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britesparc · 3 years

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Weekend Top Ten #474

Top Ten Characters Who Came Back from the Dead

I am stunned – stunned! – that I’ve not done this one before. I mean, come on! It’s right there.

So there’s obviously a thematic resonance going on here. This weekend – the weekend you’re meant to be reading this – is famous where I come from because of a story where someone came back from the dead. Unlike other holidays – Christmas, Halloween, the release of a Star War – I’ve actually been a little slow off the mark in making lists that celebrate Easter. I’ve done eggs and bunnies, but incredibly I’ve never done resurrections, which really is the day’s whole deal. I mean, if you get down to brass tacks, it’s kinda the big selling point of the entire religion really. I hesitate to say “USP” because, well, it’s been done elsewhere, but it’s still supposed to be one of the big Christian takeaways (there’s definitely a chain of Christian takeaways in the States, isn’t there?).

Anyway, resurrection. It’s actually more common than you might think. Certainly in terms of comics there are probably more characters who’ve “died and come back” than have never “died” at all. But! And this is where I get pernickety. Most characters who “die” don’t actually die. Take Batman for instance: he’s shot in the face by Darkseid, and then Superman ups and finds his charred corpse, but – shocker! – he’s not actually dead, he was just sent back in time, where he Quantum Leaps his way back to the present day, accumulating enough Omega Energy with each leap that by the time he reaches the present day he’s blow a hole in reality. Or something, I’ve not read that story for quite a few years. Anyway: he wasn’t dead. Neither was Sherlock Holmes, or for that matter Dirty Den. Generally speaking, if someone dies in a story and then reappears, they’re not dead. Not really.

So this list here is supposed to be people who actually died. Now, even here, it’s debatable; I mean, is E.T. dead, or does his body just go into some kind of hibernation? If Optimus Prime’s brainwaves survive, does he ever really die? Is a clone someone coming back to life or not? It’s all a bit wishy-washy really, which kind of makes sense when you’re talking about resurrection. And let’s not get onto the chief resurrector, the Doctor; do they die every time they regenerate? Or is the regeneration itself a way of staving off death? When David Tennant turned into Matt Smith, did the Tennant-Doctor die? “I don’t want to go,” and all that; there’s always a subtle (or not-so-subtle) change in personality. Does that count? Well, for the purposes of this list, I’ve kinda decided it doesn’t. But it’s an interesting discussion to have, if you’re a big old nerd like me.

So yeah: people who have died – properly, I suppose – and then come back to life. That’s the list. No fakery, to mistaken identity, no alternate universe shenanigans; they were dead but they got better (no Chev Chelios either; sorry, Stath stans). No zombies either! Or vampires! They’re not undead; they were dead, and now they’re alive again. That’s the rule. Also I’ve seriously tried to limit comic book characters. And I’m sure there are some big omissions (like, I know there’s one from Game of Thrones that’s not on here, but that’s because I’ve not seen that far into the show yet; I know, I know). But I reckon these are the best at being back.

Optimus Prime (Transformers franchise, from about 1987): OP is the OG when it comes to coming back to life. Dying and then stopping being dead is pretty much his thing. Technically the first time he came back from the dead was in the original animation; famously being offed by Megatron in The Transformers: The Movie (1986), he came back to life a year later. Subsequent media have frequently killed him and brought him back, even in the live-action movies, but I want to talk about the comics. Because the original Marvel run killed off Optimus at a similar time as the cartoon; he’s blown up in slightly contrived circumstances, but his brain is saved on a floppy disk. Two years later he has his body rebuilt and his brain restored and he’s off to the races once more. Then in 1991, when facing down planet-eating mega-bastard Unicron, he sacrifices himself again, but this time his personality has begun to merge with that of his ostensibly-human companion Hi-Q. Hi-Q/Prime is converted/rebuilt into a new body, and he wins the war. So there you go: even in this one sliver of continued continuity – not including off-shoots or spin-offs, let alone other iterations of the overall franchise – Optimus Prime died and came back to life twice. Beat that, Easter.

