“This is Information” is everything I love about Alan Moore as it reminds me of just how good a writer he is when he’s on form, and just how he towers over lesser writers.  I had a friendly pub discussion with Watters, who writes for T-publications, about Alan Moore vs. Grant Morrisson.  Watters had done his Masters Thesis (?) on Morrison and had argued that Moore was content lite, and, how Morrison had more ideas.  I argued that Moore was the better technician.  That one comic is proof positive – powerful, enlightening, moving.  I love the ABA Ternary form structure of it – the last panels recapitulating on the first – the perfect marriage of word and picture… Wonderful.

I’ve not read any Frank Miller since Sin City.  So, when 300 came out as a movie a few years back, I went to see it with a muslim friend of mine, Imran.  I’d heard that a number of American troops had seen it out in Iraq and had been whooping and hollering by the end, so my liberal antennae were set to offend, but I thought I’d give it a fair crack of the whip.  I’d enjoyed the film of Sin City, and the trailers for 300 certainly looked as if they had translated the artwork to the big screen.  So Imran and I went to see it at the Vue down in Croydon.

Now Imran had quite kindly taken me to a persian film festival a few years ago, where we’d come to see some Iranian films that had been smuggled out.  One of the directors were there and they had talked about how in Iran there was a vibrant, underground, movie scene.  Many of the members of the audience (I was one of only two white faces) asked many questions and the debate before the film was very lively.  Sadly, when the film started, it was entirely in Farsi, with no subtitles, and this robbed the film of any kind of detailed text I could follow – which was doubly sad because it was almost entirely verbal.

Imran’s always been deeply invested in his culture.  A film composer and sound recordist – I had one of the most amazing experiences of my life at an old people’s home where we recorded some elderly Indians singing Indian folk songs – when they sang, it was entirely without pretension or self conscientiousness, soulful voices, singing beautiful melodies, capped off by a joyful rendition of “you are my sunshine” in Hindi.  I remember listening to them sing on the cannes, getting chills down my spine – a beautiful moment.

So, Imran, loves his cultural background.  He reads Rumi.  His family have meetings, where they get together with other families and read Sufi poetry – a kind of spiritual and mystical Islam.   But don’t get me wrong – they’re not by any stretch of the imagination Fundamentalists.  To him, Islam is a spiritual, mystical, allegorical text.  These are an educated, professional class Indian family that take an active interest in their cultural heritage. Being from a typically western family, I envied to a certain degree, this close bond they seemed to share – which seemed a world a way from the dinner in front of the TV way I’d been raised.

Back to Croydon Vue.  The film has started and I’m sitting there.  I know I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t.  When Xerxes enters I lose it.  I see this ridiculously homophobic, caricature, the villain, naturally, as like a modern day version of “The Eternal Jew”.  I’m sat in my seat apoplectic with rage, at this pointed, propogandistic piece of trash, wanting to scream at Zack Snyder, “don’t you realise what you’re doing?”.   Every studio-detuned syllable of Xerxes voice, pitch shifted like the sense of morality of the filmmakers – downward – made me regurgitate bile.  In my mind, this is the clarion call for a new holocaust.  I can hear the troops hollering and whooping like blood thirsty wolves, “USA! USA!” whilst ridiculously muscled beefcakes eugenically cast out the weak or the deformed from their fascistic utopia.

If Frank Miller reviewed reviews, it might go something like this.

But in shorter, clipped sentences.  Real Tough guy sentences.  With a faux New York accent.

“Candy-ass liberals, so it made him sick.  Good.  I’m glad it did.  HE’s the reason this country’s going to shit.  A protozoa.  A microbe.  Barely even a speck.  That’s what he is.

Ain’t no room for bleeding hearts.  This is a WAR.  They struck us first.  Hell they deserve every thing they get.  Savages. that’s what they are.  I ain’t got no time to sugar coat no pill.”

So, you can see Frank Miller and I aren’t best of friends.  I still haven’t forgiven him for the 117 minutes of his life he robbed.

Time is a funny thing.

It appears, in the minds of men, that you can draw an arbitrary line in the sand, and say that the present starts at this point, and that all other events prior to that point in the sand have absolutely no relevance on any subsequent events.

That whatever event at that point in time wiped the slate of history clean and everything starts again.  First cause.  The Big Bang.  9/11.

That the events on september the 11th were just a chapter, albeit a particularly, spectacularly tragic one, in a continuing saga involving relations between the middle east and the west – and that events can be explained, but importantly NOT excused, in relation to the past. 

Russell Brand, gaw bless him, has a saying he likes to quote, “Fascism is the removal of nuance.”  Post Dark Knight, Miller appears to have suffered some kind of embolism that robbed his brain of any conception of nuance.  It’s like his beloved chirascuro appears to have sprouted tentacles, reached in and infected his morality.  Gone are the greys.  Everything is black and white.  Good and bad.   It’s enough to make a man wear a cowboy hat and dress in black.

Edward de Bernays said that Propoganda is the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses”.  It doesn’t need to be said that propoganda was a tool with which the Armies of the world dehumanised their enemies in the second world war.  Whether it be the stereotypes of the Germans, the Japanese, the Jews, the Russians, The Africans, The Chinese – all these resources have been used to make killing and enslaving people palatable.  It directly enables us to commit these acts.  “It’s OK – they weren’t really human.  Inhuman acts to kill non humans.  Don’t worry dear, it’s just beef at the end of your fork.”

With apologies to Will from last months’ crossed expose, but I feel like I’m copying your bit about the pidgeon:  1300 words in and I haven’t even touched on Holy Terror.  Frank Miller, if you’re reading this – you and Zack Snyder wasted 117 minutes of my life, and you wasted the 30 minutes it took to read Holy Terror.  I hope this wasted however long it takes you to read 1300 words.

Maybe now we can call it even.

I guess Holy Terror’s one redeeming feature is that it’s utterly transparent, that, unlike 300 – the film – it doesn’t try and dress it up in a thinly veiled metaphor.

I can’t really take the view that it doesn’t matter as long as it’s artfully done.  Even if Holy Terror had the technique of Alan Moore, it’s content is still despicable.  Understandable, within the tide of history, but not something that you think would spring from the pen of the Dark Knight Returns.  It strikes me as like a marriage wrecking comment said in an intense argument that you regret afterwards.  The only problem is, once it’s out there.  You can’t take it back.

When the film ends, Imran and I are walking out of the Cinema and I ask him, “So, what did you think?”

“I liked it.” He says.

I turn to him, shocked, “How can you possibly like this – can’t you see this was propagandistic trash?”

“Nah, it’s just a film.  It doesn’t mean anything.”