ink and ashes

Get Lost in the POOLS: a Game Review & Discussion

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 21:36:00 +0000

With a premise rooted in open exploration rather than solving puzzles or confronting monsters and enemies, Tensori’s POOLS isn’t a game in the conventional sense. It’s important to know this going in, because expectations of having something to “do,” a character to roleplay, and even a story to engage with, will likely lead to disappointment. However, letting go of these expectations, if you even harbor them in the first place, will bring you into a sublime and complex expression of liminal spaces.

Though clearly and respectfully influenced by animators like Jared Pike, Kane Pixels and Matt Studios, whose seminal shorts on YouTube have deservedly drawn attention and praise, Tensori succeeds in offering their own singular vision of the Poolrooms, a subset of the broader Backrooms creepypasta in which environments are defined by pools as you would expect at an aquatics center as well as spaces that are only pools because they’ve been flooded. The result is a stunning work of art, perfect for casual gamers and/or anyone who has yearned for an interactive, rather than passive viewing, experience of the Poolrooms.

The Architectural Wonderland

As the game starts, we are literally dropped into a white-tiled space, where we assume first-person control of an avatar with a camera. (Our perspective throughout the game is through the camera, but the first-person-point-of-view doesn’t draw attention to this.) The controls are simple and elegantly implemented, limited to moving/swimming and looking around. After noting that our point of entry is an inaccessible hole in the ceiling, gameplay continues with navigating the maze of rooms comprising an increasingly large complex of spaces. The first thing to note is how immersive the experience is. Tensori clearly have a solid grasp of architecture and the psychology of space, successfully creating environments that leverage structure, spatial volume, and light to express the tension of liminal spaces that are intelligible (that is, navigable) but without a clear purpose. Some are bright and expansive, others dark and claustrophic, and a few that are mind-bogglingly monumental. Even before we consider the oddities and fun references to Backrooms lore, Tensori’s consistently fascinating architectural design beautifully evokes a range of experiences, from calm to unsettling to WTF. It is, on its own terms, a joy to progress through each chapter and discover new elements and new space typologies as they are delivered with increasing surrealism. Add in outstanding sound design, which foregoes a musical score to focus entirely on sound effects and environmental sounds, and POOLS becomes all the more engaging. From the tapping of our footsteps and mechanical sounds of HVAC systems, to random bits of music and noises that are disturbingly weird and inexplicable, it’s astonishing how well Tensori integrate a sonic experience into the physicality of their environments.

Lost in Liminality

POOLS is no mere building tour, of course, and this is where Tensori’s other strength comes into force: their understanding of liminal spaces. Where I have a quibble with the Backrooms and the many videos on YouTube, however well done, it’s with the loose conception of liminality, which is related to but not identical to the mysterious. To explain what I mean, consider that liminality has more than one aspect. In the physical sense, liminal spaces are transitional spaces. These could be rooms like foyers, where people transition between exteriors and interiors, or thresholds like doorways. The Backrooms are liminal in the sense that they our conceptually outside our lived experience and consist of spaces that seem more algorithmically generated than actually designed. The maze-like environments are much like a sentence in which the grammar and vocabulary are correct, but the word choices don’t add up to anything meaningful. As pots say, kettles garden in orbit, but only when the moon frets in the calendar’s dreams.

It's the conceptual sense of liminality, however, that is to me the most evocative, and here I refer to semantic ambiguity – that is, the unclear meaning of a space (e.g. its intended purpose). Conceptual liminality isn’t just about ambiguity but irresolvable ambiguity, the impossibility to definitely assign any kind of meaning to a space. Just as the physical condition of being in a liminal space implies a perpetual sense of transition, the mental perception of a liminal space implies an inability to understand it in a teleological sense. We simply can’t explain why any given space is how it is. Worse, we can’t even be sure that there is an explanation. It’s precisely the irreconcilable tension between meaning and meaningless that gives liminality its power, particularly in comparison to the mysterious which implies meaning through a definite question even if the answer is out of reach.

With this understanding of liminality in mind, the most successful liminal spaces to me are therefore those spaces that never offer a resolution to our perceptions of environments that don’t make sense in their whole, leaving us at the mercy of whatever fears and wonders our minds can conjure. When someone introduces a monster, however, or starts populating spaces with all manners of entities, the liminality is lost and we are left with the merely mysterious: undeniably weird places whose meaning is fixed on surviving horror even as the origin of that horror is unknown.

POOLS is a beautiful demonstration of this physical and conceptual liminality. And in their world-building, Tensori demonstrate great skill and restraint in when and how new elements are introduced, whether these are incongruous artefacts or adjustments to the laws of physics. This drives their ability to gradually ratchet the suspense throughout the game and, without a narrative framework or monsters to chase us, makes the complex of maze-like environments delightfully resistant to explanation and rational understanding. Even the strangest, most surprising scenes in the game are presented without any means to discern their purpose, adding to an atmosphere that straddles curiosity and dread. If you want a literary comparison, here’s one: the entirety of the complex is rather like Stanislaw Lem’s inscrutable ocean in Solaris, which produces entirely human doppelgangers of people taken from the memories of a space station’s crew. Why the ocean does this is unclear, just as it isn’t clear whether there is any intentionality underlying its actions. And like Lem’s protagonist, we end having to confront the possibility that it may be impossible to figure anything out.

Tensori does push beyond the strict ambiguity of liminality, however, and does so purposefully. This is most overt in Chapter 6, when statues of the kind previously seen in static poses throughout the game begin to act like the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. Appearing in spaces behind us after we look away, they serve to shepherd us forward by blocking our way back. Even before that, however, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, the statues appear to open light panels lining a corridor, staring at us with glowing eyes. (You might want to freeze-frame the moment in the full Walkthrough on YouTube.) Although the statues aren’t exactly chasing us, and they certainly don’t act in any specifically dangerous manner, the unsettling effect nonetheless emphasizes some intentional presence within the complex. Questions about POOLS’ liminality actually occur even earlier than that, as early as Chapter 1, when a detour in a flooded corridor leads to a submerged hole and ladder – and a pair of hands that helpfully point in the right direction to the exit. Although none of these signs of activity by themselves add up to a narrative, let alone an explanation of what the POOLS complex is and what, if any, purpose it might serve, they nevertheless materialize what could otherwise be dismissed as tricks of the mind. We’re not alone in the POOLS, and that’s a different experience than not being able to know whether we are alone or not.

Ambiguity Resolved by … Mystery?

The game’s ending calls everything into question. Sort of. It’s enigmatic to the point that revealing it doesn’t really spoil anything about the game unless you view knowing anything about it as a spoiler. In essence, once we reach the final room, we’re confronted with only one exit: a door held open by a figure of whom we can only see an arm and head in silhouette. Curiously, the game removes our agency as a player and we can only watch as our invisible Explorer-Self sets the camera down on a partially submerged table, leaving only behind the sound of treading water or swimming as the scene continues … on an old TV set on a desk. The final scene is of someone ejecting VHS marked “POOLS” from a VCR.

Personally, I would have been perfectly happy without any of the activity or the meta-ending. POOLS could have concluded as non-narratively as it began, with an exit to the “real” world as abrupt and devoid of explanation as our entry into that first room. The experience Tensori create through architectural and sound design really is just that good on its own. But I have to give them credit for crafting a thought-provoking ending that doesn’t ruin the experience and is even very clever in how it subverts the idea of an ending. Thinking about what the ending means, it’s tempting to start with the fate of our Explorer-Self. Is it a happy ending in which we escape? Alas, we don’t see ourselves leaving through the open door, which actually closes as the scene pulls away to the office TV. Does that mean a tragic or horrifying ending? As we don’t hear any screaming or other sounds of distress, nor has anything in the game threatened us with anything other than being creepy, it’s not clear that anything bad actually happens to our Explorer-Self either. For unexplained reasons, our Explorer-Self simply goes against our natural inclination and sets down the camera instead of heading toward the door. The office scene offers no insights here. It’s tempting, perhaps, to interpret the realization that our game experience was, meta-contextually, the recording of a VHS tape and, from there, find a comparison to the Blair Witch. Although there are no counter-factuals per se to disprove this interpretation, studying the details of the desk scene strongly suggests another interpretation, which is where the subversion of endings comes into play. So what do actually see?

The ejected VHS tape only says POOLS, the title of the game. There is no date or other informational markings; nothing to me that suggests the tape is footage obtained from a particular time and place.
In the VHS tapes lying on the desk, while there is one labeled “Found Footage” there is also another labeled Level 188.8, which is a reference to “the Flooded Windows” sublevel in Backrooms lore. Other labels are almost impossible (for me) to read, but one seems to be about tiles, another about building games, and yet another about solving something.
There are two sketches, an incomplete one of a human torso and, below that, an architectural drawing labeled “entrance,” as well as a human figurine.
Also on the desk are two books, one on human anatomy and another titled “Architecture: Build Your Dreams.”
A scene from Chapter 1, the “helping hands” ladder and hole, is presented to us as a painting on the wall. The depiction is more artistic than photorealistic, and displays an artist’s signature.

There’s a final clue – other than the fact that the most significant anomalous artefacts in the game are art-related – that supports the idea that POOLS isn’t ultimately a found footage horror game. Look closely at the TV, and you’ll see it’s branded with the word “IROSNET” – Tensori spelled backward. Could the office be a reflection of the game developers’ studio and, by extension, their creative process? Could questions about the Explorer-Self’s in-game fate be, essentially, beside the point, because the Explorer-Self is merely a user interface illusion? If so, the camera gets sets down simply because the experience has come to an end and it is we, the actual players, who exit the door in our minds as we rejoin the game’s creators in the real world. POOLS is thus, ultimately, interactive performance art. Its meaning comes not from interpretation, but from experience.

Of course, there’s no definitive way to prove whether my interpretation is either “correct” or what Tensori intended or not. It might not appeal to fans of horror games. But it’s that unresolvable uncertainty, and the corresponding opportunity to create our own meaning, that allows the experience of playing POOLS to be truly liminal … and linger long after the credits.

What’s next, then? Should Tensori decide to continue making games in the liminal genre, I would hope they’d resist the temptation to add levels and lore to POOLS as some Steam commenters suggest. The game offers a complete experience, and there are possible development directions that wouldn’t risk its meticulously crafted. After all, the psychology of space, and the experience of solitude, is far richer than terror. After producing a game with a bias toward psychological horror, I’d see an opportunity to further subvert the Backrooms genre with a game biased toward kindness: what could a compassionate liminal environment look like? I’m not Tensori, though, so ultimately that’s neither here nor there. Whatever the future holds, POOLS stands as a magnificent achievement on its own. It certainly can, and should, be revisited to soak in the many different environments, catch previously unnoticed details, and admire the work of art that it is.

Get the game here.

F vs the Franchises: Index of Posts

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 18:33:00 +0000

Given the unsophisticated formatting of my blog and ridiculously lengthy posts, here’s a collection of all the posts in my Frederik vs the Franchises series for easy reference.

Superhero Fatigue

Part 1 - Comics

Part 2 – the MCU

Part 3 – the DCEU

Part 4 – Batman :

Part 4A , covering Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, plus some introductory thoughts.
Part 4B, covering The Batman and Batman in the DC Animated Universe.
Part 4C covering Tim Burton’s films and the Snyderverse.
Part 4D covering my favorite Batman stories.

F vs the Franchises: Superhero Fatigue (Part 4d - In the Shadow of a Man Dressed As a Bat)

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 23:53:00 +0000

Click here for Part A of my Batman discussion, covering Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy.

Click here for Part B of my Batman discussion, covering The Batman and Batman in the DC Animated Universe.

Click here for Part C of my Batman discussion, covering Tim Burton’s films and the Snyderverse.

My Favorite Batman Stories

For all that film and television have told Batman stories with varying degrees of success, and personal appeal, the stories that stand out to me as my favorite actually come from DC’s Elseworlds line of comics. Freed from the obligation to feed and maintain any kind of continuity and canoncity, these “what if” stories offer focused explorations of wildly diverse ideas, settings, and scenarios for its characters. Among favorites are Brian Augustin and Mike Mignola’s Batman: Gotham by Gaslight, in which a Victorian-era Batman confronts Jack the Ripper in Gotham City, and Jean-Marc Lofficer, Randy Lofficier, and Ted McKeever’s Batman: Nosferatu, the second book (following Superman’s Metropolis and preceding Wonder Woman: The Blue Amazon) in an absolutely thrilling trilogy inspired by German Expressionist cinema. Approaching Batman from opposite yet complementary perspectives – one is noir while the other is modernist – are two books that in their own way encapsulate what is most compelling to me about the Batman concept: Batman: Nine Lives, written by Dean Motter and drawn by Michael Lark, and Batman: Death by Design, written by Chip Kidd and drawn by Dave Taylor. Neither includes child sidekicks, the Bat-family, and villains better suited to horror movies, which to me creates the opportunity to tell more focused stories.

However realistic you might think Reeves and Nolan were in their approach, neither compare to Nine Lives, which strips away the trappings of superhero comics to leave, instead, the type of cinematic noir narrative that came out of Hollywood during the 1940s and writers like Chandler and Hammett. Its hard-boiled noir detective story that sharply distills the concept of “Batman” to its essence as a portrait of crime, justice, and trauma. There are no fantasy elements nor sci fi gadgets to be found in its pages, and villains from Batman’s gallery of rogues are here presented as gangsters and petty criminals, whose familiar monikers are casual nicknames rather than costumed personas. Even Bruce Wayne, however forceful in and out of his Batman costume, is offered to us as a fallible human rather than a mythical figure with near-superhuman abilities. One could argue that Nine Lives isn’t really a superhero comic at all, which would be a fair impression – and I enjoy the book all the more for it. Another reason for me to enjoy it: the relatable, flawed humanity of its characters. Unlike the comics, where villains’ criminal pathologies are amplified to grotesque, lurid extremes, Nine Lives offers a grounded portrait of desperation and the corrupting influence of money and power.

The story revolves around Selina Kyle who, as owner of the Kit Kat club, is privy to the secrets of Gotham’s powerful business and criminal elites she consorts with, often intimately. When she’s found dead in the City’s labyrinthine sewer system, a chain of events is set in motion in which the motive to find her killer is often obscured by the desire to learn her secrets. What’s make the mystery interesting as a Batman story and not just a noir murder mystery and crime drama is Motter’s decision to tell the story not from the point of view of Dick “Wonder Boy” Grayson, a former cop turned private detective. Like the protagonist of a good noir story, he plays a key role in figuring out the mystery. But he also provides an outsider’s view of Batman’s activities, with an attitude that is suitably cynical. Furthermore, he offers a working-class view of wealthy Bruce Wayne that, again, is rooted in suspicion and mistrust. Without the ability to see events from Bruce Wayne/Batman’s point of view, we get to experience how mysterious, and perhaps misunderstood, he is to the people he encounters. And the impression, at least initially, makes Wayne just as much a noir character as anyone else in the story. With Lark’s gorgeous art to complement Motter’s nuanced writing, the overall book is the rare Batman story that, in my mind, checks all the boxes.

Where Nine Lives dwells in the shadows, cynical and suspicious, Batman: Death by Design walks in daylight with the refreshing conviction that Gotham can be made better. Yet for all their opposite perspectives, both reject exaggerated extremes in favor of a grounded approach to their narratives and world-building. For Nine Lives, it comes from focusing on the corrosive psychology of greed and its manifestation in organized crime. For Death by Design, greed and corruption are also the focus, but here viewed through the novel lens of architecture and the understanding that the civic health of a community is tied to the quality of its built environments. While Gotham has always been a character in its own way, Death by Design stands out for paying attention to the design and construction of its buildings – specifically, the Wayne Central Station, envisioned as a grand social landmark and transit hub but ultimately a failed promise due to a compromised design and flawed construction. At the story’s beginning, Bruce is determined to demolish the building commissioned by his father and replace it with something new. But as the new vigilante X-Acto appears targeting people he holds responsible for the building’s failure, such as the corrupt head of Gotham’s leading general construction company, Wayne Central Station becomes the focal point for a story about historic preservation and the inspirational value of civic architecture. As the story involves ordinary citizens such as journalists and social activists, Death by Design understands that the fight for Gotham’s future isn’t limited to the influence of freakish villains and the costumed vigilante who opposes them. Here, then, is an opportunity to address the general critique of Batman stories that views him as essentially ineffective in achieving lasting change to make Gotham a safe place to live. Where Batman is an effective agent in dealing with the immediate danger of crime, like the police is supposed to be, it’s ultimately up to Bruce Wayne as a Gotham citizen to influence the city and address the root causes of crime, corruption, and urban despair. While there’s plenty of Batman in the story, and the Joker is the usual wildcard (although thankfully not as a quasi-supernatural Hannibal Lecter; more like a less campy Cesar Romero), Death by Design stands out for the way it pays attention to Bruce Wayne’s civic-mindedness. By extension, we get a more hopeful version of Bruce Wayne and Batman, one who is clearly motivated by tragedy but not chained to it as we see in the more common brooding interpretations. Also demonstrating how Batman can act without resorting to killing, the book gives us an inventive engineer who, in the same optimistic spirit of modernism, has gadgets like a force field that can protect the people within it. IGN may feel that “People looking for a memorable Batman yarn, however, might want to look elsewhere,” and perhaps that’s true for people with specific expectations of a Batman story. But as far as I’m concerned, Death by Design is not only a fun story but a thoughtful, insightful and in a way surprisingly plausible interpretation of Batman precisely because it foregoes the usual cliches of superhero comics. And it’s gorgeously illustrated too, which adds to the joy of reading it.

F vs the Franchises: Superhero Fatigue (Part 4c - In the Shadow of a Man Dressed As a Bat)

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 23:50:00 +0000

Click here for Part A of my Batman discussion, covering Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy.

Click here for Part B of my Batman discussion, covering The Batman and Batman in the DC Animated Universe.

Tim Burton

Each of Burton’s Batman films have jarring scenes that needlessly break their illusions. In the first it’s when Batman homes in with guns and missiles on a defiantly stationary Joker, only to miss despite apparently sophisticated computer targeting. As if this isn’t bad enough, Batman manages to get shot down from the single shot of an implausible gun there’s no way the Joker could have been keeping in his pants. The terrible choreography of the scene makes for an empty and pointless spectacle. What good are tools that don’t work as intended? Granted, the film would have been over if Batman had successfully killed the Joker on that first pass with the Batwing, but that’s an argument for replacing that scene with another that actually works. Batman Returns offers a more puzzling than jarring scene when the Penguin’s goons use plans of the Batmobile to hijack the vehicle. Where did they get the plans? Ebay? The follow-up question is: who engineers a car with a skinny mode just in case it needs to squeeze through a narrow space? Isn’t that a cooler version of keeping shark repellant in the utility belt, just in case?

In the bigger picture, though, these amount to quibbles in films that are, in my view, the best live-action Batman films to date. Obviously, gloriously gothic and German expressionist production design is a contributing factor, as few films in or out of the comic book genre can boast such iconic visuals. But the films also succeed as Batman stories, offering a synthesis of the character’s various interpretations that is remarkably coherent both in itself and in relationship to the fictional Gotham setting. In Burton’s and screenwriters Sam Hamm and Daniel Waters’ Batman we see influences from Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, and Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, which is to say that this version is quite brutal with hints of psychosis. Yet the character is kept from being overly grim by drawing on more classical depictions of the characters, such as his detective skills, engineering abilities, commitment to defending Gotham’s citizens from terrifying threats, and charmingly eccentric Bruce Wayne. From a narrative standpoint, the scripts by Sam Hamm (Batman)and Daniel Waters (Batman Returns) aren’t burdened by dead-ending topical references, as Nolan’s trilogy is. Both films keep it simple with Batman as a vigilante acting (reacting) in the absence of effective public institutions to confront rampant crime and corruption, notably oversized villains. It’s in the characterizations that we find material for rich interpretations, and the strength of both films, especially Batman Returns, is the extent to which the characters and the city of Gotham, itself a character, both feel like symbiotic extensions of each other.

However impressive Heath Ledger’s Joker is, within the limits I’ve discussed, Jack Nicholson’s Joker in Batman remains my favorite live-action interpretation. (Jared Leto’s version in Suicide Squad is more interesting than people give him credit for, but with so much of his performance and role in the story cut, according to David Ayer, it’s hard to form a decisive opinion.) Notably, he’s no less terrifying for having a biography of sorts, one that doesn’t give us a sob story about a bleak childhood or asks us to sympathize with him as a tragic figure. When we are first introduced to Jack Napier, it’s as the right hand to Jack Palance’s crime boss Carl Grissom. Later, we learned of his earlier role as a small-time hood mugging people, like Thomas and Martha Wayne, for petty cash and jewelry. Already established as ruthless and cold-blooded killer, his transformation into the Joker is chillingly believable: his disfigurement by the acid removes the thin layer of civilization necessitated by his position within an organized criminal organization. Without the restraints that comes from social hierarchy, Napier is freed to act out on his murderous impulses on a larger scale, and with a warped sense of humor, as the Joker. Although it doesn’t seem to me that Batman purposefully drops Napier into the vat of acid, and both screenplay and novelization apparently support the view that it’s unintentional, the scene itself has enough ambiguity that whatever actually happens, the outcome creates symmetry between Joker and Batman. Napier killed Bruce Wayne’s parents, leading to Batman’s creation, while Batman in turn has a role in Napier becoming the Joker. Stripped of ideological posturing and grandiose mythologizing, the antagonism between two classic opponents is refreshingly straightforward with, in my opinion, a greater visceral impact.

Surpassing Batman and, indeed, all other live-action films is, of course, Batman Returns. With greater freedom, Burton and screenwriter Daniel Waters craft a film whose story is operatic in scope and delivered with even more expressionistic gothic design. What makes the film stand out is the extent to which settings and characters reflect and influence each other, painting a dystopian urban portrait with its own insular, grotesque logic. We have Danny Devito’s Penguin embodying the outcast as both victim and threat, the alienating and atomizing effect of a city without community. Representing the corrupt business elite, we have Christopher Walken’s Max Shreck to encapsulate the failures of capitalism. Michelle Pfeiffer’s iconic Catwoman presents a radical feminist revolutionary bucking both system and social order as defined by patriarchy. And in the volatile mix is Bruce Wayne, an uneasy and problematic counterpart to these antagonists, especially when acting as Batman. Literal realism is far from the point to the film, and the story – simultaneously thrilling, disturbing, sublime, and silly – is all the better for it. By recognizing the inherently fantastical notion that is a Batman story, our ability to layer interpretations on the film is all the freer for not having to quibble with attempts at social commentary beyond the abstract.

If there’s a question that hangs over Burton’s films, though, it’s that of Batman’s frequently deadly violence, sometimes purposeful (as in his blowing up a Red Triangle gang member), sometimes oblivious (setting a Red Triangle thug on fire with the Batmobile’s fiery exhaust), and sometimes as collateral damage (e.g. from blowing up Axis Chemicals). The famous “no kill” rule clearly doesn’t apply. In fairness, the rule isn’t consistent across all versions of Batman, as Mark Hughes explains in his overview of the subject at Forbes, and if there’s a trend it’s that the moral use or rejection of lethal force is not so much an argument but the outcome of storytellers manipulating scenarios to make whatever argument they want to make. For example, if you want to justify Batman killing, make him choose between saving the lives of innocents or preserving the life of a villain, out of a principled commitment to avoid any killing, at their expense. But there are cheats. You could make kid-friendly fare in which villains aren’t sufficiently homicidal, sadistic, or generally dangerous for Batman to consider a deadly approach to foiling them. You could also draw on Batman’s engineering brilliance to give him gadgets that let him effectively stun his opponents. However you manipulate it, the question of Batman’s use of lethal force is inextricably tied to the question of how Batman actually deters crime and prevents recurrent threats? Hughes might be satisfied with the idea of a Batman who perpetually fights villains he refuses to kill out of principle, but I have to ask what good it does when public justice and mental health institutions are incapable of resolving the challenges of crime. It’s one thing if Batman catches the villains on behalf of an incompetent/corrupt police force and the public system helps confine and/or rehabilitate them. But when nothing works, Batman’s fundamental purpose is, to me, dissatisfying and pointless. The comics don’t tend to address the repair of public institutions, of course, focused as they are on keeping Batman in perpetual conflict with one antagonist or another, and the movies follow suit.

My own view is that, realistically and without resorting to tech gimmicks, while Batman shouldn’t murder people when he can avoid it, the reality is that in life and death situations someone is bound to be seriously injured if not killed. And seeing that it’s not going to be Batman, that means his criminal opponents. However, if Batman is to be a credible perspective on crime, stories also need to pair Batman’s vigilantism with Bruce Wayne’s ability to influence Gotham for the better.

Insofar as Burton’s films are concerned, I can’t help but wonder to what extent Batman’s deadliness is the product of glib choreography rather than purposeful characterization. It doesn’t really matter, though, since we get what we get. So in my view, Batman’s disturbingly cavalier violence does work in context of Gotham’s overall character. Burton’s Gotham is fundamentally a capitalist dystopia in which social dynamics are mediated (and corrupted) by money and violence, not public service and civic engagement. However much Batman is committed to protecting the innocent, and however ethical he is in his business dealings as Bruce Wayne, Batman is ultimately as much a symptom of the city’s dysfunction as he is a reaction to it – the projection, like its villains, of a damaged urban psyche. With lethal violence arguing for Batman as antihero more than hero, it serves to distance us from him even as we root for his success against destructive terrors like Joker and Penguin who are far beyond common street crime that, by the film’s logic, getting killed is an unsurprising outcome. Burton’s films are almost a deconstruction, since without being able to unreservedly romanticize Batman as a hero we are made to ask whether we want Batman so much that we’d also want the nightmarish Gotham that gives him life.

