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.

THE NEVER-ENDING BATTLE OF REALISM AND ESCAPISM

Here's a mini-essay I wrote in response to a post on this CHFB thread regarding the recent demise of highbrow film critic John Simon:

__________

I may write a longer essay somewhere in response to this, but for now let me break this down into a couple of different factors.

First, to clarify my position, I have my own problems with certain aspects of "comic book movies," though my complaints are more in the nature of whether or not they could be better as comic book movies, and not because of their effects on other movies. 

Second, I don't want anything I say here to be misconstrued as a defense of contemporary "serious movies." I think they've been in an awful slump for the past twenty years, which is not outside the influence of the so-called "summer blockbusters," though it's arguable that superhero movies as such didn't become a dominant genre until 2008, when the MCU found ways to make even formerly second-rate comics-characters marketable. So IMO I think the slump in quality may have come from other factors, though it's arguable, I suppose, that if there'd been no MCU there would still be continued TRANSFORMERS and NINJA TURTLES franchises.

Third, I think things like CGI effects and hyper-active editing are not directly responsible for any lack of variety in modern movies. I think these are epiphemona to the greater phenomena of "escapist entertainment," and for a couple of centuries, even before movies existed, critics and "serious artists" have caviled at the influence of unserious entertainment. Before we had movies, William Wordsworth carped about carnival sideshows, for Thoth's sake. The argument about the deleterious influence of summer blockbusters, of STAR WARS specifically, and even barely related entertainment phenomena like "slasher films" have been around since the seventies. Maybe some really good films have been killed off because producers were chasing the bright shiny ball of The Big Pay-Off, but I don't think "Good Films" have ever really ceased to be made at all, even if studios make them more for the purpose of the sake of reputation than for filthy lucre. When I go through Oscar's best-films nominations for the 1990s-- by which time  high-priced genre films were all over the place-- I still think a lot of those films stand with the best of Classic Hollywood. But once we get into the 2000s, there's a notable fall-off in quality.

To sum up, it's that drop-off from one decade to the next that makes me suspect other factors, some curious failing that separates a good drama like AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999) from a empty exercise like CHICAGO (2001). 

I have no theories as to what caused this failing, which I've seen for the last 20 years in most of the alleged "best films."

But I just don't think escapist entertainment is the cause-- which, to bring this post back to the main topic, is one of my big disagreements with both "highbrow" critics like Simon and "middlebrow" types like Siskel and Eberr. 

HOW ABOUT THOSE CORPSE-FIGHTERS?

Not until recently did I come across the mini-controversy regarding Ohio's Bowling Green University's decision to remove the name of long-deceased actress Lillian Gish from a campus theater. Apparently various unnamed activists (or, as one writer calls them, "attack-ivists") complained to the school that it wasn't woke to have a theater named after the lead female actor from the 1915 silent film BIRTH OF A NATION. The film remains infamous for its championing of the Ku Klux Klan as the solution to the empowerment of black citizens during Reconstruction in the American South.

Several celebrities collaborated on a letter defending Gish's post-mortem judgment, in the hope of making  Bowling Green reverse its decision. Predictably, the university was less concerned with whether or not (some of) their students were offended rather than any considerations of fairness to actors. As the celebrity letter correctly observes, the attack-ivists were resorting to an elementary form of scapegoating, particularly by attacking a long deceased actor who could not defend herself. Indeed, back in February of this year Twitter became inflamed over forty-year old comments by another deceased actor, John Wayne.

On THE CLASSIC HORROR FILM BOARD, I participated in a discussion of the Bowling Green incident, and one poster asserted that one problem was that there wasn't a coherent argument to mount against the people who were claiming that society must purge itself of all theoretical suggestions of approval of racism. The poster said:

The problem is that no one has yet come up with a suitable 'yes, but...' argument to counter efforts to remove Gish and such examples. When an energized activist group pushes for removal, absent a 'yes, but...' argument. the easiest thing to do is comply and move on.

I agree in a broad sense that the only thing that can counter such scapegoating arguments are concise refutations of their position. To some extent the Right adopted the term "politically incorrect" as a means of combating Leftism in all forms, be those forms just or unjust. However, this phrase has become so over-used that it no longer has any power to make the extremists seem ridiculous.

Mostly for my own pleasure, I'll toss out the contemptuous phrase "corpse-fighters," to make clear that these are not fearless warriors confronting real threats in the real world, but only a bunch of cowards who can only battle people who can't fight back, counting on the fact that equally craven administrators care nothing about defending said people.

As much as I despise bullies like the Antifa criminals, even they look a little better than people who can only score points against dead people. At least Antifa goons take the risk that someone may strike back at them during their assaults.

OSCAR-BAIT AND ULTRALIBERAL POWER FANTASIES

On a political thread, I wrote (at least partly with reference to the activities of Antifa):


The other day I got round to seeing Oscar nominee THREE BILLBOARDS, ETC. I knew only bits and pieces about the film going in, but now I see that the movie, however unintentionally, delivers a great metaphor for the current confusion of liberals, ultraliberals, and whatever most of the posters here call themselves. It's a movie that shows how the descendants of liberals have become the thing they profess to hate: advocating senseless violence and vigilantism-- I highlight "senseless" as opposed to efficacious activity-- willing to do anything so that they, the quasi-liberals, no longer feel weak and disempowered.

Some SPOILERS now, since I want to touch on some pertinent details on this weird, thoroughly unfocused piece of Oscar-bait:

(1) In Ebbing, Missouri, middle-aged Mildred Hayes puts up three billboards to castigate the local lawmen for failing to solve the rape and murder and Mildred's teenaged daughter. The lawmen can't legally force her to take down the uncomplimentary billboards, but most of the Ebbing people are against Mildred. Much of the resistance stems from "the old boy's network," though some locals sympathize with police chief Willoughby-- who is named in a billboard that reads, "How come, Chief Willoughby?"--  because he's dying of cancer.

(2) Willoughby's principal deputy, Dixon, is said to be a racist because he supposedly hassles Ebbing's black citizens, though only one incident takes place during the main story. Dixon supposedly regards the older Willoughby as some sort of father-figure, though the early part of the film doesn't really make this case. Yet one has to assume something along these lines, because when Willoughby commits suicide, Dixon goes berserk and beats up the guy who owns the billboards. This gets him fired from the police force.

(3) An unknown vandal burns down Mildred's billboards. Mildred assumes that one of the cops did it and bombards the police station with Molotov cocktails. Dixon, who happens to be inside the closed station after hours, gets severely burned. However, because Dixon has received a letter from the dead Willoughby, Dixon feels a belated desire to be a real cop rather than the town bully-boy.

(4) Mildred finds out that the billboard vandal was none other than her ex-husband, whose reasons for the arson make no sense at all.

