Taken from: https://www.theringer.com/movies/2024/5/21/24161120/greatest-movie-car-chase-scenes-ranked-furiosa-mad-max-saga
In honor of the imminent ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,’ we’re shifting into high gear to determine the best chase scene in cinema history
By Miles Surrey May 21, 2024, 6:30am EDTGetty Images/Ringer illustration
After wowing audiences with Mad Max: Fury Road, director George Miller returns to the franchise’s post-apocalyptic wastelands for Furiosa, the epic origin story of the eponymous heroine (now played by Anya Taylor-Joy), premiering on Friday. As the follow-up to one of the greatest action films ever made, it’s hard to overstate the hype for Furiosa, and that was before word got out about a showstopping 15-minute sequence that required nearly 200 stuntpeople and took 78 days to shoot. While Furiosa will have its own distinct flavor, as is true of every Mad Max movie, there’s one thing that unites these projects: intense, jaw-dropping scenes of vehicular mayhem. And what better way to honor the franchise than by celebrating what it does best?
Ahead of Furiosa’s release, we’ve put together our definitive ranking of the best car chases in cinema. There weren’t any strict rules in place, other than capping the list at 20—mostly for my own sanity—and limiting every franchise to one entry. (Apologies to Fury Road’s kickass predecessor The Road Warrior.) We also won’t discriminate against scenes that feature motorbikes, so long as cars (and/or trucks) remain part of the equation. As for what, exactly, constitutes a good car chase? Like list making, it’s bound to be subjective, but I tend to gravitate toward two key elements: the skill of the stuntwork on display and the ways in which a filmmaker conveys the action in relation to the story. (Also, the less CGI, the better.) Buckle up, ’cause we’re not wasting any time shifting into high gear.

20. Quantum of Solace (2008)

There have been some memorable car chases in the James Bond franchise: the first sequence featuring the iconic Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger, the corkscrew jump in The Man With the Golden Gun, the Lotus Esprit submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me. But I’m going with a somewhat controversial pick here: Quantum of Solace. There are many issues with Quantum of Solace—namely, it was one of the most high-profile blockbusters affected by the 2007-08 writers strike—but its opening scene isn’t one of them. Picking up right where Casino Royale left off, we find Bond (Daniel Craig) evading henchmen through the narrow roads around Italy’s Lake Garda. The frenetic, furious chase mirrors Bond’s sense of anguish after losing Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), the woman he opened his heart to, and his relentless quest for answers. It’s a thrilling tone-setter for Quantum of Solace and one that doesn’t overstay its welcome, capped off by Bond sending his final pursuers flying off a cliff:
If we’re being honest, though, it feels like James Bond has yet to create a franchise-defining car chase. Perhaps that’s a mission the newest 007, whoever it ends up being, can undertake.

19. Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation (2015)

The Mission: Impossible franchise is no stranger to electrifying chase scenes, the best of which find Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt working up his heart rate. When it comes to action behind the wheel, though, Fallout tends to dominate the discussion—even on this very website. But I think the vehicular chase in Rogue Nation is being slept on. What we have is effectively two sequences for the price of one: The first finds Hunt pursuing Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) by car through the narrow streets of Casablanca alongside some nefarious henchmen; the second sees him continue the chase outside the city on motorbike. (Adding to the chaos: Hunt had only just been resuscitated, and he’s clearly not all there.) In terms of death-defying stunts for the audience’s entertainment, a helmetless Cruise taking corners like a MotoGP racer is child’s play compared to his other exploits, but the actor’s authentic reaction to scraping his knee on the road underlines that there’s no one else in Hollywood doing it like him:
We’ll be sure to update this ranking if and when Cruise does something even more dangerous down the road, pun unintended.

18. Vanishing Point (1971)

A movie that counts the likes of Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino among its biggest fans, Vanishing Point is the first of a few entries on this ranking that’s essentially one extended car chase. The film stars Barry Newman as Kowalski, a man tasked with delivering a Dodge Challenger T 440 Magnum from Colorado to California while eluding police across four states. One of Kowalski’s most memorable run-ins comes when a guy driving a Jaguar E-Type convertible challenges him to an impromptu race. Incredibly, we’re expected to believe the man in the Jag comes out of this crash in one piece:
Vanishing Point might not boast the impressive production values of other movies on this list, but considering Tarantino would go on to feature a white Challenger in Death Proof, its influence in the car cinema canon is undeniable.

17. Fast Five (2011)

Let’s face it, Fast & Furious has seen better days. Some believe the franchise’s dip in quality coincided with the death of Paul Walker; others are dismayed by the pivot from street racing to absurd feats of superherodom—emphasis on the Dom. Perhaps it’s a bit of both, but the very best movie in the series, Fast Five, manages to strike the perfect balance: It’s a relatively grounded heist thriller that nevertheless takes the franchise to ridiculous new heights. After Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his crew steal $100 million from a Brazilian kingpin, they drag the entire bank vault holding the money through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, all while being pursued by authorities. It’s a delightfully destructive sequence that does untold damage to Rio’s infrastructure and features some of the most bone-crunching crashes committed to film:
If the Fast franchise is going to break out of its recent slump, it would do well to remember that there’s nothing better than letting its heroes live their lives a quarter mile at a time—no detours to outer space required.

16. The Blues Brothers (1980)

A good car chase isn’t reserved just for action flicks: Comedies can get in on the act, too. In The Blues Brothers, starring the recurring Saturday Night Live characters played by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the beloved bandmates must prevent the foreclosure of the orphanage where they were raised by scrounging together $5,000. Naturally, that’s easier said than done: Along the way, the Blues Brothers draw the attention of neo-Nazis, a country-and-western band, and local police. While The Blues Brothers has amusing gags and musical numbers, its chase sequences with the Brothers behind the wheel of a 1974 Dodge Monaco are what really steal the show—and none are better than a climactic pursuit across Chicago. More than 60 old police cars were used in the film, some of which are wrecked in a comically over-the-top pileup:
The sheer scale of The Blues Brothers’ final set piece is commendable in and of itself—as is the movie’s commitment to treating real-life cars like a bunch of Hot Wheels.

15. Baby Driver (2017)

For good and for ill, Edgar Wright’s movies exude an abundance of style, and Baby Driver is no exception. Baby Driver is centered on a clever gimmick: The action works in tandem with its soundtrack because the film’s protagonist, Baby (Ansel Elgort), suffers from tinnitus and constantly plays music to drown out the ringing. When everything’s clicking into place, Baby Driver feels like a supersized series of music videos, and nothing hits quite like its opening sequence. Baby acts as the getaway driver for a bank robbery while listening to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Bellbottoms.” The ensuing chase works around rhythms of the song, as if Baby’s Subaru WRX were the star of its own dance number. Take nothing away from the actual driving, either, which puts the rally car to good use:
Baby Driver’s gimmick stretches a little thin by the end, but it’s hard to deny the crowd-pleasing power of Wright’s film when it’s firing on all cylinders.

14. The Raid 2 (2014)

With a trio of kickass Indonesian martial arts films under his belt, Gareth Evans has established himself as one of the most exciting action directors on the planet—someone who seems most in his element staging positively brutal hand-to-hand combat. In The Raid 2, however, Evans also brought his signature brand of carnage to the road. While there’s some cleverly executed close-quarters fighting within the confines of an SUV, courtesy of Iko Uwais’s hard-hitting protagonist, what really cements this sequence’s greatness are the moments when Evans turns the cars into an extension of the characters’ fists:
This belongs in an entirely new category of combat: car fights. There are so many action scenes in The Raid 2 worth writing home about—the kitchen showdown is an all-timer—but the fact that Evans casually tossed in an unforgettable car chase shows why he’s one of one.

13. The Driver (1978)

I’ll say this for Walter Hill’s The Driver: It sure lives up to its title. In this stripped-down thriller—one where none of the characters have a name—we follow the Driver (Ryan O’Neal), a getaway driver who has become a thorn in the side of the LAPD. In the film’s best scene, we see its taciturn protagonist living up to his reputation. With the Driver behind the wheel of a 1974 Ford Galaxie, a cat-and-mouse game unfolds when a handful of police cars are hot on his tail. What I love about this sequence is the pared-down nature of it all: The Driver outwits the cops as much as he outraces them. (Though, ironically, that wasn’t entirely by design: As Hill later explained, an accident on the last night of shooting meant they had to cobble together what had already been filmed.) Frankly, you’d never know the difference from the finished article:
If the general vibes of The Driver seem familiar, that’s because it was a major inspiration for Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, which just so happened to feature an unnamed protagonist (Ryan Gosling) evading police through the streets of Los Angeles.

12. The Bourne Supremacy (2004)

The shaky-cam style of the Bourne franchise isn’t for everyone—just ask John Woo—but credit where it’s due: These movies know how to deliver a good chase scene. (A friendly reminder that The Bourne Legacy is an underrated gem with an awesome motorbike sequence to boot.) But there’s one Bourne chase that stands above the rest: the Moscow getaway in The Bourne Supremacy. After being wounded by the Russian assassin Kirill (Karl Urban), Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) hijacks a taxi, with both the police and Kirill in hot pursuit. This isn’t the kind of sequence that lingers on any one shot; instead, what makes it work is the frenetic nature of the editing, which allows the viewer to feel like they’re in Bourne’s fight-or-flight headspace:
If I’m being honest, I’m usually one of those people who doesn’t like the Bourne movies’ shaky-cam style, but when it’s executed with such craftsmanship, you can’t help but get caught up in its adrenaline-pumping power.

11. The Seven-Ups (1973)

Philip D’Antoni was the producer of two movies featuring Hall of Fame car chases, Bullitt and The French Connection, the latter of which won him an Oscar for Best Picture. And with his lone directorial feature, The Seven-Ups, D’Antoni sought to craft an iconic sequence of his own. The film stars Roy Scheider as NYPD detective Buddy Mannuci (elite Italian American name; I can practically smell the gabagool), who commands a unit handling major felony cases that lead to seven-plus-year prison sentences; that’s why they’re known as the Seven-Ups. Midway through the movie, when one of the team members is killed by two shooters who flee the scene, Buddy chases after them. The 10-minute sequence, which starts in the Upper West Side before moving out of the city, is thrillingly immersive, alternating between close-ups of the characters and wider shots of all the damage they’ve caused. But the chase’s defining moment comes right at the end, when Buddy narrowly avoids a grisly death:
The sequence isn’t quite at the level of Bullitt or The French Connection—very few are—but D’Antoni still manages to leave an unmistakable imprint on the car chase canon.

