Flashback! To “Push…!”

Now I’ve seen it three times, and honestly I think I love it.

Isn’t that strange?

I was just so sure, you know, that it was something like Misfits Of Science writ large and sloppy…something cheap and tawdry and full of the awful hard light that suffuses (it seems) every singly little audiovisual thing with the slightest of science-fictional components these days. And the pushbutton feelings. Not that I don’t go to the movies in order to have my buttons pushed, you understand! I may be a bit different, but I’m not that different…but these are the wrong buttons, these things that I guess we can blame James Cameron for, or something. Action movies; they oppress me, bit by bit. On the whole, they seem to me to be devoid of positive feeling, lacking something I don’t-know-quite-what, that I’m always looking for. “Positive feeling”, though, it sounds absurd…what is that, anyway? What can I possibly mean? Surely I don’t mean just “happy endings”…

Well, no. I don’t. Although I certainly don’t disdain happy endings, and it bothers me excessively when filmmakers seem to…when they’ve written a happy-ending story and then don’t want it, it isn’t good enough for them, so they invent all these tortured methods of ineptly subverting that textual expectation. All in the name of making me feel something, but I don’t feel anything at all when a non-happy ending is tacked-on…no more than I feel when a happy one is tacked-on! And so both are “negative”; both have the odour of something made by committee, even if it’s only a committee of one. And it would be so convenient to be able to stop right there, and say I’ve sorted it out: blah blah something something true to the story, whatever story it is, but that won’t cover what it is to lack positive feeling, because what about the stories that get that part right and then still lack it? Have you seen Avatar? I swear, I tried to watch it, you know? But I couldn’t stay with it, it was so ridiculously, insultingly hollow. I watched more of Transformers 2 — no, really, I did! — and to this day am often caught wondering just how James Cameron managed to fuck up his magnum opus just so, so badly, that watching Transformers 2 was a more joyous experience for me by comparison. I mean, no one can accuse him of not having the love, can they? Of not having the vision?

But I guess it was the wrong kind of love…the wrong kind of vision. The hyperreal simulation was certainly a most extravagant metatextual device, but the different things to look at business that draws us to the movie theatre was somehow an itch not even the supreme attainment of the hyperreal could scratch: Avatar was just so damned boring, wasn’t it? Boring perfection. I was talking to someone not long ago about the boringness of perfection, with specific reference to Jim Lee and Geoff Johns — one a weirdly-driven renderer of some kind of ideal Batman splash page that dwells only inside his own head, with apparently very rigorous standards that are nonetheless unfathomable to me, and the other a crazy nitpicking completist with standards of plot-tidiness I can only assume are similar. All some weird bubble of Outsider Art, fooling the eye with the trappings of legitimacy? Steve Ditko and Dave Sim and even Alan Moore can’t match that stuff when it comes to outre, you know…they’re just mavericks, who drop into and out of public respectability according to what they’re working on, not full-blown extremists. Dave Sim may believe some crazy things about what the Bible says, but say this for him anyway: he’s concerned with what’s real, even if he gets it wrong. Because there is a certain standard of representation of things in Sim’s work, you know? Which imposes a certain set of beliefs in, approaches to, the adoption of form? Whereas Johns and Lee…

Well, it reminds me of something Werner Herzog said: that he couldn’t think of any film that the new 3D technology would be useful for. Except, possibly, a pornographic film. Which I thought was quite an interesting thing to say, because…hmm, yeah, wouldn’t that be just a terrifying art film? The terror of the hyperreal! Absolute widescreen super-clarity brought to a sex act! You can practically smell the lotion, in the brilliance of the Klieg lights you can see what attention porn stars pay to personal hygiene! All absolutely beyond clinical, thirty feet tall and coming at you…yes, that ought to terrify us: the living autopsy of sex. How we’d long for Jason to come along and inject a little assuaging fantasy into it by chopping up the partners in a ludicrously comic-booky way! But one must presume that in the world of hyperreal sex-on-film there can be no thought any longer of fantasies, our glorious Ludwig Van simply ruined forever…from now on even the sight of a soft-focus Susan Oliver or Yvonne Craig will drive us to the wastepaper basket in reflexive recollection of why we can no longer have such nice romantic things…

…Or maybe not, but anyway: is there any boredom more boring than the boredom of perfection? So for me Avatar was just the pushing of dead buttons, and I couldn’t stand the thing. Because there was no positive feeling to it at all! Though I still haven’t managed to define what that is, I know, and maybe I don’t really need to invoke it when I’m talking about a crummy militarized ripoff of “The Word For World Is Forest”? Ye gods, a militarized “Word For World”, and with VR sex in it too. This is Simpsons-parody stuff, obviously…there’s nowhere to go with any of that but down…

For God’s sake, who thinks of making Ursula LeGuin stories for gearheads, you know? Positive feeling?

It never even gets a chance, in Avatar!

But fortunately we aren’t really talking about Avatar.

But we’re talking about Push, instead.

So, I figure it ought to be axiomatic, that anything that looks like it was published by Eclipse Comics has got THRILL-POWER. Well, I say “Eclipse”, which of course was only one company among many that pursued what Tom Spurgeon calls the Third Way of Eighties superhero comics, but I can’t list all of them, can I? Anyway we will get back to this thrill-power thing in more detail in a minute, but the reason I bring it up is because damn if Push doesn’t look JUST LIKE something that fell out of Eclipse in the Eighties, you know? I actually had to check to see it hadn’t been made from a comic, something around the time of The Crow, perhaps…or Mage…or even Luther Arkwright…

And imagine my delight, to find out it hadn’t been! Though it should’ve been: since that passionate inkiness, that start-again freshness, is all over it. Those lessons learned in the alternative scene, that particular kind of framing of a shot — comics-style set-pieces, Welles by way of Kurosawa by way of Ditko by way of Talbot by way of Sim, if you’re of my vintage you can’t not notice it…all that stuff comes right up to you and pushes a pie in your face, and the pie is delicious. What this is, is a black-and-white comic of the Eighties finally printed with the colouring they could never afford, lovingly painted — no, lacquered — in amplified hue. Did I mention that I thought I was going to hate it? That I thought all those tricks of hard light were going to be present in it? I should’ve remembered to say something about love, which is that if you’ve got the right kind of it then even cliche can make you feel something…because it wasn’t the hard light this time, but the other thing, the ratcheted palette, you know that thing where they fuck with the colour-balances and make everything orange and blue? That’s an awful programmatic cliche too, along with the shaky-cam of Hollywood-verite that became so inescapable so suddenly in the late Nineties, was never used right, I think they even film Jeopardy! that way now…and the soundtrack, the soundtrack, the endless music-videoness of the soundtrack, as though the best thing the committee that thought the thing up could imagine was to get a music-video director to make their X-Men cash-in product…my God, so much is the same, here, as it is everywhere else…!

And yet somehow, it’s really beautiful.

My apologies for being all scattery here, it’s just that I really do have so much to say about Push, too much to ever say in a blog-post anyone will bother to read, so I have to jump from place to place, quickly point and say “see?”, and then hop off to another lilypad. Because it is all about seeing, as it’s all about that old “Eclipse” soul. It’s all a bit half-assed and derivative, it’s Scanners cut with Lost In Translation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and The Tomorrow People…and Donnie Darko and X-Men, so it’s mod, it’s trad, it’s got all the mad cons and the retread cred, but it also has just something…something of my own little list of cult-classic movies, Dark Star and Sixteen Candles and Repo Man, things I could watch and watch and watch, because every time I watched them I found I could fall just a little deeper into their little worlds, get that much more absorbed into their texture, like becoming their wallpaper, becoming their character. I’ve never liked Chris Evans as much as I’ve liked him here, so much (perhaps) like me in the period of my twenties when I was cut loose in the demimonde. Because in the demimonde it’s all about origins, all the time: you barely know your own, and you don’t know anyone else’s, but origin swirls about you everywhere you go. Well, at Eclipse it was the same! Those breakaway Eighties artists who were still for some reason stuck on the superheroes, you know? And specifically on the intrigue of the superheroes as manifested primarily by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, made by them perhaps mostly by accident at first — that weird world of secret connectivity, subway tunnels of causation rumbling beneath the streets of apparent happenstance, the miracle of fantasy stories as disconnected as they were outrageous nevertheless being slowly knitted into a giant tapestry of extremely uneasy threads. The origin is always the most important thing, so important that you’ll notice they made a bestselling reprint book out of it, one of my top ten Christmas gifts ever…because to the comics readers who started around the time I did, the origin story was always the one you could never get, never find, only see in later versions done as summaries or flashbacks by later artists, the genuine article only hinted at, alluded to, seen through a prism and all that rot. So valuable, and I fancy the later Eighties renegades felt it deeply too: when in making up their own superhero mythos they successfully kept “origin” in some way always occluded, thus in some way always implicated, in their (importantly!) new stories.

And in Push, the same pattern is followed…and, interestingly at least to me, it isn’t a million miles away from James Cameron’s metatextual strategy in Avatar, except it’s got the one thing that movie hasn’t got!

A testimonial…!

Or, no…waitaminute…yes, that’s right, I’ve got it now…

A heart.

Chris Evans, bruised expatriate failure, is competent in every way except the one that counts…at home (if a little fucked-up) in his limbo, his island of stilts in no-man’s land, where the overlapping spheres of authority just don’t quite touch one another as they’re supposed to…youth, with plenty of time but no purpose, in a space where he can go unobserved for at least (if he is lucky) weeks at a time. Origin flows forth here, as a rising tide, as stormwater welling up from an underground lake, and we are ankle-deep in it already: so like it or not, it connects us all, though the fondest wish of youth is still to be free…

And then later on you find out that “being free” and “doing good” are really the same thing. Uh…

Spoilers?

Well, he does a really good job of conveying it, and he doesn’t even say much. “Hard light” would have him come to an onerous realization with a bowed head in a blue light, all suddenly self-knowing, but Push gives him an orange light and lets him do things he has to with no time to really think about them, much less make a confessional speech…and even less than much-less could he formulate one. Comics? It’s comics; because you know that one character who’s the girl? Dakota Fanning plays her here, somehow managing the nifty trick of fitting in perfectly with all the “guy from that show” character-actor faces…and such attractive faces they are, all of them! Some really major part of the credit must go to the casting, here, because the only person you see who looks like a movie star is the one person who’s kind of supposed to, the well-known noir Oracle visited by everyone from William Powell to Bob Hope to Harrison Ford to Keanu Reeves…and, sorry, that isn’t much of a spread, but I was going for a specific effect there? Which is going to fail, now, because I have not yet come all the way back around to THRILL-POWER…!

But never mind that now, though ol’ Ming-Na is framed just so Eclipse-like in her Oracle’s Den? There’s actually a longer movie here, one senses; or, should that be “a bigger story”? Some of what happens doesn’t really make sense, and interestingly (again: to me!) it’s in just those parts where blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-that-didn’t-add-up, that the action coheres into something you can care about. Well, was it not ever thus, with cult-classic movies? Did Brother From Another Planet never hand you a bag and say “hold this for me a minute, I just gotta talk to a guy”? At such moments is the audience truly involved, as they reason past the infelicities on their characters’ behalf. People rarely look right at the camera in this movie; everything is drenched in neon; if the building’s being shaded, she won’t be able to see it; anything with shrimp. Plate O’ Shrimp. The story has a happy ending, because it was always meant to, but there are still tortured steps because we’re missing ten minutes: ten minutes of explicated cause, for some of the odder necessary things that happen.

Ten minutes of origin.

It should have bothered me. There are so many movies that just needed that one line left in, for things to make sense, and it always bothers me, it bothers me, it bothers me when they leave it out anyway. But, those are movies in which the sensemaking is really the main thing: the perfect movies, that were not quite perfect. But, have you seen Avatar?

So maybe I’d better rethink this. Maybe a movie filled with cliches, basically composed of cliches, can’t really be about doing them “right”? After all, was not the thing I liked about Batman Begins and The Dark Knight that they weren’t afraid to make a virtue of inconsistency? The plot in Push is so familiar, you know…and the solution to the problem is familiar too, and it’s all familiar. I’ve seen this movie, this comic, before…and perhaps that’s the point. Have you ever watched Donnie Darko with the commentary track on?