(5) Dixon, by dumb luck (if that's the word for it), goes to a bar and overhears a conversation between two men, one of whom references a rape not unlike that of Mildred's daughter. Through an involved process Dixon manages to get a DNA sample from the big-talker. He prematurely tells Mildred that he may've located the rapist-murderer. However, the sample avails Dixon nothing, for the sample doesn't match that of the uncaught rapist of Mildred's daughter, and for good measure the big-talker wasn't even in the country at the time.

(6) Nevertheless, Mildred and Dixon are so frustrated by not receiving their share of justice that they decide to hunt down the big-talker, assuming that he must have raped someone. The film ends without revealing whether or not the allies go through with their resolution to visit vigilante justice.

NOW-- I've seen a lot of art-films in which a skillful scenarist creates valid ambivalence about what a protagonist will or should do. But Martin McDonagh-- producer, director, and co-writer of THREE BILLBOARDS-- has produced the worst "fake ambivalence" I've ever seen. His characters are alternately shrill and stupid, righteous and unprincipled, and, as I said in the post, driven to exorcise their own pain through violence, even AFTER they've made blunders of mistaken identity.

I've been often contemptuous of current Oscar nominees, for their sheer lack of talent and originality. But I'd dedicate a billboard with the words, "How come, Martin McDonagh"-- with the added phrase, "--you don't get into a career more suited to you, like selling life insurance, since all you can do is push people's fear-buttons?"

NOBODY EXPECTED THE SEXUAL INQUISITION

I just posted this short diatribe on CBR Community:

What a tool John Oliver is:

“Because it is reflective of who you [Dustin Hoffman) were, if it happened, and you’ve given no evidence to show that it didn’t happen, then there was a period in time, for a while, when you were creepier around women. So it feels like a cop-out to say, well, this isn’t me. Do you understand how that feels like a dismissal?”

I like how the media whores are focusing on a single clip from the panel that makes it sound like Oliver won the argument, when in fact, Hoffman made a very cogent defense of his position; that he was willing to apologize for possible offense but that he didn't appreciate being judged simply because somewhat made an allegation. It's pretty obvious that there was no "evidence" that Hoffman could have given that would have pleased this rabid witch-hunter.

I'm so glad I never thought he was funny in his Daily Show appearances.

As yet I haven't seen a complete transcript of the remarks Hoffman and Oliver made to each other at a function given by the Tribeca Film Institute, but here's one of the partial breakdowns. Youtube has a few films of the event, but either they're incomplete or the sound gets bad at some point.

I haven't had the occasion to rail against the abuses of ultraliberals on the subject of sexuality since July's HOW TO HANDLE A TOXIC MALE. Thus I've had no occasion to address what's now being called the Weinstein Effect, which came about following the investigation into Harvey Weinstein's alleged sexual abuses in October 2017.

While the investigation of Weinstein has been so well documented that it's clearly justified, one can't say the same of most of the "Me Too" brigade. Another of Oliver's idiocies is his claim that Hoffman's accuser "has no reason to lie." This shows an absurd ignorance of the way human beings operate in the real world. The ultraliberal narrative would have people believe that every single person-- whether male or female, hetero or homo-- is crying "Me Too" because they couldn't speak at the time due to fear of recriminations. Oliver apparently cannot even countenance the idea that people might lie, or at least exaggerate, in order to feel validated. Just as soldiers have lied about their martial exploits in order to be seen as heroes, Franken's accusers have by this time been exposed to dozens upon dozens of celebrations of the "courage" of the women who came forward, no matter how belatedly. I don't doubt that Al Franken may indeed have smooched or groped a woman without her consent at least once in his life. But is that really "sexual abuse," and does it justify the senator's resignation-- which, it has been alleged, may transpire soon?

Leeann Tweeden, the radio host who made the first allegation against Franken, got an apology-- though not a confession-- from Franken in response. Her response was to read it on an episode of THE VIEW on November 17, and thus she joined the ranks of women who had suffered in silence, but who would now display their immense courage by giving testimony against powerful men who could no longer hurt them. In the course of the interview, Tweeden claimed that she was not calling for Franken's resignation. She claimed that what she was attacking was not comparable in any way to lesser sexual approaches, claiming, "I don't want men to be afraid to talk to women at a bar."  Another VIEW lady chimed in by saying something about how men had to learn how to seduce a woman, and though Tweeden isn't responsible for that remark, I think she and the women of THE VIEW are on the same page in having unrealistic expectations about men.

Make no mistake: actual rape is a crime. But the things Tweeden described Franken doing, while also illegal, were not in the realm of forced sexual assault. Based on Tweeden's descriptions, they amount to little more than attempts by a male to get a female in the mood. They are, to be sure, supremely stupid ways for men to romance women, and they almost always fail, since women don't as a rule "get in the mood" in this fashion. I'm not defending these lame attempts at seduction, but they simply should not be considered to be as invasive as rape. They are crimes at the time they occur, but are they crimes over a decade later?

Clearly the moral logic of a "statute of limitations" does not affect the court of public opinion, and now a senator, one who seems to have promoted good works in his governmental career, must be judged guilty over acts he MAY have committed years ago.

And that's how the Sexual Inquisition works.

SKINNY BUTTS AND ALL

CBR's "Minorities Bitching All the Time" thread (not the real name, of course) gave me another reason to waste time with my own bitching about SJWs. Specifically, Sergio Mims, author of this online essay, takes great pleasure in the box-office success of the currently released black-themed comedy GIRLS TRIP. OK, I wouldn't begrudge anyone, whatever their own race, the privilege of celebrating when a movie that represents a marginalized group-- that of black women, in this case-- enjoys hefty profits.

However, I have an ethical problem when the same writer use his bully pulpit not only to display schadenfreude at the failure of other films simply because they don't feature POC actors, but also displays a sizable amount of reverse racism. Here's Sims on VALERIAN:

It didn't help to make a confusing, visually tedious (despite all the special effects) film based on a mid-1960s French comic book that no one heard of in the United States with two charisma challenged, skinny white leads that no one ever heard of before 

There are three or four things that are stupid or at least dubious about this statement, but I'll confine myself to the one I mentioned on the CBR thread. I took issue with the idiocy of Sims claiming that the supposed physical qualities of lead actors had some relevance to the film supposedly being bad, and wondered rhetorically if it would have been a better film if the leads would have still been "charisma challenged." but "fat and black" rather than "skinny and white." Naturally, I didn't get any substantive debate, but I decided to elaborate my position anyway, saying in part:

The point is that the writer of the article thinks it's OK to use both "skinny" and "white" as pejoratives, which they should not be, any more than "fat" and "black."

Yet try to imagine the reaction if a professional reviewer claimed he hated seeing a Queen Latifah movie because he didn't personally enjoy watching a "fat black woman." All three words are completely descriptive of Queen Latifah, but the bare assertion would be deemed racist because it's automatically racist to criticize black people.  The logic of the accusation, such as it is, is rooted in the idea that any criticism of marginalized people is also an attempt to further marginalize them. This is a fallacy, as is the idea that you can make white people want to see more POC in the cinema by fostering a negative visual image of white people. Hence the lunkheaded remark of the reviewer, who's OK with racist body-shaming as long as it's directed at white actors.

