Legends #2

Writers: John Ostrander & Len Wein
Artists: John Byrne & Karl Kesel

So - what's the point of Legends?

From a market perspective, Legends was supposed to help reintroduce some characters into the post-Crisis Mythos: Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, a new incarnation of the Justice League, the Wally West version of the Flash, the new Suicide Squad, and probably a few more I am forgetting.

From a theme/aesthetic perspective, the idea seems to be call into question our need for heroic storytelling. Well, not really call it into question, since, as opposed to things like Squadron Supreme or Watchmen, we already really know what the answer will be, but you know what I mean.

The writers put what could be words from a "serious" comics critics in G. Gordon Godfrey's mouth: "I feel the very concept of the hero has become trite and outmoded! Today's high-powered world is too sophisticated, too complicated, simply too dangerous for such an outdated notion as the heroic ideal! It's time we put all such childish notions behind us!" (In fact, I'm pretty sure that you can find these exact sentiments on this recent thread from the TCJ message board).

Of course, this is all part of Darkseid's plot.

Which reminds me...

The first issue ended with what I felt was a very effective moment: Billy Batson vowing to never again become Captain Marvel because he had accidentally electrocuted a giant Kirby-esque villain. That had some teeth to it, but here we find out that, no, Cap wasn't responsible at all. It was all part of Darkseid's plan: Darkseid had Macro-Man rigged with dynamite that would explode when Cap had his lightning bolt strike, which Cap was psychically induced by Darkseid's minions to call down.

This is a big problem with these kinds of "event" comics (at least until recently - I'm not completely up to date): the creators want to change things up and introduce new ideas, but, whoops, they can't really be too new and the can't challenge any of the givens of the "property".

But the bait-and-switch here feels a little like editorial weaseling. They want Cap to face a moral choice, but they want to make sure that the moral choice has no teeth to it.

Actually, after a little more reflection, I think the problem here is that Ostrander and Wein are fumbling the details. Darkseid's overall plan - destroy Earth's heroes by having the public turn against them - is solid enough. But writer's scene-to-scene execution of this plan is spotty at best. Darkseid should be able to come up with gambits that are a lot less clumsy than these. This gets back to the Fault Line Question: Kirby's Darkseid deserves to be much more than merely the Big Bad of the Week/Month/Year.

The rest of the issue features scenes of regular folks buying into Godfrey's message and turning on various heroes. Some of these scenes work, but most of them feel a little "off" in some way - somehow not true to the characters involved. For instance, an angry crowd turns against Batman and Robin. Not a bad idea in itself, but it isn't handled very well. For one thing, it just doesn't feel right to have Batman out in broad daylight in a mall. For another, it is almost a complete deal-breaker that Batman would abandon Robin to the mob, as he does here - leaving Robin to get beaten!

The similar scene with the Blue Beetle works much better.

The highlight scene might be the one between Reagan and Superman, where the Pres explains that he needs to call on all heroes to cease their activities in order to quell the growing tide of public distrust. It's interesting to see Ostrander and Wein try to bring elements of TDKR and Watchmen into a mainstream DCU title.

I should also note that the Phantom Stranger shows up hanging out with Darkseid and I have no idea where he came from. Was he introduced in one of the tie-in issues that I don't have? I'm not sure and there's no indication given here about where I should look for an answer.

Legends #1 - "Once Upon a Time...!"

Writers: John Ostrander & Len Wein
Artists: John Byrne & Karl Kesel

Since the second Flash series "spun out" of Legends, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at it. I'm glad I did! A lot of my recent theoretical/critical musings on DC comics have been based on half-remembered comics read long ago, so I'm never quite sure how well they'll stand up when tested against the thing itself. For example, I was looking for evidence of the benefits of writing Mythos-centric super-hero comics, but, so far, the Baron/Guice run on Flash has mostly shown the costs of this kind of writing.

So, on an admittedly self-centered level, I find Legends interesting because it confirms some of my ideas about the way DC's different "ages" break down in terms of (a) the relationship of the Mythos to the World and (b) the amount of self-reflexivity in the writing.

We open on Apokolips, with some pitch-perfect caption writing from Len Wein:

"Here, where even miles-high columns of flame spewed ceaselessly by awesome energy-pits fail to penetrate the eternal darkness, joy is unknown and hope is a capital offense..."

Hey - here's another theory:

There are a couple of what I'd call "Fault Line Questions" that creators (meaning writers, artists, and editorial) need to deal with when they're mucking around with the DC Mythos. These are questions that cry out to be answered, but attempts to answer them definitively usually end up creating some kind of rupture in the Mythos, which then needs to be addressed in turn, leading to a cycle of Perpetual Crises.

Maybe the biggest Fault Line Questions is "What do we do with Superman?" But coming in second is probably "What do we do with the Fourth World?"

I don't want to characterize the Fourth World as "Kirby's Last Gasp" (I think his work throughout the 9170s was pretty strong), but it was his last (or, arguably, only) chance of creating an entire "Universe" of his own. Unlike the DCU proper, which was made up of bits and pieces foraged from various Golden Age comics, the Fourth World was a coherent creation of a singular artistic vision - one of the strongest, and most singular in all of comics (and not just super-hero comics). And it also represents one of the last major "explosions" of creativity in mainstream super-hero comics (in order: the initial Golden Age boom, Julie Schwartz's Silver Age refurbishments, the Stan Lee et al.'s Marvel Age, and, finally, the Fourth World).

So, on the one hand, you've got this incredibly rich and evocative cast of characters and series of storylines. So rich and so evocative that they form the core of one of the major pop culture events of the last forty years. On the other hand, the Fourth World is palpably its own thing, or rather, Kirby's own thing. It is not quite compatible with the DCU, even though Kirby's attempt to make it so are among his most interesting comics.

With Legends, DC was trying to set up some overarching storylines and themes for a post-Crisis DCU and, following The Great Darkness Saga, they pick Darkseid to be the new Big Bad. Early into the first issue, he gives us a Title for the series and its Argument. Ranting about those accursed super-heroes of Earth, he says:

"To some these puny creatures are legends, the stories of their greatness inspiring others to greatness as well! Perhaps the time has come to strike at the core of the problem -- to destroy the very concept of such legends!"

So begins Operation Humiliation!

A quick comics-in-the-good-old-days note: Ostrander, Wein, and Byrne pull off some economical storytelling here. We get a quick set-up and then jump right into the action.

From a Flash-project p.o.v., it's interesting to see that a lot of the themes Baron has to work with are set up here. (How does that bear on the issues being discussed in these comments?)

We're also introduced to Glorious Godfrey, who has come to Earth in the disguise of media pundit G. Gordon Godfrey, speaking out against super-heroes. Anti-super hero punditry isn't a new development (see J. Jonah Jameson), but I get the sense that this particular incarnation is very much inspired by Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, which finished up a few months before Legends began.

The first issue ends with something that I had forgotten, but was like "Oh, yeah - I remember that!" after I re-read it. Captain Marvel is caught in the grip of a giant Kirby-lite villain called Macro-Man (John Byrne has drawn him so he looks like a midget Galactus). To escape, Cap yells "Shazam!", thinking that as Billy Batson he'll be able to wriggle free. But, alas, the magic lightning bolt fries Macro-Man to death! Guilt stricken, Billy vows never to become Captain Marvel again.

Though this sounds grim, surprisingly enough it's a pretty effective moment. Unfortunately, just around the corner in Legends, we'll get some narrative weaseling that will completely undermine any impact this had. (On second thought, James, maybe you're right!)

Flash v. 2 #5 and Flash v. 2 #6

Writer: Mike Baron
Artists: Jackson Guice, Larry Mahlstedt, & Jack Torrance

I use "On the one hand/On the other" formulations a lot in my writing not so much because I'm trying to see all sides of a work of art, but because I want my writing to convey the sense I have of working through art instead of passing judgment on it. If that makes me seem wishy-washy, well, then, so be it.