Ben Affleck & the Snyderverse

Michael Keaton delivers a singularly distinct interpretation of Bruce Wayne and Batman, one so tailored to the universe Tim Burton creates, that he can be argued to be in a class of his own. But among the Bat-actors who aren’t Michael Keaton, my favorite is Ben Affleck. His ability to blend charm and dry humor with intensity and pathos not only gives him an assertive screen presence as Batman, but also as Bruce Wayne. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t get the chance to have a story to himself, instead of existing on screen in relationship to Superman, the Justice League, the Suicide Squad, or the Flash. At least Snyder’s vision for his Batman was a redemptive one and a highlight in his films. If all we had gotten was Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the missed potential would have been much worse.

F vs the Franchises: Superhero Fatigue (Part 4b - In the Shadow of a Man Dressed As a Bat)

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 23:47:00 +0000

Click here for Part A of my Batman discussion, covering Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy.

The Batman

With the partial exception of Tim Burton’s films, only Batman: The Animated Series and its successors/spin-offs in the DC Animated Universe really emphasized Batman’s intellect as much as his physical abilities. So of all the reasons to look forward to The Batman, it was Matt Reeves’ promise of leaning into Batman’s detective roots and delivering a neo-noir mystery, hinging on a plot by the uniquely cerebral Riddler, that excited me the most.

Unfortunately, Reeves and his co-writer Peter Craig utterly miss their mark by giving us a Batman whose detective work is always one step behind The Riddler’s manipulations. Their script knows it, too, first by having the Penguin mock Batman and Gordon for missing a clue (“Look at you two. World’s greatest detectives!”), then by having the Riddler express his disappointment that Batman didn’t figure out his master plan. By the time Batman, now suitably informed that there’s more detective work to be done, figures out The Riddler’s endgame, it’s too late. While he does prevent an assassination, the most he can do is help deal with the aftermath of massive city-wide destruction. The worst of it is that Batman never seems especially intelligent as a matter of character, never coming across as the intellectual genius that defines his usual portrayal. What’s unclear to me is the extent to which this characterization is intentional or accidental, especially since when we first see Gordon bringing Batman to a crime scene it very much recalls the way in which Scotland Yard Inspector Lestrade brings Sherlock Holmes into a case. The difference is that in Doyle’s stories, Holmes fully validates Lestrade’s need for assistance through assertive and superior demonstrations of observation and reasoning. In The Batman, the scenes are staged mostly for Batman to pick up an envelope left behind by the Riddler.

It’s a shame that the film botches its reason for existing so fundamentally, because in other respects it’s a terrific offering with a lot to commend it, including a more believable “realism” than Nolan’s trilogy. Apart from Paul Dano, whose stereotypical incel-serial-killer interpretation of the Riddler I didn’t like at all (give me the Animated Series’ Riddler, please), the cast and characterizations from Colin Ferrel’s Penguin to Zoë Kravitz’ Selina Kyle are compelling and distinct. Unlike Nolan’s bland metropolitan pastiche, Reeve’s Gotham is a suitably noir setting with a stylish character all its own. And the fact that Bruce Wayne’s personal journey leads him to conclude that Batman should be a symbol of hope to the people of Gotham, not just a symbol of fear and vengeance to its criminals, is a welcome take on a character that has otherwise been delivered so far with cynicism. Without establishing this early-career Batman as having the intellectual as well as physical talents – however yet to be honed to peak performance – to be the formidable hero he’s meant to be, the film’s strengths flounder and the film lays an unsatisfying foundation for future stories like the forthcoming sequel and the Penguin TV series spin-off.

Batman: The Animated Series

With its blend of murder mystery, tragic romance, origin story, and study of justice versus revenge, Mask of the Phantasm is arguably the best Batman feature film in any medium. And the series that made it possible, Batman: The Animated Series, remains a seminal achievement in both television and comic book storytelling. While its gorgeous retro-futuristic art deco style make it eye-catching, it’s the focus on detective work along with surprisingly sympathetic, or at least nuanced, villains that make it stand out from the usual beat-em-up storytelling. The obvious example: Mr. Freeze’s characterization as a tragic rather than a sociopathic figure. As the transitioned into the DC Animated Universe (DCAU), however, the returns begin to diminish for me. It’s not a question of quality or even entertainment value; the DCAU ranges from good to excellent and I wouldn’t argue that there’s anything “bad” about it per se in the sense that if someone loves superhero comics, there’s no reason not to enjoy watching its many series. For me, however, as the episode count rises the more I’m pushed against the limits of what I’ll enjoy in superhero stories, especially as the DCAU succumbs to the conventions and tropes I don’t like in comics. When it comes to Justice League, that limit is my preference to leave Batman out of stories involving superpowers, alien invasions, and that sort of thing: Batman just makes more sense, and is more enjoyable to me, in the context of Gotham and crime. That brings me to Batman Beyond, which I find both entertaining and dissatisfying. Entertaining, in that it works as an action-thriller. Dissatisfying, in that the series relies too much on fantastical technology and its characterizations are made to service plots that invariably focus on giving Batman an endless supply of new and recurring antagonists. Characters tend to be less interesting for their personalities than for their gadgets or superhuman abilities, and that includes Terry McGuinness, who is only interesting as Batman insofar as he has a suit, Bruce Wayne whispering in his ear, and eventual revelation that he is Bruce’s genetic clone.

The series isn’t helped by revisiting Bruce Wayne’s rogues gallery, transferring final (or simply continued) confrontations with classic villains onto Terry. Mr. Freeze is a prime example. I would have been perfectly happy with his fate left a mystery following Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero, but he is inevitably brought back with a reductionist revenge-minded motivation. Another example is Harley Quinn, who’s not only made complicit in the torture of a teenaged Tim Drake, which makes her especially monstrous given that she started as a mental health professional, but only seeks reform after the Joker’s apparent death. Not only is her character escalated to an evil beyond what we’d seen from her previously, the series misses out the opportunity to present a strong woman character overcoming misogynistic abuse. It fell to the mainstream comics and DC movies to lean into a feminist stance and even dare to reform Harley into a heroic character.

Speaking of Harley, I’d point to Return of the Joker as a good demonstration of how I part ways with Batman Beyond and the overall DCAU. While I understand the feature-length film’s popularity – it’s a good thriller on its own terms – I still don’t particularly like it. In addition to its disappointing treatment of Harley Quinn, I’m not keen on the use of implausible, hence magical, technology to revive the original Joker (how could a microchip behind Tim Drake’s ear go undetected?) just so Terry can confront him. And the key premise – Joker, supported by Harley, tortures and brainwashes a teenaged Tim Drake, who ends up killing his tormentor only to be subjected, many years later, to technology that allows his mind and body to be digitally hijacked for a resurrection – is a horrifying escalation of the Joker’s evil that is treated far too casually. Still, there’s a story to be told out of that premise that would interest me much more if it were more charactered focused and less beholden to convention. Joker’s plan to kidnap and torture Tim Drake could have the been the step too far that finally leads Harley to make a break on her own. It could have also been the most severe test of Bruce Wayne’s no-killing principles, resolved (or, rather, evaded) only when Tim Drake shoots and kills the Joker himself. While the Joker’s plan backfiring is a fittingly ironic end, the moral impact of enlisting a kid as a sidekick would remain at the forefront of Bruce Wayne’s actions as Batman. Moving to Terry McGuinness, his Batman could face a moral challenge of his own as a new leader, patterned after the original Joker, takes over the Jokerz and engages in a series of extraordinarily lethal crimes, only to find him and his gang targeted by a murderous vigilante. That vigilante, of course, would be Tim Drake. In any case, the point isn’t my fan fiction but rather that if you’re going to tell a story involving psychological trauma – especially one so excessively brutal as to involve torture, brainwashing and murder – there should be a greater focus on character than action. (And yes, I’m aware that the film mentions Tim undergoing treatment after his ordeal, but I don’t think it’s enough.) If I have an overall critique of Batman in the DCAU, then, it’s that like comics there’s the unfortunate tendency of associating mental illness and physical disfigurements with evil and villainy. However unintentionally, this repeated association contributes to misunderstandings and stigmatizing stereotypes about mental health and physical appearance.

Ultimately, however strong the DCAU in terms of the superhero genre, I can’t help but feel that its creators missed opportunities to offer deeper and more varied characterizations than simply whatever is most expedient to set up a conflict. There are any number of approaches, predicated on the understanding that people can and do change as a result of their experiences, that could drive really meaningful characterizations for the many colorful villains. After all, criminals retire, reform, remain incarcerated, die of accidental or intentional causes, get sick, find love, have children … But the DCAU is what it is and my wish for something other than what it gives me simply points out, as I mentioned earlier, the limits of what interests me in stories. As it happens, though, Warner Bros. changed the animation style of the DCAU from Batman: The New Adventures onward, ostensibly to match Batman’s style to that of Superman: The Animated Series. This presents a continuity loophole I’m perfectly happy to exploit given that DC, by its own canon, positions its stories within a multiverse: since the characters looked different post-Batman: The Animated Series, then surely we can argue they exist in an alternate-history continuity? In which case, I’m perfectly content with seeing Batman: The Animated Series, from first episode “On Leather Wings” to the films Batman & Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero and Mask of the Phantasm, as sharing the podium with Tim Burton’s films as the best of Batman on screen.

F vs the Franchises: Superhero Fatigue (Part 4a - In the Shadow of a Man Dressed As a Bat)

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 23:44:00 +0000

No discussion of DC films would be complete without addressing the larger-than-life animal in the room – by which I mean, of course, the bat. Surveying how Batman has been presented across a variety of media, it’s tempting to conclude that the character, as a concept, borders on incoherence – i.e. lacking in consistent characterization and biography. But what would normally be a criticism is, in this case, an asset: the appearance of incoherence means there’s actually a Batman for everyone. Do you like your Batman light-hearted, even campy? Batman ‘66 is for you. Do you see Batman as a psychotic billionaire beating up poor criminals – or at least, acting out his psychological dysfunction through violence and terror? Frank Miller’s interpretation may be more to your liking. Or perhaps Batman from the classic 90s’ animated series is more attuned to your appreciation for noir detective stories. Given film, TV, and comics – especially the Elseworlds stories – if the idea of a man dressing up as a bat to fight crime holds any appeal, you can find a variation that suits your preferences.

What’s curious, though, is how much of a fundamental contradiction there is in how we collectively perceive Batman. We commonly see him as a master strategist and tactician, a physical and intellectual genius, an ever-prepared force able to defeat even the most seemingly undefeatable opponents through wits and technology. Yet, whether explicitly called out or glossed over as implied subtext, he never actually fully resolves his villains’ threat. Nor does he ever save Gotham in the sense of rooting out its criminal corruption to give social institutions the opportunity to function beneficially. Altogether, it would seem that Batman’s brilliance is at maintaining the status quo which, like most comic books, entails an endless cycle of conflict between heroes and villains. Formidable, yet ineffective except in terms of the temporary defeat of villains from his rogue’s gallery.

However, the comic book instinct to avoid definitive resolutions isn’t the only explanation for the paradoxical impression Batman creates. Fundamentally, the contradiction is that while Batman is essentially a vigilante opposed to specific villains, his very existence and actions as a vigilante necessarily requires engagement with a social context. Commissioner Gordon’s efforts to reform the famously corrupt GCPD offers some. Bruce Wayne’s actions as owner of Wayne Enterprises and a wealthy philanthropist offer another. How criminals are handled by the justice system is yet another. A single Batman story, in isolation from any kind of continuity, can get away with ignoring context, focusing narrowly on the duel between our Dark Knight and an antogonist. But the moment stories are placed within a chronological continuity, context becomes harder to ignore and the status quo invariably gets weird as Batman never positively influences Gotham despite repeatedly saving it from dangerous villains. In a sense, this paradox reflects a common limitation of superhero stories in general, in which the focus is on the impact of individual and conflicting actions rather than the collective (i.e. group) impact of cooperative actions.

It doesn’t help that the most visible Batman stories, notably in film, seem infused with cynicism or, at least, a fixation on tragedy beyond the trauma of murdered parents. Surprisingly, that’s not so much the case in the Snyderverse, which purposefully evolves Batman from a cynical, jaded and brutal anti-heroism to a more hopeful hero. But in The Flash, for example, director Andy Muschetti confessed the “real” reason his Batman retired: “And my idea was, he did something that goes against his code and killed a criminal in front of [the criminal’s] child—not knowingly, but he still did it … So he just couldn’t cope with it, and that’s why he decided to shut off his other side, Batman. And he hasn’t been able to forgive himself.” It's not a bad or illogical characterization, especially for a version of Batman that is decidedly lethal. Yet I’m not really keen on it, preferring instead what we get in the theatrical version of the film, where Bruce Wayne explains his retirement as simply being due to a city that has changed and no longer needs him. While perhaps not as visceral as Muschetti’s intended rationale, there’s something appealing about the idea that Gotham is able to shed its need for a vigilante protector. How terrible is it for a man so fixated on a cause to suddenly lose that cause, seemingly without anything to replace it? It seems to me that being adrift without a purpose is tragedy enough without compounding it with failure.

The Dark Knight Trilogy

Looking back at my reviews of the films in Christopher Nolan’s landmark trilogy, it’s clear that at the time I found a lot to enjoy and engage with, despite some quibbles and misgivings. Yet in all the years that have passed since their theatrical release, I have felt zero compulsion to rewatch them. Zero. The more I’ve thought of them, the less persuasive they’ve become as films with thematic depth and coherence. My change of mind isn’t hard to explain. Nolan is a skilled director working with strong actors and production designers, dependable on the whole to deliver an entertaining cinematic experience. The scripts aren’t stupid either per se, offering viewers plenty of material to drive discussions on topics ranging from crime and terrorism to mass surveillance and class warfare. Nevertheless, the end result to me is much like Titanic was: an absorbing theatrical experience that comes with the regret of an after-viewing hangover caused by excessive emotional manipulation and/or intellectual sleigh-of-hand.

A core problem is that the trilogy’s vaunted “realism” is more aesthetic than narrative, with the prosaic production design giving a deceptive credibility to the films’ storytelling. The masking is most obvious with specific plot devices and scenes. The Joker’s plan, for example, with elements ranging from implanting a bomb in a sacrificial victim to blowing up a hospital complex, relies too much on luck and coincidence to be believable using the “realism” standard. In The Dark Knight Rises, it’s even harder to suspend disbelief when we’re asked to accept multiple implausibilities: Bruce Wayne resuming his role as Batman after 8 years hors-de-combat and his miraculous recovery to fighting form after Bane breaks his back, to point out the most glaring. And this isn’t even getting to how the films rely on elements of extra fictional science fiction, such as the cell phone surveillance machine, to advance their plots. Still, without artistic exuberance all this is presented with a grittiness that makes it all look believable, and the fantastical is therefore easy to overlook within the overall experience of watching the films.

Yet perception of the trilogy as serious and intellectual comic book cinema persists, exemplified by the so-called “theory of escalation” expressed at the end of Batman Begins:

Gordon: And what about escalation?
Batman: Escalation?
Gordon: We get semi-automatic weapons, they get automatics. We get Kevlar body armor, they get armor-piercing rounds. And *you're* wearing a mask and jumping off rooftops. Take this guy: armed robbery, double homicide. Has a taste for theatrics, like you. Leaves a calling card. [Gordon presents Batman with a clear plastic evidence bag containing what appears to be a single playing card; Batman turns it over in his hand to reveal a Joker]
Bruce Wayne: I'll look into it.

The idea that Batman’s presence actually makes things worse in Gotham rather than better has a superficial appeal, rather like pointing out that if you eliminate one criminal gang another, far more brutal, can take its place. Yet the limit to this “theory” is that there’s a difference between escalation and adaptation, and the reality of crime is more aligned with the latter. It’s not so much that criminals escalate their weaponry or brutality, but change their tactics to evade detection and capture. Criminals use phones, police use wiretaps. Criminals talk in code, police use codebreakers. Criminals switch to burner cell phones, police use more sophisticated call intercept technologies. Criminals bribe police or judges, internal watchdogs identify and weed out the corrupt. And so on. More fundamentally, though, the escalation theory as proposed by the Dark Knight trilogy ignores the root causes of crime – it’s sociology and economics. The deterrence offered by law enforcement, or a vigilante, is only one factor. In any case, the theory itself is rendered moot in Nolan’s films because we’re never actually shown an escalation. In the trilogy’s first installment, Batman Begins, the partnership of Dr. Jonathan Crane, aka The Scarecrow, and Ra’s Al Ghul, is committed to poisoning Gotham’s population and destroying the city. How do you escalate from that? The Dark Knight Rises revisits the notion of destroying the city, albeit this time with a bomb, while in between The Dark Knight has the Joker – whose presence was hinted at the end of Batman Begins – attempting to destroy Gotham’s social fabric by inciting chaos.

The so-called theory of escalation isn’t the only example of veneer mistaken for insight. The commentary on terrorism, for example, isn’t based on an actual analogue to real-world terrorist activity but rather on the cartoonish premise that a group of assassins in Asia conclude that a city they don’t live in, across the globe, isn’t only corrupt but that total destruction is the only cure. If the League of Shadows was pulled from headlines rather than comic books (e.g. Al Qaeda or Timothy McVeigh), it would be much easier to take seriously the moral questions surrounding things like Batman’s mass surveillance machine. Similarly, The Dark Knight Rises huffs and puffs a bit about economic inequality and class warfare, through the characters of Catwoman and faux-populist Bane, but that’s not what the film is about. The story is ultimately about the League’s desire to avenge the death of Ra’s Al Ghul and fulfill his vision of destroying Gotham. For all that there are references to topical issues, these are really little more than narrative gestures – ornaments, really – that don’t add up to a distinct point of view. In the end, Batman saves Gotham from nuclear destruction and rides off into the sunset with an ideologically de-clawed Catwoman. The systemic legal and economic problems glibly referenced throughout the film prove irrelevant.

With such superficial and confused sociological thinking, it’s no surprise that even interpretations striving to categorize the trilogy’s core ideological stance – e.g. right vs left leaning – end up in a muddle. Personally, I’m not sure it’s necessary or even desirable to politicize Batman, since fundamentally he is a lone vigilante who acts outside the law – the question is how far outside and under which self-imposed constraints. Unfortunately, the trilogy muddles this too. We have a Batman who doesn’t purposefully kill, but pointedly refuses to save Ra’s Al Ghul’s life and causes Harvey Dent’s death. He won’t use guns, but he is saved from Bane by Catwoman’s gun shot (who takes the opportunity to mockingly question the value of his “no guns” approach). When it comes to interrogations, such as the Joker’s, he doesn’t act with cold calculation and psychological insight, but as a brutish thug who does the police’s dirty work for them. And the mass surveillance machine? What does that represent if not a failure for Batman as a detective? Yet despite the trilogy undermining any sort of principle guiding Batman’s actions, it nevertheless has him succeed at saving Gotham from destruction – twice – and ultimately apprehending the Joker. He even gets a statue erected in his honor. Rather than questioning how the means justify, and even achieve, the desired end, the trilogy is little more than a rehash of the usual argument that the ends justify the means.

But surely the Joker is a highlight, right? While I agree Heath Ledger is terrific, and terrifying, in my view he’s made to offer a performance without a character. The inscrutability of his motivations, their lack of roots in a tangible biography may appeal to many as the source of his terror – we don’t know who or why he is, so oooo, scary – but to me it just makes him uninteresting. It’s bad enough that, like his comic book counterpart, Ledger’s Joker is somewhat of a fantastical character who’s made to fit the needs of the plot even if that means confusing or compromising his characterization. He’s meant to be unpredictable, even “crazy,” yet he’s capable of conceiving and executing complex plans that by definition are orderly and methodical. He’s a psychological genius in the mold of Hannibal Lecter, seemingly effortless in his ability to manipulate people … but in his actions proves so unreliable and untrustworthy that it’s hard to believe anyone would fall for his mind games or even trust him in an organized criminal scheme. Given that Batman can be rather fantastical too, I can overlook Joker’s overinflated abilities more easily than the lack of psychological depth that comes from refusing to reveal a biography, a life story. Given the lack of political motivations, interpreting the Joker as an anarchist is a dead end. Wealth is also not a motive, as Joker burns the money he extracts from Gotham’s crime bosses. So we’re left with Alfred’s observation that “some men just want to watch the world burn,” which is clearly the film’s concept for the character. Yet I think that too is some hand-waving, part of the usual trend of giving us psychologically unassailable psychopaths who are just evil because, well, they just are. In that sense, the Joker isn’t any different than the average monster from the average horror movie. But this reductionist view, essentially a refusal to view the Joker as a whole human being, means he gets no character development, no change (whether redemptive or tragic).

Fundamentally, the Joker is simply a cynic who doesn’t believe in people’s capacity for good, as demonstrated in the climax of The Dark Knight, when the Joker concedes that Batman is incorruptible but triumphantly points out that Dent wasn’t – the so-called White Knight’s corruption into Two-Face is just the “ace in the hole” that will let the Joker show Gotham how futile their belief in good is. With a clear inspiration from Alan Moore’s sadly influential The Killing Joke, Ledger’s Joker views people as fundamentally corrupt, and this corruption can be exposed through encounters with absurd and arbitrary “bad days” that the Joker is only too happy to orchestrate. Understanding why he believes this would not only make him more interesting, but more frightening – humanity’s capacity for evil is far more chilling than magical, supernatural, force-of-nature evil precisely because it is plausible and relatable.

Still, even without a biography a cynical Joker can work well enough as a philosophical expression of terrorism to drive the plot, but here The Dark Knight fails in presenting Batman as an effective ideological counterargument. The only refutation to the Joker’s cynicism comes from the people of Gotham themselves, the ferry passengers who refuse to blow each other up. Beyond that, Batman is a reactionary who doesn’t act out of principle, as demonstrated by the aforementioned interrogation room beating and the use of a privacy-violating machine to track down the Joker. The biggest failing, however, comes in how Harvey Dent is treated, a problem stemming from the need to shoe-horn characters into their comic book personas. It’s not just that Batman, and Commissioner Gordon’s solution to the Joker’s victimization of Dent is to conceal it and let Batman take the blame. The moral weakness of their response to the Joker’s challenge fails as a perspective on trauma and victims of trauma. If anything, the corruption in Gotham that the film fails to address is this: that people are alone in their suffering and, without the strength of community, have no support in dealing with their trauma. Nolan’s films have no interest in serious sociological commentary, however, so the idea that Dent could be understood as a victim whose tragedy needs compassion, despite the deaths he caused, rather than fiction isn’t a perspective to be considered. And so, with Batman and allies resorting to deception, brutality, and vigilantism, there is nothing with which to refute the Joker’s cynicism. Maybe that’s the point, though. Though I don’t like it, the comics insist on mythologizing the Joker and his endless conflict with Batman, which makes any kind of decisive victory on Batman’s part, moral or otherwise, antithetical.

So with neither the substance of meaningful sociological commentary nor a Batman who particularly excels at being Batman (unlike Batman from the Animated Series), I simply don’t find the Nolan trilogy to be satisfying either as popcorn entertainment or cinematic drama.

F vs the Franchises: Superhero Fatigue (Part 3 - The DCEU Lays An Egg)

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 21:09:00 +0000

DC is home to characters that are not only global icons, but archetypes – the standards by which superheroes are judged. Superman, the benevolent protector. Batman, the embodiment of justice (or revenge, depending on your point of view). Wonder Woman, ambassador for love and peace. All tap into very fundamental psychological aspects of the human condition when distilled to their essences. As the anchors for a roster of characters that, personally, I find more interesting than the MCU’s, these three mythological figures, along with many other interesting characters, should have been easy subjects for a DC cinematic universe. Yet it’s clear that Warner Bros was its own enemy and studio interference, at least partly due to a desperate need to compete with the MCU, perpetuated repeated acts of creative malpractice. David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, whose director’s cut may never see the light of a theatre (although there is hope), is a prime example. Ostensibly intended to focus a mission against a global threat around Harley Quinn’s emancipation from the Joker (among other plot intentions), the theatrical cut instead offered a tonally confused and creatively compromised vision of the film – a far different experience than I anticipated from the director of the excellent WWII drama, Fury. (I do think that Suicide Squad was serviceable enough as a film to be enjoyed in the moment and then more or less forgotten, a mostly harmless sideshow to the DCEU’s main continuity.)

It’s impossible to hand-wave away the failure of the Snyderverse, however, although I think that the criticism leveled against Snyder often rests on inconsistently applied criteria. I’d argue that Snyder is not only a skilled director, but a visionary filmmaker with a strong instinct for the cinematic. From production design to direction and cinematograph, his films demonstrate panache as well as purpose. Watching Henry Cavill’s Superman in Man of Steel, whether taking flight or fighting against Zod and his minions, I remember being impressed by how visceral an experience Snyder created. More so than any MCU film, I could really believe his characters are superheroes and not just special effects.

