Context! Huh! Good God, y’all! What is it good for? Absolutely …
Let’s break it down: Stuff MEANS stuff. Things have meaning. Part of the way we figure out what stuff means is to see/hear/experience it in context; part of the way we destroy or redefine meaning is to recontextualise stuff … or decontextualise it altogether. Part of the ongoing effect of digital technology on broader culture is that recontextualisation, or indeed outright decontextualisation, is easier than ever before … but all the digisphere has done has been to accelerate and facilitate a process that’s been observable for decades.
Case histories? Glad you asked. Walk this way …
First off: it was announced a few days ago that the Official Song of the 2012 Olympics will be London Calling by The Clash, that apocalyptic epic which provided the highwater mark of the midpoint of their career (or, at any rate, the career of the REAL Clash: the one with Mick Jones in). It’s easy to see why it was chosen: that intro is both catchy and monumental and the opening line – ‘London calling to the faraway towns …’ – would seem to fit … except that that’s where the selection committee would seem to have stopped listening (just as Ronald Reagan’s handlers only registered, back in 1984, the – bitterly ironic – chorus of Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA when they co-opted it as a campaign song).
After all, all that stuff about nuclear errors, junkies nodding out and ‘London is drowning and I live by the river’ would seem to be somewhat inappropriate. Or rather: it IS appropriate – to the real world as Londoners experience it at the present time – but possibly not in the manner a tourist board would consider comfortably attractive. In other words: it tells you rather more about London both in 1979 – when Joe Strummer and Mick Jones wrote the song – and right now than those who helmed its repurposing might find convenient.
But then the song is no longer about what it was about, or even what it’s still about: detached not only from context but from values, it’s simply a free-floating signifier, and not for the first time, either: the song also appeared in Die Another Day, the last of the Pierce Brosnan 007 movies, as Bond flies home after escaping captivity and torture in North Korea.
Second off: another recent news story provides another disquieting example of detachment from values and context. The family and estate of master comic-book auteur Jack Kirby, whose creative work forms the basis of no less than three of this year’s Big Movies – Captain America (launched in the 1940s by Kirby and Joe Simon), Thor and X-Men: First Class (based on 1960s collaborations with Stan Lee) – have just lost a court case against Marvel Comics (now owned by MouseCorp … sorry, Disney) for a share in the corporate profits thereby generated. Under the Old Rules of Comics – before the institution of creators’ rights and royalty schemes (which meant that a Spider-Man artist like Todd MacFarlane could make more from a single Spidey comic than co-creator Steve Ditko EVER made from the character) – the work-for-hire contracts meant that the writers and artists earned simple one-off page-rate fees, the company owned all rights in perpetuity and that was IT, baby.
Now: if superheroes – those brightly-clad metaphors on legs – are about anything (other than fights-in-tights), it’s about truth and justice, doing the right thing and protecting others (Alan Moore once told me that the origins of his own value-set came from Superman comics). Whether motivated by guilt (Batman, Spider-Man) or simple altruism (Superman, Fantastic Four), the heroes risked their lives for a simple but straightforward moral code based on the principle that while might did not make right … it could serve it. Meanwhile, the publishers operated on the principle that under capitalism, comrade, anything you could get away with was yours.
Thus it was that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold all rights to Superman to National Periodical Publications (that’s DC to us … now part of Warner Brothers) back in 1938 for $130. (Yes, you read right … ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY BUCKS AMERICAN.) That contract, flagrantly unjust though it was, nevertheless stood up in court … and it was only when a public campaign, spearheaded by artist Neal Adams, shamed DC into paying up purely to avoid bad publicity around the launch of the first of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies back in 1978, that Siegel & Shuster received creator credits and pittance-level pensions. DC conceded that whilst they had no legal obligation to look after the by-now penniless old men and their families, some moral obligation DID exist.
It’s time for Marvel/Disney to do likewise, and do right by Jack Kirby’s family (interestingly enough, Stan Lee doesn’t get royalties for HIS creative work, either … though he does own Marvel stock and, as former Publisher and Chairman, a no-doubt reasonable pension) … but it’ll take a modern equivalent of Neal Adams and a major public stink to embarrass them into acting more like Supes or Spidey … and less like Lex Luthor or Dr Doom.
This is a mission for the Justice (for Jack) League of America … and all the faraway towns. Otherwise, not only will Kirby have been robbed of money, but the meaning of his work will have been diminished.
If – in a world where meaning itself has been drained of meaning – that still matters. To some of us, anyway … it does.
