Watchmen, Comic Books and the Collapse of Western Civilisation

News of persons reading the original comic while queuing to see the new Watchman movie when it opened last Friday, the better to quickly spot any on-screen heresy, is a portent. Of what exactly it’s hard to say, but it can’t be anything good.

It’s a good experiment always to substitute names to expose prejudice. Persons reading the Bible while queuing to see the Passion of the Christ would lead to sotto voce muttering about Godboys and nutjobs. Pale young men taking a comic as their totemic text cause just a smile. Ah – they must be cool, we think, and pass merrily along.

There is a tacit understanding that people know what’s serious, and what isn’t. But is this really the case?

The film critic Tom Shone wrote a book called Blockbuster in 2004. Shone’s book concentrates on where the culture actually is, rather than where film critics would like it to be. The critics love Woody Allen, the people go to see Spielberg and George Lucas.

Blockbuster identifies just how seriously people are taking these comic book movies. In the penultimate chapter, Shone discusses the Phantom Menace, the movie that was embraced like the second coming of Christ on its release in 1999 by a generation that had grown up with the original Star Wars movie in 1977.

The problem is that while the first Star Wars retains its charm, the Phantom Menace is utterly devoid of same and makes for a dour night at the movies, leavened only by the horror of Jar-Jar Binks.

Did this cause people to stay away? No, it did not. People taught themselves to love the Phantom Menace, just as religious women try to ignore that passage in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that fits so very badly with current enlightened feminist theory (1 Cor 11:7-9, for anyone that wants to look it up). Shone himself puts it best in his book when, after quoting a fan’s internet posting on her determined efforts to like the Phantom Menace even though it’s a terrible picture, Shone writes of "the plaintive sound of a fan, masking her heartbreak, and returning to see the film, again and again, in the hopes that she may one day grow to love it."

People take these things seriously. After the heavy damage sustained by the Western Canon by the successive attacks of modernism, deconstruction and, most virulent of all, the 1960s, people are looking to fill the void that was once filled for intelligent people by the arts or the Church, and they are finding it in the lowest common denominator.

People are looking for messages in texts that were never designed to carry them. Comic book movies are fun for kids, or somebody’s inner child to return to a happy place in an unhappy world. But there seems to be a worryingly large population who are looking to them for life guidance. A lot of these pilgrims have votes. They elect governments.

The theory is that this is not so bad because the comic book itself came of age with the Watchman comic in 1984, and the comic book movie came of age with last year’s Dark Knight. These are darker texts, with fully rounded, recognisably human characters.

What rubbish. There’s nothing in either movie that’s as dark as the harrowing fairytale about the Little Mermaid, and the characters are about as a rounded as a brick.

Heath Ledger won a posthumous Oscar for his portrayal of the Joker in the Dark Knight. When was the last time you met or read of anyone like the Joker in that movie? And if you haven’t read or heard of anyone like him, how can he then be real?

But when you read David Copperfield, you feel a real and palpable shock of recognition when you realise that, even though he’s disfigured her for life, Rosa Dartle will always love James Steerforth. An astonishing level of depth in a walk-in part, written by a man about whom the most frequent criticism is that he was an unredeemable caricaturist.

The most articulate advocate of the mature comic book movie genre is the Chicago film critic Roger Ebert. Before his recent illness, Ebert was on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show when Batman Begins was released, protesting that the movie should have a 15, not a 12, certificate. Adults should be allowed to see an adult Batman movie, Ebert claimed, to applause from the audience.

But if adults are watching Batman, what are the kids watching? Another question to worry about in a world where 300, the film directed by Zach Synder before Watchmen, took $300 million dollars at the box office. Charlotte Mary Yonge must be spinning in her grave.






Technorati Tags: culture, cinema, movies, Watchmen

Why So Serious? The Dark Knight, the Joker and the Comic Book Movie

SPOILERS ahoy. You have been warned.

No cultural event in the West this year will have as much impact as The Dark Knight, this summer’s blockbuster Batman movie. And what An Spailpín Fánach is pondering this morning is whether or not that’s a good or a bad thing.

The Dark Knight is certainly the most enjoyable movie of the summer, if not the year. It is unlikely to win any Oscars, but then the best movies seldom do. What it does guarantee is over two hours of high-octane incandescent thrills, the kind of thrills you can only get at the movies. When the final credits roll it’s hard not to feel worn out by the movie, by the kinetic energy of the thing, and by the weight of its different storylines.

Everything you read about Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker is true too. It’s clear now that Ledger was under-estimated in life, but if a legacy is worth anything in the Hereafter, Ledger will always be remembered for his Joker as a crowning achievement. This is a Joker as you’ve never seen him before, or as you’ve never seen a comic book villain before.