I also remarked that within the ten to twenty years it's become a common thing in pop culture to have black characters piss on white characters by remarking on their "skinny butts" or "narrow behinds." I assume that this is some sort of negative compensation, in which said characters represent that part of real black culture that isn't content to glorify "big butts" (paging Sir Mix-a-lot) but has to try to shame anyone who doesn't have a particularly protuberant posterior. There is also, in black pop culture, a lot of anxiety about the fate of "acting too white." So why is it not 'acting white" to attempt to assign negative qualities to another race due to their physical qualities?

Here, by the way, are the actors who are supposedly too "skinny" for Mister Sims, and I'd have to say that they look pretty normally proportioned to me.

By the way, male lead Dane DeHaan seems to be a fairly experienced American actor, appearing in the second AMAZING SPIDER-MAN film, and while female lead Cara Delevingne started as a model, she showed up in the box office success SUICIDE SQUAD. It's true that neither actor is well-known enough to carry a film. But would Sims be protesting the leads' lack of box-office clout if they weren't white? Suppose the characters Valerian and Laureline-- who have always been Caucasians of implied French ancestry-- had been played by two other SQUAD actors, Viola Davis and Jay Hernandez. Would we hear protests about the foolishness of casting them, since neither has proved capable of carrying a film-- or would that be DIFFERENT?

DWELLING ON DURGNAT

I've mentioned Raymond Durgnat (1932-2002) in passing a few times on this blog, but in the coming days I plan to analyze one of his pieces in depth, the better to amplify some of the aspects of my own theory.

The details of Durgnat's significance as a film-critic can be found on this Wikipedia page. As the bibliography shows, the majority of his works focused on particular film-makers or particular films, but there are some general-theory works. I assume that most of these tomes were, as is traditional in the world of academic publishing, cobbled together from separate essays written for magazines like FILM COMMENT or SIGHT AND SOUND. The Wikipedia page mentions at least one essay that he worked into the book that most resembles a "general theory of film aesthetics," the 1967 FILMS AND FEELINGS. I can well believe it that this book originated as an assortment of essays on related themes, for most if not all chapters are just a few pages long.

Doing a variety of searches on the web for Durgnat and related topics, I don't get the sense that the legacy of this once influential critic has had much impact on current Internet film-writings. Nor did I get any sense that the worlds of elitist comics-criticism were even slightly acquainted with the man; combined searches of Durgnat's name with those of THE COMICS JOURNAL or THE HOODED UTILITARIAN yielded nothing of substance. (As I opined in an earlier piece, I was surprised when I learned that some HUddite even knew who Northrop Frye was.)

There are probably more differences than similarities between the myth-critic Frye and Durgnat the "radical populist" (as the Wiki essay calls him). Still, they share a concern with the idea that popular art is not radically estranged from "high art." On the first page of FILMS AND FEELINGS, Durgnat asks rhetorically:

To what extent does criticism habitually dismiss as "bad art" films which are "coarse-grained"-- but authentic and rewarding-- and so falsify its view of the medium?

Durgnat does not quite explain what he means by "coarse-grained," but I think it likely that he was contrasting "coarse arts" with "fine arts." Chapters in the book defend such "coarse art" as 1945's THE WICKED LADY (about a female highwayman) and 1955's THIS ISLAND EARTH (Earthmen dealing with alien imperialism). The first film Durgnat mentions in the book is Nicholas Ray's 1954 western JOHNNY GUITAR, and though he freely admits that he doesn't claim that the film "is a masterpiece," but he does say that it "typifies the interesting dramatic and moral points, and 'resonance,' of a competently made film." His aestheticized populism is also displayed in the first chapter, where he emphasizes his ambition to "find not only some 'lowest common denominators,' but also some 'highest common factors' of taste, and to do so, less by theory, than by exploring specific films."

As the previous sentence attests, FILMS AND FEELINGS does not dwell on pure theory. I imagine that like most writers of the period, Dirrgnat took some influence from the Marxists film-theorists of the day, though he seems to me far less agenda-driven than a contemporary like Robin Wood. It may be that his type of criticism has been pushed off the stage by the extreme ideologues, though I imagine that some modern readers may still yearn, as I do, to see what the critic called "the wedding of poetry and pulp."

More on Durgnat anon.

STRONG CONTINUITY, WEAK CONTINUITY

It's been a month since I wrote TRANSITIVE MONSTERS, and on further reconsideration I'm going to reverse myself on some of the opinions expressed there, reason being that I don't think "the transitive effect" applies across the board to all forms of serial entertainment. The two main forms I'll adopt here are those with "strong continuity" and those with "weak continuity." I'll further stipulate that these distinctions are *in posse* rather than *in esse,* (see definition here) and that the distinctions grow from the ways in which different media use, or do not use, continuity to appeal to audiences.

In MONSTERS I said:

...by the "transitive effect" that I first described in this essay, even the subcombative films in Freddy's oeuvre become, though said effect, part of a combative mythos, just as any subcombative Superman stories-- a major example being "Superman's Return to Krypton"-- are still subsumed by the combative mythos of the Man of Steel. And the reverse applies: a sort of "negative transitive effect" means that even the two Jason films in the combative mode are subsumed by the overall subcombative mode of the mythos.

But, sticking with these two examples, I have to ask myself: does a series about a movie-character display the same level of continuity possible for a series about a comics-character?

It's always feasible for a movie-series to stress a strong continuity between each feature-- the Lucas STAR WARS films are significant in this respect-- but most of the time, the cinema doesn't approach the idea of a series in the same manner as any medium rooted in the activity of reading. In the days prior to Lucas' innovations-- from which the current "Marvelverse" marketing-strategy is one effect-- producers strove to keep entries in a given series distinct from one another. Their motive in so doing was practical: they could never be certain whether or not a significant portion of their audiences would have seen earlier episodes. Thus I would say that "weak continuity" is the *in posse* storytelling strategy of the cinematic medium, not because all films lack strong continuity, but because most of them do. The Freddy Kreuger series is emblematic of this tendency, given that Freddy is generally destroyed at the end of one film, only to pop up in the next one with no explanation of how he survived.

Comic books used to be "weak continuity" in practice, and for the same reason: no publisher could be sure that his juvenile audience would buy even two Superman comics in a row (though there were some early experiments that used continued stories, often in the "cliffhanger" format from movie-serials). But I'd maintain that "strong continuity" was their *in posse* storytelling strategy, simply because they were in a mode that combined pictures with words that had to be read and absorbed. The particular 1960 Superman story mentioned above appeared at a time when editor Mort Weisinger apparently felt he had the "affective freedom" to expand upon the mythology of Superman and his various interrelated features, as chronicled here. We will never know whether or not his sales-success with this strategy had any influence upon Stan Lee, but it seems likely, given that some of the early Marvel titles show strong similarity to the story-tropes from the Superman comics. (The panel below shows Thor's villain Loki in his early Mr. Mxyzptlk mode.)

