Procrastinatory Meditation On and Around the Movie Joe (part 1) (SPOILERS)

0.

In the Old New, Dvorak, historian of fortune, his severely pockmarked cowboy friend Dusty Voz, and ladyfriend Polly Cracker toil away a rainy afternoon. Dvorak's clacks on his laptop approach a drone, while Dusty cooks up a pot of beans and bacon on the hot plate and Polly lies on her stomach on the crash mat, idly thumbing her way through her assigned stack of comicbooks, punctuated w/ occasional heavy sighs.

1.

"Gonna break the damn delete key if I keep this up." mutters Dvorak. He's engrossed in his work, and hasn't really realized he's spoken aloud.
2. "This is terrible. I'm just... dumping out the contents of my brain, trimming only what immediately strikes me as fat, then dumping some more. It's sub-Ransom Note, is what it is. Might as well cut my penis off and join the Divinyls."
3. "Didn't you hear?" pipes up Dusty, his beaten old face obscured by plumes of steam. "Turns out there's already a band called The Divinyls who had a song on the radio once upon a time. Our Divinyls had to change their name."
4. "To what?", incredulously.
5. Dusty suppresses a sigh. "They call themselves The Scissor Dykes now."
6. "The WHAT? That's... awful! It's awful." Dvorak almost forgets to pantomime his flustration. "Are they insane? Did they pick that name? E... whu... I just now saw how badly it's going to end for them now, in vision, clear as day! Is... is this The Note's way of... shutting down the fan club?"
7. Dusty kneels staying still, a picture of patience. "And how does it end for them?"
8. "They... devolve into an angry lesbian biker gang, in process of time. With this new name in the backs of their heads, they'll start to think maybe they should live up to their names more literally, they'll each pair off and experiment, and that'll be that!"
9. "You think so?" Dusty smiles.
10. Dvorak smiles back, slowly realizing how dumb it sounds, now that he's said it out loud. "They don't call me Nostra-smart-ass for nothing, sir."
11. "I never got that, anyway," says Polly, bending her head up. "Divinyls."
12. "It's a play on 'divine'. The verb, not the adjective."
13. "Oh. Anyway, I finished this one."

2.

And her tone lets you know "I finished this one" has become a rote mantra over the last few hours.
2. "I didn't get it," she half-whines. Dv rolls his eyes, then looks over at the book in her hand. JLA Classified #3.
3. "The 'infant universe' is ours. The Justice League sends us their heroes that can't cut it in their homeworld. We're just a two-foot cube of stars in Batman's lab on Pluto. It's like Superman says at the end:
4. "
5. "It's Literalist Mythology. Instead of using exploits of the gods a loose metaphor of suggested human conduct, superhero comics are (more and more) deliberately different. Instruction by contrast, not similarity."
6. "Yeah, but this same guy used superheroes exactly as metaphors for human conduct in X-Men, at least in anticipation of science-augmented superabilities. Remember that telepathic affair between Cyclops and Emma Frost? "Does extramarital activity count if it's just thoughts?" That wasn't instruction by contrast at all, he was trying to get us to ask questions about the ethics inherent in future abilities and... dominions we may well enjoy, and before we have to figure out those ethical issues on the fly!"
7. "Look. There's not.... There's enough ideological 'space' here that there's no contradiction. If SINCE you must know, DC heroes are, for the most part, archetypes. Gods. Marvel heroes live as residents of the real world (or failing that a world closer to the real world). In that larger perspective, the X-Men are street-level heroes, even though they go to outer space all the time. They're us in our adolescence, even though they've been around since the early '60s and half of them are in their mid-to-late-30s now. (and there's no contradiction there, is there??)
8. "And you shouldn't need this background, anyway. It's OK, understandable, that you expected Morrison's Justice League story to match his X-Men stuff in meta, but you should have figured out the difference by seeing it. Your expectation was a full impediment to perception. Not cool. Read it again."
9. "What? No way!"
10. "How do you plan to comprehend books without pictures if you can't get your head around those with? Read it again."

3.

1. "Slop's on," announces Dusty, finding a break in the conversation. "You two lovebirds get to the bottom of the nature and mechanics of metaphor in funnybooks yet?"
2. Dv shoots him a dirty look, but some of a smile breaks through his glare. He takes a beat. "Ah, it's all a welcome distraction. Speaking of metaphor, this latest Boomer Bible movie's got me stumped.
3. "The rich guy finally gets worked up enough to declare the war on the younger generation the poor guy wanted him to all along, and the very end of the film is he kills his own daughter? I know what it could mean, but not what it does mean. It could be metaphied a number of ways.
4. "You know what it is? It's Tarot-riffic. Tarotastic. The characters are archetypes and rigorously believable, which is awesome."
5. He trails off, fist on his forehead, staring intently past his computer. "Dusty!" And now he moves. "Come here and read my thoughts so far."

(end part one)