Spanner R5 Update: Leila Shelley on a Road Not Necessarily Made of Yellow Bricks

As I begin the final edit on Spanner 2.1, I'll be dealing with the most important character besides Shira herself in her only Chapter 2 appearance, one of the chapter's oldest scenes.

Leila Shelley, the series' primary love interest character, may possibly be its secret hero. I already have Shira as a catalyst hero whose roles alternate between trickster and herald. The first named character she appears as herald to is Leila, the girl she's in love with. What's Leila's "hero's journey"? I found the clue in my absolute favorite David Lynch movie, Mulholland Drive. That film uses Sunset Boulevard to turn the plot of The Wizard of Oz into a tragedy. My favorite Lynch character happens to be Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks; Leila is, among other things, Audrey with a bob cut, except at the same time younger (sixteen) and far less innocent, with a past as dark as Mulholland Drive's Diane Selwyn.

Now let's put Leila on the Yellow Brick Road, so to speak. At once several elements of her character arc fall into place:

1. Drusilla Becket is, as her enemies (including who knows how many ex-husbands) nickname her, the Wicked Witch of the West.
2. The corresponding Good Witch is Leila's aunt Ariel Shield, who is (except of course for the white stripe) black-haired like herself. (In The Wizard of Oz, the movie, both Dorothy and Glinda are redheads; the corresponding character in Mulholland Drive happens to be Diane's aunt.) As the Grail Bearer, she brings in a completely different myth system, particularly the version found in the books of Margaret Starbird, a real-life mentor she invokes by name.
3. Shira, of course, corresponds to Dorothy's inseparable companion Princess Ozma in the Oz novels.
4. Seattle has many nicknames, but the most famous of them is "Emerald City", named after not the architecture but the forested surroundings. The name of the city AI, OZMA, is a blatant pun.
5. Once in the Emerald City, what "great and powerful" Wizard does she meet? Zardoz, of course, in the form of King Patriot. (The song in Interlude 11 samples Zardoz's speech in the notorious 1970s cult movie.) And she kills him — because there is in fact no man behind the curtain. That sequence is the origin of a major Spanner theme, the mystery of the Ego.
6. Leila's counterpart to the tornado that swept Dorothy to Oz is the "tornado" of scandal that destroyed her modelling career and which she barely managed to escape with her life. Another version is the Spanner Incident, in which the series' title character appears and disappears in a whirlwind.
7. Her version of the poppy-field crisis that Glinda has to rescue Dorothy and her travelling companions from may be the name crisis of Chapter 12 (R5 version), in which she fights for her life against her very name itself (which, due to Corporate customs, has trapped her in an arranged marriage to one of the story's nastiest villains). Another character plays the Glinda role here: Angela Coyne, Shira's cousin, lawyer, and fellow redhead. There's another poppy-related connection: it's in Chapter 12 that Leila leaves behind her old heroin habit forever.
8. The Spanner versions of those travelling companions are already experienced heroes unlike the originals, so they don't need to earn their brain, heart, or courage. In fact, there's two versions: three bishounen at Bangor High (Team Bremelo's Connor, Cory, and Kio) and three nameless women from the revolutionary underground (now introduced in Chapter 2).
9. The name of one gang, "Flyen Monkeez", reveals the Klownz to be a version of the Wicked Witch's flying monkey minions.
10. Who corresponds to the Munchkins? Why, the "little people" as the Corporates call them, the mass of ordinary working people against whom the Conservative Revolution is crusading in the name of "the best" (hoi aristoi, as in aristocracy). Thus do I make explicit the Populist themes that are only implicit in L. Frank Baum's original novels, though I drop the old Populists' silver-against-gold (or greenbacks) crusade and ask why, if money turned out to be ichor (the blood of gods) as the Social Darwinists' occult secret doctrine states (so theorizes Bram Dijkstra), there is any need for it at all. The Corporate robber barons and Patriot terrorists with their giant-monster Egos are in fact Nephilim, invoked under their alternate name "Anakim", Hebrew for "giants". Starbird's name for those the Anakim oppose and oppress, those whom Jesus (and the Grail Bearers after him) vowed to defend? Anawim: "little ones".
11. If Leila is a darker take on Dorothy who is in fact a witch, then her counterpart to Toto needs to be that classic witch's familiar, a black cat, a stray who charmed her way into Leila's life back when she was a young girl in her native Ireland.
12. The Spanner version of the "yellow brick road" (the golden road of heroes) will lead Leila not toward "home" (wherever that is) but into legend. She chooses this path by choosing the human version of the red pill from another cinematic mythology.