Of course, it’s his storytelling more than his direction that is controversial and divisive. But like it or not, it’s clear he did have a storytelling concept – that is, a trajectory to guide his characters from their introduction to their teaming against a formidable threat. With characterizations rooted in a far less idealized, idol-worshipping attitude than we find in the MCU, the arc of his films moves his characters from doubt, uncertainty, even cynicism to inspiration, heroism, and teamwork. The extent to which his vision was compromised is well known by now, with Joss Whedon’s takeover of Justice League effectively ending the momentum of his multi-film narrative. Though a tad overstuffed, Snyder’s cut of Justice League nevertheless offers a much more coherent plot with richer characterizations than Whedon’s version. Before that, we saw the effect of studio interference in the difference between the theatrical and director’s cut of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: the director’s cut also offers a more coherent story and deeper characterizations than the theatrical version.

Yet it’s not hard to see why Snyder’s approach received a mixed reception. A gloomy Superman, with a dour adoptive father prone to giving morally ambiguous advice, is too drastic a departure from the sunnier version embodied so memorably by Christopher Reeve. A brutal, Frank Miller-esque Batman, while not an unfamiliar depiction, is too unabashedly cynical in his lethality. The problem isn’t so much that Snyder may feel that deadly violence reflects the reality of superheroes. He has a point, within reason, insofar as the realities of violent conflict are concerned. While the scene was contrived, Superman killing General Zod in Man of Steel made sense given the circumstances. The Joker being alive and on the loose in Batman’s corner of the world, in both Suicide Squad and Snyder’s Justice League, seems philosophically inconsistent, especially after Robin’s murder, but otherwise it’s entirely plausible that people who try to kill Batman might be the ones who get killed instead. In any case, I’d say the problem is that Snyder presents a rather narrow conception of heroism, one focused on bravery in battle and the willingness to beat up bullies rather than serve as positive role models. Despite returning to Jor El’s speech about Superman being able to “give the people of Earth an ideal to strive towards” and helping them “accomplish wonders,” the Snyderverse doesn’t explore how Superman actually inspires change for the better. Even Batman’s inspiration to do better following Superman’s sacrifice at the end of Batman v Superman doesn’t come close to exploring how his redemption could positively impact Gotham. And Wonder Woman? For all that she has a kinder disposition, she’s nevertheless a warrior whose valor is demonstrated by beating up the bad guys. Whatever version of Justice League we go with, the culmination of Snyder’s arc is not how the superheroes inspire humanity to defend themselves or just generally be better people, but something more reductive: the equivalent of a special ops team going on a secret mission to defeat violent invaders. I wouldn’t even rate it as a “deconstruction” of the characters. The Snyderverse is rather straightforward in presenting emotionally ambivalent characters whose personal dilemmas are overcome to get them to exactly where they need to be within the conventions of superhero stories: ready to beat up the villains!

As to whether Snyder should have been allowed to finish his arc or not, well, I have mixed feelings about it. Personally, the planned story of Superman falling victim to Darkseid and the Anti-Life Equation (a concept equally stupid, if not more so, than the Thanos snap) doesn’t appeal. The “Evil Superman” schtick, already done within the comics, just doesn’t resonate with me. The prospect of time travel being key to unravelling the Knightmare future strikes me as a disappointing cheat. And with recent revelations of a planned trilogy of Flash films, culminating in the revelation of Reverse-Flash as the ultimate evil master mind engineering events, I am even less enthused at what the DCEU would have ultimately offered. It’s enough to wonder, along with Giant Freaking Robot (https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/zack-snyder-worst-thing-dc.html, why Snyder’s vision was chosen as the blueprint for the DCEU.

But while I won’t mourn the excellent decision to chart a new path for the DCU under James Gunn and Peter Saffron, I do think it’s unfortunate that Snyder couldn’t at least bring his story to a conclusion. Perhaps he should have just been given one movie and a smaller budget, but whatever the approach, at least Warner Bros would have had a complete story to sell on streaming and DVD for people to enjoy if they’re so inclined. The DCEU wouldn’t then be a room full of baggage to burden future movies. Regardless, the lesson points to Warner Bros lack of trust in their filmmakers, whose films might not have scored with critics but could have at least fulfilled their intention to entertain the fans.

Looking beyond the Snyderverse, around which other DCEU films orbited, I find the results more compelling. Shazam! and Aquaman might not challenge genre conventions, but at least they work well within them by offering interesting characters in fun adventures. Despite a disappointing third act culminating in the usual boss battle, Wonder Woman offers an overall hopeful tone that is a welcome contrast to Snyder’s cynicism. (I can’t comment on Wonder Woman 1984, which I haven’t watched, but going by the plot synopsis at Wikipedia it seems the film does take the character in an interesting, convention-defying direction. It’s a shame I find Gal Gadot rather unremarkable in the role.) And James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad not only makes up for Warner Bros’ botching of David Ayer’s film, but stands out for its blend of heart and brutality in an energetic covert ops action/adventure plot.

Then there’s The Flash, which bombed at the box office and met with heavy criticism from the pop-culture trades (e.g. The Escapist, ScreenRant, Inverse) who view it as a weak, even cynical whimper to end the DCEU. To a large extent, The Flash was doomed to fail. Not necessarily because of Ezra Miller’s unfortunate troubles, although they certainly didn’t help generate enthusiasm, but because the film was burdened with too many expectations related to financial performance, ability to wrap up the DCEU, and generally just offer something fresh in a genre whose bar has been set by the MCU. It’s hard to see how the film could have succeeded in satisfying both comic fans and general audiences when success depended on fulfilling so many criteria. For my money, I think The Flash is actually one of the better DCEU movies – even one of the better superhero movies. It offers some delightfully bonkers action spectacle like the opening “baby shower” scene, features an exceptional performance by Ezra Miller as two similar yet distinguishable versions of Barry Allen, and gives us a character arc with emotional heft. The Flash is also surprisingly subversive in its hero’s journey in comparison to the MCU and Snyderverse films. Where these openly embrace the use of superpowers, celebrating exercises of force, The Flash argues in favor of caution and restraint through a story on the necessity of making peace with the inevitability of death. Allen may have incredible superpowers, but learning when not to use them is just as important, if not more so, than knowing when they can be truly helpful. As for the cameos? Despite all the hemming and hawing over whether any given cameo was cynical pandering, nonsensical, or what have you – I have no vested interest. Personally, they were all fun and the film’s core drama wouldn’t have changed with different cameos. And as far as ending the DCEU goes, I think it succeeds it setting up the DC multiverse without bludgeoning us with a hard continuity reboot. I find it rather annoying when time travel movies ask us to invest in characters and situations, only to erase them so that the same characters are reset for a different story – as in Donnie Darko, for example. The Flash establishes the existence of a multiverse with all its many DC stories, setting the DCEU as one of its many branches but not requiring Gunn to specifically use Snyder’s version of the characters moving forward, even with retconned histories.

Then, there’s the Arrowverse, of which I can only say that, exhausted, I gave up on all the shows I was watching – Flash, Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow – long before they reached their end. They all became mired in the worse, most exhaustive soap opera impulses of comic book storytelling, from endlessly returning or revived villains to nonsensical fantasy that is rarely anything other than arbitrary no matter how often it’s labeled “science.” The (melo)dramatic core always reduced itself to a duel between homicidal megalomaniacs with personal vendettas against our heroes, which became repetitive and dull – the one-note Reverse-Flash being a particularly irritating example. I also found the use of superpowers to be very shaky, with villains often made to seem more powerful by making the heroes weirdly dumb or weak. Case in point: Captain Cold, who is somehow a formidable threat despite the fact that he can’t, logically, unholster let alone fire his special gun faster than the Flash can disarm him. While I get that narrative logic, mature drama, and the usual expectations of plausibility are generally beside the point for the Arrowverse (as in comics), suspending disbelief in a story in the name of fun adventuring shouldn’t be an act of faith. By the time I called it quits, the Arrowverse was beginning to feel like a multi-car pileup in a freeway accident.

When all is said and done, I’m perfectly fine with leaving the bulk of DC’s media output behind. But I do harbor a cautious optimism that James Gunn, who has so far delivered among the best superhero films to date, can deliver a DCU that fulfills the superhero genre’s potential to tell meaningful stories with heart as well as thrills.

F vs the Franchises: Superhero Fatigue (Part 2 - The Un-Marveling of the MCU)

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 19:59:00 +0000

In itself, my confusion as to what’s going on – and not going on – with the MCU isn’t much of an indictment for the pop-culture juggernaut. But it is telling that I’m seeing more commentary expressing fatigue with the MCU, such as this sign of resignation from a self-described life-long Marvel fan. Following Avengers: Endgame, the MCU seems to be creatively adrift. Attempts to launch new characters have met with mixed results – does anyone other than hardcore comics fans care about the Eternals? Sequels to characters who peaked with Endgame don’t seem to have stuck their landings. Efforts to put non-white-male characters in the spotlight come across as afterthoughts rather than a purposeful expression of value. And if there’s a unifying thread, whether as the build-up to a Thanos-level threat or something else, it doesn’t seem very clear in the hodge-podge of films. That it’s taken several films to give the next Thanos a name, Kang the Conqueror, isn’t especially encouraging, especially since the controversy surrounding Jonathan Majors is derailing that plan. If the fans are lukewarm, what can the MCU offer the rest of us?

My involvement with the MCU ended with Avengers: Infinity War, which means that, yes, I’ve never watched Endgame. The magical fluff of the infinity stones – a complete disregard for actual cosmology and physics – completely eroded any possible interest I could have in the resolution to Thanos’ snap. After all, when magic stones can fundamentally alter the fabric of reality, the plot could just as plausibly be resolved by introducing yet another magic stone to reverse the effects of the others than it is with whatever Endgame ultimately presented. When the problem is arbitrary and the solutions are equally arbitrary, there’s no reason to be invested in any outcome.

But my inclination to part ways with the MCU began long before Infinity War, bubbling to the surface with Captain America: Winter Soldier. By now, it’s hard to hold on to any tangible memory of the film, other than recollecting that it was briskly entertaining while, in my view, offering only the illusion of insight into the theme of freedom vs security. Whatever critique of imperialism and militarism the story might express is rendered harmless by its conventional hero-vs-megalomaniacs framing. Still, while I don’t think the film offers anything that hasn’t been done better in other films, I respect it as one of the MCU’s more successful attempts to add some thematic depth to its narrative. I can’t say the same of Captain America: Civil War, which is pretentious in its pseudo-moral posturing and embodies the most objectionable quality of superhero comics. Fundamentally, the film asks a good question – what oversight should the Avengers be subject to? – with a good scenario, namely, the deaths of innocent bystanders during the Avengers’ self-assigned operation to prevent the theft of a bioweapon. Unfortunately, the core drama that emerges from the tragedy is a shock tactic more than good characterization. We’re supposed to be surprised that the roguish, arrogant Tony Stark agrees that the Avengers should be overseen by the UN while the more selfless Steve Rogers argues for complete independence. And from there, we’re manipulated into viewing this as contest between ideological perspectives of equal weight. Yet Rogers is clearly wrong, and Stark – who at least has the good graces, and conscience, to feel guilt over the consequences of his past arrogance – clearly right. We don’t expect police officers, or the military, to act unilaterally without the oversight of civilian authorities so why would we make an exception for superheroes, especially when their capacity for destruction is so much greater? If the point was to dim Captain America as a moral beacon, the film certainly succeeds, but the rot is deeper than that. For one thing, the film frames the debate as between two men, along with military and political leaders, and excludes from the conversation the very people they and their fellow Avengers apparently care about protecting. Where superheroes risk a slide down the slippery slope to fascism, it’s here, in the powerful making decisions without the input, or even consent, of global communities. Worse is how the conflict plays out through violence, with Stark and Rogers each assembling their teams of super-powered sympathizers to fight it out (and cause extensive property damage in the process). That’s bad enough, but the worst comes at the film’s climax, when Stark learns the truth of his parents’ assassination by Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier, and that Rogers knew but didn’t share this truth. The result, of course, is Stark suggesting the three men seek out a psychologist for some group therapy to heal the emotional wounds. Oh, nah – that’s not what happens. They fight it out, just like noble comic book heroes are supposed to! The reflexive and consistent use of violence to solve conflicts, even interpersonal disagreements, confirms the extent to which the entire point of the film was to get characters to fight. It also proves the point that superheroes, especially these ones, certainly should not be blindly trusted – further confirmation that the comics industry hasn’t really learned the lesson Alan Moore tried to impart with Watchmen.

Beyond that, the MCU has generally been to me a variably entertaining offering, with only a few films - Iron Man, Black Panther, Captain America, Ant-Man – standing out from the spandex-wearing crowd. The Guardians of the Galaxy films are my favorites of the lot. While he got a lot of flack from fans, I think Martin Scorsese was right in comparing the MCU to theme park experiences, given the emphasis on sensationalism and spectacle. I’d rate most of the MCU films as generally well-made B-movies. But I’d qualify the comparison by re-emphasizing my view that quality and entertainment value don’t necessarily correlate. A movie doesn’t have to be High Art to be enjoyable or personally meaningful, and it’s entirely plausible to view the MCU as a theme park experience but differ on how worthwhile it is to go for the ride. It may come as a surprise, but I’m actually disappointed that the MCU turned out the way it did. The finite nature of films offered a tidy solution to those aspects of the comics – sprawl and continuity – that make them inaccessible to the casual reader. Like a film version of DC’s Earth One series, the MCU’s curated content distilled, or at least tried to distill, the years of storytelling to give us the most essential version of their characters in a separate continuity, while intriguing fans with a reasonable reinvention and update that doesn’t rotely copy what they can get from the comics. For someone not into Marvel, I welcomed the opportunity to meet characters I hadn’t previously given much thought to. And with Jon Favreau at the helm, Iron Man offered a reason to be optimistic. Not only did it thrill as a superhero action/adventure, it offered a compelling moral transformation for Tony Stark, who is forced to confront his global impact as a weapons manufacturer. While Marvel ultimately did not extend the arc of that moral transformation, with Tony essentially continuing to create weapons or security systems with global impact, it was a terrific start that signaled the potential for more self-aware heroism, and richer storytelling, than the reflexively violent fare we were actually given.

Add to that the need to watch TV series to make sense of the most recent films, as well as the constant set-up of future movies, and the MCU has come to embody the exhausting sprawl that keeps me disinterested in Marvel’s comics. The exhaustion is even more damning when it comes from a comics fan like Jenna Busch, who calls for a slowdown to the churn in her article for Slash Film:

“Nowadays, it's almost impossible to understand what's going on in these superhero stories if you don't already have a pretty good knowledge of the MCU or the DCU.

I've been a fan of this stuff for most of my life, and even as someone who can tell you a lot about obscure characters, I still have to give myself a refresher course for every entry. People like my parents, who don't have a deep knowledge of this stuff, have already given up. I used to be able to explain some things to them before a film, but it's too much now. I'd have to give a college-level class on it, and they have, you know, lives to live.“

Then there’s the issue of diversity, which has improved in the MCU with films like Black Widow, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Shang-Chi, The Eternals, and phase 4 offerings, but nevertheless feels like a late action – especially considering that the first movie, Iron Man, came out in 2008. The coy, minimal representation of LGBTQ+ is hardly impressive. Nor is the whitewashing of black culture, for example, in the way Black Panther replaces the reality of the Black Panthers – a militant Marxist group whose advocacy for Black power included calls for freedom from police oppression and violence, housing, education, and all the fundamentals for building thriving communities – with a capitalist comic book fantasy that pits Black people against each other. As Nick Irving, whose commentary I also recommend reading, puts it:

“Admittedly, the MCU put far more effort than I expected into Black Panther, which, as almost everyone pointed out, was a pretty spectacular Afro-futurist vision. But it was just as cynical a move. The title and eponymous hero appropriate the phrase ‘Black Panther’ from its radical and Marxist history, and simultaneously hints at a cartoonish version of the radical and violent aesthetics of the real Black Panthers in the character of the antagonist Killmonger. In the end, it’s another triumph of a very white western liberalism. Wakanda is as much Liberia as it is a Pan-African technological Utopia.”

From homework and narrative drift to ongoing diversity challenges, among challenges reported on by the trades, it remains to be seen if Disney/Marvel can course-correct the MCU to refresh interest. I’m done, however. The MCU is a theme park attraction I’m just no longer interested in riding.

F vs the Franchises: Superhero Fatigue (Part 1 - Comics)

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 17:26:00 +0000

While I love comics/graphic novels as a beautiful and meaningful art form, superhero stories don’t typically capture my imagination; certainly not with the consistency and intensity that marks a fan of the genre. Growing up, I read mostly French adventure comics like Tintin, Lucky Luke, Asterix, Gaston, The Scrameustache along with American comic strips like Peanuts, B.C., and Archie. It wasn’t until later in life that I delved into superhero comics, with the Death of Superman arc being one of the earliest stories I remember reading. On TV, I tuned in to Spider-Man (1967) reruns and the 90’s X-Men cartoon. Movies like The Rocketeer and Tim Burton’s Batman/Batman Returns selectively brought me closer to the genre, as did the seminal Batman: The Animated Series and associated movies like Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Also, the fantastic Jim Carrey-starring film, The Mask.

Throughout the years, I’ve periodically added some superhero books – particularly Elseworlds stories, along with seminal works like Kingdom Come – to my bookshelf along with other graphic works such as V for Vendetta, Dean Motter’s Mister X, and others, while staying comfortably away from publishers’ mainstream continuity. A notable exception: I threw myself into Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe and diligently collected its many books for years until I eventually gave up out of sheer exhaustion. I also attempted to devote myself to DC’s Earth One series, appreciating the initiative to develop independent and updated stories for classic characters. But I gave up on that too as I found the writing to be uninspired at best and the art unexciting– at least insofar as the Batman and Superman books were concerned. (I haven’t read Grant Morrison’s Earth One Wonder Woman books, so have no comment to offer on their merits.)

For all my mixed appreciation of superhero comics, it’s not for rejecting their fundamental concept – namely, to tell stories of people with extraordinary abilities – that I’m a genre skeptic. At their best, superhero comics certainly earn their comparisons to the old mythologies of gods, goddesses, strange and magnificent creatures, and the gifted (or cursed) heroes and villains of epic sagas. And they unquestionably can offer a perspective on the societal issues that preoccupy us today as well as stories in any other genre. But in my observation, these great stories are instances of superhero comics that transcend their genre more than they inhabit it. If we consider genre as a pattern of storytelling, superhero comics rely on a generally consistent application of narrative methodologies, formulas, and tropes that often bely disturbing assumptions and philosophies beneath flashy spectacle.

In this respect, while Alan Moore may arguably lack a bit of nuance in his criticism of superhero comics, I can’t disagree with the general cut of his perspective. From The Guardian:

“Hundreds of thousands of adults [are] lining up to see characters and situations that had been created to entertain the 12-year-old boys – and it was always boys – of 50 years ago. I didn’t really think that superheroes were adult fare. I think that this was a misunderstanding born of what happened in the 1980s – to which I must put my hand up to a considerable share of the blame, though it was not intentional – when things like Watchmen were first appearing. There were an awful lot of headlines saying ‘Comics Have Grown Up’. I tend to think that, no, comics hadn’t grown up. There were a few titles that were more adult than people were used to. But the majority of comics titles were pretty much the same as they’d ever been. It wasn’t comics growing up. I think it was more comics meeting the emotional age of the audience coming the other way.”

He thinks that’s not just infantile but dangerous. “I said round about 2011 that I thought that it had serious and worrying implications for the future if millions of adults were queueing up to see Batman movies. Because that kind of infantilisation – that urge towards simpler times, simpler realities – that can very often be a precursor to fascism.” He points out that when Trump was elected in 2016, and “when we ourselves took a bit of a strange detour in our politics”, many of the biggest films were superhero movies.

Perhaps the correlation between the popularity of superhero movies and Trumpism is unfair, but looking at the patterns of superhero storytelling I have to agree with Moore, if not in the specifics than at least for the need to take a critical look at how superheroes signify in pop culture.

An emphasis on the status quo, with narratives almost invariably rooted in violent conflict. While comics clearly allow for changes in some respects – for example, Harley Quinn’s turn from villain to anti-hero, hero Hank McCoy’s development into a villain, Batman’s changing Robins and expanding roster of allies – there is nevertheless a status quo expressed in the way in which the victories, defeats, deaths, and transformations of both heroes and villains are always provisional and reversible. That status quo? Conflict, specifically violent conflict – the perpetual antagonism of heroes and villains. Batman will never save Gotham or defeat the Joker, the Green Lanterns will never oversee a peaceful galaxy, the Kingpin will always be a criminal kingpin, and so on, because the absence of conflict removes a key rationale for superheroes. The genre’s fixation on conflict isn’t hidden, either; scan the headlines of comic book news sources like ScreenRant, or comment boards, and we easily find questions about who would win in a battle, who is most powerful, who has the heavier boots with which to kick ass, etc.. Batman vs Superman? Hulk vs Ghost Rider? Black Adam vs Superman? Ironman vs Captain America? This Marvel character vs that DC character?

A related problem is the extent to which character growth, despite the odd exception, also seems to favor stagnation rather than growth, particularly for villains. Maybe there are nuances I’m missing from my outside perspective, but every time I read about the latest arc in this or that comic, it always seems as if villains are consistently the same in terms of motivations. They don’t learn from their mistakes, change for the better, or suffer tragic (and permanent) consequences for their actions. They just keep coming back time after time, reinforcing the impression that the underlying impulse for superhero comics is to sustain conflict.

A fixation on power and vigilante action. The desire to pit heroes and villains against each, in any number of combinations, comes with a necessary fixation on the power needed to win a fight, whether in terms of force, intellect, or both. This is typically expressed by continually expanding a character’s power set and/or increasing the potency of these powers (even to a god-like scale). Considering that most superheroes (or antiheroic protagonists) are vigilantes – they act outside the law regardless of their respect for it (e.g. Batman and Spider-Man, who turn over criminals to the police, vs the Punisher who tortures and kills criminals at his own discretion) – much of their heroism rests on the moral quality of their individual characters. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this raises serious ethical questions on heroism defined in this sense, because beyond the escapist power fantasies of defeating bullies/villains and avenging wrongs, there comes the question of how to hold superpowered people accountable when they specifically act outside of institutional, or at least social/communal, frameworks. While some works, like Kingdom Come, are quite thoughtful on the topic, I tend to see more pseudo-profundity in the genre. For example, the X-Men are often seen as a commentary on civil rights, given the discrimination mutants face from humanity, but the analogy never made sense to me. Black skin, non-heterosexual orientations – these don’t vaporize people, cause objects to explode, violate people’s mental privacy (or override their will) or actually hold the potential to harm/kill anyone the way mutant superpowers do. If anything, the gun control debate is the better framework, but that would require challenging the idea of superheroes operating unchecked in the world.

Moore is right to point out, in my view, how the comics industry missed the point of Watchmen not only by ignoring justifiable skepticism of “heroes,” but by glamorizing antiheroes. They don’t seem to have adjusted their storytelling to account for Watchmen’s critique of power. Works like The Boys notwithstanding, the default attitude is to continue valorizing the powerful as messianic saviors of the powerless, a gesture made especially easy when the stories are really little more than fights between superpowered beings without any really connection to their societies. Our role is to trust in these beings and have faith they won’t turn against us – a faith that is often used to harshly judged skeptics – as heretics and/or villains – who develop fail-safe plans in case a superhero goes rogue, as Batman does in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. To put it simply: comics tend to focus on superheroes as empowered beings, not empowering beings.

An algorithmic approach to novelty and the seemingly unavoidable shift away from realism. From variations on the original character, including evil doppelgangers and alternate dimension variants, to saddling heroes with kid or animal sidekicks, the comics industry has a somewhat predictable approach to introducing novelty in their stories when the original character runs out of steam. A related tendency, when creators become bored with realism, is the decision to include magical, supernatural, or miraculous science-fiction elements to the story – an effect that, to me, is similar to how Hanna Barbera ruined Scooby Doo by having the gang confront actual ghosts rather than exposing charlatans posing as ghosts and monster. At times, it reaches the point where what is appealing about a character, the premise underlying their story, is diluted by all the additional characters and conceptual shenanigans. An example that comes to mind is the Hulk, initially interesting as a modern reinvention of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Jekyll/Hyde binary, who these days is reconceived as a starship piloted by Bruce Banner. Really?

Incoherent worldbuilding. The universe superheroes inhabit, particularly Marvel’s and DC’s, mash together so many different mythologies, cosmologies, and theologies that they achieve an impressive incoherence in which their worlds cannot possibly function. Magic, supernatural entities, advanced technologies, science-based powers, aliens, mutants, angels, demons, ancient gods, the Judeo-Christian God, vampires, zombies, and what-have-you – all seem to collide together on account of insisting that characters exist within a shared universe. The impact isn’t only on the physics of these universes, which is confused at best, but also their histories in that if the world has a particular set of natural laws than societies would have to develop differently than in a world with a different set of laws.

It’s not only that superhero universes tend to be conceptual kludges, however. Even familiar activities such as scientific discovery and invention tend to be detached from reality, with lone geniuses single-handedly inventing devices so far beyond our current capabilities that they might as well be magic. It’s tempting to look at all this and appreciate the boundless imagination of these mash-ups, however implausible, illogical, and even nonsensical they are. If superhero comics were typically written as hard science fiction, that would be something. But even when dressed in sci-fi clothes, what we get is essentially fantasy – and not the disciplined fantasy of a Modessit Jr. or a Tolkien, but rather the kind of fantasy in which anything can happen because the storyteller’s whim is not bound to a narrative universe with clear rules, fictional or otherwise, just as our real universe is. Plausibility isn’t necessarily about being realistic – that is, true to our world – but about creating a methodically conceived and purposefully implemented internal logic for narratives to follow. In the end, I’m of the view that smart fun is more fun than dumb fun.

