The Truth of the Word, the Falsity of the Image: Transmetropolitan’s critique of the society of the spectacle
19.09.05Filed Under: Comicsand tagged Dystopia, Parody, Satire, Science fiction, Social critique, Society of the spectacle, Violence
In this paper, I investigate the binary opposition, which is instated between words as true and images as false in Warren Ellis and Darick Roberts’ Transmetropolitan series, which deals heavily with the notion of truth in a dystopic future. The series’ protagonist Spider Jerusalem is a journalist trying to show a world that doesn’t care what the truth is. In a world saturated with images, resembling a Baudrillardian nightmare, Spider is peculiarly attached to writing, even working for a newspaper called The Word. Spider is positioned as a Messiah-like figure who, coming down from the mountain, will bring truth and revelation to the people.
I read the text as a critique of current media saturation and the struggle for instating the real in a world overrun by the hyperreal. Through punk aesthetics and style (Dick Hebdige), intertextual references to Hunter S. Thompson, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, as well as more specific comics theory (Scott McCloud), I argue that the text tries to find the ‘smoking gun’ of current media culture in order to transcend the images and get back to an original past. The medium of the text plays a peculiar double-bind in being precisely both word and image and so itself enacting the very problematics the text investigates. I will conclude the paper with how images and words, specifically text boxes, work in juxtaposition, specifically focussing on how the words comment on the images.
A common thread in much recent sf has been the position of media and images and the impact that these will have on our world. One horrible scenario is Spielberg’s view in Minority Report where we get personalised advertisements via retinal-scan recognition. Similar concerns are exhibited in Ellis’ and Roberts’ Transmetropolitan, where images are not only prevalent, but even aggressive. One of the more extreme examples of this is the buybombs or ‘block consumer incentive bursting’. What they do is :”load your brain with compressed adds that unreel into your dreams” (Lust for Life 47).
As Steven Shaviro points out (Shaviro, 2003: 25), such a strategy is extremely useful but also terribly invasive, since our dreams are the most private experiences we ever have. They are also a typical metaphor for our desires and invading this space represents the utmost violation of human privacy. That this invasion is mediated through TV is clearly a powerful symbol of the text’s view of TV and visual culture, especially because it comes at the end of a story where Spider has done nothing but watch TV the entire day. Such an activity is regarded as clearly damaging and dangerous, his assistant’s boyfriend even calls him crazy for subjecting himself to that. As we can see, this is hardly the most healthy of activities (Lust for Life 35-27), and in the end, Spider needs to react against the lies that he sees. As Spider says: “That’s what I hate most about this fucking city – lies are news and truth is obsolete!” (Lust for Life 40)
However, while Spider may be able to criticise TV and generally wreak havoc and get at least some truth out there, TV exacts its own revenge; Spider becomes television due to all the channels he has harassed. This is one of the worst things that could happen to him, since unlike what happened at the Angels 8 Riot, where he stopped the police from brutalising members of the Transient movement, he is here simply news without any forms of truth attached to him. What the newsclip mentions is only that Spider has ‘terrorized’ city call-in shows, indicating that here it is Spider’s persona which is of interest, not his journalistic pieces. What is more, he is presented in television, a media he clearly loathes unlike the textually-based columns he himself writes.
We find here a serious indictment not just of TV as medium but also what is usually shown in TV; certainly Spider indicates that there is no truth to find there, only lies. One way of stating this is that Transmetropolitan regards form and content as intimately bound together and that TV as a medium is simply unable to reveal the truth about anything. When we take the buybombs into consideration, we can see how TV, and by extension all visual culture, is regarded as a negative aspect of Spider’s world and the City in general.
