Deeds & Words

King Rat

China Mieville

Tor Paperbacks

Collage:  (n) various materials are arranged and glued to a backing; a collection of unrelated things.

Compose:  (v) Construct or create, especially a work of art of music.

Composite:  (adj) made up of various parts, blended, made up of recognizable constituents

Scavenge: (v) search for and collect (discarded items); remove unwanted products from; to feed on carrion or refuse.

            China Mieville is the king of collage.  He doesn’t cut out pictures and glue them on paper.  His layered images are verbal.

            All fiction writers are collage artists.  We scavenge, borrow and steal things we see or hear, overhear, or that people tell us.  We weave clothes, cars, license plates, and snatches of conversation into our stories.  We co-opt our neighbors’ pets, children, bad boyfriends and zany relatives.  Our collaged notions coalesce, we hope, into a believable reality-quilt strong enough to support our story.. Because Mieville writes fantasy, his collages are more textured and more direct.

            In Perdido Street Station, Lin, the main character’s artist lover, has the body of a human woman and a scarab beetle’s body for a head.  The city of New Crubozon, where Perdido Street Station takes place, is filled with horrific living collages; humans with machine parts, animal parts or additional human appendages magically grafted onto their bodies.  They are called the Remade.  The other races that inhabit New Crubozon, such as the Khepri (Lin is a Khepri) and the Garuda, are hybrids of humans and birds, insects or animals.

            But before New Crubozon there was London, and before Perdido Street Station there was King Rat.

            King Rat is Mieville’s first published novel.  It came out in 1998, a horror story set in late 1990′s London.  Saul Garamond, a disaffected twenty-something, is arrested for the murder of his father, but then a strange man. . .creature?. . . breaks him out of jail.  That creature is King Rat, a rat in human form, who tells Saul that Saul himself is half-rat, and that they must work together to defeat a deadly enemy.

            The rest of the book leads Saul and the reader through the darkened corners and scrap heaps of London, through the sewers of course, through curls of landscape.  While Saul is learning the secrets of rat existence; his human friends who, like him, live on the fringes of society, are making their own collages.  Fabian, a visual artist, is at work on an actual collage.  Natasha, a DJ who composes jungle style drum and bass music, layering “found sound” (radio static, human voices) over an imperative bassline, meets a disturbing yet appealing flute player.  The flute player is The Piper, King Rat’s hereditary enemy.

            Natasha refers to her scavenged sounds as road kill.  Here’s her process:

            “Her eyes were wide as she scanned her kills, her pickled sounds, and found what she wanted:  a snatch of trumpet from Linten Kwese Johnson, a wail from Tony Rebel, a cry of invitation from Al Green. . .she dropped them into her tune. (Mieville, p 58)”

            Rats are scavengers, and King Rat teaches Saul how to scavenge for food.  Later the reader realizes that King Rat is scavenging for advantage, for power.

            While not a physical composite, King Rat comprises the characteristics of rats and humans.  As a human he is shrewd, venial, cockney; as a rat he is strong, agile, cunning and completely survival driven.  He never actually transforms into a rat; instead he accomplishes things only a rat could do.  Soon Saul meets two other “King Animals,” Anansi the Spider King and Loplop the Bird Superior.  Anansi and Loplop have also been defeated by the Piper and seek revenge.

            Natasha, meanwhile, under the Piper’s thrall, is hard at work on her masterpiece, a composition titled Wind City.  “Because it was a city, Natasha saw as she listened.  She sped through the air at a huge speed between vast and crumbling buildings, everything gray, towering and enormous and flattened, variegated and empty, unclaimed.  Natasha painted this picture carefully, took a long time creating it, dripping a hundred hints of humanity into the tracks, hints that could not be delivered, dead ends, disappointments.

            “. . .This was Wind City, a huge metropolis, deserted and broken, alone, entropic, until a tsunami of air breaks over it, a tornado of flute clears its streets, mocks the pathetic remnants of humanity in its path and blows them away like tumbleweed, the city stands alone and cleared of all its rubbish.  Even the ghost of the radio proclaims the passing of the people, a flat expanse of empty sound.  The boulevards and parks and suburbs and center of the city were taken, expropriated, possessed by the wind. (Mieville, p210)”

            If Meiville likes sticking diverse things together, he also likes tearing things apart.  After the Piper tortures and kills one of Saul’s friends, a police inspector visits the crime scene: 

            “There was no escaping this crime; it lay all around him, on the platform, spattering the walls, carbonized on the live rail, smeared by gravity the length of the first car.  It was as if the metal stakes and the bloodied stubs of ropes, the ruined flesh had been conjured up spontaneously out of the dark tunnels.” (KR, p 151)

            Scraps of sounds, scraps of flesh, scraps of food, scraps of truth. . . these are Saul’s compass points as a rat.  In his nocturnal trips through the city, he finds scraps of art; posters for music gigs, graffiti high on the walls, and when he returns to his father’s flat he finds another scrap of truth, literally a scrapbook, his human father’s journal.