E.T. (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, 1982): not much to say here that we don’t already know from the Book of Spielberg. E.T., doddery little alien magic-man, grows sicker and sicker as he’s stuck on Earth, until in a thrillingly-edited set-piece he seems to expire, human doctors unable to help him. “I know you’re gone,” says best bud Elliot, “because I don’t know what to feel.” But then! His heart glows! His colour returns! And he positively yells, “E.T. phone hooooooome!” – and Elliot’s euphoric laugh is just devastating. The whole sequence – what is it, ten minutes? Fifteen? – is masterful in every way, from the technical to the performative to the emotional. Bloody magic is what it is.

Gandalf (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, 1954): Gandalf the Grey famously leads the Fellowship of the Ring across the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, where he faces off against a Balrog. After a bit of “you shall not pass” and all that, they both fall from the bridge, battling each other on the way down, before both perishing at the bottom. Gandalf, though, is not really Gandalf, but Olórin, one of the Maiar – basically a kind of angel, I guess. He is returned to Earth by the powers-that-be to complete his mission, and is promoted to Gandalf the White, supplanting the corrupt wizard Saruman. This new iteration of Gandalf is a bit more serious and steadfast, although he does retain his fascination with hobbits. Regardless, he gets a terrific death scene and a triumphant resurrection, and how it ties into Tolkien’s wider mythology is interesting.

Superman (DC Comics, 1993): comic book characters die and come back all the time; it’s pretty much a staple of the medium. I guess Jean Grey/Phoenix is probably the most famous, but they’ve all done at some point (even if, like in my Batman example earlier, sometimes they don’t actually die). Anyway, Superman died, very famously, after getting into a tremendous barney with genetically-engineered super-git Doomsday (as famously, and atrociously, depicted in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). The whole “Death of Superman” arc is interesting and entertaining as an example of mid-nineties big-panel EXTREME storytelling: as the issues tick down to the fateful scrap in Metropolis, the number of panels-per-page is reduced until the final issue is basically just full of splash pages. It’s a terrific, exhilarating rumble, really selling the heft of the confrontation. Interestingly, the comic spends a lot of time afterwards dealing with life without Superman, as a raft of imitators/wannabe successors emerge from the woodwork; these include the best-ever Superboy, Conner Kent, and Steel, who’s basically Superman meets Iron Man. Eventually, of course, Superman comes back, his body essentially having been sent to a Kryptonian day spa to recuperate; he emerges clad in black and with a mullet, so death obviously has some lasting repercussions. Overall, it’s a whopping arc with long-term consequences, and whilst it’s easy to make Christ parallels when discussing Superman, this story doesn’t really hew that way (unlike the Snyder-verse which really goes all-in on that plot point, much to the films’ detriment). One of the better aspects is how, even in death, Superman is an inspiration, which in itself has a long trail; leading, eventually, to Batman’s famous withering diss, “the last time you inspired someone was when you where dead.” Anyway, I’ve gone on about this far too long.

Spock (Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, 1984): let’s start by acknowledging just how great Spock’s death is in Wrath of Khan. As a plot point within the film, as a piece of staging and performance, and as a landmark moment in this franchise, it was seminal; a death for the ages (as an aside, it’s crazy to think Star Trek as a whole was only sixteen years old when Spock died; the MCU was eleven when Tony Stark clicked the bucket). Anyway, they built an entire film around how to bring him back, and Spock as we know him is absent for much of it; a presence looming over everything as he rapidly ages, going through his Vulcan super-puberty and everything. It’s actually a rather sombre film as Kirk’s son is killed and the Enterprise blows up; bringing back Spock comes with a very real cost. Trek III is not one of the top-tier films – in the loose trilogy that comprises Khan, Spock, and The Voyage Home it’s certainly the weakest – but it’s still pretty good, often underrated. And, of course, it brings back Spock, which is nice.

