THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING PT. 2

I've responded to the "anti-superhero" remarks of Martin Scorsese on this blog a couple of times. The first time, my basic conclusion was that Scorsese was most invested in what I'm pleased to term  "the mythos of the drama." This is why, in his 2019 remarks, he places such great emphasis on whether or not a given piece of cinema concerns "the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures." Elsewhere, while speaking of the enormous allure of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, he notes:

The set-pieces in NORTH BY NORTHWEST are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story and the absolute "lostness" of Cary Grant's character.

This quote relates well to the observation I made in my second essay, which didn't really examine Scorsese in depth, though I did reference my personally articulated concepts of artifice and verisimilitude:

...the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

 

Now, Hitchcock did not make "franchise films" in the sense the term is usually employed, in which the franchise offers the audience either continuing characters (Spider-Man, Antoine Doinel) or a series of roughly analogous stories linked by some umbrella concept or theme (Tales from the Crypt). But the Master of Suspense certainly used a situation beloved by espionage stories: that of "fugitive, while seeking to prove his innocence, must seek to prevent catastrophe." This situation can be fairly deemed a "trope" insofar as it has been used, and probably will continue to be used, by many authors to get audiences to invest in the fictional events.

Now, Scorsese says that without the "painful emotions" transmitted to the audience by the Cary Grant character, NORTH BY NORTHWEST would only be "a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts." There's no knowing that this would be the case, for all we can't "un-see" the version of NORTHWEST that we know. But one may fairly wonder if that less emotional version would have looked like Hitchcock's first major version of the aforementioned artifice-trope, 1935's THE 39 STEPS. 

I have not read, and am not likely to read, John Buchan's 1915 novel. Still, the summation I've read of the book makes it sound identical to the situation of Richard Hannay in the 1935 movie as embodied by Robert Donat: that Hannay is pretty close to being an emotional cipher in terms of dramatic intensity. 

And yet, it seems to me that Hitchcock's 39 STEPS is still a great movie, even without "painful emotions," and I also think it's more than the sum of its compositional shots.  It took a relatable, if artificial, situation and engrossed the audience in the outcome of the protagonist's seemingly insoluble dilemma-- often by adding elements foreign to the book, like the romantic angle. Near the movie's end Hannay has tracked the titular spy organization, the 39 Steps, to its base of operations at the London Palladium. There Hannay the ordinary man has an extraordinary insight: the spies plan to use a performer with exceptional memory (also a movie invention) to memorize vital state secrets for transportation elsewhere.

Trouble is, the London police are there too, and they're about to pull Hannay out of the crowd surrounding Mister Memory's stage. On all sides, audience-members are challenging the performer to answer any question put to him: fine details about atomic weights or historical dates and the like. Mister Memory meets every challenge, answers every question put to him, until Hannay, almost in the clutches of the cops, yells to the performer, "What are the 39 Steps!"

The crowd of fair-goers don't have any idea what Hannay is talking about, but they see Mister Memory hesitate at Hannay's inquiry, and they all take up the chant, "What are the 39 Steps?" The viewing audience doesn't know what goes through Mister Memory's mind, for he's even more of a cipher than Hannay. But as if the man can't help responding to a question to which he knows the answer, Mister Memory speaks the literally fatal words, "The 39 Steps is an organization of spies," just before his compatriots shoot him. And his death liberates Richard Hannay.

I've never seen Martin Scorsese say anything about THE 39 STEPS, but I think it impossible that a cineaste like him could avoid loving this scene. And if I am correct on that point, I argue that he wouldn't be loving the scene for its compositional rigor, and he certainly wouldn't be loving it for any character's "contradictory and paradoxical nature." 

He would be loving it because it's a vital part of a puzzle that makes the whole picture come clear. It's a picture that has nothing to do with verisimilitude, with the way people live their lives.

But it has everything to do with artifice, the way people wish they could live.

On a side-note: though Hitchcock did not make franchise-films by the definition I've used above, John Buchan's Richard Hannay enjoyed four more novels after the success of his debut, though as far as I can tell no one ever adapted any of the other Hannay-adventures. And the success of Hitchcock's adaptation of Robert Bloch's PSYCHO eventuated in Bloch doing two sequels to his novel, neither of which were adapted for the other three movies (and teleseries) in Universal's "Norman Bates franchise."