Norman K. Denzin’s comments on the rise of the cinematic society can illuminate the process which takes place in Transmetropolitan:
The movies became a technology and apparatus of power that would organize and bring meaning to our everyday lives. (Denzin, 1995: 15) [...] Reality, as it was visually experienced, became a staged, social production. Real, everyday experiences, soon came to be judged against their staged, cinematic video-counterpart. (Denzin, 1995: 32)
This process has clearly continued not only in our own age but also further in the world of Transmetropolitan. It is, of course, also old news in academic discourse where the death of the real has been argued a number of times. The most well-known is obviously Jean Baudrillard who has argued several times that:
“…the real, the social and the community [...] have been absorbed and nullified by capitalism and its law of value, and replaced by complicit simulations produced in the media. (Bignell, 2000: 29)
Baudrillard is useful in this context because he argues that this implosion of the social is only catastrophic
in regard to the idealism that dominates our whlole vision of information. We all live by a fanatical idealism of meaning and communication, by an idealism of communication through meaning, and, in this perspective, it is very much a catastrophe of meaning which lies in wait for us. (Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, quoted in Bignell, 2000: 29)
It is precisely this idealism that Spider Jerusalem is such an advocate of. While Baudrillard argues that hyperconformity can bring down the system under its own weight, Spider Jerusalem instead believes that if the truth comes out, then people will learn and turn away from the hyperconfirmity and towards the idealism of meaning.
As we can see, Spider thus has a very nostalgic view of the world, which is something that I will return to later, but for now we can note that in a world permeated by images Spider’s preference of the word over the image is not only nostalgic but even rebellious. Spider is identified primarily with his columns rather than his own persona; in other words his words over his appearance. Visually, Spider is dressed in black (as Ellis says about Sherlock Holmes “Like all good heroes, Holmes wears black” ). In this case, it is a representation of what John Harvey refers to as an effacement, a desire to not attract attention to one’s own person, while still speaking loudly (Harvey, 1995).
As we know, Spider has no interest in fame but is interested in his messages being heard, a peculiar double-bind which Spider never reflects on. Visually, his black clothes makes Spider stand out from the colourful world he moves through and in a place where we may have trouble navigating due to its difference from our own, the typical sf estrangement, he becomes easy to identify, easily recognisable in a comic often overloaded with visual reference points (example Lust for Life 16).
What this indicates is that Spider’s style is one of personal, visual effacement probably with a desire to generate as little noise as possible in the communications that he wishes to make. Obviously, his writing style is far more flamboyant and personal, but that is a slightly different matter. Style, as Dick Hebdige defines the word in relation to subculture, is a movement which goes against nature and interrupts the process of normalization. It is a code which offends the silent majority, challenges the principles of unity and cohesion and contradicts the myth of consensus. (Hebdige, 1979/2002: 18)
In essence, this is exactly what Spider is trying to do to the City and its culture, but at the same time it is also what the text Transmetropolitan is trying to do to our culture. Ellis has stated that this is the comic where he can get a few things off his chest and while much of Spider’s anger can definitely seem rather infantile at times it is clearly also quite personal expressions that we find in it.
The text’s way of representing a counterculture, even within a subculture such as comics, can be seen in a number of ways. First, Transmetropolitan was originally published under DC Comics’ Helix imprint, and when that imprint folded, Transmetropolitan continued under the Vertigo imprint, which is the imprint for smaller comics at DC. So, already during production Transmetropolitan is marked as a subculture within a subculture. Furthermore, the stories themselves are filled with four-letter words and various profanities, and there are often depictions of nudity, just as pornography is a stable presence in the City’s environment. Some stories contain strippers, prostitutes, drug dealers and drug users among whom we may count Spider. In other words, the comic bears all signs of being offensive to a large number of people and it has also been removed from Denver’s libraries. ()
Not to say that offensive behaviour is always countercultural, but it is clear that there is a desire to generate attention and perhaps discussion about the issues which are raised. Drugs, for instance, are portrayed as the only countermeasure to the buybombs indicating, as already mentioned, that consumer society relies on a form of mind control.
As a countercultural text, Transmetropolitan defies what Hebdige terms the parent culture, and it does so by parodying what is regarded as the norm (Hebdige, 1979/2002: 79). The culture of the City seems similar to Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, where everything is accepted, but unlike Bakhtin’s desire to see the carnivalesque as socially subversive it is here shown to be an empty carnival, one which may seem (especially from our culture’s point of view) decadent. Much of what occurs in the City is portrayed as moral collapse, where the favourite fastfood is long-pig, cloned human flesh. There are no social taboos left to be broken, it seems, but the text still paints a very bleak picture of this society. It is most definitely not a utopian world, nor is the relative freedom regarded positively. Instead, the City is portrayed more like ancient Rome, as a decadent empire in decline where the masses are kept happy and content with any kind of perversity they may desire.
