THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING PT. 3

Literature is a luxury, fiction is a necessity.-- G.K. Chesterton, IN DEFENSE OF PENNY DREADFULS, 1901.

In Part 2 I responded to Martin Scorsese's praise of Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST by noting that Hitchcock used much the same "innocent accused" trope for THE 39 STEPS, which lacked any of the "painful emotions" Scorsese extolled in NORTHWEST. In that essay, I said I didn't know what if anything Scorsese had written about STEPS, but I was informed that the movie did make at least one of the director's best-films lists.

Another famous film on the list, at #942, is 1971's DIRTY HARRY-- and it just so happens that in Pauline Kael's contemporary review of that film, she touched on some of the same issues mentioned by Scorsese in his 2019 remarks. Kael wrote:

There's an aesthetic pleasure one gets from highly developed technique; certain action sequences make you feel exhilarated just because they're so cleverly done-- even if, as in the case of Siegel's DIRTY HARRY, you're disgusted by the picture.

I don't know what aspects of the Siegel film Scorsese liked well enough to elevate it into his personal pantheon, but those favorable aspects must have weighed more in his personal scales than any elements he might've found problematic. 

The Kael excerpt, even though it doesn't specify the reasons why HARRY is disgusting, is a flawed analysis. I don't believe for a moment that Kael was "exhilarated" by this or that action sequence because she thought they were cleverly done. I think she had a visceral response FIRST to a thrilling scene, because it conveyed the illusion that she was experiencing the events. Then, after the fact, she rationalized that she'd been captivated by the technique behind it.

This general idea of "good technique in the service of a bad story" bears a strong resemblance to the way Scorsese dismisses superhero movies in his remarks to EMPIRE magazine re: theme parks.

The only time his ardour dims is when the subject of Marvel comes up. “I don’t see them,” he says of the MCU. “I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well-made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

In his follow-up remarks Scorsese admits filmgoers also went to Hitchcock movies to experience "thrills and shocks" like those offered by amusement parks. (I assume he's associating such parks primarily with things like carousels and roller coasters, though he doesn't explicitly say that.) But after admitting that the Hitchcock films offer thrills and shocks, he stated that they offer other elements that keep viewers coming back to them.

I don't disagree that a lot of Hitchcock films offer other interesting elements, just as I believe that Siegel's DIRTY HARRY offers more than, say, an appeal to fascist sentiment (which was one of Kael's condemnations of the movie). But I also would say that some superhero films offer these other elements as well, and that they're not all homogenized thrill-rides as Scorsese contended.

Ir's at this point I finally work my way back to my Chesterton quote. In his defense of the despised medium of penny dreadfuls-- which defense is an almost precognitive rebuttal of Frederic Wertham  -- Chesterton admits that what he calls "fiction," as opposed to "literature," is a "dehumanized and naked narrative." Yet he calls it a necessity because these naked stories are akin to the ones people tell themselves as they live their daily lives in society.

Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilisation is built; for it is clear that unless civilisation is built on truisms, it is not built at all. Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.

The "ordinary" men and women who watch the films of both Siegel and Hitchcock may be responding equally to the movies' "heroic truisms," to the convention of watching the good guy overthrow the bad guy. Some may also respond, as Scorsese says, to other elements of  the famed directors' stories, but others in the audience may not get anything out of PSYCHO or DIRTY HARRY but the visceral thrills. If the best superhero movies could compete with Siegel and Hitchcock in terms of both the visceral and what I call the mythopoeic, then that accomplishment would be a little more impressive in my book than the comparatively simple excitements of a roller coaster ride.

And as it happens, I do think at least some superhero films have more to offer than "technique" alone. 

The 2008 IRON MAN is a case in point. There's little doubt that the filmmakers capture much of the appeal of the comic-book character, depicting the wonder of a man's rebirth: of compensating for a near-fatal wound by building himself into a super-knight-in-armor. The flawless way in which the filmmakers explore every step of Tony Stark's evolution into Iron Man-- including the humorous ones-- provides enough "thrills and shocks" to satisfy even the most undemanding of Chesterton's "gutter boys." But of course there are other elements that made the Marvel Universe seem credible, ranging from Tony Stark's silver-spoon political naivete to his "daddy issues," which didn't exist in the early IRON MAN comics and only developed, very erratically, over the course of two decades. I noted in my review that in the comics the Obadiah Stane arc is clumsy and superficial, but the movie takes all of those weak "father's evil colleague" motifs and works them into a more cohesive myth of the superhero as partly damaged in spirit as well as in body.

Is the 2008 IRON MAN as great a film as PSYCHO or DIRTY HARRY? I wouldn't go that far. But IMO it does show a mastery of elements that go beyond "thrills and shocks," and other costumed-crusader films have done much the same, though there's perhaps not enough of them yet to form a "canon." I don't question that the very same filmmakers turned around and made a lot of mediocre superhero films-- not least the two IRON MAN sequels. But those sequels no more downgrade the accomplishment of the 2008 film than PSYCHO is compromised by the vastly inferior FRENZY.

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 3

 In Part 2 of this essay-series, I provided a broad sketch of how the specific genre of "the costumed superhero" had been treated in American movie serials, stand-alone films, and TV shows both live-action and animated for several decades. I purposely excluded narrative radio-shows, about which I have no expertise, as well as all of the "superhero-adjacent" genres, like jungle-hero tales, superspies and spacemen. In this essay, I want to include some "costumed crusaders" I omitted for the decades of the 1950s and 1960s (up until 1966 and the birth of Batmania). In addition, I'll mention some of the "adjacent" genres that arguably affected the superhero's development in movies and TV, though I'm going to set aside both space opera and all forms of archaic heroic fantasy as too complicated for this essay.

So I noted that the last serial of any kind appeared in 1956, and that American television in the 1950s did not show nearly as much enthusiasm for costumed heroes:

Though five space-opera teleserials showed up during the first decade of television's ascension, only three costumed crusader shows appeared-- THE LONE RANGER (1949-57), THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1952-58) and ZORRO (1957-59)-- and the first two of those were indebted to earlier radio serials, even using some of the same scripts. 

 

As for "adjacent types," DICK TRACY got a live-action teleseries that lasted from 1950 to 1951, which did adapt some of Chester Gould's freaky fiends, like Flattop and the Mole. Later, around the time both Bomba and Jungle Jim stopped appearing in features, Jungle Jim and Sheena both got one-season TV shows in 1955. One year later, ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU presented the classic non-costumed super-villain with his own series. And all of the above did better than James Bond. One year after Ian Fleming published the first Bond tale, that novel was adapted into a single episode of the teleseries CLIMAX, which didn't exactly launch a new media franchise for the hero. During that decade Fleming would use more Gould-like villains in the novels, but in movies and TV the character would not catch the world on fire until nine years after the appearance of the book CASINO ROYALE. 

I also noted that though there had been a smattering of stand-alone films for live-action costumed heroes in the 1930 and 1940s, in the 1950s there was nothing but two LONE RANGER features, INVISIBLE AVENGER (a failed TV pilot issued as a feature), and a handful of "masked swashbuckler" movies. (I don't count SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN, the pilot for the teleseries, even though it received theatrical release.) The only "superhero-adjacent" franchise that continued production of feature-films throughout the fifties and into the sixties was that of Tarzan. 

As for 1950s cartoons, I mentioned only the packaging of Mighty Mouse cartoons for THE MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE, but there are others worth noting, and sometimes excluding.

The first made-for-TV cartoon was CRUSADER RABBIT, produced in 1950 by Jay Ward's animation studio. I've seen a few episodes of this cartoon-- which loosely borrowed the format of the live-action serial, albeit with episodes of five minutes at most. I don't think CRUSADER was relevant to the superhero idiom despite the fact that the opening shows the bunny dressed in a knight's armor. From what I've seen, Crusader and his buddy Rags Tiger just walked around sans costumes (or any attire but their fur). In fact, the opening cartoon emphasizes that even though Crusader wants to be heroic he doesn't have any powers, like flight or X-ray vision. As more than one person had asserted, Crusader and Rags, being an intense little guy and a big dumb guy, look like a template for Ward's later Rocky and Bullwinkle.