There is no mwaugh-hah-hah laughing or moustache twirling from Ledger's Joker; unlike Nicholson, there is no hint of winking at the camera, and saying “don’t worry, it’s me all the time! See you at the Laker game!” With his fidgeting and twitching, the mouldy makeup and strange sibilant lisping voice, reminiscent of no-one so much as Sylvester J Pussycat of the Looney Tunes fame, Ledger takes the Joker from high camp to that odd guy sitting next to you on the bus last Tuesday, that kept talking to himself and smelt kind of funny. You wonder what sort of home he was going back to, and what he did when he got there.

The fact that the Joker is an out and out loon is the key to The Dark Knight, but also its undoing. The movie is eager to draw parallels between the Joker’s attacks on Gotham City and the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11 on New York – note how often the Joker is referred to as a terrorist in the movie – but the parallel is not the same. Osama Bin Laden might be mad, but he’s not crazy. The Joker is distant from society, but Bin Laden simply comes from a different society, one at odds with the US. If the US is looking for an explanation of what happened in New York seven years ago, they’ll have to search further than The Dark Knight.

Is director Christopher Nolan trying to invest the movie with more meaning than the story can hold? Nolan is English, and it is a fundemental rule of British film criticism that Hollywood blockbusters are infra dig, that Derek Jarman’s Blue will always be a better Saturday night at the movies than the latest Spielberg. And they wonder why the industry is collapsing.

One of the more depresssing moments in recent western culture was when the 9/11 report was published in comic book form. It meant that the US Government recognised that there is a significant tranche of US society that can only understand the real world when it’s explained to them through the biff! bang! kapow! of the comic book world. Because the comic book has become so mainstream, the comic books themselves and the comic book movies that are based on them are trying to support themes and issues that are far more complex than the genre can hold.

The Tim Burton Batman movie of 1989 portrayed the Joker as just another mobster who’s had an accident that’s lead to a murderous psychosis. But now, in the post 9/11 world, when America feels herself at bay from threats overseas, the Joker is the avatar for all that unseen and inexplicable danger. And that’s too much for a comic book character to hold. For instance: If the Joker is such a nut, why do people take orders from him?

The question exists in the movie itself. When Harvey Dent and Sal Maroni are having their little chat in the final act of the movie, and Maroni asks Dent why he’s not going after the Joker, Dent says “the Joker’s a mad dog! I want the men that let the mad dog loose!”

Up to a point, Lord Copper. If the boys that let the Joker off the leash are the boys that are really pulling the strings, why does everything else in the movie point to the Joker as the fons et origo of all evil in Gotham City? While the Joker himself might want to see everything burn, as Sir Michael Caine’s butler points out, most people don’t see it that way. Most people are in it for the money. Especially those people in the criminal henchmen community.

Comic book movies, like the opera, do not do subtle. The opera has the saving grace of the music, of course, which exists beyond – if not above - the rational plane, but the super hero movie has no such respite. The tortured super hero of The Dark Knight and of Superman Returns two years ago do not represent the age; the fact of people looking to comic book characters to find an answer to real world problems is the real story of the age, and one of the more troubling aspects of the culture as the century approach its teens.

The Dark Knight is the movie of the summer and the year so far, and it would be remiss not to note how well the great American city of Chicago looks as Gotham – Midwestern mud in your eye to the hated New Yorkers. But to say that it represents a brave new world in the comic book movie genre is something we’ll be hearing less of as the years go by. That leap has already been made eight years ago, when the first X-Men went on general release.

The miserable third instalment of the franchise has sullied the first film’s legacy, but that first X-Men’s themes of what it’s like to be an outsider in society are perhaps more lasting than anything to be gained from The Dark Knight. Enjoy it for Heath Ledger’s Joker, but if you’re looking for anything else then I’m afraid the joke’s on you.





Technorati Tags: culture, cinema, movies, The Dark Knight

Why is the New Indiana Jones Movie So Very Disappointing?

Nearly a year ago, a photograph of Harrison Ford in his iconic Indiana Jones costume surfaced on the internet. It was the first shot of the standard marketing campaign of major studio movies in the 21st century, the whetting of the fanboy appetite through online media. What the fans did not know until this weekend though, when the movie went on general release all around the world, is that the picture of the aged icon was about as a good as it was going to get.

As William Goldman reminds the world in his book Which Lie Did I Tell?, no-one sets out to make a bad movie. But that is exactly what Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is. People writing that the movie isn’t that bad are either being kind or else are so devoted to the original trilogy that they’re blinded by the glaring flaws in this latest instalment. Most people will leave the theatre with a vague sense of unease – they know they didn’t particularly have a good time, but it wasn’t awful, was it?

Yes, it was. Indiana Jones IV bears all the scars of its protracted birth. The script has been through development hell, and the scorch marks are still to be seen on the celluloid. There are certain fundamentals that must be obeyed in narrative for this type of story to work. An Indiana Jones picture is never going to be Battleship Potemkin; it must obey the rules of genre fiction.