Reminder ...

Before moving on to discuss Marvel and DC’s cinematic universes, it’s worth re-emphasizing that any critique of patterns in superhero storytelling doesn’t preclude any specific story from being excellent across any number of facets – art, characterizations, plot – either separately or all together. In this sense, then, my enjoyment of superhero stories really depends on the extent to which they diverge from the patterns, cliches, tropes, and philosophical assumptions I’ve described.

Frederik vs the Franchises: Reckoning with the Force From A Galaxy Far, Far Away

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Sun, 12 Feb 2023 01:04:00 +0000

In pop culture’s pantheon, Star Wars may reign supreme, challenged nowadays only by the MCU, but in my personal pantheon of media juggernauts I’ve always favored Star Trek. Exploring strange new worlds and seeking new life and civilizations has always engaged my imagination far more than fighting in a galaxy far, far away. Still, I won’t deny enjoying Star Wars’ popcorn fun, at least insofar as the Original Trilogy (OT) is concerned. I retain an affinity for the iconic characters that have loomed larger-than-life over popular storytelling, and keep a DVD set of the OT on my shelf to watch again when the mood strikes me. But as more and more content is added to the Star Wars universe, the more the OT is the general limit to my appreciation. As a vast media empire, Star Wars has come to embody everything I find annoying and alienating about franchises – the endless churn of product, risk-averse storytelling overly dependent on nostalgia, the collision of creative visions. It appeals to the dark side of fandom, where marketing influences artistic decisions by giving consumers what they want rather than engaging them with stories told with integrity and respect for authorial intent.

The Force Is Definitely Not With The Sequel Trilogy

While the Prequel Trilogy (PT) left me unimpressed, but not necessarily closed off to further Star Wars stories, it’s the misguided Sequel Trilogy (ST) that ultimately drained the force out of any interest, however casual, I might have in anything further Disney wants to sell. The best thing I can say about The Force Awakens is that it looks professional, which isn’t saying much because I’d expect nothing less given the money thrown at it. While I’ve never felt that J.J. Abrams offers any particularly visionary directing, let alone a substantive understanding of the franchises he works with, I won’t deny the polish he brings to his films. If nothing else, The Force Awakens is a technical improvement over George Lucas’ awkward filmmaking in his prequel trilogy. Beyond that, however, I couldn’t be more mystified by the critical consensus that yields a 93% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. While the film introduces mostly interesting new characters – Finn is particularly notable as an off-template character, a Stormtrooper who rebels against his masters as a matter of conscience –, these are smothered by a story that yields no surprises in its development on account of being so derivative of A New Hope. Sure, Abrams may have intended to play off the new characters against the mythology of the original, as he asserts in an interview with Rolling Stone: “… to tell a story that was not just history repeating itself, but a story that embraced the movies that we know as the actual history of this galaxy.” But how disingenuous. Cf course he tells a story of history repeating itself. All the events from the OT are repeated and rendered moot – the New Republic is easily (and glibly) dispatched in a single blast by a long-range weapon powered by ridiculous physics – and the attempt to exploit its iconic characters to excite fans only comes across as a depressing attempt to replace the old originals with passable replicas not beholden to Lucas’ vision. To offer an analogy: it’s like replacing checkers with chess pieces on the board only to continue playing checkers.

It’s not only in the broad and derivative gestures of the narrative that The Force Awakens sets a poor stage for the sequel trilogy; it’s in the details too, those small character-defining moments. The most memorably stupid one is the scene in which Kylo Ren tries to Vulcan mind-meld with Rey to extract information, only for it to backfire and reveal his own greatest fear. You’d think that the revelation would be something psychologically insightful, the key piece of the puzzle that is Kylo’s motivation for serving Snoke and the First Order from the Dark Side of the Force. Perhaps a deep alienation from humanity, a fear of parental abandonment, his inability to find someone to lose his virginity to – give me something! But no. What we’re given as his great inner fear is his worry that’s he’ll never be as powerful as Darth Vader. Kylo’s character never recovers from this missed opportunity to uncover an essential insight into his personality and inner conflicts. As a result, the consequences of his actions – notably, murdering his dad – ultimately comes across as pathetic and gratuitous rather than tragic. Rather than a villain whose fascistic pursuit of power has a deeply personal impact on his family, we get a weirdly entitled kid who whines and throws temper tantrums. Sorry, critical consensus: botching key dramatic moments and telling a derivative story just doesn’t add up to a good film, irrespective of its entertainment value (or lack thereof).

If I had any hope that The Last Jedi might prove more persuasive, it came from my enthusiasm for Rian Johnson as writer and director. And for the movie’s first third, I absolutely did feel that rush of exhilaration comparable to the fun of watching the OT. If nothing else, Johnson at least succeeded, where The Cashgrab Awakens failed, in surprising me with a wholly original plot that isn’t photocopied from past film scripts. Even better, he introduced some genuinely new themes into the storyline, namely the conflict between economic classes (via Finn and Rose’s mission to the Monte Carlo-like casino town of Canto Blight) and a perspective of the Force from outside of the Skywalker family. I also applauded his revelation that Rey’s parents are actually no one of mythic or historic significance, an intriguing subversion of fan expectations and a further view of the Force beyond the Skywalkers. It’s unfortunate that these ideas landed rather awkwardly given a lack of setup from The Force Awakens and, worse, died quietly off screen with The Rise of Skywalker. But Johnson deserves credit for at least trying to offer a richer context to the conflict between the First Order and the Resistance.

I entirely reject his treatment of Luke Skywalker, however. It’s bad enough that the sequel trilogy essentially erases the events and outcome of the OT and replaces them with facsimiles, but Johnson leans into this revisionism by reversing Luke’s character development in Return of the Jedi. I understand that ROTJ isn’t a fan favorite like The Empire Strikes Back, but whatever its overall merits, its climax is much more subversive than people typically think. Luke not only senses the good in his father, unlike Yoda and Obi-Wan, but actively relies on it in a plan for redemption. At first, it seems like his faith is misplaced, as Vader does bring him in front of the Emperor, the Dark Side’s most fearsome and powerful embodiment. For a time, it seems as if Luke will indeed succumb to rage and fall to the Dark Side as he duels his father. But a moment of empathy, arising from the realization that he severed his father’s hand just as his was severed, pulls him from the brink. In refusing to continue the duel, he once again allows his (purposeful, it seems to me) vulnerability to draw his father back to the light side, which is what happens when Vader kills the Emperor to save his son. So what do we get? We get an ending that not only shows Luke confronting a supremely powerful evil, but using an approach to being a Jedi that is markedly different than Yoda’s and Obi-Wan’s. This is hard to reconcile with the character Johnson gives us, a Luke who can be so terrified of the Dark Side that he’d reflexively consider murdering not only a student, but the son of his best friends. The problem is further compounded in that this single moment, which is all the less believable given how empty Kylo Ren’s character is, unravels everything about Luke and renders him an utter failure at, well, everything. For all that time after Return of the Jedi, Luke is given no accomplishments – no new generation of Jedi, no new Republic to support, not even his friendships, which only highlights how bizarre it is for Johnson’s ending to ask us to see Luke as a symbol of hope to the galaxy.

Johnson’s vision for Luke does have its supporters. Daniel Finney presents one in an article at the Des Moines Register, citing a University of Iowa playwriting instructor who pushed back against his “hate” for The Last Jedi:

"It blew up some of the sacred cows of the 'Star Wars' universe," she said. "Characters developed, grew and changed. That was so satisfying to watch."

Gogerty argues that Luke's temptation to kill his nephew fits the arc of Luke's life. He's always rushed in when he should have waited.

Gogerty noted Luke disobeyed Yoda in "The Empire Strikes Back," taking his weapons into the cave to face the dark side projection of Darth Vader.

Luke abandoned his training early to rescue his friends on Cloud City despite Yoda's admonishment he wasn't ready to fight Darth Vader.

That rashness cost him a hand.

"Luke has always been pretty impressed with himself," Gogerty said. "It makes sense that he would give into a moment of darkness when he was frightened by a vision of his nephew turning to the dark side."

Setting aside the question as to why people seem so eager to see Luke dismantled, and whether it’s an exercise in cynicism or not, interpretations like Gogerty’s don’t persuade me to change my opinion of The Last Jedi because they don’t strike me as a good fit with what we see on screen. It’s a strange argument to advocate for Johnson’s “change” in Luke by returning to his character in The Empire Strikes Back and ignoring his subsequent personal growth – let’s even call it spiritual growth, since understanding the Force, light and dark, and handling it with skill is surely what defines a Jedi Master. Luke clearly evolves from The Empire Strikes Back to Return of the Jedi, growing from an arguably rash apprentice to a patient, calmer, more spiritually courageous, and more assured planner. Indeed, insofar as there is any character development in the OT it’s in the hero’s journey Luke experiences. Even Yoda, who criticized Luke for abandoning his training in Empire and rushing unprepared to face Vader, eventually tells Luke in Return of the Jedi that no further training is needed and that he must confront Vader to truly become a Jedi. Yoda’s acknowledgement of Luke’s growth makes it all the more disappointing when Johnson brings him back to push a spiritually defeated Luke into action in a scene that plays back the teacher-student dynamic in The Empire Strikes Back and essentially emphasizes Luke’s failures. But while the scene makes some sense in terms of Johnson’s characterization, it rests on a rather unsteady reading of Yoda’s character, and Obi-Wan’s by association, as a wise Jedi in the OT. Is that really what we see, the impetuous Luke disregarding his teacher’s sage counsel as proof of his life’s arc of rash action? Consider an alternative interpretation. On sensing that his friends are in trouble, his moral intuition is to do what any good friend would do: try to help. Yoda reacts, not by offering to go along and help, but with a disapproving attitude and dubiously helpful advice. And what about Obi-Wan, the man who told Vader “if you strike me down, I shall only become more powerful?” Apparently, that translates to him telling Luke: “If you choose to face Vader, you will do it alone. I cannot interfere.” Add to that the blatantly manipulative withholding of information when it came to being Vader’s son, I’d argue that neither Yoda nor Obi-Wan come across as shining moral examplars. As for the consequences of Luke’s alleged recklessness, while he clearly suffers from his encounter with Vader, what doesn’t happen is just as notable as what does: he doesn’t join the Dark Side and become the Empire’s new weapon, choosing suicide instead. Dark, sure. But not without some nobility and perhaps even a long-term benefit. If his hand hadn’t been severed, would Luke had felt a saving moment of empathy when he later cut off his father’s hand? I’d argue that the premature confrontation with Vader ultimately enabled the Rebel Alliance’s eventual victory, which makes Yoda’s warning – “If you leave now, help them you could, but you will destroy all for which they have fought and suffered” – quite wrong.

Given the many ways in which Luke could have been included or simply referenced in The Last Jedi and, previously, in The Force Awakens – the underlying question is: why commit to a tragic and pessimistic characterization? Without requiring perfection, noting that even great teachers may make mistakes or simply not achieve the desired connection with students that makes learning possible, Luke could still have been presented as a person whose life overall had a positive and inspiring impact – especially in contrast to wishy-washy hand wavers Yoda and Obi-Wan. (It’s worth noting Darren Mooney’s charitable reading over at The Escapist, but I personally agree with commenter Inkstained Wretch that the equivalency between Yoda/Odi-Wan and Luke misreads the OT. More fundamentally, I think The Last Jedi could have addressed the theme of exhaustion, cynicism, and optimism in the context of vigilance against fascism, or perhaps as an analogue to the struggles of civil rights movements, in a much better way than it did, and with greater focus on Rey rather than Luke. If that was indeed Johnson’s intended subtext.)

So we’re stuck with tragic Luke leading into Rise of Skywalker, a film that manages not only to insult intelligence but dumbness as well – as in, it doesn’t even rate as good dumb fun. Sidelining Finn and Rose, effectively ending their stories, is a wasted opportunity for interesting characters with genuine potential, while Rey and Kylo’s stories amount to little more than melodramatic mush. (Rey’s adoption of the Skywalker name, after it’s been dragged through the muck in The Last Jedi, is a particularly sour cherry on the film’s tasteless sundae.) Of course, the crux of the movie’s is that somehow, Palpatine returns. I’d point out how the franchise tends to give the Sith all kinds of novel powers while Jedi seem limited to tricking minds, levitating objects, and telling the truth from a certain point of view, but the Force has never been anything other than an incoherent concept bendable to whatever scriptwriters want, a magic plot device akin to a deus ex machina. Still, while the magically arbitrary means of Palpatine’s return is ridiculous in and of itself, the decision itself to revive Palpatine as the ultimate evil behind the First Order makes the film worse and demonstrates bankrupt storytelling. In keeping with the ST’s commitment to erasing the OT’s (few) accomplishments, Palpatine’s return renders moot the victory Luke and Anakin achieve at the end of Return of the Jedi. (And forget that whole balancing the Force thing from the prequels.) It also takes deprives Supreme Leader Snoke from a deeper characterization, even if in a retroactive manner given his death in The Last Jedi. When considered as a whole, the ST merely expresses the worse tendency of franchise storytelling: compromising story, characters, and artistic vision by wallowing in the past rather than focusing on new ideas – storytelling by committee and marketing.

Looking Back at the Original Trilogy

As much as I can criticize Disney filmmakers, the root cause for the ST’s failure, in my view, actually rests with the OT or, to be specific, with how it’s been perceived and interpreted. I’m not alone – see here and here – in being skeptical of the perception that the OT films are great cinematic art, noting they have many of the shortcomings that sunk other films. Sure, the OT benefits from fantastic design. And many action scenes, like the Death Star trench run and the Battle of Hoth, are energetic and engaging. But the OT films don’t surpass earlier or later films in terms of cinematic experience and the fight choreography is hardly groundbreaking even by the standards of the time. Some scenes, like Obi-Wan and Vader’s duel in A New Hope or the barge fight scene in Return of the Jedi, are fine, but hardly worth getting overly excited about. Shaolin kung fu movies coming out of Hong Kong at the time offer more kinetic and imaginative fight scenes than even the best lightsaber duels in the OT.

Nevertheless, I’d agree that Star Wars generally succeeds in providing a cinematic experience befitting the spirit of adventure serials. It’s the quality of the writing that really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. To begin with, characterizations are thin. Only Luke experiences meaningful growth, and arguably Vader although his growth is less of an arc than a sudden epiphany. Han’s transition from self-interested mercenary to team playing hero happens quickly in A New Hope and doesn’t evolve much from there. Leia starts as a strong leader and ends a strong leader. The romance between the two is rather incidental, requiring only a few scenes to develop. Beyond that, most characters serve as set dressing and fashion models, with great costume design but little personality let alone impact on the narrative. Even those few given opportunities to utter some lines of dialogue here and there, like Boba Fett, barely get to register as personalities let alone characters with psychological depth.

As for the plot, that too is rather thin, with A New Hope having more plot than The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi combined. It’s rather interesting to consider how The Empire Strikes Back is rated the best of the trilogy when its “story” consists of rebels escaping from an Imperial assault, Luke going to Yoda for training, Leia and Han on the run until they get captured, then another escape from the Empire at the cost of Han’s capture. Without A New Hope, the film is meaningless. Without Return of the Jedi, it’s incomplete. And while it does have one of the trilogy’s most dramatic scenes, a scene does not a story make. All in all, the OT is an example of sacrificing plot on the altar of zippy action.

Plot isn’t the only sacrifice, though: so is worldbuilding. The politics of the Empire and Rebellion are poorly explored. The Force is nebulous hand-waving, at best, with no conceptual structure beyond boiled fortune cookie utterances. (What is the Force? How does it work? Why is it divided into such Manichean moral sides, and what is the psychology of Force practitioners within this division? Perhaps it’s no surprise that the physics of the Force are so poorly determined. After all, Lucas couldn’t even be bothered with real physics in his space-based dogfights.) Even the dramatic impact and moral contexts of key moments are glossed over in the rush to get to the next action spectacle, Alderaan’s destruction being a prime example.

These shortcomings are not disparate, but rather symptomatic of a deeper issue, namely, that Lucas’ vision for Star Wars has been opportunistic rather than coherent and methodical. Compare Star Wars to the depth of literary universes such as Dune and Lord of the Rings, or comprehensively planned TV series like Babylon 5. There’s a clearly visible difference between a series whose story and background details have been methodically mapped out and a hodge-podge approach, however creative in parts. Although to some extent it’s no different than the brainstorming any creative goes through before finalizing a story, the many stories of the various ideas Lucas considered and discarded offer some proof of this. For more definitive proof, consider this: Lucas commissioned sci-fi author Alan Dean Foster, who wrote the novelization of A New Hope based on early script drafts, to write a sequel that could be filmed on a lower budget if the first movie performed poorly at the box office. That sequel was the novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, and its significance isn’t only that it gave us an entirely different story direction than The Empire Strikes Back, it highlights the extent to which Lucas was perfectly content with outsourcing Star Wars to other people rather than conceiving his own vision. And, crucially, allowing his vision to be drastically altered by financial considerations. The Empire Strikes Back and Splinter of the Mind’s Eye are the cinematic equivalent of A/B testing in online advertising.

Assigning a Grade: B

Altogether, the conclusion can only be that the OT is B-movie grade, a triumph of style over substance. But to say that the OT movies are B-movies isn’t to say that they’re bad entertainment or can’t be personally meaningful in some way. Recognizing that a film’s entertainment value doesn’t necessarily correlate with its quality, there’s no contradiction in viewing the OT as engaging but superficial. That “B” isn’t a scarlet letter. After all, it’s not uncommon for B-movies to connect with viewers, especially as cult cinema, while more elevated award-winning fare may shine for a moment at the Academy Awards than take a nap outside of pop culture’s spotlight. A movie doesn’t have to be profound or exceptionally crafted to be relatable, inspirational, emotionally resonant, or meaningful in some way.

Still, the perception of the films as something they aren’t explains why attempts to fix the OT’s shortcomings creak and groan from the strain to make the continuity work, a common problem with franchises. Because with all the later retcons and reinterpretations reinforcing what people want Star Wars to be rather than what Lucas present, we see the franchise transformation from light swashbuckling adventure to Very Serious Storytelling and, in my opinion, losing the quality of undemanding fun that characterizes the OT. (The shift is almost like watching an Indiana Jones movie, deciding that the Nazis need explaining as villains, and creating a spinoff called Indiana Jones and the Rise of Hitler to show us why Nazism is evil all the while doing some PR to rehabilitate Indy’s image as a less-than-heroic figure.)

Rogue One is a tempting milestone for the decision to tell Very Serious (and Absolutely Not B-Movie) Stories, given a downbeat ending that is far from the swashbuckling happy ending heroism of the OT. But Lucas himself arguably changed course with the Prequel Trilogy (PT) and its modeling of a liberal republic’s fall to fascism, providing context and explanations for the state of that distant galaxy leading to the events of the OT. As films, there are some aspects of the PT I can appreciate despite shortcomings both technical (e.g. dialogue, performances) and conceptual. The storyline spanning three films is more cohesive and Lucas is generally effective at presenting a tragedy of complacency, arrogance, and moral bankruptcy as the gateways for the corrupt and destructive pursuit of power. If it weren’t for Hayden Christensen’s unwatchable performances in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, I might be open to rewatching the films despite the fact that I don’t feel the PT is quite in continuity with the OT. (Given the skepticism expressed by characters like Han Solo and Motti, my impression of the Force and Jedi Knights in A New Hope is that for all that they might have been guardians of peach and justice, they were less grandiose than their depiction at the center of Republic power in the PT. But that’s just my impression.) In any case, Anakin’s turn to the dark side and the Empire’s rise emerging from systemic flaws in the Republic’s governance, combined with the critical failings and misjudgments of a fossilized Jedi Order, makes the PT surprisingly bleak. And bleak, of course, is quite tonally different from the jauntier OT, especially when it stems from treating the subject matter with a greater attention to realism.

We can draw a line, then, from PT to Rogue One and, apparently, Andor. “One of the things Andor is interested in is how people live under fascism, and how fascism changes environments—natural, built, and social,” writes Abigail Nussbaum at her Asking the Wrong Questions blog. I’m inclined to wonder if – in addition to the retcons, continuity fixes and rationalizations – the decision to start exploring the workings of fascism is a sign that people don’t actually like the OT very much. At the very least, the transition from fluffy adventure to serious storytelling points to an identity crisis at the heart of what is, fundamentally, military fiction. Torn between Lucas’ infantilized approach in the OT, which strips the moral complexities and brutal realities to offer kid-friendly fare, to the current impulse toward grittier, more complex offerings, Star Wars is confused about its premise as a story of war and violent conflict. Alan Dean Foster’s impression of Lucas offers some support to this, as he tells Yahoo Entertainment in response to his inclusion of a particular gruesome massacre in Splinter of the Mind’s Eye: “George is a very sensitive guy; I picked up on that from the moment I met him. That’s why, I think, the Imperial troopers never take their helmets off [in the original movies]. Because if you’re seeing people get shot all the time and their faces are contorted in agony, it gives you a very different cinematic vibe than if its just a figures in plastic helmets that all look the same. I don’t know this, but I think that was a deliberate choice on George’s part to mitigate the violence.”

This essential confusion about depicting war raises cultural questions, such as: to what extent is Star Wars an expression of Hollywood’s tendency to glamorize war and repeat stories in which victory is achieved through the superior application of violence? (How many people fantasize about being Jedi so they can sit and meditate? Not nearly as many as those who dream of dueling with lightsabers.)

Uncomfortable moral questions aside, the tonal shift of later works, along with the attempt to lean into thematic issues from a more adult perspective, points to a key problem with franchise: the hijacking of an original creator’s story by other people with their own ideas of how it should be told.

For my part, then, I’m content with the Original Trilogy in all its B-movie glory. I can excuse its lack of profundity on account of being simplified for the benefit of younger viewers. I can also appreciate how the whole is more entertaining than the superficial concepts of its parts. And when I really want a sequel, especially in a franchise that’s become a choose-your-own-adventure, I can always turn to the Dark Forces story, particularly the trilogy of novellas by William C. Deitz based on the seminal game series. An excellent example of how to do a sequel, Dark Forces works particularly well because it introduces a new character, Kyle Katarn, whose journey only marginally intersects with OT characters. After starting with a gift to fans, with Katarn stealing the infamous Death Star plans, the plot takes off in its own direction, backtracking to Katarn joining the Imperial Army under the belief his parents were killed by the Rebellion, learning the truth about the Empire’s coverup, turning Rebel-aligned mercenary, and eventually discovering his Jedi heritage while attempting to stop a group of Dark Jedi from claiming a tremendous source of power. Aside from being a snappy adventure, Dark Forces succeeds in justifying why the Jedi should be perceived as forces for good, which is less about brute force but moral perspective. Katarn proves to be a Jedi not because he’s better at violence than his Dark Jedi opponent, but because for all his lifetime of cynicism he can still bring compassion to bear in even the most difficult circumstances. The clever way Dietz writes Katarn’s final duel with the Dark Jedi’s leader, Jerec, for example, is an especially memorable demonstration that the light side of the Force doesn’t have to be stronger than the dark in terms of raw power. It only needs to approach the fight with an entirely different perspective in order to win. And all without introducing new hand-waving mumbo-jumbo to magically solve thorny plot points.

One Last, and Very Important, Thing

So as Disney churns out yet more Star Wars content, I have no regret about sitting on the sidelines. The OT, Dark Forces – these are enough for me. But I will end by pointing out an important topic I haven’t addressed: racism and the challenge of diverse representation in Star Wars. There’s a lot to unpack there, and I’d encourage you to read these articles from The Playlist, Scientific American and, especially, CHS Globe Online.

Frederik vs the Franchises: To Oldly Go When Many Have Gone Before

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 02:33:00 +0000

When discussing Star Trek, it’s almost become an obligation to affix a bright red asterisk to Gene Roddenberry’s name. Because, you see, the Great Bird of the Galaxy wasn’t so much a cosmic being as he was a prisoner of gravity – and, if you believe his detractors, a marketing construct. The “corrective” portrait that’s emerged in the years since his death – notably through books like Joel Engel’s Gene Roddenberry: the Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek and the documentary Chaos on the Bridge – is sometimes tragic, sometimes hostile, mostly unflattering, and all too human. It’s a tale of his need to control Star Trek, his clash with dissenters, and tendency to take credit for other people’s ideas, which not only resulted in head-on collisions with studios but also alienated his friends and allies. The “real” history of Star Trek’s creation, if we can say there’s such a thing, casts doubt on Roddenberry’s visionary authorship of its mythos and the narrative that Star Trek was a ship of peers guided by a singularly capable captain. In space, it seems, no one can hear a scream. But the sound of an idol being shattered comes through the vacuum loud and clear.

Whatever the behind-the-scenes truth is, Roddenberry might have tripped over himself when it came to realizing his vision, but I’d argue that Star Trek is significantly diminished without his influence.

Today’s Star Trek is very much the product of a committee, a patchwork whole shaped by diverse and not necessarily compatible perspectives, creative conflicts, compromises and, yes, cash grabs. While the glut of spinoffs and the prospect of a fourth Kelvin-timeline movie indicate a period of thriving creativity, the symptoms suggest to me a case of franchitis that obscures the fact that, despite polished productions and occasional flashes of brilliance, Star Trek has become a mediocrity whose ambitions were jettisoned along with the Great Bird’s space-borne ashes.

