Metropolis

(or: “You Bees Make Honey, But Not Just For Yourselves”: The Problem with Mark Millar)

Written laws are like spiders’ webs, and will like them only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
– Anacharsis, to Solon, when the latter was writing laws for Athens

Always act like you’re wearing an invisible crown, I do.
– Paris Hilton

Anacharsis probably wouldn’t like Mark Millar, who loves a lord. Not since Tom Wolfe has there been a writer so enamored of the priveleged and potent. In Millarworld, the Gatsbys and Buchanans wear capes or skintight leather, but the message is still the same: bow before Mithras.

For guys who follow this line of thought, which passes through the suburbs of Rand on its way to Mt. Invictus Sol, even the idea of, say, bringing back lettres cachet wouldn’t be enough. If I was the kind of man to biographize, I would wager Millar is like Cameron Crowe, in that he never got to sit with the cool kids in High School (neither did the rest of us, gentlemen), and, as a result, his entire creative life, raveled out, has been spent imagining what it’s like on the other side of the glass.

He’s a Scot, so their neuroses are different. Maybe he wore the wrong tartan or kilt to school one day. Those clan rumbles can be nasty. In Crowe’s case , however — which I only know courtesy of ye olde Lester Bangs, polemicist — it was being the kid dork on a bus full of rockers (”Play us a song on your wee guitar, Cameron”). But the effect was the same: both spend their time wondering, “what would it be like to be someone whom others make exceptions for?”

Every fucking Millar plot = “What’s it like to be one of the Beautiful People?”

Or: “What goes on in Wonka’s chocolate factory? Oh, if only I was an Oompa-Loompa and knew!”

A common question asked about Batman is whether or not he is responsible for the rise of dangerous, costumed supervillians in Gotham City. In the same manner, does the “player” create their opposite number? As long as there are players, must there always be player-haters?

Perhaps. But today’s question is stranger; to my way of thinking, deeper: whither the player? Whence? Chicken and the egg. Is it conceivable that the potential of the universe to generate player-haters itself triggers the creation of players from playerless matter? Is playerness incipient within all creation? Is playing a vocation, summoned from within random human beings? But again, this is not the real question. I have mentioned players and player-haters. But there is a third class, to which Millar and most glibertarians belong, the player-follower.

Because playing and player-hating are a Red Queen scenario. A Red Queen scenario arises without interference in the natural state of things. But player-following is external to the universal Red Queen Scenario, which raises the question of why player-following exists.

About the Red Queen Scenario: it’s a fancy way of saying “Evolutionary arms race.” For an evolutionary system, continuing development is needed just in order to maintain its fitness relative to the systems it is co-evolving with. This principle is based on the observation to Alice by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” that “in this place it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Wikipedia sez:
In evolutionary biology, an evolutionary arms race is an evolutionary struggle between competing sets of co-evolving genes that develop adaptations and counter-adaptations against each other, resembling an arms race. The co-evolving gene sets may be in different species, as in an evolutionary arms race between a predator species and its prey, or a parasite and its host.

Since every improvement in one species will lead to a selective advantage for that species, variation will normally continuously lead to increases in fitness in one species or another.

However, since in general different species are coevolving, improvement in one species implies that it will get a competitive advantage on the other species, and thus be able to capture a larger share of the resources available to all. This means that fitness increase in one evolutionary system will tend to lead to fitness decrease in another system. The only way that a species involved in a competition can maintain its fitness relative to the others is by in turn improving its design.

The most obvious example of this effect are the “arms races” between predators and prey, where the only way predators can compensate for a better defense by the prey (rabbits running faster) is by developing a better offense (foxes running faster, or foxes develop jet packs).

In this case we might consider the relative improvements (running faster) to be also absolute improvements in fitness.

In sum, in a competitive world, relative progress (”running”) is necessary just for maintenance (”staying put”).

‘Cuz coevolution is hott.

The tree example shows that in some cases the net effect of an arms race may also be an decrease in fitness.

Trees in a forest are normally competing for access to sunlight. Shocking, right?

Here’s the bitter Amish of the thing: if one tree grows a little bit taller than its neighbours it can capture part of their sunlight.

This forces the other trees in turn to grow taller, in order not to be overshadowed. The net effect is that all trees tend to become taller and taller, yet still gather on average just the same amount of sunlight, while spending much more resources in order to sustain their increased height. Same deal with people, maybe.

Thus, I speculate that the player-follower or the player-worshipper — organisms, in short, like Millar — exist to give the player a ego buff.