Agent Coulson (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., 2013): Coulson’s death in Avengers comes as a huge shock, one of the fan-favourite characters being brutally offed in surprising fashion. In a film chock full of super-people, it’s the ordinary guy who buys it tragically. However, did any of us really think he was dead-dead? And so barely a year later he pops back up in the TV series Agents of SHIELD. However, his reincarnation became a recurring plot point; his references to spending time in Tahiti (“It’s a magical place”) becoming increasingly sinister as we come to understand even he doesn’t know how he’s back up and running. The eventual truth – Nick Fury using painful and transformative alien tech to basically bring Coulson back to life – may be a bit underwhelming, but it gave Clark Gregg a lot of meat to chew on dramatically speaking, and it underscored a lot of his character development going forward (especially when he, yes, died again, and then sort-of came back, twice).

Buffy Summers (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 2001): full disclosure: I never watched Buffy religiously. I think I just missed it at the start and it was only when all my friends were talking about how great it was that I started tuning in more regularly. Weirdly, I think the most I watched it was around the time Buffy died and came back. It’s fascinating, really, and full credit to the show for the way they explored it; in a series full of magic, the afterlife, and the undead, bringing a character back to life isn’t too shocking. Willow, Buffy’s witchy mate, resurrects her with magic; but in an excellent twist, it turns out that she was in Heaven, and is super pissed off to be pulled out of paradise and stuck back on Earth, leading to her feeling depressed and alienated all season. That’s a great hook for bringing a character back, and leads to some meaty stuff for Sarah Michelle Geller to do.

Agent Smith (The Matrix Reloaded, 2003): do you ever feel that The Matrix has slipped from popular culture a little bit? Twenty years ago it was ascendent, rivalling Lord of the Rings for the title of “the new Star Wars”. Everyone was copying it. but now hardly anyone talks about it. probably because it hasn’t had a multimedia shelf-life comprising dozens of games and spin-off shows. Maybe the new film will change that. But I digress; Hugo Weaving is tremendous as Agent Smith in the first film, and is exploded at the end (spoilers) by Keanu Reeves’ Neo. Unsurprisingly – especially as he’s, well, just bits of code – he’s back in the sequel. However, he’s now been corrupted; he becomes, basically, a virus, self-replicating and threatening not just our heroes but the Matrix itself. This builds across two films, as Neo has to fight dozens of Smiths in the famous “Burly Brawl”, before the final conflict in The Matrix Revolutions when it seems everyone in the program has been Smithed. It offers Weaving a lot of scenery to chew on and makes for some great set-piece battles, even if the films themselves are a little disappointing.

Olaf (Frozen II, 2019): let’s not beat around the bush here – Olaf carks it in Frozen II. Okay, maybe Elsa dies; maybe Anna dies in the first film. They’re frozen, right, but I feel like it’s “magic ice” and there’s something going on there. Do they come back to life or were they ever really dead? Anyway, Elsa is effectively “gone” but we get a protracted death scene for the comic relief talking snowman. He literally fades away, slowly dying in Anna’s arms, and melts into a flurry of snow that blows away. People talk about Bambi’s mum all the time, but mark my words; “Olaf’s death” is going to be cited as a major traumatic incident for twenty-year-olds in 2030. His resurrection, truth be told, is slightly less great, Elsa just straight-up bringing him back to life, reminding us that “water has memory” to let us know that it’s the same Olaf and he remembers everything (including, presumably, dying? That’s creepy). And that, to be honest, is where I draw the line; sentient wind and rock monsters I can handle, but we all know homeopathy is bollocks.