For comparable reasons I also dismiss 1957's TOM TERRIFIC from consideration. The titular character was a little boy with a magic hat, and he sometimes used his magic to thwart villains, but mostly in a comic manner, lacking the superhero's emphasis on action. But 1957 also introduced a spaceman/spy/superhero hybrid in COLONEL BLEEP. In this series-- some episodes of which may be missing from circulation-- Bleep, a super-powered alien with a gumdrop-shaped head, functioned as an "intelligence agent" hunting down criminals with names like Doctor Destructo and the Black Knight of Pluto, some of whom made multiple appearances. In fact, one surviving episode, "Knight of Death," may be the first time in which previously established villains teamed up on a TV cartoon, for in that episode Bleep is challenged not only by the aforementioned Black Knight, but also the Black Robot and a pirate named Black Patch. (I sense a recurring motif in there somewhere.) The same team returned in "The Hypnotic Helmets."

Even though I asserted that the TV studios seemed unwitting of the "birth of the Silver Age" in comic books, oddly 1960 opened with an animated parody of Batman and Robin. A studio known for very crude early TV toons-- one online article called the studio-head "the Ed Wood of TV cartoons"-- accepted a pitch for COURAGEOUS CAT AND MINUTE MOUSE. And as most fans know, the pitch came from the man who co-created Batman, Bob Kane. The show has its fans, but though I'm not one of them, there's no debating that CCAMM is a costumed-crusader show, in which cat and mouse used a variety of super-weapons to defeat villains. (I should also note that in 1960 Kane was still packaging BATMAN comics for DC, who would buy out Kane's contract in 1966.)

Like Mighty Mouse, Popeye's theatrical cartoons had been airing on TV for some time, and in 1960 King Features commissioned 220 new Popeye cartoons, at least some of which still showed the sailor-man using spinach-power to smite such nogoodniks as Brutus and the Sea Hag.

Briefly detouring into live-action, in 1961 one production company made the attempt to adapt another King Features property: the superhero/jungle adventurer The Phantom, but all that resulted was an unsold pilot. The same year saw the debut of a DICK TRACY cartoon show. However, though the slapstick scripts did utilize mild versions of classic Gould grotesques like Mumbles, Pruneface and The Brow, Tracy himself only appeared in the role of a supervisor, handing off the arrest-chores to four goofball detectives. Again, I disallow this one due to the downplaying of the combative mode.

Jumping back for one paragraph to the general category of live action, James Bond made his movie debut in 1962's DOCTOR NO, which arguably re-created the "superspy," realizing effects far beyond anything the genre had accomplished in serials like SECRET AGENT X-9. Though NO and later Bonds were British productions, the American company United Artists provided funding, thus tying the franchise into the American aegis. Surprisingly, it took about two years for either America or Europe to begin coming out with their own superspies. Then France initiated in 1964 a "re-imagining" of the FANTOMAS property, a three-film series that showed some Fleming-esque aspects. The U.S. launched THE MAN FROM UNCLE that same year, and WILD WILD WEST would follow in 1965 . After that, the floodgates were opened, though few imitators were as good as Fleming at creating vivid super-villains. Also, as mentioned in the previous essay, in 1963 Disney released its second costumed crusader TV-show, a three-episode adaptation of Russell Thorndyke's "Scarecrow of Romney Marsh."

Back to TV cartoons. THE MIGHTY HERCULES, debuting in 1963, deserves a quick mention, despite my disallowing archaic fantasy here, because the Greek strongman kept encountering a regular rogue's gallery, AND kept defeating them with the softness in his eyes and the iron in his thighs (if you believe the theme song). 

UNDERDOG showed up in 1964, and got right everything that COURAGEOUS CAT did wrong. The super-powered dog in the baggy long underwear had a decent rogue's gallery, though only two evildoers, Simon Bar Sinister and Riff Raff, made more than one appearance. JONNY QUEST debuted that year as a night-time animated show, and some Bond influence can be seen there as well, as in the debut episode "Mystery of the Lizard Men," with its very DOCTOR NO-like plot.

With 1965 we get into nebulous territory. The idea of adapting BATMAN as a live-action series began to get serious consideration in 1964, but it's hard to say if the earliest negotiations were known to the public. The actual show had to begin production at least by late 1965, but Hollywood would have been gossiping about the project long before the actual production. Did any cartoon shows about superheroes and their near-relations take influence from such gossip? Probably not 1965's SINBAD JR, about a heroic sailor who obtained super-strength from a magic belt (rather than a green vegetable). Nor ROGER RAMJET, with Jay Ward finally dipping his toes for real into the genre of the funny superhero. But in Fall 1965 Hanna-Barbera released its comical versions of both a superhero and a superspy-- i.e., ATOM ANT and SECRET SQUIRREL-- and the former might have been inspired in part by some notion that superheroes might start getting hot again.

And that's where I will leave things for now, because after BATMAN came the deluge.

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I noted that a lot of film critics have ample ways of authenticating the major developments both in general film history and with respect to particular film genres. When a cineaste like Martin Scorsese talks about a genre like film noir, he can draw upon a wealth of critical writings about the most important exemplars of the genre, and about the overall history of the genre's development. 

In Part 1 I also pointed out that comics-fans have over time generated both general histories of the comic book medium and of the particular genre of the superhero in comics. Yet none of these histories has any impact on the development of superheroes in the film medium, any more than a history of noir books would impact on noir films. And in essence, there is no strong developmental history of superheroes on the big screen, not even when one shows how that history intertwines with the history of superheroes on the small screen.

If one uses the term "superhero" only in its more restricted sense of "the costumed crusader," then in American cinema the genre starts in silent cinema with 1920's MARK OF ZORRO. But that film, and its 1940 remake, were one of a very small number of feature films spotlighting costumed crusaders prior to the 1950s. The main source of costumed crusader cinema were the serials, which also began in the silent era, but which did not make substantial adaptation of superhero (and superhero-adjacent) properties until the late 1930s, the beginning of the so-called "Golden Age of Serials." Zorro put in an appearance in the serial format in 1937's ZORRO RIDES AGAIN. while 1938 saw the cinematic debut of two other prose-derived superheroes, the Spider and the Lone Ranger. Many "superhero-adjacent" comic strips also were filmed around the same time, particularly those of FLASH GORDON and BUCK ROGERS. Finally, in response to the burgeoning popularity of costumed heroes in comic books, ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL in 1941 provided the first adaptation of a particular comic book superhero. Comic book superheroes continued to be adapted until the studios quit making serials in 1956, resulting in a list of adaptations that includes Spy Smasher (1942), Batman (1943), Captain America (1944), The Vigilante (1947), and Superman (1948). Serials never indulged in the gory violence seen in many Golden Age superhero comics, but they shared the same basic aesthetic: action, action, and more action.

Serials, which made their money from kids regularly going to the movies to see the latest serial-chapter, were doomed as soon as television began offering serial-style entertainment for free. Yet television in that decade, and through the early 1960s, paid the superhero almost no attention, even as juvenile entertainment. Though five space-opera teleserials showed up during the first decade of television's ascension, only three costumed crusader shows appeared-- THE LONE RANGER (1949-57), THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1952-58) and ZORRO (1957-59)-- and the first two of those were indebted to earlier radio serials, even using some of the same scripts. Slightly later, Disney produced in 1963 a three-part limited teleseries, THE SCARECROW OF ROMNEY MARSH.

The same basic dynamic informed the genre of animated theatrical shorts, which appeared alongside theatrical feature films. In the "golden age of cinema," two costumed-crusader cartoon-series predominated, resulting in seventeen SUPERMAN episodes and eighty-one MIGHTY MOUSE episodes. TV's competition with the movies meant the eventual doom of cinematic cartoon shorts and the rise of TV cartoons. On the small screen Mighty Mouse arguably gained a greater following than he ever had on the big screen, enjoying a long run as repackaged Saturday morning fare in the form of 1955's MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE.