10. Death Proof (2007)

If you ask Quentin Tarantino, Death Proof, his knowingly trashy tribute to exploitation cinema, is the worst movie he’s ever made. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to admire about the film, which honors the unsung heroes of Hollywood: stunt performers. The first half of Death Proof follows three female friends who cross paths with Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), a misogynistic serial killer who takes them out in his “death-proof” Chevy Nova. Fourteen months later, a group that includes stuntwoman Zoë Bell, playing herself, also lands on Mike’s radar. As Bell and her friends test out a ’70s Challenger, she performs a “ship’s mast” stunt, clinging onto the hood of the car with fastening belts. Unfortunately, when Mike pursues the women, it puts Bell in a precarious situation. Most of the entries on this list celebrate some next-level driving skills, but Death Proof’s inclusion is all about Bell pulling off one of the wildest stunts you’ll ever see. She’s quite literally hanging on for dear life:
If the Academy handed out Oscars to stunt performers—and let’s hope it does happen one day—Bell would’ve won in a landslide.

9. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

William Friedkin was already responsible for an all-time great car chase in The French Connection (more on that later), but the filmmaker made a commendable bid to outdo himself with To Live and Die in L.A. In this neo-noir thriller, Secret Service agent Richard Chance (William L. Petersen) is hell-bent on arresting an expert counterfeiter, Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe), who kills Chance’s partner days before his retirement. To capture Masters, Chance and his new partner, John Vukovich (John Pankow), attempt to steal $50,000 from a jewelry buyer for an undercover operation. The sting goes bad when the buyer, who is later revealed to be an undercover FBI agent, is killed and a group of gunmen goes after Chance and Vukovich. It’s a clever inversion of the usual car chase formula—this time, it’s the lawmen running away from the criminals. The outside-the-box thinking extends to the film’s most astonishing stretch, in which Chance evades the gunmen by driving into oncoming traffic:
The fact that Friedkin shot the chase at the end of filming—in case anything disastrous happened to the actors—underscores just how risky the endeavor was. The pulse-pounding results speak for themselves.

8. The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

The Matrix sequels have never been held in high esteem, but I’m ready to live my truth: The Matrix Reloaded fucking rules. (If anyone’s got a problem with this take, file your complaints with the Architect.) What’s more, the film happens to boast the finest action set piece of the franchise: the highway chase. After Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) free the Keymaker (Randall Duk Kim), a program capable of creating shortcuts within the Matrix, they’re pursued by the Twins (Neil and Adrian Rayment). Morpheus once warned that going on the freeway was “suicide,” and it doesn’t take long to see why: The chase draws the attention of several Agents, who repeatedly take over the bodies of other drivers on the road. The scene is the best of both worlds: There’s some incredible stuntwork on display, including when Moss weaves around on a Ducati, and CGI augments some feats of superhuman strength. But the most jaw-dropping aspect of the sequence is how it came together, as the production spent $2.5 million to construct its own highway (!) on California’s Alameda Island. If that weren’t unique enough, I’m pretty sure Reloaded is also the only movie in existence in which a katana takes out an SUV:
The Matrix remains the Wachowskis’ masterpiece, but don’t get it twisted: The filmmakers were still cooking with gas in the sequel.

7. Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)

Size isn’t everything, but for H. B. Halicki, who produced, wrote, directed, and starred in Gone in 60 Seconds, it’s certainly part of the package. The indie action flick follows Maindrian Pace (Halicki), a Los Angeles insurance investigator who has a lucrative side hustle jacking high-end cars. The plot kicks into motion when a South American drug lord enlists Pace to nab 48 cars within five days in exchange for $400,000. Of course, Gone in 60 Seconds is best known for what happens after Pace is caught stealing a 1973 Ford Mustang Mach 1, when he leads police on a chase that lasts a whopping 40 minutes. (More than 90 cars were destroyed in the process.) Halicki, for his part, did all the driving himself, including a spectacular jump off a makeshift ramp of crashed cars:
While Halicki wound up making a few more indies after Gone in 60 Seconds, he died in an accident on the set of its sequel. His legacy as a do-it-all daredevil, however, lives on.

6. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Long before James Cameron immersed himself in the world of Pandora, he was a pioneer of state-of-the-art visual effects. Case in point: Terminator 2: Judgment Day is credited for having the first CGI character in a blockbuster, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), a killing machine composed of a futuristic liquid metal. But Cameron also understood that the CGI of that era shouldn’t be the main attraction: It worked best as a complement to the practical effects, as seen in Judgment Day’s epic viaduct chase. When the T-1000 tracks down a young John Connor (Edward Furlong) in a shopping mall, he’s saved at the last minute by the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), giving John a chance to escape on his dirt bike. As the T-1000 gives chase, the David and Goliath vibes between man and machine are further epitomized by the T-1000’s commandeering of a truck. The sequence already has a terrifying sense of urgency, but it hits another level when the T-1000 crashes through the viaduct like the Kool-Aid Man:
Big Jim is still revolutionizing what can be achieved with visual effects in the Avatar franchise, and while I cherish those movies, nothing beats his old-school showmanship.

5. Duel (1971)

The feature-length debut of Steven Spielberg—perhaps you’ve heard of him—the TV movie Duel is essentially one extended chase sequence between salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) and a sinister trucker determined to drive him off the road. I’ve attached a clip from the ending of the film, but that doesn’t do Duel justice. What cements this movie’s greatness is how it sustains an unbearable level of tension across its 90-minute running time—with a budget under $500,000, no less. Spielberg’s masterstroke is never once showing us the other driver, anthropomorphizing the truck itself as a monster. (You can see a lot of similarities with how he would build suspense in Jaws.) When Mann finally gets the upper hand, tricking his adversary into driving off a cliff, it feels like you can breathe again:
Spielberg would move on to bigger and better things after Duel, but considering how much the director accomplished with so little, you can’t help but wonder what else he could conjure up with limited resources.

4. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Like Duel, Fury Road is basically one long car chase—the difference is Miller got to work with a blockbuster budget, and made every cent of it count. It’s hard to pick a single standout sequence in Fury Road, but if I had to choose, I’d go with the first attack on the War Rig after Furiosa (Charlize Theron) flees with the wives of Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). Here’s why: Think back to when you saw Fury Road for the first time, before you fully grasped the vehicular carnage that was in store. And then stuff like this kept happening:
To quote Steven Soderbergh’s thoughts on Fury Road: “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.” Whether or not Miller manages to one-up the action in Furiosa, the director is already in the pantheon.

3. The French Connection (1971)

We return to the Friedkin-verse for what may be his best film, The French Connection, the crime thriller based on Robin Moore’s 1969 nonfiction book of the same name. The story concerns two NYPD detectives, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider), and their tireless pursuit of a French heroin smuggler. But while there’s plenty to admire about how The French Connection illustrates the thin line between police and criminals, its greatest claim to fame is its car chase. After Popeye narrowly survives a sniper attack, he goes after the shooter, who escapes on an elevated train. The ensuing sequence is true daredevil filmmaking that Friedkin shot without permits, leading to real crashes with New Yorkers that made the final cut. But Friedkin’s finest touch was mounting a camera to the front of the car, making the audience feel like they’re part of the action:
My Ringer colleague Justin Sayles believes The French Connection’s chase should’ve landed at no. 1, and I’m sure many folks will agree with him. Being the only film on this list to win Best Picture, however, is a solid consolation prize.

2. Bullitt (1968)

When it comes to modern car chases, all roads lead back to Bullitt. A Dad Cinema classic, the film stars Steve McQueen as Frank Bullitt, a San Francisco detective who pursues a group of mobsters after a key witness is killed in protective custody. In his search for answers, Bullitt realizes he’s being tailed by a couple of hitmen, and then turns the tables on them. From there, the chase is on. Aside from McQueen doing most of his own stunts behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang GT 390 Fastback, what’s so impressive about the sequence is how timeless it is. Even the little imperfections, like hubcaps repeatedly coming off the wheels, work to the film’s advantage, stressing just how much these drivers are living on a razor’s edge. It’s been more than 50 years since Bullitt revolutionized the car chase, and yet few movies since have felt like they’re pushing the envelope to such an exhilarating degree:
That the car driven by McQueen was recently sold at auction for $3.74 million, a then-record price for a Mustang, underlines Bullitt’s enduring legacy.

1. Ronin (1998)

“If I’m going to do a car chase,” filmmaker John Frankenheimer said in an interview with the American Society of Cinematographers, “I’m going to do a car chase that’s going to make somebody think about whether or not they want to do another one!” Boy, did he ever. In Frankenheimer’s late-career masterpiece, Ronin, the director actually incorporated several chases, but it’s the climactic sequence that stands alone as the greatest ever filmed. The movie concerns an international group of mercenaries who are hired to steal a mysterious briefcase; a series of double-crosses and double-bluffs ensue. But for the final chase, all you need to know is that Sam (Robert De Niro), a mercenary with ties to the CIA, is in pursuit of Deirdre (Natascha McElhone), an IRA operative in possession of the case. Winding through the streets and tunnels of Paris, what’s most striking is just how fluid it all feels. You’re completely engrossed in the chase’s forward momentum, captured from every conceivable angle; a symphony of controlled chaos. The driving styles even reflect the characters: Deirdre is reckless and impulsive, while Sam remains calm and controlled.
There are many worthy car chases in this ranking, but in my view, Ronin takes pole position. And while I can’t imagine a movie ever topping what Frankenheimer achieved, I’d love nothing more than to be proved wrong.