SILVER SCREEN PSYCHO KILLERS

 Responding to remarks about the influence of Hitchcock's 1960 PSYCHO on the history of the psycho-killer subgenre...

I'm only aware of one year-by-year "psychofilmography" of this subgenre, and that's the one compiled by John McCarty in his 1993 MOVIE PSYCHOS AND MADMEN. I don't agree with a number of his inclusions, such as "Jekyll and Hyde" films and "evil mastermind" films like those of Fu Manchu and Doctor Mabuse. But he's generally good about focusing on killers who seem motivated less by gain than by some mad pleasure in killing, usually more than just one victim. His list suggests that, aside from Mister Hyde, supernaturally-endowed psycho-killers barely existed in any quantity before the 1980s, so that most of the malcontents on the list are either uncanny or naturalistic. 

According to McCarty, there's barely anything relevant in cinema's silent years, though Hitchcock's 1926 THE LODGER builds on the legend of Jack the Ripper. I don't consider the original LODGER a true psycho-killer film, though, because the evildoer is mainly important as a catalyst, causing an innocent man to be falsely accused.

Fritz Lang's M heads up the sound era, but it, like most of the other psycho killer films of the thirties, doesn't beget more of its own subgenre kindred. The strongest pattern I see are a series of one-offs on a theme I would call "the mad hobbyist." This means a character who's so obsessed about his hobby that he makes murder integral to his pursuits, thus taking in 1932's MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, 1935's THE RAVEN, and 1936's THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET. 

By contrast, the forties really develop the subgenre as cinema never had before. Many years during this decade can boast (according to McCarty's parameters) as many as four or more psycho-killer films each year. Was there an upsurge in the public's perception of psychology, particularly of the Freudian brand, so that ticket buyers took the subject more seriously as a way to explain deviant behavior? Es posible.

In 1944 we get the first psycho-killer film that spawns, not a sequel or remake, but a wholly different movie in the same idiom. John Brahm's THE LODGER is a wholly different film from Hitchcock's, for the psycho-killer is the focus of the story. The killer's mental makeup is described in much more detail than most thirties parallels, even more than in Lang's M. LODGER was successful enough that the studio got Brahm to do an idiom-sequel for 1945 release, adapting the novel HANGOVER SQUARE in such a way as to duplicate the appeal of LODGER.

A lot of crime-films started using crazed killers, too. Scarface and Little Caesar had their obsessions, but they didn't murder for pleasure like the psycho-crooks of BORN TO KILL, KISS OF DEATH, or Hitchcock's ROPE.

The fifties show roughly roughly the same pattern as the forties, though in this decade we get an idiom-sequel to a "mad hobbyist" flick, when the success of Vincent Price's 1953 remake of MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM leads to his appearance in 1954's THE MAD MAGICIAN. Toward the end of the fifties we're beginning to get a few films like 1958's SCREAMING MIMI and 1959's HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM, which might have encouraged (if not literally influenced) the provenance of not only PSYCHO, but the same-year PEEPING TOM by Michael Powell.

In terms of the history of psycho-killers, PSYCHO's biggest influence was that it provided a pattern that proved easy to follow. Instead of one or two idiom-knockoffs of a successful movie, the "hills" of the 1960s were alive with the sounds of psycho-killings. Going purely by McCarty, year 1966 is the only one that has as few as four such movies, and that's with me eliminating the irrelevant FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN. After 1970, McCarty's list, which concludes with Year 1992, shows almost every year with at least ten such films listed.

And to think-- it all started with a noisy shower.

THE INFORMAL POSTULATE

 As I started the prologue of the 2007 film criticism book HITCHCOCK AND PHILOSOPHY, I encountered this justification of the book's premise:

Many viewers have observed that Alfred Hitchcock focuses on ideas in the construction of his films. The French director-critics Claude Chabrol and Eric Roemer... claimed that each of his classic films is based on a sort of "formal postulate."

