2144 – Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975 movie)

spacetime coordinates: 1936

Just when pandemic rules started slackening up I ended up at a PULP-movie night in Berlin – organized by the Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Kino at the Filmrausch Palast Moabit, an independent cinema hidden in the Moabit hood. Simply put it felt like a combination of free comics day that takes place on the 1st Sunday in May, heavy drinking (cheap shots were offered during the whole event + cocktails with bizarre movie-themed names & even stranger taste). All in all, it is a good recipe to basically mindlessly indulge in B-movie trash cultural gems and celebrate smut and bad taste in all its glory in order to tear down high cultural standards that still seem to reign supreme even now in Germany’s foremost cultural establishments. ‘Transgression’ in all its forms (including the belatedly artistic) has lost it’s byte – in post-Trump, alt-right or MRM activism era where obscenity and freedom of speech are equated with class privilege and anti-system values. In no way would I call watching Doc Savage today transgressive. For one it all appears incredibly naive and one has to make sure one does not fret over his 1930s manners. Pulp has been in my veins since childhood, but pulp, be it in its heroic form or Lovecraftian cosmic horror is full of trappings, full on racist stereotyping, even if it holds an important place in our post-ironic magick wraponized meme times.

Trivialliteratur (as it is known in Germany with a pejorative sense – all-too-easy, facile, nondemanding lit) or “pulp” has been forever associated with ‘guilty pleasures’ and used as a way to shame various emerging modern publics (especially early women readers – as with the ‘female Gothic’ lit). This sense of inferiority complex is still present in enclaves such as the Romanian sci-fi community. A lot of aesthetic theory was predicated on precisely how early pop 18th c or 19th c Schauerliteratur evoked the ‘big’ categories terror, horror, the sublime or the beautiful(as opposed to the minor ones explores by Ngai in the Cute, the Zany or the Interesting) in its readership. Protecting audiences from moral decay meant controlling the influx of unwanted emotions triggered by low cultural influences and artefacts (and this was way before comics hit the stands).

Sci-Fi was strongly influenced by pulp and weird literature was basically abstract non-representational horror dressed as pulp. Nowadays it all smacks of nostalgia but it part of comic book history and remains eminently debatable because one can see other how other more upgraded heroes have not completely discarded their pulpy origins. In fact, during the Berlin screening of the 3 movies, people got in and out and most of them had comics under their arms. Movies featured that night were: Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, Flesh Gordon and Vampirella. Raunchy mondo Softcore, vampirism, imaginative vulgarity and extoticism all meet in these movies. Pulp does not have the consumption strictures of actually educating the masses or ‘refining’ its readers. Printed on bad paper, heavy with typos and full with ungainly neologisms it was affordable, catchy, shameless – available to a very diverse audience which I think might be drawn to it by countervailing reasons. The public in the Moabit cinema was very diverse indeed, one of the most diverse I have seen on these occasions which still shows the stranght of pulp. So even today’s retro pulp audience cannot be made to fit easily into a single demographic.

