When I walked out of Dredd, the exceedingly, even distractingly violent update of 2000 AD’s comic book meditation on the fascist tendencies in American depictions of law enforcement, I told the friend who joined me at the movies that I wished it had been a Judge Anderson movie. It’s not that Karl Urban isn’t good as the titular Judge Dredd, a perpetually dour man with little to no patience for violent criminals. But that as Judge Anderson and Ma-Ma, the violent drug lord Anderson and Dredd pursue on a day when Anderson’s been sent into the field for the final evaluation that will determine whether she becomes a Judge, it’s much more fun to see Olivia Thirlby and Lena Headey play two very different kinds of very tough women than to watch Dredd do his thing.

When she starts out her first day on the job, Anderson’s at a disadvantage: she’s a mutant and a psychic who got into the Judge Academy on special dispensation and when Dredd meets her, scored three percent too low to pass her graduation exams. Dredd takes her out to evaluate her as a favor, but he plainly doesn’t expect her to succeed, much less live—her unwillingness to wear a helmet so her psychic abilities can work at the highest level makes him skeptical. But in the field, Anderson does well, most notably in a show-down with Kay, a lieutenant in Ma-Ma’s organization played by The Wire‘s Wood Harris. Once he finds out she’s psychic, Kay tries to rattle Anderson by picturing himself raping her. Anderson is unperturbed. “You’re picturing a violent sexual liason between the two of us in a pointless attempt to shock me,” she tells him, bored. Rape culture apparently persists in Mega City One, and young women are still learning not to let themselves be debilitated by it. When Kay imagines Anderson fellating him and tells her it’s to shut her up, she reminds him that she isn’t the innocent girl Kay thinks she is, and that she’s fully prepared to bombard him with images and ideas he’s less prepared to deal with than she is. It’s not a good thing that Anderson has to be prepared to defend herself against both physical and mental harassment and assault. But in a sexually violent society, she’s more resilient than a sexually violent man is.

Then there’s Ma-Ma, who is so terrifying in part because she marries a kind, motherly tone to dreadful orders. Whether she’s ordering a flaying of rival gang members who have challenges her, threatening a young man she’s already horribly victimized, or leading the demolition of an entire floor of an apartment building, Ma-Ma rarely raises her voice. The disconnection between the tone she adopts, which people want to respond to, and the things she asks them to do or orders them to do is deeply disturbing, and it’s a reminder of how powerful femininity and motherhood can be. Raw domination is not the only way to exercise power. And in an even more extreme fashion than Anderson, Ma-Ma is a victim who retaliates with sexualized violence of her own. Mutilated by her pimp, Ma-Ma bites off his genitals while being forced to fellate him, an image that recurs throughout the movie.

A lot of the violence in Dredd feels unnecessary to the plot or the movie’s argument: a jaw ruined by a bullet or a mass of flayed flesh on the floor of an apartment building are mostly a test of whether you flinch or not. But I actually found the images of sexual violence in Dredd to be an exception. In their own ways, Judge Anderson and Ma-Ma want to save themselves from fates that other people feel confident inflicting on them. Violence and humiliation in retaliation may not break the cycle. But they’re an attempt to warn those who would attack women that the response is less predictable and more vigorous than the attackers expect.

“Every woman adores a fascist.” -Sylvia Plath

“We drove past the hatchery, / the hut that sells bait, / past Pigeon Cove, past the Yacht Club, past Squall’s Hill, / to the house that waits still, / on the top of the sea, / and two portraits hung on the opposite walls.” -Anne Sexton

I’m not going to Comic-Con this year, but I have been reading a lot of comics lately, plowing through 2000 AD’s editions of Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files and Savage She-Hulk #1-25. They’re wildly different comics projects—Judge Joseph Dredd is the main character in a long-running futuristic comics saga that doesn’t reboot, letting a year pass in his life for every one of ours, while She-Hulk is a mid-level character in the complex Marvel Comics universe. And even more important, they explore wildly different values. And over the past couple of weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why, as a feminist and a civil libertarian, I like both a fascist cop who originated as a British satire of American authoritarian tendencies and a green feminist defense lawyer who was created to preempt a television rip-off of both the Hulk and the Bionic Woman so much.

