Set in Detroit, 1954, it’s the story of a young man fighting to redeem himself, both physically and psychologically. It’s free for a couple days on Amazon.
Category Archives: Action
Action Adventure and Feminism Part 3
So now we know how it started, pretty much. But the amazon superninja didn’t immigrate from comic books to movies right away. And when she did, it was a gradual incursion.
The idea of a 120 pound woman physically dominating a 180 pound man in any kind of combat is laughable. So it’s fitting that the first cultural conditioning began in comedies.
(Even male couch potatoes are easily stronger than the average female. Yes, martial arts can make up for some physiological advantages, and according to action movies, every woman is a master; but I’d wager there are still a lot more men studying martial arts than women…in the real world, anyway.)
(You might want to skip forward to 6:40 or so in the clip below.)
The gender role reversals were very subtle in, say, the Howard Hawks comedies. But the more zany the comedy, the more masculine the women and effeminate the men. One would think people watching a comedy would know better than to take anything in it seriously, but when watching a movie, a person’s defenses are significantly weakened due to their suspension of disbelief, and ideas can infest directly into the subconscious. Hollywood knows this, of course, and has used this technique to influence the thinking of Joe Public regarding nearly every subject–especially politics.
By the 1970s amazon superninjas began showing up in non-comedy genres to a noticeable extent. By the 1990s it was obligatory in action movies, and becoming so in adventure fiction. Of course comic books were way ahead of the curve, having started down this road in the early 1940s.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Action-Adventure and Feminism Part 2
We are currently inundated with Amazon superninjas in action-adventure, whether it be on the big screen, small screen, printed page or videogame. And not just action-adventure anymore, either. As mentioned in Part One, this feminist myth has obviously become a de facto requirement for any form of entertainment aimed at an ostensibly male audience.
Where did it all start?
It’s no mistake that I refer to these characters as “Amazon superninjas.” You can trace this fetish back to the Amazon stories in Greek mythology. A lot can be analyzed on this subject, but one aspect I’ll point out before moving on is that this mythical race of women warriors lived in an all-female civilization. The only men they allowed into their culture were male slaves, for breeding purposes.
Fast forward to the 20th Century, and along comes a psychologist in the early 1940s, by the name of William Moulton Marston. Though no state allowed such arrangements to be called “marriage” back during his time, he lived in a menage a trois with two women–one his legal wife; the other a former student.
The late ’30s and early ’40s are known as the Golden Age of comic books. Superman came on the scene in 1938, and inspired a boom in comic book heroes. Another cultural phenomenon had infested society during the Depression years, evidently (though far more surreptitiously): bondage and female domination.
Here’s something Marston wrote:
“The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound… Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society… Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.”
Because he chose the word “people” instead of “men,” it’s probable that he didn’t just enjoy getting tied up by his live-in mistresses, but enjoyed watching them tie each other up, too.
Like many pied pipers before and since, Marston recognized pop culture as a potential tool for mass indoctrination. He published a couple articles, one of which was titled: “Don’t Laugh at the Comics,” and shortly thereafter was hired by the company which later became DC.
In a 1943 issue of “The American Scholar”, Marston would write:
“Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power.”
Mistress Elizabeth Marston (his legal wife) told Bill to invent a female superhero.
“Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”
Whatever else you can call a guy like William Moulton Marston, he was a mangina in his private life and a white knight in his public one. He obediently set forth, with all his psychological weaponry, to advance the cause of Team Womyn.
During the Depression and War years, superhero comic books were read by (and marketed to) primarily pre-adolescent boys. This was the target demographic for Marston’s psycho-cultural conditioning. Here’s a summary of his strategy, from Marston’s own typewriter:
“Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!”
After all, Bill was obviously proud of his arrangement with Elizabeth Marston and Olive Byrne.
Marston developed a character he called “Suprema.” He dipped into mythology and pulled out the Amazons. Suprema was from an advanced Amazon civilization, but would become an agent of FDR’s federal government and fight it’s enemies. The name of the Amazon colony would be “Paradise Island.”
If you’ve ever been around a bunch of women living together for any length of time, then you know it’s anything BUT paradise.
Ahem.