Saul’s experience of his city is a composite.

“This point of view was dangerous for the observer, as well as for the city.  It was only when it was seen from these angles that he could believe London had been built, brick by brick, not born out of its own mind. (Mieville, 257)”

Despite the darkness, the filth, the rot, the grime and decay, despite the persistent hopelessness expressed throughout King Rat, it reminds me of Neil Gaiman, specifically Neverwhere.  While Neverwhere is sweeter than King Rat, it too conjures an eerie magical London crouching in the corners and crevices of the modern-day city.  Gaiman’s London grew organically and there is a suggestion that somehow, London Below is even older than the everyday city.  Mieville’s London is decoupaged, a multi-layered piece of 2,000-year-old communal art.  Saul scurries through the joins in the artwork, surfacing to the world of human London only briefly, noting snippets of scenery or human landmarks.  In Gaiman’s epic Sandman, the character of Lyta embarks on a vision-quest for her lost son Daniel.  She traverses a landscape that resembles both the kingdom of dreams and the slums and alleys of her home city, not unlike Saul’s trek through London’s shadows.

Perhaps King Rat’s occasional similarity to a graphic novel is not a coincidence.

“King Rat grasped his small perch with his right hand.  He crouched, his left arm dangling between his legs, his head lowered toward his knees.  Seeing him, Saul thought of a comic-book hero:  Batman or Daredevil.  Silhouetted in the ruined window, King Rat looked like a scene-setting frame at the start of a graphic novel. (Mieville, p258)”

Neither Batman nor Daredevil, who both had murdered fathers, is a random choice here.

Because the plot of King Rat is relatively straightforward, and the book is pretty short, Mieville doesn’t really get to open up the throttle on his fantastical  hybrid images. Even his prose isn’t quite where it will be in Station, when his extreme vocabulary will add to the feeling of foreignness, when his modifiers will stack up on the page like Victorian knick-knacks, adding texture to the text.  In King Rat, the modifiers seem flabby.  The Piper’s voice is “suddenly vicious;” in a crime scene where a homeless woman lies murdered, the floor is “vile with blood.”  While he paints exquisite visual pictures, Mieville doesn’t give us much of the other senses, even, surprisingly, smell.  We see, not hear, Natasha’s music (her eyes are “wide”).  The book is filled with rats and we see them but never feel them, not even when they cuddle up against Saul, not when he is forced to step on their dancing bodies to reach and disable a boom-box, freeing them from the Piper’s poison music.  In the climactic final scene, King Rat’s feet are “ponderous and enthusiastic.”

These are small flaws.  Perfectionists may scowl at the collage and say they can see the seams, but the meta-image heralds the arrival of a new, strange and wonderful story-teller.

“He was celebrated all throughout Christendom as an enemy of the Turks.”

Lost Worlds: the Real Dracula

“I can’t believe we were talking about boobs.”

Denise Richards, It’s Complicated

Warning: The first part of this post contains graphic descriptions of torture and the second part is about Denise Richards.  Pick your poison.

            Usually I think I have an adequate grip on the bundle of consensual conventions called, for convenience’s sake, reality.  Periodically, though, surreality sideswipes me, throwing me completely off course, sometimes for hours.

            The other Monday I was watching the Denise Richards reality (sic) show—wait, I can explain.  I’m not offering a justification, because some things are not justifiable; merely an explanation.