Anyway, the "On the one hand" operating here: it's in these two issues that everything Baron and Guice have been trying to do finally clicks into place. Wally goes up against Speeds McGee - a ragin', 'roid abusin' bad guy who seems like he could have come out of the darkest issues of Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme. There are quite a few good "spectacle" scenes that revolve around Speeds' lack of control of his super powers. Baron and Guice don't play this as slapstick, but rather as more sci-fi-ish detail.

The "On the other hand" is that the whole thing is kicked off by having Speeds beat up his wife, who is also Flash's girlfriend. That kind of thing usually strikes me as a bit of a cheap trick: an artificial way to ramp up the emotional stakes and an easy way to come off as serious.

Baron is on much firmer footing with his throwaway realistic details, like the idea that the town Wally just moved to can no longer afford liability insurance because of the fear that a super-hero's presence will attract attacks from super-villains.

And, though Speeds McGee isn't that original of an idea - he's another "Rival" Flash - Baron uses him pretty effectively. His 'roid rage and his lack of control make him a good foil for Wally.

It all leads to the best fight scene we've had yet, but, interestingly enough, it is, once again, somewhat anticlimactic: Flash doesn't defeat Speeds - Speeds just wears himself out through 'roid abuse.

These two issues definitely fit into the wave of "realistic" leaning super-hero stories from that time - Watchmen, the New Universe, the Wild Card stories, the Mike Grell's Longbow Hunters version of Green Arrow, and probably a bunch more. (I'll also mention Squadron Supreme, because even though it came out a year or two earlier, it's my favorite). Though Baron's work on Nexus and Badger probably helped to originate this trend, here he seems to be just riding the wave.

One of the reasons I started going back through my old issues of Flash is that I wanted to see what specific benefits creators have when working within the DC Mythos, especially since there are a lot of costs involved. However, so far, I don't get the sense that Baron is able to actualize much of that potential benefit. He obviously knows how to write super-hero comics, but, based on this series, it doesn't seem that he has a particular affinity for writing DC super-hero comics.

Flash v. 2 #4 - "Kill the Kilg%re"

Writer: Mike Baron
Artists: Jackson Guice & Larry Mahlstedt

I love this issue's cover - the best so far - which strikes the right pulpy sci-fi-ish feel for this incarnation of the character.

What's interesting from a contemporary perspective is the way that Cold War paranoia has seeped into the storyline: they come up with a plan to stop Kilg%re - turn off all the power in the world - but the US government flacks balk because they're afraid the Soviets might use that as an opportunity to make a sneak attack.

The first action sequence in this issue is the first in the series that really flat out works, but there's still not much in the way of interesting use of Flash's super-powers.

I've also been going through the B&W first volume of Showcase Presents The Flash, as a kind of supplement to this exercise, and I can't help but note how inventive John Broome and Carmine Infantino are when it comes to figuring out different ways to show Flash using his powers. One of the premises of Baron/Guice's run is that while Flash is still really fast, he has lost a lot of his super-speed. He's not longer able to reach light speed or travel around the world eight times in one second. This is part of the overall move towards a more down-to-earth version of superheroics, but it also seems to have cut off opportunities for spectacular, flashy action.

The final fight is better, though: it's more of a chase and it emphasizes speed and motion.

I've been hard on Guice's work, but I should point out he's not at all a bad comics artist. He has a good sense of space and pacing. His figure drawing and characterizations are fairly expressive. However, four issues in, he hasn't yet shown that he's particularly comfortable as a super-hero comics artist and he hasn't been able to turn his discomfort into a virtue (a la Don Heck).

Overall, though, the book has recovered from the second issue's misstep.

Flash v. 2 #3 - "The Kilg%re"

"His finger."

Writer: Mike Baron
Artists: Jackson Guice & Larry Mahlstedt

Baron opens with Wally getting a speeding ticket while driving his new sports car (remember the lotto win). The irony is a bit too thick for me, but the tone is back on track after the confusion of last issue.

After that, Wally finds out that Frances has moved out on him. Did all DC comics of the late 80s go for this quasi-PG-13 feel?

Guice continues to have problems - IMO - drawing Flash in costume. He still always seems too posed, especially when he's in the same panel as "normal" characters. Looking at the GCD, it seems that at this point Guice had some experience drawing super-heroes, but not tons of it. He is unable to successfully integrate Flash into the rest of the action: he's always popping out, as if he were a cut-out figure.

I'd also point out that the fight with Vandal Savage from the last issue was a pretty standard super-hero fight. There's no reason it couldn't have been Daredevil versus some Man Mountain goon. That is: neither Guice nor Baron have done much with Flash's superspeed.

That's always a danger with the day-in-the-life approach to a fantastic subject. The spectacle - superpowers in action - is part of the draw of the premise. But day-in-the-life works partly by muting the spectacle.

So far, the best visuals were in the first issue's cross country trek, which was also had an effective matter-of-fact, all-in-a-day's-work feel to it. But it's hard to hit this balance: Kurt Busiek managed it only some of the time in the early Astro City stories.

The bad guy in this issue fits in much better to Baron's overall take on the character: Kilg%re is a giant other-dimensional robot, trapped just outside of "now". There's some neat background commentary on our reliance on technology: Kilg%re praises the humanoids for terraforming their planet to fit his needs.

Why I like Kilg%re more than Vandal Savage as a villain in this series: Kilg%re is a neat, contempo sci-fi idea (he anticipates some of the monsters from Grant Morrison-era JLA) that fits in well with Baron's contempo sci-fi-ish approach. There are many super-hero comics where Vandal Savage would fit right in, but (so far) this is not one of them.

I should also note the introduction of Tina McGee and the possibility of some more PG-13-ish stuff in the form of an affair between Flash and a married woman!

Flash v. 2 #2

Writer: Mike Baron
Artists: Jackson Guice & Larry Mahlstedt

Vandal Savage made his appearance last issue, but here he's the main attraction. I'm not sure, but I think this might have been Savage's post-Crisis reintroduction. The problem is that Baron can't quite seem to make Savage - or at least this version of Savage - fit into what he's trying to do.

I think that super-hero comics are always full of elements that "don't fit". One of the jobs of the super-hero auteur is to make it seem like they fit, whether through sheer force of artistic personality (the Jack Kirby-Frank Miller approach) or some kind of narrative sleight-of-hand (the approach taken by John Broome or Grant Morrison or Roy Thomas). What's a little strange about Baron struggling with this here is that he had licked this problem in Nexus and, it seems (I say seems because I'm just starting to read it for the first time), Badger. I'd like to know whether or not using Vandal Savage was something editorial forced on him or if Baron thought he could work some of that Badger/Ham magic.

But it never really comes together. Savage is a major villain, but he comes off here as a two-bit operator. That was often part of the charm of Bronze and Silver Age comics, but the gestures Baron has been making towards day-in-the-life-of realism aren't compatible with it. Baron lays on the mumbo jumbo and he seems to almost give up on trying to write evocative dialogue. Here's an exchange between Savange and Flash:

Savage: "I cannot die, therefore I kill."
Flash: "I don't understand."
Savage: "You do not live long enough to understand."

I don't like to pick on dialogue, especially out-of-context like this. Comics are a visual medium and the important question is always whether or not it works visually. But this little snippet sticks out because it is so much worse than any of the other writing in the series up to this point. I take it as more evidence that Baron just didn't know what to do with Savage.

I did like the final fight though, which features Frances Kane using her magnetic powers to TK a fork into Savage's face. You go girl! The fight and the issue end somewhat anti-climatically. Savage isn't really defeated: it's more like he had enough and decided to split.

Baron keeps up some of the motifs from the first issue: there's still a focus on Flash's health/biology/metabolism - he keeps going back to the hospital.

But in other areas, realism is completely hand waved. Like: Flash is supposed to be an ace hacker. I can't recall that this little element ever popped up again. (But I guess we'll see).

No commentary on this issue would be complete without mentioning that Wally wears the most Godawful ugly purple suit when he goes out dancing.

Flash v. 2 #1 - "Happy Birthday Wally"

"I can feel the heart sloshing around on my back. What am I doing?!"