Pulp offer cheap spectacle – and in a sense, its the secret source of all capitalist superheros on screen. Doc Savage – is almost forgotten nowadays and yet he is binding together Marvel, DC and Dark Horse. Under his absurd preposterous polymath character there lies to signs of things to come. ‘Retromania’ starts being a thing – and also shows up in both 70s pulp revival & later Lucas/Spielberg/Zemeckis groundbreaking triumvirate. This late – 1975 adaptation of The Man of Bronze strikes one as an a flop, exaggerated (so bad it is good) movie yet it reminds me of the more neo-modernist garish Dick Tracy 1990 comics adaptation in being so stylistically close and true to its aestethic iconic origins. It stands out for his unintended and unabashed camp aesthetic – that makes a bad poster of every pose of the hero. His very title name includes SAVAGE in big letters and doc small on one side. “Savage”-ness or reclaiming what was seen as the waning of masculinity of the modern men becomes a quest for many pulp celebrated authors such as R. E. Howard and E R Burroughs. All in all this is a very conventional, moralistic, wholesome and self righteous hero cult that does not stray far from the racist & imperial credo of a ‘white man’s burden’. The colonial exotic adventure is seen furthering of the civilisatory goals and as an antidote to the ills of civilisation. The narrative runs this way: if modernity is somehow perceived as a ‘feminizing’ or emasculating force civilisation over-domesticated and over-civilized Western men while women are becoming more independent & assertive. So countless heroes were dreamed up as the ‘new savages’, as the new Lord Greystoke Tarzan’s that somehow faced untamed territories on Earth and elsewhere – and that needed tonshow that they could still tame ‘nature’, as well as revert at will to their ‘savage’ predecessors if need be. These modern neo-savages (with Anglo-Saxon or Vareg or Cimmerian blood – another obsession of pulp is a sort of genetic genealogic legitimizing of their deeds) or full-fledged Barbarians have marched into pulp and heroic fantasy materials at the point where most of the so-called ‘white spots’ (that were definitely not white) on the planet disappeared and the so-called non-European ‘savages’ were being massacred, disenfranchised, and forcefully assimilated and driven to the margins or given humiliating roles on the big screen with an apology that has come often too little and too late. ‘Barbarian’ either bad or food was used at will (bad if foreign good if one of ours). At the same time several anti-white and anti-Western revolts as well the rise of Japan (after the Russo-Japanese War) produced new fears and ramped up the need to preserve Western civilisation from the ‘hordes’ inside a multipolar world.

Nevertheless Doc Savage is not another Tarzan surviving on the outskirts of civilisation, he is a polymath, well dressed and is able to combine elements of all the previous Trivial Literatur heroes (including the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes).

What he allows us to catch is the metamorphosis of how pop (male) models buckled over time and how they evolved (or not) over time. US superheroes do not spring out of the heads of their creators like Athena. Their Western British predecessors are a historically traceable subgroup. Hero-worship, since Caryle, has molded pulp superheroes, national cults and pop icons alike. Unbeknownst to most, Doc Savage was a template for both Marvel, DC and Indiana Jones adventure heroes. He may be regarded as a bridging figure in a pantheon of fictional British imperial hero-worshiping that stretches from H Rider Haggard Allan Quatermain (the quintessential white big game hunter outdoor Imperialist) passing through Doc Savage to ending up as Captain America, Bruce Wayne or Indy. Martial and military masculinities have taken many forms from the conventional muscular Christianity of colonial times to the new mass market for (little and big) boy’s fiction of “pluck and grit” of the 1880s, and Doc Savage unites both the 19th c Africa explorer, the astronomer, the surgeon and the martial arts karateka (in the vein of jingoist American Ninja). Of course there’s nuances and Haggard’s Quatermain for example – mutates from the main throng of militaristic conquering heroes and managed to to offer something new. Each one is not a reiteration and actually offers interesting ideological deviations.

Superficially, Savage looks pretty similar to the representations of the realist-socialist new man that has continued well into the 1970s and 1980s or beyond (in North Korea for example). Even the Socialist new bodies of Hans Mathis Teutsch avant-garde Hungarian Romanian artist from Brașov show such transformations of the monumental figurative. Nakedness is an interesting aspect – I would point to the fact that Doc Savage is always represented with naked chest or in almost fake tatters – sign that he’s been through some trials, that he had to leave behind his outer genteel exterior, yet his clothing still hangs on like on Hulk. He’s nothing outside of battles hard won but he’s left with his sartorial dignity untouched. He combines both armchair or lab work with perilous action and bro culture. Nature is also some form of villain although Doc Savage can turn nature (a golden volcano) against the real supervillains (which seemed very stereotypical, even Russophobic or even slightly anti-semitic in the 1975 movie).

