Waltzing With Apocalypse

Interesting visual parallels between Waltz with Bashir and Apocalypse Now that show the surrealism of war.  The first is Folman’s head emerging from the Mediterranean with the lights from Beruit lighting up his face.  He appears transfixed as he as is drawn slowly towards the city and the massacre that is yet to happen. The second is the surfing scene.  Ronnie Dayag and Frenkle lounging on a beach where soldiers are doing drugs and trying to avoid becoming friendly fire casualties.

There are other scenes where Waltz seems to have taken cues from Apocalypse.  Little bits of surreal dialog pepper both movies. “How should I know?  Look for a bright light.  That’s usually where they dump bodies” is equal to the answer Capt. Willard gets when he asks a soldier who is in charge: “I thought you were Sir.”

In Waltz and Apocalypse nobody seems to be in charge.  Ariel Sharon on his ranch and General Corman in his air-conditioned trailer in Vietnam are nominally in command and both could probably point to maps and intelligence reports to sum up the current military situation, but you get the impression that neither has any idea of what is going on with the rank and file.  If they did then massacres and renegade Colonels wouldn’t happen.  Or perhaps it is unavoidable.  As Corman says when he orders Willard to find and terminate Kurtz: “…there’s a conflict in every human heart between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil. The good does not always triumph. Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.”

Sometimes a movie…-Travis

I must say I found something in common with both novels at my completion; I was shocked that they were completed so early.  In complete agreement with Jared, I truly felt that the graphic novel of Waltz with Bashir was a meager attempt to place in literature something that was better served on screen.  I am very appreciative of the quality of the artwork and the was incredibly distraught when i discovered that the quality of each page was so fine that I was leaving finger prints on each amazing image.  The illustrations are clearly of a literal effect, almost an exact cartoonic re-crafting of the real world, unlike Asterios Polyp which enlisted very simplistic lines for effects.

The plot was simple enough, and there seems to be no end to the discourse of unreliable memory, but it was truly the “Waltz with Bashir” that officially left me in the text.  The waltz amidst the gunfire seemed to portray an incredibly dramatic scene the likes of which I really felt like I needed some background music, popcorn, and a more comfortable seat to appreciate.  I understand that there were other dynamic scenes in the work (like the sniper-work on the beach) but the entire piece seemed to culminate at that one moment to attain the most “drama”, as if time were at a stand still so that Frenkel could complete his waltz amidst a world that I thought would be focusing on the action across town.  I guess pictures just didn’t do it for me.

I actually did like the novel, short as it was.  I was more fixed on the quality of the pictures than of the story or characters, but who can argue against me there?  With such a short story and no great amount of character development, it is difficult to have much more with which to bargain.  I am looking forward to seeing more movies created with this animated appeal as I’m also tired of disney and pixar look to animation (although the movies are commonly funny).

Religion in Exit Wounds and Waltz With Bashir

(The following discussion focuses on a tiny element of this week’s texts, and I make no claim that the issues of religion are a paradigm-shaping theme in either narrative. However, I do think that the way religion appears or disappears is very interesting as a picture of the artists and the society they portray.)

When I first read these two stories, both dealing with the impact of wars with significant religious inflection, I was surprised to find so little exploration of the actual beliefs and subsequent behaviors of the combatants and victims. Waltz With Bashir particularly mentions that the perpetrators of the massacre which drives the protagonist’s search for his own actions are Christians, even mentioning that they carved crucifixes on their victims as a precursor to the massacre, but no real explanation of their position or beliefs other than the simple label “Christian Phalanges” appears in the novel. While such an omission could be merely because these facts would be apparent to anyone reading the account in Israel or Palestine, I think that combined with an earlier scene, the unspoken method of presenting religion without explanation actually mirrors the way religion is perceived by the artists.

On page 31, the soldiers in the tank debate over what to do. One offers up the suggestion that they pray, while another argues that shooting is more effective, and that you should pray while you shoot if you have to pray at all. Importantly, no mention of what belief system the prayer would fit into appears, nor do we see any praying soldiers, merely apocolyptic streaks of fire as the soldiers reject appeals to spiritual authority and instead become the life-and-death authorities. Despite this attempt to control their own situation, the powerlessness of the authority taken appears in the very next scene, as the desperate soldiers drive up to an point where death has taken over, and the soldiers merely take charge of the remains of anonymous corpses.

Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds, though it presents religion as much more present, seems to regard it again as merely a superficial covering of a person’s behavior, rather than any significant influence for changed life patterns. Numi makes some very bitter and political statements about the exclusion of unidentified bodies from Jewish cemeteries, and Kobe’s father Gabriel appears to have embraced the appearance of Judaism for the sake of his new wife, but neither of these actions appears to have any weight for Kobe, and, since the values Kobe represents don’t seem to be significantly different from the narratives’ themes (though naturally he undergoes change, as all traditional protagonists tend to), I generally take his view of his father’s religion as that which the narrative presents as fact. In that view, Gabriel’s piety becomes a complete sham, a shell he uses to hide from his wife the fact that before (and perhaps even during) their marriage he pursued sexual relationships with several women, some of them very young like Numi, some women his own age who were married to other men – all of them profoundly unethical, involving multiple betrayals. In light of this kind of relational viciousness, Gabriel’s facade of religiosity appears as nothing more than a sop for his overly gullible wife, who also seems to have her sincerity undercut by the anger she displays when Gabriel is late while Kobe waits.

All in all, the appearances of religion seem very similar in these graphic novels to the elusive “truth” that both portray the protagonists searching for. Whether it is the guilt one has no high power to absolve one of, or the pain from absence that is part of no providential plan, religion offers no comfort for the characters. Often, instead, it exacerbates the problems. However, the authors’ attitudes towards religion leaves the underlying motives behind this treatment difficult to discern. Since they provide no real presentation of the beliefs which motivate the atrocities, whether massive in scale or subtly emotional, the result is a world which functions on a surface level on the spiritual plane, using labels and images (such as the crucifix or Star of David) as an excuse or condemnation rather than exploration. The lack of curiosity here displayed does rather interest me, even though I cannot really say I have a conclusion to the issue presented by the two texts.

Reality of PTSD

When I finished reading Waltz with Bashir I was not sure what to make of the novel as a whole. The reality and brutality it portrays and the journey to rediscover that reality and bring it to light.  But when I was able to set the novel down and step back I was drawn back to the article we read with Maus on PTSD. I feel that this graphic novel really captures the stress of trauma and the power of the mind to both cover up and remember traumatic events.  While reading I often found myself trying to figure out the chronology of events as the novel jumps from one person’s memories to another person’s, and going from an anecdote back to the memory of the war.  The Traumatic Stress article notes that the difference between a stressed person and someone suffering with PTSD is that “they start organizing their lives around the trauma” (6).  The closed nature of a novel, and the fact that this novel is one man’s journey to uncover the reality behind one particular memory, for me, presents the tension and stress behind trauma, war, loss, etc. that the other graphic novels we have read about war were not able to capture.

The novel begins with the image of the hungry wolf-like dogs hunting down the narrator, which immediately put me on guard for what would come — it set up a sense of insecurity, entrapment, fear which parallels the feelings created from PTSD.  And then the novel ends with the abrupt switch to actual photos from the massacre that has remained in a limbo state between real memories and false/uncertain memories, but then becomes too real.  The reality of the final images i think shows the power of the mind to forget such images, and the power of the mind to protect oneself from those images and memories.

Exit Wounds

I was kind of at a lost as to what to write about in terms of Exit Wounds. Like discussion on the Twitter shows, I just wasn’t sure why this graphic novel received such mass amounts of praise, recognition, and awards. Upon finishing the book I was at a complete loss as to what made people think it was such a substantial piece of work. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed the story, and I didn’t have the desire to put it down out of boredom once; however, it also didn’t strike me as something that would be on Time Magazine’s best graphic novels of 2008 list. I just didn’t think the love story or the mystery story were that original, or that amazing, and the art left something to be desired.

Maybe it’s the subtlety with which Modan goes about conveying themes and meanings that made me sort of miss the triumph of the book on the first time around. After reading the interview and some others’ blog posts, I can see I missed a lot of the successes of the book. For instance, I automatically assumed when characters were talking about suicide bombings that they were directly referencing the Palestinians, but as Joe Sacco points out, they are never actually mentioned. In some ways, my assumption is exactly the point Modan is trying to convey: this conflict is so very everyday to those who live in Israel/Palestine, as well as those of us who watch CNN or BBC.