Writer: Mike Baron
Artists: Jackson Guice & Larry Mahlstedt

There's something very stilted about the way Jackson Guice draws Flash when he's in his costume. He does just fine with Wall West in civvies and he doesn't do a bad job with the other costumed characters, but his Flash always looks uncomfortably posed.

Mike Baron sets up his central idea pretty quickly: Wally struggles at being a hero and is living in Barry Allen's shadow.

Interesting in that this is a first issue, but there's very little in the way of an origin story or a synopsis for new readers. It seems to assume you know who Barry Allen is, that he died, that Wally West used to be his sidekick, that until recently Wally was still going by the name Kid Flash, and that he's a member of the Teen Titans. All of this comes out in passing, but none of it is laid out for the reader.

I'm not sure that this assumption is a bad thing in and of itself, although it suggests to me that bringing in new readers either wasn't a priority or, if it was a priority, it wasn't something that was being carried out in any kind of methodical manner.

Baron adds a number of light science-fictional touches. Wally's superspeed is tied into his super metabolism, so him having to eat and sleep a lot becomes a recurring motif. The idea is: having superpowers has a real world cost.

Baron comes up with another neat idea related to Flash's powers: Wally is sometimes moving too fast to fully take things in. His double-take at Vandal Savange is pretty neatly staged.

More bits of "reality": Flash doesn't have an income, so he can't afford to be a complete altruist. He offers his services to a hospital trying to deliver a heart for transplant in exchange for health coverage.

Baron is explicit with this theme. He has Wally tell us that Barry "died owing thousands of dollars in legal bills... He left me his costumes. And a picture of what a hero should be."

What a hero should be and what Wally is actually able to do is the conflict here. While delivering the heart, he passes by an accident, leaves a man to die in the snow, and leaves Vandal Savage to the police. Baron is focusing on the idea that Wally has to make choices, has to sacrifice: he only has a certain amount of energy and choosing to spend it one way rather than another has consequences.

But Baron's approach isn't operatic: there's much more of an "all in a day's work" feel to the action here.

Finally, this ends on an interesting note: Wally wins the lottery. It isn't unprecedented for a super-hero comic to deal with economics in this way (there's that Fantastic Four story where the team goes bankrupt), but the lottery is a pretty bizarre touch. It's like a wish fulfillment fantasy put on top of another wish fulfillment fantasy that Baron has been poking with a stick.

We'll see how it goes.

Three Comics Notes

I.

In a great post on dogs in comics, Jim Henley characterizes the original Crisis as DC's first "laborious attempts to 'clean up' and modernize their continuity, which they believe should always be done in full view of readers, over months (lately, years) of time, across all their books at once, which may seem like it offers all the excitement of watching stage hands set up props between acts but which goes on for a lot longer."

I think what he's saying is partially true, but I'm coming around to the belief that it's actually a good thing. Or at least a good/bad thing. To get the bad out of the way: it is nakedly consumerist. There's something a little bit off-putting about DC's huge, Mythos-spanning stories costing more per month than a high-end Netflix membership - especially when the quality of the books is uneven at best.

And I think that a lot of smart people who grew up with and out of DC's super hero comics tend to look at things Jim's way: that it is perverse and even fetishistic to expend so much time and energy on stage-managing "continuity".

But for me, the perversity of the endeavor - its uniqueness - is what makes it so interesting. There is simply nothing else like it.

Uniqueness doesn't necessarily equal aesthetic value, but, in this case, I think uniqueness does give the auteurs of these comics something they couldn't get anywhere else.

The exact nature of that something is still a subject for further research here.

II.

Tom Spurgeon's post on the Siegel case is a necessary reminder that there are real world consequences and implications to all of this:

Comics is an industry built on exploitation. No amount of giving each other awards, or doing work of a noble sort off the books and behind the scenes, or reforming a system so that it becomes in some cases slightly less horrible -- none of it changes that basic fact. The level of discourse between DC Comics and Jerry Siegel should surprise only in that nearly every single creative professional sees in its talk of necessary abortions and unfit artists an exchange they've endured, a relationship they've suffered, a dismissal of idea or an ambition they've experienced. We are the only industry that so loves its Colonel Parkers and so distrusts its Elvis Presleys. That managers and makers have spent equal time this summer preening in the spotlight of appreciation brought by a world starved for idiosyncratic creation shows just how damaged we've become.

As an aside: I started thinking about the comparison between the way DC and the comics industry in general treated Siegel and the way RKO and Hollywood in general treated Orson Welles. In both cases, the treatment was despicable. But, building on one of Tom's points, Siegel was exploited by the comics industry, but (following the argument put forth in Jonathan Rosenbaum's Discovering Orson Welles) it was Welles who "exploited" Hollywood in order to get Kane made.

The cases become a little more comparable when we look at how Kane is held up today as an example of "Hollywood" at its best, even though, at the time, Hollywood did it's best to make sure no one saw the movie and would go on to ensure that Welles never worked with that kind of freedom in Hollywood again.

But, still, Kane didn't create Hollywood in the way that Siegel (and Shuster) created super-hero comics.

So, almost any way you look at it, the comics industry ends up coming out behind Hollywood when it comes to how it treated its artists.

How the exploitation of Siegel effects the way we respond to something like Morrison's All-Star Superman is also a subject of further research. (But for a start: (1) give Siegel the prasie he deserves, (2) avoid "blaming the victim", (3) remember that DC's concern for the bottom line has laways trumped their any corncern they had for ethical and aesthetic values).

III.

Finally, in his review of Watchmen Sean writes:

Instead, what strikes me hardest here, what I don't think I ever thought about all that much before, is how much power the story draws from its uniformly engaging sad-sack main characters. I think it's here that Dave Gibbons's contribution is at its most valuable, with his all but countless shots of heroes and do-gooders worrying, frowning, furrowing their brows, being uncertain. It must be noted that this is worlds away from the Identity Crisis-style vogue for angst and selfish over-emoting. All the characters in those "you'll believe a man can cry"-type supercomics are just as 100% sure of their emotional experience as their relentlessly upbeat Silver Age counterparts used to be. Not so in Watchmen, where the primary mode of emotional interaction with the world is confused dismay. The mileage Moore can get out of this is almost inexhaustible. These aren't emo Batmen, they're Tony Sopranos and Seth Bullocks, idiosyncratic and troubling portraits of great physical strength and moral violence juxtaposed against tremendous emotional and psychological weakness. Their failures--and they spend pretty much the whole book failing--are hard to stomach, especially giving the truly impressive air of impending doom Moore creates out of snippets of current-events and vox-pop cutaways; we hope for their success even though the art and the script both do everything they can to show us without coming out and saying it that their failure is inevitable. I'll tell you, reading the book this time around, when Rorschach takes off his mask at the end and yells "Do it!" at Dr. Manhattan, tears streaming down his face, I nearly started to cry. To me now, it's almost as devastating as that line "I did it thirty-five minutes ago" and the subsequent reaction shot were 11 years ago.

This gives me yet another opportunity to get on my particular Dave Gibbons/Watchmen hobby horse. The failure, IMO, as represented through the figure drawing, is primarily a failure to defy gravity.

Infinite

The evolution of an idea:

1. Sean Collins reviews The Great Darkness Saga collection, praises elements of the book, then writes:

Now, is this a great comic book? No. It's too rooted in house-style artistic aesthetics, expository dialogue, self-referential continuity, corny jokes, and everything else you'd expect from a basic superhero comic of the early '80s.

2. Partly inspired by reading the Silver Age criticism at Mike Grost's site (which, by the way, is an amazing resource), asked whether there are any comics that are rooted in house-style etc. but that are also great.

3. This question is in the back of my mind during my walks to-and-from work: keep thinking about Geoff Johns' run on The Flash and the Wolfman/Perez Teen Titans comics, which are among favorite "conventional" super-hero comics.

4. Thoughts turn more generally to conventional super hero comics that deal with "real world" issues. Wonder why some I like (Geoff Johns on The Flash), some I really, really don't (Identity Crisis).