“Uh…yeah, that’s another thing that was…uh, I mean originally there was a scene that explained all that, but we had that hard 98-minute limit and…uh…”

Fucking breaks your heart. Fucking breaks your heart, but consider this: Donnie Darko wasn’t all that shit-hot of a movie, honestly. The ideas that were left out were just boilerplate, I will go so far as to say laboured, SF ideas; the only really important things about it are a) the rabbit, and b) the girl riding up on her bike asking what’s going on. And the ability to be absorbed into that little world over and over again, and deeper each time (as I know many people are and have been) is probably in part down to — though it breaks your heart to hear the guy tell it, it really does! — its ultimately disheartening imperfection. Push doesn’t really suffer from as much of that, but there are enough vagueries to satisfy anyone if they care to search them out: part of it’s the setting, an aggressively non-specific Hong Kong that nevertheless looks specific as hell…all the places are intact, with all their marvellous specific gritty detail, but the sense is not, and actually the places are not either because they’re all covered in this weird wash. There is a bit where young Dakota Fanning gets drunk and talks about being “…power in my youth!” and it adds nothing at all, except it does. Hmm, I wonder how far back this thing stretches, this set of associations called up by her transgression? The bit about the 13 year-old wanting some booze is punched up a bit, as though the general principle of the rules being partly suspended in Hong Kong (though you never know how much you can count on that, or when it will work for you or against you!) is being accentuated…however it isn’t too much work to associate it with the idea of youth being a suspended state that pops up in…oh, that movie Rich Kids, maybe? The World Of Henry Orient, possibly? I don’t mean to suggest that every person who makes a movie or a comic is just so conscious of their own influences that they sit down and map them all out, you understand…I mean, probably most of these influences are just my own and no one else’s, but the thing is that I like it, and the movie frames and poses and shoots things in such a fortuitous way that it helps me to make those connections. Everything looks like something; most of the time I can’t figure out what it looks like. A while ago I was talking about how I became attracted to opera for its comic-like qualities: the production of mere tableaux, within which exposition takes place! It’s a tough trick to pull off, honestly. Because it really puts enormous pressure on the ability to deliver a performance, you know? Action movies, or the parts of movies that consist of action, are more like dance: not about tableaux, but instead about tableau’s opposite. But in those, although you can certainly fuck it all up if you don’t know what you’re doing, at least you don’t have the problem of action being decoupled from motion. But the tableaux, the tableaux, they all have to make action take place in the pose, right? And so it’s all about the quality of performance that happens when you’re stuck there.

In my opinion: some mighty good performances here. But!

Blink and you’ll miss them.

My God, how I wish now this had been an Eclipse comic, so I could haunt used bookstores and try to track it down. The missing origin. In a way it’s quite a simple thing, this evanescence of a thrill that we’re constantly seeking in all our switch-flipping and button-pushing — as I said, we go to the movies primarily to see things, to do the fine act of seeing, and so who wants to see the same thing all the time? There needs to be something in it that sings to us, and the only thing that sings is difference…mood, tone, staging, performance, a set of evoked associations, commentary, colour, sound, costumes…the glimmer of an idea, the shadow of a purpose. Remix culture is a powerful tool for the constellation of meaning, but (as I also said up above, or maybe just implied) it needs some sort of love to drive it. Without the love, it’s all just so many flashpots going off in sequence: as mere pyrotechnics is loosed upon the world. And thus though it’s pretty easy to specify what interests a person when they go to the movies, still all the parts and pieces can be in order and the thing can fail to intrigue anyway. Evanescence: it’s, like, a thing, y’know? Consider, for example, the little matter of THRILL-POWER that I promised I’d get back to: though I believe the term first arises at Martin Goodman’s Atlas Comics, and later becomes woven into the skin of 2000 A.D., if it means anything past a marketing line then it means the top fraction of a distillation process — what you get when you bring industrial pressures to bear on a bunch of talented and subversive artists, and set them to grinding out Product on the factory floor, slipping in jokes when the boss-man ain’t looking and winking at one another conspiratorially…as if there were any other way to wink. It isn’t the only kind of art, by any means; but it’s the only one that promises such a strange and nebulous quality of success. So thrill-power is really a dream, you know: a dream of value. But with a most peculiar inflection. “We can make something out of this”, or “this can be important, somehow”, are thoughts that (it seems to me) can’t help but lie at the back of the cave of industrial relations even if for most working people it’s only slumbering there — tell the truth in art, and you can change the world, even if the art is of a degraded or twisted kind. And, you can still collect your paycheque!

Because the suits will never know!

Wink wink. Alert readers may be dismayed to see a shadow of my preoccupation with the Sufis and the Grail and alchemy here, once again, but don’t worry I won’t plunge us into all that right now…I never do get all the way into it anyway, you see, because in the back of my head there is still a tiny undergraduate looking for a senses-shattering term paper topic, and he’s saving “Magic Is Green: Colour As Icon In Twentieth-Century Fiction” for himself…so suffice it to say that the promise of bringing something wonderful and artistically-significant and world-renewing out of the atmosphere of the sweatshop is a promise with an unusually intense odour of transcendence about it. BUT!

It doesn’t have to be the sweatshop, where it’s found. Take my useful catch-all stand-in “Eclipse”, for example: which had that same stuff, that same energy, but located in the spirit of competition with the sweatshop; rather than in the paradoxical glamour of the sweatshop itself, where you get away with stuff just like a rogueish movie hero whose spirit can’t be broken though they beat him. Well, okay, okay…and maybe that glamour’s real, and relatively uncomplicated, but you don’t have to live too long to realize it’s better to write the movie than to be a character in it? Especially a character who dies in the second act because he’s everybody’s favourite, and that’ll make the jaded punters feel something? Except it’ll really only make them more jaded, probably, and anyway life’s not a movie and surely there are some better endings to be had than just these old ones where everyone loses. There was a young fellow online recently who had the idea that there are some movies that are, uh, “tonal chimeras”, where there’s a slip-point in the movie’s middle: what the movie concludes as, is not what it began as. Much like any old youthful adventure of living? So what Lee and Kirby made at Marvel Comics, as it turned out (at least: for a while) was a thing that others could do as well, in co-ops or collectives that served their labour more faithfully…okay, and sometimes it stank, because the love wasn’t really there, or it was the “wrong kind” — a useful rule of thumb might be that the more it looked like Marvel or DC, the more purely spectacular it seemed, then the less respectable it was in other ways? — and no one’s saying that nobody got screwed over again just by tinier sweatshops this time, because obviously they did, but that promise, THAT PROMISE, when it was there could never be mistaken. So hard to put one’s finger on it! But then it’s always hard to put one’s finger on an aroma…

The aroma, in some sense, of reality. Positive feeling; maybe that’s all it is, in the end? Or, all it needs to be? I rather like the idea of life being like a “tonal chimera”, that starts as the seed-pod of one implied meaning and then ends up as quite another: like walnuts from the cherry tree, your old thermodynamic miracle. So many bad movies, that bail on their original conception, what they “want” to be in their soul! Loathsomely dismal endings to hopeful stories, panderingly curative endings to hard-nosed ones! Yet in art as in life, sometimes what you want from your adventure changes along the way. So, maybe that kid’s righter than he knows? Maybe this is the kernel of every good story, that the thing you want changes along the way? Maybe every movie is a “tonal chimera”?

I still don’t know what “positive feeling” is, sad to say; I’m currently entertaining the possibility that it’s nothing but the filmmaker having interests all his or her own, and influences all his or her own too. I don’t really know if James Cameron has interests and influences like that. I mean, that’s a terrible thing to say, of course he must, he’s a person after all? But I just mean, as a friend once pointed out to me, he only makes action movies?

Only makes action movies.

And the sickly thought occurs: what is it that a person does, when they only do one thing, to branch out once they start to get bored with it?

James Cameron Pour L’Homme.

People, it is probably only a matter of time…

But I had better stop hopping now. Hey, do me a favour and go watch Push, eh? I’d really like to know what you think of it.

Or what it makes you think of.

Or if I’m just crazy for liking it.

But here’s to positive feeling, eh?

Wherever she may lie, God bless her.

Flashback! To “The Time-Traveller’s Wife…!”

This will be a short one, but true.

None of my friends think this is funny.

…So I was flicking channels on the TV one day, and came across “The Time-Traveller’s Wife”, which was a bit more than half over by then.  Though I can’t fathom Rachel McAdams’ predilection for such stuff, I figured since she’s Canadian I might as well support the team and have a look…also I don’t hate Eric Bana, do I, because he played Bruce Banner in “Hulk” and also Watered-Down Khan in “Star Trek: Nemesis” or whatever it was.

So I turn the thing on, and it’s this awful tearjerking scene where their marriage (or whatever) is falling apart, because they’re experiencing things in a different order and IT’S A METAPHOR and honestly I already get this, I get all of it, one glance is enough to tell me what I need to know.  So I turn it off.  But then…

I can’t help wondering, you see, just how they suck people in to the narrative, to the point where what I just saw could be bearable.  Where do they begin?  They can’t start out with all this goopy stuff right away, can they?

So when it gets replayed around midnight, I decide to check out how it starts…and you know the beginning of it isn’t half-bad?

I can see why people would choose to get some popcorn and watch the rest?

But having already lived through the future of this movie, I know what’s coming, and decide to spare myself the pain of getting too involved with it.

…

That’s it.  That’s the joke.  But it really happened!

I think maybe someone OD’ed on some Alan Moore a bit, before making this thing…surely any experienced SF reader must’ve seen, after just a few minutes, the whole plan of it floating entire before their eyes, a crystalline time-solid?  Yes, Veidt killed Blake, and half New York…hold on, Laurie, I’m explaining it to Rorschach five minutes from now…anyway…

Uh…

…Happy Valentine’s Day?

If A Room Eats An Elephant…

…Does it still vomit up blind men, even if no one sees them?

Just a quick note, Bloggers:  I am off to see Aida tonight, as you know the most sheerly spectacular of operas…but Aida has already proved me a liar, since I promised my young opera-going companion some papier-mache elephants, and as it turns out there will be none. And I can’t quite understand this.  After all, you can crowdsource papier-mache to elementary schools.  When I was young, our brilliant-yet-imposing music teacher had us all learn to sing The Toreador Song, then arranged for a boxing ring to be built in the school gymnasium, then arranged for two chicken costumes to be made, then put two students in the chicken costumes and then put them in the ring with a whole choreographed boxing routine, and then put all of us around the boxing ring with betting slips in our hands like it was Guys And Dolls or something, and had us all explode into ruinous song.

Parents weren’t even invited.

As far as I know, none of them even knew it was going on.

She would’ve arranged for each elementary school in Vancouver to work on a part of a papier-mache elephant’s body — foot, trunk, tail! — hmm, it’s like an elephant, only missing a trunk! — tail! — foot! — and then at the end arranged for all the parts to be delivered to the opera company, only wanting a bit of twine to tie them together, in exchange for a bank of cheap seats at each performance…

…Because nothing is more delightful than seeing little kids attend the opera and not hate it…what you do is, at intermission you buy them all five-dollar cookies from the concession…

…But unfortunately, she retired from active subversion before this show ever went on.  And that’s a shame, because…you know, elephants.

It just isn’t the same, when they’re not in the room.

Okay…

…So let’s talk about The Avengers.  It opens this weekend, so this’ll be the last good chance to talk about it.

I’m not seeing it.

You should see it if you want to.

BUT!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the advertising campaign on this one.  It is a BIG advertising campaign, have you noticed?  It’s beyond impressive, it’s…er…well, the only word is, it’s positively TITANIC, you know?  It’s all over the place;  it’s everywhere.  I’m stunned at the total media penetration that’s going on with this one, can’t think of a movie in my lifetime that’s had such a full-court press going on in the ramp-up to the opening weekend.  The energy being expended is fantastic, and so the aim is clear: this movie can’t be permitted to fail.  This movie is receiving the full attention of the parent company, in terms of marketing.  I wonder if even Gone With The Wind was so heavily, ubiquitously promoted.  I mean, it really seems to have become a big deal, somehow.  Everybody’s talking about it, somehow.  In the customary lingo of the old-time record industry, it’s clearly set to debut at Number One.  The fix is in.

And one really has to wonder why such effort has been expended, to make sure that’s the way things go.  Or…does one?  Everybody knows about comics, but no one knows what comics people know about comics, and that’s what has kept — and still keeps — the comics business from scoring massive PR heat from a public at large that is quite prone to look at business practices of the type routinely practised in comics, and give a big ol’ SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT to it.  I mean, seriously, it’s pretty politically-charged stuff everywhere else it happens that people notice it, right?  But the comics biz has long enjoyed a low enough public profile, that no one with a big CBS eye behind them ever felt moved to opine, Keith-Olbermann-style, that at long last sir have you no sense of decency.

And so, that this lowness of profile is changing is both a good thing and a bad one, for the large corporate superpredators that now control, and wish to make hay from, the irreplaceable and now-irreproducible IP stables of the comics business.  Big blockbuster movies, YES!!  They can be had, out of this.  Merch receipts dropping from the skies.  A glorious nostalgia inspired among an increasingly-jaded populace, for the half-remembered sharing of the things of youth.  You could see a perfect storm in that, if you had half a brain:  a return to the marketability of superhero comics properties that hasn’t been seen in fifty years, and as the businessmen say in their most deleriously-exuberant moments, it’s win-win-win-win…!

…With just one small defect in that colossal heavenly lens, which is:  what the fuck are regular people going to say when they find out how all the creators of said beloved nostalgic properties got fucked, when they were making them?  What are they going to say about how the health insurance couldn’t be found, how the skinniest percent of a percent couldn’t be liberated to help somebody keep a home, or put food on the table?  Real people do care about such things, you know;  there really is a presumption out there that if you made something worth millions (let alone billions!) then you damn well get proportionally-compensated for it.  No one cheers for the guy that screwed the guy who made him his fortune, they really don’t.  Why I do believe they even make movies about how they don’t.  So, it’s a bit of a problem, I’m sure you can see.  But thankfully, there’s already a solution to the problem available, that’s been most thoroughly tested.  On a small scale, to be sure, but in principle the thing is extensible…and actually it’s all real simple, right?

