Of Beans and Flings and Finding Your Community

I recently watched some episodes of the television series Northern Exposure with a group of friends, a couple of whom had never seen the show. We watched four episodes: the first two as introductions to the characters, and then two of my top picks from the series, Burning Down the House and Cicely. I was a huge fan of this show when it was on, and in my memory it still ranks very high on my list of all-time favorite television. I’m happy to say that, for me at least, it holds up. The newbies became instant fans as well. I believe that it was a seminal and transformative show, one of many that helped shape what serial television has become.

Northern Exposure was always thought provoking. Watching it now, twenty-five years since it premiered, it’s still provoking me to think. What follows here are just some random ideas that popped up while ruminating on the show, these episodes, and my love of it.

Burning Down the House is arguably the most famous and well-known episode. In it the character of Chris Stevens (portrayed by John Corbett), the town DJ, philosopher and artist, wants to create a work of art, a performance piece, what he refers to as a pure moment. He builds a trebuchet (a type of catapult), with which he plans to fling a cow. When he discovers that this had already been done in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail he was despondent. His idea had already been done. The cow had been flung. Ironically it was Maurice (portrayed by Barry Corbin), the town millionaire and the person there with the least interest in or understanding of art, who talked Chris into pursuing his vision.

As Chris famously says, ‟It’s not what you fling... It’s the fling itself.”

Here’s the clip...

While watching this my friend Ziggy (one of the newbies to the show), leaned over to me and said, ‟It’s Beanish!”

Without context that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but she was completely right. What’s more, Maurice is totally Mr. Spook in the this scene.

The context I’m speaking of is the wonderful comic book series Tales of the Beanworld by Larry Marder. I’ve written about it at length HERE, so I’m not going to go into all of the details again, but here’s the context.

Beanish is the artist of his community. He creates pieces of art that he calls ‟The Fabulous Look See Show!” He builds art installations and then shares them with everyone. The scene in the above clip could have been taken straight from the comic.

To further the analogy, Maurice takes on the role of Mr. Spook. In the Beanworld Mr. Spook is the protector of the community. He is not very imaginative and he alone of all the Beans, simply cannot see Beanish’s art. Though he never discourages Beanish from doing it, Mr. Spook cannot comprehend what art is for or about. Watch Maurice’s reaction at the 0:44 mark in the video and compare it to this scene.

©2015 Larry Marder

©2015 Larry Marder

I don’t really have any grand insights into this, I was just struck by the similarity between two pretty disparate things I love. I do think both capture the feelings of artists everywhere. Here’s this fabulous thing I did! Look! See! I’m trying to say something profound about the world we live in, and I don’t know if I’ve been successful or not but I want to share it!” I think it also, gently, captures the experience of those who ‟don’t get it.” Maurice and Mr. Spook stand outside the artistic experience, but in these fictional communities they do not hinder the artist, nor are they ostracized by the artistic community. There is acceptance of both points of view.

Which leads to another similarity between Cicely, Alaska and the Beanworld; they are, in many ways, idyllic communities. I won’t go so far as to say Utopian because that implies perfection and a lack of conflict. There are conflicts galore in both Northern Exposure and Beanworld, but they typically do not include the same type of story engines that most of our genre fictions employ. But they are places you would like to live.

Cicely, specifically. I think part of the success of the show (and there are many factors), is that it was a story of a community, one we would all like to be a part of. For me it reflects the ideas of diversity, of people and ideas, of ways of living. It’s about finding your place and needing to be accepted in your chosen community for who you are. That’s something I believe everyone craves for themselves, even those who are opposed to the same idea for others. Even those who can’t accept other points of view want to be accepted. We all want to find our home. There’s no place like it, or so I hear.

But strangely, our fictions don’t often address this. We seem geared to narratives based on conflict between competing points of view. The most popular entertainment these days seems to be the dystopian.

A friend of mine recently shared the following quote on Tumblr, within a day or so of my first musings about the semi-Utopian nature of Cicely.

‟You gotta remember, and I’m sure you do, the forces that are arrayed against anyone trying to alter this sort of hammerlock on the human imagination. There are trillions of dollars out there demotivating people from imagining that a better tomorrow is possible. Utopian impulses and utopian horizons have been completely disfigured and everybody now is fluent in dystopia, you know. My young people’s vocabulary… their fluency is in dystopic futures. When young people think about the future, they don’t think about a better tomorrow, they think about horrors and end of the worlds and things or worse. Well, do you really think the lack of utopic imagination doesn’t play into demotivating people from imagining a transformation in the society?” — Junot Díaz, Art, Race and Capitalism

This really struck me. I don’t know that there is any type of conspiracy in media to make this so, but I do think it’s an accurate depiction. What does it say about us that we can’t imagine a future that is positive? I’m certainly guilty of this in my media consumption. I’m a fan of The Walking Dead, both the comic and the TV show. I loved Stephen King’s The Stand. Mad Max: Fury Road was the surprise hit of the summer for me. I’m not alone in any of these. None of these represent a future I want to live through. I don’t think anyone really does.