5. Out of fairness, re-read Identity Crisis. Maybe I was too harsh the first time around. Maybe I missed something.

6. Decide I didn't miss anything, but start trying to clarify my thoughts on the series.

7. Begin a blog post about Identity Crisis:

In the past, I've often fallen into the trap of trying to frame my dislike of a work of art as a principled objection to something inherent in the work's very conception, rather than as a [ed. note: sentence never finished]. Earlier this year, that's essentially what I was doing when I described my dislike of Identity Crisis to a film critic friend who doesn't follow comic books, but enjoys the occasional super-hero movie. My argument was that you can't deal with rape in a Justice League story: the presence of Silver Age characters like Elongated Man undermines the seriousness of the rape, the rape undermines the integrity of the Silver Age characters. The principled objection: this kind of realistic take on super-heroes is inherently flawed.

Using that objection as the basis for my case that Identity Crisis was a bad comic was a bit of posturing, because I had certainly read and enjoyed a lot of serious super-hero comics. But I had always been a bit, well, dishonest - with myself and with others - by playing that down. I liked the Marv Wolfman/George Perez Teen Titans comics and Geoff Johns's run on The Flash, but I wasn't going to talk about them as anything but a kind of guilty pleasure.

Part of the problem is that I had gotten into the habit of looking at super-hero comics from the point of view of someone who hadn't read them for much of his life: focusing on how they would come across to an "outsider". This would have been a reasonable enough thing to do if I had been talking about expanding the audience for super-hero comic books, but I am more and more convinced that it was almost completely useless for any kind of criticism.

This is all an elaborate way to get to this: I still dislike Identity Crisis. I still think it's bad super-hero comics. Not because it tries to mix Silver Age heroes with serious subject matter, but for much more nuts and bolts reasons.

The first issue opens with Elongated Man and Firehawk on a stakeout. This sequence really sets out Brad Meltzer's M.O.:

(1) A focus on second or third rate heroes who constantly make reference to their second or third rate status. Self-consciousness about status issues among heroes and villains is one of the recurring motifs of the series.

(2) Attempts to reframe whimsical/fanciful Silver Age remnants in the mythos into something not whimsical or fanciful, presented as someone giving the inside dope.

(3) [ed. note: never got to number 3]

What Meltzer is doing is familiar enough from comics continuing in the Neal Adams/Denny O'Neil tradition of placing elements from DC's Silver Age into opposition with elements from the real world. How Meltzer is doing it deserves more scrutiny.

8. Get tired of detailed analysis of a comic I don't like (major flaw as a blogger), but like idea of Adams/O'Neil opposing Mythos with "reality". Idea goes back to my criticism of Watchmen, which unlike most criticism of that book, tries to deal with what Dave Gibbons is doing.

9. More thought on walks to-and-from work leads to following theory about DC Mythos:

Golden Age: Mythos creation is ad hoc. Relationship of Mythos to "reality" not an issue. Power comes from seeming anarchy of the proceedings (see The Great Comic Book Heroes).

Silver Age: Mythos creation is part of the purpose of individual stories. How things fit into Mythos is a genuine concern and subject of stories ("Flash of Two Worlds"). Mythos has its own rules that are not those of "reality": per Mike Grost, the "logic" of the Superman Mythos. Mythos has internal integrity: relationship to "reality" is allegorical. Power comes from the intricacy/beauty of this internal consistency.

Bronze Age: Mythos placed in opposition to "reality". Explicitly so in Adams/O'Neil Green Lantern/Green Arrow (that's even the meaning of the "/") and late Bronze Age works like "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" Power comes from unresolved tension between Mythos and "reality".

10. Posit that what comes next is a "Modern Age" that attempts to resolve the contradiction, but that this resolution leads to more problems. Crisis on Infinite Earths leads to an anti-Silver Age. Focus is on instability of the Mythos with regard to Bronze Age "infection" of reality.

11. Get idea that Grant Morrison somehow sidesteps all this. Compose previous post.

12. Start poll on Nerd NYC board based on ideas spun out of Morrison post.

13. Go back to thinking about Geoff Johns. Wonder if Infinite Crisis is different in kind from original Crisis or just different in magnitude.

14. Decide it is a little of both. Infinite Crisis makes revising/reinterpreting the Mythos the central point of the Mythos. Marks some kind of change from what Wolfman et al. were up to.

15. End up feeling deep down really should keep up with Final Crisis. Realize DC's fanboy-centric marketing did its trick. Damn American corporate consumerist culture. Where's Seaguy when you need him?

Grant Morrison

Hard to say what Grant Morrison's greatest contribution to super-hero comics is. But if I had to...

Part of what's great about DC's Silver Age comics is their imaginative mythos. Weisinger's Superman Mythos and Julius Schwartz's Justice League of America Mythos are more than just "continuities" (like the serials that made up the Marvel Universe): they are works of art in their own right, creations that have the same kind of inetegrity as P.G. Woodehouse's Jeeves stories or Lewis Carroll's Alice books or the Ellery Queen mysteries. They are finely wrought - intricate - like clockwork. (I'm influenced here by Mike Grost's informative, interesting, and in-depth criticism of these comics.)

Bronze Age comics placed elements of the Silver Age mythos in a dialectical relationship with "real world issues". The Adams/O'Neil Green Lantern/Green Arrow run is my favorite example. IMO, a lot of the power of these Bronze Age comics comes from the contradiction between "realistic" and "super-hero" NOT being resolved. However, for other people, this contradiction is a major problem.

(Bronze Age Marvel is different from Bronze Age DC because of the difference between Silver Age Marvel and Silver Age DC. For one thing, part of Stan Lee's original strategy was to add "real world" elements into his super-hero comics. For another thing, the Lee/Kirby Marvel Universe was a shaggier beast - much more ad hoc - than the Mythoi crafted by Weisinger and Schwartz. So in Marvel's Bronze Age comics, "the real world" isn't opposed to the Marvel Universe: rather, the comics just continue to add more bits of "reality" to the Marvel Universe. These bits are never fully digested, but they aren't set up against the fantastic elements of the comics in the same way. GL/GA is explicitly about the fanastic encountering the real world.)

Much of DC's "Modern Age" of comics represents an attempt to resolve this contradiction. The Crisis on Infinite Earths invokes a science-fiction premise (multiple worlds) in order to do so. John Byrne and Roger Stern's Man of Steel re-boot attempts to update the sci-fi underpinning of the Superman Mythos.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this project, in theory, but in practice it seems to have lead to a cycle of diminishing returns. The "reality" goal posts keep moving putting the Mythos under more and more stress: hence the necessity for more Crisis-like events. The original Weisinger/Schwartz clockwork became the central cog in an unwieldly, patched-together machine, always on the verge of flying apart.

Grant Morrison's great contribution has been to ignore all of this and return to the kind of comics done in the Silver Age. Morrison's comics are New Silver Age comics, cousins of the New Space Opera sci-fi novels.

In Doom Patrol and Seven Soldiers he crafted his own Mythoi; his JLA existed in its own little New Space Opera pocket of the DCU; his All-Star Superman is a New Space Operatic recasting of Weisinger's Superman Mythos.

The point here is that in none of these works does "reality" play any part. Morrison gives them their own internal logic and integrity.

So that's my suggestion: Morrison's greatest contribution to super-hero comics is to save the DCU from collapsing under the weight of those lingering, unresolved Bronze Age contradictions between the Mythos and the real world.

It's quiet here...

...but I've been busy elsewhere.

Here are some comments I (double) posted on Guillermo Del Toro on Sean T. Collins's blog.

And here's a thread I started about the Universal "Gill Man" movies on nerdnyc.