Doc Savage is also epitomizing the unblinking US all-American hero. In a way, he is taking over from older Imperial Powers (the British, Portuguese, and Spanish Empires) but is hell-bent on his own empire building (see Spanish-American War). He is exactly as the US self-portrays, as a doo-good global aid provider and weapons supplier – guardian of Pax Americana provider and representative of the ‘good’ forces of muscular democracy and Wilsonian doctrine self-determination. At the same time, he has some very peculiar habits – and he keeps this private Fortress of Solitude far from the rest of humanity (a mix btw an gentlemen study, yoga retreat, bachelor pad and luxury igloo), a clear predecessor of Superman’s and Batman’s Fortress of Solitude. It would be good to make a few observations on the typical rugged masculinity represented by Doc Savage – as he is usually represented in cover art that is hyper-realistic muscular male that is usually associated with the exploitative genre of so-called ‘men’s magazines’. It was this lowly gross pulp format that inaugurated the superhero teams from his Fabulous Five – that went on to become so popular in the future (the Avengers, X Men, Fantastic Four etc.) In the near future the Rock is due to portray the “world’s first superhero” in a future TV series. Not to forget as the debate over disability/cyperpunk has unearthed – there have been other proto superheroes (more like cyborgian superheroes) before Doc Savage (thx ambient fuckboi for that one!) – such as the French pulp hero Nyctalope (with organic and mechanical parts) by Feuilleton author Jean de la Hire. And one can add to those a lot of Buddhist or Taoist proto machine ancient robot heroes – that enlarge the limited scope of Western-centric histories of cyborg lineages.

Ron Ely as Doc Savage

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2033 – The Spine of Night (2021 animation)

timespace coordinates: an imaginary mythical time on a violent forlorn planet, not very unlike our own.

“The Spine of Night is a 2021 adult animated dark fantasy horror film written and directed by Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King.^[1] It stars Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt, Betty Gabriel, and Joe Manganiello.

The film was completed using rotoscoped animation, and traces the centuries long journey of a magical plant that bestows terrible power upon the user, as it inspires despots, empires, and black magic.” (wiki)

This has to be one of the highlights of animation in recent years – but not if one dreams for a more peaceful, pacifist or a non-violent (better) world. Ripping hearts out, dissolving meat off the bones, cutting people in half or dismemberment – a recurrent and very common characteristic of Spine of the Night. Lots of eerie blue phosphorescent flowers and lots of gaping skulls projected on starry skies. Heroic fantasy or sword & sorcery (especially the work of REH/R.E. Howard) was big bang moment for me and it was always pretty bloody and tactless. Altough, I must say it came with its own culturally specific ‘mirth’ – for these imaginary worlds were concocted by REH, and distributed by (Marvel) comics before the books came around (few of those in my collection too). Worlds I briefly inhabited got poached from smuggled comic books (Savage Sword of Conan, King Conan, Conan the Barbarian) arriving in ‘aid packages’ from my aunt in the US across the Iron Curtain to a kid in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Conan the Barbarian and King Kull of Valusia happen to overlap with my 1980s high school surroundings or my sporadic countryside haunts. Below the Carpathian mountains, around Prahova County, a wild distant hilly forested area, that I entered only much later was just behind the village of my childhood summer vacations. Let’s get this straight I wasn’t a country side kid, more of a city bookworm/documentary geek. Altough from that moment on the hills of Prahova became the realm of Cimmeria – the mythical land of Conan, a place based on a vague Black Sea region during the Greek antiquity.

“CIMMERIA (cca 1932)

by REH

I remember
The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;
The grey clouds’ leaden everlasting arch;
The dusky streams that flowed without a sound,
And the lone winds that whispered down the passes.

Vista upon vista marching, hills on hills,
Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,
Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up
A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye
Saw but the endless vista–hill on hill,
Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.

It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold
All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,
With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,
And the dark woodlands brooding over all,
Not even lightened by the rare dim sun
Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.