The point can be made that these, and other post-apocalyptic fictions, are about the triumph of the human spirit in the midst of terrible catastrophe. Still, they seem to say that we can only expect terrible catastrophe in our future. Referring to Maslow’s famous Hierarchy, there’s not a lot of room for art and self actualization when mere survival is at stake, a situation far too many people in the real world find themselves in daily without the threat of Zombies or irradiated mutants.

Odd then that our fictions often present a world where there would be no opportunity for fictions to exist (though maybe visions of a Utopian future would thrive in a wasteland).

The early days of Science Fiction, and I’m speaking in general terms here because there are always exceptions, regularly portrayed the future as a positive thing. Technology was going to save us from drudgery. Flying cars and teleportation and the elimination of death and disease were recurring themes. But somewhere our relationship with technology changed. It brought us cars and TV and medical advances but it also brought us the Atomic Bomb. Suddenly the possibility of mass destruction was a reality instead of a fiction.

So our fictions changed to make our fears manifest, and fear is always more palpable than hope (which explains a lot of our politics, but that’s a separate blog I’ll probably never write).

Star Trek is one of the hopeful SciFi futures that has endured. It predicts a world where science has solved the world’s problems and people live in a diverse, multicultural society where actual progress thrives. The original Enterprise, and to varying extents the all of the subsequent settings, was a community where you wanted to live. There was the same sense of belonging and acceptance there that we see in Northern Exposure. They are communities where you are valued for who you are, not discriminated against because of who you are.

It’s not just Science Fiction and visions of the future. To come back to television a lot of the most popular shows carry an element of the Dystopian Present. Looking at examples of things I watched and thoroughly enjoyed I can see the pattern. The motorcycle club of Sons of Anarchy was a community, but certainly not one I would want to belong to. For all of their ideals of the freedom of the road and freedom from societal norms, the rules of belonging to their community were incredibly limiting and stepping outside of those rules could have fatal consequences.

The cast of Northern Exposure, all alive at the end of the series.

The cast of Sons of Anarchy. 8 of these 10 characters died.

There was a patina of brotherhood that covered them, and as a viewer I could respond to these bonds on a visceral level. But time and again one of these ‟brothers” would have to be eliminated ‟for the good” of the club. There was no real acceptance of differences or diversity. There was a pretty strict party line that had to be followed. There was no room for true individuality.

Which holds true for a lot of subcultures that claim to be about individuality.

So what am I saying with this rambling set of connections? I’m not exactly sure. The image of the artist and those who don’t understand him can be seen as metaphor for anyone who simply wants to be seen and heard by his community. It’s something everyone can relate to, whether they are an ‟artist” or not. Maurice and Mr. Spook want their places in their community to be respected as much as Chris and Beanish do.

To quote Chis from the Burning Down the House episode:

     ‟Look at this – This is beautiful! We are standing at the center of the primordial ooze. It’s like the world at the dawn of creation...

     ‟This is the answer, right here. Destruction and creation. The scarred battlefield of life. From the ashes rises the Phoenix! From the skin rises a new snake!

     ‟You look and you look and it’s dark and you don’t even know what you’re looking for, or if you’ll even see it, or if it even exists. And then, all of a sudden...”

Just thought I’d fling this out there.

Favorite Comics Part Three – Tales of the Beanworld by Larry Marder

Of all of the comics from my past that I love, the one I have the toughest time convincing anyone to read is Tales of the Beanworld by Larry Marder. I get it. I really do. I was just as dismissive of it when I first saw the images and ads in other comics I was reading. Even when Scott McCloud, in the letters pages of Zot! recommended it highly, I still ignored it (and if you read my last post you'll know that I should have learned that lesson with Zot! itself). On the surface this weird little comic looks like nothing more than stick figures. On closer examination, not only do they seem to be stick figures, but the whole thing just seems... weird. Silly. Stupid even. Marder's tagline for the series acknowledges this. He referred to Beanworld as “A most peculiar comic book experience.”

That pretty much sums it up.

But it's wonderful. It's not for everyone, I'll give you that. But if you give it a chance, look past what you believe to be limited art and a silly premise, it is filled with grand ideas, wonder, and a tremendous amount of fun. I ignored and dismissed it for it's entire original run (21 issues from Eclipse Comics, from 1985 until 1993). I read good reviews of it in a variety of sources, but I just couldn't get past my prejudice about what I thought the series was.

In 1993 Fred and I went to a convention in Philadelphia to promote Grey Legacy (I've recounted my meeting with Scott McCloud at this convention elsewhere on this blog). Larry Marder was set up right next to McCloud in Artist's Alley, selling copies of the first trade paperback collection of Tales of the Beanworld. He was incredibly nice and said very positive things about our comic. He gave me a Beanworld action figure, a dry Lima bean with a face drawn on it. Before the weekend was over I decided to try and get over my prejudice and give his book a chance. I bought the TP from him, got it signed, then went back to our motel room and read it. I've been a convert ever since.

