In Defence Of Annoying Comic Relief Characters

It's time that I stood my ground and admitted something that has bothered me since 1999.

I have never hated Jar-Jar Binks. The Midichlorians I get, Jake Lloyd's performance was infamous, but I saw him in Jingle All The Way and I enjoyed parts of his performance like that scene where he's imagined by Arnie-Dad as an adult drinking booze proved he had some brilliance if given good material where he could mix cute with creepy and disturbing. But I never hated Jar-Jar Binks. For many years, my brother asked me in no uncertain terms, "Why?". And that's a very good question to ask of a person who defends one of the most hated comic relief characters in modern cinematic history. I hope to illuminate what occurred to me at nine years old to defend this infamous CGI Gungan as it ties into other, more recent examples of people decrying other supposedly annoying comic relief characters which for the record I disagree with in ways we'll get to later. Oh boy will we get to it later.

The reason why I defended Jar-Jar Binks to a crowd of Darth Maul fanboys who mocked me as a child was very simple now I think of it. It wasn't merely Jar-Jar Binks as a character, I mean I thought the floppy ears were cool in the promos but there was more to it when the backlash reached unholy levels of hatred to what was really a CGI creature put there to please children. Children, I remind you, who were my age at the time of The Phantom Menace's cinema release. I was Jar-Jar's target market, as were a lot of other kids who rejected him and preferred Darth Maul instead. No, it wasn't just Jar-Jar's character design or comic relief appeal that got to me. It was the way nerd society just spat on this poor critter and wanted to see him dragged through the streets and maimed, for the crime of... existing. As a child, I'd often been mocked and teased for being annoying, naive or getting in people's way a lot. I was diagnosed with high functioning autism from a very early age and I saw things in Jar-Jar Binks none of the other kids really saw because they didn't have empathy for somebody they saw as annoying. I related to Jar-Jar Binks because here was this alien creature, made an outsider by society even in universe (That's part of the plot if you recall) and despised by the divine wrath of Star Wars fandom, and he was reviled for being annoying rather than a real villain who did truly reprehensible things. Kids then fanboyed over Darth Maul because he looked cool, he had a double bladed lightsaber and had cool makeup, yet the fact my generation rooted for him over the outright harmless Jar-Jar Binks just sat wrong with me, and for years I couldn't put my finger on it until I saw this same thing play out again and again with other movies that came out which were unrelated but the hatred of these harmless comic relief characters was all too familiar. Where other people saw hilarity in jokes about Jar-Jar being frozen in carbonite and harmed in various ways, I saw the same bullying I was put through by my peers for nothing less than the crime of my high functioning autism that made me different and harder to deal with than the other kids who took their social skills for granted. It was also something I've noticed the internet latched onto, this unwarranted hatred of these outright harmless characters who hadn't hurt anyone really.

I didn't notice this cynicism creep in modern fandom reach intolerable levels for me until I saw criticism of Wreck-It Ralph because Sarah Silverman played Vanellope. Oh my word. The overreaction to this character purely on the basis on Silverman Stigma brings my piss to a boil. Don't you fucking dare bring Silverman's baggage into this. Don't. You. Fucking. Dare. I was in the cinema when Wreck-It Ralph was released. The moment I saw this character I knew I was going to like her. For reasons that will take some explaining. For starters, she's wide eyed and fun, annoying to some critics yes, but she's a breath of fresh air to what would be considered the mainstream acceptability of "annoying". Vanellope has fans. She has more fans than Jar-Jar making her a lot safer to defend. She's also got aspects to her character which I find far more eerily relatable to my personal childhood growing up than Jar-Jar had in universe, notably the fact that she has a glitch disability that makes her unable to be accepted by the other game characters and race in the Grand Prix. This character put me back in a place that was very familiar. A familiar place I associate with being hurt and shamed for who I was, by people who either didn't know any better or were just cruel for the hell of it. As soon as those bullies showed up on screen I had an inkling I wasn't gonna leave that theater before going through some flashbacks I'd rather forget. The part where Ralph smashes her car in order to spare her feelings only to make it worse... broke my fucking heart. Let's be real. I've seen Cannibal Holocaust a worrying amount of times. That movie is brutal. Yet due to a horrendous borderline clinical depression I'm still recovering from, among other things like these characters murdering animals on camera earlier, I felt nothing for these bad guys getting torn apart by cannibals. When Ralph tore that car to shreds though, the car that Vanellope worked so hard to create from spare parts, I was in actual tears. My eyes are watering right now just remembering it. There's a big difference between the catharsis of seeing a villain suffering from violence and seeing some poor comic relief character that's done nothing to hurt anyone get their dreams crushed. There's a very important difference. About three jugs of tears worth of difference. I cried the same tears children a quarter of my age cried that day. I thought my years of political activism was enough to kill my soul and I'd never feel emotional about anything ever again. I have never been so wrong. I learned that day that I did have a soul still. That I was capable of emotions I forgot I had. And that I felt the same way about this carnage that these kids who didn't know how rough the world was yet, despite being three times as jaded.

