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'Maus' just seemed very, very over-played to me. The visual solecism of men in mice and cat-suits does not change enough for me, and the central conceits are simply, to me, uninteresting. It goes out of its way to take a complicated thing and make it as simple and easily digested as possible, except that every other panel I would pause and know I was being spoonfed something suspicious.
Nazi cats. Jewish mice. Oh, there's an entirely unloaded and intelligent dichotomy being established in wonderfully laden and dense metaphor... wait, no. It's not.
It's all about his father, then. The mouse that walks on two legs. But, again, it's not. It's his father in a mouse mask, opressed by cats. Because cats are evil and hunt things to eat, but also to fuck around with while the prey is terrified and confused, before coming over and rubbing on your shin for a pet and some water. Just like nazis. Do you see? Cat! Nazi!
Mice, on the other hand, are small, innocent, plucky and industrious and lovely animals that never do anything horrible like gnaw through clothes and stuff, eat your food and crap in the kitchen drawers... or kill people by rounding them up into concentration camps and shoving them in rooms to be gassed, burnt, or just shot and thrown on a pile of almost-corpses to die a day or three later.
Pulitzer Prize winning material here! How could I not see things so clearly before?
It's cheating when you use Nazis as the bogeyman to scare a moral into your audience. I despise Nazis and recognize the threat of that sort of thing, but dammit....
And dressing them in cat-kit does not a useful metaphor make. An easy, cheap potshot that insults cats everywhere, yes, but useful, productive, or something that might cause a flourish of thought, restrospective analysis, and an understanding of the human condition and our relationship to our ancestors?
'X was impressed by nazis' is a powerful statement, but stating it relies so much on outside material that it does not make a particularly fair story.
'Cats kill mice and so, mice, who obviously never kill anything - except when they do and for the same reasons as cats but we'll not get into that - mice are not Nazis and must garner our sympathies.' Not as impressively overwhelming as 'persecuted by Nazi' but still pretty good.
It's an overblown and politicized 'my dad can beat up your dad, and he makes more money and he's more fun too' argument.
My point is, rubbish writing has no depth, not even the illusory depth or begging depth of say, the last few Nabokov novels, or an early issue of Fantastic Four, even. Rubbish writing takes every easy out, gives us nothing surprising or confrontational or intriguing, reassuring us and sugarcoating all the way, and doesn't think highly of its audience at all. And above all it is uninteresting and appears to have no fun with itself at all. Even the bleakest of material, well, strives for its bleakness energetically, if it's any good.
Horrible writing has to lack (a) impetus and (b) wit. That's all I ask of anything. Depth is nice, but ultimately, unnecessary. 'Sugar is not a vegetable' is perfectly alright by me. As is 'We're here to hurt you.' And that fascist prettyboy thing.
And that's how I read 'Maus' and 'Maus II' which I believe is actually packaged together in one go, these days. But, a quick glance at past posts here on Barbelith reveal the sorts of thing I love, so y'know, there's ample evidence that I have off tastes. |
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