I also didn’t really bat much of an eye at the fact that we don’t meet Gabriel the entire book. I guess it was another assumption I made that plot-wise Modan would either choose to Gabriel discovered (in one way or another) or make him end up being dead. It wasn’t until John pointed out that his absence is “haunting” the text that I put anymore thought into it. That, combined with Phineas’s post about the title pointing out that people are scarred by others’ exits, and therefore absences, made me realize that Modan could never actually let the reader see Gabriel in order for the love story between Koby and Numi to have weight.

In the end, I find a lot more to be impressed about by Exit Wounds, but I guess I still take issue with so much of the brilliance being in what is left out, than what is actually there. I think this is why I was generally unimpressed to being with: what we are presented with is a fairly average story. What Modan actually shows us and gives us isn’t this spectacularly brilliant thing until we realize that something is missing, that this is unusual, unique, and brilliant because it is somehow out of the norm of the way real life is.

Dissonance

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of cognitive dissonance.

Direct from Wikipedia:

Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions.[2] Dissonance is also reduced by justifying, blaming, and denying. It is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology.

What I get from this theory is that people have an idea of what they are. Mostly we believe that we are good people. But what happens when we are placed in a situation that causes us to come face to face with the cracks in our humanity? On top of Waltz with Bashir being a pretty clear case of PTSD, I also think it deals with this notion of dissonance.

In this graphic novel we are led through Ari Folman’s quest to recover his memories of the 1982 Lebanon War. As reader’s we are aware that soldiers are asked to do and witness some pretty traumatizing events. But what was it about the massacre that led him to completely wipe his memories of what occurred? Did he corner a group of women and children and then was asked to kill them? Maybe some of us were slightly confused by the passive role he played in the massacre, as in how could just lighting a few flares create enough guilt to erase a chunk of memory?

In reality, the leap from doing something like lighting the way and actually being a part of murder is not that hard to make. I can say from personal experience that doing nothing is almost as culpable as actually taking a part. And both acts will change or haunt a person.

Wounds from Exiting

From Wikipedia: “An injury in which an object enters the body or a structure and passes all the way through is called a perforating injury, while penetrating trauma implies that the object does not pass through.[2] Perforating trauma is associated with an entrance wound and an often larger exit wound.” Source

This is what I assumed the title of Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds referred to. I guess given the cover and images of explosions and Israel and my general knowledge of what an “exit wound” is, I made the assumption that there would be some kind of physical trauma. When I reached the end of the book, I’d completely forgotten about the title because it did not seem applicable to my reading until I looked back at it afterward.

Rereading the title suddenly put an interesting framework around the entire story for me: The novel is about the wounds left behind by someone’s exit from out lives. Perhaps this was obvious to everyone else immediately and I’m just a total idiot who wasn’t paying attention, but it really changed my view of the whole piece. In reading the Twitter feed and some of the posts prior to mine, it seemed that many people had a similar reaction to me in that I wasn’t quite sure what the story was about. Like Kelly there didn’t seem to be any closure for me. However, my new-found insight from the title does give me closure.

Essentially the whole book isn’t about Koby and Numi searching for Gabriel and finding him (as others have pointed out already), but is instead about the effects Gabriel’s exit has had on them. The ramifications of his abandonment of his family and various lovers is the central theme of the story. But it is more than just Gabriel’s abandonment, but also Koby’s mother Aviva’s death. The exits of these characters (or are they non-characters since we never meet them?) leave everyone that’s left in a completely different world.

I think the term “exit wound” is appropriate for this kind of psychological trauma, the after effects of the initial entrance wound are often much larger. In the case of Modan’s book, the ramifications of Aviva’s death continue to expand outward, injuring more and more people as Gabriel and Koby’s suffering continues and is projected, creating more and more exits and subsequent wounds. In this context, the ending does provide some closure, since both Koby and Numi choose not to make additional exits. Koby comes back and Numi doesn’t walk away like she says she will. In some ways this potential relationship (though clearly not solidified yet) closes the exit wounds both characters are suffering from.