Suprema was given a skimpy costume that was scandalous for its time. Though a corset/push-up bra, short-shorts (or a tiny-miniskirt) and tall boots would become fashion for some women half a century later, the only women who wore such an outfit in those days either performed in kinky stag films or posed for kinky stag mags. Bondage toys were added to Suprema’s utilities: slave shackles on her wrists that could deflect bullets, and a magic golden lasso that forced confessions from the person bound by it.
William Moulton Marston adopted the pseudonym Charles Moulton, and changed Suprema’s name, too. The same month that Imperial Japan surprised and devastated the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Wonder Woman was unleashed on the young boys of America.
(Actually, comic books were routinely distributed months before the publication date on the cover, but the significance of that date was too much to go unmentioned.)
There were obvious lesbian/bisexual implications from the beginning, and bondage was a consistent motif. Wonder Woman was regularly either a victim or perpetrator–sometimes both in the same story. Had people in the WWII generation been half as aware of kinky sexual fetishes as they are now, DC could never have gotten away with printing such material for minors.
Early on, a pilot (Steve Trevor) crashed on Paradise Island, and became an ostensible love interest for the butch super-babe. This presented opportunities for gender-role reversal in several comic stories. Trevor often played the part of dude-in-distress, in need of rescue from his dame-in-shining-girdle.
And, of course, each issue with the Amazon princess depicted her physically overpowering men. Even Roman gods were no match for her in combat.
There was an explosion of four-color Amazons during that time (though unlike WW, most weren’t literally Amazons). Writers and artists rushed to bring out Sun Girl, Miss Masque, the Black Cat, the Blonde Phantom, Phantom Lady and Miss America, to name a few. Heroines like Sheena and Rulah brought female domination fantasy to the jungle. Gender-role-reversal and female dominance were common themes with them, too.
But the impact of this character (and the ideology that spawned her) pushed far beyond her short-lived Golden Age comic book imitations. The baby boomers didn’t just embrace the conditioning from New Deal socialist writers in Hollywood and New York; they would grow to take this female supremacy concept to new levels.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Action-Adventure and Feminism Part 1
This year I discovered something called “the Manosphere.” Is it possible to discover something you’re already a part of? Because as near as I can tell, I’ve been part of the Manosphere since starting the Two-Fisted Blog a few years ago. Granted, the 2FB was never about game or gender relations, but it was written by a man, for men, and usually about men. Specifically red-blooded heterosexual men. I’ve never pandered to the feminists on my blog or in my books, nor will I ever. I was a manosphere poet and didn’t know it.
But now I know it.
My epiphany began after hearing the phrase “alpha male” for the umpteen-zillionth time, and deciding to find a definition for it. I got a lot more education than I bargained for. To summarize briefly, there are names for the phenomena and personalities I’ve observed; for the theories I’ve formulated and even some attitudes I’ve adopted. And yet there’s still a lot I had not discovered strictly on my own via the School of Hard Knocks, so other blogs in the Manosphere have been like a crack addiction to me lately. My vocabulary increased overnight to include terms like “white knight,” “mangina” and “NAWALT.”
NAWALT – Not All Women Are Like That. Frequently heard on Manosphere websites, usually used by intruding women or trolls who want to derail an assertion. If only one out of a million women “aren’t like that,” it’s still technically true (but Diogenes wouldn’t waste the lamp oil to go looking for her!).
White Knight – (1) a man who “comes to the rescue” of a woman, or of women, reflexively, emotionally-driven, without thought or even looking at the situation; (2) a man in authority who enables Team Womyn in his legislative actions, judgments, or rulings, reflexively, emotionally-driven, without thought or even looking at what’s right.
Mangina – an unfortunate (in all ways) combination of “man” and “vagina”. Generally used to describe a male person who has left his balls in some woman’s purse.
I’m not going to start blogging sex or dating advice here. But some very astute observations have been made in the manosphere and some of them have helped me put something into perspective. For lack of a better subject heading, I’ll call that something “GENDER BIAS IN POP CULTURE (IN GENERAL) AND ACTION-ADVENTURE MOVIES (IN PARTICULAR).”