            I started out watching a show on the History Channel about Vlad Dracula’s castles.  It was pretty cool.  They were using cgi and some old historical drawings and plans to re-create images of the various towns and castles Vlad Dracula used as they would have looked in the middle 1400s.  Only, it’s about Vlad Dracula, Bram Stoker’s inspiration for Count Dracula,  and you can’t really talk about him without addressing some of the horrible things he did.  So they detoured away from Vlad’s real estate to talk about how he took vengeance on the boyars who assassinated his father.  When one of your nicknames is Vlad the Impaler, it’s difficult to avoid a discussion about impalement, and this show didn’t want to avoid it.  They tackled with gusto.  A blond-haired English historian lady, wearing a thick sweater (I think it was winter in Rumania) held  up a pole about four inches in diameter, one end sharpened to a point so that it looked like a huge pencil.  “Often the enemy would be impaled through the navel or the heart,” she said, “and death came relatively quickly.”  Relatively; that’s good.  “However, if they really didn’t like you. . .” She flipped the pole.  “They took this rounded end and they greased it.”  Her voice took on that tone of low-key matter-of-fact English glee.  “Then they inserted it into the rectum.  The bottom,” she added, remembering that her ignorant American audience probably wouldn’t know what rectum meant.  Her eyes widened slightly.  “As they pole made its way through the body, you see, it could take literally days to die.”

            Clearly in those days it paid to invest in a relative who was a good shot with a long bow.

            Hoo-kay.  I read fantasy and horror, and I’m not squeamish, but if they were this excited about impaling people I could just imagine what fun they were going to have with that time Vlad drove iron spikes into the skulls of the Turkish emissaries because they would not remove their turbans in his presence.  I channel-surfed away from Vlad, thinking I needed a mental palate-cleanser.  Click.  The Weather Channel had the big map and was talking about Kansas.  Click; Comedy Central was in commercial.  Click again; and I was on the E! Network and Denise Richards and three of her friends were walking on a white sand beach somewhere in the tropics.  Denise accosted a nondescript-looking guy with a camera with a huge lens, like maybe 700mm.  It had to be digital with some sort of stabilizer, which my friend Mary describes accurately as the “no-shaky-thingee.”  Denise had deduced that he was a paparazzo (or, as she called it, “a paparazzi.”)  It turns out that she and her friends are on a man-and-child-free vacation on Maui, and they “just want to be free to have fun;” just the four of them and the camera crew.

            There was a jump-cut and next we saw Denise and her dark-haired friend getting ready for a paddle-surf lesson.  Cut to Denise sitting somewhere, speaking directly to the camera.  “I knew they would take the worst possible picture of me, I had gained weight and didn’t like how I looked in my bikini, and I just didn’t want to look stupid.”

            Well forgive me, but Denise Richards worked in a movie called Starship Troopers, which means she must have faced and conquered that particular fear many years ago.

            A few shots of Denise paddle-surfing and then we were in their hotel room while the four women ate candies or mac-nuts or something from a crystal bowl in the center of the table.  It was their last free day on Maui.  They wanted to cut loose, do something really wild.  I’m sure there dozens of wild things you can do on Maui.  You can hike, hang-glide, snorkel or ski.  You can probably go culturally wild and visit a hula-helau, or a gourd carver, or find a music jam.  You can go bar-hopping, Mai-Tai wild.  Faced with this plethora of choices, the four made the decision most mature, sophisticated women would.  They decided they wanted to find a slightly more private beach and sunbathe topless.

            Just them, and the camera crew.

            They discussed their breasts, pre-and-post childbirth, and one of the friends was reluctant but finally agreed she would take her top off if all the others would too. These four never once broke the fourth wall.  No one said, “I’m okay being half-naked in front of you guys but I’m embarrassed about the camera crew.”

            This is what I don’t get.  Are the viewers supposed to forget that there’s a camera crew there?  Since the crew follows you around all day, I suppose the participants really do partially forget, until they decide they want to go somewhere.  If you drive somewhere, and the crew’s in another car, and you start to get in an argument with your friend, do you both say, “Stop!  We’ve got to wait for the crew?”

            At this point I was ready to do errands anyway, but these questions kept revolving at the back of my mind as I hauled boxes down to the storage unit.

            I understand not loving the paparazzi.  As a celebrity, you have no control, no “final cut” they way you do as the producer of your own reality (sic) show. I don’t understand pretending a need for privacy.  “I’m sooo tired of being pursued by the paparazzi!  I feel besieged!  I just want to go someplace where I can be alone with my friends. . .and the camera crew.”

            I predict that soon, “camera crew” will replace “elephant” in a well known therapeutic figure of speech, as in this example:  “Stephanie, you say you’re angry with Alan because he hogs the remote, but isn’t the camera crew in the room really the fact that he had an affair?”