I will expand further on other examples of strong and weak continuities in future essays, but for now I'll wrap up this essay by stating that:

(1) even subcombative stories in the Superman comics become part of his combative mythos because the strong continuity engenders a strong transitive effect,

BUT

(2) subcomnative stories in the Freddy Krueger movies may not really integrate with the dream-monster's combative mythos, since a weak continuity engenders a weak transitive effect.

TRIBAL IN PARADISE

As a quick follow-up to my last essay, I'll expand upon some of the reasons that I don't think it would be a big crisis if all the Amazons of Paradise Island were white, or why previous depictions of this status, whether in comic books or the 1970s teleseries, are not implicated in some sort of racist conspiracy.

In my refutation of Berlatsky, I mentioned that even if WW's creator Marston had wanted to do a liberation-fantasy directed at "the women of either local minorities or of Third World countries," no comics-publisher would have touched it. That calls for two different expansions:

(1) Some ideologues have criticized the early feminist movement for being too centered on the plight of white women, and not of their darker-skinned sisters. This is clearly putting the cart before the horse, in that there was no practical way that the women who had been marginalized by majority culture could have assumed a dominant role in the framing of feminism-- not for lack of ability, but for lack of resources. Simply put, 'POC women" of the 1940s had far less leisure time to spend on politics. I strongly doubt that even progressive males of the period. whether white or non-white, would have agreed to raise the children while their wives went out to raise their consciousness a la bell hooks. The greatest gains of Black Americans in the 1940s related almost entirely to the liberation of black men in the workplace, as seen with 1941's establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee.

(2) I characterized DC Comics-- and by extension, all of the comic-book publishers of the period-- as businessmen who "played to the prejudices of the dominant white majority most of the time, while allowing for occasional breakthroughs with particular characters." This means that just as there were vaguely pro-imperialist fantasies circling around, like Marston's African tale in WW #19, there were also a fair number of progressive stories, such as a couple of postwar GREEN LAMA stories that critiqued the poison of racism. But both the progressive and regressive stories were occasional in nature; they existed to entertain the readers of the white majority in one way or the other, not to reform society as such.

No blogpost of mine (and certainly not of Berlatsky's) can do justice to the complex social and economic history that led to the marginalization of POC in the United States, in contrast to the avowed ideals by which many white Americans believed that they lived. Nevertheless, while the tastes of the white majority determined that early comics focused almost on Caucasian protagonists, it's still arguable as to whether a given work, be it a comic book or a movie based on one, is implicated in historical racism simply for the crime of omitting POC characters from its narrative.

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.

And this was the right decision. In the case of STAR WARS, there was no reason not to have all sorts of POC human beings represented, since it was a fantasy of humans and aliens existing in a universe devoid of any connection to the history of Earth-humans.

Fast-forward 36 years, though, and we have Noah Berlatsky foaming at the mouth because he thinks all of the Amazons of Paradise Island will be white. In contrast to STAR WARS, his righteous resolution does present some narrative problems with the 2017 WONDER WOMAN film, depending on how the Amazons come into existence.

Putting aside the question as to whether all Greeks of the Classical period were "white" as we now understand the denotation-- a discussion best fitted to the adherents and detractors of BLACK ATHENA-- Marston's original idea is that all of the Amazons who come to Paradise Island are descended from Greeks. Quite probably Marston would never have cared to depict any Classical Greeks as non-white, even if he had been apprised of alternative interpretations. But was he racist to default to the common idea that all Greeks were white?

In a word, no. The Greeks of Classical times were, by my reading, an extremely xenophobic race. I'm sure that they, like every other culture on the planet, mingled with other human *clines* when they were so "in-clined." But that likelihood doesn't mean that there wasn't a dominant phenotype in Greek culture-- and that was the logic that Marston and other contributors to the Wonder Woman mythos have followed. It's an ineluctable part of history, as I detailed in this essay, that the people of any given tribe become psychologically attuned to the dominant phenotype, and it becomes an expression of their social identity-- not, as the ideologues would have it, as a means of exerting social control. It can *become* a means of social control, as it was in 20th-century America, but there too it started as an expression of social identity.

The reader should note that when George Perez introduces Philippus to the Amazon mythology, he does through a *deus ex machina,* according to Wikipedia:

3,000 years ago a select few of the Olympian gods, which included Artemis, Athena, Hestia, Demeter andAphrodite, took the souls of women slain throughout time by the hands of men and sent them to the bottom of theAegean Sea. The souls then began to form bodies with the clay on the sea bed. Once they reached the surface the clay bodies became living flesh and blood Amazons. Philippus was one of these new race of women.

I suspect that the makers of the 2017 film will probably find some way to inject "diverse" Amazons. Certainly they would be ill-advised to follow Perez's creation-story, which is well suited to an ongoing comic book but not to a stand-alone movie. The interpolation of, say, Middle Eastern Amazons would make a great deal more sense than a character from Black Africa, since the historical Greeks had a lot more contact with the former than with the latter.

But should the filmmakers have to do so? Is it moral to insist that some POC character be injected into every narrative, just so that the filmmakers can avoid the taint of being called racist? I know that the Social Justice Warriors like to think of this sort of kibitzing as righting the wrongs of history. Yet if this passionate call for justice depends so substantially on fear-mongering, then it's not different from the tyranny of the old white majority-- except in terms of whose ox is gored.

SWORD, MEET CHALICE PART II

In Part 1 I recapitulated some of my earlier musings about the division of male and female roles in biology and culture, and the expression of the "feminine will" in its literary form of the "Athena archetype." At the end of the essay I specified that the charisma of weapons did have a positive manifestation comparable to the manifestation seen in male heroic archetypes.

The negative charisma is not so pronounced. As I mentioned in THE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD OF VIOLENCE,  fictional male heroes are often constructed as being so tough that they can outfight enemies who have the advantage of being armed with a non-projectile weapon, such as a sword, whip, or knife. This manifestation certainly does not contradict the positive charisma of, say, two sword-experts dueling one another, as seen in films like 1935's CAPTAIN BLOOD; it's simply a different variation on the theme of proving superiority through violent conflict.

Without mustering any statistics as such, I would say that the variation of unarmed heroines choosing to fight, or being forced to fight, armed opponents (be they males or females) is not as pervasive as it is with male heroes. Certainly there are numerous examples where the same scenario takes place; in KILL BILL, Uma Thurman's heroine initially pits her sword against Gogo's spiked "yoyo-weapon,"  but Tarantino disarms the heroine rather quickly, forcing her to fall back upon her personal resources (notwithstanding some improvised weaponry). Still, on the whole I believe there's less of an emphasis upon using the "unarmed vs. armed" trope as a proof for martial toughness.