So, you ask, what is Beanworld about? That's really difficult to describe. It is a most peculiar comic book experience, after all. It's about ecology and living in harmony with the world. It's about mythology and symbolism. It's about the world, and finding your place in it. It's about art and music and the need to balance personal identity with living in a society. All told with “stick figures” in what Larry Marder refers to as “two and a half dimensions.” He talks about this and the influence of French Surrealist painter Marcel Duchamp on his creation of Beanworld. Really! You can read it at his blog.

I can't really talk about the plot or ecology of the Beanworld without sounding really convoluted and confusing. Many of the details of how everything in this world fits together are revealed over the course of the story. Most of the Beans who inhabit this world appear to be undifferentiated in appearance, yet each works to serve a function in their society. 

There are a few very specific characters who serve specialized roles. It seems that when the need arises for something new in the system, a new point of view, or skill necessary for the Bean's survival, the world provides. When the series premieres there are only five Beans with idiosyncratic personalities separate from the others (and three of them are inextricably linked, so that really there are only three real individual voices).

Mr. Spook is the Hero, and in many ways represents the classic Warrior archetype. The Beans rely on what is essentially a hunter/gatherer method of survival (though like everything else in this series, that is an oversimplification). Mr. Spook carries a three pronged fork, a magic weapon that helps achieve their goals. He leads the troops on their hunting/gathering expeditions. He is a straight-line thinker with very little imagination, but his dedication to their survival comes before any personal gain or glory. The very concepts are foreign to the Beans.

Professor Garbanzo is the intellectual of the group and fulfills the archetypal role of the Magician. She wears the classic Magician's pointy hat, covered in arcane symbols. In this case, the symbols represent the actual building blocks of their reality, and it is the Professor's job to understand how these work to create new inventions from them that will benefit society. There are only four elements in the Beanworld, and everything that is not organic is built from them. I want to point out that Garbanzo is referred to as “she” throughout the narrative. There are no noticeable differences or secondary sexual characteristics between the sexes of the Beans, nor, as we learn later in the series, do they reproduce in a sexual way. Sex only exists as a personal pronoun in this world. I find it interesting that Marder chose to specify female characters since the difference in the sexes seems to have no bearing on the roles they play in society. Equality isn't an issue. It simply is.

Then there are the three unnamed Beans who collectively form the Boom'R Band, a group of musicians. Their only job in the collective is to create music. I think it's wonderful that in a world where everything develops specifically to serve the needs of the community, that once food and safety is being taken care of, music is the next thing that appears. The Boom'R's earn their keep through their music, and there is never a question of it's necessity.

I'm reminded of Kokopelli, the flute player that appears
in petroglyphs all over the American Southwest

Which leads us to Beanish. If there is a central character in Beanworld (and that's debatable), it is Beanish. One of the earliest story’s is called “Beanish Breaks Out.” Breaking out is the term the Beans use to describe when one of them goes from being an undifferentiated member to the community to finding a specific identity and role in their society. It is assumed that at some point Mr. Spook, Professor Garbanzo, and the Boom'R's all broke out as well.

Beanish breaks out and becomes an artist. He begins to create pictures from the four basic elements, creating the “Fabulous Look-See Show” for the other Beans to enjoy (and in a stroke of genius, it is only Mr. Spook, the practical straight-line thinker, who just doesn't get Art. He never questions Beanish's right to create or earn his keep in this fashion, but like many people who encounter Beanworld for the first time, he just doesn't get it). I think "Fabulous Look-See Show" is a great way to describe comics, by the way.

Beanish's story of personal growth becomes a focal point for the series, the storyline that the reader can most identify with. It is the struggle any creative person goes through. He has issues with his materials and discovering how to use them. He questions the value of what he does. He engages in a personal relationship with his muse, in this case a physical manifestation that goes by the name of Dreamishness. Only Beanish knows about her, and he cannot talk about her with anyone else. The metaphor of this will ring true to any of us who have had dealings with our own personal muse. The core lesson Beanish learns, in terms of what he needs to give to his muse, and what he receives from her, is wonderfully expressed in a world where symbols have a physical reality. It is both beautiful and true.

The entire original series is available in two hardcover editions published by Dark Horse Comics. A couple of years ago, after a long hiatus, Marder began creating new tales of the Beanworld. A third volume of new material was released. A new collection, Volume 3.5, according to the solicitation, is due in June, 2012.

Beanworld is a challenge. It is not like anything else you have ever read. A lot of the language used in the dialog is created by Marder, and much of it can sound unfamiliar and weird, but, like the dialects and language in the comic strip Pogo or the novel A Clockwork Orange (and you've probably never seen those two things referenced together before), once you get into it there is a poetry and rhythm. But, if you are interested in comics as a storytelling medium, this is one of the best examples of how far the format can be pushed. Try to move beyond the Mr. Spook way of looking at it and try to see the deeper stories and concepts the symbols are referring to. Be like Beanish and break out of your habitual ways of seeing.

Beanworld and all of its characters are copyright Larry Marder.