As we all know, don’t we?

What you do, is you make the people who might object to the poor treatment of creators complicit in that poor treatment.  You get them liking the stuff, see?  You get them boosting it.  Then when the truth comes out, they’re implicated:  they’re shamed, they’re guilty.  And this provides a most powerful motivation for them to turn their back on the issues at hand.  If I talked up the Avengers movie, and then found out how Marvel treated Jack Kirby, then my only choices would be a) to walk it back, or b) to push it ahead, and guess which of these is easier?  Out of “I was wrong”, and “I don’t see what the problem is”?  Well…there is always the danger that the whole thing will backfire, that somebody somewhere will find a way to build a more successful soapbox because of the increased visibility of the superhero stuff, the heightened sensitivity to the hypocrisy of the superhero business…but then what are the superpredators supposed to do:  not try to make blockbuster movies and giant merch-showers out of the IP they now control?  And if the worst-case turns out to be the actual case, then of course there will be damage control to be done, but when you consider that what “damage control” means in this case is only making a few retroactive agreements, possibly shaving off just a few tenths-of-percents of profits, then as long as the snowball keeps rolling you can afford to lose a few flakes, right?  And if it ever stops rolling, then people will stop caring so it won’t matter anyway, and in the meantime what you can do to ameliorate this potential equitable-payment disaster is get your public attached to your properties, just as the comics public got so attached, and thus give them a motivation to scuff their feet and drive those guilty consciences under the carpet.  Beat the implications, by getting people implicated first, before they even know what’s going on.

And if worst comes to worst…well, so you pay the people!  And say you’ve fixed it.

And then everybody’s happy!

But then again…

It may never come to that.

And it probably won’t, but you know there is something you can do, and I can do, and we all can do, even if we do want to see the movie…even if the ending of this story is pretty well predetermined…

That is:  we can just skip the opening weekend.

Just the weekend.

That’s not too hard to do, right?

It may not seem like much, sure.  Well, it really isn’t much!  But the small thing that it is, is at least a very definite thing…

…In that it at least the elephant keeps on existing, even when there’s no one there who wants to see it.

Which is, you know…

Not nothing.

So why not just give it a try, Bloggers?  Close your eyes and just visualize that elephant, eh?

That’s what I’ll be doing, tomorrow night.

What fun it’d be, if we could arrange to do it together!

On Strike For Comics Creators

Hello, everyone — no, I’m not shutting the blog down.  Technically I’m not even really “on strike”.

It’s more of a boycott.  Call it a boycott?

Actually it isn’t really a boycott either.  After all I’m not looking to negotiate.  I don’t have any demands.  All I’ve got, are consequences.  And maybe they’re not even big ones.  We’ll see.

Call it a PR disaster.  I gave up buying all Marvel and most DC comics because I stopped liking them.  But I bought trades, I saw movies, I reviewed stuff, I spread word of mouth…you know?  I’m all my friends’ local comics geek, I’m always being asked about comic-book movies.  That’s not going to change.

But my answers are going to change.  “That movie can rot in hell for all I care, Marvel and DC are such goddamn unethical companies and always have been, and I’m finally just plain sick to death of it.”  That’s gonna be about how it goes.  Not gonna go to the movie theatre, not gonna go to the video store, not gonna buy the comics, not gonna review any of the above.  Marvel and DC have both had plenty of chances to become more progressive organizations.  Marvel and DC have both had plenty of chances to do the right thing.  Marvel and DC have had a good long run of me not altering my buying habits because of their more odious business practises.  But as I think I may have mentioned before, you can’t rely on spin forever.  Eventually the apathy you’ve thought to make friends with will be something you need people to cast aside.

And that “eventually” could certainly be now.  Marvel’s making movies all the time, even making new movies from old movies, “relaunching” franchises.  DC is about to relaunch their entire line, a dicey proposition even under the best of circumstances.  And so these things could fail.  At least:  these things could underperform.  You know?  That might happen anyway.  That’s always a risk.  Will people sit still for another Spider-Man movie, or for an Avengers movie?  For another crappy Superman movie?  Is New New Teen Titans a lock to sell well?  All this would be up in the air anyway.

But now…at least as far as I’m concerned…it’s not just up in the air, it’s out of the atmosphere.  I will tell you a funny thing about unions, that I happen to know.  Well, two funny things:  one being that comics creators don’t have one, obviously.  But the second thing is that unions are, by and large, pretty good for business.  For one thing, the existence of CBAs preserves labour peace.  For another, it prevents PR disasters like the one that has just snapped the lid shut for me on Big Two-related products.  Hey, and where I find it convenient to cut out Time-Warner and Disney I won’t mind doing that either!  Which maybe, you might say, is an unreasonable overreaction, but then if that’s what you think then you should also probably realize that unreasonable overreactions are exactly what PR disasters create, and that’s why corporations have to watch out for them.  Why should DC suffer just because I’m mad at Marvel?  Aren’t they competitors, anyway?

No.  Not in this, they’re not.  And let me remind you that since I am the mob I don’t have to care about stuff like that anyway.  Hey, if there was a CBA in place this would totally have been avoided, right?  Complicity could’ve been nicely bounded, and excuses could’ve been nicely floated.  But Marvel and DC have always had a choice about that.  Comics creators have never had a choice about that.  So, who should be blamed, for PR disasters such as these?

Is there one of us who is cool about, say, the way Jerry Siegel’s wife was treated?

Boy I’ll tell ya, it would’ve been a treat to read some of those comics, see some of those movies.  But there are plenty of creator-owned comics out there, so don’t worry about me, I’ll be JUST FINE without DC and Marvel.  All that will really change is that I’ll save a bit of money, and have less to say.

But, having put it that way, let me also put it another way:  what if we all, suddenly, had less to say?

No more questions for Didio, Quesada, Brevoort.  For even a small amount of time.  Say a month?  For me it’ll be longer, but let’s say a month.  A month without online reviews of Big Two Product.  A month without interviews about them.  A month without coverage.  Would it make a difference?  Think about it…

…Would it?

We don’t really know if it would, do we?  How do we know what kind of influence these informal “lettercolumns” of ours have, anyway?  If the Big Two know, they’ll certainly never say…and anyway how could they even get the numbers?  How do retailers know how many people are coming into their shops because of some recommendation they got online?  Well, one fairly easy way to find out (because all the other ways are difficult!) would be to stop providing that coverage.  Just give the tree a kick, is what I’m suggesting, and see if the branches move.  It’s not like the Big Two are paying us to talk about them, after all!

That’s more like the other way around.  We pay, and then we talk.  Sometimes, then, others pay.  And then…?

It all stops here for me now, until and unless some day comes when I feel like Marvel and DC are worth going back to.  Right now, though…

I wouldn’t waste my breath on them.  And I won’t.

This is my five hundredth post on this blog, and I don’t think I could be much happier with it.

Universe Part Two: Flashback! To “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World…!”

I got this for Christmas, Bloggers!

Every once in a while, my family pulls a rabbit out of a hat.  How did they know?

I loved it, of course.  Cannot explain how much I loved it.  As I asked Ed, who’d come over to watch it because he hadn’t seen it either:  “Christ, it’s really good isn’t it?”  He spread his hands:  “oh yeah,” quoth he.

“Suddenly I feel like a real asshole for never getting around to reading the comic, you know?”

“Oh yeah.”

And so it was decided.  Although…

…Once I figured out that Ed had read the last volume at the library, I started peppering him with questions about the final big battle.  Did he think that somewhere in here was where the film script finally parted from comics-logic, in the name of conventional closure?  Or — or was I reading this wrong — was it simply the fidelity to the comic’s presentation, transposed directly to the big screen, that made the filmic part of its web of influence more apparent, made it seem like something more assiduously conventional than it was, because once you put something influenced by film back into film it just looks like…well…film? I couldn’t tell, you see:  because ever since David Golding laid it on me that all the most impressive film-influenced accomplishments of Watchmen would look trite when actually put into a film (“oh my God I think that guy’s having a flashback about something FOR CHRIST’S SAKE SOMEBODY GET ME SOME B-12…!“) I try to be alert to how overly-faithful replications can amount to horrendous plot-losing…

Or am I overthinking it, Ed?  Or what?

“Oh yeah.”

I think he might’ve meant:  “well, kinda…but not really. Except a little.  In a way.  Maybe.  Shut up.” But then again I suppose I can’t be sure that’s what he meant, because I sort of forgot what the question, uh…?

But anyway, right or wrong, true or false, north or south…it sort of got me thinking.

I really liked this movie…I mean, I really liked it.  I felt, in a way, like it was made for me.  But…

…That couldn’t be right, right?

So, since it couldn’t be right, and since therefore I could probably not really trust my own impressions about it to be those of who it was made for, I decided to phone a friend.  Now over in snowy Toronto, best beloved, lives a good friend of mine who could probably win a Hallowe’en costume contest if he went dressed as Michael Cera…a bright young fellow, he reminds me of me at that age if I’d only been cooler and more talented and more tuned-in.  Where I am lead, he is palladium;  where I dully vibrate, he sings, and after a while his song begins to chain.  So since it’s all aimed at him anyway, I thought, maybe I just better ask him.

“What’d you think about Scott Pilgrim?” I asked him.

Quoth he:

“I sort of felt like it was fucking with me, on a personal level.”

Now this came as something of a shock to me, Bloggers;  because I’d really been expecting him to say “yeah, that part’s a condensation” or “no, that part’s just like how it is in the comic” or even “you have no idea how much sense that bit makes in terms of the gaming thing, and that’s what you’re missing”, but one thing I most definitely did not expect to hear him say was that, if you know what I mean…

…He hated The Breakfast Club.

There, I said it.

I said it, and I’m glad.

Except…

Not really.

***

Is Edgar Wright his generation’s John Hughes?  Well, that’s obviously a terribly unfair and ludicrously high-concept sort of comparison, and not just because it appears to try to slot Edgar into some stupid “moral” comparison he obviously doesn’t deserve, but also because it takes as read that John Hughes is someone we don’t have to consider as a person or an artist — I mean, just take a look at his biography and filmography to see that he goes deeper than some self-serving “generational” prejudice, or better yet take a look at THIS, for God’s sake — I mean do we just judge people now, we modern media trackers, in order to shore up some self-concept of our own?  Is that what we do, just obsessively “rate” every possible person in order to construct a constellation of taste we can belong to, that we feel is immune from exterior assault?  Well, some people do, obviously:  you can’t really even go online at all without seeing this horrible objectification taking place, these vile motives so cleverly and self-servingly exposed.  And it is perhaps something very like a confusion of politics and ethics that we can observe there:  in this case, though, as a deliberate tactic in the juvenile mind’s favourite argument, an odiously scornful zero-sum equation that reflects a paranoiac need to be better than somebody by setting up a rigged game.  Politics and ethics, ethics and politics, which card is the Lady’s, ha-ha YOU FAIL AT BOTH.  EPIC FAIL.  It’s the morality of a game of marbles:  the attempt to make nothing important if you can just knock it out.  So…“is Edgar Wright his generation’s John Hughes”, that’s a question that decomposes rather easily in an alert reader’s mind to the statement “I am a venal and self-interested hipster whose only interest is in having a bigger slice of a smaller pie made of nothing”, but that is not why I bring up the idea of such a comparison Bloggers, I swear.  But rather I’m just interested in the effect Scott Pilgrim had on my young Torontonian friend…

…Which is to say, I am kinda interested in myself, but mostly I’m interested in seeing how this guy copes with a cultural context he inherited from me and his mother and all our friends.  Because I didn’t expect him, of all things I did not expect him, to resent the Scott Pilgrim movie, and feel like it was “fucking with him”.  I thought he’d just naturally love it, as I did and do.  But…

Can I just get back to that, in a minute?

(Some of you may want to get a cup of coffee, for this part.)