HC McNeile, the man that wrote the Bulldog Drummond stories, believed a good adventure story is like a good golf shot; it should begin explosively, rise swiftly, and then fall to earth, stopping dead at the pin. This is the case in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first movie of the Indiana Jones series. The explosive beginning is the rolling boulder; the revelation that the Nazis have discovered the Ark of the Covenant is the rising arc, and the denouement is God’s terrible vengeance and that guy’s face melting before His wrath. That’s a picture.

By contrast, the narrative of Crystal Skull (one feels so Hollywood in referring to movies in a word or two!) is all over the shop. It’s difficult to follow, there’s too much detail and, overall, it’s hard to really give a fig. In Raiders, Adolf Hitler is attempting to gain control of a device that would render his Reich invincible; in Crystal Skull – um, well, you tell me. What does that skull do exactly, except give John Hurt the opportunity to try his hand at what modern cineastes have to come to understand as the Patrick Stewart or Sir Ian McKellen role?

It’s nice, of course, to see Hurt and Ray Winstone make some good money in this sort of venture, but what purpose do their characters serve, exactly? What do they do? As for Shia LeBeouf, the only reason for his presence seems to be as a person to say “Daddio” at appropriate intervals.

In the slang sense, as opposed to recognising paternity, as it were. Which is another problem with the movie, and one distressingly common to sequels. The temptation in making sequels is to emphasise the character traits that we know and love (and thanks to which the producers are very rich people). Unfortunately, this often happens at the expense of narrative.

Example: when Marion Ravenwood appears in Crystal Skull, she echoes her first appearance in Raiders, with a “well, well, well – if it isn’t Indiana Jones!” type of line. But in Crystal Skull, she sent for Indiana Jones in the first place. She should be expecting him. People don’t always register this of discrepency, but it does generate a vague unease, and this unease then becomes one of the reasons why people leave the theatre wondering why exactly they didn’t have the blast they were hoping for. These sort of inconsistencies litter the script, and they are the stretch marks of time spent in Development Hell. The Jones’s family moment in the quicksand is particularly wretched.

The other things that litter the script are action sequences. Action sequences, even in an action movie, are like sugar in your tea. Just enough is sublime; too much is treacle. There are far too many action sequences in Crystal Skull. It’s like Spielberg and Lucas thought they needed to shove in as many as they could and in doing it they lost a lot of the charm of the original iteration of Indiana Jones.

Which was this: when Indiana Jones gets beaten up, it hurts. It never knocks much of a stir out of James Bond, you’ll notice, even the more realistic Daniel Craig version, who took those shots to the nuts very well indeed, all things considered. But Indy was like TV detective Jim Rockford, getting beaten up all the time and hating it. One of the iconic moments in Raiders was when Indy and Marion are on the steamship, making their escape. Marion is looking at her reflection in one of those reversible mirrors and, in attempting to reverse the mirror, delivers Indy a tremendous upper cut with the end of the mirror. He ruefully rubs his chin and remarks that it’s not the years – it’s the mileage.

Now that Indy is showing both years and mileage, Spielberg and Lucas had a tremendous chance to run with that idea, the vulnerable part of Doctor Jones. And they missed it, every time. There are some throwaway references to Harrison Ford’s age, and the forced setting of the movie in the fifties, which sits particularly badly with the whole flavour of the series, but they don’t work because while they tell, they don’t show, and this is in violation of the one cardinal rule of narrative. It’s an opportunity persistently missed, and it’s very disappointing.

Is there any bright side? Well, the latest trailer for the new Batman, with the late Heath Ledger as The Joker, looks absolutely fantastic. That’s something.




Technorati Tags: culture, cinema, movies, Indiana Jones

Spider-Man 3 is Muck

Friends of your regular correspondent have been trying to break it to me gently. Spider Man 3 is “the weaker of the three films,” they tell me. It’s “not great.”

Up to a point, Lord Copper. Spider Man 3 is “not great” in the same way that living next door to a pig-slurry pit during a heat wave is “not great.” Spider Man 3 bites, and bites big time.

It is unlikely that Spider Man 3 is the worst movie that will be unleashed on an unsuspecting public this summer – anybody else suspect that Fantastic Four teaser trailer is the best bit of the whole movie by a country mile? Me too. Sigh – but what’s especially distressing about the movie is that its worth in artistic terms is in inverse proportion to its worth in monetary terms. In its opening weekend alone, Spider Man 3 grossed $150 million in the US and over $350 million overseas. That’s just fundamentally wrong.

Tell all your friends – if you must go to the movies, give Spider Man a skip. That’s not your Spidey sense tingling – it’s your retch reflex. It’s over-written, over-long and not over half soon enough. I have seldom seen people scurry for the exits more quickly once the credits began to roll, and who could blame them, after suffering the horrors of that terrible, terrible – I mean awful now – ending. How very, very disappointing.





Technorati Tags: Cinema, culture, movies, Spider-Man 3