It was so long ago and far away
I have forgotten the very name men called me.
The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,
And hunts and wars are like shadows. I recall
Only the stillness of that sombre land;
The clouds that piled forever on the hills,
The dimness of the everlasting woods.
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills, To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun,

How many deaths shall serve to break at last

This heritage which wraps me in the grey Apparel of ghosts?  I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night”

The gravel on top of the gymnastics/sports hall next to my Bucharest school was strewn with small bones of dead animals. This made a perfect substrate for our Hyborian immersion. To that place where nobody could follow us, we arrived climbing up on a creaky rusty metal ladder – and in the distance we started seeing the rooftops shapes and church towers that would transform into temples of Mitra…

Conan, King Kull, Valeria, Thulsa Doom, Red Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen), Grace Jones playing Zula (all pulled from a growing comic book pantheon enlarged by Roy Thomas & Barry-Windsor Smith and others) ended up bringing havoc to an old and corrupt world, swept by sinister cults and pre-human civilisations with walled crumbling cities. These were all heroines and heroes that made civilized life into a sham, never adopting the mores for civilized men and women for long. All thieves, all brigands, tomb raiders, all hailing from the borderlands, the steppes and the forests, all former slaves, orphans or members of a barbarian hinterland that got raided as labor force pool or got sacrificed in the name of unknown gods or blood-thirsty cults. A pean to a neo- barbarian ethos born out of modern Fantasy that did not exist outside the invented Hyborian Age conjured up by that suicidal pulp fiction-writing Texan obsessed with physical culture called Robert E. Howard. There is much to be critical about it now – including a certain Social Darwinist bent – and a kind of might is right. At the same time there’s a sort of materialist common sense attitude of swords that make Gods or tyrants bleed, of sorcery or supernatural or Lovecraftian entities that are not invincible. So there’s always the risk of maybe too much sword and too little sorcery. On the scala of toxic masculinity many abcelebrated Frank Frazetta cover would score pretty high and come across as just reinforcing gender stereotypes, seemingly promoting those undultared, manly, virile, battle-scarred bodies forged in cosmic foundries – at the time of great changes of Fordism labor rights struggles and post-Fordist malaise. Those sweaty – sword wielding (working man) recently unemployed bodies that are so easy to ridicule in movies, as in the recent lumberjack character played with gusto by Nicholas Cage in Mandy. Work and virility was somehow on the go – labor was not only outsourced to a feminized Asia, but the whole regime of formerly unwaged labour, care work included more and more men – a feminization of work that started seeping into what had been once a working class industrial preserve.

Even with the heroic fantasy glorification of berserk battles, heavy metal/doom metal soundtrack & general mayhem, let’s also consider Conan the Barbarian mostly a kind of modern scavenger, a sort of Spartacus outsider that never accepted a warrior lifestyle and that was forced into it. From his initial peaceful village life Conan (in one account) was taken prisoner with other children, was pushed and had to adopt a slave – warrior livelihood, not because he was born into it. Conan used all his anger to mostly strike down civilized lords, power hungry priests and cruel rulers.

Now to this recent animation and how it departs from previous models even if stylistically has much in common with a whole genre of pulp. First in the Conan comics there’s is a certain class and even racial division amongst these pulp savages and barbarians. This is a recognizable colonial (Euro-American) separation of good barbarians vs bad barbarians – even in Conan THE Barbarian. There is the ‘noble savage’ and the rest, an Enlightment era division that has brought much misery and death to countless living native indigenous peoples. So in the comics there is “the Cimmerians” and there is “the Picts” of the Pictish Wilderland (usually a swamp or a jungle rainforest) as par of an extended REH universe. Classified as ‘primitive’, truly vicious they are almost like living examples of Darwinian evolutionary atavism. They are the remains of pulp racist pseudo science, representatives of the irrational primitive archetype, described in dehumanizing terms, as an animal-like – superstitious horde. I think The Spine of Night – even if at the surface tributary to REH universe does a benefic move towards foregrounding these reclusive swamp ‘savages’, their cause, the quest not of warriors or swordsmen but of witches, of pantheist and animist rituals. It also makes explicit the predatory relation of much of these civilisations & cities on this sparsely populated, un-cultivated, yet fertile hinterland. This I consider quite a big departure that puts to shame simplistic pulp comic divisions with a colonial inheritance. The Swamp is finally not a place of unnamed horrors like in Conan the Barbarian, but a place of various forms of life and where a very powerful plant thrives, a plant that is part of the ethno-botanical lore of these human groups. The horror is most likely to arrive with new intrusions, clearings, enclosures and with militaristic ecocidal ideology of brutal conquerors and their henchmen. I sense there’s a possible Bachofenian critique of patriarchy as a historical process, the arrival of a patriarchal order that took pride in treating both nature and women with the same brutality & rapacity. There’s also no passivity here – the swamp people don’t just dissappear and the witch is always coming back and ready to counter the worst of them.