It is here that we must recognise that what is parodied is not the parent culture in a generational sense (Ellis, born in 1968, must be said to belong to the parent culture), but rather the ‘parent culture’ is contemporary culture, the postmodern age, the society of the spectacle or whatever we might prefer to call it. Through sf’s typical hyperbolic strategy our own Western culture is parodied and ridiculed. However, it definitely seems that there is a certain longing for a re-instating of certain values which our contemporary culture has seemingly destroyed.
As Zygmunt Bauman states, capitalist society modifies utopia into individual consumption, a culture where pleasure is not contingent on a specificity of time and place, but instead preoccupied with the construction of systems of media spectatorship and consumption which will deliver the same mobile pleasures of looking to each citizen. (Bignell 2000: 28) In Denzin’s word, we all become voyeurs in a cinematic society where reality is the social re-enactment of visual fictions. Humans, then, become commodities rather than individuals. This is visually represented in Transmetropolitan in an instance where we see a stripper who instead of nipples have barcodes. (Back on the Street 55)
Both the comic and Spider are nostalgic for a time when this had not yet occurred and in many ways the blame is laid squarely in the rise of visual culture, which is seen as the cause of hyperreality and the death of the subject. There are many examples of Spider’s nostalgic view of the word, but the most clear case is that of the newspaper he works for which is The Word, giving an almost biblical connotation to its presence.
One other telling clue is Spider’s laptop, a marvellous wonder of technology which is not just a computer but also a telephone and many other devices in one. Yet, its keyboard resembles an old-fashioned typewriter. (Lust for Life 112) This is an example of what we might call an old-fashioned future or simply a general nostalgic thrust in the design of the future, what Fredric Jameson refers to in his discussion of nostalgia films. (Jameson 1991) It is clear that most of the Transmetropolitan world is not influenced by this appropriation of a missing past, but it is evident that Spider’s writing is influenced by this. There is constantly an ‘old’ feel to his columns, such as the fact that his columns are visually represented in the Courier typeface, also reminiscent of old typewriters.
In Hebdige’s words, Spider’s activity:
represents ‘noise’ (as opposed to sound): interference in the orderly sequence which leads from real events and phenomena to their representation in the media. We should therefore not underestimate the signifying power of the spectacular subculture not only as a metaphor for potential anarchy ‘out there’ but as an actual mechanism of semantic disorder: a kind of temporary blockage in the system of representation. (Hebdige 1979/2002:90)
Spider thus represents ‘noise’ in two ways: visually for the reader since the columns break with standard comicbook representation, and culturally for the City because he attempts to break the visual culture. Semiotically speaking, Transmetropolitan thus represents a desire to present subversive and blocked readings of contemporary culture. This desire for subversive readings is further emphasised by a number of intertextual references, all of which point to anti-establishment people or events.
The basis of Spider can be traced primarily to Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stones journalist and author of several books on politics and some fiction, where Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is obviously the most famous. Not only is Spider Jerusalem visually inspired by Thompson’s appearance (show images) but his journalistic style is clearly also that of Thompson’s gonzo style. Spider describes his view on journalism a number of times, for instance as:
Him [Wolfit, journalist teacher] and his ‘plain old observation’ had him covering goddamn flower shows. [...] You don’t learn journalism in a school. You learn it by writing fucking journalism. You teach yourself to wire up your own brain and gut and reproductive organs into one frightening machne that you aim at the planet like a meat gun. (Lust for Life 11)
Journalism is not about plans and spreadsheets. It’s about human reaction and criminal enterprise. Here the lesson begins (Lust for Life 15)
Add to this Spider’s expansive drug use and his first person style, and we have an archetypal gonzo journalist. Although there are differences between Spider’s and Thompson’s interests, they are both mainly interested in politics and social change.