In coming to terms with the cop, it help that Dredd is a satire of the yearning towards authoritarianism, and that the writing is often very funny. In a confrontation with the Dark Judges, undead villains dedicated to eradicating all life, Judge Fear attempts to drive Judge Dredd mad by telling him, “Gaze into the face of fear!” “For a moment the icy chill of terror courses down Dredd’s spine,” the comic tells us. “The shock of this gaze can kill an ordinary man. But Dredd is a judge—and Judges are not ordinary men!” His response? A solid punch, delivered with the retort: “Gaze into the fist of Dredd!” In another story arc, called Block Mania, Mega-City One’s inhabitants, cramped into massive apartment buildings with strong internal identities, are drugged with a chemical that leads to city-wide riots. Dredd leads the response, but ultimately gets hit with a heavy dose of the substance himself. It’s hilarious watching this highly controlled man go as bonkers as his neighbors, hollering at the Judges under his command, “Now there’s just one thing I gotta know. I’m with Rowdy Yates Block! Who you fighting with?”

The comic also regularly punctures Dredd’s stoicism, particularly with regard to Walter, his lisping, worshipful robot butler who is an obvious stand in for stereotypically gay functionaries. Walter adores Dredd, and embraces subservience and slavery (something that causes him real psychological struggle down the line). But even though Dredd finds Walter irritating, Walter often inadvertently saves him. When Dredd is infiltrating the inner circle of a corrupt Chief Judge, the leader of the Department of Justice, which lead a coup and now rules Mega-City one in a dictatorship, Walter helps him sneak through a secret passageway in the Hall of Justice. During the Apocalypse War arc, Walter, who is trying to help Judge Dredd’s landlord Maria get cured of her Block Mania, finds out that invaders from East-Meg One, the nation that’s replaced the Soviet Union, are flanking Dredd’s forces and about to destroy them. Walter’s decency ends up being more crucial to Dredd’s survival in that moment than Dredd’s competence or authority.
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I’ve been reading a lot of Judge Dredd comics thanks to the nice people at 2000 A.D.—the new collection of the Complete Casefiles is gorgeous and well-curated—so I was particularly excited to see the trailer for Dredd, the second attempt to make a movie about the lawgivers who attempt to bring order to the post-apocalyptic dictatorship of Mega-City One:

From what I can tell, the moments we see in the trailer are extremely faithful to the script for the movie that’s been circulating for a couple of years, which to my mind is a good thing. The story looks to be simple: Jude Dredd, the best street patrolman in the Justice Department (which, for the unfamiliar, took over the remnants of the United States in a coup, and gave its Judges the power to act as judge, jury, and executioner to combat crime), is meant to spend a routine day assessing Judge Anderson, whose scores would mean she’d fail out of the program, but given her other abilities, the Chief Judge wants her to have a second chance to pass. But their day on the streets takes an unusual turn when Dredd and Anderson investigate a series of murders in a giant housing block called Peach Trees, the provenance of a ruthless drug lord named Ma-Ma (Lena Heady in a role that should make terrifying use of her experience as Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones).

My only real reservation with the story is that I think Judge Dredd is most interesting when he’s questioning the system that’s empowered him, or pushing for a more expansive or humane vision of Mega-City One citizenship. Ma-Ma is an unambiguous villain, not someone to make Dredd question the hyper-violent exercise of his authority, though the script makes pretty clear how dehumanizing life in the blocks is, and how the violent war on crime takes its toll on civilians. The only real discretion he exercises is in his evaluation of Anderson. I’m hoping this will be a success and that we could see a franchise grow out of this, both because I think the character is excellent, and because I think with success would come confidence to tell some of the more ambiguous, and more cosmic, Judge Dredd stories. If The Avengers universe can get Thanos, surely the American public is ready for a Judge Death movie.