There are two moments that, to my mind, mark Star Trek's decline. The first comes from Deep Space Nine, when showrunner Ira Steven Behr reasoned that the nobility of the Federation was only possible with the support of a ruthless and amoral secret security apparatus. Apparently inspired by a line of dialogue for Commander Benjamin Siskso from DS9 episode "The Maquis" – "It's easy to be a saint in paradise" – Behr mused in the 1999 reference companion to the series, "Why is Earth a paradise in the twenty-fourth century? Well, maybe it's because there's someone watching over it and doing the nasty stuff that no one wants to think about." He expressed an interest of exploring what life was really like for those living the fictional 24th century, saying "Is it this paradise, or are there, as Harold Pinter said, 'Weasels under the coffee table'." With that decision Star Trek’s fundamental outlook shifted from aspirational to cynical. Since then, not only has the malignant Section 31 and the moral calculus used to justify its existence become entrenched in current continuity (both Prime and Kelvin), we’ve also been given a militaristic, realpolitik Federation that seriously contemplates genocide (Discovery Season 1, DS9’s Dominion War seasons) and succumbs to xenophobia and resentment (Star Trek VI, Picard Season 1). And that’s before we even get to discussing how contemporary showrunners repeatedly portray the Federation as inept – scientifically, judicially and defensively – and, all too often, an ideal just outside the characters’ reach. Discovery’s come-to-Gene moment in season 3 was a nice gesture, but rather Pyrrhic given the franchise context.

The second moment comes with the release of Star Trek II: the Wrath of Kahn, which marked a significant course correction for Star Trek movies after The Motion Picture’s lackluster response. Its success established a move toward conventional action movie storytelling rooted in a conflict between heroes and villains typically resolved through violence. Hence: Voyager’s crew fought TNG’s Borg, Enterprise had its temporal cold war, Discovery’s seasonal rotation of villains included Klingons, the Mirror Universe, malevolent AI, and the Orion Syndicate. Picard’s first season also involved hostile AI, and the Kelvin timeline movies each had their own Big Bad for the good guys to fight. Only Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home bucks the trend with its heartfelt environmentalist cautionary tale, delivered with a good humor that’s generally lacking in the newer films and series. The fact that fandom has embraced this course correction is evidenced not only by the box office and television ratings, but through the current crop of games (e.g. Star Trek Fleet Command and Star Trek Timelines) that trumpet the opportunities to engage in space battles.

Underlying these two influences is the successful overturning of Roddenberry’s injunction against interpersonal conflicts between crew members, which further contributes to Star Trek’s devolution into conventional storytelling modes not all that different from Firefly, Dark Matter, or other gritty SF series. Picard exemplifies how UnRoddenberries finally got their wish with a crew of liars, murderers, drug addicts, and PTSD-sufferers, all working for a captain the showrunners present, intentionally or not, as out-of-synch with his peers in a narrative that undermines his values. (For example, the resolution of season 1 doesn’t emerge from moral insight and diplomatic skill, but the wielding of force.)

The thing is, it isn’t hard to discern Roddenberry’s distinct vision for Star Trek, especially considering that he elsewhere conceived alien invasion and space opera series that were posthumously developed in, respectively, Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda. When given the opportunity to revive the original series in the late 1970s, the result – after many development twists and turns – was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a high-concept film obviously inspired by icons like 2001: A Space Odyssey. It apparently wasn’t what critics or fans wanted to see, however, which was more visceral, action-oriented storytelling than TMP’s more cerebral approach. For my part, however much it puts me in the minority, the film’s humanistic design aesthetic, artsy cinematic vision, and rejection of action movie conventions are bold gestures in service of a premise that is actually science fiction – the very reasons why TMP stands out as my favourite Star Trek movie along with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. While we can debate the film’s strengths and shortcomings, TMP clearly lays a defined course for Star Trek that looks beyond reflecting humanity’s 20^th and 21^st century failings to focus instead on the next stage in our civilization’s evolution.

While the movies more or less sidelined Roddenberry as Paramount charted a new course, his efforts in television with The Next Generation provides further evidence of the vision he was striving to realize against a current of opposing, or at least unsympathetic, creative forces. Representing a manifesto of sorts for the series, the first episode credited to D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry, “Encounter at Farpoint,” centers on the Enterprise’s crew solving a diplomatic mystery not with a brawl, but with empathy and science. And in the process, they prove their worthiness as galactic good citizens to the omnipotent and judgmental Q. While we could nitpick at how well the episode juggles its multiple goals of telling an SF story while introducing new characters, a new ship, and updated world-building, the episode nevertheless expresses the very ideals underlying the series that would find further expressions in episodes like “Inner Light,” widely considered one of the series’ best.

Broadly, the shift away from Roddenberry marked a shift in Star Trek’s fundamental genre from high-concept science fiction of the kind you’d find in literary SF to the action thrillers that Hollywood churns out in between outpours of superheroics and horror. The impression to me is of a franchise that not only lacks the skill to deliver on the challenges of science fiction – a particularly difficult genre because it involves both crafting stories with compelling characters and drama as well as the ability to speculate about science rooted in an understanding of actual science – but a lack of interest. How else to explain the relentless repetition of plots centered on the Mirror Universe, Federation corruption, planetary destruction, war, time travel, and the tiresome Borg, who are to Star Trek what the equally one-dimensional Daleks are to Doctor Who? How else to account for the jagged, disjointed history attempting to link together the various series? And forget about embracing the socialist implications of the Federation, because Hollywood’s fealty is to capitalism.

It makes no sense, for example, that the Romulans in Picard would be ghettoized and impoverished in a universe in which material needs can be easily satisfied with the help of technologies such as replicators, clean and plentiful energy generators, robots, and so on. Similarly, it makes no sense for Federation medicine to be unable to repair the defect in Picard’s parietal lobe, and the resulting terminal illness, given nanotechnologies, genetic technologies and the capability to break people down at a subatomic level and reassemble them (transporters). But today’s Star Trek is rarely interested in science fiction as anything other than a mood and aesthetic, and the franchise’s technology is not the concrete foundation on which stories are built but rather malleable devices that are adjusted to serve whatever the writers happen to need for their storytelling goals. So if they need to inflict an uncurable disease on Picard, confine Data’s mind to a box, make Section 31 especially formidable, or portray the Federation as a racist bureaucracy with disparate economic classes, then that’s what we get even if it means sacrificing consistency – and the ambition for speculation – within established sciences and technologies. Worse is how showrunners regularly sacrifice fruitful science fictional plotlines in favor of action thriller story beats. Picard’s Season 1 provides a particularly egregious example of this when it literally kills off all the characters involved in the show’s most intriguing idea: a project to help the victims of Borg assimilation rebuild their mental and physical health so that they might eventually return to their home societies, many of which have themselves not healed from the trauma of Borg attacks. An SF medical drama? Now there’s an idea for a Star Trek series! But as it stands, we have been given over the years generally middling series that, despite occasional displays of inspiration, don’t measure up to their ambitions (e.g. Enterprise, Voyager). Even in light of my reading of it’s Season 2 synopsis, I can’t shake the feeling that Picard is, essentially, oldly going where many have gone before. Or at the least, arriving very, very late.

If Star Trek’s Powers That Be were genuinely passionate about, and committed to, science fiction in general and Roddenberry’s vision in particular, than the answer to Ira Behr Stevens’ question would be obvious: speculate on a better future through more than just technology, engineering, physics, and medicine. A common blind spot in popular science fiction, sciences such as psychology and sociology, as well as arts, the humanities and political science, are frequently glossed over, if not outright ignored. In a society with the technology to eliminate material needs, what role do psychology and sociology play in promoting harmony? How has humanity’s practice of politics evolved to leverage advances in psychology and sociology to create harmonious social structures? Can ship crews organize themselves better than the traditional military-inspired hierarchies? What would xenoarchaeology look like? There are certainly precedents in literary SF of speculations beyond the conventional disciplines, James Whites' Sector General series being a notable example. Which means there’s a wealth of untapped potential Star Trek showrunners could draw on to support an optimistic vision of the Federation, if they were so inclined. In a sense, it’s almost as the showrunners are afraid of leaning too far into the implied socialism of future Earth and the Federation lest they betray their aim to appeal to the broadest audience possible.

Even Star Trek’s much-vaunted humanistic values are curiously behind the times and conventional by speculative SF standards. As much as I welcome the inclusion of a romantic gay couple in Discovery from the beginning, and trans characters in Season 3, the gesture feels belated and just a bit self-congratulatory. Decades after the Original Series broke ground with an interracial kiss on TV, an admittedly problematic statement given the specifics of the scene, it’s sad to think how long it took the franchise to fulfill its promise of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” Better late than never, I suppose, but these gestures might not come across as so contrived if they expressed a well-thought-out universe beyond gadgets.

Perhaps the Star Trek I want and, I believe, Gene Roddenberry wanted, the one that boldly goes where no one has gone before, would have a much more limited appeal. So what? I’d rather have less but higher caliber Star Trek than a buffet that sacrifices its ambitions for low-hanging entertainment. And I don’t buy the argument that there’s a Star Trek for everyone with the various series currently on air and in the works (i.e. from the more comedic Lower Decks to forthcoming fair like a Michelle Yeoh-starring Section 31 series). By definition, a vision that molds itself to whatever people want to buy is a vision that lacks integrity, even after accounting for some creative flexibility. Star Trek should be Star Trek.

So beam me up, Scottie. Let’s see what else is out there.

Frederik vs the Franchises: No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Die ... and Stay Dead

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 00:50:00 +0000

By several accounts from media sources wondering where the Bond machine will go following the decisive end to Craig’s run with No Time To Die, producers Barbara Broccoli and Martin G. Wilson are themselves unsure of what to do next. Which is funny, because they already had established a clear direction for Bond with Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace (a tonal shift already attempted with the Dalton-era films), than squandered it by devolving Bond to what made the franchise overall outdated and somewhat, at times entirely, ridiculous.

I appreciate that the Craig-era films presented a character arc for Bond, from origin to terminus, and readily acknowledge Casino Royale as one of the franchise’s best offerings. But I’m mystified at the critical (and popular) acclaim for a series with diminishing returns – B-grade films whose undeniably slick production values are paired with scripts ranging from mediocre to downright awful, despite occasional moments of surprising psychological nuance. For my money, the downward slide didn’t start with Quantum of Solace, a film I enjoyed irrespective of shortcomings I might agree with on a more critical rewatch. Like Casino Royale, QoS offered a grounded plot and a plausible mission with real-world parallets for Bond to undertake. Skyfall, or Downfall as I tend to think of it, marked the return to everything annoying about the franchise, starting with indestructible superhero Bond against flamboyant and implausibly omniscient supervillainy. Sure, the film gave us more a more fleshed out Bond biography than we’ve typically been given, but that doesn’t excuse the regression. If Craig’s Bond was getting too “woke” for some fans, Skyfall addressed the concern by killing off Judi Dench’s M to replace her with white guy Ralph Fiennes and putting field agent Miss Moneypenny on administrative duty behind a desk, which is right where we started when Connery inhabited the role. Craig’s Bond was not a superhero in a key aspect, however; while he does kill the villain, Javier Bardem’s Silva, he fails in arguably his more important task of saving M’s life. Killing off M isn’t the problem, but rather the timing – how much more interesting if this was the start of a mission, not the expression of a Pyrrhic victory?

Spectre was less enthusiastically received, garnering a 63% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes compared to Skyfall’s 92%. In my case, it was barely received at all. I know that I watched it, but don’t remember anything about it other than how annoyingly miscast Christoph Waltz was as Blofeld and how irritated I was that the classic villain was reinvented with a personal connection to Bond. Establishing a trend from Skyfall, it was no longer enough to send Bond on secret missions in the UK’s foreign policy and security interests, or at least to save the world from megalomaniacs. It had to be personal. At any rate, it’s from this great “meh” that the series concludes with one of the worst Bond films in the entire franchise in my view, No Time to Die. We could dwell on any number of failings – Rami Malek’s bafflingly incoherent villain, Blofeld’s annoying return that overdraws, and then overdraws some more, on Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, the disappointing underuse of the kick-ass women characters played by Ana de Armas and Lashana Lynch, or the sci-fi bent that by all rights should flag the film as borderline camp the way an invisible car did for Die Another Day.

But great googly-moogly, the film’s cardinal sin is worse than Spectre’s lack of memorability: No Time to Die is memorably boring. My mind was ready to check out at the first action set piece, an uninspired vehicular chase that ends with Bond in his Aston Martin, surrounded on all sides, who predictably escapes by pushing a few buttons to go-go-gadget the car’s weapons and shoot his way out. The subsequent chases make O.J. Simpson’s famous run from the law seem like an outtake from The Fast & The Furious by comparison, but it’s that early scene in the film that detached me from the film and emphasized how contrived the whole affair had become. By the end, taking stock of Craig’s run on Bond, the realization is that the series successfully re-characterized Bond as irredeemingly tragic, a blunt instrument who is marginally successful at saving the world from bloated plots but whose personal life, and personality, is defined by failure. Craig’s Bond is perpetually stuck in the past – after all these years, Vesper still holds her hand on his heart no matter how decompose – and emotionally incapable of resisting manipulation. This point is emphasized when he confronts Blofeld, who effortlessly plays him like the stringed instrument he is. The conversation doesn’t end with Bond achieving a moral victory over his mortal enemy, but with Blofeld unwittingly killed by bad science fiction before anything dramatically satisfying can happen.

Surely Bond’s death is meaningful, though? A poignant moment punctuating the distinctly deep pathos infusing the Craig-era films? I’ll agree that killing off Bond was a bold choice. But I see it less as an act of heroism than an act of suicide for a broken character, a narrative outcome that owes more to the will of the produces than to inexorable narrative logic. The film’s invisible car – I mean, killer nanotechnology – functions not out of science but out of screenwriting contrivance, which makes No Time To Die’s entire ending feel manipulative. Q could just as easily have devised a cure than not; that he doesn’t is purely a creative decision. My last thought on this is a question: I wonder if killing off Bond really was the boldest choice the screenwriters could have made. Given the surprise revelation that Bond has a daughter, wouldn’t it be more subversive to have one of cinema’s original macho international men of mystery retire – for real, this time – as a family man?

Frankly, I don’t much care what happens next with the Bond franchise. Perhaps if someone really cared about my opinion I’d suggest returning to a 60s setting, ditching the bad sci fi, putting Bond in moral jeopardy within the tension of his imperialist masters’ agendas, and adopting a skeptical perspective regarding the real-world consequences of plausible missions. But the Craig-era films aren’t the first time Bond producers had the opportunity to pursue a new direction only to reverse course. The previous time was with the Dalton-era films, criticized at the time for the more serious portrayal of a Bond shorn of the excess womanizing tendencies and overall flippancy. With gritter, more realistic plots involving cold war rivalries, arms dealing, drug cartels, and the like, Dalton’s films were a clear course-correction from the excesses of the Roger Moore-era. The new direction didn’t take, of course, and while Goldeneye (one of the franchise’s best) ushered in the Pierce Brosnan era with some restraint, the subsequent films became increasingly fanciful until producers pushed the reset button with Craig.

My indifference to Bond’s future stems largely from an indifference, or least a strong ambivalence, about its past, beginning with the portrayals by various actors. Obviously, I’m not convinced by Craig’s morose, tortured, tragic, unglamourous Bond, however well he plays the part. Although I prefer him as the Saint, Roger Moore is a most charming gentleman and his films have a certain appeal, however close they come to self-parody, precisely because he is so likable. (It’s all the more unfortunate, then, that his last turn as Bond in A View to Kill exploited his charm and his era’s overall light touch to sanitize appalling violence that, in the hands of a director today, would equal the savagery of any hard-R horror film.) Connery and his films benefit from being first, and thus the standard by which later films are measured against. But I was never quite enamored by Connery’s brute in a suit as many fans are, and the misogyny and uncritical imperialism mark his era of films as dated and objectionable products of their time that tarnish the luster of even otherwise entertaining films like Goldfinger. I have nothing to say about Lazenby, which in itself is saying something. Of all the actors playing Bond, Pierce Brosnan’s is the only one that, to my mind, checks all the boxes if the marks you’re looking for include a heroic character (i.e. a character who unequivocally defeats the bad guys) with charm, style, and a twinkle in his eye as well as an undercurrent of pathos more than hinting at the personal toll Bond’s work exacts. How many drinks, indeed, does it take to silence the screams of all the men, and women, he’s killed? That said, my favorite Bond, insofar as I find it meaningful to have a favorite, is Timothy Dalton. His portrayal of Bond, particularly in the context of plots just as grounded as Casino Royale’s, strikes me as the most credible.

Despite all that, I’m generally of the same mind as Esquire’s Stephen Marche, although perhaps a bit more willing than he is to find some entertainment value in the films here and there. The films strike me as B-movies – entertaining to varying degrees but ultimately not exceptional. Going forward, it’s unclear how Bond can continue to make a case for relevance when so many other franchises - Mission: Impossible, the Bourne films, the Fast & the Furious – offer better action stories, better action, and characters who don’t need constant renovation to be relevant to modern audiences. But the situation is a bit more grim than that: even looking back to the Connery-era’s contemporaries, we can find superior espionage fare. Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer films, based on the books by Len Deighton, for example. Or, in television, Danger Man / Secret Agent, whose character played by Patrick McGoohan, John Drake, is by far the superior spy in a series notable for its realistically, often morally compromised stories. Not only is Drake more resourceful and intelligent than Bond, he too can hold his own in a fight – and is notable for shunning the use of weapons unless absolutely necessary. Beyond that, do I need to mention Le Carré?

Perhaps the best course of action is to let Bond die in peace, assured of his place as a pop-culture icon for better or worse. But if he does return as the credits promise at the end of No Time To Die, it’s not me who’ll break open the gin for a celebratory martini.

Frederik vs the Franchises: Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 19:22:00 +0000

The box office may not show symptoms of fatigue for any given film franchise, but I sure am tired of all those vampires sucking the life out of popular culture (e.g. genre websites devoting so much coverage to Star Wars and the MCU/DCEU you’d swear nothing else exists). Franchises are a common topic in the entertainment press, of course, with sequels the frequent object of pity for failing to recapture the lightning that sparked in their progenitors. Yet franchise sequels we get, as long as the studios make a reasonable return on their investments.

Not all franchises are equal in ambition, however. Some are content to be film series, while others aspire to transmedia sprawl and iconic cultural status. Both levels of ambition are prone to diminishing returns with each sequel or spin-off in my view; the greater the quantity, the greater the chances of mediocrity. Personally, I think we’d be better off if crowdfunding was the dominant business model for filmmaking: rather that studios spending marketing dollars trying to manipulate us into seeing their latest mediocrity, only filmmakers with the visions and skills to persuade audience to give money to their efforts get to see their films realized. But that’s not reality. Given the often-exorbitant upfront costs of movie production for studios and the nature of our economy, it’s impossible to fully sever the profit motive from the artistic drive, so I understand why studios – businesses, fundamentally – reflexively turn to proven commodities such as successful films, best-selling books, classic films from the past, dormant franchises, popular characters from past works, and appeals to nostalgia as fuel to keep the box office fires burning.

To be fair, the current business model does produce some excellent films with artistic merit. Nevertheless, I don’t think that’s typical of films produced through a franchise model, and I’d level two general critiques to the franchising impulse.

Franchises inhibit rather than enhance individual artistic visions and authorship.

The reason is rather simple: it isn’t filmmakers who (own the intellectual property rights of their creations, but studios. I’m not only referring to the famous impact of market-driven studio interference on a director’s vision, resulting in critical panning and/or audience rejection (e.g. David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, the DCEU’s Justice League). I’m also referring to how one set of filmmakers on a franchise (including the original creators) are often replaced by others whose visions conflict, or at least don’t align, with their predecessors. Star Wars, Star Trek, the MCU, the DCEU, and Terminator are obvious examples. With so many different visions in play, franchises become saturated by retcons, reboots, and endless variations that serve to undermine the efforts of individual artists. What’s the value in crafting a poignant character arc or proposing an imaginative story concept when their outcomes can be revised, reversed or utterly ignored with subsequent franchise entries?

Franchises can lose their integrity even when they aren’t cobbled together by a multitude of creatives; the original creators themselves can undermine their creations when studios, market conditions, fandom, and/or personal motivations pressure them to revisit their work, especially after a lot of time has passed.

Franchises reduce fans to consumers.

The impact of a franchise isn’t only on the creative professionals who contribute their considerable talents to money-making projects for studios, but on the fans themselves. This may seem paradoxical, in that “successful” franchises clearly have excited fanbases (to varying degrees) who willingly spend money on the latest offerings, cosplay at conferences, and rev the social media buzz engine. That hardly seems like a bad thing, right? But as a certain Admiral might say, it’s a trap.

Broadly, the problem is one of volume: so much material is produced that it’s daunting for fans to keep up and for non-fans to find a way in, resulting in a struggle to savor past offerings while keeping up with the latest product. At some point, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we end up having to accept mediocrity; “good enough” but disposable entertainment typically consumed once than left behind for the next new product. We also end up boxed in – the more we commit to a franchise as it sprawls out, the harder it becomes to enjoy other franchises or - <gasp> - creative stories that aren’t franchises. There’s only so much time, after all. Good luck to you if you’re a completionist!

The impact on fandom can be more insidious than issues of money and time commitments, however. In an effort to create new material, franchises often resort to two maneuvers: 1) Fill in story gaps, and 2) Overemphasize novelty. The former risks demystifying stories by limiting opportunities for us to use our own imaginations, while the latter risks replacing what we enjoyed in the first place with something less compelling, if not ruinous. When novelty becomes more important than integrity and quantity overshadows quality, franchises end up resorting to the instant gratification of gimmickry in trying to sustain their profits, which can only annoy purists and further reduce fandom to mere consumerism. Worse than that, it may convince fans that their love of a franchise entitles them to be pandered to as co-owners, a perspective that drives fans to get angry when they don’t get what they want, regardless of whether it aligns with the vision of those people actually creating the franchise. In this way, fandom itself becomes antagonistic to authorial vision by demanding a tailored product; fandom becomes less appreciative and more transactional.

A fixation on canonicity doesn’t help. At its simplest, there’s no problem per se with the idea of a canon – all it is a narrative continuity across multiple films or books. The concept can be used to distinguish between a creator’s original work and works by others. For example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are the canon, while the countless derivative works that have followed are not regardless of their individual merits. But canonicity in recent years, particularly with the massive success of the MCU, is often just a way for studios/publishers to reassign creative privilege, justify mediocre work, and persuade consumers to spend more money on whatever new product they’re offering In other words, canonicity is code for intellectual property and, therefore, creative control, which ties in to my first general critique. “Canonicity” can also drive efforts to force disparate creative projects into some kind of whole, which comes weird narrative continuity projects as the DCEU demonstrates.

From Star Trek and Star Wars to Mission: Impossible, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and others, I’ll take a look at some of our popular franchises with these two general critiques in mind. So which franchise will stand up to scrutiny and which will fall? Stay tuned!

Sorrow Gothic: Thoughts on a Goth/Gothic Revival

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 04:17:00 +0000

Introduction

The Gothic is undead; long live the Gothic.

It’s been roughly 40 years since the Gothic genre was rejuvenated – after decades on the relative sidelines of mainstream attention – by the fresh blood of a new musical style and the community that grew out of it. A concept, a mood, a method, an aesthetic; however defined, the Gothic was pulled from the bookshelf, dusted, and set to a soundtrack that gave birth to a Goth subculture that has ebbed and flowed over the decades, but has so far resisted being fully staked by changing tastes.

However…

… the dead may travel fast, but even they must slow down eventually. And so, years after Goth’s heyday, we find the number of nightclubs greatly diminished, legendary stores (like Toronto’s Siren) shuttered, and leading magazines out of print. Even Hot Topic, contentious among Goths for its commercialism but somewhate underappreciated for its efforts to celebrate alternative music and subcultures, has shed much of its counter-culture charm by embracing pop-culture franchises. New bands do emerge, of course, and a few dedicated Goth/Punk/Alternative retailers like Tripp NYC, Lip Service, Heavy Red, and others remain to leverage the Internet to cater to an international clientele. Yet for the most part Goth has become stagnant for a number of reasons: aging demographics; trends in youth culture; the diminishing popularity of Goth’s parent genre, rock, in favour of hip hop and new country; and the niche status of its muse, Gothic literature, at least in its classic form.

Another reason for Goth’s apparent stagnation arises from the nature of group dynamics. Open arms and lack of authority has made the culture wonderfully decentralized, organic, and welcoming to social “misfits,” but its vague definition all-too-easily reduces to style over substance. As the old saw would have it, we don’t always know what Goth is, but we know it when we see it. The consequence is that, like almost anything, Goth’s original expression has been diluted by variations over the years, some relevant, others tangential at best, and still others irrelevant. (Illustrator Trellia demonstrates with a none-too-serious classification of Goth stereotypes at DeviantArt ). Without some sort of impartial reference, overly personal definitions sometimes become exclusionary gestures in communal settings (e.g. the curious gother-than-thou snobbery), which hardly fosters a sustainable cultural identity. It doesn’t help that Goth is easily caricatured by both the sympathetic and unsympathetic.