I wouldn't go so far as to say that all of Hitchcock's signature works are "idea-centered," but it's certainly fair to say that certain ones, particularly ROPE and VERTIGO, have a sort of ordered intellectual approach that I tend to line up with what I've termed "the didactic potentiality." However, I don't see so much focus on ideas in such films as 1943's SHADOW OF A DOUBT or 1960's PSYCHO. To invoke my own terminology once again, the latter two seem to belong to the mythopoeic potentiality, in that the films focus more on correlations than cogitations.

But I can understand the editors of the Hitchcock book seeking to draw parallels between the popular productions of the director and the high-toned cogitations of philosophy. In fact, even though I don't agree with Chabrol and Roemer, I'm glad that they advanced the term "formal postulate," because this fits in with the rational discursiveness of the didactic potentiality. In contrast, works heavily invested in the mythopoeic potentiality might be said to be more concerned with "informal postulates." This notion reminds me not only of my own notion of "half-truths," but also the way film-critic Raymond Durgnat summarized the appeal of the Frankenstein Monster terms of symbolic oppositions:

The Frankenstein Monster is brutal but pathetic; he's a creature who masters his creator; he's brute material capable of a lofty idealism that, turning sour, makes him a devil-- but a sympathetic one.

But when one wishes to convince others that a given work, medium or genre deserves respect, it's a lot easier to persuade an audience using the idea of formal postulates than informal ones. Informal postulates communicate, "I think this hidden complexity is there,"  while formal postulates make it sound as though the complexity is there for anyone to see. 

I also encountered this preference, possibly expressed on an unconscious level, when I finished Jess Nevins' interview with Alan Moore in the 2004 concordance A BLAZING WORLD. On page 254, one reads Moore claiming that his LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN series is predicated, at least in part, in "pulling down the barriers between High Literature and pulp literature and pornography and low literary forms like that." Makes Moore sound like he's kissing-cousins with Durgnat's advocacy of "the poetry in pulp," right? But then on page 267 he advances this lofty sentiment:

Art is not about reassuring people. We don't read Art to be reassured, we read Art to be challenged and to challenge our assumptions and to maybe extend our ideas in certain areas, which you really can't do without challenging them.

No poetry here, despite the fact that Moore has produced some of the most resonant poetic-pulp in the annals of the comics medium. This "formal postulate" rather sounds a lot like what Northrop Frye wrote of those critics he called "Iliad critics" with respect to their idea of literature's purpose:

Many of our best and wisest critics tend to think of literature as primarily instructive... They feel that its essential function is to illuminate something about life, or reality, or experience, or whatever we call the immediate world outside literature. Thus they tend... to think of literature, taken as a whole, as a vast imaginative allegory, the end of which is a deeper understanding of the nonliterary center of experience...

Without repeating myself too much, I've also noted that Frye's two breeds of critic, "Iliad critics" and "Odyssey critics," seem to line up, respectively. with the mythoi of drama and irony for the first and with comedy and adventure for the second. One might agree with Moore that the former mythoi emphasize the challenging of assumptions, but if so, that would only be because those mythoi depend on putting their characters in deeply conflicted situations. In contrast, it's evident that a great deal of comedy and adventure does offer a kind of "reassurance," though maybe not in the way Moore imagines that reaction. That reassurance might be better compared to Tolkien's concept of "consolation."

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

(I note in passing that in the course of the interview Moore expresses a distaste for Tolkien's signature work in the context of complaining about "big, stupid clashes between good and evil.")

In conclusion, I realize that to some extent the preference for intellectual directness over intuitional indirectness is an individual one. However, knowing that does not make me amend my preferences in any way.

ADDENDUM: I thought I might expand further on the "formal/informal" dichotomy accidentally implied by the editors of HITCHCOCK AND PHILOSOPHY. However, upon re-reading my own CORRELATIONS AND COGITATIONS, I see that I included a reference to Whitehead's concept of "prehensions and apprehensions," glossed by another writer's assertion that the former focuses upon "soulful understanding" (aligned in my system to the mythopoeic potentiality), while  the latter focuses "intellectual understanding" (aligned in my system to the didactic potentiality). That's probably enough expatiation on the "formal/informal" dichotomy for now.

OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS PT. 3

In CAUSAL CONUNDRUMS AGAIN PT. 2 I wrote:

I'm now asserting that causality in a literary context-- which, contra Todorov, is not homologous with the causality human beings experience in life-- has both a cognitive aspect and an affective aspect, summed up as "regularity" and "intelligibility." 

And in the first installment of OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS I defined the uncanny aspect of the film as inherent in Sherlock Holmes' foe Jack the Ripper:

 ...in what qualities does Jack the Ripper's metaphenomenality inhere?  As his only qualification for the metaphenomenal is his status as a "perilous psycho," that metaphenomenality must inhere in a mental, "non-body" quality.  His madness is his method, and therefore his metaphenomenality.

I then debated whether or not Sherlock Holmes' "polymath" qualities might qualify him for as a "mental metaphenomenality," but decided that I would have to re-view STUDY IN TERROR to see whether or not Holmes showed such uncanny qualities himself.  However, in OF SHERLOCK AND PSYCHOS PT. 2 I acknowledged that the Holmes of the 2009 SHERLOCK HOLMES film definitely did use his special deductive powers in an "uncanny" fashion:

What I did not then note is that in this scene Holmes-- who is obviously less heavily muscled than his opponent-- is utilizing his deductive skills as Doyle never did and probably would not have: to suss out his opponent's weaknesses and to plan his attack with machine-like efficiency.  Thus this film, which I have not yet reviewed, would fit the uncanny version of my trope for "uncanny skills." The film's use of graphics to depict the way Holmes thinks-- projecting words or images onto the screen, to share diegetic space with the actors-- also imparts an aura of "strangeness" to Holmes' computer-like cogitations.

I have no problem in stating that this sort of mental acuity, while it does not violate the regularity aspect of causality, does defy its intelligibility aspect, even as does Jack the Ripper's madness. And though I explored a couple of Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories briefly, I have not yet decided whether or not Holmes' unusual command of arcane knowledge can be termed "anti-intelligible." I am tending currently to think not.

Fictional reiterations of Jack the Ripper, though, do not show the same ambivalence. 

I do not render any final verdict here as to whether "the causality human beings experience in life" is entirely naturalistic or not.  But it is certainly of a different order than anything we experience through fiction, and so the two are not homologous.  That said, when I think of the historical figure of Jack the Ripper, I opt for the default characterization that almost everyone does: that he was a real human being who killed out of some lunacy and eluded the law.

I have yet to encounter a fictionalized Jack the Ripper, however, whose spectre does not suggest either "the uncanny" or "the marvelous."  This is in contrast to many other perilous psychos. 


In this essay I showed how Norman Bates, though his character was based on the real-life aberration Ed Gein, exceeded what I now call the intelligibility aspect of causality.  Despite attempts by writer Bloch and director Hitchcock to inject standardized psychological readings of Norman Bates, Norman is not reduced by these readings.  He remains a figure who dominantly suggests the antipathetic affect of dread, as signified by the famous shot of Anthony Perkins at the film's conclusion, which I like to call the "Mona Lisa Death's Head."

Ironically, the A&E BATES MOTEL teleseries manages to reduce Norman to the more mundane level of "fear"-- although to be sure, the opening episodes focus more on the fearful nature of his mother, Norma Bates, and softening Norman as the series works toward its "evolution of a psycho."


I admit that I have not seen or read every fictional portrayal of Jack the Ripper, which this Wikipedia list purports to cover.  There may be renditions of the Ripper that do to him what A&E did to Norman.  Yet because the real Ripper was never apprehended, his figure resists the naturalistic straight-jacket.  Of course, many "imitation Rippers" may fall into this category.

 This 1927 Hitchcock film departs from its source by renaming the serial killer "the Avenger." Further, though Hitchcock had wanted to keep some ambivalence as to the guilt or innocence of the man suspected of being the killer, he was overruled, with the result that the accused man is proved innocent and the real killer, though his capture is mentioned, is never seen on-screen.  Without question Hitchcock introduces visual motifs to suggest the dread associated with a serial-killer boogieman, but one may argue that these are overpowered by the film's naturalistic focus.