Erstwhile on:

The Sopranos: Tony has problem with his kid a school. While talking to the shrink Tony has trip down memory lane. He remembers his father getting raided by the Feds.
Breaking Bad: Walt needs more money for his cancer treatment this forces Jessie to contact a new drug wholesaler. It end very badly and Jessie gets the shit kicked out of him. Walt can't let this stand and He hatches an explosive plan. Now there no problem selling drugs.
Dexter: Dexter was careless with his last kill and there was a witness. Dexter goes into bugout mode and starts destroying all his trophies. The witness claimed the man that did the crime was Jesus Christ. Dexter is off the hook for the moment. The serial killer duel continues.
Fargo: Malvo completes his master plan , but things don't end up well as he gets into a gunfight with assassins. Malvo kills his purser and shoots Molly in process. Lester hatches a scheme of his own too. He plants evidence on his brother in law so the police will suspect him of the murder of Lester's wife.
Hannibal: The murder likes to turn people into angels by cutting large portions of back off to create false wings. The killer become an angel himself at the end. Jack Crawford's wife has been lying to him about having cancer. She also has been seeing Hannibal for counselling. This can not end well.
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Show starts at 8:00 PM CDT in PreRec Twitch chat.
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(All Links Here)
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The Sopranos (1999-2007) New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano deals with personal and professional issues in his home and business life that affect his mental state, leading him to seek professional psychiatric counseling.
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S1, E08 "The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti" (48:54)
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Breaking Bad (2008-2013) A chemistry teacher diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer turns to manufacturing and selling methamphetamine with a former student in order to secure his family's future
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S1, E08 "A No-Rough-Stuff-Type Deal" (47:52)
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Dexter (2006-2013) He's smart. He's lovable. He's Dexter Morgan, America's favorite serial killer, who spends his days solving crimes and nights committing them.
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S1, E07 "Circle of Friends" (52:27)
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Fargo (2014-) Various chronicles of deception, intrigue and murder in and around frozen Minnesota. Yet all of these tales mysteriously lead back one way or another to Fargo, North Dakota.
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S1, E07 "Who Shaves the Barber?" (47:51)
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Hannibal (2013-2015) Explores the early relationship between renowned psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter and a young FBI criminal profiler who is haunted by his ability to empathize with serial killers.
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S1, E06 "Entrée" (43:02)

Peer-reviewed articles discussing lifetime number of sexual partners consistently show that body count is a strong predictor of infidelity, relationship dissatisfaction and divorce. Most men and women care about sexual history, and, in some respects, women care even more than men do.
Promiscuity and Infidelity

Factors found to facilitate infidelity

Number of sex partners: Greater number of sex partners before marriage predicts infidelity

As might be expected, attitudes toward infidelity specifically, permissive attitudes toward sex more generally and a greater willingness to have casual sex and to engage in sex without closeness, commitment or love (i.e., a more unrestricted sociosexual orientation) are also reliably related to infidelity (pg.71)

https://imgur.com/vCvZmQR.jpg
Fincham, F. D., & May, R. W. (2017). Infidelity in romantic relationships. Current opinion in psychology, 13, 70–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.03.008
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Individuals exhibiting sexually permissive attitudes and those who have had a high number of past sexual relationships are more likely to engage in infidelity (pg.344)

https://imgur.com/a/GUWDVUi
Barta, W. D., & Kiene, S. M. (2005). Motivations for infidelity in heterosexual dating couples: The roles of gender, personality differences, and sociosexual orientation. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 22(3), 339–360. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407505052440
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the odds ratio of 1.13 for lifetime sexual partners obtained with the face-to-face mode of interview indicates that the probability of infidelity increased by 13% for every additional lifetime sexual partner (pg.150)

https://imgur.com/ZhxoqNv.jpg
Whisman, M. A., & Snyder, D. K. (2007). Sexual infidelity in a national survey of American women: Differences in prevalence and correlates as a function of method of assessment. Journal of Family Psychology, 21(2), 147–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.21.2.147
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promiscuity is in fact a good predictor of infidelity. Indeed, promiscuity among females accounted for almost twice as much variance in infidelity (r² = .45) as it did for males (r² = .25). (pg.177)

https://imgur.com/2vklWn1.jpg
Hughes, S. M., & Gallup, G. G., Jr. (2003). Sex differences in morphological predictors of sexual behavior: Shoulder to hip and waist to hip ratios. Evolution and Human Behavior, 24(3), 173–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(02)00149-6
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Participants who had experienced sexual intimacy with a greater number of partners also reported greater extradyadic sex and extradyadic kissing inclination. (pg.344)

https://i.imgur.com/gkf9CZT.jpg
McAlister, A. R., Pachana, N., & Jackson, C. J. (2005). Predictors of young dating adults' inclination to engage in extradyadic sexual activities: A multi-perspective study. British Journal of Psychology, 96(3), 331–350. https://doi.org/10.1348/000712605X47936
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Sexual promiscuity was significantly positively correlated with emotional promiscuity [r(356) = .261, p < .001], as well with sexual infidelity [r(323) = .595, p < .001] and emotional infidelity [r(323) = .676, p < .001] (pg.390)

https://imgur.com/qEPttQz.jpg
Pinto, R., & Arantes, J. (2017). The Relationship between Sexual and Emotional Promiscuity and Infidelity. Athens Journal of Social Sciences, 4(4), 385–398. https://doi.org/10.30958/ajss.4-4-3
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Each additional sex partner between age 18 and the first union increased the net odds of infidelity by 1% (pg.56)

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Treas, J., & Giesen, D. (2000). Sexual Infidelity Among Married and Cohabiting Americans. Journal of Marriage and Family, 62(1), 48–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2000.00048.x
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An indicator of whether or not the respondent has had previous sex partners is included and identifies the number of male sex partners the woman had previous to her relationship with her current primary partner… A history of numerous sex partners indicates a pattern or habit of sexual behavior that we expect will negatively influence sexual exclusivity in the current relationship. (pg.37)
Having previous sexual partners greatly increased the likelihood that a woman would have a secondary sex partner. In particular, a woman with 4 or more male sex partners prior to her primary relationship was about 8.5 times more likely to have a secondary sex partnerthan a woman with no previous sex partners… Having previous sex partners also increased the likelihood that dating and married women would have secondary sex partners. In particular, married women with 4 or more previous partners were 20 times more likely to have secondary sex partners than married women with no previous sex partners (pg.41)

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Forste, R., & Tanfer, K. (1996). Sexual exclusivity among dating, cohabiting, and married women. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 58(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/353375
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As has been found in prior research (Feldman & Cauffman, 1999; Treas & Giesen, 2000), having had more prior sex partners predicted future ESI, possibly suggesting that a higher interest in or acceptance of unmarried sexual activity may be related to ESI. (pg.607)

https://imgur.com/hqXh1t8.jpg
Maddox Shaw, A. M., Rhoades, G. K., Allen, E. S., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2013). Predictors of Extradyadic Sexual Involvement in Unmarried Opposite-Sex Relationships. Journal of Sex Research, 50(6), 598–610. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2012.666816
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To insure that the female partner has previously avoided men and is not predisposed to seek them out, men often insist on virginity or little sexual experience (Espin 2018; Bekker et al. 1996). This idea, that low promiscuity becomes low infidelity after marriage, was supported by Essock-Vitale and McGuire (1985) who found that among adult women, promiscuity prior to marriage was also a predictor of infidelity once women were married. (pg.7809)

https://imgur.com/Y0X8ui3.jpg
Burch, R. L. (2021). Solution to paternity uncertainty. In Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science (pp. 7808–7814). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2029-1
.
Promiscuity, Instability and Divorce

When compared with their peers who report fewer partners, those who self-report 20 or more in their lifetime are:

• Twice as likely to have ever been divorced (50 percent vs. 27 percent)
  
• Three times as likely to have cheated while married (32 percent vs. 10 percent)
  
• Substantially less happy with life (p < 0.05) (pg.89)
  

https://imgur.com/rxkpWM4.jpg
Regnerus, M. D. (2017). Cheap sex: The transformation of men, marriage, and monogamy. Oxford University Press.
.

As expected, we find evidence of a nonlinear relationship between the number of sexual partners and the risk of divorce. Those in the highest category of partners (9+) consistently show the highest divorce risk by a substantial margin, followed by those with one to eight partners, with the lowest risk for those with none. In other words, we find distinct tiers of divorce risk between those with no, some, or many premarital, nonspousal sexual partners. (pg.16)

https://i.imgur.com/mcSj4g0.jpg
Smith, J., & Wolfinger, N. H. (2023). Re-examining the link between premarital sex and divorce. Journal of Family Issues, 0192513X2311556. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513x231155673
.

The findings from this study demonstrate that the number of sexual partners participants had was negatively associated with sexual quality, communication, and relationship stability, and for one age cohort relationship satisfaction, even when controlling for a wide range of variables including education, religiosity, and relationship length. (pg.715)

https://i.imgur.com/0MuuWmd.jpg
Busby, D. M., Willoughby, B. J., & Carroll, J. S. (2013). Sowing wild oats: Valuable experience or a field full of weeds? Personal Relationships, 20(4), 706–718. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12009
.

women who had more experience with short-term relationships in the past (i.e., those with high Behavior facet scores) were more likely to have multiple sexual partners and unstable relationships in the future. The behaviorally expressed level of sociosexuality thus seems to be a fairly stable personal characteristic. (pg. 1131)

https://i.imgur.com/k3ZcwTn.jpg
Penke, L., & Asendorpf, J. B. (2008). Beyond global sociosexual orientations: a more differentiated look at sociosexuality and its effects on courtship and romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1113–1135. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.95.5.1113
.

Women who serially cohabited and/or had premarital sex with someone besides their husband had higher odds of marital dissolution than women who never cohabited. Teachman’s findings suggest that both sexual history and cohabitation history influence marital stability. (pg.4)
Serial cohabitors’ higher number of sexual and cohabiting partners suggests that they have a longer history of dissolved relationships -- i.e., sexual, (most likely dating) and cohabiting relationships – that they bring to their cohabiting and later marital relationships. This relationship experience may affect the quality and stability of their cohabiting relationship and the odds of marrying their cohabiting partners. Consistent with Teachman (2003), who found that both sexual and cohabiting partnerships significantly predicted the odds of marital dissolution, our findings suggest that studies of union formation and stability should consider the full range of sexual experiences in early adulthood. (pg.11)

https://i.imgur.com/jzTUT5p.jpg
Cohen, J., & Manning, W. (2010). The relationship context of premarital serial cohabitation. Social Science Research, 39(5), 766–776. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.04.011

Peer-reviewed articles discussing lifetime number of sexual partners consistently show that body count is a strong predictor of infidelity, relationship dissatisfaction and divorce. Most men and women care about sexual history, and, in some respects, women care even more than men do.
Promiscuity and Infidelity

Factors found to facilitate infidelity

Number of sex partners: Greater number of sex partners before marriage predicts infidelity

As might be expected, attitudes toward infidelity specifically, permissive attitudes toward sex more generally and a greater willingness to have casual sex and to engage in sex without closeness, commitment or love (i.e., a more unrestricted sociosexual orientation) are also reliably related to infidelity (pg.71)

https://imgur.com/vCvZmQR.jpg
Fincham, F. D., & May, R. W. (2017). Infidelity in romantic relationships. Current opinion in psychology, 13, 70–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2016.03.008
.