The tall tree doesn’t get a lot for growing so tall, but it does get a nice benefit in that the Millar-organism seeks to emulate it and say nice things about it. And write endless stories about players. You know the drill.

In return, the player-follower gets to bask in the reflected glory of the player, maybe gets to pretend it’s a player itself. Indeed, the player-follower gains a great deal of borrowed light from the player, like a moon does the sun.

Another example: there is penicillin, a player in the world of preventing disease. There are superbugs, which are player-haters.

Whether or not the bugs were players first and the penicillin is actually the playerhater is a mind-breaking notion worthy of exploration but beyond the scope of this present exploration.

This is playerhating, and its consequence.
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YOU: All very good, Jason. But Why Should The Red Queen Exist?
ME: HA-HA, I don’t know.

But really. There’s a good argument. That argument’s name is Diversity.

Assume that in a few seconds,  some horrible supernatural creature hidden from the sight of God — a golem, zombie, revanant, werewolf, vampire, young Republican — will come crashing through the door. You have no idea what it might be, but you ‘ve got weapons on the table. Would you be more likely to survive with many different types of defense, or none? With more, of course. If it’s a werewolf, your vampire stake won’t work but those silver bullets’ll sure come in handy. Diversity is good for survival.

The Red Queen, when used by nature, makes lots and lots of diversity. Graham Williams described the “Tangled Bank” hypothesis: in a saturated economy, it pays to diversify. For example: longer-lived mammals exhibit more chromosomal crossovers: 30 in man, 10 in rabbits, 3 in mice.

This is why sex exists.

So let us examine the Red Queen hypothesis: species do not get any better at surviving, their chances of extinction are random. “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get to somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that. [Carroll]” Sex is all about combating the enemy that fights back (parasites [including microbes], predators and competitors). Parasites are especially deadly.

And you never win, you only gain a temporary respite. Consider Virulent parasites versus ones that do not kill their hosts … pr artificial viruses (computer programs). Parasites employ binding proteins, which the host evolves and varies. The advantage of sex can appear in a single generation when it comes to parasites. Enough people fucking eventually will throw up enough random mutations, like sickle-cell anemia. SCA, incidentally, is a response to the ubiquity of malaria on the African continent. It’s very old and very useful for mosquitoes.

So we come to the player, and to what is perhaps the player’s closest analogue in the animal kingdom, the peacock. As we see in the case of Millar, in the case of the player-follower, peacock tails attract both females and other males. The other male peacocks want association with the flashiest peacock. And what peacocks are flashier than superpeacocks? (”There’s some FUN in being a superhorse!”)

Superpeacocks. Yeah, I just wrote that. I’m kind of in shock myself. Moving on …

The showy tail is the peacock’s way of attracting the peahen. Sexual selection has selectively bred this trait. Males invest less in childrearing than females in most but not all species (e.g., jacana). In elephant seals, only a few males father all the offspring. Beauty arose to satisfy the Red Queen contest. Previously bright colors were seen as a warning to predators. In peacocks and other birds, size (and symmetry) of plumage matters.

Exaggerated gaudy ornaments burden the males (in terms of longevity and protection from predators) but are the key to successful mating. Females prefer them because other females prefer them–fashion is arbitrary . Polygamy… Most of the peahens choose the same male. Bird leks (places where males gather, parade their wares to the visiting females. Only a few males do most of the mating–up to 30 times in one morning).

Ornaments are handicaps to survival from predators but increase ability to seduce females. They are also living proof of the male’s vigor that he has been able to survive with it. The more flamboyant or symmetrical a male’s appearance, the less troubled with parasites he is. Successful males are not necessarily truthful, sometimes just more persuasive. In humans, attractiveness is not just about appearance but also wittiness, cleverness, etc., the complete package this author represents, basically. But aside from my own fitness, Nature might as well be cribbing a line from the book of Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell, to be precise.

The Matthew Effect. That’s the name. Jennifer Shahade of USChess.org writes:

I was born on New Year’s Eve, the biggest party night of the year aka “amateur’s night.” December 31 is also the worst birthday for a young chessplayer, and to a larger extent, an aspiring Canadian ice hockey professional. When I was 14, I started playing in World Youth events and was miffed that my eligibility was determined by my age as of January 1, making me a year older in chess age than I would have been if I was born one day later. So I was immediately drawn in by personal experience to the “Matthew Effect”, the first chapter of best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell’s third book, Outliers: The Story of Success.

The “Matthew Effect”, refers to how an age cut-off in sports creates a glut of athletes who are born just after the cut-off. It’s named after the gospel of Matthew in the New Testament: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away.”