As a new Judge Dredd convert, and a big fan of innovative action movies, I’m actually starting to get excited about Karl Urban-starring Dredd even though the production’s hit some difficulties. What really got my juices going was the news that Olivia Thirlby’s going to be playing Judge Anderson, which I would guess mean that the Big Bad in the movie is going to be Judge Death and the Dark Judges, who hate crime so much they’ve decided the best way to stop it is to wipe out all life in the universe. Now, there’s no question that the Judges are totalitarian, but I kind of appreciate the idea that the movie will show what the end consequence of a policy aimed at getting crime to zero.

I also appreciate that apparently, Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson will work together, but won’t kiss, staying faithful to a narrative in which the big emotional reveal is that Judge Dredd considers Judge Anderson his friend. That’s a welcome diversion from the standard stressful situation=smooches narrative, and it’d be nice to have a story where men and women actually get to focus on building their professional relationship and friendship rather than figuring out when they’re going to get down. Of course wartime romances are a thing But if you’re going to really go in on building the world the Judges live in, it makes sense that the standard emotional narratives that operate in that realm would be different. And cutting the Judges off from a range of human experiences emphasizes both the unnaturalness of what they’re being asked to do and their distance from the people they pass judgment on.

Regular-schedule blogging commences tomorrow. But while I was making personal resolutions, I thought of a couple of cultural ones I want to take care of, too.

1. Get over my anxiety about getting stuck on levels and finish playing Portal.

2. Film school: lots of Kurosawa. Lots of Truffaut.

3. Catch up on or finish: Sons of Anarchy, Mad Men, Cheers, The X-Files, Enlightened, Dexter, How I Met Your Mother, Misfits.

4. See John Lithgow in The Columnist and Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Death of a Salesman,” “Chinese Art in the Age of Revolution” and “Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition” at the Metropolitan Museum, “Strange Interlude” at the Shakespeare Theater Company, “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980″ and “Zarina” at the Hammer Museum.

5. Read: a lot of Judge Dredd. Barchester Towers. Play It As It Lays. Joseph Lelyveld on Gandhi. Manning Marable on Malcolm X. Swamplandia.

What’s everyone else working on?

The charming and ridiculously smart Douglas Wolk did me the favor of sending me the Judge Dredd trilogy “America,” “America II: Fading of the Light,” and “Cadet,” about a singer, an anti-Judge activist-turned-terrorist, and the child they eventually have together, and then asking me to discuss it with him. Our very long conversation about the books, including their startlingly beautiful and fully-realized backgrounds, and their pretty awesome gender politics, as well as whether it’s possible for fascists to embrace reform, is up here. Some thoughts on the core story about pro-democracy terrorists taking on the Judges:

As a former student activist, I have a somewhat complicated relationship to America, the Democrats, and even to Total War. I should be clear that most of my activism was working through the democratic process—registering voters, agitating down at City Hall, asking questions in forums—though I did get arrested for occupying the admissions office at my college as part of an action to push the university towards more progressive financial aid reform. (Pro tip: singing the same folk song as a round for three hours will speed up the rate at which the university decides to arrest you, which can be useful when you’ve been sitting in the same hallway all day.) And so part of what strikes me about America and her cohort is that they’re kind of terrible activists. The march is a good idea—but the Democrats don’t plan for there to be instigators in the crowds, or to document their work. There doesn’t appear to be much of an organizing program. The terrorist campaign waged by Total War is fairly stupid as propaganda: yes, killing Judges demonstrates their vulnerability, but it’s guaranteed to bring down reprisals. And their plan to kill celebrities during an awards show without any plan for a communiqué is a huge wasted opportunity to reach the masses. I’m frustrated with them because I’d like them to be better.

And of course, that’s sort of the point of the book. We see the Democrats and Total War from the perspective of a very weak sympathizer. And we see the Judges from the perspective of their most articulate representative, who gets space to break down ideas about why democracy isn’t particularly representative. Nobody gets a fair chance for a rebuttal. The comic works for the same reason the Judges maintain an effective hold on government—they control the narrative.

This was my first go-round with Judge Dredd, but I’ll definitely be back. The character’s obviously been around for decades, but he feels particularly timely, a logical extension of both our law and order fetishes and our anti-hero obsessions in a way that subverts both.