Beside the knowledge vs power narrative there is something else in the Spine of Night – a way in which the great Swamp – is the first to disappear or to fall victim to the empires or to fires, and expansive drives for domination.

Another thing is the dependency of civilization, of the mighty on someone else, even on rare irretrievably lost knowledge, or on something that is non-human (or pre-human) or not recognized any longer as human. Rulers are always dependent on inhuman energies and entities. Or even better – in all their might they show a dependence and encourage the exploitation of a complex – nexus of other humans, their lore and practices and plants (magic flower) & biodiverse environments (swamp, wetlands, marshes). There is no development or spells or even warfare without these (one might recall here Londa S. studies of abortificient plants known to indigenous peoples as well as slaves) ‘political plants’ that are an integral lore of these swamp people in The Spine of Night.

It is the first epic time the actual heroine is a swamp witch, her quest is not the quest of the mercenary barbarian but of a revived cosmic witch queen that makes the last stand against a technologically- empowered, resource-hungry, and knowledge thirsty imperial power represented by a man, a former scholar. I am not going into details – and I think the images telling the mythical story of this bloody world are pretty telling because they include the killing of the gods in its cosmogony.

Knowledge or – ancient libraries and scholars are not all evil and corrupt, there is actually a few idealists left and a few dedicated to saving the plebs outside the gate. Yet it is clear that this kind of disdain combined with hoarding of knowledge in search of power brings only doom & destruction. There is also a knowledge that is non-literary, transmitted by oral cultures, what we might call oral/aural culture – so-called illiterate knowledge, one that does not get recorded so easily in the pages of grimoires. Besides the pungent mythical undertones in Spine of the Night – there is also the sense that a lot of specialized, ‘written’ knowledge is definitely growing in complete disregard for its human (humanistic) usage.

Apart of all these brief notes – the Spine of Night animation conveys the best cosmic dark epic doom entertainment since Ralph Bakshi’s collaboration with Frank Frazetta – on Ice and Fire, the 1983 dark epic fantasy rotoscoping masterpiece. Yet, I repeat I do not consider it a mere piece of geek nostalgia per se – but a powerful new and welcome turn of an old animation technique (to be enjoyed and practiced). Visually it is not so much – like a lot of recent animation – one technique, but a kaleidoscope of techniques and technologies both digital & analog, hand-drawn & CGI, combining ‘realist’ rotoscoping style with abstract – dark silhouettes with blazing eyes and patches of ‘bioluminescent’ parafernalia (like characters in the cosmogonic/Titanomachy scenes). Instead of just images of decay, or constant dissolution of forms – animation in Spine of Night is mostly about metamorphoses (like Levitt puts it in her Animatic Apparatus), morphing and melting the boundaries of usual anthropomorphic – figurative shapes. The background art is very effective and stands on its own even without the action – because all the environmental elements are unstable, lines tremble, the sky/cosmos constantly is prone to paraeidolia – skulls get distended & extended into galaxies. One could say in the Titanomachy – god killing scenes, what we see is a cosmogony of the animation process itself, the unseen acts (techniques, technologies, rotoscoping etc) enacting the ani-motion principle, “the artificing of man” (Cholodenko) – the dreams of silent creators, lively nightmarish creations that overtake and revert the roles, rob their creators special effects & take on a life of their own.

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