Individuals exhibiting sexually permissive attitudes and those who have had a high number of past sexual relationships are more likely to engage in infidelity (pg.344)

https://imgur.com/a/GUWDVUi
Barta, W. D., & Kiene, S. M. (2005). Motivations for infidelity in heterosexual dating couples: The roles of gender, personality differences, and sociosexual orientation. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 22(3), 339–360. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407505052440
.

the odds ratio of 1.13 for lifetime sexual partners obtained with the face-to-face mode of interview indicates that the probability of infidelity increased by 13% for every additional lifetime sexual partner (pg.150)

https://imgur.com/ZhxoqNv.jpg
Whisman, M. A., & Snyder, D. K. (2007). Sexual infidelity in a national survey of American women: Differences in prevalence and correlates as a function of method of assessment. Journal of Family Psychology, 21(2), 147–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.21.2.147
.

promiscuity is in fact a good predictor of infidelity. Indeed, promiscuity among females accounted for almost twice as much variance in infidelity (r² = .45) as it did for males (r² = .25). (pg.177)

https://imgur.com/2vklWn1.jpg
Hughes, S. M., & Gallup, G. G., Jr. (2003). Sex differences in morphological predictors of sexual behavior: Shoulder to hip and waist to hip ratios. Evolution and Human Behavior, 24(3), 173–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(02)00149-6
.

Participants who had experienced sexual intimacy with a greater number of partners also reported greater extradyadic sex and extradyadic kissing inclination. (pg.344)

https://i.imgur.com/gkf9CZT.jpg
McAlister, A. R., Pachana, N., & Jackson, C. J. (2005). Predictors of young dating adults' inclination to engage in extradyadic sexual activities: A multi-perspective study. British Journal of Psychology, 96(3), 331–350. https://doi.org/10.1348/000712605X47936
.

Sexual promiscuity was significantly positively correlated with emotional promiscuity [r(356) = .261, p < .001], as well with sexual infidelity [r(323) = .595, p < .001] and emotional infidelity [r(323) = .676, p < .001] (pg.390)

https://imgur.com/qEPttQz.jpg
Pinto, R., & Arantes, J. (2017). The Relationship between Sexual and Emotional Promiscuity and Infidelity. Athens Journal of Social Sciences, 4(4), 385–398. https://doi.org/10.30958/ajss.4-4-3
.

Each additional sex partner between age 18 and the first union increased the net odds of infidelity by 1% (pg.56)

https://imgur.com/poSLp4U.jpg
Treas, J., & Giesen, D. (2000). Sexual Infidelity Among Married and Cohabiting Americans. Journal of Marriage and Family, 62(1), 48–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2000.00048.x
.

An indicator of whether or not the respondent has had previous sex partners is included and identifies the number of male sex partners the woman had previous to her relationship with her current primary partner… A history of numerous sex partners indicates a pattern or habit of sexual behavior that we expect will negatively influence sexual exclusivity in the current relationship. (pg.37)
Having previous sexual partners greatly increased the likelihood that a woman would have a secondary sex partner. In particular, a woman with 4 or more male sex partners prior to her primary relationship was about 8.5 times more likely to have a secondary sex partnerthan a woman with no previous sex partners… Having previous sex partners also increased the likelihood that dating and married women would have secondary sex partners. In particular, married women with 4 or more previous partners were 20 times more likely to have secondary sex partners than married women with no previous sex partners (pg.41)

https://imgur.com/naqmXdN.jpg
Forste, R., & Tanfer, K. (1996). Sexual exclusivity among dating, cohabiting, and married women. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 58(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/353375
.

As has been found in prior research (Feldman & Cauffman, 1999; Treas & Giesen, 2000), having had more prior sex partners predicted future ESI, possibly suggesting that a higher interest in or acceptance of unmarried sexual activity may be related to ESI. (pg.607)

https://imgur.com/hqXh1t8.jpg
Maddox Shaw, A. M., Rhoades, G. K., Allen, E. S., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2013). Predictors of Extradyadic Sexual Involvement in Unmarried Opposite-Sex Relationships. Journal of Sex Research, 50(6), 598–610. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2012.666816
.

To insure that the female partner has previously avoided men and is not predisposed to seek them out, men often insist on virginity or little sexual experience (Espin 2018; Bekker et al. 1996). This idea, that low promiscuity becomes low infidelity after marriage, was supported by Essock-Vitale and McGuire (1985) who found that among adult women, promiscuity prior to marriage was also a predictor of infidelity once women were married. (pg.7809)

https://imgur.com/Y0X8ui3.jpg
Burch, R. L. (2021). Solution to paternity uncertainty. In Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science (pp. 7808–7814). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2029-1
.
Promiscuity, Instability and Divorce

When compared with their peers who report fewer partners, those who self-report 20 or more in their lifetime are:

• Twice as likely to have ever been divorced (50 percent vs. 27 percent)
  
• Three times as likely to have cheated while married (32 percent vs. 10 percent)
  
• Substantially less happy with life (p < 0.05) (pg.89)
  

https://imgur.com/rxkpWM4.jpg
Regnerus, M. D. (2017). Cheap sex: The transformation of men, marriage, and monogamy. Oxford University Press.
.

As expected, we find evidence of a nonlinear relationship between the number of sexual partners and the risk of divorce. Those in the highest category of partners (9+) consistently show the highest divorce risk by a substantial margin, followed by those with one to eight partners, with the lowest risk for those with none. In other words, we find distinct tiers of divorce risk between those with no, some, or many premarital, nonspousal sexual partners. (pg.16)

https://i.imgur.com/mcSj4g0.jpg
Smith, J., & Wolfinger, N. H. (2023). Re-examining the link between premarital sex and divorce. Journal of Family Issues, 0192513X2311556. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192513x231155673
.

The findings from this study demonstrate that the number of sexual partners participants had was negatively associated with sexual quality, communication, and relationship stability, and for one age cohort relationship satisfaction, even when controlling for a wide range of variables including education, religiosity, and relationship length. (pg.715)

https://i.imgur.com/0MuuWmd.jpg
Busby, D. M., Willoughby, B. J., & Carroll, J. S. (2013). Sowing wild oats: Valuable experience or a field full of weeds? Personal Relationships, 20(4), 706–718. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12009
.

women who had more experience with short-term relationships in the past (i.e., those with high Behavior facet scores) were more likely to have multiple sexual partners and unstable relationships in the future. The behaviorally expressed level of sociosexuality thus seems to be a fairly stable personal characteristic. (pg. 1131)

https://i.imgur.com/k3ZcwTn.jpg
Penke, L., & Asendorpf, J. B. (2008). Beyond global sociosexual orientations: a more differentiated look at sociosexuality and its effects on courtship and romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1113–1135. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.95.5.1113
.

Women who serially cohabited and/or had premarital sex with someone besides their husband had higher odds of marital dissolution than women who never cohabited. Teachman’s findings suggest that both sexual history and cohabitation history influence marital stability. (pg.4)
Serial cohabitors’ higher number of sexual and cohabiting partners suggests that they have a longer history of dissolved relationships -- i.e., sexual, (most likely dating) and cohabiting relationships – that they bring to their cohabiting and later marital relationships. This relationship experience may affect the quality and stability of their cohabiting relationship and the odds of marrying their cohabiting partners. Consistent with Teachman (2003), who found that both sexual and cohabiting partnerships significantly predicted the odds of marital dissolution, our findings suggest that studies of union formation and stability should consider the full range of sexual experiences in early adulthood. (pg.11)

https://i.imgur.com/jzTUT5p.jpg
Cohen, J., & Manning, W. (2010). The relationship context of premarital serial cohabitation. Social Science Research, 39(5), 766–776. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2010.04.011

hi!! i'm anna and i'm 20, and currently in uni studying psychology in the uk!! i'm looking for online female/fem aligned nb friends to send memes to, be silly with, n play games with!!! mainly roblox :333
about me: - i had an emo phase from ages 10-basically now, i do NOT play abt pierce the veil :3 (i also heavily fw swancore, midwest emo, screamo, post hardcore etc etc) - i also rly like chiptune/digital hardcore/DnB/breakcore/cloud rap n just anything experimental with fast bpm - my fav media include: yakuza (the games), jjba (currently on pt4), serial experiments lain, puella magi madoka magica, vocaloid songs and games, any horrospooky stuff (scp and analog horror are guilty pleasures) - i love aesthetic and fashion subcultures, i've always been obsessed w 2000s emo/scene queen but i also love mcbling, dollette, cutecore, and tenshi kawai/anything y2k ! - my fav clothing brands r true religion (somewhat influenced by sematary), ed hardy, vivienne westwood, and anything that makes me look like im straight outta 2007 - i have the autism + adhd combo so i may struggle w/ understanding certain cues or remembering things/losing focus - I have a bf who i very much luv so please respect that boundary! - i am very much a feminist and politically left wing, if you're antifeminist/anti lgbt/racist/zionist we can't be friends :3
if ur a girlie/fem aligned enby and u understand basic boundaries and relate to any of this, feel free to message!!

hi!! i'm anna and i'm 20, and currently in uni studying psychology in the uk!! i'm looking for online female/fem aligned nb friends to send memes to, be silly with, n play games with!!! mainly roblox :333
about me: - i had an emo phase from ages 10-basically now, i do NOT play abt pierce the veil :3 (i also heavily fw swancore, midwest emo, screamo, post hardcore etc etc) - i also rly like chiptune/digital hardcore/DnB/breakcore/cloud rap n just anything experimental with fast bpm - my fav media include: yakuza (the games), jjba (currently on pt4), serial experiments lain, puella magi madoka magica, vocaloid songs and games, any horrospooky stuff (scp and analog horror are guilty pleasures) - i love aesthetic and fashion subcultures, i've always been obsessed w 2000s emo/scene queen but i also love mcbling, dollette, cutecore, and tenshi kawai/anything y2k ! - my fav clothing brands r true religion (somewhat influenced by sematary), ed hardy, vivienne westwood, and anything that makes me look like im straight outta 2007 - i have the autism + adhd combo so i may struggle w/ understanding certain cues or remembering things/losing focus - I have a bf who i very much luv so please respect that boundary! - i am very much a feminist and politically left wing, if you're antifeminist/anti lgbt/racist/zionist we can't be friends :3
if ur a girlie/fem aligned enby and u understand basic boundaries and relate to any of this, feel free to message!!

hi!! i'm anna and i'm 20, and currently in uni studying psychology in the uk!! (lincs) i'm looking for online female/fem aligned nb friends to send memes to, be silly with, n play games with!!! mainly roblox :333
about me: - i had an emo phase from ages 10-basically now, i do NOT play abt pierce the veil :3 (i also heavily fw swancore, midwest emo, screamo, post hardcore etc etc) - i also rly like chiptune/digital hardcore/DnB/breakcore/cloud rap n just anything experimental with fast bpm - my fav media include: yakuza (the games), jjba (currently on pt4), serial experiments lain, puella magi madoka magica, vocaloid songs and games, any horrospooky stuff (scp and analog horror are guilty pleasures) - i love aesthetic and fashion subcultures, i've always been obsessed w 2000s emo/scene queen but i also love mcbling, dollette, cutecore, and tenshi kawai/anything y2k ! - my fav clothing brands r true religion (somewhat influenced by sematary), ed hardy, vivienne westwood, and anything that makes me look like im straight outta 2007 - i have the autism + adhd combo so i may struggle w/ understanding certain cues or remembering things/losing focus - I have a bf who i very much luv so please respect that boundary! - i am very much a feminist and politically left wing, if you're antifeminist/anti lgbt/racist/zionist we can't be friends :3
if ur a girlie/fem aligned enby and u understand basic boundaries and relate to any of this, feel free to message!!