There had been a very tiny number of costumed-crusader feature films in the 1940s, such as three SHADOW B-films from Columbia. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were only a smattering of mostly forgotten "masked swashbuckler" B-flicks and two LONE RANGER feature films, the latter issued by the same production company that made the TV show. 

The upshot of all these changes was that even though the Silver Age of Comics had brought new life to the superhero genre in the late 1950s, neither the big screen nor the small screen evinced any strong interest in the genre-- until 1966.

Was '66 BATMAN influenced first by a producer reading a BATMAN comic book, or by Hugh Hefner screening the old Bat-serials for a laugh, or by Pop Art usages of comic book art? Primacy does not really matter. But although "camp Batman" was opposed to the "straight" content of the more streamlined BATMAN comics of the Silver Age, the 1966 show was the first film/TV serial that successfully communicated the appeal of a superhero who continually battled a horde of repeating adversaries. Indeed, one could argue Silver Age Bat-comics began emphasizing the hero's colorful rogues a lot more than Golden Age Bat-comics ever had, and so the 1966 show was very much in tune with that sea-change.

 Later that same year, Hanna-Barbera's cartoon studio jumped into the costumed crusader business with galaxy-protecting superhero SPACE GHOST. The same company would present six other such TV cartoons, among them an adaptation of FANTASTIC FOUR, before concerned parents campaigned against this fancied increase in Saturday morning violence.

But neither the large screen nor the small screen did much else with the superheroes for the remainder of the decade. However, one could posit that most of the superheroes of the 1970s were in the same mold as BATMAN and SPACE GHOST, and at least some of the Silver Age comics: colorful, fairly intelligent adventures with light humor and none of the gory violence seen in Golden Age funnies. This aesthetic embraced not only moderately successful 1970s teleserials like WONDER WOMAN and INCREDIBLE HULK, but also misfires like the 1975 feature-film DOC SAVAGE. Roughly the same Silver Age aesthetic stayed in place for the four live-action SUPERMAN films and the considerably less noteworthy super-films of the eighties, such as LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER and MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. During this "late Silver Age" of film and TV, I tend to find most of the costumed crusaders from cartoon-land to be nugatory, with the possible exceptions of 1983's HE-MAN and 1987's TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES.

Now, one might say that cinema started exploiting the grittier nature of the comic-book Bronze Age with Tim Burton's first two BATMAN films in 1989 and 1992, and maybe even with the 1989 PUNISHER and the 1990 DARKMAN. However, if elements of the comic book Silver Age only appeared in very rough fashion in American comic books of the 1970s through the 1990s, such elements continued to appear alongside the edgier fare in movies and TV shows of the nineties. Thus the other two BATMAN films of the 1990s sought to hearken back to 1966 BATMAN, albeit in a very clumsy manner. Similarly, the hallmark superhero cartoon of the nineties, BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, emulates the tight plotting of Silver Age Bat-comics and, unlike the first two Burton Bat-films, eschews the transgressive violence found in Frank Miller's signature Bronze Age DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. The live-action TURTLES films followed the lead of the eighties cartoon, choosing light humor over blood and guts.

As I see it, even in 2023 we remain in a sort of "superhero soup" in cinema and TV, constantly mixing together either the sunny Silver Age motifs (the MCU's ANT MAN) or the dark and transgressive tropes of the Bronze Age (ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE). It's like modern superhero movies and TV can't decide if they want to follow the lead of Stan Lee or of Alan Moore. 

In one respect, modern costumed-crusader films and TV shows have allied themselves with the comic-book "Iron Age." In PATIENT ZERO PONDERINGS, I hypothesized that the 2009 "diversity hire" of the MS MARVEL creator marked the beginnings of hyper-politicized comic books. MCU films would not substantially begin following this storytelling model until roughly 2015, but to date the studio has not deviated significantly from said model. I don't know what it would take, in any of these media, to re-orient storytelling priorities enough to produce a "New Age" not entirely beholden to any of the others, but I suspect something's got to change eventually, even if its the extinction of the superhero genre in all its variegated forms.

CHALLENGER VS. DEFENDER PT. 3

In ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE and related essays, I’ve noted that though most focal ensembles are composed of characters who share the same cause, there are assorted exceptions. In SUBS AND COES PT. 2,  I noted that on occasion some teams, such as the Teen Titans and the Omega Men, who have a “stealth enemy” who functions as part of the ensemble for a time even though said traitor plans to destroy the other characters. Thus all the stories in which Terra pretends to be a superhero still place her, like the other Titans, in the narrative position of a defender, while whatever villains she battles alongside her team are the challengers of those stories. Only when Terra reveals her true intentions and joins with Deathstroke to destroy the heroes does she become a challenger-type.

“Opposed ensembles” present a knottier problem. Most such ensembles consist of two opposed characters who receive equal emphasis within the narrative. This stands in contrast to the many narratives built around a defender battling a formidable challenger (Sherlock Holmes/Professor Moriarty) or a challenger meeting his match in a canny defender (Dracula/ Van Helsing). Typically, opposed ensembles share a similar dynamic in terms of engaging the audience’s sympathies. For instance, in viewing the final fight in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN, most viewers are likely to see the Wolf Man as a relative “hero,” given that the Frankenstein Monster looks like he’s about to do nasty things to a helpless female. But the entire narrative shows that both monsters are equally dangerous to humankind. Thus, even though the monsters end up fighting one another, in a greater sense both of them are challengers to the peace of humankind, whose defenders are represented here by a handful of imperiled characters.

Most of the opposed ensembles I’ve cited concentrate only upon two characters, where one is strongly antipathetic and the other may be somewhat sympathetic. M. NIght Shyamalin's GLASS is a rare exception, though it's preceded by two other parts in a series that are configured in more standard ways. The first film in the series, UNBREAKABLE, follows the standard dynamic of the superhero story, in which David Dunn fits the role of the defender and Mr. Glass, that of the challenger. SPLIT, the middle film, is patterned more on the dynamic of the monster-film, so that Kevin Crumb takes the role of challenger and his main victim is the defender. However, GLASS posits a situation in which a mysterious cabal takes the role of “challenger” to all three entities—hero, villain, and monster—and, despite the fight between Dunn and Crumb, the three of them have to defend their independence against the ruthless organization. However, it's very atypical for films in a series to shift the roles in this manner.

TERRY GILLIAM AND THE TOTAL FAIL

I'm only a modest fan of Terry Gilliam's cinematic writing and directing, and the only Gilliam film I sometimes want to rewatch is THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN. But despite my merely middling regard for Gilliam's creative work, I found his December screed against the movies of the MCU worth analyzing.

Gilliam's comments for the online magazine Indiewire had some resemblances to earlier complaints by both Martin Scorcese and Francis Ford Coppola, in that all three rants attacked superhero films for devouring the lion's share of the box office dinner. By itself, this is sophistry. Gilliam says:

“I don’t like the fact they’re dominating the place so much,” he said. “They’re taking all the money that should be available for a greater variety of films. Technically, they’re brilliant. I can’t fault them because the technical skills involved in making them are incredible.”

There are two major problems with this attitude. First, for anyone else to concur with Gilliam, that person would have to believe that the cinematic marketplace can support whatever ideal of "variety" that Gilliam advocates, if there were no MCU or any similar cinematic trend to dominate the market. But let us suppose that "fellow travelers" might come to some accord about an overall range of "good variety" while differing on particulars. Gilliam's statement still represents a leap in logic in that it assumes that Result B will take place from Cause A, even though it's arguable that Cause A has never actually been observed to take place in the arena specified, cf. the American film market.