In addition, the stories are permeated with the belief that one journalist with a scoop can change the face of politics; such a belief can certainly be regarded as a reference to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein whose articles arguably caused the downfall of President Nixon. Spider is always taking pictures and recording what he hears in order to use it for his columns. There is even a direct reference to deep throat, when Spider offers one of his contacts the nickname of ‘Deep Throat’ to which he gets the response “I’m armed, you know.” (Dirge 45) Although this is clearly simply a joke, it does indicate the nature of Spider’s work and his mode of operation.
Other references are evident in the title of one of the tradepaperback collections, which is called Lust for Life, which most likely is meant to refer to Iggy Pop’s song and album of the same name, rather than Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film about Van Gogh. The Pop reference can be seen as an extension of the general discourse of punk aesthetics, indicating a certain kinship with Pop’s general career and even the lyrics to the song, dealing as it does with drug use to escape from the drudgery of reality.
If we turn to the visual style of Transmetropolitan, we can first conclude that it is most definitely a post-80s comicbook. There are many unusual panels and transitions used. Unlike the usual superhero style, this comic employs practically all types of transitions as Scott McCloud defines them (McCloud 1993/1994: 70-72), the exception being non-sequitur. We can particularly note the higher use of moment-to-moment transitions and aspect-to-aspect, both of which are indications that this is not always an action-filled comicbook. Transmetropolitan alternates between slow-paced scenes and sudden jumps and ruptures.
What is most significant in the present context, however is the use of anchorage and relay. As Matthew P. McAllister argues, there are two ways of looking at comicbook and how it presents ideology: “On the one hand, the communicative elements in comic art encourage the form to occasionally create a closed ideological text, imposing on the reader preferred meanings” (McAllister, et.al., 2001, 3)
but,
On the other hand, techniques – such as the ease of comics to visually change the point of view on a comic strip or book [...] and the semantic space created by the sometimes ambiguous relationship between word and picture [...] make comics a potentially polysemic text, encouraging multiple interpretations, even ones completely oppositional to any specific artistic intent. (McAllister, et.al., 2001: 4)
The possibility of such oppositional readings are not necessarily a bad thing; in many cases it is actually preferable for a commercial text to remain at least somewhat open. John Fiske terms such texts producerly, rather than Roland Barthes’ readerly or writerly texts, and such a position is useful in that it allows the reader a large degree of freedom, hence creating a personal sense of enjoyment which is unique but still requires the text to be present. As such, superhero comics, for instance, can be enjoyed by a wide variety of readers despite constant objections that the genre is fascist in nature. Transmetropolitan cannot be counted among those comicbooks that are interested in emphasising a certain freedom of interpretation regarding its ideological intentions, hence we find a strong emphasis of anhorage over the technique of relay more often used in comics.
Roland Barthes defines anchorage as when “the text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others; by means of an often subtle dispatching, it remote-controls him toward a meaning chosen in advance.” (Barthes, 1972: 40) and relay as “Here text (most often a snatch of dialogue) and image stand in a complementary relationship; [...] and the unity of the message is realized at a higher level…” (Barthes, 1972: 41)
Anchorage then subordinates the image to the word, while relay grants them equal status. We find several examples of Transmetropolitan opting with anchorage to ascertain specific readings of the events and images in the stories. To put it another way, words are often given a higher status than the images; the images must be kept in line in order not to be taken the wrong way. I will here leave out a more complex discussion of whether words are always interpreted in the way the sender desired. Transmetropolitan seems to argue that words are far more trustworthy than images.
Spider’s words are constantly shown to break the flow of images in society, just as they in several cases break, or fix, the floating chain of signifieds on the page. If we take the Angels 8 Riot from the first collection, Back on the Street, which is where Spider is re-catapulted back to his old fame before he left the City. The plot revolves around a group of people called Transients who have genetically modified themselves to be an alien species. In order to get attention and respect, they demand to secede from the City, which results in the police attacking the Transient mob. We as readers are presented with the riot from an omniscient perspective, in that we are presented with panels from all over the City, which Spider does not have access to. However, all panels are commented on by Spider’s column. (Back on the Street 60-63)
As we can see here, Spider’s comments are interpretations of what is happening; that they hit close enough to home is simply a function of Spider’s penetrating mind and excellent journalistic abilities. The juxtapositions in this case work as anchorage where the words are the truth of the matter and the facts. Words constrain our interpretation of the images in a specific direction; often in many comicbooks, particularly superhero ones, fights are not negative in the sense that they are here. Often fights are the justification for reading the story, not as a way to gorge on violence but rather to enjoy spectacular lays-outs and dynamic drawings.