As for the Gothic in literature and other media, we could debate to what extent it really is marginal. With its decayed architecture, gloomy landscapes, and Victorian sensibilities, Classical Gothic memorably appears from time to time in films like Crimson Peak and Sleepy Hollow but is otherwise a rare beast in today’s menagerie of genres. As a general influence, however, the Gothic continues to exert pressure on modern genre variations such as Southern Gothic as well as contemporary horror, albeit in the crude sense that the Gothic is often used interchangeably with the supernatural and lurid.

What can be done to invigorate a near-moribund genre and its supportive subculture? It would be too much to suggest a restoration of old regimes cleansed of their shortcomings and polished for the 21^st century; the past can’t be repeated. A revolutionary reinvention would present another kind of problem, namely, that of straying out of the Gothic altogether. The question, then, is what sort of evolutionary gesture can we propose?

To answer the question, it’s necessary to trace what we might call the Gothic Idea – the unifying thread between the Gothic from architecture through music and culture.

The Gothic Idea – A Brief History

Architecture

“Gothic” was not the given name of the architectural style that expanded the Romanesque design philosophy. As a pejorative invoking the barbarian hordes, the label was used as a shorthand criticism of Middle Age architecture by later Renaissance architects and critics who viewed their own neo-classical approach as a superior and refined expression of civilization. The label stuck, mostly without its negative connotation, and it continues to describe a singularly unique architectural design philosophy.

Unlike Romanesque buildings that feature a denser massing of building forms, simple ornamentation, and details such as rounded arches, Gothic buildings use innovative structural elements such as flying buttresses and a highly ornamental design vocabulary including pointed arches, stained glass windows, and ornate facades. It’s no surprise that our overall experience of Romanesque and Gothic buildings is quite different, and it is in this difference that the Gothic Idea emerges. Where Romanesque conveys a fortress-like impression, the Gothic uses space, light, and highly artistic ornamentation to create an expansive experience. If we feel small in a Gothic volume, it’s typically because we are small. When that feeling of smallness is contextualized by architectural and artistic elements, it becomes, to the sympathetic, an experience we could provisional label as “awe;” beautiful yet terrifying, comforting yet alienating, sacred but fully aware of the profane. This last quality is particularly noteworthy, because it points to why Gothic architecture can be judged as both beautiful and grotesque/ugly: it formally acknowledges the brutish aspects of living that later renaissance styles suppressed in the pursuit of a bright, refined aesthetic (i.e. a purified beauty).Of course, a Gothic cathedral’s ecclesiastical function purposely interprets awe as an encounter with divinity. The architecture shapes the congregant e

xperience to connect with the Church and with the divine. But it isn’t necessary for the meaning of this experience to be religious, as demonstrated by the use of Gothic architecture in the academic realm. Here, the experience of awe is not that associated with encountering the divine, but with our encounters with the mysteries of the universe.

The Gothic in architecture, then, can be described as using the built environment, though a specific design vocabulary, to elicit an experience of awe (religious or secular), which we might also refer to as the uncanny or the sublime.

Literature

Unlike the ambiguity of architectural experience, the clearest – although by no means absolute – articulation of the Gothic Idea comes from Gothic literature. Scholars generally point to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, as the first definitive Gothic novel, but textual elements as well as the author’s admitted indebtedness to Shakespeare makes a case that the Gothic originated, in prototypical form, with Hamlet. Walpole’s innovation was to take elements of Hamlet such as the ghost and medieval setting, and heighten them with terror in a narrative that blends the fantastical with romance. Firmly establishing what later became genre tropes, we find in the novel gloomy medieval buildings, dark passages, secrets and mysteries, supernatural phenomena, lingering menace, and a sense of foreboding and mystery. These DNA molecules positioned The Castle of Otranto as the genetic ancestor from which the Gothic genre evolved and splintered.

Following Walpole, and surpassing him, were two authors whose prominence marked a split in the nascent Gothic genre. The first was Ann Radcliffe, a literate genre innovator who proved a popular and respected novelist in her time with six Gothic novels, a book of poetry, and a travelogue to her credit. Her work, as exemplified by Romance of the Forest, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian, was notable for its romanticism, evocative (if lengthy) descriptions of nature, and gothic plot elements involving a vulnerable heroine, menacing villain, and remote castle setting. The supernatural played a part in her novels as well, but in the form of the “explained supernatural,” strange phenomena that eventually receive a rational explanation. Only in Radcliffe’s turn to the sublime (in line with Edmund Burke) is the supernatural left unexplained, its occurrence ultimately left to a broadly-hinted theistic level: religious characters will, naturally, leave God to God. The sublime also factors in her focus on terror, a complex and related concept. In a posthumous essay titled On the Supernatural in Poetry, a character discussing Shakespeare with another points out,

“The union of grandeur and obscurity, which Mr. Burke describes as a sort of tranquility tinged with terror, and which causes the sublime, is to be found only in Hamlet; or in scenes where circumstances of the same kind prevail."

By contrast, Matthew Lewis caused a scandal with the publication of The Monk in 1796, a lurid tale of a pious monk corrupted by lust into treachery, rape, murder, and demonic pacts. Grafted onto the prototypical expression of horror in German fiction of earlier periods, it proved a milestone in establishing the horror branch of Gothic. Less concerned with touching on the sublime, if at all, and eager to depict rather than imply the menace (albeit in a level of detail that’s tame by today’s standards) The Monk is the pulpy counterpart to Radcliffe’s work. Its lurid character prompted Radcliffe to write The Italian, also about a malevolent cleric, in response before quitting writing altogether. But despite Radcliffe’s low opinion of The Monk, its stylistic departure from Terror Gothic proved popular and enduring. Lewis’ indulgence of the supernatural fantastic, along with an emphasis on the lurid, is arguably one reason why the Gothic, the supernatural, and the grotesque are linked to the point that the terms are often used concurrently.

As to the distinction between terror and horror, once again we can turn to On the Supernatural in Poetry for insight. Radcliffe highlights the key distinction while proclaiming the two to be incompatible:

“Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror [note: terror and horror?], but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?"

Where horror is direct, on account of showing the particulars of a horror (the gory details, as it were), terror is ambiguous, providing gaps that require interpretation and imagination. Horror is a reaction to the known, physical, and actual, while terror is a confrontation with the unknown, psychological, and potential. As a result, horror is something to be survived while terror is an ambiguity that requires resolution into certainty. Terror leads to a greater awareness of life while horror is merely deadening. Naturally, the distinction in practice became blurred.

For all that Radcliffe’s Gothic was informed by theories of the sublime and terror, another key distinction between her work and that of Lewis’ is one of genre. As opposed to Lewis’ prototypical “crime thriller” approach, Radcliffe’s narratives were structured as romances, with stories typically dealing with young people in love who must overcome circumstances and misunderstandings before finally being allowed to marry. Whereas romantic comedies will place mistaken identities and other obstacles between lovers, Radcliffe’s novels place terror in between them. In this sense, we could more usefully describe the Terror Gothic branch, as represented by Radcliffe, as Gothic Romance – taking care to note that in literary history “romances” were not strictly defined as love stories, but more broadly as heroic, typically chivalric, adventures with fantastical overtones.

Of the two branches, Horror arguably became the most prolific. Where Gothic Romance delivered the Bronte Sisters’ works and a few others before quietly retiring to the bookshelf in wait of the occasional revival in modern forms (e.g. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca), Gothic Horror spawned the penny dreadfuls and grand guignol that evolved into contemporary horror. Before the Horror genre began shedding its original Gothic trappings as new narrative forms were developed, the Gothic found memorable expression in three well-known genre milestones:

Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Following Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla ,James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire, and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, Stoker’s classic is the literary culmination of the project Lewis began with The Monk. It continues even today to serve as the standard-bearing model of supernatural horror. Gothic in its presentation with remote castles, graveyards, and night-bound monsters, Dracula memorably blended terror and horror through the menace of death, implicit sexuality and, worse, a predatory post-death in which a victim’s very identity is corrupted. Significantly, Dracula anchored the vampire into the popular imagination; as villain, as hero, as tragic figure, as a manifestation of morbid romance and eroticism, as the iconic representative of Gothic Horror.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. While often interpreted as a cautionary tale on the hubris of scientists playing in God’s sandbox, Frankenstein is in my view less about forbidden science than it is about the way in which a lack of compassion leads to alienation, which in turns breeds resentment and ultimately homicidal hatred. It’s a tale of humankind’s inhumanity. Although the Creature’s murders are horrific, the novel revolves around Victor Frankenstein’s terror over artificially creating life – a terror of the sublime knowledge of life and death that tragically blinds him to his failures towards the Creature. As Terror Gothic’s counterpart to Horror Gothic’s Dracula; Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, evolved the explained supernatural of Radcliffe’s work to its logical form as science fiction. (A similar observation could be made of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.)
Edgar Allan Poe’s works. Death, madness, grief, guilt, insanity, and sometimes the supernatural – Poe’s stories encapsulated the features of both Terror and Horror Gothic. Example: The Fall of the House of Usher in which the narrator arrives in a quintessentially gothic environment (complete with gloomy, sublime weather), meets with the borderline-insane Rodrick Usher, and is an unwitting observer and participant in a live burial. Poe’s work not only joined Shelley and Stoker’s in shaping later horror fiction, but paved the way for another of Gothic’s descendants: detective fiction, in which the explained mystery takes the place of the explained supernatural.

So Gothic’s genealogy is roughly as follows: Shakespeare’s Hamlet followed by Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, leading to Radcliffe, the Brontës, and Shelley’s Frankenstein in one branch and Lewis’ The Monk and Stoker’s Dracula in another – with many other works in between. The branches hold hands in Poe’s works before penny dreadfuls and grand guignol evolve into contemporary horror and contribute to erasing distinctions between terror and horror gothic. To this we could add the influence of romanticism, beginning influential works such as Gottfried August Bürger poem Lenore, published in 1173, but I’ll leave that to the literary scholars to explore.

What essential ideas unites these works in spite of very significant genre differences (e.g. horror, romance, science fiction, mystery) and author idiosyncrasies? Two key points emerge:

The by-now stereotypical aesthetic of the Gothic genre – medieval settings, remote castles, stormy weather, ruins, labyrinths, secret passages, graveyards, and so on – all serve as reminders of change, impermanence, transformation, and mortality.
Whether called the sublime, the uncanny, or simply awe, the Gothic goes beyond awareness of mortality to emphasize existential ambiguity – ghosts, vampires, and other creatures that defy death highlight a fundamental quality of life, namely, the mystery of existence. But even without the supernatural, the universe itself, with its fundamental mystery, provokes existential anxiety.

Stripping away the fear inherent in terror and horror, we are left with impermanence/change and mortality as the key concepts underlying the Gothic in literature.

Music and Subculture

After the Gothic’s consignment to a covert undeath in the early 20^th century, it came back to overt life as the Goth musical genre via the late 70’s punk scene – an emergence made possible through a feedback loop between the British music press, fans, and bands. Although it’s debatable to what extent the first wave of gothic bands welcomed the Goth label – as is typical for art, the categorization often came later and from the outside – the label eventually stuck. What began as casual uses of the word “gothic” by rock journalists in the 1970s to describe offerings by artists such as David Bowie and the Doors eventually grew into the sustained recognition of a musical genre encompassing bands such as Joy Division, Siouxie & the Banshees, the Damned, and others who pursued a distinctive sound, lyrical content, and performance aesthetic very much influenced by Gothic literature.

If there can be said to be milestones to formally inaugurate Goth as a culture, even if only as a musical appreciation community, then we could begin with Bauhaus and the release of their seminal “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” in 1979. But it is with the Batcave, a London nightclub opened by Specimen lead singer Ollie Wisdom in 1982, that the Goth culture finds its most significant milestone. As the host for notable gothic rock bands and musicians such as Bauhaus, Sex Gang Children, Alien Sex Fiend, Nick Cave, Siouxie Sioux, and Robert Smith, the Batcave gave the nascent genre a focal point for both the genre’s innovators and the community that grew around their music.

The growth of Goth culture was not confined to the UK, however. While British bands certainly gained popularity elsewhere around the world, the kindred genre of deathrock evolved in the US through bands such as 45 Grave and, notably, the pioneering Rozz Williams and Christian Death.

From these scattered beginnings, Goth finally assumed an identity distinct from its punk progenitor as a musical expression of Gothic literature and even architecture, one that increasingly adapted a variety of musical genres from rock, punk, and electronic music to classical and avant-garde. Succeeding waves of bands emerged, this time deliberately adopting for themselves the Goth identity while gathering around them a community of Goths who made possible a cottage industry spanning fashion, art, nightclubs, and festivals with often surprising diversity.

What of the Gothic Idea? The content of Goth was not essentially different from the content expressed in literature, but the subculture that arose from music fandom succeeded in making the Gothic Idea a lived rather than passively consumed experience. For a while, at least, Goth served as the proverbial fertile ground for new ideas within a renewed Gothic that could stand as its own genre, unlike literature where the Gothic was invariably grafted onto other genres (e.g. romance and horror). Most importantly, Goth came to emphasize the role of the “Other,” whether literally in terms of being inclusive of marginalized identities (i.e. alternative lifestyles, LGBTQ persons, etc.) or figuratively by embracing those “darker” aspects of life mainstream society strives to keep hidden (death, insanity, paganism, depression, and so on).

Defining the Gothic Idea

With all that, let’s define the Gothic Idea.

Gothic architecture gives us the sublime, the uncanny, the awesome – what we might call an existentialist experience. Literature confirms the importance of impermanence and mortality in distinguishing the Gothic from other literary forms. Goth music and culture emphasizes the importance of the Other. Put together, the Gothic Idea we have been tracing is an existentialist awareness of mortality and impermanence in a mysterious universe.

Towards a Gothic Revival

By what criteria can we describe a Goth/Gothic Revival? What would such a revival achieve?

First and foremost, the revival should have a specific definition, yet be open enough to enable creativity. Like a sandbox, it should have boundaries to distinguish it from its environment yet allow for considerable freedom with the sand it contains.

Second, the Revival should be about practice and not personality. Just as not everyone finds Gothic Cathedrals beautiful or Goth music enjoyable to listen to, not everyone will be drawn to Revival Gothic. However this might be explained by psychology, explaining the revival by turning to personality or other psychological contrivances risks creating identity politics that, invariably, tend to be divisive. Far better to set aside the intangibles and let it be personal choice – based on a clear understanding of what Revival Gothic is and is not – that guides participation in the effort. The Revival should be open and accessible to both practitioners and spectators without a litmus test beyond choosing to adopt the new Gothic framework as defined.

Finally, and rather obviously, the goal is not to rewrite the book on Gothic but to add a new chapter. The Revival should be enriched by its heritage without being chained to it.

Up to now, horror and terror have served as the dominant (although not exclusive) paradigms for expressing the Gothic Idea; both have reached a conceptual end. As a matter of general genre practice, horror declares, if not outright celebrates, the triumph of evil; the proof rests in the number of memorable (and recurring) villains and monsters relative to heroes, the common pattern of depicting the gory slaughter of innocents, and the “twist” endings that underscore the futility of heroism. (These endings are typically predictable based on the plot, hence: the failed exorcism, the uncontained plague, the surviving or reproducing monster, insanity induced by exposure to forbidden knowledge, and so on.) Horror is primarily a reactionary genre, a reflection of societal anxiety that is often cynical and nihilistic. Its best examples offer compelling characters and narratives, while at its worse the genre is fetishistic and rooted in the arbitrary magic of fantasy storytelling. In either case, it’s a question of craft and identifying contemporary fears to replace old fears (of sexuality, for example) more so than genre innovation that challenges how we conceive, and relate to, fear and violence. There is only so much to be said of fight-or-flight survival scenarios, revenge-driven atrocities, and their ilk. The same applies to terror, which today overlaps so strongly with horror that the distinction is hardly useful.

So where can a Gothic Revival take inspiration from without resorting to a traditional association with horror and terror? We can find hints in two sources:

The sublime, uncanny, or what we might term “awe,” in which terror isn’t the only emotional experience. As Immanuel Kant wrote in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, “melancholy characterizes those with a superb sense of the sublime” – an idea expressed in an entire subgenre of melancholic art.
The subset of Goth culture that takes its cues from funerary practices, such as Victorian mourning garb and an affinity for cemeteries.

The answer, then, is sorrow and the constellations of emotions associated with it – from the melancholy experience of solitude and alienation that arises when confronting a mysterious, awe-inspiring universe to the sorrows that come with living a life marked by change and transitions.

Of course, sorrow as the topic of art isn’t in itself a “new” idea, not even within the Goth subculture. But its relatively marginal position within Goth provides Revival Gothic with a thread of continuity. And just as the Gothic defined a particular approach to terror and horror in contrast to non-Gothic approaches (for example, compare a Jane Austen romance with a Brontë romance), the idea is to give form and function to a Gothic approach to drama.

What might we call it? Sorrow Gothic? Melangothic? Winter Gothic?

What the Revival Coul Be

Although the Gothic doesn’t explicitly factor into English Professor Eric G. Wilson’s advocacy for melancholy in his book Against Happiness, although he does offer an occasional disparaging comment about Goths, he might as well have been talking about the core idea underlying Sorrow Gothic when he writes:

“Once we accept these seasons of mental winter as inevitable parts of life – indeed, once we affirm them as essential elements of existence – then the paradox comes truly alive. We actually feel, in the midst of our sorrow, something akin to joy … We somewhere sense, probably deep in the unconscious, that we are now in our melancholia participating in life’s vital fluxes, in the profoundest forces of the earth. We suddenly feel better – not blissfully happy but tragically joyful. We die into life.”

With Horror and Terror having had their time, and in no danger of disappearing, Sorrow Gothic offers a different perspective from which Goth can evolve. But it’s not enough to think in terms of adjusting mood and aesthetics. Fundamentally, the question is: how can the art of Goth move beyond a nostalgic repetition of sounds and images past to incorporating new influences? How can we push the technical skill in support of ambitious artistic visions?

Of course, we can point to bands like Dead Can Dance, Soporus Aerternus, Cinema Strange, and even disbanded Bauhaus with its timelessly avant-garde sound as enduring pioneers (to name but a few). But to thrive, any culture needs a regular influx of new voices that aren’t simply repeating the past. While not identifying as Goth, but unquestionably within its sphere of influence, the Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble and its sibling, the Mt. Fuji Doom Corporation, offer an avant-garde path to gloomy and contemplative new musical expressions drawing on jazz rather than rock. Electronic musician Lorn, while again not identifying as Goth, offers a melancholic groove on the theme of personal angst and suffering. This too presents a possible direction forward. And I’m sure, there are other examples that I’m not aware of (yet) that could influence a Goth revival.

Whatever forms the influence take, my feeling is that to succeed a Goth revival would do well to follow the examples of cultural art movements such as Surrealism. While comprised by as many distinct artistic visions as there were artists (e.g. Breton, Dali, Duchamp, Apollinaire), there was nevertheless a general agreement on the principles of the movement. (Only in the most general sense. Historically, the Surrealist movement split into factions, one led by Yvan Goll and the other by André Breton.) This was enough to create a recognizable identity for Surrealism without placing strict limits on the artists who practiced within it. While the elements of a Gothic Revival in the “Sorrow Gothic” vein are already present in the subculture to various degrees, starting with the affinity for cemeteries and funerary symbolism, a revival would benefit from a refocusing of these elements under a coherent framework of guiding principles and vocabularies. There is the risk of reinforcing the stereotype of the depressed Goth, perhaps, but that shouldn’t be a hindrance. Instead, as with anything, it should be yet another challenge to overcome in the pursuit of meaningful art.

And so, subject to revision ...

The Sorrow Gothic Manifesto

With blackest moss the flower-plots

Were thickly crusted, one and all:

The rusted nails fell from the knots

That held the pear to the gable-wall.

The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:

Unlifted was the clinking latch;

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch

Upon the lonely moated grange.

She only said, "My life is dreary,

He cometh not," she said;

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!"

- Mariana / Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Sorrow Gothic …

… is an art movement spanning multiple genres (e.g painting, sculpture, film, etc.) and media.
… focuses on the experience of sorrow (melancholy, grief) with an uncanny awareness of mortality.
… embraces melancholy as a positive rather than negative influence.
… is a deconstruction of sorrow and joy in the context of impermanence.
… is symbolic in its approach rather than abstract.
… uses a vernacular of ruin, time, death, change, madness, sorrow, ecstasy, alienation, solitude, liminality.
… replaces the literal supernatural in narratives with allegories, dreams, and the operations of the mind.
… views the nihilist’s task as overcoming nihilism, not embracing it.
… fosters compassion and understanding towards its subject matter rather than fear and stigma.
… insofar as it is political, champions the marginalized, the ostracized, the silenced, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the societal others.
… despite the above, should not always take itself too seriously.

RESOURCES

While not an exclusive source of information, the Wikipedia entry on Gothic Rock provides a good launching pad to explore the history of Goth. Searching for the history of goth music online will also yield some interesting resources. Of course, as with any research vetting is recommended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_rock

Also helpful is this curriculum outline for a 2013 literary course on the Gothic Experience from Lilia Melani at Brooklyn College’s Department of English

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/gothic/index.html

Lost Girls, Neither Coming nor Going

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 02:05:00 +0000

It’s been several years since I first read Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s porn cum art comic Lost Girls. A potentially scandalous work, I overcame my wariness over its controversy with a trust that reflected, at the time, my relative alignment with the popular assessment of Moore’s work. Since then, however, I find myself more of a dissenting voice, questioning not the intelligence and knowledge Moore clearly brings to his writing but his often-overwrought craft in service of a muddled vision that brooks no criticism. Erudition should be an invitation to share a journey of discovery, not a wall that demands people prove themselves worthy to enter the ivory tower – a distinction Moore’s work seems to have increasingly abandoned.

Fundamentally, the problem I see in his work is a common one among writers; the tendency to thrust more ideas into a story than is necessary and meaningful. For Watchmen, it’s Moore’s inclusion of the god-like Dr. Manhattan that undermines an otherwise nuanced critique of the era’s prevailing mood of superhero worship and a study of the morality of power via the mythologize of costumed vigilantes. As a self-proclaimed puppet able to see the cosmic strings, Dr. Manhattan serves to establish a strictly deterministic universe in which all actions are predetermined and free will, along with the moral accountability that comes with it, is an illusion. Whatever critique of superheroes Watchmen can offer is, on its own terms, impossible given the characters’ lack of agency. After all, what morality can wind-up toys have? The layering of a free will vs determinism debate is too much for the story to bear, especially when Dr. Manhattan is the only character to grapple with it.

But Watchmen is a model of lean storytelling compared to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books, orgies of literary references, tangents, pureed concepts, metafictional wankery, pastiche fetishes, and an unpleasant penchant for the lurid that arrive nowhere if the standard involves meaningful characterizations and relatable narratives. The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, which predates League by about 25 years, remains to me the quintessential model of how to tell philosophically provocative and meaningful, yet entirely gonzo, post-modern meta-stories. League, while admirable and often clever in both ambition and grasp of literature, comes across as posturing in comparison.

These excesses stand out to me precisely because of those works in which Moore does display the focused storytelling of a masterful writer with keen insights to offer in his characters, plots, and narrative themes. The first is V for Vendetta; a suspenseful and satisfying political thriller infused with a deliciously provocative ideological perspective. Words and images complement each other beautifully to deliver an outstanding example of what comic book storytelling can be. The other is From Hell, Moore’s provocative metaphysical meditation on the horrors of the 20^th century as ritually presaged by Jack the Ripper’s murders.

So what of Lost Girls, Moore and wife Gebbie’s ambitious attempt to bring together art and pornography into something that could, in the mating, transcend both? The book is premised on a chance encounter between three characters extracted from classic children’s literature – Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy – at the posh Austrian hotel Himmelblau shortly before the onset of World War I. The narrative hasn’t even begun to undress when, alas, Moore’s tendency for excess shows itself. It happens in a conversation between two inconsequential servants who, in Moore’s process of hinting at Alice’s libertinous character, reference an unseen black character using the “N” word. The word is not only jarring, but entirely gratuitous since the book doesn’t deal with racial issues and is populated entirely by white characters. The first question that comes to mind is: do we really need a scruffy old white guy carelessly and pointlessly bandying racially charged words just to prove whatever notion of authenticity he harbors for his work – in a narrative fantasy? Next is: should we start questioning why Moore is so fixated on English and American literature, with nary a look outside of white borders?

Moving on to the broader thematic excesses, Moore’s decision to reference World War I is hard to reconcile with the overall erotic goals of his fantasia. Other than some passing references, particularly through the transient character of a convalescing soldier, Captain Rolf Bauer, the specter of war only haunts the narrative when readers remember it. Until the end, that is, when it seems as if Moore suddenly remembers what time period he set his story in, at which point the most he can muster are banal musings on how much better it would be for the young men to be home having sex rather than fighting/dying, along with a final sequence of panels depicting an eviscerated soldier on the battle field. When the post-orgasmic glow of an erotic story comes from artillery shells rather than sex, something’s gone awry with the storytelling.