Second, it's demonstrable that the "superhero trend" is far from unique in the American film industry, which has been for the most part driven by genre films that had wide appeal to audiences, and so encouraged producers to keep pumping out more films in those genres. Gilliam does not accuse the MCU of being a unique phenomenon, but the long history of genre films in Hollywood renders his complaint problematic.

Only on one point does Gilliam attack the superhero genre in a specific manner:

“What I don’t like is that we all have to be superheroes do anything worthwhile. That’s what makes me crazy. That’s what these movies are saying to young people. And to me it’s not confronting the reality of, you know, the quote-unquote human condition. You know what it is like to be a normal human being in difficult situations and resolving them surviving,” he said. “I can’t fault them for the sheer spectacle, except it’s repetitive. You still have to blow up another city.”

Now, Gilliam does not cite any specific instance from either MCU or from other superhero films to bolster his interpretation, aside from one offhand comment that makes it sound like it's too easy for Iron Man to replace his armor when it burns up. I've had my problems with some of the films in this series, but I certainly would not concur with Gilliam. At the very least, the three Iron Man films continually call attention to the difficulties that the genius in the armor has with interacting with the ordinary world.

Gilliam supplies even less support for the statement that "we" (meaning the audience) "have ot be superheroes to do anything worthwhile." Perhaps the former PYTHON performer overvalues the idea of deconstructing genre icons, as he and the Python troup did in their HOLY GRAIL film. It's only in a comic/ironic context that one can make, say, a film about knights in which the activity of the knights is not the center of the narrative, but exists to point the way toward something else in society. So it really makes no sense to critique superhero narratives for making superheroes the most important figures in the stories, just as cowboy-heroes are the most important figures in the majority of westerns.

I have a lot of personal reservations about MCU films, though I don't really think Gilliam's comments are MCU-centric; as he phrases them  I think that they could be applied just as easily to the Sony company's series of SPIDER-MAN and X-MEN films.

Ironically, the part of Gilliam's screed that I most agree with on aesthetic grounds is one with which I disagree on logical grounds. Of the 2018 BLACK PANTHER film, which I reviewed here, Gilliam said:

“I hated ‘Black Panther.’ It makes me crazy. It gives young black kids the idea that this is something to believe in. Bullshit. It’s utter bullshit. I think the people who made it have never been to Africa,” he said. “They went and got some stylist for some African pattern fabrics and things. But I just I hated that movie, partly because the media were going on about the importance of bullshit.”

While I didn't hate BLACK PANTHER, I too thought that much of its hype was bullshit, and that the film's characterization of Africa was politically correct nonsense. However, I don't entirely fault the film for not being realistic, which Gilliam does. I critiqued the film for not finding a middle ground, weaving real-world politics into an evocative fantasy, and as a result, the film is weak both in terms of its reality-elements and its fantasy-elements. Given that Gilliam has become best known for fantasy-films, I would think that the lack of a balance between these respective sets of perceived elements would be more important than the film's failings to mirror reality precisely.

It's strange that these admonitions from Scorcese, Coppola and Gilliam have come at this late date. While perhaps an old-time Hollywood director might've looked back at the 1990s and viewed the BATMAN and TEENAGE TURTLES films as a transitory phenomenon, by the early 2000s it should've been obvious that big-budget films in this genre were making big, big money, and that they weren't going away, even before the 2008 success of IRON MAN. Perhaps some of the hostility stems not just from the superheroes ruling the box office, but also because they're getting critical approbation, which has usually been directed at films of perceived "variety" as opposed to more generic forms of cinema. I didn't think BLACK PANTHER deserved an Oscar nomination, though ironically it was much better than two other more "mainstream" nominees. But I believe Gilliam, even though he certainly has greater knowledge of fantasy than the other two directors, simply doesn't engage with the particular nature of the superhero fantasy, and for that reason makes a superficial judgment about this particular genre.

STAR WARS, NOTHING BUT STAR WARS

For my last ARCHIVE essay of the year, I thought I might put together something a little more accessible to the casual reader (if any) than the previous "Concrescence and the Kinetic Potentiality." And since this year I devoted several essays on my movie-blog to reviewing most of the as-yet-unreviewed-by-me live-action films in the STAR WARS series-- concluding with an analysis of the current RISE OF SKYWALKER-- I'll make the Lucasverse my last ARCHIVE subject for 2019.

In 1978, when Bill Murray sang the lyric in my title for an episode of SNL, he was playing the part of a lounge-singer making up lame lyrics to please an audience of barflies. The main focus of the schtick was to make fun of the way commercial performers tended to latch onto items of popular culture in order to sell themselves. In a different era, Murray might've constructed the same idea around, say, THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.

And yet, though the comedian couldn't have known that the original 1977 film would be anything more than a flash in the pan, he could well have been aware that STAR WARS had garnered an adult audience far beyond anything seen in past SF-successes. I find it unlikely that the same schtick, done in 1968, could've sold the idea that a lounge-singer would've tried to appeal to a bunch of adult drinkers with insider references to any other fantasy-film, even a popular one like PLANET OF THE APES.

There had been a handful of fantasy-works in various media that somewhat escaped the "fantasy is for kids" cultural judgment. DUNE and THE LORD OF THE RINGS attracted an audience outside the world of hardcore SF-readers. The James Bond book-series and its attendant movie-adaptations trafficked in sci-fi gimmickery and villains that resembled the freakish fiends of the DICK TRACY comic strip. The fifties generated a handful of SF-films that enjoyed some qualified support from adult audiences, such as Howard Hawks' THE THING, and the late sixties mirrored that development with the first of the APES films (though later ones became more kiddified) and Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Comic books remained a marginal medium despite adults' brief flirtation with the irony-drenched world of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries. Yet Marvel Comics changed up the game by introducing the formula of "heroes with problems," and while Marvel's penetration of "the real world" was minimal during its strongest creative era, its long-term influence on American culture would make possible the current hegemony of "superhero movies for all ages."

Yet, for all of these influences, the eventual validation of metaphenomenal entertainment for adults all comes down to "nothing but STAR WARS." In my review of the original film, I wrote:

...the religion of the Force works well in the first film because it's become the underdog in the galactic empire. Whenever the materialistic minions of the Empire mention the Jedi, it's only to sneer at the absurdities of their beliefs. To them Darth Vader's continued existence is little more than an indicator of the foolishness of having faith in anything but machines-- and the fact that Vader himself had taken on the semblance of a machine is merely a further confirmation of their world-view.

Luke Skywalker's existence defies the Empire's passion for "technological terrors," and whether or not Lucas meant him to be Vader's son at the time hardly matters. By inheriting Obi-Wan's mantle as the new embodiment of Jedi spirituality, he supplants Vader in the cosmos as Jacob supplanted Esau. This is the unlikely turnabout that Lucas teaches his audience to hunger for, and it plays as much a role in the franchise's success as the aforementioned love of pulpish extravagance. Indeed, without Lucas having crossbred the magic of fairy tales with the machines of SF, the furor over STAR WARS might have petered out over time like many other fannish enthusiasms, no matter how hard big corporations labored to keep them stoked.

George Lucas's scattershot research into fairy tales, archaic shamanism, and mythology clearly touched a cord in the American psyche, not mention the psyches of a great many other world cultures. And its popularity with adults was reflected in one of America's earliest instances of "political correctness," on which I reflected in my essay TRIBAL IN PARADISE:

STAR WARS was the test-case for racial representation. Not long after the film came out, I recall hearing a black comedian say something like, "Tell the truth, white people; you like STAR WARS because it means ya'll gonna leave alla us behind!" There may be more truth than humor in that statement, and Lucasfilms was quick to remedy the lack of POC in the SW universe by introducing Lando Calrissian in the second movie.