Back to Chess “aka ‘amateur’s night’” lady:

In Canadian ice hockey, which Gladwell focuses on, the effect is particularly extreme, because all young Canadian boys are funneled into a training system in kindergarten or even earlier, ages at which 9-11 months will likely make a big difference in weight and height. The most skilled undergo a series of grueling training sessions. In this sport, January, February and March birthdays dominate even professional league rosters, with November and December kids under-represented. Gladwell explains that the bigger January boys will be more likely to be chosen for an intensive training program, the benefits of which will extend even when boys born later in the year will have caught up in size. Gladwell doesn’t examine gymnastics, which prizes smallness and flexibility, but I’d imagine that sport would show the opposite effect.

Everyone understands that the Matthew Rules is one of the essential unfairnesses which make up and undergird the unbalanced world: them has gets more, them that don’t, don’t. In other words, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

These kinds of distributional patterns occur all over nature. They’re called Power Laws. You may be familiar with the Long Tail. (see sauropod, right)

Although  I generally try to shy away from the kind of stuff that’d give a McKinsey Human Resources droid an everliving synergistic Web 2.0 beta Boner in the crag where, in most people, the soul resides, it’s regrettably necessary in this speil to explain Millar and the many horrible reasons Millar exists.

Back to the Long Tail, which is a Power Law, and as the Great Wiki tells us, “a power law is a special kind of mathematical relationship between two quantities. If one quantity is the frequency of an event, the relationship is a power-law distribution, and the frequencies decrease very slowly as the size of the event increases. For instance, an earthquake twice as large is four times as rare.

If this pattern holds for earthquakes of all sizes, then the distribution is said to “scale”.

Power laws also describe other kinds of relationships, such as the metabolic rate of a species and its body mass (called Kleiber’s law), and the size of a city and the number of patents it produces. What this relationship means is that there is no typical size in the conventional sense. Power laws are found throughout the natural and manmade worlds, and are an active study of scientific research.”

All that opaque ramble means is that Power Laws are different kinds of Matthew Principles. Shit tends to cluster at one end of a scale.

It’s also known as the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity, the last of which must be the most boring title for a mathematical concept ever.

The 80-20 rule, hereafter called the Pareto principle, because I like how the Eye-Talians role, states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. Again, not much of a shock for those of us in the real world.

Hell, look at how many times I’ve posted on this blog. 80% of blog madness comes from 20% of the contributors …

“HAI, Win tends towards the high end of the scale,” says Jason, still running a Facebook group. (Hint, hint)

And it’s probably not just good stuff either: I’m sure 80% of the douchiness of the world comes from like twenty percent of all actual douchenozzles.

Where did this principle come from? Business management thinker Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients.”

The Pareto principle also applies to a variety of more mundane matters: one might guess approximately that we wear our 20% most favoured clothes about 80% of the time, perhaps we spend 80% of the time with 20% of our acquaintances, etc.

It even happens in the market share of comic companies (Note: RELEVANT!)

(Disclaimer: Paul Krugman in the New York Times dismissed this “80-20 fallacy” as being cited “not because it’s true, but because it’s comforting”, as the benefits of economic growth over the last 30 years have largely been concentrated in the top 1%, rather than the top 20%.” From Wikipedia.)

Like a champagne glass. DERP.

What’s that? You’d like a wider  and wilder example? Well, I aim to please, and my pleasing is an aim. Let’s look at market share across the world:

Distribution of world GDP, 1989:
Quintile of Population Income
Richest 20% 82.7%
Second 20% 11.7%
Third 20% 2.3%
Fourth 20% 1.4%
Poorest 20% 1.2%
Status of Dirty’s Money: Hey, you got it. Why must you make him worry? Despite your claims to the contrary.

The Peacocks of the above example draw more than their share of the chicks. Or peahens. Do I need to go down the list? We keep seeing the same actors over and over again because most of the work goes to the same group of people. Rich people tend to be the people who get richer: of the ten wealthiest individuals in the world, the top three (Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim Helú, and Bill Gates) own as much as the next seven put together. You sassy hellcats!

All of these laws state what the Peacocks know, or what you’ve noticed from high school or college: all the girls date the same jerks. Or like how in the Ducktalesverse, luck is not distributed evenly across the cosmos in equal proportion to every anthropomorphized animal, but simply vested in one single Gladstone Gander-shaped bloc.