Ending Exit Wounds

Reading Rutu Mordan’s Exit Wounds leaves me thinking “What’s the point?” I don’t mean this question to be in the typical sense, about questioning whether or not the graphic novel has a point, but rather, I think it is interesting to think about what Modan sees as being the “main storyline” of the work. If one was reading this graphic novel as a plot for Koby to find his father and Numi to find her once lover, who is also Koby’s father, then the book would be disappointing. Yes, Koby does “find” his father by finding his father’s new home and new wife, but he doesn’t meet Gabriel, nor do we get to see him by the end of the book. In that sense, the book would lack closure, perhaps, but I can’t make myself see the search for Gabriel as the point of the book. Rather, I see the search for Gabriel as a means to tell the story.

The point could be a practice in looking at Koby and Numi as they come together through their struggles about their own flaws and supposed shortcomings (Koby and his father issues and Numi and her physical hang-ups). It could be showing how the characters push aside inadequacies in order to overcome their loss (of Gabriel through his abandonment of both characters in different ways). I think to this point, Lindsay makes a lot of good point about how the book is painted by victimization.

I think what really led me to the question of what was Modan’s point was the fact that by the end of the book, I didn’t feel like the end was really the end. The book didn’t feel resolved, and I don’t believe that was simply because I didn’t get to see Gabriel by the end. Like Koby in the last panel, I’m left free-floating, not necessarily in plot but in feeling. Okay, they didn’t find Gabriel, but Koby and Numi found each other; I just didn’t and don’t think that the story could be left literally hanging without me feeling like the ending was a little abrupt. However, I do feel like that’s pretty unfair of me to ask for more at the same time because I’m not sure what else I would really want to see. I think it’s better we didn’t see Gabriel; I’m okay with Koby being with Numi, I think; but by the end of the graphic novel, I’m left suspended (which undoubtedly reminds me of the end of Fun Home, visually and psychologically but the latter in a different way).

I suppose this is the part of my post where I remark that the “left in the air” or perpetual juggling without falling was Modan’s point in ending this graphic novel the way that she did, and maybe, to that end, a lot of others found that ending to be effective, but for whatever reason (one that’s increasingly elusive to find), I can’t make myself be completely satisfied with the ending of Exit Wounds, even if I can see Modan’s point in leaving us always coming down to earth with Koby. Maybe I’m just over the “in media res” abrupt endings…

~Kelley

Illustrating a movie

While I liked Waltz with Bashir, the movie was better. Perhaps this comes from the fact that I watched the movie before approaching the graphic novel, or watched the movie a second time as part of a film class (Terrorism, Conflict, and Resistance), which helped me gain a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding the massacres at Shabra and Shatila. Either way, I felt the graphic novel was just an attempt to re-create– word-for-word, scene-for-scene–the movie. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I appreciated the muted tones and harrowing message of the graphic novel. It just couldn’t quite succeed in creating a haunted feel the way the movie does. There are two specific reasons why I feel the movie does more to Folman’s story than the graphic novel: music, and disjointed, moving images. One of Folman’s only memories of the war places him in the ocean as flares light up the sky over the Shabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon (11–13). He walks away from the sea and sees crowds of people swarming past him. In the graphic novel, these are powerful images, but contrast them with these:

Something about the way the camera shifts around him as the slow, sublime music plays in the background makes the scene even more haunting. The camera shifts and stuttering crowds create an effect that just can’t be gained with pictures alone. Perhaps more moment-to-moment shifts in the graphic novel would have better conveyed what exactly is happening and the tragedy it signifies, but reading the graphic novel, I just never felt tragedy the way the movie does. It just all goes by too quickly.

At other times in the movie, Folman glorifies war in stark contrast to the overall message of both the graphic novel and movie. For example, the scene that takes place on the beach with people surfing, smoking and drinking (before most of the men have seen real combat or witnessed a massacre) (46–47), does little justice to the movie’s Apocalypse-Now-like scene with a punk song playing over glorified war images:

Scenes like this don’t exist in the graphic novel at all. We are merely provided the memories of people who were there and the tale of a person trying to understand his part in the conflict. In a story about a massacre told by the son of people who were in Auschwitz during one of the biggest massacres in history, these scenes help provide an important, satirical viewpoint of war, unintended casualties and the real price paid, especially later, when the Phalangists knowingly and purposefully kill thousands of Palestinian refugees for revenge. I felt that the lack of glorified war scenes (or the inability to pull them off in a novel form) took away an important juxtaposition in the film and because there’s no music (you have to admit, that song is catchy), the graphic novel loses a big emotional element.