hi!! i'm anna and i'm 20, and currently in uni studying psychology in the uk!! i'm looking for online female/fem aligned nb friends to send memes to, be silly with, n play games with!!! mainly roblox :333
about me: - i had an emo phase from ages 10-basically now, i do NOT play abt pierce the veil :3 (i also heavily fw swancore, midwest emo, screamo, post hardcore etc etc) - i also rly like chiptune/digital hardcore/DnB/breakcore/cloud rap n just anything experimental with fast bpm - my fav media include: yakuza (the games), jjba (currently on pt4), serial experiments lain, puella magi madoka magica, vocaloid songs and games, any horrospooky stuff (scp and analog horror are guilty pleasures) - i love aesthetic and fashion subcultures, i've always been obsessed w 2000s emo/scene queen but i also love mcbling, dollette, cutecore, and tenshi kawai/anything y2k ! - my fav clothing brands r true religion (somewhat influenced by sematary), ed hardy, vivienne westwood, and anything that makes me look like im straight outta 2007 - i have the autism + adhd combo so i may struggle w/ understanding certain cues or remembering things/losing focus - I have a bf who i very much luv so please respect that boundary! - i am very much a feminist and politically left wing, if you're antifeminist/anti lgbt/racist/zionist we can't be friends :3
if ur a girlie/fem aligned enby and u understand basic boundaries and relate to any of this, feel free to message!!

hi!! i'm anna and i'm 20, and currently in uni studying psychology in the uk!! i'm looking for online female/fem aligned nb friends to send memes to, be silly with, n play games with!!! mainly roblox :333
about me: - i had an emo phase from ages 10-basically now, i do NOT play abt pierce the veil :3 (i also heavily fw swancore, midwest emo, screamo, post hardcore etc etc) - i also rly like chiptune/digital hardcore/DnB/breakcore/cloud rap n just anything experimental with fast bpm - my fav media include: yakuza (the games), jjba (currently on pt4), serial experiments lain, puella magi madoka magica, vocaloid songs and games, any horrospooky stuff (scp and analog horror are guilty pleasures) - i love aesthetic and fashion subcultures, i've always been obsessed w 2000s emo/scene queen but i also love mcbling, dollette, cutecore, and tenshi kawai/anything y2k ! - my fav clothing brands r true religion (somewhat influenced by sematary), ed hardy, vivienne westwood, and anything that makes me look like im straight outta 2007 - i have the autism + adhd combo so i may struggle w/ understanding certain cues or remembering things/losing focus - I have a bf who i very much luv so please respect that boundary! - i am very much a feminist and politically left wing, if you're antifeminist/anti lgbt/racist/zionist we can't be friends :3
if ur a girlie/fem aligned enby and u understand basic boundaries and relate to any of this, feel free to message!!

hi!! i'm anna and i'm 20, and currently in uni studying psychology in the uk!! i'm looking for online female/fem aligned nb friends to send memes to, be silly with, n play games with!!! mainly roblox :333
about me: - i had an emo phase from ages 10-basically now, i do NOT play abt pierce the veil :3 (i also heavily fw swancore, midwest emo, screamo, post hardcore etc etc) - i also rly like chiptune/digital hardcore/DnB/breakcore/cloud rap n just anything experimental with fast bpm - my fav media include: yakuza (the games), jjba (currently on pt4), serial experiments lain, puella magi madoka magica, vocaloid songs and games, any horrospooky stuff (scp and analog horror are guilty pleasures) - i love aesthetic and fashion subcultures, i've always been obsessed w 2000s emo/scene queen but i also love mcbling, dollette, cutecore, and tenshi kawai/anything y2k ! - my fav clothing brands r true religion (somewhat influenced by sematary), ed hardy, vivienne westwood, and anything that makes me look like im straight outta 2007 - i have the autism + adhd combo so i may struggle w/ understanding certain cues or remembering things/losing focus - I have a bf who i very much luv so please respect that boundary! - i am very much a feminist and politically left wing, if you're antifeminist/anti lgbt/racist/zionist we can't be friends :3
if ur a girlie/fem aligned enby and u understand basic boundaries and relate to any of this, feel free to message!!

Ecco tutto quello che sappiamo sul futuro cinematografico dei Simpson, la leggendaria serie tv animata di Matt Groening.
Quando uscirà il nuovo film dei Simpson? Dopo aver parlato del prossimo futuro della serie tv dei Simpson, facciamo il punto della situazione sull'atteso sequel del film cinematografico dell'ormai lontano 2007.
Prosegui la lettura

Hey all. I'm admittedly not very knowledgeable on most things DC but I heard about the concept of Booster Gold and was instantly intrigued. I've done a bit of research so I know that in terms of solo runs, he originated in an 80s run and also had a 2007 series. I found a 'book one' of the 2007 series and I was just wondering if I could buy that without being confused about continuity from his older series or Justice League International which I saw he's also on. I know that there'll obviously be call backs to older works (as is the nature with long-running serialized stories) but just wondering if they aren't so continuity heavy that I can't read the 2007 series without getting lost.

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007) is one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, known for his pioneering work in electronic music, aleatoric processes, and spatial music. His innovative approach has left a lasting impact on contemporary music and sound art. Below is an in-depth analysis of his music, focusing on harmonic texture, popular forms, and his contributions to the music industry.

Harmonic Texture

Stockhausen's approach to harmony evolved throughout his career, reflecting his explorations in various musical dimensions:

1. Serialism: In his early works, Stockhausen embraced serialism, a technique involving the use of series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres, or other musical elements. Notable works include "Kontra-Punkte" (1952-53), which uses pointillistic textures and twelve-tone rows to create complex harmonic structures.
   
2. Electronic Music: Stockhausen's electronic compositions often feature innovative harmonic textures created through the manipulation of sine waves, noise, and other sound sources. "Gesang der Jünglinge" (1955-56) combines the human voice with electronic sounds, blurring the lines between harmony and timbre.
   
3. Spatial Music: His interest in the spatial distribution of sound led to works like "Gruppen" (1955-57), which uses three orchestras placed around the audience. The resulting spatial effects create unique harmonic textures that change depending on the listener's position.
   
4. Intuitive Music: In pieces like "Aus den sieben Tagen" (1968), Stockhausen explored "intuitive music," where performers are given textual instructions rather than specific notes, leading to unpredictable harmonic textures.
   

Popular Forms

Stockhausen's works often defy traditional forms, but several key types can be identified:

1. Electronic and Tape Music: Pioneering pieces like "Studie I" (1953) and "Studie II" (1954) are among the first examples of purely electronic music. "Kontakte" (1958-60) integrates live instrumental performance with electronic sounds, creating a form that bridges fixed media and live performance.
   
2. Moment Form: Stockhausen developed the concept of "moment form," where musical sections are self-contained and can be experienced independently. "Momente" (1962-64/1969) exemplifies this approach, with sections that can be reordered or omitted without disrupting the overall structure.
   
3. Operatic and Theatrical Works: His seven-opera cycle "Licht" (1977-2003) represents a monumental exploration of musical form and interdisciplinary art. Each opera is dedicated to a day of the week, combining music, stage design, and ritualistic elements.
   
4. Electronic Opera: "Mittwoch aus Licht" (1995-97) includes the famous "Helicopter String Quartet," where musicians perform in helicopters, integrating live performance with aviation sounds.
   

Innovations in the Music Industry

Stockhausen's contributions extend beyond composition, influencing various aspects of music production and theory:

1. Electronic Music Studios: He was instrumental in establishing the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, one of the first facilities dedicated to electronic music production. His work here set the stage for future electronic music studios worldwide.
   
2. Spatial Audio: Stockhausen's exploration of spatial music anticipated contemporary practices in surround sound and immersive audio. His ideas influenced the development of spatial audio technology used in modern performance venues and sound installations.
   
3. Aleatoric Techniques: By incorporating elements of chance into his compositions, Stockhausen influenced subsequent generations of composers and performers, encouraging a more flexible and dynamic approach to music-making.
   
4. Extended Techniques: His work often required musicians to employ extended techniques, expanding the vocabulary of instrumental performance. This has had a lasting impact on contemporary classical music and improvisation.
   
5. Interdisciplinary Art: Through works like "Licht," Stockhausen demonstrated the potential for integrating music with other art forms, inspiring countless interdisciplinary collaborations in contemporary arts.
   

Conclusion

Karlheinz Stockhausen's contributions to music are vast and multifaceted. His innovations in harmonic texture, form, and the integration of new technologies have had a profound impact on the music industry and contemporary composition. From his pioneering electronic works to his expansive operatic projects, Stockhausen's legacy continues to inspire and challenge musicians and composers around the world.

This is my new to me 2007 Emerson MODEL CR202EMS. Audio and video work great, wanted to see your thoughts!

Hi folks, please share some recommendations for movies based on true crime or serial killers. Catch me if you can(2002) and Zodiac(2007) are few movies on similar lines that I loved.

I have quite an old system that's currently not being used by anyone in my family at the moment. It's got maybe an intel based processor (quite old maybe 2007) and I think 4 GB RAM and 125 GB SSD. There's gotta be a good use for this thing that I'm not quite thinking of. Serial terminal? Server?

On January 1st 2021 the 5% value added tax on women's sanitary products, a.k.a. the tampon tax, was abolished. In November 2022 the Tax Policy think tank published a study titled How the abolition of the "tampon tax" benefited retailers, not women. In it they claim that the savings from the tampon tax was retained by the retailers.
The above study has been widely popular in the media. It even found its way into a report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), which is one of the most respected independent economic analysis institutions in the UK. It is references by Footnote 96 on page 45 in this report.
If we look at the report by Tax Policy, we'll find that they have used the CPI pricing data to determine whether the tax cut has lead to a reduction in prices. You can find the CPI data on the ONS website. However, some of the files have been removed and others are missing. Some of the removed files can be found on the GitHub of the author.
The first issue we encounter with the Tax Policy analysis is that they've split the data into two 6-month periods before and after the tax cut. They've then run the Student's t-test on both periods to determine whether the sample mean has decreased.
However, the Student's t-test relies on the assumption that the sample mean of the two data samples approaches a normal distribution. Usually one can use the central limit theorem provided the samples are independent. However, one can expect the samples in a time series to follow some serial correlation.
Indeed, this is what we have in this case. Taking the CPI data, seasonally adjusting it, interpolating the missing values, and adding the seasonality back allows us to compute the ACF. Furthermore, the Ljung-Box test yields

data: tampons$TimeSeries X-squared = 230.32, df = 12, p-value < 2.2e-16 

So we reject the null hypothesis that the data is independent. Hence we cannot simply apply the t-test.
The bigger problem with the above analysis is that the CPI uses the last January prices as a base when calculating the index. You can read more about how the CPI is calculated in the technical manual.