Transcending the Gimmick

I finally caught up with Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) on DVD. I thought it was effective and diverting, but that, for the most part, it's central gimmick - that the whole thing is meant to be "found footage" - never stopped being just a gimmick. The film would work almost exactly the same way without it. It does add a "conceptual" layer - i.e. it provides a topic for conversation and/or "think pieces" - but it's a surface layer: there's no depth to the concept built into the movie.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but Cloverfield is weak sauce compared to The Blair Witch Project - a movie which I don't particularly like and didn't find all that scary, but where the same gimmick becomes more than just a gimmick because that choice - that the movie is meant to be "found footage" - influences every other choice made by the directors - acting style, cinematography, staging, temporal-spatial integrity, etc.

And as for the marketing angle: the guys who made and sold The Blair Witch Project were genuine independents going for a grassroots approach. That's certainly not the case with Cloverfield.

More on intentions...

I thought Jim Emerson's post on The Happening was interesting and valuable: Emerson goes into detail about Shyamalan's filmmaking choices - his compositions and staging and editing - which is something critics rarely bother to do anymore. (I don't do it either, but I'm not a professional). I still think that he's talking about the movie as a failed attempt at doing something it's not trying to do. Jim's comments seem to be about how he would have filmed the same kind of material and what he needs from that kind of movie. Fair enough - but I think he gives short shrift to the way Shyamalan is consciously going against the grain of how scenes should be filmed (per the conventions of contemporary filmmaking) in order to work out his own visual ideas. For instance: the first classroom scene is constructed to set up the groups vs. individuals motif that runs throughout the movie.

Keith at The House Next Door seems to like The Happening more than anyone else but me and Roger Ebert, but his take is very mixed. Keith's points are interesting because he's definitely a Shyamalan partisan. Like me, he has a lot of admiration for The Lady in the Water. He sees The Happening as a movie partly done in by the compromises Shyamalan makes between his own personal way of making movies and his attempts to appeal to a popular audience. I agree that The Happening is a step back from The Lady in the Water and The Village to something that tries to be more "audience friendly" - like Unbreakable - but, for me, this is kind of relative. After the drubbing he took over The Lady in the Water, it's understandable that he'd do this, but he doesn't pull back too much. The Happening is still very much against the grain.

On the level of interpretation, I don't think the various theories the different characters come up with about the event in The Happening represent an attempt to spell things out to the audience. Rather, I think this plays into Shyamalan's concern with interpretation (a kind of storytelling) in general. I think Signs and The Lady in the Water develop this theme in a more interesting manner, but I don't think the way it is played out here is "preschool".

Five Cases:

(a) My wife and I watched Indiscreet (Stanley Donen, 1958) the other night. She mentioned afterwards that, though she liked the movie, she was unable to completely get into it because Ingrid Bergman's Swedish accent sticks out because Phyllis Calvert, who plays her sister, has an upper-class-ish British accent, and the discrepancy doesn't seem to have been explained (i.e., a line in the script telling us that Bergman was adopted or something else along those lines). But she said this wasn't nearly as bad as Dangerous Liasons (Stephen Frears, 1988) - a movie she was unable to take seriously at all because of the American actors, playing French characters, all speaking with different "affected" accents.

(b) During a discussion about standards of realism on an RPG blog's comment thread, Meg Baker brought up the case of an electrician friend of hers who watched Capote (Bennett Miller, 2005) and was bothered by the fact that "a phone that figures prominently has a wire jack" which would have been "utterly impossible for the era."

(c) A film critic friend (and former teacher) of mine was unable to get into The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999) because he couldn't buy Terrence Stamp as a guy who just got out of jail. "He looked more like he just got back from a Caribbean vacation."

(d) The first time I watched In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993), I had no trouble responding to/engaging with the movie on its own terms. However, I saw it again after having read more about the historical case and the liberties Sheridan and Terry George takes with Gerry Conlon's story, and the movie no longer "worked" for me. While I was still sympathetic to its politics and its overall p.o.v., the fact that the central event - Conlon being imprisoned with his father - had been almost completely fabricated seemed like a betrayal of the audience's trust.

Now: though I think I'm justified, in case (d), I can't help feeling that the people in (a), (b), and (c) are not quite playing fair with the movie. I mean, even though this is subjective, a dislike for incongruous accents, props, or suntans seems, to a certain extent, like something to get over. At least/especially if the movie is coherent in some way: that is, if there are organizing principles at work.

But I can even play devil's advocate against myself, too. Here's another case:


(e) On a message board discussion about how the makers of The King of Kong had not only kept things out of their movie that would complicate the story they were trying to tell but actually manipulated events to get the story they wanted, Luke Crane wrote that these simplifications, omissions, and manipulations did not matter because of the movie's overall truth:

I thought it was great. I was poignantly aware of the artifice of it as I watched, but I couldn't get past the characterizations. Why? Because I know those people! Not personally, but I meet people like that every day in my gamer life. And those on screen portraits were incredibly accurate to what I experience in my day to day.

I'm bringing all this up not to say that anyone was actually right or wrong, but rather to suggest that there is a gray area between approaching a movie as a "generous viewer" - one who engages with it on its own terms - and "discerning viewer" - one who measures the movie against his or her own values/sensibility etc.

Sometimes I get the feeling that unsympathetic viewers will bring in a concept like "historical accuracy" to make their argument against a movie stronger: it gives the impression that they are holding the movie up to an objective standard. This is a suspect maneuver, IMO, because most viewers (general audience members, film critics, and film buffs alike) are not at all consistent in terms of which movies they hold to that standard. "Historical accuracy" is like a club they pick up when they feel the need to beat on movies they don't like. On the other hand, there's something about the way that movies like In the Name of the Father or The King of Kong play around with the facts that definitely bugs me. So, like I said, a gray area.

Talking About The Happening

The Happening is one of only two movies I've seen so far this year about which I feel evangelical (the other one was Boarding Gate).

I went into the theater knowing almost nothing about the movie: I had avoided watching the trailers and hadn't read anything about it. I didn't want to get caught up in the continuing anti-Shyamlan backlash (which seems to have been gorwing ever since Unbreakable). I had wanted to recommend the other people see the movie in the same way - going in clean, if you will - but I also wanted to make sure they were on the right wavelength, so I started bringing up Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur in all my conversations about Shyamalan and the movie. I'm not sure that is "strong" enough, though, so my new suggestion is that people who are watching it make the leap of faith that it is, on its own terms, a complete success. In other words: everything in it is the way it is because that's how it's supposed to be, not because Shyamalan was trying to do something else but failed.

For instance, I don't think Shyamalan was trying to write "realistic" dialogue and somehow screwed up. I don't think he was trying to direct his actors to give gritty, naturalistic performances à la 28 Weeks Later, but couldn't get that across. I don't think he was trying for a thrill-a-minute feel and stumbled into making a movie that was more creepy/dreamy than thrilling/intense.

This isn't to say that because I think it is a success on its own terms, everyone has to like it. Taste and all that is certainly still important: you might not like the way he uses stylized dialogue, you might not respond to the performances, you might think that the creepiness isn't realized as effectively as it could be.

Invisible Connections

The Happening

I.

My case for The Happening - my case for M. Night Shyamalan's movies in general - begins with the suggestion that we should look at it as a contemporary version of the kind of films that Val Lewton made with Jacques Tourneur and not as the kind of large scale thrillers made by Steven Spielberg (Jaws, Poltergeist, War of the Worlds). I bring this up, because a lot of the criticism of The Happening seems to be based on the idea that it is a failed Spielberg movie. Signs, The Village, and The Lady in the Water were subject to the same misapprehension.

A better comparison might be with Brain De Palma, in that De Palma : Hitchcock :: Shyamalan : Lewton and Tourneur, but the differences are more illuminating than the similarities. (a) Shyamalan's movies don't feature direct homages or allusions to other movies; (b) they have a grandeur and solemnity without any distancing irony, in spite of their pulpy, Twilight Zone origins*; (c) where De Palma's project is partly in "updating" Hitchcock - adding in what is "left out" of Hitchcock's movies - Shyamalan's aesthetic and thematic vision centers on what is "left out" - the "fruitful void" (to borrow a term from Ron Edwards that could be used to describe the source of power of the Lewton/Tourneur movies).

