

But we start things off in Act One real casual, kinda goofy, kinda like The Sandlot but with adults . . .

Masaki is a minor league baseball player who struggles to hit the ball. He doesn't really want to be at practice. He hides in the baseball field's restroom pretending to take lengthy shits in order to avoid the scorn of his teammates. Maybe he's constipated. Stress can do that to you. After getting struck out for the umpteenth time, Masaki goes off to sit by his lonesome in some tall grass. 

We find out that Masaki works at a gas station. Pumping gas. Wiping down windshields. Vacuuming interiors. Dumping ashtrays. Washing mud off tires. He has no zeal for this job, and can barely be bothered to show up on time.

Is Masaki depressed? Is he dissatisfied with his rut in life? He seems to feel trapped. 

One day, a gangster rolls into the gas station expecting full service only to be left waiting for an unreasonable amount of time by Masaki, who is supposed to be on duty as an attendant. The gangster lashes out with verbal abuse and violence. Masaki punches the gangster. This is the fatal mistake. The gangster has a whole gang of goons ready to lean on the gas station. Which they do. The rest of this film follows Masaki in his winding, often half-assed, quest for vengeance. 

Now, Masaki has the right idea. That yakuza guy was an asshole, and yakuza, generally, are crooks and exploiters, so there's no reason not to fight back . . .

. . . except for the stark reality that everyone else at the gas station is afraid to stand up to the gangsters, and prefer the safety of apology, appeasement, and self-abasement.

Also, Masaki isn't really a tough guy. Although he exists within a film with genre elements-gangster intrigues, vigilante justice, three act structure-Masaki is closer to being a person from real life than a genre protagonist. He's justifiably outraged, but he’s not someone with a capacity for violence. Masaki has no military training, nor is he inherently attracted to bloodshed. The guy is barely able to maintain normal conversations-perhaps due to shyness or social anxiety-let alone crack one-liners as he slaughters bad guys. In movie protagonist terms, Masaki is a loser. In real life terms, Masaki is just trying to get by like billions of other people on the planet. 

This is Masaki's dilemma: can he-a Real Life Person-survive ordeals that usually call for a Violent Movie Protagonist? 

Well . . .

Masaki and one of his baseball bros decide to leave the sticks for the big city of Okinawa. The plan is to purchase illegal firearms so they can go shoot up the bogus real estate offices where the yakuza bullies hold court. Masaki and his friend don't divulge specifics to We the Audience of how they hope to buy guns which are severely restricted by law in Japan. It seems like a bit of a fishing expedition. Big cities are places of crime and guns. Want a gun? Go to the big city! I also wasn't clear if we're just supposed to be aware that it's common knowledge that you can purchase firearms from American military personnel stationed in Okinawa. This was a surprise to me, in any case.

But before Masaki and his bro can buy the illegal guns, they need a hookup. This hookup is a gangster named Uehara. Uehara is in big trouble with his boss for spending money recklessly, and drinking to excess. Uehara is also a walking timebomb who revels in torture, rape, and murder, but the boss is just like, "The money, Lebowski!"

Uehara hijacks the Second Act. Masaki and his bro go out 'partying' with Uehara and his sworn bro . . . and it's a wonder any of them survive. Complete tonal shift. The slackery vibe of Act One is gone, and we are on a nonstop death trip with the frightful demon beast that is Uehara. The situations of Act One induced a certain anxiety. Uehara's pitiless, stony gaze may induce panic in some viewers who stay through Act Two. 

Now, Uehara's problem is that he's too good at being a Violent Movie Protagonist. Uehara makes Charles Bronson look like Mr. Belvedere. Uehara makes Frank Booth-the Dennis Hopper villain from Blue Velvet-look like Tickle Me Elmo. Uehara makes Chuck Norris look like a Teletubby. Hell, Uehara makes John Wick look like Keanu Reeves. 