In practice, the item indices are computed with reference to prices collected in January.

You can see this effect in the following section of the data:

> df %>% filter(ITEM_ID == 610310) %>% select(INDEX_DATE, ALL_GM_INDEX, ITEM_DESC) %>% filter(INDEX_DATE <= as.Date("2009-02-01")) %>% print(n = 100) # A tibble: 25 × 3 INDEX_DATE ALL_GM_INDEX ITEM_DESC    1 2007-02-01 99.4 ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 2 2007-03-01 102. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 3 2007-04-01 106. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 4 2007-05-01 110. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 5 2007-06-01 111. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 6 2007-07-01 111. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 7 2007-08-01 110. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 8 2007-09-01 109. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 9 2007-10-01 112. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 10 2007-11-01 116. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 11 2007-12-01 118. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 12 2008-01-01 120. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 13 2008-02-01 100. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 14 2008-03-01 102. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 15 2008-04-01 104. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 16 2008-05-01 108. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 17 2008-06-01 113. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 18 2008-07-01 114. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 19 2008-08-01 109. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 20 2008-09-01 107. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 21 2008-10-01 101. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 22 2008-11-01 91.6 ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 23 2008-12-01 85.9 ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 24 2009-01-01 83.0 ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 25 2009-02-01 104. ULTRA LOW SULPHUR PETROL CPI 

As you can see, there is a big jump every February when the base price changes to the prior month. Consider a situation when prices dropped by 10% in January then remained unchanged. What you'll see in the data is 100 (December), 90 (January), 100 (February), 100 (March) etc. So it would appear that prices dropped in January only. However, in reality the prices remained at 90. What you are measuring is the change of the inflation base prices.
So what has been the effect of the tax cut? To determine this I have re-based the data set at January 2005 prices. Then I've taken the log, seasonally adjusted the data, run the augmented Dickey-Fuller and the Breusch-Pagan tests on the diff to ensure stationarity. Then I've fitted an ARIMAX model on the data with an external regressor having value zero before the tax cut and one afterwards.
The results are that the tax cut yielded a reduction in the price of tampons of 4% with p-value of 0.0003265771. You can see a plot of the tampon price here. The tax cut is equivalent to 4.8% of the price. Hence the majority of the savings were, in fact, passed on.
I have also run the same process above for each of the 13 example products in the report, which they claim experience similar price drop to the tampons. Some of the prices are heteroscedastic.

# A tibble: 5 × 5 Description Regression P ADF BP      1 BOYS T-SHIRT 3-13 YEARS 0.0107 0.669 0.01 0.000000273 2 DISP NAPPIES, SPEC TYPE, 20-60 0.0309 0.0659 0.01 0.00809 3 MEN'S T-SHIRT SHORT SLEEVED -0.00891 0.611 0.01 0.000570 4 TOOTHBRUSH 0.103 0.000313 0.01 0.0101 5 TOOTHPASTE (SPECIFY SIZE) 0.0469 0.0563 0.01 0.00121 

From the rest, the only items with statistically significant effect are the following three.

# A tibble: 3 × 5 Description Regression P ADF BP      1 BABY WIPES 50-85 0.103 0.0000661 0.01 0.500 2 PLASTERS-20-40 PACK 0.0274 0.0328 0.01 0.329 3 TOILET ROLLS 0.0521 0.0226 0.01 0.196 

As you can see, none experience a price decrease like the tampons.

SOURCE
I'm going to do something a bit different and take a close look at two major works from the DC Universe: Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier, and James Robinson and Paul Smith's The Golden Age. If you're playing along at home, the texts I'm using are The Absolute New Frontier from 2006 and The Golden Age trade paperback from 1995.
First a bit of personal context: I didn't enjoy The New Frontier when it first came out, serialized in six quite expensive installments. I loved Cooke's art, I loved the use of some of the more obscure DC war characters, and I loved the characterization of the Martian Manhunter, but the narrative didn't work for me when read in small monthly doses back in 2004. I had read all of the full-length work Cooke had done up until 2004, and none of it had disappointed me at all. But The New Frontier seemed to read more like a tour through the 1950s and 1960s than an actual story. It wasn't until the final issue that I really understood what Cooke was leading up to, but then it was over, and I didn't have the time or the inclination to dig out the back issues and read the whole thing in one sitting. Even when I got the two-volume trade paperback collection a couple of years ago (in an eBay lot of trade paperbacks I bought off of none other than comic book scholar George Khoury), I still didn't bother to read it. To paraphrase Hemingway's Frederic Henry, we don't do the things we want to do.
So I never actually read the entire text of The New Frontier until this past winter, when I was able to sit down with the luxurious Absolute edition and dive into Cooke's illustrated world. I enjoyed it immensely, enough that I wanted to reread it again this summer, which is what I have just done, and now I want to talk about it. But I don't want to talk about it in isolation, and I'm interested in the connection between texts, so I'll also talk about its logical precursor: The Golden Age.
Like The New Frontier, Robinson and Smith's The Golden Age deals with the era between the 1940s and the 1960s. The era in which the comic book Golden Age grew into the comic book Silver Age. The era in which America was undergoing its own transformation, moving from threats abroad to suspicion at home. And just as I had difficulty enjoying The New Frontier as a serialized comic, I couldn't appreciate The Golden Age in that manner either. I only bought the first two issues, actually, back in the early 1990s, and then I lost interest, vaguely thinking that I might buy it as a collected edition some day (even though collections were not guaranteed the way they are today). I did buy it when the trade paperback was released, and because I had never finished it originally, I read the collection immediately. And I liked it. But I thought it was deeply flawed.
I reread The Golden Age yesterday, after thinking about it in regards to The New Frontier. It's not a surprising connection, after all. Cooke himself claims The Golden Age as an inspiration for his own work. But my memory of The Golden Age was a bit hazy, and I recalled it being a much more cynical view of the territory than what Cooke achieved in The New Frontier. My recall was pretty accurate--Robinson and Smith present a quite cynical view of the late Golden Age America.
Now that I've read both works back-to-back, I'm interested in exploring what each says about super-heroes, what each says about America, and how each achieves its (very different) effects. These are the kinds of things I'll be looking at over the next few days.
James Robinson's use of History in The Golden Age
One of the things that strikes me about both The New Frontier and The Golden Age is the way the creators weave American history into their stories. On the surface, such a technique might not be surprising, especially considering that both tales take place in the past. And while it may be true that a so-called "historical novel" or "period film" would be amiss to neglect the details of history which fit its setting, the same isn't always true for comics.
In comics, stories set in the past tend to take place in some vague memory of the past, without any apparent intent in locking the stories into a particular date or era. Take the typical origin stories, or "Year One" stories which DC Comics' creators have retold again and again. In such a story, whether it be Miller and Mazzuchelli's take on Batman, or Waid, Augustyn, and Kitson's take on the Justice League, the setting lacks a distinct time stamp. The characters are younger, true, but the setting lacks specific period detail. The reason for this isn't at all surprising, because locking the characters' past into a specific date would require some major explanations about their ages in the present. Had Miller time-stamped the date on Batman: Year One, and included captions saying "May 3rd, 1980," or whatever, then that might have worked for a few years, but even if we assume that Batman was only 23 when he took inspiration from that window-smashing flying rodent, according to that temporal continuity, he'd be 50 years old in the current stories. And he's clearly not.
So we expect stories set in the past to avoid any kind of specific references to contemporary history, at least in comics. A recent jarring exception to that can be found in Diggle and Jock's newly released Green Arrow: Year One, in which a young Oliver Queen references the "Kevin Costner" Robin Hood. That means Queen must have become Green Arrow sometime in the mid-1990s, which might explain his age today (if he was 22 in 1992, he'd be 37 today, which might be right), but it also implies that his son Connor must only be a teenager today, and he's clearly older than that. Perhaps the reference will work better 10 years from now when the Kevin Costner reference will become part of the vague historical past, but right now it seems too current to make sense.
Anyway, the other MAJOR exception to the rule of not using historical references in comics is the case of stories set during World War II. Even comic books written at the time of WWII regularly included time-stamp references in a way that later comics tended to avoid. Yes, since then, Superman has met Kennedy, and you might see analogues of Bill Clinton or George W. in a story or two, but in the 1940s heroes came face to face with major historical figures (contemporaries to them) on an almost daily basis. Here's FDR! Here's Superman grabbing Hitler on a cover! Here's Tojo! Here's Hawkman enlisting in the army to fight overseas! Etc. Such close ties between "comic book reality" and real-life events never matched the heights of the WWII comics.
And that's why later writers, Roy Thomas MOST prominently among them (he practically invented the whole idea of historical nostalgia super-hero comics), felt compelled to weave actual historical events into the retelling of stories from the WWII era. Thomas's Invaders for Marvel and his All-Star Squadron for DC playfully fit the timeline of actual US history into the fictional timeline of the past super-heroes. In his letter columns, Thomas would often explain (or justify, for the more contentious fans) how the chronology worked.
But, other than WWII era-stories, most comic book stories that take place in the past (unless they are time travel stories, which have their own rules) DO NOT USE SPECIFIC HISTORICAL REFERENCES. It's weird to imagine novels or films avoiding such references—they would surely be criticized for it—but in comics, it's commonplace.
So, in the case of both The New Frontier and The Golden Age, you have two rather significant violations of that standard "rule." And both of which seem deeply indebted to the type of approach Roy Thomas favored so much.
Let's take The Golden Age first, since it was published a decade before Cooke's work. The Golden Age seems like a logical off-shoot of Thomas's All-Star Squadron. It features many of the same characters, and Johnny Quick, a relatively obscure DC character from the past, would certainly not have been a suitable narrator for the story without the characterization Thomas provided in years of All-Star Squadron stories. James Robinson is clearly building on the foundation Thomas created. So, it's not surprising that he would, like Thomas, blend US history into his story. Yet Robinson's approach differs in two distinct ways: (1) He doesn't seem interested in the exact historical details and how they fit into his timeline—he seems more interested in the general sense of historical forces of the time, and (2) Unlike Thomas, who was writing out of a Golden and Silver Age optimism and a belief in the American Dream, Robinson was writing from a post-Watchmen perspective, as a foreign-born writer, who could play with the cynical expectations of the time.
Thus, Robinson gives us coke-sniffing "super-heroes," corruption, brutality, and sex in a tale which features the "pure" heroes of the DC Golden Age of comics. Robinson's approach is not to use specific elements of McCarthyism or the Red Scare (even though those ideas are referenced at least once), but to use the general sense of paranoia and panic, the cynical manipulation of the public for personal gain, and the looming threat of the bomb.
Ultimately, however, Robinson uses all of this as a backdrop for a traditional super-hero romp. The coke-sniffing "super-hero" turns out to be Hitler in disguise!!! (Well, actually the brain of Hitler in the body of a former kid sidekick—talk about a symbol of corruption!) And the hero-turned-power-hungry-politician in the form of the patriotic Mr. America turns out to be old JSA villain the Ultra-Humanite, who knows a thing or two about brain transplants. So, in the end, it's just a classic Golden Age story about punching Hitler and defeating an evil genius.
But it's Robinson's historical subtext which makes the story resonate. It's his use of those undercurrents of paranoia and despair which make these formerly perfect heroes of the past seem flawed and human. His story starts dark and becomes darker but, by the end, Robinson's veil of cynicism falls away, and he reveals himself to be a humanist, if not an optimist. His reverence for these Golden Age characters would not let them be truly corrupted—it had to be evil masterminds and Hitler all along.
And that, perhaps, is one of the failures of The Golden Age. The shock of the initial chapters is just a ruse, and as low as these characters seem to sink, everything can be explained by pseudo-science and comic book logic.
It's just another Justice Society of America story, ultimately, but it's a good one. And Robinson's use of the undercurrents from that era of history make it work, even if it never transcends its roots.
The New Frontier and Camelot
While The Golden Age used the historical subtext to evoke currents of paranoia and doom in a super-hero story, The New Frontier approaches history with a different agenda. As Ultimate Matt pointed out in response to yesterday's post, The Golden Age is labeled an "Elseworlds" title, which not only grants it an exemption from DC continuity, but it allows more freedom for the creators to take the characters and setting in a fresh direction.
The New Frontier, however, is not labeled as an "Elseworlds." And yet, it strays far more from the currently accepted version of continuity than The Golden Age does. The key word there is "accepted." Darwyn Cooke, in his annotations, states that he approached The New Frontier with a set of rules:

1. The timeline is real and covers 1945 to 1960. Silver Age characters appear at the time DC started publishing them.
   
2. Retcons haven't happened yet.
   
3. No New Frontier retcons could contradict original continuity—they had to complement existing continuity or show a fresh point of view.
   
4. When the story ended, everything had to be as it was when the JLA debuted in Brave and the Bold #28.
   
5. Snapper Carr does not exist.
   

In other words, you should be able to pull out your original comics from that era (or the Archive editions) and read them concurrently with The New Frontier and nothing Cooke does should contradict what happens in those old comics.
The problem with the continuity is that the comics from that era didn't have any continuity. It was never explained how a character could be on the moon in one issue of his own comic, and under the ocean in the same month in his Justice League adventure. All Golden and Silver Age DC continuity is a retcon. So what Cooke did was create his own continuity—he made his own sense out of the various adventures as they were originally published, although the bulk of the book deals with the time between major events. Just like The Golden Age, The New Frontier is about filling in the gaps.
While James Robinson filled the pre-Silver Age gap with an almost allegorical tale of Cold War paranoia and corruption, Darwyn Cooke fills the gap with a sense of wonder and idealism, and he uses his attitude toward history to solidify that tone.
Cooke's approach takes three strands: (1) The Right Stuff-inspired history of that era, embodied by the test pilots and early astronauts, (2) The early promise of the Kennedy administration, and (3) The strange DC comics history as seen in the stories published during that time. Cooke uses the first two strands to illuminate the latter. He puts the Silver Age ascension into perspective as part of a generation of hope and achievement. He shows that the formation of the Justice League was not a random incident, but part of a larger historical movement which led (in our reality) to things like the Peace Corps and Apollo 11.
Cooke ties together such disparate elements as The War that Time Forgot, The Challengers of the Unknown, Dr. Seuss, and all of the characters who would join the initial incarnation of the JLA into a single narrative. And although it takes quite a while before the villain emerges and the heroes band together, the narrative is structured around the real historical forces that would have shaped the creation of these characters. John Broome doesn't wax poetically about the symbolism of Hal Jordan's career as a test pilot in the original Green Lantern run from the Silver Age, but Cooke takes the fact that he was a test pilot and places him in the actual context of such a man. He even includes a scene where the young Jordan meets Chuck Yeager.
That's quite a different approach to history than we saw in The Golden Age, which covers a very similar time frame.
Although Cooke didn't intend (according to his "rules") to change any of the original stories, his interpretation of "fresh point of view" allows him to add things which would have been more historically true even if they weren't addressed in the comics of the time. For example, he not only changes Wonder Woman into an almost plump, hawkish, zestful character (to signify her Greek origins and Amazon heritage), but he creates an entirely new character to illuminate the civil rights struggle of the time. Since he had no black DC characters to draw upon, he created a Silver Age analogue to Steel, the black Superman ally. The Silver Age Steel, unlike his modern equivalent, isn't a technological marvel. Instead, this earlier incarnation of John Henry suffers at the hands of the KKK before taking vengeance, and ultimately dying when he's betrayed by an uncaring white America (symbolized by a blonde little girl, who points out his location to his pursuers). John Henry never meets the Justice League or teams up with any heroes. His death doesn't affect them at all, really, since they didn't know him. But Cooke includes a scene where Edward R. Murrow mourns the fallen hero and laments the state of the country, bringing an actual historical personage into the DC story.
The civil rights subplot, although powerful, is overwhelmed by the exceeding optimism of the other plot threads. Cooke's America, as full of conflict as it might have been, is one of scientific progress and movement toward a brighter future. His villain, ultimately revealed to be Dinosaur Island itself (a sentient being who has unleashed monster after monster), is even more absurd than the Hitler-brain-transplant nemesis in The Golden Age, but because Cooke accentuates the fun and spectacle of the super-heroes (and, to be clear, his emphasis is on the men and women in the costumes, and the risks they take for their heroism), the absurdity of the villain doesn't detract from the story.
Both The Golden Age and The New Frontier end with similar images (the first appearance of the Justice League banded together) and similar sentiments (hope for the future), but where James Robinson built that hope out of the wreckage of the 1940s, Darwyn Cooke builds it out of the dreams of the men and women who sacrificed for the promise of tomorrow.
Both books end with optimism for comic books and optimism for our country, but they took starkly different approaches to get there.
The Unstoppable Force of Progress: Characterization in The New Frontier
Since both The New Frontier and The Golden Age re imagine comic book chronology through one part actual US history, one part comic book history, and one part imagination, it's not surprising to find both Cooke and Robinson taking liberties with the characterization of these pre-Silver Age heroes. Both creators ask the question asked by any creator attempting to retell stories from the past: Okay, this is how they were portrayed, but what were the characters who did these things REALLY like?
I'll start by looking at The New Frontier. Cooke doesn't focus his story on one dominant point of view the way Robinson does (with Johnny Quick), but he tells his story through a few central characters:
Rick Flagg: Leader of the WWII-era Suicide Squad (and presumably the father, or grandfather, of the Ostrander-penned incarnation). Cooke presents him as a tough guy cliché. He's a Hemingway hero—he does what needs to be done and doesn't whine about it or waver in his determination. In Act III of the narrative, his position in the story is replaced by the similarly-characterized King Faraday, who also does what needs to be done, although he seems to have more internal conflict than Flagg. Faraday is a spy, after all, not a soldier. But both characters represent a government which has the best interests of the country in mind. If they hurt a few individuals along the way, that's a necessary sacrifice for the good of the many.
Hal Jordan: The man who would be Green Lantern is NOT portrayed as a cocky rocket jock, as he usually is in contemporary interpretations. Cooke turns his lack of fear into a self-destructive streak stemming from his face-to-face act of self-defense in Korea. In Cooke's universe, Jordan doesn't immediately become a hero just because an alien handed him a ring. It takes time for Jordan to learn that he deserves to be a hero, and that's a large part of what The New Frontier is about. He doesn't reveal himself in Green Lantern costume until AFTER he risks his life to save the world working as a pilot. The two-page "hero shot" of the characters walking towards camera (a la The Right Stuff) shows some costumed heroes, but Jordan is wearing a flight suit. Cooke seems to be showing that he needed to prove himself TO himself before he could accept his new identity, but his reluctance to use the power of the ring leads to Nathaniel Adam's death. (Adam is later reborn as Captain Atom in the comics, but that doesn't happen in this story, and as far as Jordan should be concerned, Adam is dead.) Cooke doesn't provide Jordan with any time for remorse, though, since he needs to use his ring to kick alien butt. The ring, by the way, is also shown as a symbol of destructive energy. When Jordan first uses it, he cannot control it, and it causes great damage. Cooke, then, seems to indicate that the ring might symbolize nuclear energy, and the subtext would be that Jordan's hesitance to use it led to another hero's death. Ultimately, Jordan is Cooke's symbol of the Kennedy era: conflicted, yet determined to bring forth a positive future—harnessing great powers for the good of the nation (and the world).
John Jones, the Manhunter from Mars: Jones says, "...this is a world where good and evil struggle in all levels of existence. I want to be a force for good." That's a simplistic view of humanity, but it's one seemingly shared by Cooke throughout this work. Good and evil may not be easily discernible on the surface, and Cooke gives us the threatening-looking John Henry (with a hangman's hood) as a hero and a little blonde girl as a villain, but the line between good and evil is absolute (and, in fact, John Jones assumes the role of a film-noirish detective so he can find the evil beneath the surface appearance of the world). Jones defines this ethical stance for the reader, and it represents the code of Golden and Silver Age comic books, which lacked anything but absolutes. Even though Cooke might try to provide some not-so-subtle shades of gray (Jordan as a murderer, Wonder Woman as feminist avenger, an undercurrent of xenophobia), his view of history seems to echo the simplicity of the comic book stories of the era. Individuals may not have always done the right things at all times, but it was an era of progress, and good triumphed over evil. The subtext could also indicate that governmental order triumphed over chaotic nature, with the unified heroes, under the leadership of the US government, destroying a threat that wasn't so much malicious as it was animalistic.
Even though Cooke's characterization of some of these characters, Hal Jordan in particular, might not match traditional representations of these individuals, I think it works in the context of the story. The characters serve the story and add a few layers to the text, but it's primarily a historical action spectacle, a celebration of progress over stagnation, and Cooke's characterization unifies the text. I don't think his characters have many hidden depths, but I think their lack of depth matches a story which is primarily about the grand force of history.
As one final observation: Cooke is actually better at small character moments with the minor characters than he is at developing convincing lead characters. The death of Johnny Cloud, Jimmy Olsen's eagerness, the sassiness of Carol Ferris, and several other character bits show Cooke's facility on the small scale, even if his epic narrative doesn't provide the opportunity for subtle nuances with the major characters.
Characterization in The Golden Age: Dragging Heroes to Earth