Each of these differences ties into larger problems critics (and audiences) have had with his movies, although I'd like to frame them not as problems within the movies but rather as challenges posed by the movies.

II.

I decided I needed to reassess M. Night Shyamalan's career after seeing The Village for a second time after I had been underwhelmed by it when I first saw it in the theaters. I realized that part of what kept me from appreciating it was that I had been expecting it to be something it wasn't. Watching it again - already knowing what it was and able to watch it on its own terms - was a revelation, in a way. Its ambition and audacity - the way it cut across the grain of contemporary big-budget Hollywood filmmaking both in terms of how it was made and how it was presented - struck me as something to be celebrated, not mocked.

But I made the mistake of paying too much attention to the critics' take on his next movie - The Lady in the Water - and missed out on seeing it on a big screen. When I finally caught up with it (spurred on by some comments from David Bordwell), I decided to write about it, but I made another mistake: instead of writing about the movie's strengths, I focused - facetiously - on the three things that had made it a target of critical scorn. I wasn't trying to mount a defense of these "obnoxious" aspects, but rather, by bringing them up, to defuse them. The problem, though, is that because no one was taking this movie seriously to begin with, writing about these choices as "flaws" - instead of, say, defending them on aesthetic/thematic grounds - wasn't a strong way of arguing that we should take the movie seriously. Rather, I think my post would actually have the opposite effect from what I had intended: it gave people more and/or stronger reasons to dismiss the movie. (Because only twelve people read my blog, this might not seem like a big deal - it might even seem like I'm taking myself too seriously - but eleven of them are Shyamalan haters).

III.

But it is important to talk about why critics don't like his movies. I'm not trying to second guess anyone or suggest that they are "wrong" for having a negative reaction to The Village or The Happening. However, I do think that his movies which are anti-critic or rather anti-"film criticism as practiced by American film critics". This is made explicit in The Lady in the Warer, but it is implicit in his other movies.

To start, let's go back to Difference with De Palma (a) - "Lack of homage or allusion". This poses a challenge to critics, because noticing and explaining homages and allusions is central to the practice of film criticism (i.e., is There Will Be Blood more a Kubrick movie or a Malick movie?). I'd argue that it is "more central" when it comes to criticism of "post-classical" Hollywood cinema, where one of the major ways a director working in genre fare can signal that he/she should be taken seriously is by using homage/allusion.

While The Happening has elements that are reminiscent of other movies (Romero's apocalyptic movies come to mind), Shyamalan doesn't deploy these references for in-the-know audience members to pick out.

This brings us - skipping over (b) for a moment - to Difference (c): "What's important is what's left out". Shyamlan's movies place themselves not so much through homage/allusion, but by adopting the strategies of the Lewton/Tourneur chillers where meaning is made by leaving things out - by what is left unseen.

The problem is that you almost need to have this in mind before you see his movies because it goes completely against the way most contemporary Hollywood movies work - even the ones I really like, like Speed Racer or Rambo (to pick the other two movies I liked this year that did not get much support from critics).

The Happening is a great illustration of "what's left out": there are no "fantastical" uses of CGI, no thrill ride sequences, menace is suggested by shots of the wind blowing through the trees - which may be the movie's ultimate Lewtonian motif.

Val Lewton developed his distinctive style because of outside constraints: it was a question of working within limited budgets and disreputable genres. Shyamalan's approach is to work within self-imposed constraints.

Looking at some of his other movies in terms of constraints - which also means in terms of what's left out:

Unbreakable is a super-hero movie without any of the adventure movie trappings of contemporary super-hero movies.

Signs is an alien invasion movie that keeps the alien invasion hidden.

The Lady in the Water restricts itself to one location.

Watching a movie for "what's left out" in an age where so much emphasis is placed on showing new things in new ways takes practice (I'm certainly still working at it). Writing about movies in these terms also takes practice (ditto). For a number of reasons, film critics are generally better at it when dealing with art films, but the important reason here is this is not how we expect to have to watch a Blockbuster.

And that brings us to Difference (b): "Solemnity and grandeur - yes; irony - no."

When I wrote about Speed Racer, I didn't want to spend too much time on the negative critical reaction, but my suspicion was that the Wachowski Brothers daring to be as ambitious as they were with a summer popcorn movie made them a target for scorn. My "evidence" was the much more favorable critical reaction to Transformers. Now - I'm not necessarily suggesting that the Transformers-liking, Speed Racer-loating critics were being dishonest about their tastes and I'm not necessarily suggesting that liking Transformers and loathing Speed Racer is a sign of bad taste. I'm actually not sure that taste has anything to do with it. The judgment on these movies seemed to be a moral one: Transformers was a dumb movie that did nothing new and was fairly sloppily made but it knew its place, whereas Speed Racer - much more carefully made, with a genuine aesthetic and thematic vision behind it - was too ambitious.

The critics have gone after Shyamalan and The Happening in a similar manner: there's always been a fairly popular idea floating around American film criticism that movies with fantasy elements shouldn't take themselves "too seriously" and Shyamalan is definitely a serious filmmaker - though most of his movies, The Happening included, have their own off-beat sense of humor.

Shyamalan certainly takes himself seriously and it shows in his movies. But I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing. He tackles serious subjects, even if he does so in fantastical genres: why not take a serious approach?

I think that a lot of the case against Shyamalan is based on the idea that his movies are not like other Summer Blockbusters. He does his own thing, (mostly) unapologetically. As Roger Ebert and David Bordwell (two of his fans) have pointed out: his filmmaking is somewhat "old fashioned" in its use of long takes and reliance on visuals to carry the movie. He also writes very stylized dialogue - something that is accepted when it comes from the Coen Brothers but, again, not something that we expect from a Blockbuster. (I don't think Shyamalan has a "tin ear", but I do think that he sometimes overestimates his audience's tolerance for stylization.)

Personally, I think his iconoclasm is something to be celebrated and suspect that because it threatens "the way the business works", critics see him as a safe target.

Again - I'm not suggesting that critics should say they like his movies if they actually don't or they should ignore what they see on the screen because of his ambitions. However, the glee some of them seem to be taking in charting his "fall from grace" is pretty sickening. They are approaching The Happening completely unsympathetically and with blinding cynicism. And this is not the kind of "muscularly" directed movie that's likely to win fans through displays of bravura filmmaking (like No Country for Old Men, for example).

IV.

(This section technically contains a spoiler, but it isn't too drastic. And I'm vague enough that you can probably read it without actually spoiling anything).

My favorite scene (at this moment, at least) in The Happening comes towards the end of the movie. The guy in the farmhouse and the girl in the spring house, separated from each other physically, but able to hear each other - magically - through the speaking tube (a "gimmick" that would be right at home in an Edgard G. Ulmer movie). What I love about the scene is the way it brings the movie's thematic and visual ideas together: physical separation, invisible connections; the need to be part of something bigger than yourself, the danger of being part of something bigger than yourself.

If I were doing a long close-reading of the movie, this is the scene I would build towards, as almost every scene - almost every shot - points to it.

V.

All that said, I think The Happening is a step back from The Village and The Lady in the Water. Not a retreat, but a re-grouping. Up until this one, I think Shyamlan's movies got better as they went along, although I can't really choose between The Village and The Lady in the Water. The Lady in the Water in many ways is the "inside-out" version of The Village, where so much that was implied in the earlier movie is brought to the surface and made explicit (i.e., the anti-film criticism element). So, The Village is perhaps more skillfully and subtly crafted, but The Lady in the Water is more daring, taking a bigger risk by putting everything out in the open. And it's a kind of personal risk - in Shyamalan's casting himself in the pivotal, symbol-laden role - that I don't think I've ever seen in a Blockbuster before and have even rarely seen in "art house movies".

With The Happening Shyamalan hedges his bets a little, although he's very far from playing it safe. This is as personal a movie as any he made up until The Lady in the Water and resolutely refuses to provide apocalyptic thrills à la Spielberg's War of the Worlds (a movie which I like, but is working in a far more conventional - if still very effective and virtuosic - manner). However, it's a smaller, more focused movie than his last two. In some ways it is a return to Unbreakable in that it shows Shyamalan applying his "touch" to an established genre.