            So what have I learned from this experience?  The first lesson is more like a reminder; British historians, Vlad the Impaler, definitely the better choice.  And what about these unscripted shows who follow some used-to-be-famous person around all day?  I came to the conclusion that I can’t judge Denise Richards as harshly as I want to, because the show is a complete construct.  Even if the people who turn these hours of banality into half an hour of solid waste wanted to show Denise volunteering at her children’s school, helping with a food drive or serving meals at the local homeless shelter (assuming she does those things) they probably couldn’t, because of all the privacy waivers they would need to get.  I doubt the other demi-celebrities and genuine celebrities whose kids go to school with hers would ever agree.  So she probably isn’t as shallow and pathetic as. . .well, not as shallow as. . .well . . . She is probably a woman with small children who has figured out a way to make some money without leaving home or her kids.

            What else did I learn? This is America, the land of opportunity.  Any boy or girl can grow up to have a camera crew of their very own.

            My final lesson: If you’re going to watch this kind of thing, go for the contests; American Idol, Project Runway, Next Food Network Star; shows where people have a talent and actually create something.  Otherwise, iron spikes through the skull are still the better choice.

Before we went to see the lava flow, my friend L took us to a kava bar in the Kalapana district. “Kava and lava,” she said. We made a left onto a street that paralleled the highway and drove for about a mile. Soon we were looking at dunes. L made a right and followed the road into a small square parking lot. Behind us was a café and fast-food place that sold coffee drinks. A sign, hand-lettered on plywood, advertised a nature walk. Palm trees, ferns and hibiscus bushes lined a sinuous curve of walkway along the café area. We got out and walked over in the shade of the vegetation to the kava bar.

     The bar looked like those places you see in movies set in tropical resorts, with a palm-thatched roof and a three-sided counter lined with stools. The back wall had a cold case with some beer and some soft drinks, and a large ice chest sat on a stool near the back. The bartender was short, smiling, and friendly. He was sitting on the inside of the bar. Along the parking lot side sat an older white-haired man, who also gave us a nod and a friendly smile.

     “A kava,” said my friend L, and I echoed it. I reached for my wallet but L waved me off.

     “My treat,” she said.

     Our bartender opened the chest and took out a bottle. He pulled down two clear plastic water cups, about six-ounce size, and poured in the kava mixture.

     L asked her other guests if they wanted one. They each said no.

     “It’s an unusual flavor,” L said.

     I looked at the cup. The liquid was a translucent green/brown/yellowish/gray, and not visually appealing, particularly. I lifted the glass. The smell was pleasant, herbal. I took a small sip.

     Mmm. Imagine a very bitter carrot, mixed with a little bit of rotting vegetables, and– I swallowed.          

     “Earthy,” I said.

     “Sort of an acquired taste,” said L.

     The white-haired guy at the bar said, “How are you enjoying your kava mud-water?”

     I took another swallow. “It takes some getting used to,” I said.

     Kava, , or ‘awa, or yaqona in Fiji, or sakau, is kind of a tranquilizer. It induces a feeling of well-being with no loss of mental clarity. The traditional beverage is made from the pulverized root of the plant (which is about 80% liquid) and mixed with water to a palatable strength. The Latin botanical name of the plant is Piper Methysticum, which means, “intoxicating pepper” but which looks like it should be the name of a wizard in a fantasy novel. “If Piper Methysticum refuses to help us, then all is lost!”

     The beverage I was drinking is a traditional way to serve kava. Maori elders in New Zealand use a kava drink ceremonially at the beginning of tribal councils. Here in mainland US you can buy kava powdered, in capsule form, in some health food stores. They recommend it to calm anxiety and help with insomnia. Before you run out and buy some though, consider that the powdered kava may be made of leaves and stems, which you don’t want. The main reason is potency; the heaviest concentration of kavalactones, which are the ‘mellowing” agents, is in the root; and the other reason is health. A study done in 2001 showed that while there were no liver-toxins in the roots of the kava plant, there were some in the leaves and stems. Go to Hawaii and drink it with water. Trust me.

     I leaned back against the bar and sipped my “kava mud-water.” It was late afternoon, and a breeze rustled through the palms, the ferns and the hibiscus. J, one of L’s other visitors, wandered off to explore the nature walk. From the house up the hill slightly to our left, two small children came out and started to play in the driveway, giggling. After a few more sips I realized that the inside of my mouth felt numb, a typical kava response. “It’s great when you have to go to the dentist,” said L, and laughed.