This wasn't pure tokenism, though. The Lucasverse as we now know it recapitulated a number of political attitudes, not least Lucas's favored trope of "lots of little good guys can beat a big bad guy." This is best illustrated in the first film in the Rebels' triumph over the Death Star. In addition, an early draft for STAR WARS would've also included a primitive tribe of Wookies beating a contingent of Storm Troopers, even though the story-idea didn't show up on celluloid until Lucas reworked the Wookies into RETURN OF THE JEDI's Ewoks. Reportedly Lucas was not entirely pleased that the only well-known black actor in the cast was "off-camera" in the form of Darth Vader's voice, but the appeal of James Earl Jones' baritone overcame those reservations. Thus I would surmise that Lucas probably didn't engineer the role of Lando Calrissian merely to profit from tokenism. He probably sincerely believed in a judicious forms of racial representation, much like that similarly-liberal toiler-in-fantasy-fields Gene Roddenberry. However, Lucas he didn't virtue-signal quite enough to head off his critics in 1999, when the buffoonish Jar Jar Binks was assailed for being a modern reincarnation of Stepin Fetchit.

The prequel series displeased a lot of viewers for a lot of reasons, but on the whole the series proved a success-- not just in terms of box office, but also in showing how thoroughly the viewing public had become enthralled with the Lucasverse cosmology. That said, even in the sixteen years between RETURN OF THE JEDI and THE PHANTOM MENACE, countless film producers sought to pursue the grail of the "Big Lucas Pay-Off," seeking to subject the once marginal genres of science fiction, magical fantasy and superheroes to the big-budget treatment. Television showed a similar transformation, though obviously Hollywood's Veblen-esque investment in conspicuous consumption didn't play so well on the small screen. Still, serials like XENA, HERCULES and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER demonstrated methods of bringing in big ratings on a small budget. For all anyone knows, the increasing profitability of sci-fi and superheroes may have played a role in encouraging George Lucas to return to his long-neglected franchise.

There's not much doubt that the "Rise of the Box-Office Profits" motivated Disney to purchase the Lucasverse, but here too, it's hard to say if pure profiteering explained the whole megilla. In my essay FREEDOM VS. FREEDOM PART 4, I called attention to the way Disney strategists re-wrote Lucas's "Clonetroopers" scenario from the prequels in order to start off the new series with an appeal to racial priorities. Thus the first promo for FORCE AWAKENS opens with the sight of a Storm Ttrooper unmasking and revealing the face of a black man (or at least, a face whose ethnicity is less ambiguous than that of actor Temeura Morrison, who played the mercenary from whose cells all Storm Troopers were supposedly derived).

Now, with the Disney trilogy is complete, it's possible to state categorically that the company's vaunted commitment to diversity did not extend to making Finn a halfway interesting character. In my review of FORCE AWAKENS, I pointed out that this revelation could be seen as a war to replay what I called "the African Diaspora," insofar as Disney's white-clad troopers were abducted from their worlds and forced to serve the Empire/First Order. However, even if the persons responsible for crafting the Finn character had some such intention-- and the idea is re-emphasized anew in RISE OF SKYWALKER-- the producers failed utterly at making Finn even as compelling as a Lucas toss-off like Boba Fett. That said, other new characters in the Disneyverse-- Poe, Rose Tiko, Holdo-- were no better characterized, so Finn certainly wasn't singled out for half-assed treatment. The one decent new character, Rey, got most of her mojo from being tied to one of Lucas's legacy characters in a literal sense, and with others in a more symbolic sense.

It may be a measure of Disney's perceptions about the adult audience's investment in the Lucasverse that the company chose to virtue-signal the company's commitment to diversity. However, it should be noted that, even if Lucas and his collaborators might have been influenced by tokenism in crafting Lando Calrissian, they still managed to make Lando an interesting character despite the creators' possibly-monetary motivations.

Even before SKYWALKER appeared in theaters, the first two films in the Disney trilogy were excoriated for their virtue signaling, though this criticism tended to focus less on people-of-color than on a perceived overemphasis of female characters. I feel that this criticism is partly justified in the cases of Holdo and Rose Tiko, who were such ciphers that I find them unlikely vessels of female empowerment. However, I will defend Rey against that charge. I don't think that Lucas's STAR WARS cosmos was ever directed exclusively to the male gender, and I think that Princess Leia stands as a major femme formidable, even if it's true that Carrie Fisher was less than entranced with her role. Rey has been accused by some critics of being a "Mary Sue" in terms of how easily she attains power and formidability. But while I might share some critics' concerns about the depiction of her path to power, I felt all three Disneyverse films succeeded in making her a vital character, one not defined by the gender wars. Thus, when Rey takes the name "Skywalker" at the end of SKYWALKER, I for one embraced that conceit. For me, the gesture demonstrated that, even when the new-verse was compromised by venal virtue-signaling, and dull diversity-concerns, it still was possible for people who weren't George Lucas to create at least one character that escaped such banal politicization.

RACE-BENDING FOR FUN AND POLITICS

This week's mythcomic deals with the politically incendiary topic of race-bending, possibly the most divisive topic in the comics-subculture.

In art and literature, race-bending refers to any situation in which an audience's expectation of a character's racial makeup-- usually though not invariably associated with the character's phenotype-- is contradicted by a new iteration of said character.

Race-bending falls into two categories; the overt and the covert.

The overt form refers to all depictions within a given narrative, where a character starts out being depicted with one racial appearance but is given a different appearance within a subsequent narrative. One of the most memorable cases of recent years appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, wherein the Caucasian comics-character Nick Fury was played by Samuel L. Jackson. Within the MCU iteration, the Nick Fury who co-ordinates the Avengers has never been anything but a black man, and so he has no direct connection with the earlier depiction.

The reverse of the overt form is not seen very often these days. However, the main character of the 1999 book PAY IT FORWARD is a black male, who becomes a white character in the 2000 movie of the same name.

The covert form refers to depictions that stand outside the narrative as such. For instance, in the prose debut of the Oriental villain Fu Manchu, the character is unquestionably Asian. However, though Fu is still supposed to be a Chinese character within all of his film appearances, he's almost always played by Caucasian actors, such as Boris Karloff, Henry Brandon and Christoper Lee.

A similar extrinsic distortion takes place on those occasions when an actor of color plays a character whose racial identity as a Caucasian is historically relevant. In the 1993 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, Denzel Washington plays the traditionally white-Italian character Don Pedro, but there is no attempt to rewrite the character to take account for his sudden negritude. It's more as if Washington is simply playing a Renaissance-era Italian without reference to the actor's actual race, just as one sees in the "white Fu Manchu" films.

In the United States, leftist ideologues approve of race-bending when it serves the perceived interests of an ethnic minority, and to disapprove of it when it serves the perceived interests of an ethnic majority. Thus Jackson playing Nick Fury in 2008's IRON MAN is "good," while Scarlett Johanssen playing the Japanese character Motoko Kusanagi in 2017's GHOST IN THE SHELL is "bad." I use the term "perceived interests" because ideologues don't care how good a given actor's performance is. The primary concern of the ideologues, despite all their high-sounding rhetoric about "diversity," comes down to "who gets paid."

This state of affairs is without a doubt a reaction against the early practices of Hollywood casting. Though I reject all political cant about a "cult of whiteness" in the United States, it's quite true that the main reason white actors played Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics, and even a few Negroes in Hollywood is because the dominantly white film-going audience wanted to see actors of their own ethnic persuasion. Since this system mitigated against non-white actors regardless of the level of talent involved, clearly it was an unethical system. However, the current, one-sided political correctness ideology-- which does not care how well Scarlett Johanssen can play Kusanagi, only that she is not Asian-- is no great improvement.

Though I've discussed the covert form in the previous paragraph, my concern in the forthcoming mythcomic is that of the overt form, wherein a creator decides that he will literally change the established racial identity of a given character.

NEEDFUL SPECIALTIES

Helen: Everyone's special, Dash.

Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.

SYNDROME: And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that everyone can be superheroes. *Everyone* can be super! And when everyone's super...*no one* will be.