Despite it's qualified box office success and despite the multiple sold-out showings at the multiplex I saw it in over the weekend, I got the sense that it wasn't winning over any audiences. There was a puzzled response to most of the humorous moments and I heard a few people say things along the lines of "Is that it?" on their way out.

VI.

(More spoilers and this time I'm talking about the endings to all of his movies).

Watching The Village for the second time, I got the idea that Shyamalan had become a victim of his success. The Sixth Sense established him as "the trick ending" guy and he played this up in Unbreakable. In both cases, we learn something at the very end of the movie that changes our understanding of everything that preceded it.

Signs worked somewhat differently, though: in that movie various elements that don't quite make sense during the movie, come together in an unexpected way during the ending. And though it does change our understanding of what came before, that change is really on a metaphysical level.

However, with The Village the notion of the trick ending becomes a burden of sorts as its not quite as effective as a trick or puzzle as those of his earlier movies. For once thing, it has a more obvious solution, but it also doesn't have the same kind of "pulpy" kick. I don't think this hurts the movie, but it does, perhaps, set up false expectations for the audience. So, with The Happening, the other people in the audience seemed to be bummed out that the movie didn't really have a trick ending. "Where's the twist?" a guy behind me yelled out as the credits started to roll. Had he seen The Lady in the Water, which also didn't really have a trick ending, he might not have been as surprised, but I have to wonder to what extent Shyamalan's ability to connect with a popular audience was tied up with the endings of his movies rather than their substance.


*Actually, you can make the case that the best episodes of the original Twilight Zone also had a grandeur and solemnity without any distancing irony.

The Happening

It's probably too late for you, but...

Don't read anything about it.

Don't watch the trailers.

Just go see it.

As soon as possible.

But if you need some kind of encouragement or are the kind of person who doesn't like to go into
a movie cold, here are two words to keep in mind: Lewton, Tourneur.

But, like I said, it's probably already too late.

The first shot of Blind Date (Blake Edwards, 1987) is worth more than all of the frames of every Judd Apatow movie, ever.

I.

First a quote:

Here's a highly speculative thesis, and one I'm not especially prepared to defend, though I've long suspected it has some truth. Starting in the late 1960s audiences became more self-conscious that they were going to the cinemah. They became more conscious viewers, more appreciative of distinctly cinematic flourishes. Even highly commercial films began to project their "style" -- flashy cutting, nice decor, self-conscious acting -- in a way that got viewers' attention, because viewers now were a little bit more demanding than the average viewer of "Red River" or "All That Heaven Allows." Superficially, this new situation might seem to encourage creative and "artistic" film directing. But the great masterpieces of classical Hollywood always worked on two levels: "Red River" was an "oater," a standard Western that fulfilled naive entertainment functions, as well as a film about the interrelationship of landscape to character. On the genre level Hawks or Sirk had to do certain things, whereas on a sub-rosa level (and in Hawks's case, perhaps without even being consciously aware of it) they could do something quite different. And since no one in the studios was really able to see or understand the "sub-rosa level" (if there were such people, then perhaps Harry Cohn could have written "The American Cinema" a decade before Sarris), there were no Harveys who know they understand "cinema" because they cut their teeth viewing a Truffaut movie telling Sirk to cut down on the weirdly-positioned flowers at the sides of the frame, and he had almost total freedom.

But as audiences became more demanding, their demands were not so much for the profundity of Sirk but for the self-conscious and simpler stylizations, of, say, "Far From Heaven," to choose a film that I quite liked. This, paradoxically, encouraged directorial stylists whose flourishes were more obvious, and in which the two levels are collapsed into one, one that because it needs to be able to appeal to mass tastes is almost by definition less profound. Hence we got more "style" but less real art. This is a shift that may have helped Tarantino, but it sure hurt Monte Hellman.

This is one of Fred Camper's posts to the A_film_by discussion group which links up with some of my own observations/speculations inspired by watching The River's Edge (Allan Dwan, 1957) and Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941).

Both of these movies are what I'd describe as Men's Adventure Movies. "Men's Adventure Movie" is also the phrase I used to describe parts of No Country for Old Men.

To what extent this is a real genre - using my definition of genre as dynamic conversations between audiences and artists - rather than a category that makes sense just to me is open for debate, although I'm not sure that I feel too strongly one way or the other and, more importantly, I'm not sure that it matters much. However, I think I should point out the main reason why I'd link these three movies under that heading: they present a male hero, accomplished at manly pursuits (hunting, tracking, wilderness survival), up against a dangerous antagonist, and trapped - by choice or chance - outside of the protective circle of civilization.

(Incidentally, this links into why I don't think the movie version of No Country for Old Men is really much of a Western. That is: it seems to take part in the Western Movie conversation on a fairly superficial level, while jumping right into the center of Men's Adventure Movie concerns).

Using Fred's language Man Hunt and The River's Edge are examples of movies that are working on "two levels", although I tend to think of them as "movies with a wealth of subterranean interest". That is: simply parsing what's on screen in these movies for story stuff - plot, character, literary themes - is going to leave out a lot of what is interesting about these movies - i.e., the way that their directors use design, staging, and composition to create a thematically and aesthetically coherent vision. To put it another way: it isn't exactly that "what they mean" is less important than "how they mean", but that the what's importance is subordinate to, because organized by, the how's.

Watching and thinking about these movies (and then coming across Fred's quote) has helped to me get a clearer understanding of the problems I had with No Country for Old Men.

In these terms:

The Josh Brolin sections of No Country for Old Men mimic this kind of Lang/Dwan "two-level"/"subterranean" movie, but his abrupt exit collapses everything into one level, at which point all of the built up underground meaning is thrown away in favor of an on-the-surface meaning derived from contemporary literary fiction. The problem isn't so much that it's too literary, though, but rather that's it's too literal: that it is on the surface and so comes across like a gambit on the part of the Coen Brothers.

(Comparing/contrasting with Psycho would be an interesting exercise: Hitchcock doesn't back away from playing games with the audience and these games are certainly sites of deeper formal/thematic/aesthetic meaning. What the Coen Brothers are doing is the sledgehammer approach and seems, to me at least, to come out of a certain strain of literary fiction (see Mao II, where the lack of narrative closure is meant to stand in, symbolically, for - broadly speaking - the unknowability of the world).

Anyway, I recommend checking out both Man Hunt and The River's Edge if you get a chance.

II.

I'm always at least a little bit skeptical of critics who use a set of "essentialist" criteria to evaluate art. In popular/folk/semi-popular music, this is often tied into the idea of "authenticity". In movies, we get the people beating the media-specificity drum.

Maybe I should have said I'm only a little bit skeptical, though. I've gone back and forth about this since I started getting seriously into movies when I was in high school, but over the last year I've seen so much praise being heaped on films made by people who are barely filmmakers that I'm becoming less and less skeptical.

The Coen Brothers are certainly not "barely" filmmakers, but I'd like to use them to help tease out some ideas not so much about the decline of filmmaking qua filmmaking but the short shrift it continues to get in lots of discussions about movies as art.

Since re-seeing The Pink Panther last month, I've watched a number of Blake Edwards's other movies that I hadn't seen (Operation Petticoat, Breakfast at Tiffany's) or hadn't seen in a while (The Party, A Fine Mess, The Great Race, Blind Date). Although I loved The Party when I was in high school (I owned a tape that I watched over and over again), I never really thought of it as a particularly well-directed film: I was mainly into Sellers's performance. (I can only guess at how much this had to do with watching a pan-and-scan copy). As with The Pink Panther, seeing these movies in the light of Play Time - see my comments here for an explanation - was a revelation.



One thing I started to think about while watching these movies: if you turned these stories into novels, you would lose what is great about them as movies. And it strikes me that that really isn't the case with the movies made by the Coen Brothers. There are a lot of nice things in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? that a hypothetical "novel version" would have to leave out - the music, for example, or George Clooney's line delivery - but a lot of the "meat" would remain: the way the movie links folk culture, pop culture, and politics and the way it draws on archetypes from "classical" literature, tall tales, and folk songs could make its way unscathed into the O Brother book.