Action-adventure has been a predominantly male genre, and marketing gurus will tell you it still is.
In literature it was once labelled “men’s fiction.” This genre disappeared from traditional publishing circa 1990. A handful of authors (including myself) have done our best to resurrect men’s fiction (in various sub-genres) for the last few years. In fact, that was one goal of the Two-Fisted Blog and, now, Virtual Pulp Press.
The obstacles have been large and numerous. One is the astronomical volume of available books in the online age, now that anyone/everyone can get a book published. And does. So just getting a reader to discover a particular book is a significant hurdle. And with so much garbage being published by the aforementioned anyone/everyone, indie authors suffer guilt by association, rendering odds of discovery even worse. There’s an assumption that if the New York Publishing Cartel (NYPC) didn’t publish it, it’s not worth browsing/sampling. And finally, the target audience for the genre (red-blooded heterosexual men), by-and-large, just doesn’t read much anymore… besides Twitter posts and videogame subtitles, anyway.
Men still pay to see action movies, though.
And despite the wives or girlfriends who accompany them to the theater on occasion, nobody disputes the audience for this genre being male at its core.
The genre appeals to traditionally masculine impulses. It was designed to be escapism for males, giving them heroic, masculine role models that, at least subconsciously, men and boys aspire to be. Why then is it absolutely obligatory (so far as film makers are concerned) to have at least one woman in every action movie who is at least as masculine, if not more so, than the hero? (This certainly isn’t limited to the big screen, BTW–you find the same fetish in comic books, videogames and other media, but movies have the largest audience, and this fetish is apparently a requirement in film.)
The motives and reasons behind this are too numerous to document here. What it boils down to is that this convention is one symptom of a feminized culture, in which worldview, opinions and thought patterns are conditioned by pop culture and mass media.
In my aforementioned crack spree intensive research, I discovered two counterculture (or perhaps anti-establishment is a better description) websites: The Rational Male and Return of Kings. If the latter was an automobile, there’s no doubt in my mind it would be festooned with “No Fat Chicks in Bikinis” bumper stickers. But despite the frequent superficiality, and what seems to be a conscious effort on the part of the writers at times to resemble the “sexist pig” stereotype, there are some interesting conclusions reached there. Here’s an excerpt from one of their articles about the myth of “male privelege:”
Women…see media as a source of therapy. …They expect to be able to turn on any media outlet and have their egos massaged. …Of course, ferocity, independence and intelligence are always assumed on the part of the woman. Think about that – female egos are not even worried about actually being smart or tough, as they assume that they are that just by existing.
This assumption is regurgitated in action movies.
The hero in an action movie is nearly always an exceptional man. Often he has undergone extensive training to achieve his level of physical prowess; or sometimes he towers above other men due to superpowers. Traditionally, only the villain mastermind approaches equality with him in unarmed combat…
With the exception of female characters.
A woman can be a waitress, or receptionist, or welfare queen–it doesn’t matter. There’s no necessity of rigorous training or superpowers–the very fact that she has a vagina automatically makes her equal (or superior) to the action hero. Look at the TV portrayals of Lois Lane for the last 20 years, just for one example. She’s such a badass you just know she’d thrash Superman back on Krypton. Bet you didn’t know reporters were one-woman armies, dijja?
In this case it’s not even necessarily women who are dogmatically inserting this female dominance fantasy into action movies. More often it is feminized males (white knights and manginas) behind this overused canard.
More on that in another post, perhaps.
Indeed, pop culture is not just a propaganda tool of the political left; it is a cohesive theraputic strategy for the female of the species. She turns on the idiot box television, and watching any sitcom, the denigration of everything masculine is reinforced…at least when embodied in a male character (because it’s not enough to flatter empower women by virtue of their being born female; men must also be ridiculed for the cardinal sin of being born male).
Special little snowflake Jane Public goes to watch a romantic comedy and reviews how women are emotional victims of alpha males, and the only sympathetic male characters are white knights, metrosexuals, or homosexuals. She watches a dramatic movie or TV show and it is reinforced that 1. women are simultaneously victims and strong, take-charge leaders while 2. men are cheaters; bullies/cowards; rapists; abusive; ineffectual; incompetent; weaklings; or some combination of the above. And when she sits through an action movie with her boyfriend (poor fool), she is conditioned to believe there is no physical difference between men and women besides breasts and genitalia.