Of course, the Wizard of Oz plot doesn't sum up all of Leila's character arc. For one thing, Dorothy has nothing resembling Leila's signet ring (the sign of her enslavement to her aristocratic clan that she throws away in Chapter 16) or power crystal (which Shira returns to her). Also, I haven't figured out any counterparts to the ruby slippers (that mentor's gift which gives Dorothy the power to return home) or the Emerald City's famous Horse of a Different Color (that obvious dream symbol of radical change to come). But it definitely serves as a good ready-made template I can model Leila's character arc on (at least in Book 1). David Lynch followed the template in Mulholland Drive, even adding a Princess Ozma figure in Camilla Rhodes; but this Hollywood Ozma proves as totally corrupt as Zardoz (an evil Wizard of Oz), so Diane murders her and ends her journey in tragedy. I'll make my own variations, of course. And it all becomes obvious when you remember that Seattle's nickname is "Emerald City".

Spanner R4: Looking Back So Far: Mad Love, or Romantic Love as the Destruction of Society

I've posted on this theme before, but I never managed to fully integrate it into Spanner until Revision 4, including Chapters 22 and 23 which I'm racing to finish as I write this. André Breton, leader of the twentiety-century Surrealist literary and artistic movement, defined "mad love" (l'amour fou) as a love so extreme, so far beyond the limits even of unreason, it can destroy the entire social order itself. It drove Shira to her suicidal lover Leila, Leila to declare war against the Brinkman clan and erase her name, and the couple to copulate using a power crystal under the speaker's platform in Chapter 15 in order to fuse their boosted powers into a "binary system" that killed King Patriot. Now they are escalating their love into full-blown revolution, and bringing in Shira's blond cousin Jennifer to make their couple a threesome.

The Fourth Revision finds the couple/threesome doing insane things for the sake of mad love. In Revision 4.1, the final one-pass edit and ebook stylesheet hackathon, I intend to strengthen the last weak points in their love arc and integrate it better into the revolution and Student Union storylines which converge on the final three chapters of Book 1, as some weaknesses remain from Revisions 2 and 3; also, I should bring forward such counterpoint romances as the unstable one between Charmian and Bart that implodes in Chapter 20, or the four-sided love triangle centering on Corporate villain Oliver and involving a mad scientist, a high-school mean girl, and the world's most evil pop idol, and which used to be five-sided until Leila ditched her name and patriarch-arranged marriage and left him for her tempestuous lesbian romance with Shira.

One of the inspirations for importing "mad love" into the Shira-Leila romance was an analysis I read in a film book of Surrealist director Luis Buñuel's last film, That Obscure Object of Desire, in which the author speculated that, Buñuel being the Surrealist he was, this movie was at least in part about l'amour fou, and that though bourgeois French protagonist Mathieu and his tempestuous Spanish lover Concha (played by two actresses, one Spanish, one French, alternated at whim, sometimes even in mid-sentence) did have a crazy relationship involving mutual torture, Mathieu was too much the bourgeois Frenchman to let himself go and destroy the bourgeois French society to which he belonged. Since I had planned the Shira-Leila relationship as a lesbian romance since that fateful day in 1996 when I discovered yuri manga on the Internet, I realized the best way to fit that romance into the longer revolution plot was l'amour fou: a teenage lesbian mad romance between a prank-loving superslut and a suicidal fashion model. As Jennifer has been in love with Shira since childhood, she proved easy to suck in (and her role will be strengthened in Revision 4.1). Add the moral fascism of the Eugenics Institute and Shira's eight-year-old niece who happens to be a rare "true loli", and watch things go completely to hell — exactly (cackles the evil mad scientist) as planned.