So there are a couple of things about this younger generation (although GOD but I detest loose-witted “younger-generational” excuses for “older-generational” self-dissatisfactions, but just for a moment please!) that have been made popular in the general mass media but that turn out not to be true…that very plainly to us, Bloggers, have no substance to them whatsoever.  For example, how bankrupt is the idea that there was a generation of people (ugh) whose special province was the exploration of influence, the charting of artistic continuity, and that the ones that came before them made little insular kingdoms of taste, and the ones that came after were just ahistorical remixers who did excessively brilliant cut-up art but never saw a linking thread that wasn’t magical in its character:  working by the ancient laws of sympathy, proximity, or similarity, and tossing aside the secret logical connections of Kingdom for the inspired collisions of Plasma?  Answer: very very fucking bankrupt, is how bankrupt that idea is.  Were the young people of today not supposed to care about history?  Was history just supposed to fold around them and dissipate when it met its own outer edges, in some sick Childhood’s End fantasy of the last generation’s poignant Living Will?  It’s not an expression I like to use, Jeeves, but:  tchah.  The “younger generation” types (like that even means anything!) have turned out to be far better and far more responsibly literate historians than many of their “older generation” predecessors, and the myth of their short attention span is like a misery-loves-company wish-dream;  the loss of what they now call “cursive script” in schools is not on the kids but on the (bad) teachers, who want the kids to not have the Good Tools because (just like the principal dude in The Breakfast Club!) they’re more interested in their own past disasters than they are in the future…

Sorry;  rant! But listen, I tutored a lot of these teacher-type clowns when they were undergraduates…and I can tell you pretty authoritatively, there are a lot of them that prefer cracked mirrors to open windows…

(And, don’t come back from your coffee just yet…you may want to put an extra sugar or two in there, or something…I mean what I’m saying here, in plain English, is stall…)

…So, but what I meant to say before I got started on that rant, is that when The Breakfast Club came out it was not seen then as it is now:  through the two-foot airport glass of nostagia.  Instead, it was loathed as much as it was loved.  Yeah, check it out:  it was loathed, as much as it was loved.  And there’s a reason for that, and the reason’s called “realism”.  Some people saw themselves in that movie, and admired its fidelity to their experience.  Others saw it as a colossally over-romantic slap in the face to life as it’s really lived.  And these differences didn’t exactly cook down according to party lines…at least, not the very obvious party lines that were drawn-out by the movie itself…but even so, more of the “outsiders” probably were annoyed with the thing than any of the “insiders” were, because there was a feeling afoot at the time that this movie was more for the “insiders” than their outer-dark brothers and sisters…and this really polarized the general “generational” view of John Hughes as time went on.  Sappy “feel good about yourself” crap, is how black-painted people in their mid-twenties tended to characterize the movie “Home Alone”, as though anyone even asked them to see it…maudlin faux-nihilists beyond the very most excessive dreams of even Michael Moorcock, these proto-hipsters seized on the dehumanization of unlikely, lucky, intelligent, funny, and humane filmmaker John Hughes as a weird point of pride:  I am against this…!

All because, probably, just a few years earlier they had been seduced by the comforting lesson of The Breakfast Club…because they were, in fact, the ones much closer to “inside” than “outside”.  So in a way the canard was true, but then again that it pretty much had to be true is not really the fault of John Hughes:  since how could the “real” outsiders in my town think either this or that of The Breakfast Club when like Napoleon Dynamite they just stayed in their rooms drawing ligers, and were never invited to Movie Thursdays in the first place.  Eh?  They didn’t even know this polarization was something to be a part of.  It was only the people who might find something in it, who did find something in it, and then began the campaign of coolness against John Hughes long long long after they should’ve cared…

…Because it had claimed to be realistic?

Well, it never did claim that, actually…but those who are flattered by a thing always see realism in it, you know.  Some cops used to say Hill Street Blues was realistic;  some doctors used to say that ER was realistic.  Absurd, of course…I mean it’s like saying Battlestar Galactica is realistic, or something…

(Maybe stir a little cream into that coffee?)

So the fun thing here is that Scott Pilgrim is completely not realistic, and cannot even be mistaken for being so in the smallish ways that John Hughes’ movies somehow mistakenly were…and yet it’s all of a piece here anyway, because we never were expecting Mike Leigh or Ken Loach or anything from most of our filmic or televisual entertainments, were we?  And “real” realism is not really a real thing, that we talk about in this way in the first place;  we know perfectly well that this word stands more for some sort of topical consanguinity than it does for any actual representational truth, so “fidelity to experience” or the reading of realism in flattery…well, that’s just playing with our descriptors the same way the movie plays with our images.  Sixteen Candles, as a matter of fact, is a lot like Scott Pilgrim in its creation of a convincing analogic world where impossible, forbidden, and deeply longed-for transactions can occur in just this way…and the internal trivia, the trivial logic, of world-building takes hold very firmly to make it so.  The themes, the arcs, the conclusions are all simple as can be, purest boilerplate really, and obviously pure fantasy…but each makes a special aesthetic feast of those generic frozen-chicken-finger ingredients, that is the viewer’s aesthetic:  flattering, funny, forgiving…hopeful.  Well, but The Breakfast Club actually is “realistic”, by those lights…!

Except that it ended up being vexed in a way that Sixteen Candles was not, and so the word was harder to apply in a casual, dare I say apolitical way.  Which is naturally down to the movie’s very ambition:  seeming to give an easy answer, but all too conscious that the answer in reality is not so easy, it shows it and then it takes it away, in a movement most profound to the mind of its intended audience-member.  And you can’t not see the drawing hand behind that sort of thing:  it has a point, but the point’s much more like the point in a play than the point in a movie, and so in a way it’s garbage.  It’s thoroughly artificial, and so is deemed to be a cheat.  Although it really is not…

But then…in a way…

…It sort of still is.

And that’s in the play, too.

***

(Okay, you can come back from your cup of coffee now.)

Let me just say that there was always something in me that resented the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off…I mean, resented it like hell.  And maybe that’s why I kept on seeing it over and over.  I saw The Breakfast Club over and over too…because I was one of those people who had just graduated high school, had not yet found their own new thing to do.  For guys like me, dating girls still in school, feeling viscerally tied to that weird conceptual environment…it was hard to break free.  I mean:  I wanted to break free, but it was hard.  And so to me it all had something of a secret message, a subtextual trivia-reality that I could locate my misgivings in…and yet still not have to do anything about them…and so it was very forgiving indeed, and even better than that it was useful…

But enough about that, as we get back to Edgar Wright, whose Hot Fuzz (and to a slightly lesser, or possibly just more cryptographic degree Shaun Of The Dead) is a movie I can’t believe American audiences even liked…! Because it’s built on influence so very strongly.  Beyond the callback to The Avengers in the final battle in the model village, which any normally-hip person is sure to pick up on, its televisual anglophilia runs so deep and spreads out so wide that myself I expected to see Penelope Keith in the thing and maybe I even did…! Expected to see Robbie Coltrane wandering around in it and maybe that even happened…! Why it shocked me to my core that there was not a portrait of Helen Mirren on a wall somewhere in this movie, I expected to see Saffy as a vampire, Felicity Kendall viciously slam Simon Pegg in the gut with an organic artichoke, this was JLA/Avengers stuff here, and it was no less pretty and no less ugly, and wasn’t Timothy Dalton just fantastic in that episode of Midsomer Murders? He really was, wasn’t he.  And so this is the Northrop Frye thing, really:  if you’re trying to read John Donne and you don’t know your King James, you’re not going to get more than 40% of the logical density.  Well, I said the “younger generation” aren’t exclusively ahistorical remixers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do any remixing, you know…!  And yet still, Edgar Wright is no more of the generation he appeals to, than John Hughes was of the generation he appealed to.  Born in 1974 (according to Wikipedia, anyway), the director of a couple movies I like a great deal and one that I LOVE UNREASONABLY (if I may just remind you) is not quite as much older than my Torontonian friend, as John Hughes was older than me…but he is close, and that puts him in about the same ballpark as the Old Master, and arguably doing the same sort of difficult things excellently:  i.e. setting a beat that others can drum along to, recognizing as their own.  But more than that, absolutely Edgar Wright at…what, 36 or something?… is most definitely old enough to have absorbed some of the flavour of the young-adult Nineties (as Brian Lee O’Malley is just a bit too young to really have done) where I made what you might call my second adolescence.

Every generation is encumbered by the “coolnesses” of the previous one, you see;  it takes time for that stuff to work itself through the cultural alimentary passage.  And so here are the T-shirts, here are the shoes, why no wonder I liked this movie so much here is even my generation’s riff on Audrey Hepburn, the Unobtainable Girl with the ever-changing hair colour.  My shit’s still not over, it seems:  it keeps gaining vitality.  Skateboarding with the good trucks?  Invented it. Video game logic/music?  In at the start. Basement-suite living?  Jesus, no wonder Ben was driven crazy by this.  The shoes, the quokes, the party scenes…that’s all me, isn’t it?  Me and mine.  I me mine.

But all through that beautifully-rosy two inches of nostalgic airport glass.  “Fuck you, Twenties, you can’t hurt me anymore!” I think that’s what I felt.  “Fuck you, Bueller!” It really was a wonderful moment, because where Ben saw it and thought, “oh movie, why you gotta rub my nose in it like that?” I saw it and and thought “why what wonderful virginal blood you have, movie, all the better for me to bathe in and now I shall NEVER GROW OLD, NEVER NEVER…!” Honestly, the Unobtanium Girl, the fantasy of how she is nevertheless-obtained is my own personal cry-yourself-to-sleep-at-night Alvy-Singer-play that’s-how-it-would’ve-gone-if-she-wasn’t-a-person distortion…and I would almost feel like I need a royalty from its use, except oh movie, oh movie, you did give it to me just the way I always wanted it, didn’t you?

Well…

It did, actually.

Because when I entered the early Nineties, where just about all this hip shit came from (what, you thought hipness was reinvented every seven years? nope, that’s Disney audiences), I had a very odd experience indeed.

“It’s called paedogenesis, Ben,” I said to him.  “The amount of time an organism spends as a juvenile, it’s changing in front of our eyes.”  And this much anyway, Bloggers, is true.  Fifteen years ago, the Canadian government defined a “young adult” as anyone up to the age of thirty-four…and this year it’s actually crossed forty.  The cause of this is schooling, one of the most powerful technologies ever invented by the human mind, macro-circuits like in Neil Gaiman’s version of Jack Kirby’s “Eternals”…big factory/prison style buildings, with input and output and throughput, Plato’s Academy only with the changes of efficiency and equality wreaked on it.  Biologically, we’re adults as soon as we hit puberty — “shaddup and drink yer gin!” — and it takes us the longest to get there, even in the pure bio-state, of any other land-walking animal on the planet! — but school changes us, my dears.  In that, as a certain two-time winner of the George Orwell Award For Clarity In Language might assert, it erodes the distinction between childhood and adulthood, erodes its marks and erodes its privileges on both sides, and puts the young into a peculiar position indeed…as now unlike any other creature on the whole Earth, being of reproductive age and achieving maturity don’t mean the same thing anymore, for us.  I mean…

…Heck, it isn’t even close, really.

But we’ll get back to that my dears, back to it…back to it…I mean we obviously can’t get to it now, can we?  Not, at least, when it seems the topic of how childhood and adulthood are constituted is itself such an alarmingly vexed one…so constructed, so fluidly-changing, so interpenetrated with all the other practical (read: social) issues of “how to be in the world” and indeed what that world even is…in the London streets of Dickens one sees it very clearly as the interference produced by several overlapping worldviews that the individual must find a way to transit, and for the poor at any rate the necessity is absolutely urgent, so the boundaries between interpretations are correspondingly more permeable.  After all, if “childhood” is in some way the creation of the state of being wealthy, it only seems to stand to reason that as one’s environment gets wealthier one’s guiding definitions about childhood get harder to perturb…but on the streets, where being alone and unsupported is the most dangerous thing in the world, the notion of childhood/adulthood itself becomes fungible, and the cultural dialogue that surrounds it becomes correspondingly more interreactive.  One “is” not one thing or the other, but one is a much more active identity-seeker than any “is”-type category would allow.

Which is the whole problem/burden/unexpected joy of adolescence…not being one thing or the other, but instead being an active seeker after identity no matter what one’s socioeconomic class happens to be.  Because paedogenesis puts a strain on all of us…

As it put a strain on me too, of course…but then off I went to university, into a comfortable paedogenetic limbo of sorts, where those forces were balanced in a new activity.  Aha, except that then I bombed right out of university, and the superposition of states failed:  and back into my own hands fell the liquidity of a “youthful” identity, which really amazed me because I totally thought I was too old to have it.  However, starting work, starting roommate living, out from under any sort of umbrella of purpose…I’m not saying it isn’t something we all do, I’m saying that it is something we all do, but what’s interesting to me, about my story, is that the second adolescence had two components.  One being that it came right on the heels of an abject social failure…

…And the other being, that it was a wonderfully freeing time, a time between, an untethered time that felt a lot like adolescence, except that this time it was without the paedogenetic frustrations that run through teenagehood like Judd Nelsons through hallways.  And once having tasted that absence of frustration, who would ever go back to it, eh?  Con-sider yerself…!

But we’ll get to all that later, because now we finally are on to the business of Scott Pilgrim.