Uehara has no problem making the necessary moves to buy military grade hardware from an American soldier. Uehara has no hesitation when it comes to obliterating his own boss and those who stand with the boss. Uehara cares not for any innocent people who get caught in the crossfire. Hey, disregard for civilian deaths is kinda baked-in to any form of warfare including gang warfare. But Uehara also seems to relish his own destruction which is where the guy kinda seals his doom. In a completely amoral universe, you can live a life of total depravity, but if your appetite for destruction consumes even your own life . . . 

. . . well . . .

. . . guess that means Masaki's carrying the baton for Act Three. 

I suppose it's a spoiler to say that Masaki survives as long as he does. Although after his ordeal with Uehara, he might wish he had been killed with the others massacred in Okinawa. 

Don't get me wrong. My heart is with Masaki on this one. But this is a guy who's barely equipped to hold down his gas station job let alone confront the heart of madness that drives Boiling Point to its jaw-dropping climax. Yes, there is a helluva payoff to this elliptical, confounding, and punitive film experience. The pettiness, stupidity, and sadism that suffuse the asinine conflicts demand some spectacle of mayhem, I suppose. We begin in a world without any moral order, and Masaki, in his blundering, imposes . . . something . . . upon this mess-

-unless he doesn't. 

The end returns us to the baseball field's restroom, wherein Masaki lingers over his phantom bowel movement. Was it all a B-Movie phantasia in the mind of an anxiety-ridden minor leaguer? Did Masaki carry over his Save Data into New Game+? Does Masaki-at long last-get to drop a fat shit? 

Maybe we need a cartoon owl to start licking on some lollipops to find out for sure.

Boiling Point fucks with you like that. 

POETIC VIDEO GAME REVIEWS #20: WIZARDRY: PROVING GROUNDS OF THE MAD OVERLORD/OVERLOAD (NES VERSION) (1990)

stalking dark corridors

the treasure can't be trusted

if it's not booby trapped

it's a monster in disguise

our greed turned against us

gotta go slow

embrace the methodical

speed kills 

ten floors deep

wireframe and theatrical flat suggestions

of blando corridors 

you'd think the domains of some maniacal wizard would be more flamboyant 

but this monotony could all be to a purpose:

drive the enemy out with confusion and tedium 

leave theatrical evil to Count Dracula and his aristocratic indulgences 

Werdna's austerities of form and place have their own anti-distinctive protective mojo 

leave the seductions and the spectacles to the pretentious bloodsuckers of this world 

maybe this is Werdna's Way

of evoking a monstered community

ravaged'n'hollowed out

by capital-as-per-usual

fuck the hero quest

this is some kind of an eviction, 

ain't it?

play it with a homebrew OST

of sounds of demolition 

chatter of trash-out crews

heroic dungeoneering no more

now the party's doing a slow motion tear down

of some unwanted, unauthorized Labyrinth

that the state has turned a blind eye to

for far too long

no doubt the Mad Overlord's gonna turn it all into a shopping mall combined with underground Apocalypse shelters for all his oligarchic friends 

THE NEXT EVOLUTION OF PREMIUM RETAIL SURVIVALIST LIFESTYLE IMMERSION 

brochures come to mind

you

the player character 

ain't even really playing at anything

you roll up a crew 

you're gathering workers 

you

the player

are just some form of

uh

what?

a . . . spooky supervisory consciousness 

that'll do 

minimal interface

strip out the human

rationalized processes of erasures 

the hardcore gamers are like "fuck the story" 

which is good basis

for trash-out supervisory consciousness 

Werdna

or so I hear

got rehoused

inside that blazing bland low-cost development 

Werdna's pension's just enough to cover it

better than getting disappeared by the Mad Overlord's secret police,

I guess,

but His Madness is trying to put on a happier global capitalist face

and Werdna's not making a stink

and he's got Murphy's Ghost to keep him company,

now there's a sad sack spirit,

the Murphy's (Law) Ghost

wandering the blazing blando development 

mutter-composing some endless letter

chronicling his great unrecognized Protagonist-hood 

to some fanbase 

that only exists inside Murphy's spectral skull

well,

least Murphy's still got that hustle

however much of a Godot Routine it might be

Werdna's just staring into television 

drinking beer after beer

likes them microwaveable Santa Fe rice and beans

and the Swedish meatballs are just fine,

too

heard that the Mad Overlord's in talks with Count Dracula to do something special with the newly renovated underground 