As a side effect (whether fascinating or annoying depends on the reader), my quest for l'amour fou led me to the Surrealist poets (one of Breton's own poems is of course titled "L'amour Fou"), and from there to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and American Modernist poetry in general (particularly William Carlos Williams and Sylvia Plath) — and when I started writing my own poetry under their influence, I suddenly found my poetic voice, and naturally it ended up all over Spanner R4, another of the ways it's so radically different from Revisions 2 and 3. For R4.1, I found myself re-editing the climactic moment of 1.6 as one of the surreal passages from a novel by science fiction writer Alfred Bester (that proto-cyberpunk who got a Babylon 5 villain named after him) in the form of a free-verse poem written by the likes of Breton or Ginsberg. Which seems appropriate enough, considering that Bester's short story "Fondly Fahrenheit", a major influence on the cyberpunks, is itself a complete Surrealist mindfuck involving wavering identity.

In La Révolution Surréaliste #12 (the final issue), the the editors posed these questions:

1. How would you judge a man who would go so far as to betray his convictions in order to please the woman he loved?
2. Do you believe in the victory of admirable love over sordid life or of sordid love over admirable life?

To which the only proper Surrealist answer is: yes.

Spanner R4 Update: Where Did I Get Some Of These Characters?

While editing Chapter 8 for the Final Revision, I got to thinking about the origin of some of my characters. Some of them are riffs on characters of other stories. Some of these riffs date all the way back to 1992, when I created the original group around Shira.

Diana Shockley: I created her as early as 1991 because I hated Appleseed's Deunan Knute when she killed Chiffon in the first graphic novel. The concept: what if Deunan were a villain?

Henry Becket: Her father was the second villain I created. He's basically the original Battlestar Galactica's villain Baltar without the smirk and with a fedora and thick glasses and the invincible delusion that he's the last actual hero in existence. When borrowing public-domain superheroes, I made him the Bronze Age version of the American Crusader from the Nedor comics.

Richard Becket: His younger-looking older brother is basically the Corporate version of Eblis, the Satan figure from the same show. He also thinks he's the good guy; since he's the story's supreme elitist, that means the masses are by definition the villain. His superhero identity is the Bronze Age Scarab — and for him I borrowed the idea of superhero lineages from The Phantom. The original Scarab was a Frenchman in Napoleonic Egypt, and the lineage has occult origins. Dick Becket is the seventh Scarab (the Golden and Silver Age originals being the fifth and sixth), and he has to fight his own successors, the eighth and ninth Scarabs. The Scarab lineage is central to the mystery of Spanner.

Drusilla Becket is the answer to the question, what if Erica Kane from the soap opera All My Children were a guru like, say, J.Z. Knight (of Ramtha fame) or Elizabeth Clare Prophet? For one thing, like them and other gurus, she made an enemy of Shira's grandmother Eleanor Richter, the children's author and witch.

Will Becket: If Diana is Deunan Knute as a villain, her younger brother is Mobile Suit Gundam's Char Aznable as an extremely ambiguous antihero. There will be hints of another antihero inspired by Char, Lelouch Lamperouge of Code Geass, especially come Book 5.

Colonel Tom Becket: I didn't get a good grip on the Dictel Corporation chairman until I saw James Cameron's Avatar. Then I realized he's basically the villain, Colonel Quaritch, as the chairman of Blackwater.

I just noticed that these are all Beckets. One of the characteristics of the Cromwell Becket clan is their stubborn resistance to change. They are more archetype than character. They claim divine origin, descent from the Norse, Celtic, and Egyptian gods. More than the other dominant clans in the Conservative Revolutionary Party, they remind people of Unseely Fae with their inhuman morality and their lack of respect for human lives.

This in contrast to my more protean heroes, and especially heroines. Shira is a chameleon. Jennifer has a whole arsenal of personae she can summon at will. Surviving Leila or Melody, even when they're not at full power, may depend entirely on what mood they swing into. The only heroic character who is genuinely archetypal is Ariel, with the striking white stripe in her black hair and her Holy Grail obsession. She's the one who puts the heroines' doings into some mythical context and puts them on heroes' journeys. She traces her own ancestry (and therefore her niece Leila's) through the female line ("bar sinister" in heraldry) to Mélusine, Morgan le Fay, and ultimately to Mary Magdalene. And of course she's a mentor character like, say, Willa Richter-Thomas, Zac Finney, or (looking to Chapter 16 R4) Dr. Hiram Whistler. Shira herself has multiple origins.