While to my eyes Moore has a tendency for overworking his sentences to the point of making H.P. Lovecraft look like Hemingway by comparison, even when he’s consciously aping classic authors, Lost Girls suffers more from his need to provide a running commentary, dialogue, or some kind of verbiage on every panel instead of trusting Gebbie’s artwork to excite readers. The lack of balance between words and images is particularly unfortunate in the story’s flashbacks, patterned in the broadest sense from Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz. Because Moore has Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy narrate their life stories, essentially explaining what Gebbie illustrates, most of the book’s characters don’t benefit from a voice, and therefore personality, of their own. Moore essentially locks us into the women’s interpretation of events through their narration, instead of allowing dialogue and images to guide readers to their own understanding of the pivotal moments in the lost girls’ lives. There’s so much writing that one wonder why Moore bothered with a graphic novel format for the story he wants to tell. The book’s limp drama is all the worse given that, for all the writing, Moore fails to create relationships that evolve throughout the course of the story. A notable example is between Wendy and her husband, the condescending and chauvinistic Harold Potter with whom marital bliss is tragically lacking. One would hope that with Wendy’s sexual escapades and Harold’s eventual indulgence of his repressed homosexual urges, each character might learn something to lead to some kind of change in themselves and their relationship to each other. But no. Harold remains every bit the condescending paternalist by the time he drives out of the plot; he and Wendy never even have a conversation to reflect on the meaning of their experiences. The lost girls themselves are similarly deprived of any depth of relationship to each other, since Moore requires very little to get them fucking each other and sharing their life stories. Whatever healing they arguably gain from recounting their trauma-laced sexual comings of age doesn’t lead to anything. For a book with literary aspirations, Lost Girls is curiously dry when it comes to character development. Like a burlesque dancer who comes on stage without any clothes on, and thus no means to tease and tantalize the audience, there is no buildup and release in Moore’ storytelling.

While the above shortcomings provide more than enough interruptus for the book’s coitus, it’s the depiction of child and teenaged sexuality that looms largest over the entire project. The controversy is arguably exaggerated, partly because Moore and Gebbie are not the first, nor the most boundary-pushing, artists to engage the topic, but also because in a book’s storytelling isn’t in service of gratuitous titillation. While there’s no accounting for how readers will personally react, the most questionable panels are generally a minority in a book that is, essentially, cover to cover sex mostly between adult characters. And violence, while implied in a few rare instances, is never depicted. So what, exactly, are Moore and Gebbie doing? The youth sexuality is presented in two ways. First is methodological, in that the story concerns three women’s life stories from the perspective of their sexuality, which means consistent explicitness for them as both youths and adults. There is context, biography, and characterization to what Moore and Gebbie offer, regardless of my view that it ultimately doesn’t amount to very much. Second are the short story pastiches, presented as excerpts from a scandalous little white book the hotel owner makes available to every guest in their rooms. A few of these pastiches consist of big, happy, incestuous, all-age family orgies that are so ridiculous and over-the-top, the impression is neither serious nor erotic but, intentionally or not, hilarious.

From here we get to the point of the book, the climax of its project that serves to pre-emptively defend their choice of methodology and subject matter from criticism. Through the character of Mr. Rougeur, the Hotel Himmelblau’s owner and the coy author of that little white book, Moore makes his argument during the grand orgy that caps off the story:

“You see? Incest, c’est vrai, it is a crime. But this? This is the idea of incest, no? And then these children: how outrageous! How old can they be? Eleven? Twelve? It is quite monstrous … except that they are fictions, as old as the page they appear upon, no less, no more. Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them.”

To underscore the point, the not-entirely-reliable Mr. Rougeur says this right before observing that he is having sex with a thirteen-year-old. And thus, Moore believes, the trap is set: what, exactly, is there for readers to be morally outraged about? There is no reality, no action, no person to point to. Nothing, indeed, is actually happening, except as a mental fiction, an interpretation of words and images on the page.

But the trap is far from shut, not the least because Moore isn’t offering a new argument. Horror creators have long pointed to the fictional nature of their work as a moral bypass for the extreme violence and suffering they depict. And as long as there have been artists, there’s been a struggle over what constitute acceptable artistic subjects – with sexuality, of course, being a common flashpoint of censorship efforts. While there will always be debates in this area given a pluralistic society, particularly over where the boundaries of tolerance are drawn, the notion of freely exploring ideas even in light of their relative ability to offend is for the most part accepted and settled in liberal environments. Besides, what is pornography or it’s more refined sibling, erotica, if not the exploration of fantasies both attainable and unrealistic? It simply isn’t clear with whom Moore is arguing with.

Moore presenting an old argument to an outdated problem is unfortunate enough, but all the more so because it means he misses the opportunity for more interesting and relevant questions. The issue, really, shouldn’t be what responsibility reality has toward art, but what responsibility art has toward reality. It’s a matter of psychology and the role of fantasy in our mental health. While I wouldn’t argue that fantasy is necessarily bad, Moore’s declaration of support for an amoral mental playground neglects how thoughts influence our emotional states and patterns of behavior. Pornography, like reality TV, can warp our understanding of reality and can, without a skillful mindset, lead to harmful consequences in terms of body image, performance expectations, relationships, and related expressions of sexuality. When combined with mainstream cinema’s tendency to associate sex with menace (i.e. in thrillers and horror) or embarrassment (i.e. in sex comedies), our cultural understanding of sexuality tends to be more debilitating than liberating. Rephrasing the question, then: how can the art of sex help us enjoy our sexuality with skill and empathy in our day-to-day reality? Unfortunately, Moore doesn’t even offer a rationale or exploration for his declaration via Mr. Rougeur, so Lost Girls is certainly not positioned to explore any other questions.

Whether, despite all that, Lost Girls is of the one-handed or two-handed persuasion isn’t for me to say. It’s different strokes for different folks, and there’s enough variety for at least some panels to achieve some kind of effect. That said, I found the book to be singularly lacking in joy. The WWI context contributes to the downbeat impression, but really it’s Moore’s decision to retell whimsical stories as personal traumas that makes the book more cold shower than hot fling. For Alice, the journey to Wonderland beings with a sexual assault by a family friend, and continues with her upbringing in an all-girls boarding school from which she falls in with a lesbian dominatrix, becomes addicted to opium, and is subjected to all manner of sexual debaucheries and twisted power games. Wendy’s experience involves her encounters with Peter Pan, over which looms the threat of a sexual predator nicknamed the Captain, a plot whose resolution leaves Peter a prostitute and Wendy sexually repressed. Of the three, only Dorothy has a less brutal retelling, in that after discovering herself during a tornado she merrily fucks her way through farmhands inspired by the Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man, before moving on her father the Wizard. Other than a devastated stepmother, Dorothy is the only lost girl to emerge relatively unscarred from her teenaged experiences.

Not only is this grim stuff, glibly exploited, Moore’s decision also undermines the sexual freethinking he claims to support by resorting to unfortunate cliches, from Harold Potter’s latent homosexuality expressed as male chauvinism to Alice’s maturation into lesbian as reaction to a man’s sexual assault, immersion in an all-female environment, and drug-induced mental flights of fancy. He and Gebbie don’t get caught up in obsessions over body types and sizing, but that was the least they could do. And just as Lost Girls disappoint in terms of LGBTQIA+ allyship, it does nothing to alleviate the concerns raised by Moore’s questionable record in handling instances of sexual violence, from The Killing Joke to the Invisible Man’s crimes and punishment in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Furthermore, Moore’s retelling of Carrol, Baum, and Barrie’s stories amounts to an act of artistic bad faith given his habit of complaining about people using his characters in follow-up works, such as the Watchmen prequels and sequel, while having made a career appropriating other artist’s characters for his own purposes. (Watchmen repurposed old Charlton Comics characters in the form of substitutes. Neonomicon and Providence directly H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, of course, steals from everyone.) The outcome is a book that doesn’t engage with the original works, but appropriates and replaces them with little opportunity to deepen one’s interpretation of both. By comparison, look at how American McGee’s Alice games engage with Carroll’s books as a dialogue. Interpreting the books’ Wonderland as Alice’s healthy, childhood mental landscape, the games act as sequels exploring what happens when personal and social trauma warp Wonderland’s whimsy into gothic horror with Dickensian overtones.

Having read Lost Girls three times, with diminishing returns, the fact that there is much to write about isn’t a measure of how rich but rather how disappointing the book is. With that, the final word belongs, actually, not to Moore’s writing but Gebbie’s illustrations. Though a bit static and low-energy, her storybook style is nevertheless beautiful and inviting, explicit but not anatomically obsessive. I’m not the first to point out the cleverness she often displays in her panels, such as the sequence in which shadows frolic to emphasize the actual frigidity of Wendy and Harold Potter’s marriage. Also admirable is her ability to change her style to suit the various pastiches splashed throughout the narrative. While I don’t think her art is enough to compensate for Moore’s writing and storytelling – a comic’s success rests, as I mentioned, on the balance of words and images – that’s where the book blossoms best, when it blossoms at all. And with that, I’m perfectly fine with saying that I’ve reached the end of the daisy chain when it comes to Moore’s work. If nothing else, Lost Girls motivates to discover other artistic voices.

What Possessed the Filmmaker? An Interview with Sixto Melendez (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Thu, 25 May 2017 21:41:00 +0000

For part 2, independent filmmaker Sixto Melendez and I look back to the good and bad of filming a feature film, and forward to the future. Click here for part 1.

What was your most challenging day while filming The Conduit, and how did you overcome it?

Through some connections in the town of Globe, AZ, where we shot 90% of the film, we were allowed use of a conference room in a local hospital for a couple of days. The plan was to shoot two different scenes that occur at different places in the narrative during the movie. One takes place earlier in the film and the other is non-consecutive and takes place much later in the film. The scenes involved group therapy sessions where our troubled protagonist meets his opportunistic antagonist and their lives become connected. Anyway, we had our cast, a number of extras. Among our cast we had an actress playing the therapist that was leading the sessions. Well, the first scene went off without any major issues of note and we got it "in the can" as we filmmakers say.

However, when we went back to shoot the second scene, the actress who played the therapist on the morning of the shoot informed us that she would not be able to get back to Globe from Phoenix where she was from.

We jumped through a number of hoops to get use of the hospital conference room and we knew there was no way we'd be able to arrange for another day within our schedule. The clock was ticking and we were playing phone tag with this actress, begging, pleading, crying, stressing out but at the end of the day we finally had to accept the fact that she was not going to make it. We were about to lose the day and our only option was to replace her, but we had already shot her in the other scene so we would potentially have to re-shoot that scene as well, which would have been impossible. It wasn't just getting the hospital location but also coordinating all of the extras who had already been shot in the previous scene.

After much stressing and time lost, we finally decided to move forward with another actress that we found on extremely short notice. As for the continuity of the two scenes with different actresses playing the therapist … I simply chalked it up to the notion that this is an ongoing therapy group that meets regularly and will often have different therapists in the lead.
I think I got an ulcer just recalling this.

Conversely, what day was the most fun?

It was a while ago, but one night stands out in my mind as particularly exciting. We were shooting a small but pivotal scene where our protagonist Eddie (played by Wes Martinez), after much difficulty and confusion, finally turns to the mysterious character Gabriel (played by Mike Watkiss) that has been stalking him for answers. In the scene, Gabriel enlightens him on the mysterious backstory of the femme fatal who is tormenting him.

The scene was very small and simple. Just two characters, one small room, and a broken down shed where the character Gabriel lives. We had a very small skeleton crew, just me directing, Javi our DP, and Eric our sound recorder.

As writers we put word on the page, describing the images we see in our minds as we try to convey a narrative to the viewer. Our minds can fool us sometimes because what we are trying to express is clear in our minds so while it makes narrative sense to us in our own heads, what we put on paper and eventually on the screen doesn't always translate as you imagined.

However, when it does and when two of your strongest actors begin to deliver a scene and the chemistry between them is working and the scene is already working and coming to life right before your eyes, before you've done any of the cutting or sound design, or color grading or any of the post effects that you will eventually add, there's just an amazing, fulfilling sense of gratification that I wish I could bottle and sell.

Sometimes when you're shooting and everything is just falling into place, the actors are delivering, the crew is functioning smoothly and things are going as they should – you can already sense it working. Rather than hearing the voice in your head ask "Will it cut together?" the voice actually changes and says "I can't wait to cut this together!" Because you just know that it's working and you're capturing a moment.

Shooting this scene was one of those special moments that I'll always treasure.

Now that The Conduit has been released, I assume you're conceiving your next film. What are you thinking about doing next?

I have an idea that I'm kicking around, but it's a pretty deep spiritual idea that I have not quite found my path with yet. So, I don't want to divulge too much. It has to do with altered states of consciousness and a spiritual quest seemingly gone awry. I need to have an altered state experience before I will allow myself to write a script because I do believe in writing what you know, or at least have enough experience or good research to speak with some level of understanding and not just dream things up.

If money was no object and you could choose any actors/actresses you wanted for your cast, what would be your dream film to make?

The idea that I mentioned above is a one that I would love to see developed and executed with a real budget as opposed to the shoe-string on which we made "The Conduit". I'm taking lots of notes and compiling my thoughts at this time but I am not ready to tackle the script just yet. Although I am getting close to possibly starting a rough treatment.

In my head, I imagine Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead. I've been drawn to him as an actor since Donnie Darko, and this idea that I am kicking around is similar in that it deals with cosmic mysteries. I'm not sure what it is about him. He's definitely a solid actor but there's an everyman quality about him that I appreciate, especially for a character like this. A grown man able to make his own choices yet on some level young enough to make the wrong choices. I'm not sure if that truly sums up the qualities I like about him but at the moment that's what comes to mind.

And honestly, if I found myself on a set directing Jake Gyllenhaal, I would have to take a moment to revel in the moment because he's definitely an A-list movie star, so if ever I'm lucky enough to find myself in that situation I'll be able to say "I made it."

For now, it's nice little fantasy. It's important to dream.

###

Watch the trailer for The Conduit here:

And to buy the Conduit, visit Brain Damage Films.

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What Possessed the Filmmaker? An Interview with Sixto Melendez (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Thu, 25 May 2017 21:35:00 +0000

It’s always a pleasure to discover and promote independent talent in the arts, especially since they don’t benefit from the huge marketing budgets of Hollywood studio productions. So by way of his short film Laberinto Infernal, let me introduce to you to Sixto Melendez, who just completed his first feature film, The Conduit.

And now on to part 1 of our interview…

I understand that personal experience plays a big part in your storytelling. What experiences inspired your new film, The Conduit?

I've always been terrified and fascinated by the concept of demonic possession. The idea that some alien entity can enter your body, suppressing your essence, soul or whatever it is we believe comprises us beyond our physical bodies and take the wheel is absolutely terrifying. But it's like a train wreck, as scary as it is you can't look away. I can't, anyway.

I remember being a kid and discovering the novel for "The Exorcist". I must have been 10 or 12. It was beat up old paperback that someone, maybe my older brother or sister, had brought home. I was reading this terrifying novel and it was getting under my skin. I remember my mom hiding it from me when I had trouble sleeping. I would lay in bed thinking about it and my heart would race and I swear it felt like the bed was shaking, which scared me further, increasing my heart rate which only made it feel like the bed was shaking harder.

It was a powerful curiosity based on the fear of knowing that while some people chalked it up to superstition many others truly believe that this is real and if it is real, well, then there's the mystery of why? Who is susceptible? Can it happen to me? That kind of thing in the naturally creative mind of a child led to long nights staring into the darkness and listening to the silence.

Sixto Melendez

I also did have a short spell in my early 20's where I personally experienced sleep paralysis. It happened about 4 or five times in the span of about 5 or 6 years. I just remember slowly drifting to consciousness from a deep sleep. Being aware of my surroundings, perhaps even seeing the room through partially open eyes but not being able to move. My body felt like lead. I didn't know if something was wrong with me physically or if something was happening to me in a metaphysical, spiritual sense but it was exasperating. It was a panic that I can't properly convey. You can't imagine what being perfectly aware yet not having control of your body is like unless you experience it.
Of course, my first thought was that something was trying to possess me. I mean it's human nature to jump to the absolute worst-case scenario conclusion. Which is interesting because when I finally looked into it and found that there actually is a recognized, documented condition called sleep paralysis. I then learned that, in the middle age, when people experienced this they, too, drew the same conclusion that it was an early stage of demonic possession.

The book, the movie, the experiences the concept became part of the fabric of my existence. Something I would always return to. Somewhere along the way I learned about the concept of demonic transgression. The idea that an attached demonic entity could be passed from one person to another and that led to the idea of comparing demonic transgression to a sexually transmitted disease. Imagine passing a demon to a lover like a really evil herpes! I loved the idea and had to explore it.

How would you describe your storytelling process?

For me the creative process is a struggle that requires too much effort for me to just "like" an idea. I need to be obsessed with it on order to see it through. After that it's a long slow process of kicking an idea around, taking notes, reading books or whatever material I can find on the subject, studying movies and whenever possible actually experiencing the subject matter as closely as I possibly can in order to understand it enough to where I don't feel like I'm just spewing bullshit. Often times my friends and creative partners will throw ideas at me about film topics. While they are often very interesting ideas that would probably make great movies, if it doesn't intrigue me personally, I can't commit.

Which all comes from my love/hate relationship with writing.

If the idea is crystal clear in my mind. If I know my story and my characters and where everything is going, I absolutely LOVE writing. It's so gratifying to take this idea from within my head and put it on the page, giving birth to it and making it so that others can take the ride. It's a wonderful experience when the idea is ready and when I'm ready to tell it.

But if the idea is half baked, if I still have questions or the narrative is unclear, I absolutely DETEST writing. I'd rather have a root canal than sit at a computer trying to dream up a story and so for that reason, I don't write much. I scribble notes. I have two physical notebooks filled with stuff. Concepts, scenes, characters. I collect and compile as I ponder my concept. Sometimes for months. Sometimes a year will go by or longer before I feel confident enough that I know my story well enough to bring myself to sit down in front of the computer and put words on a page.

How different was your approach to conceiving and producing/directing a full-length feature film compared to your previous shorts?

The process was not really that much different other than as one would figure with a feature everything is just a little more of the same. You have to research a little more because you're going to develop your story and characters to a greater degree than you would in a short. So essentially it's the same, just on a bigger scale. You research more, you develop further creatively, you produce more because you're going to shoot more, everything translates to just a bigger version of the same things.
The problem I found with this was that while this translated in many respects from writing to pre-production, the one area where it really hurt us was during actual production – and that was due to simple human limitations of stamina. Often times when you make a short film, a group of friends will get together for a weekend or two on their days off and engage in the fun and sometimes exhausting process of shooting a short film. You easily push past an 8 hour day carried through by the excitement of the simple fact that you are working on a passion project. Something you love doing so that carries you past the exhaustion of 12 or 14 hours of working on the project. It's easy when you're shooting on a weekend or two. You know that if you just hang in there for a little longer, you'll soon be able to rest and recuperate and you'll have a hopefully wonderful little film for all your efforts after pushing through.

While it's easy to push the boundaries of stamina for a weekend, it becomes extremely exhausting when you wind up pushing the boundaries for weeks on end. I remember a number of times getting home filthy, exhausted and on the verge of tears due to the hoops we just had to jump through. You make a plan, you set things in place, you move your team and gear into place, you get started and then any of a million unexpected things will happen and your carefully laid plans are slowly coming undone. So, you learn how to deal with the stress of having things fall apart as you try to salvage them to the best of your ability. But you push on.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

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losing it in La La Land

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 20:05:00 +0000

La La Land is one of those movies that can’t possibly mean what it says, no matter how much marketing and overheated critical acclaim might wish otherwise. The last such movie I can think of that similarly blinkered audiences was Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo Del Toro’s exquisitely crafted cinematic work that posed as an anti-fascist parable but ultimately affirmed a nihilistic preference of fantasy over reality. It could have been a film about imagination’s power to inspire action against oppression. Instead, its final shot casts an escape into a fairy tale world as the reward for a child’s suffering and sacrifice. What Nietzsche wrote about Christianity applies well to Del Toro’s fairy tale: “Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.”

But Pan’s Labyrinth, at least, is diminished by a philosophical error that can be overlooked given how otherwise magnificent it is as a film. La La Land, for all the effervescence of its sensational score or the chemical reaction of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, is illusory in almost every aspect – and has nowhere near the craft of a Pan’s Labyrinth. Although presented and structured as a romantic comedy, the film proves itself the opposite of romantic. Romance presupposes a commitment to love, whether it’s the love that conquers all, as comedies would have it, or love worth suffering and dying for, as the tragedies declare. “Love is the drug,” as Roxy Music puts it. La La Land initially plays the melody of a romantic comedy – unlikely couple meet and fall in love – but ends on a melancholy note of regret over the path not taken. (Woody Allen purposefully explored the same theme in Café Society with greater focus and emotional heft, despite a similar tendency to trade in clichés and hackneyed insights.) The turn towards the bittersweet feels like a wrong note in La La Land. Partly because it’s tacked on with a 5-years-later epilogue, but mostly because writer-director Damien Chazelle splits his leads – a jazz pianist who dreams of owning his own nightclub and an aspiring actress struggling for her big break – for the flimsiest reason: an inability, or unwillingness, to reconcile their relationship with their career dreams in a situation where no sacrifice is necessary. We can interpret it in two ways: either they choose their careers at the expense of their relationship, or the film manipulated the scenario so that pursuing one’s dream requires sacrificing love. Neither option is romantic; romance is understanding that one’s dreams are best achieved when the journey is shared with the people we love.

The other deception La La Land foists on audiences is that it is an homage to Los Angeles in general and Hollywood in particular. But Chazelle, who hails from the East Coast, falls into a common trap when trying to make a character out of a city like LA: equivocating the distinct character of specific places with the persona of the whole. Sure, La La Land opens with the familiar cliché of LA’s notorious traffic, then graces us with scenes at the iconic Griffith Observatory. But LA is not defined so much by places then the connection between places. Films like Swingers and LA Story understood this, and remain even today insightful portraits of a sprawling metropolis and what it’s like to live in it. La La Land, however, retreats into advertising a tired Hollywood promise: work as a barista and fruitlessly audition for parts long enough, and maybe, by chance, you’ll meet the right person at a party or casting call who’ll give you that almighty break. The Hollywood Dream, brought you to by the Golden State lottery.

Here’s the thing: if it’s a film about the magic of movies you want, Michel Hazanavicius delivered it a few years ago with The Artist, an imaginative and quintessentially cinematic revival of the silent film that also succeeded in actually being romantic. So did Martin Scorsese with Hugo. And if it’s Los Angeles you want, the aforementioned Swingers and LA Story are worth revisiting. As for romance, there’s no shortage of films to inspire all the lovers in the world.

Yet for all that La La Land really amounts to Hollywood loving itself, it’s an enjoyable revival of the movie musical –when we stay on the surface. The song-and-dance numbers are energetic and captivating, beginning with an opening scene on a gridlocked Los Angeles highway with happy motorists demonstrating that we’re about to watch a fantasy. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone succeed in creating genuine characters we become vested in, even if Chazelle ultimately undermines them. La La Land isn’t Best Picture material but, with the understanding that this isn’t a romantic comedy, it isn’t a total write-off either.

Book Review - The Explorer’s Guild Volume 1: A Passage to Shambala

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 20:31:00 +0000

Book Review - The Explorer’s Guild Volume 1: A Passage to Shambala

As with many books thick enough to serve as masonry units, The Explorer’s Guild is slow to start and all too easy to set aside for more appealing distractions – and this despite the fact that the book is part graphic novel. Where there’s a case to stick with for the first few hundred pages or so, it lies in Rick Ross’ clean artwork and, most of all, Jon Baird’s beautifully crafted writing mannered after the style of Victorian/early 20th Century. Unlike Susanna Clarke’s clever but twee pastiche of English literature in her Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Baird’s prose succeeds as a charming recreation because it emphasizes the earnest rather than the ironic. It succeeds perhaps a little too well, however. The narration, set as a personal relationship between the narrator and the gentle reader, casts us along the lines of a guest of the Explorer’s Guild. All that’s missing is the brandy and cigar as the narrator regales us with the tale of adventurers in pursuit of a mysterious city alternately known throughout history as Shambala, El Dorado, Atlantis, and so on. But this approach creates a distance between us and the characters, precisely because the narrative is explicitly narrated, which means it is also interpreted. And when characters are filtered through the narrator before reaching us, there is less room for one of reading’s best delights: interacting with the characters through our own perspective and imagination. The result is that even by the time we reach the book’s end, it’s hard to feel all that vested in the characters’ welfare and purposes except in the most general, abstracted sense.

Still, when the going finally gets adventurous, the adventure gets going with increasing gusto. Alas, where it leads is straight to an anticlimax. As we follow John Ogden, a British major and force of nature during World War I, along with his rough band of dragoons on a global hunt for the fabled Shambhala at the behest of his brother Arthur, we are treated to an artful catalog of perilous classics: airships, underground cities, strange machines, hidden castles, and nostalgic parties inhabited by the closest approximation to zombies Old Europe could muster, namely, displaced and obsolete Aristocrats. Along the way, Baird treats us to innumerable details of this and that, many of which only serve to create a mood rather than develop characters or kick the plot forward. Yet none of that changes the fact that the narrative is resolved, not by the protagonists whose journey we followed, but by a quasi-antagonist who essentially shares the same goal yet operates on information the narrator purposefully withholds from the reader. In other words, our protagonists are sent on a wild goose chase only for their rival to swoop in and complete their task – for obscure reasons. It’s a sleight-of-hand, which isn’t at all like the charming deception of a stage magician but rather that of the con artist playing a shell game in a dingy back alley.