And you know, one of the great things about this for me was the Canadianness of it…I deeply recognize the locales as wonderful analogues of the places I lived in, the places I went to.  BACK THEN.  Through the airport glass.  But for my good friend over there, they actually are the places he does live, they are actually the places he does go…and there ain’t nothin’ analogic about it, and besides that it isn’t great.  Because they are loving looks at those places, but they are not his loving looks.  Though not a single soul will ever come riding to the rescue of an averagely white guy who feels colonized, still that’s exactly how he feels, and he’s not wrong.  We’re all colonized, some time or another.  But some of us, strangely enough, are supposed to like it.  And not start complaining when you get absorbed by your own stuff.  Because that doesn’t make any sense, right?  How can you colonize you? How can you think you have a leg to stand on, if you want to complain about that?  However, as I always say, the people in the world who complain about the Americanization of their culture — your Nike, your McDonald’s, and so on — really would do well to stop and remember that these things colonized America itself first, and that’s even something that’s still being fought over.  The slang of California, the music of the Rockies, how to broil good beef and boil good bagels…southern-fried poker, with its weird in-between hands like Little Dog and Blaze.  All the myriad folkways of an America that was, that people are trying to hang on to, but having trouble articulating why, what’s so valuable about it, etc. etc.  And as well, the America that may be, the melting-pot of the twenty-first century…all that stuff, too, is threatened by “Americanization”, is it not?  That great modernist steel-and-glass superskyscraper, good to no one for nothing, except it makes money.  Real culture has to go underground, in the sight of that monolith…

…And, just try to make the best excuses it can?  Up in Canada, we see that pretty clearly, and identify with it.  The thing you’re forbidden to complain about it, because it’s you, and other people don’t have a problem it, and it’s you…and other people don’t have a problem with it.  Oh, just because it’s a bit weird up here, you see?  Not to jump any guns, but Canada is strange because although it’s a post-colonial country — like Rhodesia minus the diamonds! — it still isn’t a post-revolutionary one, and so although it loves being part of stable old North-North America, the super-Anglo part, and feels for the most part rather cushioned in its nice-and-wealthy viewpoints (we are talking about the white people here, obviously, and don’t worry I will get back to this in a more complex and cautious way, for now I’m just dashing paint around) it still is true that we’ve got a little bit of what they call in ivory towers the “colonial mentality” — that weird pushme-pullyou perspective in which identity is always contested, and doing the contesting, all at once.  So…

Scott Pilgrim.  No wonder I loved it, but also no wonder my friend felt like it was touching him in a bad place, and couldn’t quite get his head around how to say that without having people jump all over him and tell him he was being insane.  And I confess, I’ve never had anyone make a movie about me before, only featuring someone who’s exactly not like me, acting out my own colonial-mentality second-adolescent drama to himself while I watch and wonder how not to be insulted at being made to take that stance with respect to my own story…

(“It was like you and American Splendor, only I didn’t like mine…!“)

…I wouldn’t know about that, because (you see) the biggest movie anyone’s ever made in my town, that went to my places, is still Rumble In The Bronx.  Not exactly a threat.  The North Shore Mountains leaping and soaring over New Jersey and Manhattan:  hovercrafts beaching near where I was swimming.  “You are all cabbage.” It was like the ultimate triumph of Canadian locations being used for Anytown, U.S.A., Canadian actors being used as Anypeople, U.S.A.  Simply as crazy as it could get, and I loved it.  I felt, in a strange way, almost vindicated by it…

…And American Splendor, that was just a whole other thing, obviously.  But it was vindicating too.

So, those two things were very nicely split up, for me…!

But not for Ben.

And is it not bad enough that he is walking around in all the cultural detritus that me and his mother and our friends left for him?  Because he is, you know:  the T-shirts and the shoes, the little hipnesses and the dream-girl we invented.  My story, perhaps…and so not his.  By the time “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World”‘s source material was done, Brian Lee O’Malley was thirty years old.  Dude, that’s old.  As old as the chick who wrote Juno.  It’s like his life is going in reverse, played out onscreen:  things that we are removing from your imaginable possibilities.  Oldies:  gone for good.  And so what’s a guy to do?  They just come for you now, eh? And it’s just movies, other people don’t have a problem with it, how can you possibly pretend to feeling “oppressed” or anything, I mean isn’t that just ridiculous?

I must say, though I’m not feeling what he feels there with movies, there is something that this all reminds me of, and that’s…

…The Olympics, of course.  That one felt like a hovercraft riding up over my head.  And I really, really, really hated that aspect of it.

Seven evil rings.

But of course, I never beat them.

Because I got so in the habit of mistaking one thing for another over my lifetime, that I forgot the big lesson, and fell between the stools.

***

Yes, in case you were wondering:  my new little nephew’s name is Oliver.

But, what were we talking about?

Gee, y’know…that’s the problem with blog-posts that go on too long, isn’t it?  Eventually you stray from the clear focus you had at the beginning, and that’s when you’re bound to make a misstep, say something you didn’t mean, or can’t defend.  Does it all add up to anything?  Is any of it true?

Well…

That’s a good question, isn’t it?

But any question can go more than one way, I guess…

…So anyway there’s that!

And so that’s that.

LOVED. THIS. MOVIE.

But get those links while they’re hot, eh?  Because I think Sony’s taking them away even as we speak.

Okay!

Flashback! To “American Splendor…!”

Why I waited so long, I don’t know.

But a little while ago I spent about four days watching American Splendor, another couple of days rooting around the Internet for various memorials, and rather felt like Harvey Pekar had colonized my soul for a long moment…which is no bad thing, for sure: because at the time I was dead broke and doing nothing but writing stuff and mailing stuff and boiling stuff to eat, and it’s all okay, that stuff, those little patches of put-your-head-down doldrumish living, in that it gives you that virtuous self-flagellating feeling…nevertheless, role models help, too! And Harvey-ish old Harvey, honestly he makes a pretty good one.

So there’s that, right away, before anything else.

But then on top of it the movie was real interesting to me, even if (I suspect) not for the reason the folks at Sundance and Cannes found it interesting — because I was fascinated by Paul Giamatti’s effort to “translate” Harvey. Of course no translation’s perfect, and every translation can’t help but betray the personality of the translator, that’s not exactly news…but in this case the subject’s pretty challenging, and that’s likely why things got weird in such a way, in this translation, that I can’t help but wonder what really went on in the making of this movie, can’t help trying to pick out the seams between the scenes. Everywhere you look in it, there are filters that acknowledge their own existence to you, and yet at the same time seem calculated to draw you in past them as though they were transparencies. Paul G. looks like himself sometimes, like “real Harvey” in flashes, other times (as I’m sure everyone has already said) like another caricature of Harvey out of American Splendor itself…and yet other times like a guy doing Serious Acting (or Comedic Acting) in a way you’re supposed to notice, while still other times not…and in total, it’s like something of all of them. And to me the whole thing’s all weirdly visible because of that, kaleidoscopic almost; sometimes the dialogue sounds like a ninth-grader wrote it, for an Afterschool Special no less…a demonstration of how what constitutes “realism” is sometimes prone to change with your platform, I think, as something tells me all the clunkiest-sounding stuff was lifted right off Harvey’s own pages…and yet it’s just at these times, in these vexed moments, that Paul G. is also extremely convincing, perhaps more convincing than at (almost) any other time, right when he has to infuse the clunk with something else to make it read more real. And this is acting that’s a bit harder to…I want to say “notice”, but I think “appreciate” might be better? There’s a grating absurdity to the staging of certain scenes, stuff you just know can’t have been somebody’s idea of the best thing to do…when Harvey meets Crumb we are treated to a weird myoclonic twitch of Hollywood-style hagiography, “two legends meet”, and it seems wildly underconceived: “hey, I’m inta comics myself, man”. Jesus, it’s like watching Roadhouse for the briefest of instants, all about how bullshit characters bump into one another, Roadhouse with a dollop of 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould thrown in. Comic-book stuff, you know? It’s a fight scene, or it would be if somebody was playing this a lot more meta than they are…but they aren’t, and it isn’t, so it’s more peculiar overlap, more kaleidoscope stuff…

But for me it’s a bit hallucinatory too, and therefore it works frighteningly well, to draw me in…because that’s my scene, I grew up in those rainy, shitty backyards with their garage sales, I recognize the clothes and I recognize the argot, I feel as though I am there, as though at any moment I myself might walk into the scene in the background, broke, hands in pockets, trying hard to look cool. Okay, and it’s not really synchronized well, it’s a few years out; but it’s just a few, and that’s still all the stuff I remember. Add to this that I can totally relate to Harvey, I consider myself a connoisseur of people like Harvey…and also maybe it’s just that so many people have banged on about the resemblance to me, that I can’t help seeing a bit of myself in Paul G…although my friend Stu D. looks a lot more like him than me, and so I see Stu in there too, and Stu’s inta comics himself, man, and so who does that make me in this movie again…? Weird deja- and double vu-type shit everywhere, and I don’t know if I remember all of it, or just enough of it to make me think I remember more than I do. Did I see Harvey’s friend Toby on a tape or something sometime, at some hipster’s house years later, and get ported back to the Eighties in the seeing? And thence to the early Seventies in my memory, perhaps, down the road of childhood but I just DON’T KNOW, it’s all wreathed in some kind of nostalgic familiarity but I’m not sure it’s mine. And yet, at the same time, I’m quite sure it is. There’s so much I recognize in here from comics, so much I’m bringing to this movie myself…there’s so much that Harvey and I share, even though we were not contemporaries or even neighbours, our towns are nothing alike and our lives are completely set apart…and yet, and yet, and yet once again. We go from scene to scene in the old movie-making fashion, though on first viewing we may not notice it…it’s just a thing about movies these days you know, the structure is all buried somehow, the lines of the symbolic skeleton are hard to discern under all the thick flesh and flabby motion laid on top of it. Stuff you have to have, of course, like you have to have the moment where Harvey slumps down and realizes he has to change his life, the most standard Hollywood motivational boilerplate there ever was and YET…!

It happened, didn’t it?

Paul G. plays it from the inside in that bit, just like he knows it…like he knows he’s in the scene in the movie where the hurtin’ songs are all over the radio after the breakup with the girl, like he’s resigned to the fact that it looks that way, and he can’t change how it looks. And that’s the movie, really; when he turns to Crumb on the bench and bitterly complains about his go-nowhere life, and his voice cracks…it’s like a bad movie then, something the kids in the theatre would laugh at, repeat to each other as a catchphrase later on…but that’s all true too, I think, even if this is Paul trying to say something and make it look natural, when probably only Harvey himself could make that bit look natural, because guys like Harvey are just really hard to emulate, you know? They’re too much themselves, they’re tough to reduce. And so there are things that break there, and a bit of real angst seeps through into that bad moment…it is really a good moment, then, and it sticks in my craw, I can’t quit replaying it. Translation hits a limit there, and I don’t know if that was intended, but it does work. Well…

Probably it was not intended?

Probably it really wasn’t, although on repeated viewings I did see the deep structure, the skeletonization of the thing…the symbolic balance that was designed into it, that could not have been accidental. In movies there is a strange thing that sometimes happens where the changing of the scene — the changing of it! — is what reveals character by carrying content, much as a penciller draws the eye across a page, or (probably more accurately) a colourist pushes it. It isn’t just about knowing where to end one thing and begin another, it’s about how that’s done — because it can be done many ways. A film is a montage, finally, in its core, and it obeys the dynamical rules of attraction and repulsion that animate a montage, the stuff they get down so pat with trailers, by snipping scenes and piping in music, playing with the beat of your expectations. It’s like comics, too, that part; as a montage and a collage have, inevitably, a lot in common. But in the actual movie it’s as well not to lean too heavily on the crutch of music, there, not to just say “take it to the bridge!” and then jam any old eight into the middle. That’s not really the high level of doing those things anyway, even if you do just put the music in there because you can you still must find a reason for it being that music, it can not really be “any old eight” and still tell you something at the same time. You’ve got to be more judicious than that. And sometimes “music” isn’t the answer, in a scene transition — because there are other ways of chasing down the dynamic of a transition, that follow the same rules as the other kind of break but use different devices. And sometimes that’s better.

And it does happen here, and you can see the intent percolating along behind it, and that’s fine…even if it takes a couple viewings, it’s still fine. It’s actually not the main thing, though I seem to be harping on about it a bit here…it’s not the main thing, but it tells you something about the toolbox of craft that’s being used here. But, that break, on the bus stop bench…I don’t know if that’s out of the same toolbox. Later on, when Harvey turns to Joyce and asks her if he’s real, if he can survive himself…it is the same thing as the bench, it is the same thing, but what was previously “bad” is reconstructed here as “good”…now Paul is being Harvey in a way he wasn’t before, or Harvey’s being Paul, or we’re being both of them…something’s happened to the kaleidoscope, it’s all collapsed in on itself, and the light’s broken through. Art? Yeah, well, but that kind of thing’s happened to me, you know? I’ve been there; right there. It isn’t just something somebody made up, it’s real, and meanwhile the real Harvey is still sitting in the White Room, too, comfortable as you please, no monolith in sight but just people wandering around in that holding-tank of a space, that strange little isolation ward, peculiar little spaceship…and the most important thing about that scene is that it happened, not to Charlie Chaplin or Achilles or Batman, but to Harvey Pekar. Paul will get just so close to him in his final soliloquy, he will get extremely close actually, if you know what Harvey looks and sounds like, and if you watch. He’ll get as close, really, as he’ll ever come. And that’s how a real actor does it, I think: I think the world of Paul’s skill, and here at last you do get to see it in “full” performance, the one-man show style. So suddenly it goes meta as anything, and a bunch of tensions built up in the “translation” resolve themselves…

Happily…

But, was it actually planned-out that way?