I could not deny that this character reawakened something human in me, when I'd lost all hope I'd ever feel something like that again. I once more believed in cinema. It's entirely likely that Vanellope's glitch disability would make me biased to defend her from the get go. As a high functioning autistic, disabled people in movies get me very protective. I do not fuck around with that stuff. But Vanellope's charms worked all on her own. She was more than just one gimmick to tug on your heart strings. She was a complete character with actual dreams and hopes beyond just being there for sentimentality. She refused to be a victim of her own condition. For these reasons, and a few others I've forgotten to mention by now, I just don't see that Silverman Stigma has any right to remove the dignity of this character. No. Just... no. Jar-Jar has his detractors, but I refuse to acknowledge that he in any way ruined the Star Wars franchise. And I refuse to my dying day to concede to the haters that Vanellope somehow makes Wreck-It Ralph a bad movie. Don't you fuckin' dare.

I should probably mention that Donny is my favourite character from The Big Lebowski, even moreso than The Dude because I know I'm a Little Lebowski Achiever who can't give himself permission to BE The Dude. Donny is the guy who gets on Walter's nerves a lot. I was irritating and hard to love by my friends and family also. He walks into conversations not knowing where the context started. He's out of his element. And I've been out of my element a lot of times. This doesn't make Donny a bad person. He's just a bit out of the loop but he brings a lot to the table. He's still the best bowler. And a guy like that deserves a better funeral than he got.

Muffy: Or A Transmigration Of Selves (Book Review)

Transgressive literature often tries to say something but the execution makes them say something else by accident. In the case of Muffy: or A Transmigration of Selves this is especially true since unlike other transgressive novels I’ve read like American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis or Michel Houellebecq’s The Map And The Territory where Patrick Bateman is a character intended for us to detest and The Map And The Territory feeling more like a fictionalised essay about the contemporary art market and capitalism’s confusing relationship with human labour, Muffy is a bit like American Psycho in that it also contains sexualised torture scenes but this time Patrick Bateman’s been swapped out for this left-leaning extremist woman whose commentary would be grating towards American readers who would find the beating of the Ronald Reagan dead horse juvenile via the author’s implying the man tripled the national debt buying a sculpture made from the corpses of an African American family… to an Australian man like me whose irreverence towards authority is considered a national trait shared by many other of my countrymen and women, this satire is a bit lost in translation much like I imagine my own work’s references to the OFLC would be lost on readers if I didn’t put footnotes in my novels out of mercy. Muffy is a novel that in all honesty, I can only explain via reference to obscure lesbian internet comedian reviewer Diamanda Hagan and her internet show on Blip.tv where she dresses up as a supervillain with minions and reviews Z-grade transgressive cinema as well as the occasional special episode about more mainstream stuff. If Diamanda Hagan reviewed books instead of messed up cinematic delights, this is the kind of book she would review on her show. It’s so eerily up her alley that the book explicitly mentions that the character Sarah who makes sculptures out of human corpses has a collection of depraved cinema at her disposal. Diamanda Hagan is the sort of person who’d find a book where a woman is masturbated with the severed arm of a still alive human baby compelling if not worthy of consideration for examining its core themes, so if you’re part of Hagan’s fandom and you’ve ever wanted a book that combines The Raspberry Reich’s political diatribes with Schizophreniac The Whore Mangler’s Z-grade cinema exploitation and sleaze, there is no other book I would sooner recommend to this very niche demographic. I’m only expending five hundred words on this thing because it’s less plot driven as much as a number of transgressive vignettes, but as far as independent self published projects it’s proof that books are getting just as weird as independent cinema has gotten in the opening parts of this decade, and that books are still rather relevant as a counter cultural artform that can be distributed cheaply now that eBooks are a thing. I bought this for about three bucks on my Kindle so it’s worth a look.