In Back on the Street, then, we find that Spider’s comments serve two functions; one is to control the images in the diegesis, to point out to people in the City what is going on and to show the Truth of the events. The second is to control and constrain the reader’s interpretation, to make sure that there are no oppositional readings of the images where pleasure is derived from the fight scenes. The second function, then, is a metafunction which guides the reader’s protocol and ‘cancels out’ certain readings that are often preferred by comicbooks. Note that this function can still fail, of course, as readers may still find pleasure in the images which runs contrary to the captions.
The images remain important for the text; primarily in two ways. The first is to help guide the reader’s emotional response: showing one of the stripper’s as crying is a clear cue for this scene to be read as tragic; in this case we have a word-image relationship which functions as a relay. A clear example of anchorage is the fist punching the Transient’s face, something which could be interpreted in many different ways, here directing and repressing the potential meanings into just one: tragedy.
The other important use of the images is slightly different: they generate emotional reactions. As Steven Shaviro argues “[w]e respond viscerally to visual forms, before having the leisure to read or interpret them as symbols.” (Shaviro, 1993: 26) Here we come upon the one thing which words have more problems with than images; conveying emotions as quickly and viscerally. All reading depends far more on interpretative moves before they may affect us, emotionally or otherwise. Because of this, images are used in the Angels 8 Riot as a way of communicating this to the reader (but importantly not the readers of Spider’s column), and it is in this connection that the relay function is used; to allow word and image to communicate the same message.
Still, what stops the Angels 8 Riot and what saves the Transients are of course Spider’s words. That his column is displayed where everyone can read it is sufficient enough for the police to be called back. This is clearly a very idealistic way of portraying the power of words, but it is clearly evidence of how Transmetropolitan denounces the image-filled society for a hope of returning to a better past.
Transmetropolitan thus establishes a hierarchy where word is placed above the image; we need the word to constrain the and contain the image, which in this text is presented as a sort of phobic structure to be isolated and cured.
I read this as an attempt at destroying the image’s potential for spectacle; such a move is important since as Guy Debord argues, spectacle destroys the past, something which Spider fights to prevent. Transmetropolitan, for all its countercultural posing, is in many ways a deeply nostalgic text, trying to bring back a past that never existed. A time where Truth existed uncontaminated by the incursions of the image.
It seems inherently paradoxical that such an argument be made in a medium which is as clearly visually oriented as the comicbook medium. While this warrents further examination it is a subject which must merely be noted here.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland (1972). Image-Music-Text, Glasgow: Fontana.
Bauman, Zygmunt (1993). Postmodern Ethics, Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell.
Bignell, Jonathan (2000). Postmodern Media Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Denzin, Norman K. (1995). The Cinematic Society, The Voyeur’s Gaze, London: SAGE Publications.
Ellis, Warren & Roberts, Darick (1997). Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street, New York: DC Comics.
Ellis, Warren & Roberts, Darick (1998). Transmetropolitan: Lust for Life, New York: DC Comics.
Ellis, Warren & Roberts, Darick (1999). Transmetropolitan: The New Scum, New York: DC Comics.
Ellis, Warren & Roberts, Darick (2003). Transmetropolitan: Dirge, New York: DC Comics.
Harvey, John (1995). Men in Black, London: Reaktion Books.
Hebdige, Dick (1979). Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London & New York: Routledge, 2002.
Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London & New York: Verso.McCloud, Scott (1993). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
McAllister, Matthew P, Sewell, Jr., Edward H., Gordon, Ian (2001) (eds). Comics & Ideology, New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
Shaviro, Steven (1993). The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis & London, University of Minnesota Press.
Shaviro, Steven (2003). Connected, or What it Means to Live in the Network Society, Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press.
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