Now, while I can imagine a great short story on the same subject as The Party, I think that the things that are great about that movie (which mostly have to do with a Tati-like milking of the set for thematically apt gags) would simply not make the transition. In other words, the novel of Oh Brother would resemble the movie of Oh Brother more than the short story of The Party would resemble that movie.

I'm not sure that this means that The Party is a greater movie than Oh Brother, but I do think the likelihood that such a claim would provoke derision or (more realistically) that such a claim (or the reasons underlying such a claim) would be dismissed out of hand by a large portion of contempo film buffs/critics/etc. is worth thinking about. (I could be exaggerating this "likely derision", but it is based on my own experiences talking with other film buffs.)

III.

For more insight on the title of this post, see here and here.

Speed Racer

There's simply no way that Speed Racer (The Wachowski Brothers, 2008) could be the kind of revelation that The Matrix was. That movie - which set its digitally-created fantasy world inspired by the aesthetics of anime and the physics of Hong Kong action movies against a "real world" inspired by James Cameron's blue-collar sci-fi actioners - consciously drew the line between old school and new school special effects, not just analog vs. digital, but covertly-digital vs. overtly-digital. During the summer of 1999, it was hard for me not to see The Matrix, with the way its use of digital fx became part of its unifying aesthetic and thematic vision, as pointing the way forward, while The Phantom Menace - which showed George Lucas embracing digital technology with as much, if not more, enthusiasm than the Wachowski Bros. - felt old-fashioned. It looked like Lucas was using the new technology to make a shinier version of the same kind of movie he had made twenty years earlier. If anything, for me (and I don't think I was alone), the CGI seemed to sap the charm out of Star Wars.

Ten years later, things don't look quite the same to me. While my appreciation for The Matrix has grown, most of the movies that followed in its footsteps - including its two sequels - learned only the most superficial lessons from it (its most impressive descendants, Sin City and 300, got as much of their oomph from the visuals from Frank Miller's original comic books as they did from their directors' deployment of digital filmmaking), while the stubbornly old-fashioned tack taken by George Lucas in Attack of the Clones and The Revenge of the Sith gives some retroactive grandeur to The Phantom Menace. I bring this all up because, walking out of Speed Racer, I couldn't help feeling that this was the Wachowski Bros.'s attempt to make a George Lucas movie: their version of The Phantom Menace. More specifically, I think this is their way of "correcting" The Phantom Menace, by making that movie's covertly-digital effects overtly-digital.

For example, the racing sequences in Speed Racer are elaborations on the pod racing from The Phantom Menace. Both draw from video games (especially the F-Zero series), but the Wachowskis not only play up that connection, they take a common element from video racing games - the "ghost car" and use it narratively and thematically.

Somewhat more esoterically, while there always seems to be a disconnect between the human actors and the CGI-covered green screen background in The Phantom Menace which gives off the effect of watching a "cut scene" from a Japanese computer RPG a la Final Fantasy, the Wachowki Bros. emphasize the disjunction between their human performers and the CGI world they inhabit.

The important paradox of Speed Racer is not that it's the multi-million dollar centerpiece of a (failed) marketing campaign whose message is anti-corporate and pro-small-time-independent, but rather that it is a multi-million dollar movie made by an army of technicians that, nonetheless, draws from and aspires to being a kind of "hand made" work along the lines of Tim and Eric's Awesome Show. What's surprising is the extent to which Speed Racer's status as a "personal movie" is written on its surface, like Tim Burton's Batman Returns and Mars Attacks, as opposed to a "covertly" personal blockbuster, like Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible or Mission to Mars. However, like Mission to Mars, Speed Racer seems to be fundamentally concerned with the contradictions of how (if?) such an industrial system can be used to convey a personal vision.

As a side note: I can certainly understand not liking Speed Racer, but the negative tone taken towards the movie by many film critics, which seemed driven by mean-spiritedness as much as anything else, was troubling. Compare the Metacritic page for Speed Racer with the one for Transformers. Transformers isn't a completely unlikable movie - the ersatz Joe Dante moments making up for the ersatz James Cameron action/suspense sequences - but, even by Michael Bay's standards it is sloppily made and has no ambitions beyond the marketplace. Speed Racer does: as with The Matrix, the Wachowski Bros. are trying for a unified aesthetic and thematic vision, which seems much more personal this time around. Or rather, personal in a different way: The Matrix looks like a collection of their tastes as movie buffs, whereas Speed Racer is their personal statement about being filmmakers. Is this what made Speed Racer more of a target? If so, that's pretty disheartening: essentially arguing for unambitious, paint-by-numbers escapism over any kind of large scale personal/popular filmmaking.

For what it's worth: from a moviegoer's perspective I'm not quite sure to what extent Speed Racer is a success. I certainly enjoyed it and though it was visually and thematically interesting. The acting, overall, is better than in the Matrix trilogy - especially the supporting/background performers. Still, it felt shallower - emotionally and thematically - than The Matrix (let alone Mission to Mars). Although, since this is a family film, a better point of comparison might be: it felt shallower than Brad Bird's Pixar movies. On the other hand, that's just a first impression and unlike 90% of the summer blockbusters I've seen over the last 10 years, Speed Racer is a movie I'm interested in returning to at some point.

Thoughts on: Batman, Super Heroes, Special Effects

I thought about writing up some kind of response to Sean Collins's short, anti-Batman Begins, pro-Tim Burton Batman comment from his recent Carnival of Souls post, but I realized I had already said most of what I have to say about that here. At one point I know that I had meant to mount a more detailed defense of Batman Begins against the specific criticisms Sean had raised in his original post on the movie, but I now figure I'll save any extended writing on that subject for when the sequel comes out.

I will add now that I think the Burton Batman suffers from the same problem as Byran Singer's Superman Returns: a script whose cleverness undermines something integral to the central character. In the case of Batman, making the Joker the killer of Bruce Wayne's parents creates nice narrative symmetry but it reduces Batman's crusade into a conventional revenge story and neatens everything up. The sense that Batman can never truly avenge his parents' death by fighting crime is completely lost because he actually gets to avenge his parents' death. Likewise, the big reveal in Superman Returns undermines any poignancy that the character has for being someone trapped between two worlds, two lives that are not reconcilable.

Anyway...

Seeing Sean describe the Burton Batman as his favorite super-hero movie got me thinking about my own favorites: Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man movies, the first three Superman movies (yes - even III), the three X-Men movies (yes - even The Last Stand), Ang Lee's The Hulk, Batman Returns, and Batman Begins. And Batman and Superman Returns, because, despite my problems with their scripts, they have something most of the other movies (except for The Hulk, where the script also has some "cleverness" problems) on this list lack: a sense of visual poetry and design that characterizes the best super hero comics. For the most part, super-hero movies have only achieved this sporadically (some of the moments in Superman II and III and the first two X-Men movies), instead focusing on a very literal use of special effects to convince us that a man can really fly.

One of the few poetic fx-driven moments in recent super hero flicks...

The two Fantastic Four movies offer the clearest example of what I'm trying to get at: I think they're both fairly enjoyable as lightweight summer spectacles, but the nature of their spectacle is completely within the domain of blockbuster action movie conventions and doesn't even try to achieve an ounce of the power, grandeur, and poetry of the Jack Kirby artwork from the original comics. The movies are as far from the comics as The Man of La Mancha is from Don Quixote.

Better movies suffer from this, too: as much as I like Spider-Man, there's something off-putting about the obvious transformation of Tobey Maguire in a Spider-Man costume to CGI Spider-Man every time he puts on his mask and starts to leap around. In some ways, the much lower-rent sub-Matrix effects in the first two X-Men movies have more integrity.

Considering the ubiquity of special effects and their central place in many comic book movies, I'm a little surprised that there hasn't been more of any effort to deal more systematically with the "poetics of sfx".