Spoilers through chapter sixteen of Chasm City appear below the jump, but as usual, please don’t spoil beyond that. The first installment of the book club appears here. Let’s go through chapter 26 for next week.

Noir’s an interesting genre, with its basis in the assumption that the main characters are denying emotions that the readers are quicker to realize they have than the characters are to acknowledge that they’re experiencing them. Successful noir may take a complicated path to that acknowledgement, and it may be momentary, but that wellspring absolutely has to be there for the story to work.

I think much of the trouble I’m having with Chasm City comes from the fact that I can’t find the wellspring here. Our nun, Amelia, doesn’t want much more than to be left alone. Tanner wants revenge for the death of a woman who is a sort of depressingly passive and semi-incompetent version of a manic pixie dream girl. The person he’s trying to kill obviously experiences profound emotions of revenge, but we don’t even have a glimpse of him yet. And there’s not a lot about this society that feels terrifically compelling. As Tanner says at one point:

We knew what could be achieved, but we lacked the time or resources to duplicate what had been achieved elsewhere, or the planetary finances to buy off-the-shelf miracles from passing traders. Teh only occasions when we bought any new technologies was when they had some direct military application, and even then it almost bankrupted us. Instead, we fought centuries-long wars with infantry, tanks, jet fighters, chemical bombs and crude nuclear devices; only rarely graduating to such giddy heights as particle-weapons or nanotech-inspired gadetry. No wonder the Ultras had treated us with such ill-concealed contempt. We were savages compared to them, and the hardest thing of all was the fact that we knew it to be true.

As cynical as it is, it’s not actually cynical enough. It’s not time or resources that’s stunted this society—it’s will and priorities. I don’t know why I’m supposed to care about about these brutish people. I’d like to spend more time with the Ultras, but that’s not what I’m getting.

Much of the rest of the society we’re spending time with feels similarly tired. The mist-jumpers take horrendous risks because they’re bored. The other residents of the Canopy hunt people from the Mulch in increasingly complicated games, but they seem sort of lackidasical about it. There’s nothing exceptional noble about the folks we encounter down in the Mulch: the kid who drives the rickshaw is reasonably nice, but there’s nothing so compelling about that society that it feels worth defending against the depradations of the Canopy.

I think part of the problem with the shallowness of these depictions is that the alternate narrative we’re getting suggests something enormously momentous. Sky Haussmann’s supposed to be some sort of villain, but at this point, he’s the only person who’s connected to higher-level emotions and events. If there’s going to be a spectacular downfall, there has to be some sense of spectacular promise, right? But I don’t understand what’s so fraught about this mission that the saboteur would be planted in the ship, and from what we see of the world that Haussmann’s mission gave us, it’s hard to retain any sense of hope that their mission was ever worth it.

Welp, we get Megan Fox in a Judd Apatow movie. Fox has had a terrible, terrible run of movies lately—Jonah Hex really should be the kind of project that gets someone sent to the Career Naughty Corner, and I count Josh Brolin as in for chastizement (John Malkovich exists in his own universe of merit and hilarity, so he’s sort of exempt). But I’ve always got the sense that she wants to do something meaningful, she just doesn’t really know what that means, and her body’s such an asset that she’s never really found a director who works his or her way around to her mind, whatever that might be like.

But really, I’m more interested in what this casting choice means for how Apatow intends to expand the universe in which his stories take place. I love the idea of Apatow doing something like what Beverly Cleary did in her young adult novels, or Nick Hornby did with his London in High Fidelity and About a Boy and creating a coherent look at a broad community through his movies. If he picks Los Angeles, women like Megan Fox are part of the scenery. It’s what he does with them that matters. Apatow has yet to surprise me with a portrait of a lady, but I’d like to see him try.

I wanted to pull this comment from William up onto the main page, because I think it essentially subsumes everything I wrote about superheroes and crime, and is the kind of systemic analysis I reach for on my best days:

It’s not necessarily that urban crime is no longer worth the time of a fully realized superhero. What usually happens is that the moment a hero becomes familiar with his/her powers, they also realize the true scope of the system. 

When you’re a little guy, being hassled by the drug dealers on the corner, you see them as the biggest problem threatening your existence. Later on, once you’re enhanced by gamma radiation, you realize that someone is supplying that drug dealer on the corner. In a comic like Daredevil, that leads all the way up to The Kingpin – which still keeps things local and gritty. However, if the same thing happened in a DC comic, you’d find that all roads eventually lead to some corporate mastermind like Lex Luthor or Vandal Savage. Not only is the hero now powerful enough to take things to that level, but he/she also realizes that they can’t really permanently clean up the streets until they clean up the entire hierarchy. 

Marvel has always been better with the street level crime, as the battles rarely leave Manhattan. With so many heroes to protect such a limited area, some are going to be relegated to the slums.

I think there’s something interesting going on in our superhero movies at large that I haven’t quite figured out. This attention to crime coincides with a rise in superhero movies as period pieces, about which more last week; in other words, comic books are returning to their origins, even though the context for their origins no longer exists.