I guess that doesn’t really matter; the French liked it well enough without knowing that. Aha, the French, they really did like it, didn’t they? I amuse myself by imagining why: because here was something really, really American, but also something they could come to grips with, this Very American Thing, so aha! That’s what they’re like, I knew it! I swear I knew it all along.

Of course, I don’t see it that way. Because I’m not seeing it, I’m feeling it…I’m feeling all that weird familiarity, that nostalgia, loaded on top of the slice-of-life and the artful construction. It’s like a mirror to me, as to them (I imagine) it is more of a window. Sitting there boiling my potatoes and trying to write enough decent stuff down to call it a proper day, feeling broke, feeling invisible. Economizing, in many more ways than one. I’m as old now, as Harvey was when Revenge Of The Nerds came out.

Do you remember that movie?

Man, I remember that movie.

There is no part of it, that I don’t somehow remember.

Funny how that goes.

Flashback! To “No Country For Old Men…!”

So, here it is at last…my favourite Coen Bros. movie.

I’ll always have a soft spot for Miller’s Crossing and Raising Arizona, mind you…but this is so obviously what it’s all been building to, all along, that I don’t see any way for it not to be my favourite Coen Bros. movie.  This is where it all folds together, where the longtime fan finally gets — so unexpectedly, in these days of boiler-room art marketing! — a payoff, not merely a punchline.  A way of looking, of seeing, of talking, of listening…the wry and the sinister, the cute and the chilling and the conversational…

…The space and the time.  The whole thing’s as lean and as spare as anyone could want, and yet there are oceans in it:  time for the eye to drink in everything it needs to.  Time to drink in the colours of the evening sky, and really what is any American movie ever doing, if it isn’t providing excess vista for the viewer’s retina to be enriched by?  Of course the Coens are old hands at this, and everyone knows it;  but here, too, there is a sense of culmination implicit in every frame and beat, that descends all the way from good old Blood Simple‘s formal intrigue, down to plain and hard-hitting personal meaning in the end.  The tricks aren’t tricks anymore, and they’re not to be simply admired now:  every odd observational joke the Brothers ever made is revisited here in the light of some kind of horror — the one aesthetic, as I believe I may have mentioned recently, that is always relevant.  Whose very soul is relevance:  because “irrelevant” horror is a contradiction in terms.

And that’s what’s so remarkable about this movie, pretty much in a nutshell:  it hews to relevance as such a through-line, as such a code, that it (to my mind, anyway) invites rare comparisons.  You may feel free to disagree, naturally;  but before I get back to why I love the thing so much as a movie experience, I just want to get into how it lights up the fluorescent spiderweb of influence in my own mind as a viewer.  This is maybe going to sound a bit whacked-out, because it’s not just Buddhism but Batman too…and just as (I’m so fond of saying) Repo Man was the greatest movie about skateboarding culture ever made, though it included not one railslide or ollie, so I think this movie’s about as Buddhist as it gets though it contains not one shred of ethicity.  And it’s not just for the noir-intersection that we all sometimes sense but never say, that I call it thus:  the grim fidelity to the actual that deliberately lets aesthetic prescriptions slip from its hand…well, but if the through-line in question isn’t centred on good and bad, how about beautiful and ugly instead?

Or, if not beautiful and ugly…how about intelligent and unintelligent?

Skilled and unskilled?

Appropriate and inappropriate?

Close to the Way and far from It, perhaps.  Oh heck, maybe that is what I mean to say.  You see there is at least a bit of Buddhism in every movie, every book…because it isn’t a religion, you know.  It’s an action…

So look, a little weirdly now, at Franny And Zooey:  a sutra retold in chic 1950s New York magazine style, a roman a clef for the paperback generation just feeling their eclectic oats at that time.  Oh, there go the first fireworks outside my window, but I prefer these fireworks:  it’s still incredible to me, that all the various Big Serious short-story writers of twentieth-century America who felt themselves so indebted to Salinger’s influence refused to actually pick up on anything he put out there for their benefit…but do you all think it possible, even conceivable, that crazy old Cormac was the one who got the transmission at that particular Flower Sermon?  Tough truth:  well, if noir is anything it’s elliptical.  And it owes you nothing you don’t already possess.  It doesn’t even offer the thing called understanding:  but instead it merely demonstrates an object.  So, there’s no “story” there, as such…

…Just as my countryman Denys Arcand knew, when he performed his culmination of oeuvre:  there Rene sits in hospital, grappling with the reality of cancer, of death, and that reality truncates every other Hollywood story that bubbles up around him.  All the tropes and all the conveniences fall to the ground half-used, and pointless:  focus is bestowed on a grateful audience, and then it’s taken away, perhaps to see if the gratitude can persist…

…Or even, possibly, evolve.  A hundred pitches in a minute, the Hawking radiation of plot-production, it’s just like The Player, and it’s got just the same point:  stories are great, but ultimately they’re contrivances, and ultimately they evaporate and blow up.  They’re very pretty when they overlap, they make lovely abstract Spirographic particle-tracks…but their purposes are hard to specify, in any complete way.  Stories have limits;  stories have restrictions.  Sometimes it’s necessary to remind ourselves of that.  Say, do these balloons come in funny shapes?

Well:  nope.

‘Less round is funny.

No, I’m not done yet, though my point was arguably done before I even put it in the oven…but let’s take that existential humour for a moment, and look at Batman with it.  Shall we?  Fucking Batman, that’s who it always comes back to on the comics-geek Internet, but there’s a reason for that:  I remember Geoff Klock said he didn’t go to Frank Miller because he thought Frank was a politics expert, but that he went to Frank because Frank is a Batman Expert…and I’ve gotta tell you, that expression’s been rolling around in my head for a good long time, now.  A “Batman Expert”?

What in the hell, I ask you, could that possibly be?

Whatever it is, it seems plain that Grant Morrison’s pretty much determined these days to prove himself one.  But a link comes in, here, courtesy of Batman #700…entitled “Time And The Batman”, for those of you who don’t know, and so there’s a man who understands the spirit of insouciance that the superhero’s heart needs to keep itself beating…!

…And in it, the Batman of the future mocks a supervillain, saying basically “using all these old Master Plans from old Batman comics, don’t you have any sense of originality?”

And the villain replies:

“I don’t invent;  I innovate.”

And right there, I’ll tell you folks…

…That’s the killer line, for sure.

Because it’s absolutely nothing, if it’s not philosophically relevant.  It’s boundary-crossing stuff:  hey, why in the hell would you bother reading these awesome Morrisonian Batman comics anyway, what can they possibly hold for you?  Well, the answer is as simple as pie:  they hold exactly what they have…!

And thus:  a mystery is reaffirmed.  Sure, it looks like it’s just more “meta” stuff, but it isn’t:  it isn’t as insular or as incestuous as that.  It’s a real problem, instead:  what are books about? What are movies about?  Batman’s questions about them are no different from your own, and the answers he gets are the same too.  Story is a burden.  But story is also a beauty.  Morrison’s Batman stories are always ending, always decaying into their own toxic waste-products, and there is something threatening in that, but not unmagnetic.  We are forever poised at the lip of the falls, we are always just noticing that the handrail on the catwalk is beginning to give way….the story itself is always a neon pubescence, the moment of the story is always in the yet-to-come…and then suddenly in the next panel it’s already caught in the rear-view mirror, with no intervening time having passed.  It’s the Marvel Method writ strange:  the impact is felt in the moment yet to come, the impact is felt in the moment just past…the punch-line, eh?  Everything in Morrison’s Batman (especially in Morrison and Quitely’s Batman!) is a moment just past or a moment yet to come, but Batman is always centre-stage in the present, the moments dithering around him like speed-lines in a tunnel.  Still think this is off-topic?

You think Batman’s in there all alone, in the tunnel?

At the centre of “No Country” is a story that doesn’t happen, that we never see unfold.  That’s because the story doesn’t make as powerful a point as does its absence.  AND THE PUNCHLINE WAS ME!  DOODLE-DO!  DOODLE-DO! All superhero stories are a struggle with the nature of maya, of samsara…and if you’re the villain you lose that battle, but if you’re the hero you have no choice but to go beyond winning and losing, to a sort of weirdly absurd long-underwear version of standing-wave peace.  Batman, whatever it is we call Batman, whatever we mean when we say “Batman”, always wins.  Because that’s just what’s in the script, see?

It’s all mapped out already.

But no map’s ever any good without a compass, and that’s the lesson here.  So regard the oeuvre of the Coen Bros., all the funny little absurdities that deflate carefully-built characters:  koans, yeah.  It’s an accidental pun, a space for the “reader” of these words that’s left blank, so he can fill it in himself.  A spiderweb in the dark, under “black” light:  I mean look at these words, they’re gaps too, they’re UV silk too.  The pattern isn’t already there to be seen, it’s the act of seeing that creates the pattern in the first place.  The Grant Morrison Party Line, you could call it, or you could just call it a bit of postmodernism I guess.  We all think postmodernism’s dead because it ran into the very limit that it, itself, specified:  the limits of story, the limits of narrative.  But Gautama’s smile is never very far away:  postmodernism can be reconstructed, too, the same as anything else.  Postmodernism is a lot older than we think, it just has gone by a lot of different Christian names.  You listening, Mindless?  You’ve gotta admit, Damian…the detective thing, it’s fun, isn’t it?  Once you start seeing these things, you see them everywhere.  Sean says he can see the Lone Man everywhere, but I can’t see always him, I freely admit it — for whatever reason, I usually need help to see him — however what I can usually see without special prosthetic aid is the queer phenomenon of Character-As-Diaphragm, where POP! the interior life suddenly finds itself inscribed on the external landscape, and then POP AGAIN! the scalar forces flip to turn the external inwards, abruptly redefined as a bunch of historical scarring like the moving finger writes, on the inside…and you never know when it’s going to happen, so wisdom quickly becomes the ability to manage it whenever it happens.  Except that no wisdom is ever perfect, and no state of skillfulness lasts forever, or anyway remains unchanged for long…unless one is Batman, of course, whose relationship with Time is incorruptible.

Oh, he hews to the Way, does Batman!  He practises his artless art, for sure!

It’s his only real story…!

But enough about that;  we were talking about the Coen Brothers, and “No Country”.  And how it’s my favourite.  All those characteristically absurd deflations, they’ve always been a fingerprint:  the way of seeing and hearing has always been too sharp not to cut.  Here, though, it’s cutting different things.  Ordinarily, you laugh;  whenever you see Raising Arizona, you laugh.  The way you know you’re watching one of their movies is all in how you laugh:  you hear yourself doing it, and you know it’s them just by the sound.

But here, in “No Country”, that’s all turned around.  Folded:  because it really is Raising Arizona, you know?  But seen through the other end of the telescope:  and the humour punctures the ones who deliver the lines, instead of the ones who butt up against them.  It’s the same humour, exactly the same in every way, except it isn’t funny:  it’s terrifying.  And so, predictably, I laughed.  Those throwaway lines, those diamond-splitting strokes!  It’s so Morrisonian you could almost scream.

“DOODLE-DO…!”

Shit, but it’s threatening.  Magnetically threatening.  Headlights on a hill, noise followed by silence.  Real chaos is somebody having to change your feeding tube for you.  Little throwaway lines, sharp as steel splinters.  Deep blue skies.  We’ve seen this before — and that’s the point, that’s where the magnetism comes from in the first place — but never like this, and that’s the point too.

I could write ten thousand words on this movie, and never mention Batman once.  But because this post is essentially a haiku…I did.

Anyone wants to go postmodern on it, be my guest.

What I’m saying is:  all those patented Coen Bros. bits, those funny bits of theirs that they’re so good at…they froze my blood, in this movie.  That shit, in other words, got real.  It got real in a hurry.  I think there may even have been a Doppler effect, it got so real so fast.

I think I may even still be surrounded by the echo of it, actually.

Me and the Joker going down the tunnel with the speed lines.  Still not sure what the relationship of Noir to Enlightenment is, can’t quite seem to figure that one out, old chum.  But, yeah:  well, of course.

Truth is tough.

Tough…!

And also, incidentally:  beautiful, too.

Highly recommend this movie.

“Flashback! To “Star Trek 2009…!”

And okay, everybody: let’s be serious here. Serious enough not to shoot the messenger?

Yes.

Because you may have liked it, you may have found it fun, but this was a hardcore geek’s movie all the way around, and the sooner we all accept that, the sooner we can get down to recognizing what was genuinely good and genuinely bad about it, and put our liking for it in the appropriate perspective. The story that it wasn’t a hardcore geek’s movie, that’s very flattering I’m sure, but then spin always is — and the thing called “good marketing” has always been distinguished from bad marketing by just this: its willingness to flatter its intended audience with something mostly true, instead of mostly false. So, let me be (as the politicians say) “very clear about this” — in that I don’t want to give the impression that I think anyone’s wrong to like it. We all like the stuff we like, and obviously much of it is horrendously geeked-out and narrow-niched, and none of us are immune to marketing, and none of that is anything like a crime against good taste…but at the same time, I’d be horribly remiss if I didn’t point out that this thing made me laugh my head off in as many places as it made me groan, which is coincidentally the same number of places where it stimulated my inner fanboy’s, ah…

…Let’s call them “reflexes”.