say,

player,

they're gonna need you 

to crew-the-fuck-up 

put on some security theatre for the influx of oligarchs and fugitive war criminals 

looking to occupy

some newly valuable space

pays well

or so I hear

-June-December 2021  

The Lynch Meditations 12: Wild at Heart (1990)

"Everything's bigger in Texas!"
-Former Texas Governor Rick Perry

Okay. Wild at Heart works a little better for me this time. It's basically a hallucinatory redneck soap opera pervert version of The Wizard of Oz. Or something like that.

David Lynch isn't exactly a redneck himself . . . so is this cultural appropriation? Redneck-sploitation? I'd be lying if I told you I actually gave a fuck one way or another. I've known some rednecks. They inspire little to no pity in my heart. Hey, they got their Fake President trump, right? I'm sure they're all wealthy and healthy and free of opioid addictions and have secure employment and all those bigly income tax refunds are no doubt buyin' every last one of their dreams and aspirations.

No Spoilers . . . so I'll just describe my favorite scene:

Two lovers
Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern
on the run into the night
riding in their super-cool convertible
headlights barely pushing back the darkness
they see clothes scattered across the highway
and a car run off the road, headlights on
so our lovers pull off to investigate
to find the corpse of a man lying beneath the bestilled car's headlights

a young woman comes staggering out of the dark
gibbering semi-coherently about losing her pocket
due to a massive head wound-presumably incurred in the crash
Cage and Dern follow the young woman around some trees
trying to coax her to get into their car,
drive into town,
drop her off at an emergency room,
somethin'

but the scene is also about two of the living
trying to call a dying soul back
fighting against the gravity of the abyss

in a film filled with goofy grotesques, rape, sexual violence, incest, and hysterical overacting
this is an unexpectedly poignant moment.

Oh, and that bit about shooting a porno Texas Style-that was funny. I dug that.

NEXT: 4/8/18: Twin Peaks Episode 8 (1990)

The Lynch Meditations 10: Twin Peaks Pilot Alternate Version (1990)

This is basically the same as the broadcast pilot but with an ending involving a one-armed man discharging a revolver into another man presented as Laura Palmer's killer, and an extended dream sequence shot for a later episode involving Agent Dale Cooper in the Black Lodge and listening to the Man in the Red Suit as he says weird shit, and then does a dance.

I'm trying to avoid spoilers if you've never seen Twin Peaks. I don't know how much longer I can hold out. Once I get to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, I'll probably be at Full Spoilers, so be warned.

If you've seen Twin Peaks, like I have, I'm guessing you are going to be underwhelmed by this alternate version of the pilot, though it is not terribly done in and of itself. I consider it largely superfluous-an artifact of the convoluted processes of getting a network contract for an entire series as opposed to a movie that truly stands on its own.

I first watched this alternate version sometime in late 1999 or early 2000. I recall renting a Warner Home Video VHS at a Blockbuster, confused that the real deal pilot was nowhere to be found in terms of an official release ("official release" . . . sounds kinky!) and so I had to tape the actual pilot during a rebroadcast on one of the cable networks that was re-running some-but not all-of the Season One and Season Two episodes. I want to say it was the Bravo channel, but I don't recall, exactly.

Anyways, all this confusion really doesn't matter anymore. The complete run of all three seasons of Twin Peaks has been released in numerous formats, and if you try hard enough or spend enough money you can get 'em all in one place, and watch 'em real convenient-like. Such is the wonder of our digital age!

Onwards . . .

NEXT: 3/8/18: Twin Peaks Episode Two (1990)

The Lynch Meditations 9: Twin Peaks Broadcast Pilot (1990)

"She's filled with secrets."