Emperor Palpatine (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, 2019): look, I hate this. But let’s deal with it anyway, because I have a funny feeling it’s going to lead to some quite interesting stories being told in spin-off Star Wars fiction. I personally feel quite strongly that Palpatine should have stayed dead. And maybe he did? We are led to believe that the Palpatine we see in Rise is a clone; there are jars of stilted Snokes floating in the background. He’s all knackered and broken, eyes blackened and fingers dropping off; clearly he’s not well. So is he really the same character at all? Is his Sith essence somehow fed into this new body, the way Prime’s mind is downloaded from a floppy disk (“run prime.exe”)? Let’s say it counts, let’s say he’s the same slimy Palps we know and love. He is, at least, a sinister presence, and like I say, the whys and wherefores of how he came to be back is quite interesting. There’s a fascinating story to be told about the rise of Snoke and the seduction of Ben Solo – a more interesting story than anything told in The Rise of Skywalker, for starters. Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian seems to be researching cloning and seeks to extract midichlorians from a Force-sensitive being; are we to conclude that this in service of making a new body for the Emperor? All this – stuff hinted at but not explored in the film itself – is, like I say, interesting if not outright fascinating. And I agree, there is a certain degree of circularity in bringing back the series’ Big Bad for the final instalment. But I still feel, hand on heart, that it undoes a lot of the victory of Return of the Jedi (as did The Force Awakens, if I’m honest), as well as throwing away all the development of Rey and Kylo in The Last Jedi. So: Palpatine is cool, his presence and backstory in Rise of Skywalker is suitably creepy and interesting, but on the whole it’s crap and they shouldn’t have brought him back. The end.

Ten people who definitely died and definitely un-died! What could be more Easter-y? Honourable mention goes to the episode of Red Dwarf where Rimmer changes history and ends up not being a hologram, only to accidentally blow himself up in the final seconds.

#top ten #dead characters #alive characters #easter #back from the dead #resurrection

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jessicakehoe · 5 years

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An Exclusive Interview with Fashion’s OG Bad Boy, the Mysterious Manfred Thierry Mugler

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Manfred Thierry Mugler is tap dancing for me. It’s maybe the last thing I expected from the famously reclusive designer. But apparently it doesn’t take much to get Mugler dancing. “Your shoes are so cute!” he says, while doing an impromptu buffalo-step shuffle. “Very Fred Astaire.”

I look down at my two-toned spectator-ish flats and then back at Mugler, who is still moving with such casual grace that it seems unfair. He looks as if he could have eaten Fred Astaire, like he’d stepped out of a George Quaintance print so he could put on some leather in time to be in a Tom of Finland illustration.

Photography by Kat Irlin. Styling by Anna Katsanis. Creative direction by Brit Eccles. Hair, Dennis Lanni for Art Department/Oribe. Makeup, Joseph Carrillo for Atelier Management/Maybelline. Manicure, Geraldine Holford for Atelier Management/ Chanel Le Vernis. Fashion assistants, Paulina Castro Ogando and Kallie Biersach. Photography assistants, Ros Hayes and Bailey Sontag. Model, Josephine Skriver for The Society.

But his lightness and rhythm shouldn’t be surprising: Long before he became a celebrated designer, perfumer, photographer and artistic director, Mugler was a ballet dancer, and after he left fashion in 2002, he transformed his physique. “The physical mutation was a sort of return to myself—a repairing and reconstruction, too,” he once said.

“The physical mutation was a sort of return to myself—a repairing and reconstruction, too.”

We take our seats at the conference table at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) to chat about the Thierry Mugler: Couturissime exhibit that will open on March 2. It’s the first exhibition of his work and a considerable coup for the museum. Mugler has led a rather hermitic life for more than 15 years, since Clarins—which owned his clothing line—shuttered the business. This marked the end of a spectacular career that was launched in 1974 in Paris and reached its zenith in the ’80s and ’90s. But once Mugler was out, he distanced himself from the industry—and who the industry had made him into. He started referring to himself as Manfred (his first name), and he bulked up.

It left him practically unrecognizable, which was the intent, says Thierry-Maxime Loriot, the exhibit’s curator. “He told me that after he left the fashion industry, it annoyed him when people recognized him. He felt ‘Thierry Mugler’ was a label, a brand. He wanted to move on to other things.” However, Mugler still continued to work with Clarins on fragrances. In addition to the iconic Angel, which was released in 1992, he created Alien in 2005, Womanity in 2010 and Aura in 2017. Today, these scents—and the flankers that followed—continue to generate close to $757 million in annual sales.