Still, if I am correct regarding this lesser emphasis of this scenario with respect to female characters, it may have come about because any "Athena archetype" who has mastered the arts of combat-- thus, as I said, swimming against the current with regard to biology and culture-- really does not have to *prove* toughness in quite the same way that males do.

The theme of the human body's superiority to weapons receives a different emphasis, as well.  A male who avoids being penetrated by a weapon only avoids injury and/or death. A female who performs the same action *may be* avoiding the indignity of a figurative rape as well. I've argued here that male characters certainly suffer humiliation through violence as well. Yet in the same essay I also stated that the trope is certainly better known with respect to female characters, whether they are heroines as such or not.

However, the other side of the coin is that the female capable of exerting "body violence" (as opposed to "weapon violence") usually gains an image of superior sexual attractiveness in addition to the fact of her innate toughness. This is by no means inevitable with regard to male heroes: Bruce Willis' toughness may enhance his sexy repute, while Arnold Schwarzenegger's toughness does little if any good for his image as a "sex machine."  In contrast, even a female actress who is not conventionally attractive, such as Melissa McCarthy in the 2015 film SPY, obtains greater sexual allure through her ability to kick butt and take names. In this particular film this transformation is referenced by the attitude-change of Jude Law's character once he's seen her fighting (admittedly, with a substantial amount of gun-play as well).

SWORD, MEET CHALICE

In THE DOUBLE EDGED SWORD OF VIOLENCE, I pointed out that the charisma assigned to weapons could assume one of two values. One is positive, ranging from Thor's hammer to Dirty Harry's magnum handgun. The other is negative, but only in contrast to an emphasis upon the superiority of the human body's resources, as illustrated by the film ENTER THE DRAGON and the teleseries KUNG FU.

It may be noted that all of the examples cited deal with male characters. There would be no need to philosophize about exceptions if I subscribed to Nietzche's dichotomy, detailed here, regarding males and females as representing "will" and "willingness" respectively-- or, as I reworded it: "masters of violence" and "mistresses of sex." But I specified that these social and cultural roles, though they came about due to the evolutionary predispositions of the two genders, did not determine the full range of possible roles either for real persons or fictional representations. In Part 4 of SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE,  I showed how either dominant role could undergo a boulesversment, and gave examples, respectively, of two "turnabout archetypes" that I termed the "Adonis type" and the "Athena type." 

Yet, when these types are realized in real persons, the nature of the reversal involved has different physical permutations. A male human being does not have to transform himself radically in order to become a vessel of all those things I associate with Nietzsche's "willingness"-- receptivity, romantic ardor, and so on. A female human being must undergo such a transformation, in order to make what I have called "the feminine will" possible. In WHAT WOMEN WILL PT. 3 I wrote:

...when fictional action-heroes do their kickass thing, they are in essence "going with the flow," conforming to an archetype of male behavior based in both culture and physical nature.  When fictional action-heroines kick ass, they are in essence "swimming against the current"... [Action-heroines] align themselves with a reverse-archetype that describes not real experience but a gesture toward desired experience.  That implies a greater level of conflict in this reverse-archetype in that it contravenes (albeit in fiction, where nothing is impossible) both physical law and cultural experience.

Having established this line of argument, I must next inquire whether or not the "charisma of weapons" applies to the "Athena archetype" as it does to the normative "male warrior archetype."

In WHAT WOMEN WILL and elsewhere, I've drawn attention to the appearance of "warrior goddesses" in archaic cultures, including not only Athena but also Anath, Ishtar, and (to stretch the definition of "goddess" somewhat) Celtic war-maidens like Badb and Scathach. However, I am not aware of any strong tradition in which the weapons of the war-goddesses are given particular names or properties. That doesn't mean that there never were such weapons, since it goes without saying that many oral traditions have been lost to the mists of time. But for whatever reason, there seems to have been more narrative attention paid to the concept of male warriors using weapons that have actual names like Excalibur and Mjolnir. It's inevitable to draw comparisons with modern men who choose to give a name to one particular organ, though of course no one can prove, or should assume, that this male quirk has a history stretching back to the gods of Asgard.

In contemporary pop culture, it's become standard to produce female versions of every male heroic archetype, ranging from a "Lady Terminator" to various types of "Dirty Harriet." Fictional heroines, however, seem to be somewhat less *attached" to their weapons than fictional male heroes. One can't make too much of this, though, since for every Dirty Harry there are dozens of cinematic cops who don't generate any special "gun-myths."

But even if one could demonstrate that the weapons wielded by female characters were statistically less "charismatic," one certainly cannot say this about the females wielding them. This page of links from GirlswithGuns.org isn't devoted exclusively to the subject of girls and their guns, for the page also links to sites that simply concern overall "tough girl" fiction. Still, on the whole, there are a lot of pages that focus only on girls-and-guns. I'm not aware of any other weapon that has received this much Internet attention, though I have come across one devoted to female swashbucklers and their swords.

Thus, I conclude for this part of the essay that the positive charisma of weapons certainly occurs with respect to fictional female characters, even if it does not follow precisely the same paths seen with male characters. In Part 2 I will devote some attention to what happens when weapons are given a secondary status in comparison to the superiority of the body's resources.

PRACTICALLY INCONSUMMATE IN EVERY WAY

I said at the end of PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS that I'd seek to find examples of the four potentialities that might be more accessible than the novels I cited (GONE WITH THE WIND being the only one of the four that is widely read these days). But it's occurred to me that since I revived the concept of the potentialities alongside the Langerian concept of consummation, adapted here with application to literary merit.

I chose "potentialities" as the term for these four types of relationship between literary elements because such elements are not "given," like physical elements. The author is, as Tolkien rightly says, a "sub-creator," and for a work to succeed with respect to any of the potentialities, a significant number of readers must feel that all or at least most of the proper elements are well enough assembled that the work feels "finished," which is the definition of the adjective "consummate," But when the audience feels that the work is "unfinished" in some way-- i.e., "inconsummate"-- the result is audience dissatisfaction. Of course, "consummate" and "inconsummate" will never replace common terms like "good" and "bad," or even "cool" and " sucky." But I believe that they are not only more accurate with respect to the vagaries of taste, the dichotomy allows one to explore the potentialities with a somewhat more objective eye.

I've stated in a general way that most works are dominated by a particular potentiality, but here I want to state that my principle of centricity applies to the potentialities as much as to mythos. In JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY I stated:

 One of the key features of my ongoing theory is the notion that every coherent narrative, even if it contains elements of all four of Northrop Frye's mythoi, only one of the mythoi dominates the narrative.... I find it interesting that even though Frye does not invoke Jung's four psychological functions (sensation, intuition, thinking, feeling), Frye's "logic of dominance" (my term) mirrors the logic Jung uses to assert that only one of the psychological functions can be dominant when it is in a "conscious" state. 

