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July 15, 2006
Black Hole
Back in the mid-nineties, around the time my voice was breaking and Pulp Fiction was coming to steal me back to cinema after my pre-adolescent flirtations with comic books, I caught a glimpse of some of the crisp, haunting artwork from a book called Black Hole, by Charles Burns. It was an image of some monstrous form: a misshapen head, its face twisted in misery, atop a twisted, extruded spine of a body. I knew that Burns' graphic-novel-in-progress had something to do with teen sexuality, and the dynamic between that subject and that image wedged the title in my head. It stuck with me, and over the years, as I'd see Burns' immediately recogniable, less grotesque but no less evocative artwork on the covers of books or The Believer magazine from time to time, I'd remember Black Hole and wonder about it.
Last fall, when - a full decade after its inception - Burns finished the novel; last month I finally picked it up and finished the entire thing in one long sitting. It's an outright masterpiece, easily ranking with my favorite works of the medium. One a purely graphical front, it's one of the most beautifully illustrated works I've read in a long time; Burns captures a world of detail in seemingly simple brush strokes, and his artwork is so rich and nuanced that I didn't even realize it was entirely monochromatic - solid blacks and whites, without a single shade of gray. Most reviews have marveled at how he maintained exactly the same style over the ten years it took to finish the book; equally impressive is his organic utilization of the geometry of the medium, of the repetition of various motifs and the overall cohesiveness of his form that affects the reader on almost subconsicous levels (the most obvious of these is the recurring use of vaginal imagery - it's there, with its shifting implications, in a disected frog, a nasty wound, a bit of parted foliage, not to mention an actual vagina) and keeps the thematic content bubbling constantly under the surface.
The book, set in the 70s, is a dense horror story of hormonal awakening and physical maturation. It centers around a group of teenagers beset by a strange disease, known as 'The Bug,' that is transmitted through sexual contact and which causes odd, frequently terrifying physical deformations. Burns offers no explanation or exposition for this plague; one might initially assume it to be a metaphor for AIDS, but after the few chapter or two, such a strict reading will seem far too limited (in fact, after that first chapter or two, I found myself so caught up in the narrative that I stopped thinking about metaphors entirely). The book is not simply about sexually transmitted disease; nor is it simply about teen sexuality, or alienation, or going to school, or first loves and heartbreaks. It is about adolescence, in general, and the end of it, in particular, and its intimately subjective perspective affords it a scope that it is epic and precipital.
I don't mean to suggest, however, that the sense metaphor of 'the bug' isn't persistent in the narrative. It's there throughout, in a vaguely enveloping sense, and its meaning is of the sort that is profoundly affecting and yet hard to put a finger on. Paging back through the book after I finished it, I realized that Burns' intentions are most immediatley displayed on the inside cover and dust jacket of the book's hardcover edition. In the front, Burns has illustrated a page from his own high school senior yearbook. Smiling faces, all looking just off camera, anonymous and yet completely familiar. On the back half, the same illustration has been altered; the faces are all still there, still smiling, but they've been mutated by 'The Bug.'
The key to this equation, though, is the way Burns presents himself on the dust jacket. On the front flap, he offers a rendering of his own yearbook photo. On the back, alongside all his deformed peers, he's drawn himself again; the same expression, the same picture - except he's in his 40s. All grown up.
The novel has, of course, unfortunately, been snatched up by Hollywood. Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman are adapting it, which is okay. The problem is that Alexandre Aja is attached to direct. Haute Tension is one of the most insulting scary movies I've seen recently; The Hills Have Eyes wasn't quite as bad, but, while I don't want to be judegmental, I've seen nothing from him that suggests that he won't treat the story as anything more than a parade of grotesqueries. I hope he proves me wrong; more than that, though, I sort of hope the project falls apart until another filmmaker, more in tune with Burns' sensibilties comes along to guide it to the screen.
Who might that filmmaker be? I was talking to Clay about it last month, right after he'd just watched Funny Ha Ha for the first (and second, and third) time, and he thought Andrew Bujalski might handle it really well. Yen mentioned Higuchinsky, the director of the comically bizarre Uzumaki. Both are interesting possibilities, but I think that Larry Clark, as predictabl a choice as he might be, could really do the work justice. And of course, as with any literary property I fall in love with, I can't help but propose myself (to myself, mostly) for the job. I'll add it to my list of projects I dream of one day rescuing from development hell.
Posted by David Lowery at July 15, 2006 02:25 PM