And that isn’t necessarily all good stuff. Because there’s an evident calculation in that: this isn’t a movie, it’s three movies, because somebody somewhere decided that those fannish reflexes couldn’t be “properly” stimulated in just one movie…which is kind of, what’s the word, bad of them…and even worse, none of those three movies are really “movies” either, not even really pastiches of movies, just a memory quilt sewn from bits of other movies and shows and scenes and tropes and (let’s face it) fannish ideas about what would be cool, propped up by the somewhat-crazy and inordinately fan-servicey supposition that there are “good” Star Trek fans who are members of a basically-ungeeky mass market that is well-socialized, and then there are “bad” ones who just live in a little nitpicky ghetto of bad taste and daddy issues, and this movie’s for the “good” ones. Which, I should be sure to say in plain English, is pretty much horseshit…even, from a certain point of view, offensive horseshit…but horseshit that’s at least guilty with an explanation, horseshit that gets saved at the last minute with a Hail Mary pass as Mr. Spock accomplishes the cold restart of the warp engines, because thank goodness for the fact, Bloggers, that there aren’t actually any specially Star-Trek-ized daddy-issue geeks out there in truth as a genuine demographic, that the marketing charge can be fairly levelled against. But rather the existence of those fans as a category of human weirdness is just a fannish idea in itself…after all, who is it that even bothers to watch that “Trekkies” movie, anyway? I’ve told someone about that (awesome) movie, my words all flowing scrupulously from the Hipster Chakra so as to seem as palatable as possible, but then receiving this response no matter how much normal-guy topspin I tried to put on it:

“Yeah, I’m not really into Star Wars, man.”

Because you see, there’s the people who think it’s fucking bullshit, and the people who don’t, and those are the only demographics that exist…

…Whatever we tell ourselves because we happen not to be the guy dressed as Riker who thinks the presence of spirit gum on his face means he can be lewd in a “turbolift” to some girl. The “bad” Star Trek fans…

It isn’t Star Trek that makes them bad. Hell, I’ve been to a Thin Lizzy convention where two harmless people in wigs pledged their love to one another. Massive applause and cheering; everybody had a tear in their eye.

It wasn’t Thin Lizzy, that made that happen.

And so I know that this seems like a way over-the-top statement in terms of blind boldness, to some, but until and unless we can see our way clear to accepting its basic truth, we’re never gonna be able to see what was good about this movie and what was bad — until we can see that the “bad fans” are rare as green rubies, in other words an empty category jury-rigged by someone as a temporary demographic barrel for a temporary marketing gun, then we’re going to be victimized by the parts of this movie’s brilliant marketing scheme that aren’t so nice, and be convinced by them to give up our ability to critically evaluate a thing that we all love, all in the name of despising people who would be exactly like us but for the fact that they practically don’t exist at all. Or do we really want to be in a foxhole with that non-fan online who says things like “dude, it’s just comics; dude, it’s just big dumb fun?” I tell you honestly, brothers and sisters, when someone says something like that, what I hear really coming out of their mouth is “comics are stupid and childish, but I hate this self-identification I’ve chosen anyway so it all evens out”…

And so I reject the elitist sentiment, the negative aspect of the genius marketing plan for Star Trek 2009, in favour of the positive…and thus come to what I hope is honest criticism. “We’re” certainly all the good Star Trek fans…

But this isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, the best Star Trek movie.

And: now that the preamble’s over, let’s quickly begin again. With a fact we should all be able to agree on: that Star Trek (note how I italicize it) was once a fairly large mass-market entertainment machine, and that this is what the “bad fan” stuff is glossing over. My parents have seen “Wrath Of Khan”, for heaven’s sake. Everybody knows about “Beam Me Up, Scotty”. These aren’t deeply subcultural trivia, rare gems of secret knowledge, they’re more like dandelions: they’re everywhere. And yes, some people are allergic, but I humbly submit there’s a real simple rule of thumb, here. My grandmother knew the words to Yellow Submarine despite never having heard it; meaning she knew more about the Beatles than she knew about cooking spaghetti. Yes. That’s what a mass-market entertainment machine is, and the line’s pretty easy to draw. It’s easy to find people who know who Darth Vader is, a lot harder to find people who know who Commander Adama is. More people know Lois Lane, than know Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Star Trek used to be like that.

But not anymore. Of course no one could possibly have come to Star Trek 2009 who didn’t already at least know Jim Kirk, Spock The Ears Guy, Dammit Bones and Scotty…but then there are plenty of people like the “I’m not into Star Wars” guy who didn’t come, and they’re not fans…and do you and I and him and her really make all that much of a common cause with the “Dammit Bones” guy? Or, who are we really claiming to be, who is it we’re trying so desperately not to be? Nothing in Star Trek 2009 was made for the people who only knew those Jim-Bones Spock-Ears characters, because they weren’t the target audience: they were part of the marketing machinery that targeted the real audience in the first place, that audience which is actually much larger than their weird-ass “sure I’ll see it why not” demographic. But the existence of the Jim-Bones folks were only another method — albeit a very clever method, and one that paid for itself into the bargain! — of cashing pop-cultural credit out of the mass-market entertainment phenomenon that used to be called “Star Trek”. And I know I sound like a grouch, but you have to remember that (as I said) it’s no shameful thing to be successfully marketed to. My old friend Emma could tell you that. After all, she went through it way back when, when she confided in me that “actually I liked Grosse Point Blank”.

And I laughed, and said “Well of course you ‘actually liked it’, Emma! After all what is it, but something that was made to get you to say so, and say it in exactly so many words? You and your media-savvy eclectic hipster ways, they really totalled you up and marked you down! High-school outsider John Cusack returns to his class reunion, to a soundtrack you’ve been making mixed tapes of for more than ten years? Is there any way you could not like that?”

And: “Oh,” she said, frowning. “Well…shit. I guess they got me. Damn.”

“But hey,” I said, “why worry about it, you know? So we can be marketed to now…well, so what? What’s the harm? You did like the movie, after all; so would you rather they hadn’t made it, just so you could hang onto your impenetrable hipstress cred another year?”

And okay, Bloggers, I confess it: I did not sound quite this world-weary and wise at the time, and Emma’s both funnier and smarter than me anyway. But let’s take the right kind of gist out of this admittedly self-serving little microdrama…which is just that there’s no shame in developing your taste to a point where you can sometimes, under the right conditions, be handled as a part of a demographic. The irony, at least, oughtta be instructive: since when you started to make all this stuff up about what you liked/didn’t like, you spent at least as much time dreaming of replacing the Establishment as you did revelling in your outsider status. I mean, did we really know what we wanted then, either way? Did we really want to “take over”? Or did we really want to simply wash the old staid formulae away? You can’t live in the complex of undecidedness, the complex of opportunity, forever — eventually all your impulsions do recollide as you inherit your own cultural capital, but the question then is just the question that always was, which is: what kind of story is that going to end up being, as you get older? Will you still be able to own your own taste, once it becomes possible to commodify it? What postures will you be able to adopt with respect to it, that will still let you zig, and zag, and break new unanticipated ground? Or…are there even such postures to be had?

Well, sure there are, and no one’s saying there aren’t. If you’re like me and Emma, you don’t have to look at “Grosse Point Blank” as the point where you were forcibly cashed out, because you took your time about selling out…because nothing’s stopping you, after all, from engaging with that story…slapping the pen out of the marketers’ hands, and picking it up and turning it around to the page yourself…!

And thus it is, even so it is, with Star Trek 2009. That they got you doesn’t mean your story’s done, or become stupid or futile or pointless. HOWEVER!

HOWEVER…!

You’ve still got to get to grips with it, don’t you? Look, this movie’s pretty fucking cynical in places, honestly. You don’t think that first shot of the Enterprise isn’t her spreading her legs for you? What, do you think it’s a “real” picture of the Enterprise, you think that’s just what she “looks like” when seen from “that angle”? But there is no real Enterprise, and there is no “accidental” angle you can see her from, and it isn’t you that’s even doing the looking — it’s only you that’s doing the seeing. So, yes: they meant it like that. And if you think I’m saying that’s a bad thing…no, I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. I’m saying it’s a thing that made me laugh my head off, I’m saying it truly was a meant thing — listen up, for God’s sake, that image was MEANT! — but I’m not saying it made the movie a bad movie, or not even really a movie at all, or not even really three different bad-not-movies cut up into one.

Hell, I’m not even saying I didn’t like it.

But come on, it’s there. How is it not there? And somehow I don’t think it’s aimed at the casual Star Trek semi-fan, do you? And so maybe we would (naturally) like to excuse it by saying it is aimed at the “bad Star Trek fan”…but knowing deep down that this Bad Fan business is really code for us, maybe it’s better we pretend it isn’t there at all? The Enterprise legs-spreading thing? Is it possible we can laugh at it? But we like it too much, see that’s the problem. And we know it really isn’t for the people everyone tells us the movie isn’t made to please, don’t we? So we know that, at any rate.

The word, as I’m sure you know, is “self-loathing”. And we might take a moment to wonder what that concept really consists of. “I am this, but there are people who are every bit as this as I am, that I don’t like to think I am similar to.” Well, natch. Happens all over. But it happens more, sometimes: where real love, real idealism, real caring are called into the circle…it happens a lot more, then. Where nerves get raw, is where something’s really at stake, on both sides; and there’s perhaps nothing so alarming as a fellow fanatic, because you are not free to withhold your respect from them unless you are also willing to withhold it from yourself.

Succinct enough for you, Bloggers?

I mean there’s just one sort of GEEK, isn’t there?

Understand, I’m not saying there aren’t things in this movie I thought were fantastic. I thought the scene with Spock and Uhura in the turbolift was fantastic. But it was fantastic because I’m a Star Trek fan. As a reinvention, as an example of how this stuff can still be made fresh while simultaneously trading on tired old fanwanky expectations…well, there’s no other scene quite like it in the movie, and I mean that both sincerely and sadly. And as an example of things you can do in a movie, if making a “real” movie’s what you want to do, it’s really rather good. Not exactly stuff we’ve never seen before, true. But decent stuff, stuff with some emotional pep to it, a place in the script where acting can be done, a place where directing can be directing and not just CAD-work…but let’s not kid ourselves, the punch it had for dedicated and hopeful fans, that’s a different punch than the punch it had for casual fans who know Spock-Man and little else, that percentage of its audience made so remarkably low, by the fact that the original series was so remarkably good, and so appealing to the mass market. But then that’s also part of what makes it such an effective scene: that it invokes that semi-fan appreciation that our self-loathing (to the degree we have it) encourages us to identify with. And so in this sense, to the right sort of eyes, it’s got two different complexions. It’s got two different kinds of roots, it’s of two different worlds if you take my meaning…and that appeals to just a certain type of Star Trek fan anyway…

That is: to every Star Trek fan, if the truth be known. And yet not everything in the movie cooks out so felicitously. The Rebel Without A Kirk opening is pure nonsense, for example: one of the most unnecessary bits of paper-folding I’ve ever seen in any movie, I am telling you that whatever that Roy Scheider “Sealab” TV show was called (damn, what was it called?) (okay fine, so I know damn well what it was called, it’s an O’Bannon joint after all, I mean jeez), it did this same thing better and to more purpose. You know? And in fact that’s where the whole passage was lifted from, not from James Dean at all. (By the way, did you know J.J. Abrams is only three months older than me? Believe me, I know his influences cold, that guy. I could go as him on Hallowe’en, if I wanted to. Honest to God.) But anyway I won’t bore you you with all the nitpicky ubergeek stuff in that scene, that I could go on for hours and hours about, all the reasons it’s wrong, all the reasons it’s dumb because it doesn’t fit, all the reasons it’s amazingly ridiculous beyond all semblance of science…little “WhatNot” reference for you guys, there…except just to say that every complaint that’s ever been made about it is dead right, yes the supernerds are right about it all, I’m sorry folks!…even sorrier that you are the supernerds, because there are no other nerds but you here anyway!…because “dumb” is entirely as bad as that scene gets, and lots of movies have dumb crap in them, and therefore so what? When it’s just summer fun, right? People responded to that silly scene, it grounded their expectations of Chris Pine’s Kirk even if it it grounded them in remarkably inelegant style. But they knew what they were looking at, and that was the point.

It’s the only point this movie has, when you bake the shit out of it. You always know what you’re looking at. This is where the crosshairs are, you guys. You know when you’re looking at comic relief. You know when you’re looking at dramatic confrontation. You know what you’re looking at when you’re looking at “The Big Reveal”. You can almost imagine Jeff Probst sitting in the seat behind you saying “now wait for my go”. This isn’t a movie, not even three movies, it’s a telegraph transmission: message follows stop act surprised end. One-two punches?

I gotcher one-two punches right here.