Given his sensitivity about reliving his past, I ask Mugler how Loriot had seduced him into agreeing to the exhibit. “Oh, that’s a funky question,” he laughs, explaining that he appreciated they wanted to do a “creation rather than a retrospective.” At this point, Loriot, who also curated Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk and produced Viktor & Rolf: Fashion Artists, interjects that Mugler isn’t a nostalgic person. “He doesn’t look at his old work and say ‘These are my babies.’ Instead, he asks ‘How can we transform them?’”

During the two and a half years that it took to create the exhibit, the pair worked closely to choose more than 140 outfits that Mugler designed between 1973 and 2001. In addition, there are 100 photos of his designs, captured by Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton and Herb Ritts, as well as videos, sketches and costumes from his stage productions.

“He has always been an outlier whose work is provocative and unapologetically designed for women who own their sexuality and power.”

Loriot says the exhibit will be immersive, with animated holograms, infinity rooms and a wild forest created by Rodeo FX, the same company that created special effects for Game of Thrones and Birdman. “The main message behind the Mugler exhibit is to not fear your desires,” says Loriot. “His work is a timely example of what we’ve lost in the fashion world and what we’re beginning to crave again.”

Looking back at Mugler’s shows on YouTube, I can see that the designs were visionary, yet their fantastical, futuristic and sensual aesthetic seems out of step with fashion’s preoccupation with being real, relevant and representative. He was the first (pre-Alexander McQueen and pre-Marc Jacobs) to produce astonishingly theatrical runway shows. His advertising campaigns, which he often shot himself in exotic locales, fuelled pre-online #fomo envy.

His clients? Basically a stylish A-list gaggle that included David Bowie, Jerry Hall, Diana Ross, Ivana Trump, Celine Dion and all the iconic supermodels, not to mention Beyoncé and Lady Gaga. He has always been an outlier whose work is provocative and unapologetically designed for women who own their sexuality and power. It’s also for women—and audiences—who share his mischievous sense of humour.

Holly Brubach, who covered fashion for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine during Mugler’s epoch, suggests that his work might be viewed with a different lens if it were being released today. “I think there might be a backlash about the way it presents women,” she tells me later, over the phone. “I suspect that the humour we saw at the time wouldn’t be there today. I think the striking thing about Mugler’s work is that the women who wore it owned it. It wasn’t something that had been imposed or foisted on them by some man and they were trying to look attractive based on his terms.”

“I think the striking thing about Mugler’s work is that the women who wore it owned it. It wasn’t something that had been imposed or foisted on them by some man and they were trying to look attractive based on his terms.”

Brubach interviewed Mugler for The New York Times in 1994, when she set up a Q&A between him and Linda Nochlin, a noted feminist art historian and critic. She thought they would be unlikely conversation mates because, at the time, some of Mugler’s designs could have been interpreted as sexist to an almost cartoonish degree.

To her surprise, however, they really hit it off. Nochlin felt that Mugler’s fashion empowered women to appropriate their own sexuality: “It’s so extreme that these women aren’t sex objects; they’re sex subjects,” she said.

But the designer also played with the notion of femininity. “Mugler was at the far end of the spectrum in fashion that was just on this side of drag,” explains Brubach. “One of the things that interest me about drag is what it says about women and what constitutes femininity—in terms of both appearance and behaviour. I think Mugler did the same thing, but he was doing it for women. It was a time when women were inventing themselves in unprecedented roles, and a big part of that was their appearance and trying to find a new way to be in the world.”

“It was a time when women were inventing themselves in unprecedented roles, and a big part of that was their appearance and trying to find a new way to be in the world.”

Eric Wilson shares Brubach’s fondness for Mugler’s work. His first (and only) encounter with Mugler took place in 2010, when he wrote a profile on the designer for The New York Times to coincide with the launch of Womanity. “I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, and he was one of the first names in fashion that I connected with,” recalls Wilson, who is now the fashion news director for InStyle.