The same logic pertains to the potentialities. In FOUR BY FOUR I used Dave Sim's CEREBUS as an example of a work dominated by the potentiality of "the didactic." (And though I've never stated it outright, its overall structure conforms to the mythos of the Fryean irony.) The same "logic of dominance" pertains to both. CEREBUS contains elements characteristic of the drama, the comedy, and the adventure, but overall the elements of the irony dominate. And like all works that are primarily about "thinking," its potentiality is dominated by the didactic. Elements of the kinetic, the dramatic and the mythopoeic are all present, but they don't inform what Frye would call the "total vision" of the work.

Now, since Sim was a superlative (if problematic) artist, even the "inferior potentialities" are generally well executed, even if they are "side dishes" to the main entree. So in none of my four categories do I consider Sim's work "inconsummate."  In contrast, if a work seeks to craft even a side dish, and does so in an unsatisfactory manner, then the work is inconsummate with respect to that potentiality. For instance, in this essay I judged that Mark Millar's WANTED fails in the domain of the dramatic. Dramatic relations are certainly not the focus of WANTED, but since Millar fails in this department as much as he does in the centric area of WANTED-- that is, the sensation-oriented "kinetic"-- then in these two areas the work is inconsummate.

Similarly, Millar botches any mythopoeic elements that might have been inherent in his proposition that "this is what happens when the villains win." So WANTED is inconsummate with respect to those three potentialities.

But is it fair to view WANTED as having failed in the domain of the didactic? Millar isn't really dealing with abstract ideas at all; he doesn't even bother to lend any intellectual rationalizations to the characters' actions. I would probably judge the potentiality of the didactic to be inconsummate as well, but in a different way than the others. It's not so much "tried to run the marathon and failed to complete it" as "didn't even show up at the starting-post."

ADDENDA: I should add that it's certainly possible for an author to use one of his non-centric potentialities in a minimal fashion, yet still prove satisfying and thus "consummate" with respect to that potentiality. Spielberg's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, like Millar's WANTED, is primarily intended to evoke the audience's thrill in pure kineticism, and so like WANTED, the other three potentialities are all used to a lesser extent. Yet whereas WANTED fails to support its extravagance with any hint of abstract concepts, RAIDERS evokes didactic concepts-- like modern man's indebtedness to ancient history-- to a degree which is satisfying even though it remains even more minimal than the film's dramatic and mythopoeic components.

NUM-INOUS COMICS

Before going on to the next phase of my current project, I want to respond to a suggestion made in the comments section of TAKING STOCK OF 2014.

Correspondent AT-AT Pilot expressed interest in seeing more studies of comics with reference to both mythic analysis and the NUM theory. I responded in the comments that I was thinking about doing something more with "myth-comics," but I should devote a little space here as to how the NUM theory works out with respect to comics.

First thought: it's a lot easier for any medium dealing with "drawn" characters-- and that includes comic strips and animated cartoons-- to invoke the marvelous, that level of phenomenality that allows for absolute freedom. Media that communicate via living actors will of necessity always be more limited, though the process of CGI-- which could be said to "draw" images real enough to mingle with live actors-- has leveled that playing field somewhat.

I'm sure that as a young watcher of fantasy-movies, I had often considered the gulf between what many live-action movie implies would be a really scary monster, and the unhappy reality. I just reviewed one of the worst, 1958's WOMANEATER.

In his first COMICS JOURNAL interview, Steve Gerber put it down to the fact that the fact a comic-book artist could draw whole armies of aliens and weird creatures with nothing more than a pen and ink, while even a well-funded movie had to exert a lot more time and money to make such scenes come to life-- though I think he admitted that STAR WARS had bridged the gap considerably.

At any rate, prior to the 1970s a lot of metaphenomenal cinema, especially but not only in the genre of horror, sought to evoke thrills with the tropes of "the uncanny."  As I've mentioned elsewhere, an awful lot of my ten tropes invoke situations most associated with horror-films, though such ideas as "perilous psychos" and "weird families and societies" aren't limited to that genre.  I suspect that in comic books, the most-used uncanny trope is that of "outre outfits, skills, and devices," since American comics were quick to pick up on those tropes as they appeared in pulp magazines.

Now, one can FIND these tropes in comic-book stories, and I've been giving some consideration as to which comics-stories might be the best exemplars of each trope. But it isn't always as easy to access a comics-story as it is to check out a film that some online pundit has reviewed. In other words, there's no Netflix or Youtube for comic books.

The only online resources for comic books are those blogs where the blogger has devoted time and trouble to reprinting entire stories. The best example known to me is PAPPY'S GOLDEN AGE BLOGZINE, which began in 2006.  Here, for example, is the first story I found that he posted that involved the "outre outfits" trope, a tale of the superhero known as "the Face," whose only "super" aspect was-- as the dialogue below establishes-- the ability to scare people with his hideous fright-mask.

This is a pretty fair story of its type, but there's not a whole lot to analyze in it. Whenever I find time, though, I'll take a shot at finding other online stories that might lend themselves to NUM-analysis.

But now, back to the other project.

TOO ILLEGIT TO QUIT PT. 1

Before delving more into the question of "Bat-legitimacy," I want to lay down some background as to what ways, if any, characters relevant to the "superhero idiom" have or have not been perceived as legitimate art-forms.

What I'm printing in this section is a slightly rewritten response to a letter. Suffice to say, I wrote a piece for my apa talking about the fact that of all superheroic types, only Tarzan enjoyed long-running serial success as a cinematic hero. A correspondent pointed out that Tarzan wasn't perceived as an "A-list" character. What I wrote in response may not be entirely easy to follow without the correspondent's words, but some of the commentary does bear on the question of legitimacy in pop culture.

___________________________

Re: my remarks on Tarzan—I wasn’t speaking of the studios’ attitude toward Tarzan, as to whether he was viewed as “A-list” or lower, but merely that audiences in the Classic Hollywood era were willing to accept him as a hero despite his lack of naturalistic normality.  It would be fair to regard Tarzan as one of many well-made B-film serial franchises, including Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan. Yet, while some series-franchises flirted with metaphenomenal antagonists, the heroes themselves were ordinary if exceptional-in-some-way human beings. Other attempts to feature extraordinary protagonists in cheap feature films—the Shadow, Chandu the Magician—didn’t last long for whatever reasons, and for twenty-something years the only consistent cinematic source for “superheroes” was what I choose to call the “C-list”—that is, the serials, firmly aimed at kids.  Only there did Hollywood choose to address the popularity of comic-book superheroes, whether they were adapting comic-book characters or coming up with their own versions, like “the Masked Marvel.”