Back to Mark Millar: he’s probably better described not so much as a player-follower, but a worshipper of the Power Law. A Pareto-follower. I like my coinage better, however, so I’m sticking with it. Such is the caprice of the ADD blogging tyrant in this world of CSS and Ruby on Rails, which, the more I think about, sounds like a Dutch porno, the kind you order in the mail but never seems to get to your doorstep even though the estimated time for a package crossing the Atlantic is really, like, nothing. I’m guessing, I mean. Let’s move on from this person who certainly is not myself to other, less important but equally compelling matters, although really it’s the principle of getting what you paid for that I’d like everyone to take home with them tonight. You know?

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Pulling Crowe back into the argument for a sec: he and Millar, they’re alike, sure.

Except what (sort of) “saves” Crowe is that he eventually sees, and has his characters see, that the entire charade is ridiculous. Lester Bangs could and did make his complaint against Crowe, but Crowe is no Millar. Sure, “Vanilla Sky” starts off as paean to how awesome Tom Cruise’s life is, but by the end, we learn being the Lord of your own earth is no fun (Jason Lee is your friend). Likewise for “Almost Famous” (Mom is real and Stillwater is a bag of shallow homunculi, which, considering Jason Lee’s in there, is not a surprise).

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.
– Nietzsche, “The Antichrist”

There’s nothing more cool than being hugged by someone you like.
— Sonic, “The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog” Lovesick Sonic, Sonic Says Segment, 1993

There’s “Jerry Maguire,” where Crowe’s opening shot has us meet all of mankind’s top jocks, destined to beat all of us up one day, and actually has Renee Zellweger say, “First class is what’s wrong.  It used to be a better meal.  Now it’s a better life.”

(The script directions actually read “She is now craning out into the aisle to hear this story. The plane is now quieter.  She listens to the easy sound of Jerry discussing his charmed life”) That’s *before* we meet Cruise’s fiancee — if there’s a DuPont Guide of BSDM, she would be in every issue, like Oprah is in “O.”

But we learn, eventually — at length — how awesome all of that is not. Man, Nietzsche would have hated Crowe.

And Crowe wrote *all* of this after posing undercover at a high school for “Fast Times,” which I *know* must have somehow been the inspiration for Drew Barrymore’s “Never Been Kissed” where a reporter who was a dork in high school gets to go back and be cool.

It turns out to be a Very Important Lesson, as these things usually are. An Aesop, as the champs over at TVTropes call it. But what an Aesop! Even Mr. Courtney Cox gets involved in this one. God bless him for eating all of that cafeteria salad, known since the eighties to be a chief front in the fight for, and against, bowel cancer.

The best statement of this philosophy is in “Say Anything,” when Ione Skye’s glamorous life gets razed to the ground by a John Mahoney-hunting Internal Revenue Service (he ends up in jail, and then hides as the Fraiser paterfamilias, still in Seattle)

By the end of the movie — around the time her father starts making shivs in the big house — poor Diane Court is has been so disillusioned by her road trip into the existential Balkans that a kickboxer’s car, baptised by rain, is the only refuge.

Too many people remember John C. holding up the boombox outside stately Court manor; less recollected are the Lynchesque scenes where the protagonist steers his great streetwhale down the dark and rain-wet streets, dictating to himself in a tape recorder like Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper, recording field messages to send back to Diane in the home office. But I digress, and big time, as usual.

To the point, then. Never mind that John Cusack created what Chuck Klostermann called an unattainable model for romantic manhood that men have been expected to attain (and failed) since the movie’s release (the first time I ever heard of “Say Anything” was when my eccentric, brilliant, and un-mainstream-as-you-can-be cousin E. referred to Cusack’s character as “the perfect man”) — if creating impossible standards for American masculinity was a hanging offense, then Bogart, Peck, Wayne, Mr. Fonda and Tyler Durden would have been collected from the branches of the sour apple tree a long time ago.

The point is, Crowe sees through the gold mist. Cusack’s hero is a little older, a lot deflowered, and broken of nose by the end of “Say Anything” but he’s still the same man as in the beginning.

It’s Diane Court who’s changed. Her father’s world of possessions, control, and safety has been shown for the sham it is, and good riddance. It’s not so Parsifal the kickboxer has won (although he has), as the High Life has been tried, and found wanting. Millar would have had nothing to do with Lloyd Dobler, I assure you. “Bonesmen first, God second.”

Of course, in the film’s last moment, John Cusack turns to the camera, and says “this is me while I’m fucking you in the ass!”

Oh wait, he didn’t. That was from Mark Millar’s script in “Wanted.” Right.

