| Anyone
familiar with the typical Amazon.com Customer Review -- of, say, Bret Easton
Ellis's American Psycho -- is all too used to reading sentences like
this one: "With Manhattan as a backdrop, all of Patrick Bateman's good looks,
shiatsu massages, Evian, Comme des Garcon facial products, and unbeliveable
[sic] wardrobe will not be enough to stop him from becoming a monster in
his spare time who enjoys tourchering [sic] Sharpeis, and all sorts of other
human pets." Sickened by this kind of insipid commentary, a revolutionary
cadre of Amazon.com denizens has infiltrated the Customer Reviews bulletin
board for Daddy's Cap is on Backwards, a collection of Bil ("Family
Circus") Keane's strips, and applied every radical interpretation imaginable.
In recent weeks, the underemployed post-grad subculture has been abuzz with
the news; e-mails with the subject line "Check this out before Amazon gets
wind of it!" have been flying back and forth across the country.
"Keane has been following the same outdated left-wing intellectual formula
since the start of the Cold War. Each of his one panel cartoons are so filled
with subtexts and post-Leninist commentary in the decay of capitalism that
you are almost compelled to shout, 'Hey, get with the rest of the world!
Socialism is dead!'" cried one hard-line critic. Others read Keane's banal,
family-friendly comic strip as a "dramatic, painful portrait of the American
family, caught in the jaws of the bear-trap that is 20th century capitalism,"
"an amazing pastiche of modern angst," and a masterpiece in the genre of
"burb noir." As if these examples were not already excellent proof that the
web-business mantra "Content good, free content better" is a fallacy,
there's more. Keane is a "stubborn iconoclast of a nearly Kantian refusal
to deny subjectivity any positionality other than a rather liminal objectivity,"
insists one acolyte. Another muses on the elderly cartoonist's ability to
follow "the travails of a country without mystery, without science, without
theatre; through a morass of deeply etched black dotted lines."
This kind of tongue-in-cheek expression of hermeneutic vertigo is harmless
enough, but the self-referential bulletin board activity has began to mushroom
into unwieldy metalevels. Most gleefully subversive are those mock Customer
Reviews of Daddy's Cap is on Backwards which ape the authentic ones.
One "patrickbateman" penned a reappropriated review of American Psycho
in which Keane becomes "a literary authority on the lives of the infinitely
wealthy," and his creation Jeffy becomes a misogynistic serial killer. Another
disparages the "cash-and-carry theory crowd" for making light of such an
important text. But while all this reviewer mutiny may just end up getting
squirreled away in the Amazon archives, it exemplifies just the sort of
democratic activity that could restore to the medium -- and by extension,
to Amazon -- its anarchic integrity.
Josh Glenn is the editor
of Hermenaut, a (print) journal of pop culture and philosophy.
Communicate.
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FEED
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check
out last month's Daily Loop.
Visit the
Dysfunctional
Family Circus to see Billy get admonished by Dad: "Fer chrissakes, Billy,
calm down! The beer man will be here in just a minute!"
The writing in Half
Empty isn't all that remarkable (a rant against Northface fleece-wearers,
a search for the best Canadian burger) but Blink, their gallery of Flash
animation is definitely worth checking out, and returning to again and again,
as it's updated daily.
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