But the American A-list actors only rarely went near extraordinary protagonists, with the exception of Douglas Fairbanks Sr,, who created one of the first in American cinema, the Thief of Baghdad, and provided the first film-adaptation of  Zorro, which alone probably kept that hero from falling into obscurity along with other Johnson McCulley characters. John Wayne, whom you mention, did in his early years perform in three serials, one of which, THE HURRICANE EXPRESS, might qualify for meta-status, though of course Wayne wasn’t an A-lister at the time. Once an actor moved into the A-list, he or she might appear in any number of realistic adventure-stories, in the genres of westerns, war, or mysteries—but not often science fiction or fantasy. Horror-films were something of an exception: they offered such opportunities for barnstorming performances that you could get an A-lister to do one, like Claude Rains in THE INVISIBLE MAN or Charles Laughton in ISLAND OF LOST SOULS. But then, these were also adaptations of novels that had some strong critical repute, which is more than one could say for TARZAN OF THE APES or most other novels featuring metaphenomenal heroes.

         BTW, to support the A-list distinction even more—in a TCM interview William Wellman said that he was brought in to provide uncredited direction on a Tarzan picture-- specifically, TARZAN ESCAPES--  because the studio was short-handed. He didn’t want to do it, but was surprised when he enjoyed the experience. Supposedly he asked the studio heads to let him do another, and was told, “Are you crazy? You’re an A-lister, bringing in the big money; we can’t have you waste your talents on Tarzan!”

MEGA, MESO, MICRO PT. 1

Here's a quick illustration of some other modes in which my "three-part harmony of dynamicity" works in practice, taken from John Carpenter's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA.

In this shot, we see four characters.  Of the four, the one to the far right is not a major player in the story, though she supplies the original motive of the other three heroic figures to get involved in fighting a Chinese wizard and his kung-fu henchmen.

At the far left, we see the character Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall), a reporter who gets mixed up in the battle.  By my theory of dynamicity she would be *microdynamic,* in that she possesses only minimal ability to defend herself.  I think she gets off one punch to an off-guard henchman during a general melee, but she's not a tuff girl.

Next we see the technical star of TROUBLE, Jack Burton (Kurt Russell).  Played for some degree of comedy by Russell, Burton is supposed to be a tuff guy-- at least in his own bailiwick as a truck driver.  But when he gets mixed up in "oriental intrigue" (cue Todd Rundgren), it's clear that his toughness is no match for even the least formidable of the main villain's henchmen.  He is therefore *mesodynamic,* in that he represents a "middle" level of toughness.

Third over is Wang Chi (Dennis Dun).  In contrast to many Classic Hollywood films in which the Asian Guy was seen as less dynamic than the white male star, Wang is the only one who possesses an exceptional level of martial-arts ability.  Because he's seen engaging the exceptional henchmen of the villain, sometimes with an unquestioned victory, Wang Chi is *megadynamic.*

Burton, however, has one ace in the hole that gives them the victory over the main villain: a simple knife-throwing trick.  It's arguable that his possession of this one special talent *temporarily* raises him to a *megadynamic* level.

Thus the *mesodynamic* level, like a lot of my "middle categories," is one with an intrinsically amphibian nature.

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.

STANDARD BARING PART 1

At the conclusion of this essay I said:

Maybe in a future essay I'll enlarge on the reasons why I think why superhero films, like their cousins in the pure-fantasy and pure-SF genres, can tap and have often tapped that range--

And why said superdude films have often done much better in that range than Seitz' beloved zombie films.

This essay is a prelude to talking about what range of emotions superhero films have successfully tapped, since I find it incumbent to discuss first some of the potential abuses of "the call for standards" voiced by Seitz, Spurgeon and others too numerous to name.

In George L. Kline's essay "The Use and Abuse of Hegel," the author discusses the many ways that Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx-- though hardly fellow travelers in any other respect-- radically re-interpreted many of the "world-historical" concepts of their philosophical predecessor Georg Hegel. Kline concludes the essay thusly:

"It is in their instrumentalizing and devaluing of the present-- of present communities, cultures, practices, and, especially, persons-- that Nietzsche and Marx most unambiguously exhibit the abusive reversal and inversion of Hegel's doctrine which both of them have undertaken."-- Kline, "Use and Abuse of Hegel," HEGEL AND HIS CRITICS, 1989.

Now Tom Spurgeon is certainly not a philosopher re-interpreting anyone's doctrine, but certainly he's practicing his own breed of "instrumentalizing and devaluing" with the provocative if empty title, "If Superhero Movies Suck, And I Suspect They Do, Why Can't Folks Stop Seeing And Discussing Them?" I refuted his essay in my cited response above, pointing out that his assertion that "Many Superhero Films Also Fail To Meet Most Low Standards" comes down to utter nonsense. I'm sure current superhero films do fail to meet whatever Tom Spurgeon *imagines* to be "low standards" as seen through his eyes, but the datum that most superhero films violate what a Spurgeon *imagines* to be low standards demonstrates nothing about why a real audience of moviegoers bestowed financial success upon a respectable number of these cinematic travesties. The only way Spurgeon's statement could be made to yield sense would be if one posited that the moviegoers who made the first FANTASTIC FOUR film a minor box-office success had not merely "low standards," but "no standards." This conception of the hoi polloi viewing-audience may remind one of the standard Marxist/Adornite portrait of the consumer of "light culture," who is essentially little more than an automaton progammed to buy whatever the Culture Industry grinds out.

I suggest that anyone who still propounds this self-aggrandizing view of popular culture today is incompetent to talk about standards, be they high or low, be they indebted to Nietzsche's faux-aristocratic snobbery or to Marx's liberal obsession with leveling all of culture to a flat economic plane.

Devoted as I am to seeking a middle path between these timeworn extremes, my next essay in this series will explore a possible model that superhero films might seek to emulate to their genuine improvement, as opposed to Seitz' oddball model of "zombie movies" or Spurgeon's lack of any model beyond his laundry list of personal complaints.

QUICK, GO: SHOOT THE BARREL-FISH

As noted in my last essay I thought of writing a long piece on the notion of "critical standards" that Matt Zoller Seitz raised but did not demonstrate that he understood. But since I've now read Tom Spurgeon's reactions to the Seitz piece, I'm just going to open fire on some of the fish he was kind enough to offer.

"The strongest part of Seitz's essay comes out of the simple fact that he pays superhero films the respect of holding them to a high standard."-- I might agree with the possibility of someone, somewhere managing to do so. Since Seitz doesn't even begin to articulate standards, beyond his praise for the "rainbow spectrum" of zombie movies, I don't see Seitz's bare assertion of standards as anything but empty rhetoric.

"Then Again, Many Superhero Films Also Fail To Meet Most Low Standards"

Nonsense. The fact that most superhero films in recent years have made excellent-to-respectable money demonstrates that they did, in fact, meet the low standards of the audiences, who often do want nothing more of such films than what Seitz calls "their capacity to kill two hours and change." It would certainly be correct for Tom to say that the films have not met what he considers to be *his* lowest possible standards, by which (for instance) he judges that "all the superhero movie fight scenes combined make a poor cousin to the hallway brawl in Oldboy or even the casino fight in Kung Fu Hustle."