I have no reason to disbelieve Brad Bird, in interviews like this one, when he says that his 2004 INCREDIBLES wasn't informed by any readings of weighty philosophers like Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. It's much more likely that he was primarily seeking to invest his big-budget superhero cartoon with as much drama and comedy as he could, the better to impress the "big kids" in the audience. His principal strategy was to take the superhero concept at face value and figure out what made the concept popular, as opposed to reading it as a fascist construction or the like.

As far as THE INCREDIBLES is concerned, the core concept is that of a hero with special abilities or talents rescuing ordinary people from assorted menaces. This was how almost all superheroes and their related congeners were treated in the pulps and comics of the early 20th century. However, in the 1960s Marvel Comic Books spearheaded a new paradigm. Now superheroes still strove to rescue ordinary human beings from danger, but the people didn't always reward their saviors properly, responding instead with pettiness, greed, and superstitious fear.

To my knowledge Brad Bird has never admitted his film's borrowings from Marvel's FANTASTIC FOUR. Though this indebtedness is very likely, it's less important to me than his translation of the Marvel paradigm into a standalone cartoon form. Bird may or may not be familiar with the earliest Lee-Kirby-Ditko breakthroughs, in which petty human responses to superheroes were used largely for comic relief. Yet later comics-writers expanded on these tropes to show the full span of human intolerance, which often led to situations in which superheroes were banned from active service to humankind.

Real superhero comics started out with heroes receiving nearly unconditional accolades for their deeds in the 1940s, and began dealing with more ambivalent responses from the 1960s on. Bird's scenario begins with a time of acceptance, wherein superheroes endlessly contend with super-villains and other threats and win public gratitude, but this period only occupies the first fifteen minutes of the movie's running time.

The period of rejection begins with the film's viewpoint character, Mister Incredible, who becomes the focal point of his world's paradigm shift. In the space of one evening-- when he's scheduled to marry the costumed heroine Elastigirl-- Incredible tries to get in a few more good deeds. The first indication of trouble-to-come is his meeting the obnoxious "Incrediboy," who presumptuously demands that the superhero adopt Incrediboy as his sidekick-- a demand Incredible instantly rejects. The same night, Incredible rescues an attempted suicide. This fortuitously leads him to encounter a crime-in-progress by super-villain Bomb Voyage. But Incrediboy, not one to take "no" for an answer, intrudes, arguing that his special rocket-boots make him fit to join Incredible's crusade, A complicated set of circumstances results in one of the villain's bombs destroying an elevated train-track, though Incredible manages to save the passengers. However, both the attempted suicide and the passengers then sue Incredible for injury-claims. (All are seen wearing neck-collars, which in pop-culture has become code for "phony injury.') These suits lead to the widespread banning of superheroes, who are forced to hang up their capes and live the same ordinary lives as everyone else.

The first quote at this essay's opening is from Dash, youngest child of Incredible and Elastigirl, fretting that he's been forced to conform to an unfair standard of ordinariness. He's what I'll call "the positive face of exceptionalism," which applies to a person who possesses exceptional qualities and seeks to use them well-- be it simply for self-fulfillment, as Dash initially desires, or for the protection of people without such qualities, which is the main orientation of Mister Incredible.

But what does it mean when Syndrome-- the embittered Incrediboy turned super-villain-- expresses the same sentiment? Syndrome, though he's aged fifteen years by the time Mister Incredible encounters him again, is more like a child than Dash ever is: a being of pure ego who has no empathy for victims and merely wants to be lionized. Syndrome plays an indirect role in bringing about the circumstances that exile Mister Incredible from the game of superheroes, but this isn't enough. His ego is so deeply bruised by the rejection that he must eradicate all of the retired superheroes from existence, humiliate and kill Incredible, and eventually become the world's premiere superhero by an act of phony heroism. Thus he's clearly the negative face of exceptionalism, desiring to be seen as the pinnacle of creation. Yet, once he's satisfied himself with duplicating Mister Incredible's popularity with ordinary people, he then plans to put an end to the raison d'etre of superheroes by giving artificial super-powers to everyone.

Since Syndrome is defeated without realizing any of his goals, Bird's story doesn't have to deal with what might or might not happen if the villain succeeded. But the question remains: why would it have been bad, to have a world in which everyone had artificial super-powers?

The answer may lie in the philosophical ruminations of Nietzsche, even if Bird never read him. Nietzsche's ideal of his Ubermensch is not covalent with any version of the superhero, with one exception. the motivation of magnanimity. The Nietzschean "superman" is magnanimous because he has so much more "spirit" than common people. Superheroes generally don't show as much contempt for the rabble as Nietzsche did, but there's still a sense that superheroes are frequently magnanimous for similar reasons. But even here, there's a crucial difference. Mister Incredible enjoys getting praise and plaudits for his super-deeds, but his deeds primarily spring from empathy: from the realization that ordinary people need his help. Syndrome has no motivation beyond lionization, and so it's easy for him to restructure the world so that it reflects his own mediocrity. Once everyone has access to artificially-enhanced superpowers, will anyone feel any need to feel empathy for those weaker than themselves?

Lastly, the opposition of "natural powers" and "artificial powers" begs some consideration. The only real superheroes the viewer sees are the four Incredibles and their family friend, Frozone; any others get only brief references. These five seem gifted with "natural" powers, though, because Bird provides no origin-stories, there's no knowing if they were all born with their powers like Dash and Violet. When Incrediboy makes his second audition to be Incredible's sidekick, he claims that not all superheroes have super-powers, meaning that there may be analogues to Batman and the Green Hornet in Bird's world. But this sort of niggling would have distracted from Bird's main theme: the opposition between that which is ordinary and that which is "super" or "special." Syndrome, with his plethora of weapons, is first and foremost an evocation of classic super-villains like Luthor, able to unleash a never-ending series of challenges to a hero or group of heroes. (It's also worth mentioning that a fellow named Xereb, rather than Syndrome, was originally going to be the movie's main villain, until the character of Buddy/Incrediboy impressed people enough to rework him into Principal Villain.) There's no suggestion that artificial enhancements are wrong when used for good purposes: the whole idea of Edna, costume-maker to the superheroes, depends on her being able to pursue her own ideals of excellence with the use of technological items like expanding fabric and invisibility cloth.

TRANSITIVE AND INTRANSITIVE ENSEMBLES

In CREATOR AND CREATED ENSEMBLED HE THEM I sussed out the centricities of various "mad scientists" and their creations. In Stevenson's DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE, Jekyll's alter ego Hyde has the greatest centricity, and is therefore the story's focal presence. In Wells' ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, the beast-men creations of the scientist are less central to the story than Moreau himself, and so he takes the position of the focal presence. However, in Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, both the creator and his creation share the spotlight.

From these books, it should be clear that the title of a feature doesn't indicate the focal presence, and as I've noticed elsewhere, this is equally true in other media. As others before me have noted, the Universal Frankenstein series is principally about the monster, while the Hammer series concentrates on the scientist.

This principle applies across the board to many comics-features. BATMAN started as a concept with just one focal presence. But the addition of Robin, BATMAN became known as an ensemble of two focal presences for the next twenty-odd years. After Robin went away to college, the serial feature frequently alternated between Batman on his own, and Batman rejoined with a new Robin, though some of the Robin-rebirths didn't go so well.

I would tend to say that whenever a comics-feature presented a team-mate as an "equal partner," then that partner, however nugatory he might be as a character, became an equal focal presence in the feature. Yet this sense of equality had to flow more from the creators' attitude toward the character than from the character's representation in the stories. As a contrary example, the comic strip introduced "Junior" to the DICK TRACY in 1932, and the youth got more than a fair number of storylines devoted to him. But he was not treated as an equal partner, and so he remained one of the main character's support-cast.

In the terminology I've introduced here, then, Robin has a transitive effect in terms of his centricity, so that he's centric to the action even in stories where he has no significant role. Junior, though, has an intransitive effect in terms of centricity. Whole story-arcs can be centered on him, but he's never really the focus, but rather a reason for central character Tracy to take action. Tracy is always the "common thread" of the stories, even if he doesn't appear that much in a given arc, much the same way that Will Eisner's Spirit is that feature's common thread even in stand-alone stories where the masked detective barely appears.