No wonder Spider-man is Millar’s favorite hero. (see “Wizard” where he and Jeph Loeb (champion of the Bat) square off). Spider-man is the self-flagellant of superherodom, a nerd who became a god, and one of the three most beloved characters in comic, plus he’s married to a supermodel.

I’m surprised Millar didn’t end his run with Spidey coked to the gills running a Porsche over Ben Parker’s grave like George H.W. Bush doing wheelies and tearing up dirt all over Homer Simpson’s lawn in that one episode where the ex-President and Bar moved across the street from Our Favorite Yellow Family.

It’s hard to imagine Spidey at the wheel of a bitchin’ Camaro. Maybe that was in the original draft, true believer.

Try this trick and spin it: every single script the man’s ever written gets stamped, like a coin shaped in the great machines of Newton’s Royal Mint, with Millar’s trademark fantasy: the cool kids invite you in. Usually, but not always, this takes the form of:
1) a band of shadowy self-involved technocrats come to the inheritance of the Earth,
2) a guy outside the system has the chance to join. He either does, or attempts to subvert it and place himself in power.
3) look for this type of sentence: “Looks like your [noun][predicate], huh?” The “huh” is the important part.
4) somebody having sex with somebody who is waaay out of their league, and this bit of dialogue: “Sorry, [term of endearment], I’m busy [some insanely advanced achievement unthinkable in issue one].”
5) if every Grant Morrison story can be deconstructed as Morrison using his fictional pawns as proxies in his lifelong war against despair and depression, then Millar’s characters are his constant fictional attempts to be beautiful and awesome and hang on the cool side of school. It’s so bleeding obvious I can’t believe I have to even freaking remark on it.
6) snarky dialogue that manages to tunnel under even  Claremont’s level; the sort of snaps you’d expect to find in a junior high classroom. See 3.

Aside from Trouble (that’s another essay altogether), and his work with Grant Morrison (who dilutes Millar with the alloy of genius), find me one series of his that doesn’t have both 1 and 2. The longer the series goes on, the more the certainty of 3-6 appearing approaches 100%.

Okay, yes, the blood kin of Walter Mitty are endemic habitués to Planet Fiction’s adventure continent, sure. Who hasn’t shopped around for a Fantasticar in their own way?

But in the same way that there’s a big difference between people those who read Choose Your Own Adventure Books and those who literally choose their own adventures, there’s a long way to walk between high school and the rest of life. If Millar ever saw “Porgy ‘n’ Bess,” he would cheer for Sportin’ Life.

Nonconformity – right. I can’t remember the last time saw a twenty-something kid with a tattoo of an Asian letter on his wrist. You are one wicked free thinker! You want to be a rebel? Stop being cool. Wear a pocket protector like he does, and get a hair cut like the Asian kids that don’t leave the library for twenty hour stretches. They’re the ones who don’t care what you think.

- Dr. Gregory House

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And now, I come to “Kickass.”

…

God-damn it, Millar.

Satire, my cock. If this is satire, Regis is a god of sex and Biden is the Chirst of Chuck E. Cheez.  (The jury, interestingly enough, is still out on the former.)

Enough is enough. Why is it wrong to pray for someone’s death? In a world of more civilized beings — a world like Matter-Eater Lad’s Bismoll, let’s say — it would not be called a curse.

To shake off this weary existence and its toils? Stoics would and have wept. How much sweeter would that passage into the darkness be if you knew that tens, hundreds, thousands, or millions of your earnest fellow creatures were urging you onwards into oblivion?

Wouldn’t that be a booster rocket of sorts? Wouldn’t you relinquish your hold and succumb to necrosis much easier if you knew that hearts across this green world were united in prayer, meditation and contemplation on the happy prospect of your reaping?

Could anyone be neutral, if even every philosopher and the priest were rapt on the consummation devoutly to be wished? The consummation of Mark Millar going into the boo-box and never returning? The secret hope that, as a planet, we might bid farewell to Millar, wave to him as he departs from the cattle pens of this life, strew flowers before his path as he disembark for the jolly clime of the Land of the True-Believing No-Prize.

What mortal could refuse such a request? What loving god could deny the will of fervent billions? Surely but inexorably, the Reaper would be drawn to the focus of this penitential hope like iron filling to magnetic north. If enough people hoped for it. Surely the Universe would not deny the single-voiced shouting of this General Will.

So why can’t we all join hands and kumbaya for one of our own, Mark Millar, to disembark for the Undiscovered Flavor Country, from whose country no Bore ever returns?