I'm not actually cloning any characters. I'm too good a writer to let myself be that lazy. But some of my own characters were inspired by characters in other works. Of course, creating them is only the first step. After that, their job is to grow away from their origins so they can help the other characters take the story away from their author and run amok.

Spanner R4 Update: The Tough Edits, and an Old Influence Unearthed

First, the influence I'd forgotten. Its name is Sukeban Deka, and Erica Friedman of Yuricon brought it up in a recent blog post that links to her new article on this classic manga, "Hooliganism, High School Crime, and Giant Snakes", in which she declares it "one of the most awesomely outrageous series ever made."

Back in the early 1990s (1993?), during my anime club days, I watched the OVA series. If fortysomething me had seen it back then (or read the original Shinji Wada manga), I would have howled, raised the devil-horns salute, and cried out, "rock 'n' roll!" But twentysomething me was a virgin of sorts, and I saw it just as I had barely begun developing the early Spanner concept with just the five heroines, two mentor figures, and four villains of the "Class of '92". There's a group of characters who can be considered the "Class of Sukeban Deka": the Fleer sisters (the first three, oldest to youngest: Charmian with the long blond princess-curly hair, Christian with the short brown hair with pink highlights, and the less villainous black-haired Julian), their mother whom I would later make part of the villainous Becket clan, and the characters I would much later name Mimi Scott and Polly Parker. A late addition to this "class" is the Fleer sisters' father, Alan Fleer, whom I would make not just an admiral but the son of a fascist Argentine general. The twist on my part is which of the "Class of '92" heroines would get the loaded yo-yo: not Debbie Longmuir (who became another Becket!), she of the impossible aim, but rebel protagonist Shira Thomas herself. And since unlike Sukeban Deka title character Saki Asamiya, a sukeban (roughly "gangster bitch") drafted by the Japanese government and made a deka (cop), Shira is manipulating an American government that hates her skin color and conscience. For this reason, her loaded yo-yo is not government-issue like Saki's, but a Go-Yo, in homage to a now-forgotten American comic called Go-Man.

Back when Sukeban Deka was published, 1978-82 in the shoujo manga anthology Hana to Yume, anything still went in manga, while American comics and television were subject to strict censorship codes. Today Saki would not be allowed to drink and smoke in the censorious new Japanese climate, while on American TV (at least on cable) you get such things as True Blood, Breaking Bad, Diary of a Call Girl, and The Borgias, and American comics can get as outrageous as anything from Europe (case in point: Sin City). A Sukeban Deka could not be published in Japan today, but it sure as hell could make it onto American TV. Japan and America, it seems, have switched places in this one respect. In its original concept and final execution, Chaos Angel Spanner is very much a homage to an age of freedom in Japanese comics and animation that is now lost, and Sukeban Deka is one of its earliest pivotal influences. Saki Asamiya may be gone forever (she dies at the end), but Shira Thomas has only just begun.

Now for the tough edits: it took me over a month to finish the Fourth Revision versions of Chapters 4 and 5. Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised that editing them turned out to be so difficult; after all, it took me about four months to edit Chapter 1. But Chapter 1 is special; its purpose is to sell the novel. Absolute awesomeness was absolutely required. Maybe the problem is that the final edits of Chapters 2 and 3 had gone so smoothly and fast. One scene in particular, "Meeting at Mudlark House" in 4.4 (it's the second big scene), I rewrote over and over and over till I got it right. The first two scenes of 4.6 (before the flashback) also gave me a lot of difficulty. To wrestle these three scenes into shape, I came up with a new trick to help me. It's a three-step process:

1. take the scene I want to edit in the ebook's HTML file,
2. go to the corresponding part of the TV-episode script, and
3. start a new text file as a workspace in which I can combine the two versions.

While editing 5.2 and 5.3, I forgot this method and did a new one:

1. tear the long scenes into pieces,
2. write a new outline around the pieces, and
3. rewrite and rearrange until everything feels right at last.

I ended up creating new transitional scenes, particularly in 5.3, whose major scene I had already divided in half and set in different high-school sports venues.