     L struck up a conversation with the stand owner about music. She had heard musicians, and seen hula, there several times. I realized I was feeling very good. I felt relaxed, friendly. That usual, almost-invisible barrier between observer-me and the world had faded, but I wasn’t having the short-term memory issues or loss of coordination I tend to experience (quickly) with alcohol. In short, I was having a good time. This is a good time in relation to being in Hawaii, where I had already been having a pretty good time for several days.

     I looked at the glass.

     I had drunk about half of the six ounces.

     I’m not very mathematical, but I did figure out that I felt about as good as I usually feel halfway through my second glass of wine—on three ounces of kava. Wow.

     I asked the bartender if he had ever tried putting honey in the kava beverage. “No,” he said. “It doesn’t dissolve. I have put coconut syrup though, for people who want it sweeter. You want coconut syrup?” I thanked him and said no. The thought of coconut added to the ripe ditch-greens flavor just didn’t seem appealing.

     I decided I was done with the kava, but I offered L’s son Daniel a taste. He took two stips through the narrow red straw. He was not impressed.

     Later, when I got home, I found an article on the internet about kava in New Zealand, where it is legal but there is limit to how much you can have “for personal use,” which means that young tribal people find it easier to use alcohol. Tribal elders are upset because kava has ceremonial value but also because kava does not create the hostility and violence that alcohol consumption can. Clearly this plant, while lowering inhibitions, works on different parts of the brain. For me, it created a sense of optimism and openness. In a tribal council, where you are trying to work out problems collaboratively, I think this would be excellent. I wouldn’t want to knock back a couple of kavas in Las Vegas, through, and then go wandering around the strip. Of course, if I could find kava on the strip in Las Vegas, it would be mixed with some fancy-flavored vodka (New! Stoli Papaya!), and have an umbrella in it—and I wouldn’t be in Las Vegas, or on the strip, in the first place, so the chances of that happening are probably small.

     Except that is doesn’t taste very good—and it’s about three times as strong—having a kava drink with your friends is like sitting on the deck after dinner and sipping a glass of wine.

     L finished hers, then sent her daughter to buy her some coffee, since she would be driving us up to watch the lava flow into the ocean.

Photo (c)2008, Marion Deeds

The Lake County EcoArts Sculpture Walk  is installed at the Trailside Park in Middletown.  I’ve been going to sculpture walk for the last three years, since John Randall Williams, one of the coordinators, who is in my writers’ workshop, told me about it. The art works line the walking trail, with a few detours into oak glades. Because this is an eco-arts exhibit, the work often uses recycled or natural materials, and almost every piece has an environmental theme.

In art, my preference runs to the narrative or representational rather than to conceptual, and I’m a sucker for anything with textiles.  There is something for everyone in this show.  I got plenty of art that told a story, but my favorite was a textile installation by Sheila O’Hara and her students called “The Rainforest is Crying.”   Long pieces of woven fabric, cut into strips (or perhaps woven in strips, I can’t tell) waft back and forth, like layers of silvery rain, among the oak trees, which are draped with Spanish moss.  The cloth is beautifully done in shades of white, brown and black, the fabric is strong with a nubby texture that is surprising since it looks sleek.  Near the top of each panel runs an uneven stretch of black/gray, as if smoke rising off the fires in the rainforests, or the scar left where the trees have been logged. It’s a beautiful, thoughtful piece.

This show has always been inclusive, and this year was no different.  There is art from a third grade class (“It’s Up to Us”); one individual eleven year old artist makes a statement about the importance of keeping our water safe; a high school class is included, and Redwood Children’s Services contributed a textile piece called  “A Nest of One’s Own.”  It was easy to read layers of meaning into that title.

The park is flat, a meadow surrounded by oak and fir trees.  By July the grasses are blond and the rattlesnake grass chirrs when you walk through it.  I try to get there by mid-morning, no later than nine, because to me that’s when the light is best, but some of these pieces are designed to change as the light hits them throughout the day, so there’s no bad time to go.  The day I went, my car thermometer said it was ninety degrees by the time I got back to my car, a little after ten.  I recommend bringing water, wearing sunscreen and carrying a hat if you are sun-sensitive.  Also, while I’ve never actually seen a rattlesnake, it is their type of terrain so high shoes and long pants are probably not a bad idea. Having said that, I was eager to blunder off the path in order to look at pieces up close, touch them, and see them from different angles, which the placement of the pieces certainly allows you to do.