Next thing you know, special little snowflake Jane Public (and her white knight cheerleaders) regurgitate originate ideas like: “Why shouldn’t women be in combat? Obviously women are just as tough as men–usually tougher, in fact.”
Hmm…I can see I’m going to need more than one blog post for this subject. To be continued…
007 In Film and Fiction
Thanks to Books on Tape, Blackstone Audio, et al, and now Audible Audio for my Kindle, I’m tearing through books at a steady rate during work-related travel.
After paying for my subscription to Audible Audio, I decided it was finally time to read the source material for the spy movies I grew up with. I had previously read Casino Royale and You Only Live Twice which were fairly good reads, but were quite a different flavor from the Bond flicks I’d seen. So anyway, I set out to go through the rest of the Bond canon in the order the novels were written. So far, in addition to the two mentioned above, I’ve read Live and Let Die, Moonraker and From Russia With Love.
The first Bond I ever saw on screen was Roger Moore. It wasn’t until my teen years I began to see some of the Sean Connery flicks. I knew nothing about the literary Bond, and didn’t favor one actor over the other, but I liked the Connery flicks better. My favorite became Thunderball. How can you go wrong with an underground battle between frogmen using spearguns and submerged jet skis?
My senior year in high school I got a chance to see Dr. No and I really liked it. Not many cool gadgets, but the feel of it was groovy, and Connery’s Bond in this flick was one cool customer (closer to Ian Fleming’s character, in my opinion, than any actor has come until Daniel Craig or perhaps Timothy Dalton).
Speaking of Timothy Dalton, I just saw License to Kill this month. Hollywood finally did to Felix Leiter what Fleming did to him in the second Bond novel. I was shocked to read about the fate of Bond’s CIA counterpart in Live and Let Die, not just because it was gruesome, but because Felix Leiter had been a healthy, able-bodied staple in just about every Bond movie.
I’m sure this topic has been analyzed to death, so I won’t ramble on too long. But reading the books does take some of the Bond mystique away.
The silver screen Bond is a supercharged exaggeration of the character in nearly every way, as are his adventures. The literary Bond has only used his “license to kill” a couple times in his career. The movie Bond kills anywhere from three to a dozen times in any given story.
One of those kills to Bond’s credit, by the way, occurred during the war if I remember correctly. What war? Fleming’s Bond got into intelligence work during WWII, and continued serving in that capacity into the Cold War. In the movies, he was strictly Cold War, and we were never given any indication how he got into the business. He was conceived in a test tube by M for all we knew. With all the reboots, I think even the Cold War origin will soon be swept back (if it hasn’t been already). And with the Daniel Craig films delving more into the Bond character than any previous flicks, we’ll probably get his background filled in, too (retrofitted, of course).
Hmm. Just checking the canon, I realized I skipped Diamonds Are Forever. Have to remedy that. I was actually checking because From Russia With Love ended in an almost cliffhanger fashion and I wanted to see what followed it, guessing it would be You Only Live Twice.
Nope. Dr. No.
My least favorite Bond is, hand’s down, the Pierce Brosnan dynasty. That’s when the writers and directors transformed our favorite sexist pig superspy into just another action hero franchise. Along with that, the amazon superninja has become as obligatory in OO7 flicks as in every other action movie.
I’ll be glad to watch Halle Berry strut up out of the ocean all day long, but watching her out-macho the male lead is about as interesting as an old Wonder Woman rerun.
Look for Bond to get a sex change in the future, much like Thor, the Terminator, etc. “Bond. Jane Bond. I’ll take a sloe gin phiz, shaken, not stirred.” Maybe some “Bond boys” with names like Dick Steel, Bolt Upright and Hardin Cox.
Well, my Bond education will continue. Though the books are interesting, I don’t like them enough to make them a priority. So this could take a while.
Castigo Cay by Matt Bracken
Matt Bracken is a former SEAL with what seems to me an obsession about sailing. You’d think, when someone like this becomes a novelist, he’d try his hand at writing high seas thrillers after the manner of Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt.