And of course, Hitchcock himself did a seventies-era version of this type of serial murderer in 1972's FRENZY, reviewed here.  I noted in the review that despite an early comparison between the film's "Necktie Killer" and the legendary "Jack the Ripper," there was no "strangeness" in Hitchcock's handling of FRENZY's strangler, in contrast to his handling of Norman Bates.

By contrasting Hitchcock's approach to the serial killer in this and a genuinely uncanny film like PSYCHO,  I find that Hitchcock's approach with FRENZY has more in common with his 1943 film SHADOW OF A DOUBT.  In my earlier essay I asserted that the psycho-killer of SHADOW lacked any of the "strange or unworldly aspects" I find in Norman Bates, and the same is true of the "Necktie Killer" in FRENZY, even though he's compared to Jack the Ripper in the film's first ten minutes.

To my knowledge, though, whenever a modern writer attempts to write of the actual Jack the Ripper-- the tendency is to see him through the lens of the uncanny affect of dread, whether he is seen as a man hiding a psychotic secret (A STUDY IN TERROR),  a delver into supernatural secrets (Moore and Campbell's FROM HELL), or even-- as in one novel I won't name to avoid giving away the "big reveal"-- Sherlock Holmes himself.  There are, as I said above, also versions in which Jack the Ripper is some marvelous being, as in Robert Bloch's short story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper." But more than any other famous madman of reality or fiction, the Ripper seems to work best as an image of dread--one that bends, but does not break, the normal configurations of the causal world.

 

SON OF THE LEE-KIRBY DEBATE

I've already held forth here on my reservations regarding the idea of Jack Kirby playing a "lone hand" during his long and estimable career. Still, I threw myself into the debate once more on a listserve, starting with an observation that even if Stan Lee had given Kirby and Steve Ditko every credit that modern fans think that they merited, this credit would never have been noticed by the average person outside comics-fandom. Such outsiders would have continued to believe Stan Lee created everything because he was the most visible figure, just as filmgoers think of Alfred Hitchcock as the sole author of his films, even though he never wrote any of them.

_________________________


My point is that the general public doesn't remember all the collaborators for popular works; average audiences are doing good if they can remember one major player attached to a given work. I'm not necessarily making a one-on-one comparison between Lee and Hitchcock, though I think Lee did marshal talent in a manner comparable to the way Hitchcock did-- an important factor in such collaborative endeavors.

Maybe this comparison will sit better with you: Lee and Frank Capra. To underscore the comparison, Capra wrote a very self-serving autobio in which he basically claimed that he, the director, did it all. Later a critic-- Joseph McBride?-- wrote a well-research refutation of Capra's "I did it all" assertion. McBride demonstrated that all of Capra's financial or critical successes stemmed from his collaborations with two key writers-- two writers whom the general public will never know. Sound familiar?

And yet, saying that Capra and Lee didn't do it all isn't the same as saying that they did nothing.

On Kirby and writing: well, they are documented artist-writers, like Jack Cole, who did for comic books what Foster and Caniff did for comic strips. (Raymond started out collaborating with a writer for some years though; don't know how many.) But the problem with Kirby is that his Golden Age work is so tied to the S&K partnership. I have no problem with believing that Kirby plotted his stories, probably with little or no advance notes before he started drawing. But-- DID HE DIALOGUE THEM? Apparently neither he nor Simon kept records; we don't even know if Kirby got a separate writer-payment in those days, the very thing which became the bone of contention in the Marvel years. (Maybe if one of us was an IRS agent, we could check Kirby's 1940s filings!) The Golden Age works, from SANDMAN to BOYS RANCH, are all basically well written pulp entertainment, efficient but not stylistically outstanding.


Then there's a fifteen-year period in which exigencies forced Kirby to collaborate outside the S&K shop, where so many hands contributed. Kirby works with Dave Wood, Stan Lee, and Larry Leiber, possibly rewriting a lot of what he's given, and only rarely does he have a dialogue-credit, as in that one issue of Nick Fury.

Then, toward the end of his first Marvel tenure, he gets sole credit on a couple of features: one of which is passable (Ka-Zar), one of which is ghastly (Inhumans). He goes to DC, and though some of his dialogue-writing experiments with Shakespearean rythyms, a lot of his dialogue is, in a word, goofy.