Since the pictures and dialogue in the graphic novel follow the film almost exactly, I feel like I’m left with a lesser text. I’ve often heard some people say “why read a book when you can watch the movie?” Of course, as English majors, we all know the books are better in 99.9% of cases. But what happens when the book comes after the award-winning movie? Well, why read the book, when you can watch the movie?

I’ll leave you with two additional clips from the movie (the waltz and the rocket scene) that the graphic novel tries to recreate, and comes close, but just quite can’t capture the effect I felt when I watched the pictures move to a stunning score juxtaposed with interviews in a way that makes for a more complete text in my opinion.

Look at the struggle for the gun. Listen to the music. It’s an amazing scene that the graphic novel just can’t recreate. And it also does a great job of overlaying interviews with the historical “footage” that is important to Folman’s story as someone trying to piece together the massacre he was a part of, but can’t remember.

Jump to about 2:45 and watch the way the rocket tracks slowly through the woods before they kill a kid. It’s amazing filmmaking.

Maybe I’m just being grumpy because I expected more from the graphic novel. I enjoyed reading it, but it felt like a lesser experience. For anyone who liked the graphic novel, I recommend checking out the movie, which you should be able to watch on YouTube.

Victimization in Exit Wounds

While reading the interview in the back of Exit Wounds, Modan’s discussion about victimization was particularly enlightening (p. 183).  She says that the Exit Wounds is about dropping the victim role, specifically for Israelis to stop playing that role so that they may move forward.  When read through the lens of victimization, the story takes on a deeper layer than the surface story of an estranged son meeting his father’s estranged lover and falling for her offers.  When we break down the various characters, it seems that they all embody the victim.  For instance, the lady in the morgue is very cheery, which is juxtaposed by her position as being the morgue receptionist.  Her defense is a particularly bothersome sunny disposition that we are not privy to seeing beneath.  She is nonchalant about death and to her everything is just a matter of course.  In other words, while Numi and Koby are freaking out about the fact that an unidentified body might be Gabriel and now they cannot be sure because he has been buried, the receptionist goes off to lunch and dismisses their emotional distraught-ness as nothing important.  Her defense mechanism is her impenetrable upbeat-ness, which is a sign that she is thoroughly entrenched in the victim role.  Instead of dealing with the facts of the bombings and bodies constantly moving in, she has become blind and untouchable to the atrocities around her.

Numi and Koby are both acting within their victim roles until the very end, when they lay such roles aside to be together.  Koby’s emotional distance is indicative of his victimization, specifically by his father.  When he does open up to Numi, because she has shown him kindness by getting him a perfect present that his father failed at, and they start to have sex, he overreacts to her joking comment, “Like father, like son” (p. 139), and leaves.  He is not confident enough to take her joke at face value.  Numi, on the other hand, plays the victim when it comes to her looks.  She is not beautiful and is awkwardly tall – in no way is she the typical or even celebrated female and because of this she has been victimized.  She is ready to assume that everyone believes her ugly, and does not want Koby to see her body (“Don’t look” (p. 136)).  Both Koby and Numi, then, are equally victims, only in different ways.

Gabriel is perhaps the more complex of the characters because throughout Exit Wounds we mistakenly think Gabriel has been a victim of a bus station bombing (probably by Palestinians, though this is not mentioned).  We find out throughout the course of the graphic novel that he has been the victimizer to both Numi and Koby. He victimized Numi by betraying her; Koby by not being a good father.  The link between Gabriel and the Palestinians is interesting because in a way I think Gabriel represents the Palestinians, though this link is more complex than a simple straight line.  If he does represent victimizers of Israel, but is also thought to be a victim of those victimizers, it would mean that Gabriel is a victim of himself, which I don’t think is necessarily wrong.  This would probably need to be thought out in more detail, and if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Finally, Koby sheds his emotional detachment and goes after Numi.  The many obstacles he faces (gate, high wall, dogs, Numi’s initial rejection) are ones that would have probably convinced him to give up if he still was still playing the victim.  Because he has finally shed that role, he is able to continue on.  Numi likewise sheds her victim role, and in fact is able to use her physique to save Koby, thus validating her untypical femaleness.  The happily-ever after ending takes place only because both Koby and Numi shed their victim roles thus giving them the capability of moving forward and being together.