Logging machinery sharpens its own teeth as the music of mystery plays.

An endless parade of actor names blink on to the screen-how many people are in this show? What kind of a name is 'Ontkean?' Is that the name of a murderer?

A sad and beautiful woman puts on makeup in front of a mirror only to turn towards the camera just so-as though she were suddenly aware of the camera, and now cheating out to the audience to reveal an eerily powdered face.

A fisherman kisses his hand and touches his wife's ear before going out to the shore to discover a woman's corpse wrapped in plastic.

The police show up to take pictures of the corpse, make a preliminary identification, and a tall, goofy looking cop weeps openly despite the admonitions of his superior to handle his business. Apparently, this policeman weeps at the sight of the fallen.

The cops try to keep a lid on the news of the identity of the murdered young woman, carefully regulating the dissemination of the information to the immediate family . . .

. . . but soon enough the word gets out: Laura Palmer has died. And the specter of grief prowls the community of Twin Peaks bringing shock and tears to many who learn of Laura's death. Apparently, this young woman was well regarded in her home town. She was popular, beautiful, smart, the golden child.

Of course, this is all revealed to be partially a facade of perfectionism covering soul-deep misery, uncertainty, and a fear of secret, all-consuming evil, but this first episode concentrates on the ripples of grief and heartbreak emanating in all directions from the carefully wrapped corpse of Laura, what her death means symbolically to those who knew her or knew of her. Her death is a small town version of the murder of JFK: a catalyst for bringing to the surface deep-seated conflicts that go beyond the mere mechanics of murder-of an aggressor taking the life of their victim-and into the realm of metaphysical conspiracy.

When an admired person is senselessly killed, we struggle to make sense of why such a person had to die and in such a pointless, brutal fashion. Surely there must be some larger significance than the anger and entitlement of the perpetrator triumphing over the life of the victim. A lone asshole with a gun-Lee Harvey Oswald-murdered an American president, and we, as a nation, have never been able to live that down. How can one miserable piece of shit strike so deep into the heart of the nation all on his own? Surely there must be some far-flung conspiracy, some allegorical significance?

But in America, lone pieces of shit with guns strike deep into the national heart all the time, usually by slaughtering scores of unarmed children attending public schools. Sane gun control would pretty much end these crimes, but American society is infected with an irrational belief in a kind of interpersonal militarism that mandates that each person is all alone and must provide for their own security at all times by becoming a soldier in the army of one ready to shoot anyone who poses a threat at all times . . . but I digress.

Twin Peaks is a fictional construct, and so it is, by design, full of secrets, constructed to be rich with internally logical allegory and symbolism, and, yes, Laura Palmer's death is not just another sad and sickening outcome of America's longstanding culture of violence toward women-indeed, she will be revealed to be at the nexus of a vast metaphysical struggle worthy of George Lucas and J.R.R. Tolkien.

But in this first episode, we have yet to rocket off into the realms of high Lynchian weirdness. We are essentially presented with a realistic, if quirky, police procedural involving a joint FBI-Twin Peaks PD investigation into Laura Palmer's murder. The large cast of characters-all those names popping up in the opening credits-exist to give various layers of depth to the story, to allow a nuanced, meandering exploration of the ripple effects of grief, and to provide a wide array of possible suspects within the mainline murder mystery plot.

This pilot episode runs about ninety-three minutes, and almost plays as a self-contained feature-length film, save for its cliffhanger ending, and abundance of characters and clues which have yet to be satisfactorily paid off by episode's end. The pilot assembles a large cast, and establishes a distinctive look and tone with simple, direct filmmaking. It isn't nearly as weird as the episodes to come-this is the David Lynch that would go on to make The Straight Story, not so much the Lynch of Wild At Heart, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr., or Inland Empire.

But the weirdness is coming.

In fact, there's another version of this pilot-a misbegotten twin that leaned hard into the desire for tidy endings in order to secure a release as a stand alone movie for European television . . .

