{"id":8052,"date":"2011-10-27T09:00:03","date_gmt":"2011-10-27T08:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.badreputation.org.uk\/?p=8052"},"modified":"2011-10-27T09:00:03","modified_gmt":"2011-10-27T08:00:03","slug":"dave-mckeans-celluloid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/badreputation.org.uk\/2011\/10\/27\/dave-mckeans-celluloid\/","title":{"rendered":"Dave McKean’s Celluloid"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Celluloid<\/a>As a big fan of Dave McKean’s rich and haunting art and illustration, I was intrigued and admittedly a bit excited to hear he was producing an erotic graphic novel earlier this year \u2013 Celluloid<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Pr0n<\/h3>\n

I’ll get my position down as briefly as I can here so I can get on with the post. I wouldn\u2019t say I\u2019m ‘pro-porn’ because I’m dead against the unsafe and exploitative (like many industries, it must be said) mainstream porn industry. I find a lot of it distressing and unpleasant to watch. But I don’t accept the argument that violent porn has any causal link to violence against women beyond the fact that it re-inscribes the values already at large in our society. Symptom not cause, I\u2018d say.<\/p>\n

I have no problem with porn in theory. But mainstream heterosexual porn and all its cliches has become so dominant and so widely accepted that it has become the ‘norm’ against which the bodies, fantasies and sexual experiences of real people are judged. We need positive, progressive sex education and much greater diversity, acceptance and openness about sex and representations of sex.<\/p>\n

Back to Celluloid<\/h3>\n

Anyway. Here’s a brief synopsis I pinched from this Comics Alliance review<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Celluloid is the story of a woman who, during a moment of sexual frustration, discovers a film projector and reel of film that depicts a couple having sex\u2026 this woman finds herself traveling from our world into a dreamlike realm of sexual fantasies that’s presented in the artist’s trademarked style(s)…. The woman begins simply as a voyeur and eventually graduates to full participant in various activities with the entities she encounters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here\u2019s a Flickr slideshow<\/a> of images from the book so you can see what they\u2019re talking about. It\u2019s terribly beautiful, which to be honest I have come to expect from McKean. But the whole thing left me with a sadly unsexy feeling of \u2018meh\u2019.<\/p>\n

Tickle my Intellect<\/h3>\n

Of course, reviewing an erotic work is tricky because what flicks your switches is such a personal matter, but even setting that aside I found I was disappointed. It didn\u2019t turn me on. But it didn\u2019t interest me either. In this Comic Book Resources interview<\/a>, McKean outlines some of his aims behind the project:<\/p>\n

Most pornography is pretty awful. I mean, it does the job at the most utilitarian level, but it rarely excites other areas of the mind, or the eye. It’s repetitive, bland and often a bit silly. I was interested in trying to do something that\u2026 tickles the intellect as well as the more basic areas of the mind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yay for intellect-tickling! That sounds right up my street. But I don\u2019t think Celluloid<\/strong> delivered. I realise now that what I was hoping for was something that felt as different to mainstream porn as Black Orchid<\/strong><\/a> was from most 1980s superhero comics. And of course it is<\/em> different on its shimmering surface, but the fantastic situations and sensual artwork are resting on some conventions from mainstream pornography that hold no allure for me.<\/p>\n

For example: the female protagonist is inevitably thin, white, and able-bodied, with long blonde hair. She’s apparently bi-curious heterosexual. After having a bath in her empty house, she decides to put her high heels back on. The situation that frames her sexual journey is that she comes home and calls her boyfriend\/husband\/playmate, but he\u2019s still at the office, so she\u2019s stuck with a pout, a bath and some self-pleasure. I was half expecting her to order a pizza and get it on with the delivery man. One reviewer, who I won\u2019t grace with a link, even described her as a \u2018bored housewife\u2019.\u00a0It just feels so clich\u00e9d, and for me that undermines the eroticism of the art and the originality of the project.<\/p>\n

Boobfruit<\/h3>\n

Visually the weakest section (in my opinion) is what I\u2019m going to call the Boobfruit section, in which the protagonist:<\/p>\n

\u2026encounters an \u201cearth mother\u201d figure, haloed in fruit and with fourteen breasts\u2026 as the woman consummates her meeting with the goddess, the resultant imagery throws some interesting analogies between fruit and the body.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Double<\/a>

The beginning of the Boobfruit episode. The 'earth mother' character is wearing some grapes on her head. Image \u00a9 Fantagraphics, 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

I don\u2019t know what Graphic Eye<\/a> find so interesting about the analogies between fruit and the body. Fruit as a symbol of sex and fertility, and particularly cis female reproductive organs, is pretty much as old as art. Here\u2019s some extremely luscious fruit conveniently dropped into a painting of a youthful Elizabeth I<\/a>, painted at a time when her fertility was a subject of international political speculation. And what could Frida Kahlo possibly be referencing here<\/a>? You get the picture.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a clich\u00e9-within-a-clich\u00e9 of fruit being used as a sensual reference point in descriptions of lesbian sex. I just couldn\u2019t take this episode seriously, especially as the fruit pictures look like they\u2019ve been cut out of an M&S advert.<\/p>\n

Subject or object?<\/h3>\n

In the Comic Book Resources interview, McKean says:<\/p>\n

I also thought it would be more interesting coming from a woman’s perspective, and for it to be essentially fantastical, a series of sex dreams, allowing for a more impressionistic view, trying to express the feelings of each stage, rather than just showing you literally what happens\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Double<\/a>

Image \u00a9 Fantagraphics, 2011<\/p><\/div>\n

But although the story \u2018stars\u2019 a woman, it\u2019s not really told from her perspective. I mean, you follow her on her surrealist sex adventures, but at no point do you get any real idea of her feelings or thoughts. She is stereotypically passive; she wanders into situations and things happen to her, and she embraces them, but doesn\u2019t act or take the initiative.<\/p>\n

Although the woman begins as an observer and becomes a participant, it\u2019s just a trade of one kind of objecthood for another, we have no sense of her interior life, to the extent that I find it a bit creepy. She is even drawn in a remarkably dead-eyed, expressionless way.<\/p>\n

I still admire Dave McKean as an artist and illustrator, and I don’t intend this review as an attack on him; he seems like a thoroughly nice bloke. I understand that he didn\u2019t produce Celluloid<\/strong> with me in mind as his target audience, and perhaps he never intended to challenge all (or any) of the conventions of mainstream porn. But I wish he had, since for me that would have turned a mildly interesting and attractive book into something extraordinary.<\/p>\n