That’s not quite what he does.
Castigo Cay is a bit of an adjustment from his previous work–more of a straight-up adventure–with a point of view decidedly unorthodox, as you might imagine.
Dan Kilmer is a USMC veteran of the Iraq deployment who escaped the near-future dystopia in a 60-foot schooner, making a living as a sort of modern day privateer. His gorgeous, sexy girlfriend leaves him in the first act to chase her ambitions inside the economically ruined USA; specifically in the de facto fiefdom of Miami. Dan is sorry to see her go, but prepared to move on with his life, when another expatriate sailor brings him news about the shady billionaire who enticed Cori (the ex-girlfriend) away.
The billionaire is one of the amoral corporatists who has profited from the dismantling of the republic. He’s a real sicko, and has hired a crew of fellow sickos. On his private island in the Carribbean (ostensibly a “game preserve”) he brings young attractive women to be raped, tortured, then hunted and killed as if big game.
Dan spends a lot of his private savings (in the form of gold krugerands–the universal barter currency in the wake of the US Dollar’s obliterated facade of worth) and spends most of the novel on a sort of goose chase, but meets some helpful friends along the way.
Bracken really hooked me at the beginning with the strong characterizations. The story did bog down a bit, however, during the second act in the Miami area. The third act poured on the juice, though, with a return to the eponymous locale and a showdown between Dan and the sickos.
As apparently is SOP with Bracken’s novels, this one is packed with a lot of information, most of it about sailing. I didn’t always know what the names of different equipment referred to, but it was never so thick that I got lost, either. It reminded me a bit of The Sand Pebbles in that regard. I got the gist of it enough to follow the flow of the story weaved through this maritime universe.
Regardless of how right or wrong the worldview behind an adventure story is, or the technical details, what makes it sink or swim are the characters. Bracken batted it out of the park in that regard. Dan Kilmer is flawed to be sure, but he kind of knows it, can admit when he’s wrong, and when given the chance to redeem himself he charges straight for it at flank speed.
No-Frills Japanese Mythology?
Is it mythology or embellished history? I’m not sure.
This film had great potential. The visual component was breathtaking, the acting solid, some of the plot ingredients tantalizing. For the first half hour it was shaping up to be a top-notch epic.
One of the main characters (played by Keanu Reeves) is a “half breed” who is also a boy partially raised by “demons.” For both those reasons he is an outcast among the clan he is imbedded with.
During a visit of the Shogun, the master of the clan is framed for a dishonorable crime by a witch working for a rival clan. The Master (Asano) commits seppuku, leaving his samurais without a master (the textbook definition of ronin).
This was all a plot by the rival master, Kira, and the witch Mizuki to have their clan take over the province, which they do. You can probably guess where the story goes from there–which is not a criticism, necessarily.
What is worthy of criticism is the gaps in character development; outright neglect in character building in some cases, and a choppy, rushed execution of the narrative.
Some probably would complain that the film is too long already, but I believe some more screen time was necessary to make it flow. There were some cultural insights and other expository requirements left out which could have saved it for a western audience. With a big budget historical epic there’s just no excuse for cutting corners in the screenplay.
The story concept was much more interesting than Dances With Japanese Wolves The Last Samurai. However (and it hurts me to say this) ruthless adherence to formula, as in the Tom Cruise vehicle, might have been an improvement.
I don’t remember any nudity or sexual content, so this aesthetic adventure might be a candidate for Amazon Instant Theater with the kids. Despite being a one-time fan of Akira Kurosawa, I haven’t seen many samurai films by other directors, and know nothing about other versions of this movie. Nevertheless, I’m including a couple links below.
Pirates Be Advised: Yer A$$ is Mine!
Thanks yet again to David in Sausalito, California for a nice review of the Tier Zero audio book. This is the sequel to Hell & Gone and an unabashed throwback to the glory days of men’s fiction–as the cover suggests.