So again I ask the question--

If Kirby was writing such competent dialogue back in the 1940s-- when he himself was in his late twenties and early thirties-- HOW DID HE LOSE THAT ABILITY?

That one factor makes me doubt that Jack Kirby ever wrote a line of dialogue in the 1940s and 1950s.

I'm not saying that I believe it impossible; that Kirby was once capable of very efficient pulp dialogue, and then just lost the knack.

But an alternate theory would be that Kirby might have had a lot of help over rough spots in his shop days, so that he wasn't fully prepared to write dialogue as a solo talent in the 1970s.

FOOTNOTE: Another member of the listserve provided specifics on Alex Raymond's writer-collaborators--

"Alex Raymond had Don Moore as his writer for most of FLASH GORDON and JUNGLE JIM. Dashiell Hammett, Don Moore and Leslie Charteris were his writers for SECRET AGENT X-9. Ward Green and Fred Dickinson were his writers for RIP KIRBY."

QUICK CRONENBERG POST

I'm taking part in a thread debating the substance of director David Cronenberg's remarks on NextMovie.

 In response to one poster on the thread, I wrote the following regarding the dividing line between "high and low culture," which I've been treating as "big and little myths" in recent essays:

"I haven't encountered any arguments as to how the GODFATHER book (which I've not read) might be better than the film, but I've seen comparable instances: there are things about Bloch's PSYCHO-- another not-classic book-- which I like better than Hitchcock's adaptation, even though the PSYCHO film is indubitably classic.

If I had to set down some rough standards, it might be that people tend to see "elevated" art (whether it's there or not) in works that suggest elevated levels of communicability. Bloch's PSYCHO is written with a meat-and-potatoes clarity; it has some depths, but it doesn't express them with any great style. Hitchcock and his collaborators take essentially the same story Bloch wrote (with some differences) and bring to it a great deal more style, though perhaps no greater content.

I think certain Cronenberg films, such as SCANNERS and THE FLY, are just like Nolan's trilogy in that they take melodramatic subject matter and express it with a great deal of attention to style. Again, as with my example of PSYCHO, this does not mean that melodrama has no deep symbolic content, but a lot of it doesn't. I'd consider THE FLY to possess more story-content than any of the Nolan trilogy, but I regard the Nolan trilogy, flawed as it is, to have more content than SCANNERS or, frankly, Cronenberg's graphic-novel adaptation HISTORY OF VIOLENCE.

Now I don't know precisely what Cronenberg is thinking about when he avers to Nextmovie that superhero directors in general-- not just Nolan-- aren't making an "elevated art form" (his words). I suspect that he's thinking that as soon as you've got a man in a funny suit, that's zero content. I disagree; I think there can be as much substantive content as THE FLY at the very least, possibly more. He's also got a bone to pick with the idea that artists don't have to answer to outside interests. I think I'd like to see the shade of Michelangelo conjured up, to ask him if he thought he still produced art despite having to answer to the Church of Rome."


I'll expand these remarks somewhat to say that what I called "melodramatic subject matter" is more or less covalent with the "little myths" of non-canonical fiction, and also with what I've termed works of "thematic escapism."

In contrast, the "big myths" of canonical fiction compare well with the works of "thematic realism," also discussed in the essay referenced above.

It's unfortunate that an intelligent director like Cronenberg-- who has himself dealt with material that is at heart no less thematic escapist than Batman (specifically the Batman of the comic books, just to keep to Cronenberg's original context).  I for one found Cronenberg's HISTORY OF VIOLENCE to be no more than a well-executed revenge melodrama, different from Batman not in terms of the realism of its theme but only of its naturalistic phenomenal orientation.  I think his confusion springs from the Aristotelian notion of art being governed by *mimesis,* often interpreted to mean the imitation of experiential reality.  It's a shame that a man who has made a great number of sophisticated fantasy-films is apparently unable to see that superhero fantasies can have a level of distinct content that stands independent of how "elevated" they may appear to be.

NOTE: The phrase I tossed off for the thread, "elevated levels of communicability," compares favorably with Philip Wheelwright's concept of plurisignative poeto-langage, discussed here.