Pat Grant's Blue and Australian Identity

Pat Grant's Blue is possibly one of the most intelligent deconstruction of Australian identity and latent bogan racism ever written. It's also a very good comic book that's well produced and drawn instead of being a narrative with a graphic novel tacked onto it. The story of young kids adjusting to adulthood as times change around their fictional isolated country beach town while immigration of blue people from an unnamed nation sets tensions between cultures to a boil explores the uncomfortable and weird subtext of racism in Australia that seems odd because these people are fighting for a way of life that wasn't very culturally enriched to begin with. They fear losing their precious meat pies and sausage rolls while disparaging newly introduced cuisine to their local area that's made by immigrants that don't speak their language, but it's left unsaid whether the noodles in a bowl they make is better than what the yobs had before. In the final panel of Blue the central bogan character is seen eating one of these bowls even as he literally whitewashes the blue alien graffiti off a wall, which is re-claimed by a passing by blue person as he abandons his post. The graphic novel before us could be misinterpreted as a right wing screed against immigration but the author states in the end notes he's not a right wing crank at all, and given Shaun Tan took a look at this thing before he was willing to publish it says a lot about where this Pat Grant guy's intentions lie. He's so successfully captured the mindset of a bogan racist within a fictional universe with blue alien people that he could be mistaken for a racist himself.

But in the endnotes, Genealogy Of The Boofhead: Images, Memory And Australian Surf Comics, included in the back of the graphic novel, Pat Grant's true genius as historian as well as cartoonist emerges.

I knew I wanted to write about localism, racism and the creepy politics that play out in small town supermarkets and surf club car parks, but the ideas I came up with didn't work until I combined them with the story of some spotty kids who walk up the line to see some human wreckage. - Pat Grant

 Yet the disturbing undertones of Australia as a culture of bogans isn't fully appreciated with the text of the Blue graphic novel alone until the themes of this work are further elaborated on in the endnotes:

Today's 12-year-old will never understand what it was like growing up in an isolated Australian coastal town in the 90s. The nearest comic book store was six hours' drive from my home. The internet was five years late and another five had to pass before it was fast enough to be useful. The media we had access to on the north coast of New South Wales was as bland and lacking in sustenance as the white bread in our lunchboxes. To add to this, Australia does not have a wealth of comic art history. In fact, this country has a bad record when it comes to any kind of history. Our way of writing history is to destroy old things pertinent to our landscape and experience, and to import readymade mythologies from overseas. There's not a lot of comic art floating around Australia, in the way that there is in the US, nor is there a culture of collecting it. If we had a silver or golden age of comics, it's unknown to me. And while there are attempts at a publishing industry like that in the States, a truly Australian comics culture has been something of a chimera. That's not to say there weren't or aren't amazing artists or devoted fans, but when it seems you're on the rock farthest from the bright center of the comic-book universe, Tatooine syndrome tends to prevail. Success on the sandy planet isn't much success at all, and there's always another womp rat in a Southern Cross singlet looking to tear you down. - Pat Grant

There is so much in that singular statement that expresses so much of the older, Generation X mentality towards Australian culture that says more than I ever could about how the Australian creative character feels stunted, and no matter how much you wish to create something beautiful and thoughtful  some yob in a Southern Cross singlet will kick down the elaborate and wondrous castle you have built on the sand. The beginning sequence of panels where a newcomer to the beach inquires what his peers are up to, explaining he's from Sydney and he's come to visit the beach. But when the locals who have built what they declare is not a sand castle, but a keep, grow bored with their own creation, they kick down the object of their creativity, leaving the newcomer to gaze upon the ruin of something that he showed interest in. The symbolism of these sequential images is palpable given the above statement, which I haven't entirely finished unpacking. Perhaps Pat Grant is implying that the Australian culture has been neglected and destroyed once the yobs who made it popular are bored with it, and furthermore his statement seems to imply that any Australian attempt at creating any kind of art that wants to compete on a world scale with imported works has to cope with the looming boofheads who will tear down any attempt to create a civilised world in the Land Down Under.

Pat Grant is entirely correct in one assumption. The isolation of a pre-internet Australia will never again exist for my generation and the ones coming after it. Where Pat Grant's generation must have seen apathy, cynicism and painful resignation to the lack of change and caring about our own history, I've seen slowly disappearing, if a bit gradually from the ranks of my own peers. The best and brightest of my peers I hang around with aren't going to risk trusting their future with the yobs who would tear down everything beautiful. There is a deep distrust of politicians currently with people my age, however it is not a cynicism rooted in the idea that nothing will ever change. It's the idea that we know how to run the country better than the boofheads in Parliament, and because we have no Bill Of Rights to call our own because of our archaic Constitution written in a time when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were considered subhuman and terra nullis was the order of the day, we feel completely powerless to change anything until we can finally take the reigns for ourselves.

The awkward embarrassment young people with intelligent minds feel about Australia isn't just the racism or the misogyny and the lack of a true established culture we haven't imported from elsewhere, it's the result of several generations of Australians living under the dinosaur era isolation mentality that refuses to die in spite of the internet. We feel like our politicians have to die off before the threats to our sanity and our reason expressed to the decaying wreck of bogan rule before anything good or beautiful can exist here. We care little for our history because we're screaming for a future where intelligence is valued and art can prosper to arrive.