Here’s what David said:
Great sequel! The badass band of homicidal misfits are back together for another testosterone-feuled adventure through the pirate infested oceans, cities and jungles of Indonesia. In this sequel to “Hell and Gone” Henry Brown really sharpens his writing with a much improved “flow” and a much improved story arc. “Tier Zero” is much more character driven (and developed) than its predecessor, focusing a little more on the people rather than the action but don’t worry, this is a Henry Brown book–there’s still enough blood, bullets and guts to keep even the most hardcore action junkies drooling – just look at the cover art. These books have a kinda old-school “pulpy’ feel to them that I really like but don’t see (or hear) that much of anymore. The narrator did another outstanding job with the characters both male and female. Don’t worry if you haven’t read “Hell and Gone”, this book can easily be read as a stand alone. Awesome book overall!
Recorded books are a godsend for me, as my time to sit and actually read anything is pretty scarce. But there’s still a lot of times I can listen to something without breaking stride. And Audible downloads to your listening device are painless.
Equalibrium
This action sci-fi thriller is set in a dystopian future in which emotions have been made illegal.
You read that right. More on that below.
I don’t know what (if anything) the film makers have said about their stylistic vision for this film, but visually it is identical to the Matrix trilogy. The plot, however, is built on a different platform of fears.
In the future, emotions are controlled by a mandatory drug citizens are required to take periodically. Anyone suspected to be foregoing their dose is turned in to the authorities and executed.
The Christian Bale character is a model cop (called “cleric”), as upon finding his partner with a book of poetry (all stimulus which might induce an emotional response, or “sense offense,” are illegal), he takes him down with all the poignancy of the Orkin Man stepping on a cockroach. We also get flashbacks which show his own wife was terminated for sense offense as well.
The main catalyst for the plot is when the cleric begins to experience emotions of his own.
I would say the acting is good, but then with the wooden personas of law-abiding citizens in this flick, that’s hard to argue. And of the few emotions displayed throughout the film, most were displayed by the last person it made any sense to have show them: Bale’s even colder new partner, played by Taye Diggs.
Either Diggs was auditioning for a toothpaste commercial, or the director had a huge blind spot. All his mugging actually annoyed me with its anomaly. We’re supposed to believe that Bale is in danger because Diggs suspects he’s “sense offending” when it’s Diggs who is the obvious sense offender from where the audience sits and Bale hides his emotions fairly well.
There were some suspenseful scenes and plot twists, so if you can suspend disbelief, it truly will be a “thriller” for you.
The “gun katas” practiced by the clerics look kind of neat, but are rather silly as a combat technique.
That’s not far from descriptive of the movie as a whole: looks neat, but rather silly.
I recently saw Pleasantville, so I’m becoming aware of a new apparent phobia spreading among the Hollywood elite: that fascistic bullies are plotting to take over the world and suppress their feelings.
The symbol dominating this police state is intentionally reminiscent of the Swastika (I guess the film makers never watched film footage of the Nazis, because it’s kinda hard to miss how emotional/passionate Hitler and his followers were.)
The movie gets really heavy-handed when the Clerics find an illegal kennel and decide to kill off a bunch of puppies.
I’m stopping here. I’ve already spent too much time on this flick.
“What A Blast! A-Team meets the Expendables.”
“What A Blast! A-Team meets the Expendables.”
So reads a review of the Hell & Gone audio book on Audible.com.
I remember a few years ago I was faithful about posting the latest reviews of my books on the blog. Not so much anymore, but I’m about to toot my own horn again.
(Wait a minute…is it really me tooting the horn if somebody else wrote the review? I’m probably more like an amplifier or something.)
This guy can write! Great action packed “mercenary” type story with very likeable “good guys” and very dislikable “bad guys”. I’ve read reviews from military/action writers praising Henry Brown’s skills but due to my “wish list” being so full I haven’t been able to listen to any of his books ’til now and I seriously regret not doing it sooner. Very impressive for what I believe to be his first action book. Without a doubt I’ll be listening to the sequel, “Tier Zero“- if the reviews are accurate it’s suppose to be even better than “Hell and Gone”. The narrator did a very good job with the dialogue-no complaints.
Many thanks to David in Sausalito, CA for taking the time to share his thoughts.
BTW, I have a code coupon for a free download of the Audible book for somebody willing to post an honest review on Amazon and Audible.