Baird’s, and fellow co-creator Kevin Costner’s, muddled conception of Shambhala does little to salvage an enduring sense of satisfaction from the ending. Never defined or described concretely, we are given oblique references that present the mystical city as surprisingly unappealing despite its supposed heavenly character. The city, which only appears at specific times in various places around the world, comes across as an elitist by-invitation-only paradise that offers amnesia, or death, to interlopers. Baird attempts to relate the city to the course of history, with Arthur’s early foray to the city serving as a violation of metaphysical etiquette that has to be redressed at the risk of some kind of cataclysm. Yet the final panel, which implies the restoration of world order brought about by our protagonists’ rival, rings false given what we know of the 20th Century after World War I: a century of horrors that Alan Moore grasped more keenly in From Hell than Baird and Costner do in this book.

Also unfortunate is how Shambhala is presented as a rebuke to science’s ability to know the world. For a book that celebrates adventure, it misses the point: science isn’t a dogmatic collection of facts, but an active pursuit of the unknown infused with a sense of awe.

Even if we were to be charitable and apply Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of non-overlapping magisteria, assigning science and spirituality their own territories, the book succeeds even less as a spiritual journey. Where the exploratory scientific aspect is given some weight thanks to the Explorer’s Guild concept – despite Shambhala looming over the narrative as the universe’s way of spanking materialists – none of the characters approach their quest as a spiritual one. And by the end, they certainly don’t achieve any sort of enlightenment. The mystical might as well be called by its real, if not entirely accurate, name: MacGuffin.

Finally, and this is a minor grievance, the book isn’t even really about the secretive yet globe-spanning Explorer’s Guild, that august club of adventurers (or perhaps genteel drunkards with a talent for fanciful storytelling). Other than launching the narrative when one of its members, Arthur Ogden, sets out to deliver a comeuppance to a hated social rival by setting out for adventure in the North Pole, the Guild puts in but cameo appearances. For the most part, the book’s major characters really have little to do with the Guild except for sporadic encounters.

Altogether, The Explorer’s Guild Volume 1: A Passage to Shambhala is a handsomely printed book with more potential than is realized and little incentive to look forward to further volumes.

What are you reading? Join me at GoodReads!

a soundtrack for 2016

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 20:22:00 +0000

My pal Becky Haltermon Robinson, punner extraordinaire and inventor of the Amazing Pump-o-matic Defrumpanator, posted her annual musical encapsulation over at her blog, Pump Up the Frump. Good stuff.

Now I'm inspired to offer a musical encapsulation of my own. I leave it to you to interpret the mix vis a vis the dreadful year that was 2016 in any way you like. Or you could just enjoy the music for its own sake.

Without further rambling, here's the list:

Little Swing - AronChupa
Dancers - Faderhead
Dead Stars - Covenant
Sex Beat - Sex Beat
Shelter - Icon of Coil
Arena - VNV Nation
The Window of Appearances (from Akhnaten) - Philip Glass
Lazarus - David Bowie
You Want It Darker - Leonard Cohen
Sound of Silence - Disturbed
B()NES - M△S▴C△RA

Go ahead, have a listen over at YouTube.

And if you have a musical commentary on 2016 to share, please do so in the comments below. I'd love to hear it.

Did DC commit hara-kiri with suicide squad?

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 23:50:00 +0000

Here we are, after Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, with another comic book ersatz-blockbuster bloodied by critics while running the gauntlet of marketing hype and fan expectations. As the mighty box office pronounces its own apparently victorious judgment on Suicide Squad, one can’t help but if wonder if DC/Warner Bros executives and filmmakers are starting to feel like Pyrrhus after his costly victory at the battle of Asculum. “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans,” the Greek general reportedly said, “we shall be utterly ruined.”

While not strictly a bad movie as the media would have us believe, Suicide Squad does suffer from a failing that consigns the film to a footnote in DC’s film universe rather than a milestone: a lack of ambition, which is all the more obvious in contrast to the acid trip promise of its marketing campaign and the relative novelty of its concept. It’s not just that Suicide Squad ends up subjecting its supervillainous Dirty Dozen to a rather banal save-the-world plot, but that it sets up promising ideas only to give us lackluster follow-through. The most obvious example of this rests in David Ayers split-personality direction. He starts us with half-an-hour of exposition delivered with a modicum of guerilla style (complete with cutesy graphic overlays), but then drops the guerilla and settles for the usual hum-drum once the plot gets going. A catalog of characters, even when livened up by Batman and the Flash, is no way to start a film – remember show don’t tell? – and abandoning the flourishes that might electrify an otherwise middling narrative is no way to finish a film. Suicide Squad should be edgy, but the tame results beg the question: what happened to the grit and harrowing pathos that David Ayers so capably delivered in the WWII tank drama Fury, with considerably more panache than he does here?

Perhaps it’s time to dispense with the industry’s obsession with realism – Marvel movies all look the same, and DC has so far relied on Zack Snyder’s moody aesthetic and Christopher Nolan’s urban pragmatism. Let’s have the idiosyncratic and unabashedly artsy approach Tim Burton used for his Batman films and Robert Rodriguez for his Sin City films. Or how about taking inspiration from Kerry Conran and his criminally underappreciated Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?

Stylistic inconsistencies might be overlooked if Ayers had opted for a more sophisticated narrative approach. Off the top of my head, the film could have started mid-mission and used flashbacks to fill in the gaps. Or it could have more openly aped its inspiration, The Dirty Dozen, which provides a more plausible perspective of how a team of misfits could be forged into a cohesive unit capable of fighting a dire menace. It could have used stories of encounters with Batman and other heroes as a means of bonding the villains together. Heck, it could have just followed the path Ayers capably tread in Fury. There are any number of creative ways to tell the story, but instead we get as many empty promises as genuine pleasures, particularly in how characters are described versus how they are developed throughout the narrative. Joel Kinnaman’s Colonel Flag, for instance, comes across especially poorly; although described as the world’s best special-ops commando, he acts like a wishy-washy mop, a far cry from Lee Marvin’s Colonel Reisman. (He even hugs Deadshot at the end.) And Karen Fukuhara’ Katana, ostensibly Flag’s bodyguard, is described as not only the deadliest woman in the room but gifted with a soul-stealing sword that is depicted as little else than a good listener and a sharp blade. This all typifies the struggle Suicide Squad has in managing an ensemble cast; some characters get more attention than others, and only one – Jay Hernandez’ tragic criminal-with-a-conscience El Diablo – is given the opportunity to grow and change. Even the story’s major players – Will Smith’s Deadshot and Robbie Margot’s Harley Quinn – are kept in neutral. Essentially, Suicide Squad’s dramatic conceit is limited to the notion of forcing villains to act on behalf of the great thanks to implanted explosives. How the experience changes them, or reinforces their initial villainous proclivities, is yet another missed opportunity.

Strip away the film’s unrealized potential, and you’re left with a serviceable action movie that plausibly contributes to DC’s world-building and is punctuated by enthusiastic but unambitious character design. Will Smith is enjoyable as a version of his usual action movie personal, and Viola Davis offers us a terrifying and sociopathic Amanda Waller (creator of the Suicide Squad), but Margot Robbie especially sparkles as the psychedelically psychotic and homicidal Harley Quinn. Her gleefully off-kilter performance, however, is limited by the film’s refusal to emancipate Quinn from her definition as the Joker’s victim and plaything. A telling scene is when the film’s supernatural antagonist offers the Squad their deepest desires in exchange for loyalty; Quinn’s wish is for a domestic bliss with a de-Jokerized Joker, which suggests that her innermost psyche is just as much an appendage to the Clown Prince of Crime as her body. In the comics, Quinn achieves an independence that doesn’t rely on the consent of men. The film, however, squanders a major opportunity to give her agency distinct from male expectations. And Clara Delevigne, as an archaeologist possessed by an ancient evil witch, gets even less than that.

On to the Joker, then, performed by Jared Leto. His version, a suitably deranged synthesis of Nicholson and Ledger generously seasoned with MTV and Miami Vice chic, worked for me. Where some complain that there is too little Joker in the film, I submit that there was too much. However deliciously menacing, and however much Leto and Quinn share a disturbing chemistry on-screen as the King and Queen of Gotham, the Joker is nevertheless locked into a “love” story that goes nowhere and takes away from other characters. Once again, the impression is that the filmmakers didn’t have the courage of their conviction, preferring to elevate the film’s most marketable elements at the expense of fully embracing the ensemble nature of its cast of villains forced to do good.

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Enjoy Star Trek Beyond, but for Smart & Fun Sci-Fi – Watch TV

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 19:26:00 +0000

What would Paramount’s Star Trek film franchise look like had they launched with Star Trek Beyond instead of J.J. Abrams’ slick counterfeits? We’ll never know how much better it would be, but at least we finally have a film that acknowledges the substance of Star Trek instead of merely grafting its modernized aesthetic onto generic action movie plots.

Star Trek Beyond is the trekkiest of the films set in the so-called “Kelvin Timeline,” mostly because unlike its Earth-bound predecessors it actually does go, if not quite boldly than at least with greater confidence, into the unknown to seek out new life and civilizations. Set mid-way during the Enterprise’s 5-year mission, it positions the series where it was meant to be all along: out in space. Although the planet hosting the majority of the film’s action is just routinely beautiful, the film makes up for it with the stunning Yorktown, a majestic starbase whose cityscape twists and loops on itself, Inception-style, and looks every bit the futuristic ideal of civilization Roddenberry’s Star Trek strove to represent.

Given the low standards established by the previous films, it almost doesn’t matter that Star Trek Beyond’s plot is ultimately revealed to be yet another revenge drama. The cast – always the new franchise’s strength alongside production design – is in its finest form, giving us an Enterprise crew worthy of representing the original thanks to focused and often funny script. (Yes, Spock’s romance with Uhura still grates. But it’s handled here with enough nuance to feel less like a stunt and more like a genuine relationship – and this is less critical than the surprisingly thoughtful interaction between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy as well as the introduction of a pleasingly tough new character, Jaylah, played with smarts and sass by Sofia Boutella, and Shohreh Aghdashloo’s dignified Commodore Paris.) Justin Lin achieves a brisk and exciting pace for the film, revving up the action scenes and deftly managing spectacular special effects while also letting the film breathe during its character moments.

It does matter, however, that Star Trek Beyond remains mired in Paramount’s – and Hollywood’s – resistance to high-concept films, particularly in the science fiction genre, and preference for action to ideas. Like the recent glut of superhero movies demonstrates, there is the trend in the industry to look for conflict and drama only in situations involving violence and combat – a trend that has afflicted TV-to-film adaptations beyond Star Trek, like the Mission: Impossible series, as well as generally excellent higher-concept films like Edge of Tomorrow and Oblivion. Although very entertaining and a welcome throwback to some of the elements that made us fall in love with the Original Series, Star Trek Beyond presents us with a villain – Idris Elba under heavy makeup – reducible to a vengeful menace with an appetite for mass destruction. The idea that the Federation might meet opposition by alien races who view them as a colonialist rather than a cooperative force never gains traction as anything other than the stage on which yet another apocalyptic scenario is played. And in the end, just as Starfleet’s identity crisis in Star Trek Into Darkness’ somehow fit into the single character of Peter Weller’s warmonger, it boils down to a personal confrontation between Kirk and the villain.

Lacking a majestic sense of grandeur – which only Star Trek: The Motion Picture succeeded in achieving among all the Star Trek films – as well as well as grand and grandly executed ideas, Star Trek Beyond’s by-the-numbers action-adventure plot just doesn’t stand alongside Star Trek’s best stories – like “Devil in the Dark” and” Encounter at Farpoint,” to name two of many.

The lesson, then, is that the best science-fiction stories aren’t to be found in film but in television, which is rather sad given how different the cinematic experience is from the small screen. It comes down to economics, of course, and the cost of production that studios need to recoup even before profit is factored in. But what does it say that television, with its lower budget, can succeed at telling smart stories rooted in fiction about science while movies run the hamster wheel of exploding blockbuster action movies? If you’ve never done so, I suggest watching shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek Voyager, Odyssey 5, and FarScape.

There’s a vicious cycle at play, in that studios don’t typically present audiences with beautiful and smart science-fiction films (Duncan Jones’ Moon and films by Neil Blomkamp being notable exceptions), so audiences don’t get exposed to what is possible and, consequently, don’t demand better than the usual action movie formulas. Yet there is also a technical element, in that visually demanding film productions don’t seem to have benefited from computers to significantly reduce costs and make it easier to depict strange new worlds – worlds limited by imagination rather than budget.

Nevertheless, Star Trek Beyond certainly is fun. But I do wish people could see what the wonder and challenging social commentary science-fiction is really capable of offering.

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notes from LACMA: rain room washes out, but del Toro lights a bonfire of imagination

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 19:01:00 +0000

Rain Room

Rain Room has been a bonanza for LACMA, its popularity prompting extended runs to accommodate the demand. After the hype, of course, comes the deluge after a brief wind-up in the waiting line. Admitted in small groups of 15 or so, patrons are led down a short corridor that opens up on the famous space itself, a large room illuminated by a single bright spotlight and dominated by a grid of falling water. Sensors detect the presence of people beneath the nozzles and switch them off accordingly. The experience, then, involves wandering through the grid surrounded by raining water while staying reasonably dry.

There’s fun to be had daring the sensors to fail, and of course it’s a dream setting for artsy Instagrammers. But essentially, it’s a toy, not unlike splashing around a park fountain. It might be tempting to see in Rain Room an oblique commentary on California’s drought, but forget it: Rain Room is a content-less experience. No music. No supplemental imagery. Not even space for contemplation, as there are too many people bustling about. Whatever artistic aspirations one might want to uncover, they are overshadowed by that dreary and dreaded question: is it art?

Ever since Marcel Duchamp obtained a urinal, flipped it upside down, cheekily named it The Fountain, and submitted it to the Society of Independent Artists for exhibition only for it to be hidden from view, the Art World has reacted to Dadaist acts of subversion by erasing their most fundamental provocation. The result is an unfortunate trend in contemporary art to define as art any “thing” that is placed in an art gallery.

The critical problem is this: art that simply serves as a blank surface onto which viewers can project their own meanings is, in my view, scarcely worthy of being considered art. Ornamentation, perhaps, but not art. To that essential dialogue between artist, viewer, and the artwork itself there should be some communicable concept; the joy lies in fixing or loosening this concept, that is, in framing a work’s meaning. The meaning doesn’t have to be clearly articulated or overtly define. It can be vague, suggested, or even deferred in a post-modern gesture. (Whether it can be refused altogether is the Dadaist question, but Rain Room doesn’t manifest a Dadaist sensibility.) You can make it mean whatever you want, but the experience itself is just water falling from the ceiling in a darkened room. As with LACMA’s Levitated Mass, a rock perched above a walkway, Rain Room’s impression is of a gimmick who distinction is its artificiality. Make of that what you will, and decide for yourself whether it’s worth paying for a ticket.

Tickets for Rain Room are $30 and must be purchased in advanced.
www.lacma.org

Guillermo Del Toro: At Home with Monsters

A view inside del Toro's Bleak House.

Designed to provide visitors with the impression of walking into Bleak House, del Toro’s Los Angeles Home, At Home with Monsters is a phantasmagorical exhibit well worth visiting. Much like LACMA’s Tim Burton exhibit some time ago, At Home with Monsters works to provide visitors with a richer context for the imagination of one of cinema’s most visionary artists. The salon-style exhibit is organized by theme, which makes the experience more personal than the usual didactic, chronological arrangement. But once exposed to the buffet of artefacts, however, curatorial concepts become less important than feeling of wonderment at the paintings, sketches, sculptures, books, maquettes, movie props, concept art and astonishing assortment of curios that span the mystical, the horrific, the beautiful, the macabre, and even the humourous.

The crowd of visitors jostling for a closer look at the exhibit’s many curios can be jarring, but don’t let it deter you: the prospect of exploring the vast catalog of Del Toro’s inspiration should boost your courage for getting close and personal. From idea journals, displayed next to tablets allowing visitors to virtually scroll through the impressively illustrated diaries, to video monitors with film montages, the exhibit immerses us in the influences that drive Del Toro’s art. It particularly highlights the synthetic aspect of the artistic process, the convergence of artistic and cultural forces absorbed over a lifetime that produce singular visions. As with Burton’s exhibit, biographical insights emphasize how Del Toro’s outsider perspective and its embrace of the bizarre and freakish ultimately serves as an affirmation of humanity.

A page from one of del Toro's journal.

At Home with Monsters even comes with its own “rain room,” a simulation of del Toro’s home workspace that takes its cues from Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room to provide 24-hour rain and thunderstorms. It is, appropriately, the space in the exhibit dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe. But it also presents one of del Toro’s most potent insights: “The point of being over 40 is to fulfill the desires you've been harboring since you were 7.”

A particularly refreshing aspect of the exhibit is its sheer lack of pretentiousness. Where we might ordinarily distinguish between high and low art, the sublime and the pulp, At Home with Monsters reminds us that the best art knows no class. And insofar as visitors leave inspired not only to look more deeply into life’s shadowy and creaking nooks and crannies but to embrace the creative impulse for themselves, then the exhibit triumphs as more than just a showcase for del Toro.

On display at LACMA from August 1, 2016–November 27, 2016

Tickets are $25 and include general admission as well as admission to At Home with Monsters and other special exhibitions.

www.lacma.org

While You're Visiting ...

While you're visiting LACMA, be sure to visit the contemporary Islamic Art exhibit in the Ahmanson Building as well as the Enigmatic Image, an exhibit on symbolism and other fascinating aspects of Indian art. Both are beautiful,fascinating and insightful.

quick review: deadpool

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 19:33:00 +0000

Here we go again with another attempt to shock the bourgeoisie, only this time the outrage is perpetuated on superhero films after years of Marvel formula. Are we really outraged anymore by crass humour, crude sex, or gory violence, or are we just being good consumers by buying into the marketing?

Deadpool adapts an intriguing metafictional anti-hero – 31st on IGN’s ranking of Top 100 superheroes – but like most of Marvel’s film output, it’s a mediocrity. The plot is a rehashed revenge-driven origin story, the settings are banal, characters not named Deadpool/Wade Wilson are either clichés, bland pudding, or punchlines with little humanity to them, and the raunchy rapid-paced humour is more often hit-and-miss rather than the hit-and-run it hopes to be. (T.J. Miller’s comic relief is particularly limp, but if you’re amused by the description of Wilson’s disfigurement as the offspring of two avacadoes hatefully fucking each other, dig in.) There’s nothing in its metafictional makeup – breaking the fourth-wall, self-referential humour – that we haven’t seen done better elsewhere (by characters named Ferris Bueller, for example). Not even the addition of two X-Men helps. Negasonic Teenage Warhead’s contribution is to be the butt of moody teenager jokes, while Colossus isn’t even allowed to win his own big fight let alone be more than Deadpool’s naively moral straight man. At least the romance between Wade Willson and Morena Baccarin’s Vanessa is sweet. Awwww.

If Ryan Reynolds, who made the film his passion project, wasn’t so well suited to the title role we’d have a plotless bore. But Reynolds carries the film like it was his birthright, partly due to his charm but also because Deadpool is the only character the filmmakers care about. It’s a shame that the film comes across as money thrown at a low-budget indie production. Tim Miller stages his action scenes with verve, but there’s nothing about his direction or Ken Seng’s pedestrian, colourless cinematography to thrill the senses. Deadpool has its moments – enough to be worth a watch if the trailer intrigues you, and the character has potential, but as far as this pool goes Marvel is swimming in the shallow end.

zootoopia and the culture war over diversity

noreply@blogger.com (Frederik Sisa) — Fri, 22 Jul 2016 14:55:00 +0000

Mulling over Disney’s magical Zootopia prompted me to check in with the American Conservative’s resident culture warrior, Rod Dreher and, sure enough, there was this gem with the pop-conservative click-bait title, “What If Diversity Is Our Weakness?” The article is essentially Dreher quoting a reader’s comment from a previous article, all the while channeling Nelson from The Simpsons as he points to the “left” and ha-has. The source of all this glee: a challenge to the cherished notion that encouraging interactive diversity will result in social harmony. But he cites no mere trolling from the unwashed commentariat. No; his citation is powered by a liberal political scientist from Harvard, Robert Putnam, whose research into diversity in 2007 yielded the counterintuitive result that diverse communities exhibited decreased civic engagement. People vote less, volunteer less, trust each other less in diverse communities compared to homogenous communities.

The rhetorical headline makes it clear that with diversity suitably chastened, Dreher is free (as if he wasn’t already!) to advocate for monoculture without being dragged down by liberal critiques of homogeneity (read: white, male, heterosexual). He can be perfectly happy in his very own little bubble – in his particular case a project he calls the Benedict Option where he can be insulated from anyone who doesn’t fit into his Orthodox Christian worldview.

But the results of Putnam’s research aren’t an end to the question of diversity; they describe, in fact, the very challenge diversity poses by its very nature and ubiquity. How, indeed, do we encourage the positive civic interactions capable of overcoming the dissociative factors at play in our multifaceted communities? How do we even sensibly define diversity in type (e.g. ideology, ethnicity, economics, etc.), scale (family, community, city, region, state, nation) let alone policy? The question is fundamentally personal; a matter of our approach to whether we approach diversity with curiosity, detachment or, in some vocal quarters, revulsion.

For an example, we could look to the controversy surrounding North Carolina’s law that bans ordinances denying discrimination against LGBTQ people and directly prohibits transgendered persons from using bathrooms according to their gender identity. The law is partly the product of dangerous misinformation and fearmongering about transgendered people (see Media Matters' debunking here). Broadly, however, it’s an expression of the religious right’s hostility towards LGBTQIA identities – e.g. sinful offenses to God, perversion of nature, heterosexual familial breakdowns. It can only be considered hostility when it isn’t enough to accept that legal doesn’t mean mandatory; to the religious right, what is deviant in their view must be forbidden to everyone.

It comes as a surprise that Zootopia, a Disney film, would offer a remarkably nuanced perspective on the challenges inherent in a diverse society, all the while delivering a crackerjack conspiracy thriller and buddy movie. The film’s creators previously offered us Frozen, a welcome call to girl power that nevertheless came across as glib and, worse, perpetuated Disney’s obsession with casting women as princesses. (What sort of subtextual goodness would have infused Frozen had its sisters been peasants?) That Zootopia dispenses with the fetish for aristocracy and instead gives us a proletarian view is a refreshing change on its own.

The film centers on Judy (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), a rabbit whose keen sense of justice leads her away from carrot farming into the unlikely profession of policing – unlikely, because in Zootopia’s world small mammals aren’t generally considered physically matched to the demands of police work. A lesser movie would have dwelled in Judy’s challenges at the police academy, cataloguing every act of bullying and condescension from teachers and fellow trainees. But the filmmakers breeze through Judy’s challenges in an exciting montage that culminates with her proud graduation as the first bunny cop before launching into the film’s narrative. Unsurprisingly, being a trained and top-of-the-class graduate earns her no respect in the precinct to which she is assigned. The police chief, an imposing bull voiced with wonderful grit by Idris Elba, even assigns her to parking duty on her first day. It says a lot about Judy’s character that she commits herself to excel at the less-than-ideal assignment. She does excel, but by the second day we can sympathize when the job leaves her demoralized. Who wants to punish people for parking infractions and get abused for it?

The situation changes when she unwittingly helps a sneaky fox, Nick (voiced by Justin Bateman), pull a con on an ice cream store owner. She gets the upper hand on him quickly enough, but the stage is set for an oil-and-water partnership when a missing person’s case connects to a series of frightening incidents where Zootopia’s carnivores revert to their primal states. At stake: the civilizing influence that redefines the predator-prey relationship as one of peaceful co-existence.

Zootopia is exceptionally well-conceived and executed with superb voice work and animation, as funny as it is heartfelt, and inspiring for featuring a female heroine defined by her blend of kindness, toughness, and smarts rather than the usual romantic tropes. Cinematically, it’s one of the finest animated films in recent years solely on the basis of his rich characters a sophisticated narrative.

Layered interpretations aren’t necessary, of course, but when it comes to reading the film from a political perspective it stands out above the usual genre feel-good messaging by refusing to reduce its characters to stereotypes or allowing itself to be glibly mapped onto the conservative/liberal dichotomy. A lesser film would have sorted characters into unabashed racists and their victims, and the big villain would have been some sort of Trumpian blowhard. But every principal character is a nuanced mix of nobility, prejudice, wisdom, ignorance and righteousness of varying degrees. The difference lies in how each chooses to confront the legacy of a savage past: can predators evolve beyond their killer instincts? Judy and Nick – the rabbit and the fox – form a credible and touching friendship from a partnership of convenience, and in their relationship we have a positive, but by no means bump-free, response to the challenges of diversity. (It’s interesting to note that what separates them, more so than their species, is their positions as cop and criminal.) In the film’s startling villain, we find a destructive response, not unlike the rabid right-wingers who denounce Muslims and Mexicans, that illustrates how even understandable fears can upend empathy and moral reasoning.

Ultimately, Zootopia illustrates the take-away from Putnam’s research: we live in a diverse world, and whether we live well or succumb to conflict depends on our willingness to embrace that diversity and make it work. As the RNC convention demonstrates, with supremacists like Rep. King proclaiming that capital-C Civilization owes its success to white people, America has not freed itself from its legacy of racism. This is the context for culture warriors like Dreher, who fail to understand both the distinction and overlap between overt discrimination among individuals and the institutional discrimination of white heterosexual male privilege. In the end, though, it comes down to will. As reactionary conservatives and Trump’s New Republican Party – an expression of fundamental right-wing angst – prove, some people just don’t want to get along. A film alone may not change minds, but films like Zootopia that can deliver terrifically entertaining stories with nuanced cultural commentary go a long way towards fostering a better culture.