Titles of movies and movie-serials are similarly deceptive. CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR picks up story-lines that are established in other movies, particularly AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, and Captain America shares the stage with about eleven other costumed characters. Yet the other Avengers and hangers-on are in the same position as Junior in the DICK TRACY strip: intransitive. The main thrust of the story focuses on two aspects of Captain America's personal cosmos: the fate of his old friend Bucky Barnes, and the need to keep himself and his fellow superheroes free of government oversight (which attitude is to a slight extent justified by the events of INFINITY WAR). The other heroes of CIVIL WAR are more in the nature of "guest stars" than supporting characters-- even the Falcon, who had the status of an equal partner during a brief period of the CAPTAIN AMERICA comic book, but did not achieve that status in the movie series.

But though the title of CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR correctly foregrounds the fact that it's a Captain America film in a series of Captain America movies, AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR is not focused only upon the Avengers in the diegesis. The title in this case only functions to provide a semblance of continuity with the 2012 AVENGERS film, but in structure the story is just as much a sequel to the first GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY film. INFINITY WAR's structure is directly patterned upon one of Jim Starlin's many superhero smorgasbords, which in turn owes its lineage to early multi-character mashups like Marvel's SECRET WARS. To be sure, not every character in such mashups is necessarily a focal presence. For instance, Shadowcat's quasi-pet Lockheed the Dragon, who was never a focal presence in the X-MEN titles, did not become one just because he also took part in SECRET WARS. He would still be intransitive in terms of centricity, just like Junior Tracy-- but almost every other hero in the story would be a focal presence, whether that hero played a large or small part in the story. (CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS also tosses in many hero-cameos that simply don't register high in terms of centricity.)

But INFINITY WAR doesn't have those niggling problems, and so all the featured heroes of the Avengers and the Guardians groups are focal, as is the one solo act, Doctor Strange, making a total of nineteen focal presences in all. The only characters who aren't part of the ensemble are those who weren't ever focal in other films: "helper-types" like Nick Fury, Wong, et al.

BEAT COMMENT #33 1/3

Responding to THIS item:


If, as the essay says, it's true that Marvel's Valkyrie and Grandmaster characters are even temporarily popular, it has nothing to do with how good they are, as characters. I for one think they're godawful. I like how the script skirts the fact that Imitation Valkyrie has evidently been capturing people to die in Grandmaster's games for some good little time, But hey, she can't be implicated in slavery and murder, because she represents GIRL POWER!

No, they're popular because Marvel knows how to sell even a crappy script with loads and loads of humor. People remember enjoying the laughs in RAGNAROK and so everything is ennobled thereby. This is the mainstreaming advantage of the MCU that the DCEU didn't quite get, Joss Whedon's belated employment notwithstanding.

Frankly, I think Geoff Johns is probably part of that problem, but that's me.

ETHICS AMONG THE SUBCOMBATIVES

In THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS-- posted a little after I wrote THE ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE  and around the same time as the SUBCOMBATIVE SUPERHEROES series-- I defined the ethical significance of excessive strength in Nietzschean terms.

(1) Megadynamicity, the level of extraordinary strength, is the narrative "proof of strength" in that its very excessiveness suggests a propensity to transcend ordinary limits.

(2) Mesodynamicity and microdynamicity, the levels of "good" and "poor" strength, cannot be used in narrative to prove the nature of strength because by their respective natures they are determined by limitation.

In the conclusion of EXCESS I allowed that some readers' tastes naturally inclined toward "humbler manifestations of strength," and this preference shows up in two of the films I recently reviewed for NATURALISTIC, etc.

In my review of 1963's JUDEX, I expressed a philosophical puzzlement as to why anyone would deem the title character a "superhero," merely because he has "a funny name and a double identity." There are, after all, dozens upon dozens of criminal characters who have both, and this certainly does not make them "heroes." I compared Judex's career-- at least in the two films that I've seen, the original silent film by Louis Feuillade and the sound remake by George Franju--- to the obsessional mission of the Count of Monte Cristo, because Judex is motivated by revenge on a man who wronged him. Yet the character was created as a "good" counterpoint to a villainous character, Fantomas. Feulliade's serial featuring this amoral character had been a financial success, but not without receiving criticism for the sin of putting a villain center-stage.

But in my own terms, is Judex a "hero," a representative of glorious ideals rather than basic persistence? For the first half of the film, he really seems more like a demihero, meting out justice to an enemy. I believe Franju, who had to condense the rambling continuity of the serial into a feature film, meant to show an arc of redemption for Judex, in which he feels empathy for his enemy's innocent daughter and comes to her rescue when she's been kidnapped. But the latter half, while visually stunning, fails to redeem Judex as a character.

In earlier essays, I talked about such "subcombative superheroes" as the Masked Man and Captain Klutz, who at least wore outfits that resembled those of certain superheroes. But Judex doesn't have an outfit that's especially arresting: it's just a slouch hat and a long cape that anyone might wear to ward off the rain. This Judex could pass others in the street and no one would think twice about him. I have also seen characters that I deem to belong to the "superhero idiom" even if they're garbed in street clothes, but they at least do something that normative superheroes do-- they have weird gimmicks or powers, or they fight freaky criminals or mad scientists. Judex-- really doesn't do all that much. He drugs one villain and tracks down the kidnapper, who falls off a roof without any intervention from the protagonist. Big deal. I haven't re-watched Feuillade's original serial for years, but I believe that Franju's main interest here was to emulate the serial's dreamlike, surrealistic aspects. Thus the level of violence is "determined by limitation" in the sense that Franju wants no frenetic activity that would break his story's mood.

In passing, I'll note that Judex does some masked helpers, though they too don't do much of anything. This gives the Franju film a nominal similarity to 1937's DOCTOR SYN, in which the main character never wears anything but ordinary clothes. The only metaphenomenality in the film is supplied by Syn's henchmen, who dress up like marshland spectres. However, Syn can and does show that he can fight, and so in his case his own megadynamicity and his henchmen's uncanny phenomenality complement one another.

I also reviewed last year's MOANA, and this one proves a little more complicated. Here the ensemble consists of two characters who, although they have no resemblance to normative superheroes, both possess actual super-powers. The titular heroine, for some reason I've forgotten, possesses a limited ability to summon the waves of the ocean to do her bidding. Her companion, the demigod Maui, is also somewhat defined by his limits, for he can only exercise his super-powers-- mostly shapechanging-- when he has possession of his magical fishbook. Yet even when Maui gets full use of his powers, the film's creators chose not to create a major battle between the demigod and his opponent, a gigantic fire-demon. Instead Maui merely stings the giant with gnat-like blows. Yet, just as Franju had his reasons for de-emphasizing action in JUDEX, so did the Disney collaborative team behind MOANA. Because Moana is even less capable of fighting the giant than Maui, she's given the job of securing the magical whatsit that they've quested after for the whole film, which, when used against the giant, transforms "him" back into a beneficent goddess-figure.

MOANA's story would probably impress kids who'd never before seen a fantasy-film with a strong heroine, but I found it somewhat trite, and a little too predictable in its routine of the "mismatched partners." Still, I have no problem considering Moana and Maui to be heroes, albeit of a subcombative mode. They are, more than Judex at least, more committed to the ideals of heroism, and even Maui, who plays "the shirker" to Moana's "cheerleader for the cause," is revealed to have stolen the magical whatsit in order to benefit humankind. Of course, these stature of these high ideals is somewhat mitigated by the fact that MOANA is a comedy-adventure-- which in my terms means that the elements of the comedy take precedence over those of the adventure mythos.