It seems as if certain artists are drawn to specific areas of the park trail.  I think Don Speed has had his metal sculptures in the big oak tree before, and Zack Pine’s porcelain installations always look as if they are in about the same location.  It’s a good spot.  This year he did a peace sign, and Don did some different views of the future, ranging from whimsical to apocalyptic.

Christalena Loren’s “Druid Dancing”, and Kevin Brynes’s “Elise” both have perfect placement.  Loren’s benefits from a madrone tree nearby that mirrors the rusty-earth color of the dancing figure and the mushroom stems.  The piece does remind me of the Marin Civic Center just because of the colors.  “Yeti or Not. . .I’ve Got to Go” also benefits from perfect placement.  Please, follow your impulse and the footprints that lead you off the path to irrefutable proof of the existence of the Yeti.  You’ll laugh.

“Re-Life Cycle” is one of the most interesting pieces in the show this year.  “Big MaMa” creates a strange mix of power, humor and comfort. “Flying Reptile. . .” by Larry Williams, and “Buddha” by Rebecca Kaplan, are both beautiful pieces that don’t seem specifically tied to this exhibit (they would look beautiful anywhere), except that they both used recycled materials. Despite my statement earlier that I like narrative or textile based work, I was captivated by “A New Species” (Sherry Harris).  These strange flowers assembled out of palm frond, gourds and branches kept drawing me back. 

Karen Turcotte’s sculpture, “Process”, is near the trailhead.  Karen is the breath and soul of the sculpture walk.  She coordinates the event every year and she and John spear-head the set-up.  They also do remediation when pieces fall victim to weather or vandalism (which, sadly, they do).  Every year I’ve gone, Karen has also had a piece in the show.  The first year I went, she had placed a bust of Medusa underneath a good-sized manzanita shrub, the spiny red branches recapitulating Medusa’s writhing snakes.  For a couple of years she did different things with three tall cut outs of women figures, each painted in a primary color.  One year they were muses.  One year they guided visitors into the park (although if I recall correctly, they had to wear clothes for that gig, even though they are flat cutouts).  While I liked “Process,”(the opening picture in this post) I did miss the muses.  It’s that whole representational versus conceptual thing again, although I liked the geometric interest in the piece very much.  It reminded me of the robots in Transformers, in a good way.  Sorry, Karen, that’s more a comment about my education that your art!

Ever year my plan is to go, experience the exhibit and then have a late breakfast somewhere in Middletown or Calistoga.  Every year, I fail at this plan.  I have never eaten in Middletown.  A couple of times I’ve stopped in Calistoga, but it seems more like a lunch town than a breakfast town.  As a fall-back, this trip, I planned to stop at a coffee place at the southern edge of Middletown, in a converted gas station, but it didn’t look open.  Since I planned to meet someone in Santa Rosa anyway, I drove back over the mountain and settled for a disappointing breakfast burrito at a taquiera on Fourth Street. 

Good thing there had been art to sustain me.

Pictures:

1) Process

2) The Rainforest is Crying to be Saved

3) Druid Dancing with Mushrooms

4) Big MaMa

5) Relife Cycle

Hancock

Starring:  Will Smith, Jason Bateman, Charlize Theron

Directed By:  Peter Berg

Written by:  Vince Gillligan, Vy Vincent Ngo

The 4^th of July brings us three things we can count on; fireworks, family picnics and a big honkin’ Will Smith action movie.  This year’s offering is Hancock, an action comedy—sort of—about a reluctant superhero with a bad attitude.

The first two-thirds of this movie are delightful.  This is mostly because of the interaction between Smith and Jason Bateman.  Bateman is wonderful!  Smith can always be relied on to turn in a good performance, and he is suitably vulgar, funny and forlorn  throughout.

Hancock is an alcoholic loner who has super strength, is impervious to bullets, and can fly.  He saves lives, he stops crime, but he is sloppy about it, and has a nasty personality.  He has also racked up a lot of property damage—a lot of bright, shiny Los Angeles property damage.  In a theme better explored in another superhero movie—The Incredibles—Hancock has to deal with a populace who resents him and takes him for granted rather than acting grateful.  In one scene, the people crowd around to critique Hancock’s rescue technique.  When Hancock saves the life of Ray (Bateman), an idealistic PR man, Ray decides to return the favor by “re-branding” Hancock and making him likeable.  Aaron, Ray’s young son, thinks Hancock is cool, but his wife Mary (Charlize Theron) is obviously, visibly skeptical.