For the climactic sequence of Chapter 5 I used a different technique entirely:

1. break up the sequence into its constituent scenes,
2. put them in the correct order using the cinematic intercutting technique I first used in Chapter 1, and
3. flesh them out.
   
4. 
   

It's been very much a learning experience. It's almost as if I've had to unlearn and relearn everything repeatedly, or at least learn to do everything a new way every time I do it. I think I may have left Chapter 5 a little rough in dialogue and style in comparison to the obsessive sheen of Chapter 1, even if the plot is now far more cohesive than it ever was before. But at least I know a little bit more about what I'm doing, and I'm going to take that knowledge into my next edit, in which I sink my teeth into that bloated mess that is the current edit of Chapter 6...

Spanner Influences: Ayn Rand and Her Un-Capitalistic Sense of Life

The article: "Defending Capitalism Against Ayn Rand" (Steven Farron, Liberty Magazine)

Steven Farron says Ayn Rand is the greatest novelist. My opinion of her fiction is not quite so exalted, but both her fiction and her philosophy were major influences on mine, since I was under her influence for about 15 years. But we agree that she has one big weakness: her sense of life. In his article, he says Rand's sense of life is too heroic for capitalism. In fact, it comes right out of revolutionary Russia.

This, therefore, is a study in the anxiety of influence.

Here's the contradiction:

1. Her sense of life is heroic, inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, High Romanticism, British adventure fiction, and (this is rarely mentioned) the heroic environment of the Russian Revolution. Her heroes do not deal with the "penny-ante".
2. Capitalism is about making money from anything you can make money from. You can definitely make money off the "penny-ante".

So she exalted the mighty captains of industry and the great innovators, while she despised the shopkeepers and small enterprisers who make the free market run. Her father, Zinovy Rosenbaum, was one of those small shopkeepers dispossessed by the Bolsheviks. Yet her sense of life is suspiciously similar to the revolutionaries who dispossessed her father: they were driven by the certainty that they were heroes creating a new world. In fact, though her fundamentalist approach to philosophy is that of her enemy Stalin and her politics and economics are deliberately the exact opposite of his, her sense of life reminds me more of Trotsky because he himself was a hero. Naturally, she hated workers (her stock example was the grocery clerk).

(Here is where I ransack the bookcase in my computer room to find my copies of The Romantic Manifesto and The Virtue of Selfishness.)

True Love as Terrorism: "Destroy and Revolution" and "Spanner"

Destroy and Revolution by Kouji Mori is a manga about the sweet, sweet love story of two pretty Japanese boys — who just happen to be violent terrorists on a bombing rampage. Strangely enough, I only heard of it yesterday, while randomly surfing TV Tropes (it's on the "Ho Yay → Anime" page as the sole entry under "D"). Like Chaos Angel Spanner, it begins with a bang — with our titular heroes, brooding Makoto and charming Yuuki, destroying a high-rent apartment block in Tokyo for "the purification of the unworthy" (a corrupt politician in this case).

Like I said, I only heard of Destroy and Revolution yesterday. That means it could never have become an influence on Spanner, which I've been working on since 1992. Now consider this: in developing the relationship line for Spanner, I did this, in approximately this order:

1. I centered it on the story's two main girls.
2. I made their personalities volatile: brooding Leila, hot-blooded charmer Shira.
3. I put their love in direct opposition to a future fascist United State of Amerika.
4. I re-envisioned it on the Surrealist principle of l'amour fou or "mad love", which can lead to not just personal liberation but the destruction of society, thus making their love itself terroristic.

And even though the two stories developed completely in isolation from one another, Spanner uncannily resembles a yuri version or "distaff counterpart" of Destroy and Revolution, with a more sophisticated revolutionary ideology (which, admittedly, grew out of nearly 30 years of at least rebellious thinking). Also consider that Shira and Leila are only a couple years younger than Yuuki and Makoto. Now consider this scenario: Destroy and Revolution, starring Utena and Anthy from Revolutionary Girl Utena, working toward a real revolution, against Ozymandias from Watchmen. That's as close to a perfect description of Chaos Angel Spanner as you'll get in terms of other stories.

Adolescent love expressed as a passion for destruction. Too bad Destroy and Revolution came far too late to have any direct influence on Spanner. But you never know...