While Cooke ignores anyone else's retroactive continuity to graft archetypal personalities onto the early Silver Age heroes in The New Frontier, Robinson takes characters straight out of Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron (like Johnny Quick on the left here) and Young All-Stars and sends them on a dark journey into the 1950s. Robinson does not re imagine these characters drastically, although he seems to do so with Mr. America (but that's part of his narrative ruse). Instead, he takes their established characterization and expands upon it by adding seeds of self-doubt, paranoia, and despair as the characters face a world in which the villains are not as easily identified as they once were. Robinson misdirects the reader at first by pretending to adopt a simplified Watchmen approach, pretending that he's showing what these characters would have been like without costumed villains to fight or gangsters to punch, when, in truth, he's simply changed the nature of the evil to something more covert and less easy to spot. (Which might seem Watchmen-esque as well, except Alan Moore showed us that the heroes were the villains in that story, and here, Robinson ultimately reveals that secret villains with brain-transplant powers were behind the whole thing from the beginning.)
Here's a quick rundown of the central characters in The Golden Age:
Johnny Chambers, a.k.a Johnny Quick: Johnny not only provides the book-ends to the story but, as a documentary filmmaker, he provides the exposition which sets up the story context. One of the things Robinson does NOT do well here, by the way, is clearly distinguish between narrative voice (provided through white, rectangular caption boxes), and newsreel voice over (also provided by white, rectangular caption boxes), although perhaps the colorist was supposed to use different color cues for each and didn't. The CHARACTERS who narrate, like Johnny Chambers, each have their own style of caption—Johnny's are rounded and blue, as you can see in the image. Actually, it's not that it's so difficult to identify the narrative voice, it's just that there is an omniscient narrator who pops up every once in a while for no good reason, and tells us things about the story sometimes, while other times he sounds like he's trying to give us character thoughts but not really: the highly subjective "fingers...fumbling...focusing...trying to..." immediately follows the objective "a photographer lurks among the rubble." The photographer is the one who's fingers are supposedly fumbling as he tries to snap the photo, so why does the caption sound like a bad Batman internal monologue? This really has nothing to do with Johnny Chambers, but I just wanted to point out this major flaw in the narration throughout. With so many characters (Johnny being one) actually providing narration through captions, why does Robinson add an omniscient narrator also? It's jarring and ineffective. It's like he took the strategies of Watchmen with the multiple points of view, and then spliced the conventional narrator on top of it. It just doesn't work.
But a few more things about Johnny: He smokes, and he wears glasses. He still has his powers, but even though they would help him in his day job, he doesn't use them. And he's incredibly suspicious, which is the characteristic that makes him the character the reader most identifies with. He's also lost the woman he loves because he works too hard, although he gets her back in the end. In short, he's a slightly older (although he actually seems to get younger as the story progresses, perhaps symbolizing his return to heroic stature), slightly more sullen, slightly more flawed version of the character we saw in the comics produced in the 1980s (even though those stories were set in the 1940s). He refers to his costumed self as "That Jerk!" at the beginning of the story, but ends on a hopeful note as he describes a "new age...fresh and clear and bright...as sterling silver!" He's never really a cynic, but his pessimism and self-loathing turns to optimism in the end (even quickly dismissing the threat of McCarthyism to look ahead to the glowing future of super-heroics).
Paul Kirk, a.k.a Manhunter: If we play out the James-Robinson-is-trying-to-do-Watchmen-but-not-as-well game a bit more, we could say that if Johnny Chambers is the Dan Dreiberg analogue (the low-self-esteem voice of reason and calm) then Paul Kirk is clearly the Rorschach character. He's the crazy one who will surely upset the apple cart, yet isn't that what has to happen in order to get to the truth? That's his role, anyway. Unlike Rorschach (in his insane way), Kirk doesn't have a methodical approach to uncovering the truth. In fact, he's tormented by the truth, which lies buried beneath mind implants, exploding into awareness only through a series of horrible dreams. He seems deeply disturbed because of the War, but he's actually deeply disturbed because of the secrets he knows. He's another character, like Johnny, who seems to become more youthful and vibrant in the final Act, when he is able to unleash his demons through old-fashioned fisticuffs. Unlike Johnny, though, he visibly suffers for a long time before he reaches the point of action. Here's a sample of his internal monologue from one of his many tortured dreams: "Save the eagle. Save it. Save—n...no...nooooohhhh!!" Then he wakes up and thinks, "Still afraid." That's about the extent of his characterization. He's tormented, fearful, and knows he should be better than that. And, "save the eagle?" Geez, I wonder what in the world that could possibly mean in a book about corruption within the American government. Clearly, even though this book is directed at an older audience than the original Golden Age tales, Robinson keeps his symbolism quite simplistic.
Tex Thompson, a.k.a. Mr. America, and Daniel Dunbar, a.k.a. Dan the Dyna-Mite: These are the two characters most radically changed from their Golden Age counterparts. Mr. America was a whip-wielding patriotic hero and Dan was a kid sidekick who later, under Roy Thomas's writerly guidance, became one of the lead characters in Young All-Stars. In Robinson's story, Mr. America becomes a corrupt politician who seeks power by any means necessary, and Dan the Dyna-Mite becomes America's beloved Dynaman, the only active costumed crime fighter of the time. And he snorts coke. And he's evil.
Neither of these two characters have internal monologues via captions for the reader, because that would give away the twist. Tex Thompson is not really who he seems, for he has the brain of the evil Ultra-Humanite (who has in previous stories adopted the forms of a gigantic white gorilla and a hot ex-starlet, among others). And Daniel Dunbar, who has fallen so far from grace in our eyes (a former teen sidekick with a drug problem whoring around) actually has the BRAIN OF ADOLF HITLER!
So there's not much to say about the characterization here, since these are two evil characters in the most simplistic way. What is interesting, though, is that (a) Robinson chooses one character, Thompson, who seems vaguely sleazy to modern readers anyway, what with that whip and the mustache, and when he's shown to be corrupt, we can buy into it, falling into Robinson's trap of thinking that it's just a regular dude becoming corrupted by power; and (b) Robinson's use of the pure and innocent Dunbar is also a good choice, because it is not only shocking to see him corrupted so extremely (before the truth of the brain-swap is revealed), but it's a nod to cultural expectations about former child stars, who, by the 1990s, were expected to grow up and become criminals or drug addicts or worse, at least by our tabloid-fascinated society.
Like a director who makes his film better through excellent casting, Robinson uses the right two ex-heroes in the apparent role of the villains. His bait-and-switch works, although I was personally disappointed that the threat turned out to be external (evil villains) and not the corruption of these characters from within.
Robinson uses other characters to show the corruption of innocence and loss of the heroic dream. Robotman, so noble in Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron, has lost any humanity by the time of this story—he's pure machine, while Alan Scott, Green Lantern is conflicted about his duty as a business leader and law-abiding citizen and his passion for ring-slinging and butt-kicking. Hourman is shown to be addicted to his Miraclo pills, while the man once known as the Tarantula is an egoist with writer's block. Ted Knight, Starman, who Robinson would go on to write with great depth and sensitivity in the ongoing series about Jack Knight, is a mad genius who is trying to put the pieces of this shattered world together through science.
I should add here that Robinson, unlike Cooke, isn't drawing from the original sources as the basis for his story. He's adapting his characterizations from the work done during contemporary comics, as Roy Thomas provided retroactive characterization (and explanations) for the WWII-era heroes. Robinson is building on the layers which Roy Thomas built upon the layers which Gardner Fox (among others) built.
Overall, Robinson does provide a sense of disillusionment in his characterizations in this story, even if his narrative technique is sometimes sloppy or inconsistent. Cooke tried to add a bit of humanity to iconic characters in his work, but he was mostly interested in the icons of the era. Robinson drags his characters down into the muck and then builds them back up again, hoping to show how their inner humanity wins out (with all of its flaws) in the face of systematic adversity. Cooke's characters inhabit the skies, the stars. Robinson's characters live on the ground.
So, the final verdict, after looking at The Golden Age and The New Frontier for a week: Not much different than my initial assessment after reading them both last weekend. The Golden Age is flawed because of its inconsistent narrative point of view and it's cheap, brain-swapping revelations. Robinson and Smith capture the disillusionment and paranoia of the time quite well, but it all amounts to nothing except a superhero slug fest in the end. It's 80% of a great work, and 20% of stuff that doesn't quite fit (including the optimistic ending, which seems unearned). As part of a larger, genre-wide trend to make super-heroes more "realistic," violent, and depressing, I'm not a huge fan of its influence.
The New Frontier is flawed, but it's a flawed masterpiece, and I can imagine revisiting the story many times in the future (and I can't say the same about The Golden Age). Cooke tries to include too much in the narrative, and the main threat of Monster Island isn't presented as well as it needs to be, but the book contains dozens of amazing sequences, and it features sharp, engaging characters who flash in and out of the story. The speed of the narrative demands that the book be read quickly, and it works best when read this way, not because it allows the reader to gloss over the weak parts of the story, but because The New Frontier is an overture, and can be best appreciated when all of its notes are heard in rapid sequence. I didn't love it when it first came out, in the completely inappropriate floppy installments, but I loved it after reading the Absolute version a week ago, and I love it just as much after studying it closely all week.
As one final thought: Both The Golden Age and The New Frontier tap so deeply into comic book lore, and I am so deeply embedded in it myself, that I wonder if either of these works has any merit for a "civilian" reader. And I wonder if, perhaps, the darker, more "realistic" tone would be appealing to a non-comics fan, more so, perhaps, than the wide-eyed optimism (tinged with bits of darkness) seen in Cooke's work. Or would the non-comics fan find both stories completely useless and without merit? Are both works examples of the snake swallowing its own tail? I've already been swallowed by the snake of comic book geekery, so I can't answer that one.