Still, even for a comic heroine, whose mission is seen to be right even though she's got a standard "stick up her butt," Moana's confrontation with the fire-giant is certainly a more courageous act than anything seen in JUDEX. In COURAGE OVER FEAR, I reprinted several phrases from Nietzsche's THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA, but these seem most apposite:

For FEAR--is an exception with us. Courage, however, and adventure, anddelight in the uncertain, in the unattempted--COURAGE seemeth to me theentire primitive history of man.

The wildest and most courageous animals hath he envied and robbed of alltheir virtues: thus only did he become--man.

So, while I would say that MOANA's disinterest in any sort of megadynamic strength makes it just as subcombative as JUDEX, the storyline of the former at least emphasizes the virtue of courage. Thus MOANA participates somewhat in the "significant values" seen in combative works, even if it lacks the "narrative value" of megadynamicity-- while JUDEX lacks both.

OBJECTING TO OBJECTIFICATION AGAIN

Now that I've finished my review of the 2016 DVD-adaptation of the Moore-Bolland KILLING JOKE graphic novel, I may as well return to a long-neglected subject: how the word "objectification" came to be used as a buzzword for anything a given critic does not like.

Here's a sampling from online reviews, with my responses, and golly gee, the first one I found-- just a little above my own, when searching "Killing Joke+ dvd+ objectification-- is my old pal ENNBEE, telling the GUARDIAN readers that you just can't update "sexist source material."

Well, certainly not as easily as a critic can lie about what a film shows:

Pursued by a creepy stalker mafia tough-guy villain, Batgirl makes amateurish mistake after amateurish mistake, prompting Batman to sneer to her face that the bad guy “led you like a lap dog”.

Does Batgirl make some mistakes in handling the "creepy, etc." villain? Yes, but not in the repetitive manner asserted by Ennbee. Nor, despite Ennbee's claim, does the Batman character ever "sneer" at the Batgirl character. I can well understand why Ennbee would make such a claim, since he's addicted to victimage. But as written, Batman has no reason to bust Batgirl's lady-balls. The storyline, whatever its failings, does make clear that Batman values Batgirl as a partner, and when she starts going off the rails, he loses an ally thereby. He gives a tough and unsympathetic assessment of the ways in which Batgirl has allowed herself to let the villain get inside her head, and he dismisses her from the case not because she's a woman, but because she has fucked up.

And then there's this willful misreading of the whole arc of the Batgirl-prologue:

In response, Batgirl whines that Batman doesn’t trust her, has impulsive sex with him, and then indulges in a series of violent emotional tantrums before deciding to retire her Batgirl identity on the grounds that the stress is too much for her.

Really, Ennbee? When a woman protests a man's verdict, it's just "whining?" They oughtta kick Ennbee out of the Liberals' League for that one. It goes without saying that Ennbee would not approve of the sex-scene, but after the sex-scene there's only one "emotional tantrum," in which the villain Franz attempts to kill Batman, almost succeeds, and is beaten to pudding when Batgirl comes to Batman's rescue.

I'm reading along as I write this, so I'm betting that Ennbee will still top this. Let's see--

As a bonus, Batman hypocritically lectures her on the dangers of objectification while the bad guy compulsively and smarmily sexualizes her, and the cartoon lingers on a closeup image of her butt when she jogs. Girls aren’t emotionally or mentally tough enough to be heroes, is the message; they’re just too darn emotional. But hey, they look good in those tight costumes, right?

Bingo! Yes, ultraliberals cannot divorce the hero's actions from those of the villain. I pointed out that Batman letting Batgirl shag him would be problematic in real-world terms-- that is, if Batman were a person. And I'd expand on that to say that a fictional portrait of sex between two people who shouldn't be together is practically the foundation of Western drama. There is of course nothing hypocritical in Batman's warning: he's not talking about objectification per se but about the effect one crook's smarminess is having on one character's psyche. There is also no blanket condemnation of women as crime-fighters. Will Ennbee even mention the DVD's reference to Barbara Gordon's transformation into Oracle?  I'm betting not, but I'm sure I can find more prevarications.

Let's see, after he quotes one of the creators about what they meant to do, Ennbee decides that the faults in KILLING JOKE are not those of the specific creators, but of all males, and that only female creators could have possibly obviated them (though probably not in an adaptation of KILLING JOKE, which is explicitly beyond saving):

Perhaps different creators could have managed to craft a non-misogynist Batgirl story, especially if those creators were women. But a big part of the problem is, simply, that this is a Killing Joke adaptation. 

I won't waste repeating Ennbee's driveling, repetitive claims that Batgirl's failure is automatically the failure of all females, and therefore leads to a "misogynist cartoon."

However, this particular review-subject didn't allow for Ennbee any enlightened posturings on the subject of race. Therefore he drops the subject of KILLING JOKE and starts harping on why the new GHOSTBUSTERS was racist because it didn't automatically make the black character a great scientist. I think the movie's greatest crime was that it wasn't funny, but I'm not surprised that Ennbee decided to cram both race and sex into one pre-digested package.

Damn, when I started this, I thought I'd just skim a few representative quotes from different reviewers. Once again, though, Ennbee's addiction to both victimage and prevarication has taken up the whole dang post. More later, perhaps.

NULL-MYTHS: OLD MAN LOGAN (2008)

It was only after watching the 2017 film LOGAN that I learned that it had been based on a graphic novel-- actually a compilation of stories from Marvel's ongoing WOLVERINE title-- and that the writer was none other than one of the worst scripters currently in the business, Mark Millar. This is not entirely a fair opinion, since I've read few of Millar's works since my bad experience with the atrocious WANTED.

However, once I read the Millar GN, I was happily disabused of the idea that anything by Millar could have had quality in its original form. Like the 2008 movie WANTED, the 2017 LOGAN-- directed by James Mangold, who also helmed the respectable 2013 WOLVERINE-- just borrows dribs and drabs from the Millar continuity. In fact, the only things Mangold really takes away from Millar's GN are the ideas that (1) in some future setting, Wolverine has gotten very old and beat-down by coping with everyday life, which is a consequence of the fact that (2) most mutants and superheroes are out of the picture. 

Though LOGAN is far from being a game-changing movie, I can appreciate that Mangold uses some subtlety, refusing to dilute his story by telling the viewer what happened to the heroes. In contrast, Millar's OLD MAN is just Millar regurgitating the same brain-dead concept that informed the WANTED graphic novel: that all the super-villains get together and wipe out most of the heroes, sparing only a few like Hawkeye the Archer and (inevitably) Wolverine. 

As with WANTED, Millar's work is made visually bearable by his collaboration with a good if somewhat slick artist. Conceptually, though, it's just channeling the same old vibe that had begun to get tedious in Alan Moore's work in his "grim and gritty" period: What If the Superheroes, the Ones Who Always Win, Went Down to Dusky Death (and Degradation)? Incidentally, though I've scoffed at Alan Moore's claims that every writer in the business is guilty of ripping off his wonderfully ironic and deeply intellectual concepts, in the case of Millar Moore's ire would be fully justified.

 In OLD MAN Millar trades on the cumulative histories of the standard Marvel heroes for cheap shock-with-no-awe, showing no appreciation for said histories. For instance, Millar knows that Wolverine started out life as an opponent for the Incredible Hulk, so by the rules of fannish consistency, Logan as an old man must once again face the Hulk. But this is a Hulk who, for no stated reason, has become as much of a villain as the Red Skull. He's also become a gross hillbilly who rules his territory in the villain-conquered U.S, alongside a passel of green, gamma-mutated offspring. There had been other attempts to show the Hulk becoming a darker figure-- Peter David's "Maestro" iteration of the character, not to mention a few intimations of Hyde-like nastiness in the character's first appearances. But as far as I can tell, the only reason that Bruce Banner becomes a cannibalistic redneck is because he couldn't find any regular humans to have sex with. So he had sex with his first cousin, the She-Hulk, and-- presto, Instant Hillbilly!

About the only nice thing I can say about this worthless work is that I smiled a little when Hawkeye and Wolverine start tooling around in a rebuilt Spider-Mobile. But it was definitely a smile of short duration.