Sidebar: KUNG FU HUSTLE? Really? Yukk.

"Very few emerging film genres have made this kind of money while offering so very little in terms of quality construction, let alone art."

Two words: disaster films. Beside either the earliest or more recent moneymakers in this genre, HELLBOY comes off like a freaking Hegelian tract.

"To return to our original example, Fantastic Four isn't an all-time great comic book because it's about *family* or *exploring* -- give me a break! -- it's a great comic book because Stan Lee is a funny and inventive writer and Jack Kirby had one of the great visual imaginations of the last 100 years and exercised it constantly."

While I don't disagree with the argument that the FF films are incredibly mediocre, the core of the FANTASTIC FOUR comic's success cannot be seen apart from its representation of the dynamics faux superhero family. The exciting stuff was there, but it wasn't the main attraction, as it might've been for (say) CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which title managed to keep going for almost ten years even w/o Kirby's visual imagination.

"One of the reasons a lot of people grow tired of superheroes as comics readers is because it's a relatively narrow genre that's harder than many to connect to some sort of human experience."

"Human experience" is a loaded phrase. If it means what Tom sardonically referred to as *exploring,* then no, superheroes will probably never be as adept at audience-identification as are, say, the films about the "stone cold killers partnered with daffy blonds" that Tom also mentions. But "human experience" also takes in a wider range of thoughts and emotions than one gets from sitting around BS-ing about relationships (which is one of the attitudes that kills the two FANTASTIC FOUR films for me). Maybe in a future essay I'll enlarge on the reasons why I think why superhero films, like their cousins in the pure-fantasy and pure-SF genres, can tap and have often tapped that range--

And why said superdude films have often done much better in that range than Seitz' beloved zombie films.

SEITZ WARNING

I really hate to give any more publicity (however minor) to Matt Zoller Seitz' goofball essay for Salon.com. From the essay's first paragraph it's clear that this isn't anything resembling serious film criticism. "Superheroes Suck!" is just a sharp stick designed to provoke the grizzly bear (OK, Pooh-bear) of superhero comics fandom. I wouldn't think twice about seeing such poorly reasoned drivel on, say, the online COMICS JOURNAL site, but its appearance on a site with a considerably better rep surprises me. I have to assume that Salon.com's editors commissioned this mess simply to exploit the debut of IRON MAN 2. Given that the essay currently sports almost 100 responses, I guess Salon.com succeeded in manipulating its audience at least as well as your average film sequel.

So, in order to spend as little time critiquing this rubbish as possible, I'll just sum up my disagreements as "Six Things I Hate About Puff-Critique Pieces:"

1) The easiest shot-- just to get it out of the way-- is one that many people have already jumped on: Seitz starts out talking about the superhero genre in his title but within moments is labelling all films in this genre to be "comic book movies." Granted, that's probably what the average filmgoer thinks as well, not taking time to remember all those great comic book movies of other genres. But a critic with any mojo simply can't oversimplify like that, especially since it means not giving due credit to all those other stellar works-- you know, CASPER and RICHIE RICH.

2)"The comic book film has become a gravy train to nowhere. The genre cranks up directors' box office averages and keeps offbeat actors fully employed for years at a stretch by dutifully replicating (with precious few exceptions) the least interesting, least exciting elements of its source material..." Again, others have pounced on this remark with reference to other "Hollywood blockbuster" film-genres. I'll add that a lot of critics from Hollywood's Golden Age would probably have said the same of most of Hollywood's adaptations of literary prose works, ranging from Lewis' BABBITT to Kerouac's SUBTERRANEANS.

3) "And as a critic who made a point of clinging to my sense of wonder long past childhood, I've tried (too hard at times) to find signs of life in formula." Hollywood Writing 101: the critic with a harsh message tries to prove in advance that he's Not A Snob; He's Just an Average Guy. This in invoked again a little later as Seitz anticipates his being critiqued for being either an "aesthetic turista" or a "snooty killjoy." Don't holler before you're hit, Seitz.

4) "Even at the peak of their creative powers, big-budget comic book films are usually more alike than different. And over time, they seem to blur into one endless, roiling mass of cackling villains, stalwart knights, tough/sexy dames, and pyrotechnic showdowns that invariably feature armored vehicles (or armor-encased men) bashing into each other." I'm not sure what to make of this. Take away the bit about "pyrotechnic showdowns" and this could almost be a description of the panoply of Hollywood's classic film noirs. Maybe he doesn't like the similarities in film noirs either?

5)"The superhero movie too often avoids opportunities to summon tangled feelings, lacerating trauma and complex characterizations -- qualities that make genre films worth watching and remembering for reasons beyond their capacity to kill two hours and change." This statement simply assumes that his preference for trauma and entanglement is obviously a Greater Good, sans proof, than "pyrotechnic showdowns," but he's claiming that there are genre-products that have managed to do These Good Things, so let's see what he's talking ab--

6) "--let's set the most notable modern superhero movies alongside titles from another durable genre: the zombie film."

Pardon me?

The ZOMBIE film?

Not the horror genre as a whole? Not even some genre that more closely resembles the superhero flick's emphasis on heroic violence, like the western, but--

The ZOMBIE film? That's what he thinks has "poetry" and "soul?"

Yes, Virginia Seitz, there are some excellent zombie films out there. But this subcategory of horror films has benefitted in no small way from the rise and advancement of the "adult" horror film. The original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is a cool little film, sure. But would we have some of the other films in Seitz's zombie-rific "spectrum of moods and modes" had it not been for breakthroughs in horror cinema as a whole? Is there an audience for 28 DAYS LATER in 2002 without the seminal breakthroughs of 1973 (THE EXORCIST) and 1976 (CARRIE)?

I'll make it easy for Seitz: no.

Given Seitz's stated distaste for sameness, the mind boggles to see him write as if there were no important differences between films about zombies (a subgenre at best) and films about superheroes (a distinct genre in itself, albeit allied to a variety of related works in what I've termed the superhero idiom). Clearly, the superhero film has been marginalized as kid-stuff to a greater extent and for a longer period than the horror film. Even going back to Classic Hollywood, one can find critics who swooned at the subtleties of Val Lewton or the disruptive scenarios of Franju while disdaining horror films as a whole.

By contrast, the general popularity of 1978's SUPERMAN notwithstanding, it's not until 1989 that Tim Burton gave critics a superhero film that forced many (though not all) of them to devoting a little more thought to the genre's appeal than your basic "action bad-- drama good" schtick (which Seitz is plainly happy to rehearse).

In a future essay I'll probably have more to say about the genre-components of the superhero genre, and how they impact when adapted into film. But I'm really going to try to make this my last endeavor to bomb Seitz.