“To see his work through the lens of contemporary society will be fascinating. These pieces did cause controversy in their time, but I predict people will react positively to these clothes because they are so different from anything you see in the world. There’s this embrace of the superhero mystique, which is really important in his work as it’s about fantasy and assuming different identities. It’s like a warrior putting on a battle suit.”

“When I look at his pieces, it’s really clear to me that the intent wasn’t at all about misogyny but, rather, empowerment. His designs were progressive, and his vision was remarkable.”

Wilson adds that Mugler’s work references comic books and adventure series that were created by populations in America that had been oppressed, such as Jewish people and gay men. “It was really about breaking out of the boundaries that are imposed on us and that we impose on ourselves,” he says. “When I look at his pieces, it’s really clear to me that the intent wasn’t at all about misogyny but, rather, empowerment. His designs were progressive, and his vision was remarkable.”

And how does Mugler think a younger generation will react to his chrome-corseted robot women and vampy femme fatales encased in vinyl and rubber? “I hope they will look at the quality,” he says. “I think beauty is the human emotional vehicle between us and it’s very important. It’s important in architecture and painting and art, but people don’t invest in beauty anymore. They invest in violence, and that’s why I tell people to look beyond the sexual aggressivity that’s sometimes in my clothes: Don’t look at the cliché; look at the way it was done. There was always this balance to make it beautiful, high-class and respectful for the human being.”

“[Beauty is] important in architecture and painting and art, but people don’t invest in beauty anymore. They invest in violence, and that’s why I tell people to look beyond the sexual aggressivity that’s sometimes in my clothes.”

I’m not entirely sure what Mugler means, but I suspect he’s urging us—as he always has with his work—to think beyond what is predictable. While he likely came into the world imprinted to be an iconoclast, Mugler says he was fortunate to have met exceptional people who pushed him forward—from the person who helped him get past his hippie life, living on a houseboat in Amsterdam, to the person who helped him come down from his mushroom-laden life in Kerala, India.

Later, it was the coach who transformed his physique and the body therapist who understood that pain is a necessary part of growth. Most importantly, four years ago, he also met the man he calls the love of his life. “He’s the most free, real, simple and beautiful person I have ever met,” says Mugler. “I do have a lucky star on me.”

That star has been a recurring motif in Mugler’s work—both in his designs and even in the shape of the iconic Angel fragrance bottle. On his right hand, he wears a macaron-size golden star ring that he describes as his armour. His fascination with stars began when he was a boy.

He’d often run away from home and spend the night on a bench staring up at the sky. He always looked for one blue star, which he felt was a harbinger of better times. The night sky continued to comfort Mugler when he estranged himself from his parents at 14 to join the ballet in his hometown of Strasbourg, France.

A writer once suggested that his adolescent discontent stemmed from his feeling conflicted about his sexuality, but Mugler scoffs at that suggestion. “I didn’t have a problem with my sexuality or identity,” he says. “I had a problem with my family, and I had a problem with the world. I was feeling out of place, and I was feeling very miserable. I was in the ballet for six years, and no one in my family came to see me onstage; I was the ugly duckling who left the theatre alone. I guess I was too bizarre. I would watch the skies at night and look for the blue star and know that I had to hold on.”

“I didn’t have a problem with my sexuality or identity. I had a problem with my family, and I had a problem with the world. I was feeling out of place, and I was feeling very miserable.”

It’s a beautiful, sad, poignant memory. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost call it nostalgic. Of course, stars aren’t Mugler’s only inspiration. Animals—and the symbolism behind them—find their way into his work, including the mythical phoenix and the boar. The first is a fitting metaphor for a man who has undergone his own dramatic metamorphosis—in terms of both his career and his body.

But what about the boar? A Google search reveals that this creature symbolizes freedom. “‘Boars have few predators, so they have the luxury of living freer than most creatures,’” I read out to Mugler. “‘They do what they want, when they want.’ That pretty much sums you up, doesn’t it?” He laughs, sits back in his chair and says: “I love that. I’ll go for that.”

See every look we pulled from the Thierry Mugler archives as modelled by Josephine Skriver below and in our March 2019 issue, available now.

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