NEXT: 2/26/18: Twin Peaks Pilot: Alternate International Version (1990)

BOOK REVIEW: THE FEELIES (1990)

by Mick Farren

Originally published in 1978 by Michael Dempsey/Big O publishing. 
Revised version published June 1990 by Del Rey Books.

PLEASE NOTE: This review is based solely on the revised edition.

...

"Those who remain in the real world will be those who are able to accept reality for what it is."

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Combined Media has got a future for you, my friend, if you can afford it. They call it Integrated Entertainment, or IE for short. IE is a mixture of life support system, and virtual reality via chemical/electrical stimulation of your central nervous system. You can seal yourself into a self-contained bed, have the IE techs run nutrient drips into your veins, put your respiratory and circulation systems in sync with life support apparatus, insert a cybernetic feedback array into your brain, and you're ready to techno-trip balls for the rest of your days. No more messy interactions with a world filled with crime, drug resistant disease, poverty, and people who will always be smarter, more beautiful, and more successful than you. Once you plug into IE you can be Billy the Kid, a paperback space pirate, the Marquis de Sade, or a Ku Klux Klansman-it's all doable. Nothing is forbidden. After all, it's inside your own head. As long as you got a triple AAA credit rating, you're good to go.

IE is the central technological commodity that powers a grim New York City in Mick Farren's The Feelies, a lean, insightful dystopian novel about the consequences of building a capitalist economy around a powerful form of escape from flesh and blood reality. IE, at first, is only for the super rich. Well, not really super rich, just those who have triple AAA credit ratings. The poor are left to fend for themselves by joining ultraviolent street gangs, or to work mindless jobs maintaining the IE infrastructure. The smart ones have signed up with the militarized police forces who have formed themselves into heavily armed and armored CRAC (City Combat and Riot) squads who love nothing better than busting civilian heads. If you can't be one of the ones born to wealth, status, and a guaranteed life of ease working in the upper echelons of corporate leadership then at least you don't have to be one of the little people. You can put on a uniform, grab a truncheon or an assault rifle, and lord it over the lowly shitizens.

Or, if you're ambitious, lucky and attractive enough, you can land a role on the Reality TV anticipating Wildest Dreams, a kind of R-rated Double Dare-style game show built around inane trivia games and sexually humiliating obstacle courses. The unwashed masses go nuts for the insta-celebrities who make it on to this show, often times mobbing the stars when they make publicity appearances or stalking them in their own neighborhoods.

More disturbing ideas float to the surface: all those cameras down at the subway station? Rumor has it that no one's watching the feed anymore. Even the pan-optic surveillance infrastructure is crumbling. No one is in control, even though everyone is fighting to maintain the illusion of control.

Farren's book alternates chapters following a handful of central characters, a selection of random citizens, samples from various IE fantasies, and the machinations of the corporate officers to give a fast-paced but comprehensive portrayal of Combined Media's infiltration and lockdown of human consciousness at the individual level. Two people emerge as significant point-of-view characters: Ralph, an alcoholic technician who services the IE beds, and Wanda-Jean, an underemployed pill popper who pursues her dreams of becoming a celebrity on Wildest Dreams. Neither of these characters are anti-corporate messiah material, nor are they meant to be. Farren's intention is to show how these two all-too-average beings respond to their growing awareness of the absolutely fucked nature of the world around themselves. Ralph and Wanda-Jean are both funny and grimly authentic.

Eventually, CM decides to offer IE at economy prices to draw in the masses. The implication is that only the most down and out and the super wealthy will remain outside of the VR fantasy trip. And then . . . a final showdown between the haves and the have-nots? Farren doesn't say. In the end, even the powers that be seem to be in thrall to the economic paradigm they've unleashed. No great visionary or rebel messiah shall emerge to save humanity from being enslaved by the New Corporate Predator State. It's a beast which cannot be defeated or satisfied. It can only self-destruct.