As part of Hancock’s image-rehabilitation, Ray says, Hancock must turn himself in for the property damage stuff.  Ray believes that once Hancock is unavailable to stop crime, the public will begin to clamor for him.  Hancock reads a public apology that calls to mind the myriad of celebrities who have done exactly the same thing, and goes off to jail.  The jail scenes, while completely unrealistic, are mostly hilarious.  The very best jail scene is coarse and laugh-out-loud funny when it relies on sound effects and actors’ reactions, which are priceless, and is then ruined by an unnecessary visual that makes two inmates look like a centaur from an old Xena episode. 

Still, the jail idea is funny because it resonates with so many bad celebrities—public apologies, jail processing, rehab, etc.  My favorite set of scenes in the jail sequence is Jason Bateman, who has suggested that Hancock could schmooze the police better when he is at a crime scene, coaching Hancock to say “Good job.”  By second favorite scene is any one of the group therapy scenes.

For reasons that are unclear and unlikely, Mary brings Aaron to the jail to visit Hancock, and warns him not to disappoint Ray, who is a “good man.” This scene actually undercuts the story logic—if that word isn’t too grandiose—later on.

Ray’s plan works, and the Chief of Police himself calls to spring Hancock from jail when he has a situation he can’t control.  Dressed in a spiffy costume, a newly politically-correct Hancock rescues a wounded cop who is pinned down by the bank robbers. (“Do I have permission to touch your body?” he asks her.  “I want you to know this isn’t sexual, not that you aren’t attractive.”  She replies, “Get me the hell out of here!”)  He confronts the “master criminal,” who is really only the premise of a master criminal, rescues the hostages, but makes a permanent enemy.  The people of LA, however, applaud him and chant his name.  It’s just like with Britney—the whole MTV Music Award thing is in the past, sweetie.  All is forgiven.

And up to here it’s been a little different, pretty exciting and pretty funny.  Ray’s idealism and Hancock’s defensive bristling have worked well.  Theron is beautiful and the action scenes are active.  It’s good that we had that, because it’s all about to change.  Now comes the Reveal, and after the reveal, the movie slides into complete incomprehensibility.

Hancock, it turns out, has amnesia and can’t remember anything since waking up with a head injury 80 years ago in a Miami hospital.  He has assumed that the injury somehow gave him his powers, because otherwise, how could he have a head injury?  He is, of course, wrong, and very shortly he meets another being like himself.  This person promises, somewhat under duress, to explain everything, and then there’s a baffling flying-fighting-explaining sequence that doesn’t make sense, oh, and it snows.  In LA.  In summer.  I was really irritated that the other super-being wouldn’t just honestly explain to Hancock about his past instead of indulging in all this “maybe angels, maybe gods, maybe ETs” claptrap until I realized that they couldn’t.  They couldn’t explain honestly because this explanation makes no sense. 

The short explanation; kryptonite.  The slightly longer explanation; you can really like someone and they can still be your kryptonite.  While this is a useful metaphor for a relationship coach, it doesn’t really do what it should to advance this particular movie. This is a failure of the script.  With this cast, even this lame rationale could fly, so to speak, if the writers had taken the time to let the characters be real and react honestly to the new information, instead of giving us a special-effects scene that accomplishes nothing.

Some time later, the bank robber/master-criminal dude escapes with two convicts, and they come after Hancock who is vulnerable now. They catch Ray, Mary and Aaron in the crossfire.  The purposes of this barely-sensical sequence are 1) to allow Ray to be a physical hero (read, “man”) instead of just the “heart” of the movie, and 2) force Hancock to make the kind of dramatic self-sacrifice that passes for nobility and maturity in super-hero movies. 

The ending implodes, but the first two-thirds carried it for me.  There is a great slapstick routine between Theron and Smith that sizzles because of perfect timing and Bateman’s absolute self-discipline, as Ray, engaged in a cell-phone conversation, appears oblivious.  The scenes in the hospital even engaged me because Smith is able to be vulnerable, emotionally as well as physically.  Some reviewers have complained about the extreme close-ups, but I liked them in the hospital section.  The confusion and openness in Smith’s eyes almost make this movie’s premise work.