Everything here is from something else. The original Star Trek series is mercilessly ripped-off every twenty-two minutes like clockwork, sometimes inelegantly in sense, sometimes elegantly in the copying of its highly-skilled rapid-fire should’ve-been-impossible-given-the-constraints quasi-Olivier-movie-style Shakespearean shot-framing; and the Star Trek movies are on a similar cycle, only exactly out-of-phase Mr. Spock…and the rest is stuff you saw in other places growing up. We’re missing John Cusack in alien nose make-up saying “come with me if you want to live, plate o’ shrimp”, sure, but that’s about it. It’s Photoshop filmmaking, a lot of the time: the effect of the big-ass sea-urchin Romulan ship with the rotting Caesar in its heart, so familiar from the Nemesis movie that gracelessly beamed down “Wrath Of Khan” into its scriptwriting process, is made infinitely more watchable by the hybrid filmmaking techniques born of computer colouring in comics, and whoever it was who did Firefly’s (and then BSG’s? am I right?) external action sequences — man, I’m telling you, this is a Wildstorm movie in so many ways! — and yet of course it’s still essentially dull no matter what tableaux are successfully made, because, how does one put this, no one cares. Seriously, the fucking vendetta-bound Romulans, it’s too much now. TOO MUCH. This guy’s like a Romulan space-trucker. , this Shakespearean villain-dude, here.  It’s stupid. But then it’s the first time the casual Star Trek fan has seen that shit since ST: TMP, right?

That’s what it is, right?

It’s a mash-up.

And one of the things that is worst and most wrong about it, is that it never aspires to be much of anything more. However, let me pause a minute to give some praise where it’s due…before I charge up the phasers again. Zachary Quinto’s momma’s-boy Spock? That’s some beautiful stuff, honestly: as good as the Thor-dude they had in the Ultimates, and possibly in exactly the same way. The pugnacious little dickhead Kirk, the burnt-out mid-thirties McCoy whose backstory is lifted from New Voyages pre-Vonda McIntyre (and do not tell me I don’t know the inside of J.J. Abrams’ skull as well as I know my own, damn you!), all just brilliant, the “pump-up-the-lens-flare” business on the hyperlit Ikea bridge, it’s all fine and good and good and fine. Bring the bar fights, bring my countryman Bruce Greenwood who played such a great sociopath on St. Elsewhere and…elsewhere…playing against against-type here, Canada’s own Dennis Quaid, and by the way we always knew one day he’d play Bobby Kennedy, that was always in the cards, guys…I believe he used to put in on his resume: “one day will play Bobby Kennedy”…

…And bring the callbacks to Marvel’s “Starfleet Academy”, bring that Claremont/Byrne X-Men shit too while you’re at it (Simon Pegg = Nightcrawler, FYI), bring every ingredient. The green chick. The Kobayashi Maru. The goddamn apple-biting in the Kobayashi Maru. You guys see this happening, right?

Truly, I hope to God you do: because it literally was made for you.

And, in places: extraordinarily well-made. But now enough with the praise for the influence-peddling: let’s talk movie-ness.

I keep saying there are three bits of movies stuck onto this thing. That’s because there are. One is the movie that’s the essential component of what you might call the whole “Star Trek Begins” business…the one with a young Kirk going to Starfleet Academy and being all Kirktastic. And that’s nostalgia-stuff, sure…but it’s also the movie we most came here to see, and for the best of reasons. Because the TNG stuff went hopelessly wanky and narrowcast long, long ago; because the TOS stuff needs rebooting in a huge way, if this franchise is going to stay a franchise. And because thanks to Gene Roddenberry’s Runyanesque work habits back in the Sixties it all still works as well as it ever did…and so somewhere in all those facts (but particularly in the last one!) there’s the opportunity once again to make the Thing With Two Symbolic Complexions from it. And genre fans like us are used to seeing our old favourites, franchise-wise, undergoing reconstructive surgery…if you like superhero comics you’ve seen practically nothing but this for going on thirty years now, and wondered if the time of the Nostalgic Reconstructionist would ever, ever ever, ever really end…and to be honest it hasn’t exactly been easy to watch TV in this time either. But truly vital art-forms, Captain, have already penetrated this particular veil; gone on to make new really new stuff. So why can’t we?

Star Trek Begins. We could’ve cleared the decks, for real.

It’s just possible that my Dad would’ve watched it.

But that movie got abandoned after about forty minutes, and the first ten minutes of it was taken up by Rebel Without A Kirk, anyway. Understand, I’m not saying it would’ve been a good movie, necessarily. Indeed, I wouldn’t really have asked it to be: hey, I like fun as much as the next guy. But it would’ve been — and this is important! — a movie.

Which is something that my Dad, though I think he probably doesn’t know how to say it (because he assumes every movie will be a “movie”), really cares about. But he wouldn’t've liked this one, because instead of a movie, we got an extended trailer, a Star Trek music video, basically “Hungry Like The Wolf” with tricorders. And then jumped sideways to the next movie, which was basically like someone doing an impression of Ron Howard doing Steven Spielberg. I mean that as a compliment, actually: because at least it didn’t seem as desultory as the “first” movie did. An actual problem, a couple of real character moments. I mean you hardly noticed the failure of will that fell back on notions of alternate timelines and Romulan vendettas and better movies, to make it all go forward. For a moment — for a couple of moments, actually! — I forgot that this wasn’t a Hard Reboot, a true Star Trek Begins…

But maybe that’s because the plot of this second movie was so darned familiar, so I just thought they were doing it “again”. I mean, no wonder I liked it! It was actually Star Trek. I mean: Star Trek with annoying cutesy bits, why I half-expected to see E.T. sitting in a closet pretending to be a stuffed animal at some point…perhaps talking in a Wussian Accent…but WHATEVER! At least to see some original Star Trek, you know? Or some shadow of it. Young dickhead Kirk: I did not see enough of him in the first movie in this movie. I was told plenty about him, of course. But see him I did not. Listen, I’m not going to kid myself: that Rebel Without A Kirk business was not showing, but telling. It was TELLING. It was lame. But here, for a precious forty minutes or so, I actually did get to see him in motion, in action, in justification. And not by accident!  Because you can tell where the good parts of this movie are: the McCoy character’s in them.

And:  what a huge problem, really!

They didn’t know what to do with him, once he’d got his plot-point thing over with!

Fucking McCOY, they didn’t know what to do with…!

Just as Sexy Uhura turned as desultory as all get-out when it came to the part where her loyalties ought to have been divided…and sure, that could’ve been a beating heart in this movie…but this was never supposed to be a movie anyway, okay? It was never supposed to be, and so it never was. So don’t blame the messenger. And of course it was all in service to the big black sea-urchin of lame-ass time-travelling no-name Costco-cheese-sample Khan, and his complicatedly useless plan of revenge, but do I blame the actors? Do I blame the second unit? I most certainly do not: they did their best, with what they had. It minds me of Crystal Skulls, where for a moment some filmmaking genius was seen in a wheel almost going over the edge of a cliff, just as the snake slithered through Marion’s shoe in Raiders…and here is where I don’t blame myself for my ridiculous tastes: yeah, I liked it. There were moments, and I wanted to see them. I wanted to believe we could take Star Trek on into the land of the new really new, and for a brief clutch of moments here, we could. Of course Ham-Fisted Kirk blows the scene: that’s unfortunate. It seems deliberate. It seems perverse. But can’t you smell the fear here, Bloggers? These are highlights from three movies; don’t you wonder why things were so arranged? Can’t you see why there’s such a dependence on what’s worked before?

Can’t you see, in fact, that the filmmakers ate from the fruit of their own poisonous marketing tree?

If they weren’t fans themselves, they might’ve been up to the task. But: undecidedness. In all this undecidedness, here’s the closest they get to a decision, but they blow it. But they tried? Well at least they tried. And this second movie might’ve been good, too. It looked good; like that ad for The A-Team where they try to fly the tank, and then Face-Man goes topside like the total loon he always should have been. And if that was only the come-on, then I’d probably plunk down some money…but unfortunately these days the come-on and the payoff are usually identical…sigh…

And so on into the third movie, the aggressively head-patting one. Bloggers, do any of you really think this movie wasn’t made for the hardcore geeks to marvel at? Do any of you really think there are such things as non-hardcore-geek-fans of Star Trek? It’s just that being one isn’t such a bad thing, that’s all. We’re all Star Trek geeks now. These dreams are what our stuff is made on, has been for twenty years. But let us also bear in mind that this bathlith cuts both ways: no one who isn’t a geek ever saw a Star Trek movie past “The Voyage Home”. Just didn’t happen. That movie attracted tens of millions; “Generations” attracted dozens of hundreds. “Final Frontier” I’m not sure anyone even saw. I wish I hadn’t seen it. Come now, brothers and sisters: this shit got unpopular a long time ago. A hundred million Star Trek fans went to sleep for the simple reason that the money wasn’t left on the screen. My grandmother knew more about the Beatles than about cooking spaghetti; my parents know more about the Sex Pistols than they will ever know about the Borg Queen, or Marina Sirtis getting drunk. If they’d seen this third movie (and they never will or would), would they not have thought “jeez, that’s some pretty harsh and fucking expensive discipline Starfleet’s got, sending off a guy in an eight-million-dollar escape pod to the surface of some fucking moon or other…I mean what, they couldn’t've just taken away his key to the executive washroom or something?” Of course they would have, because they would’ve demanded the mass-market Star Trek stuff, the RunyanRoddenesque stuff, the stuff that made sense. And they wouldn’t have got this marketing missile’s impact, so they wouldn’t have liked it. Nor would they have thrilled to the weird distortion of Kirk going through several blends of Galileo Seven, Empire Strikes Back, and All Our Yesterdays…and the Farscape one where Aeryn dies…and the goddamn X-Files movie…and Red Dwarf…I mean pastiche is pastiche, people, but this is ridiculous, this isn’t desultory it’s insultory, and what in the hell’s going on, here? Oh yes, I forgot: the extremely bad and derivative and take-it-away-already overplot, and the grotesque light-fingered parody of the fan-service. Not that the two aren’t the same, eh? Trust me when I say I had scrupulously avoided any spoilers for this thing when I saw it, but I KNEW…Good Christ, I knew it all. Suddenly I was the time-traveller, suddenly I had the perfect foreknowledge. May I go so far as to say it was “icky”? ICKY, my friends: that’s what it was. Is it wrong for me to say I “hate” the character of Mr. Spock now? I HATE him; who the hell is he to be so goddamn cavalier? Do you want your future self to come back to you and say “oh, you know what you should do, divergent self who’s totally different from me? EXACTLY WHAT I DID, and never mind I’ll take care of everything else…” I mean the basic dramatic misunderstanding here is immense, I know it all graphs out tickety-boo on paper but the movie itself is at pains to establish that Spock has MOMMY ISSUES, not DADDY ISSUES…! Holy Hannah, one wonders how this could’ve been misunderstood, one wonders why whoever let Zachary Quinto act in Movie #1 suddenly withheld that permission from him in Movie #3…and why they never really understood the original Spock character enough to make all his changes in this movie stick. They know what inside-out looks like, and they do that pretty fine…but unfortunately they also can’t tell upside-down from right-side-up, and the movie – I should not say “movie”, I should say effort – suffers because of it. We should’ve just had a Hard Reboot, honestly. In the third movie they are simply losing it, simply going on the stuff that appeals to the “bad fans”, that the people who liked this movie are not supposed to be, it degenerates into junk like the Genesis planet, it’s head-patting garbage, it doesn’t even bother to slap you on the back and create bogus cameraderie, it just sends you to bed with a Bad Fan Cookie. And it’s sort of horrifying, and it has a sort of horrifyingly undeniable appeal. I like this Spock, I like this Kirk, I would like this McCoy if he was only onscreen long enough to register as McCoy…but more than any of them I like Simon Pegg, and it pisses me off to no end that it just doesn’t work with Simon Pegg. I mean, can we just cut him free to either be Scotty or a Pegg-ized version of Scotty, or at any rate not the venerable Australian dude who plays the looney-tune in Cosi Fan Tutti guest-starring on Farscape with an alien pet/sidekick that might as well be out of Gremlins? I don’t really care if the movie’s any good, if Simon Pegg’s in it: that is, if Simon Pegg being in the movie is what it’s all about. I’d take an Ape Lincoln moment. But it seems the Ape Lincoln moment here is all about getting Christopher Pike into that space-wheelchair. AND IN EVERY OTHER RESPECT IT IS THE SAME AS THAT SHITTY POTA REMAKE, except there is no real “Ape Lincoln” bit to speak of. Chris Pike might just as easily not have been paralyzed; because we’re rebooting, remember? But there is no commitment here: at the end of the trick, there’s nothing to show. Nothing happened. You just recognize things that you see, and that’s all.

In “Wrath Of Khan”, say this for it: something happened.

In “Nemesis”, even: something did happen.

But here there’s nothing.

And was the the Dammit Bones He’s Dead Jim Mr. Spock! contingent really not turning to themselves and going “what in the…?” at the Chris-Pike-In-The-Chair bit? With the rising chorus of “aaah”s all around them?

Christ, can we really even believe they were there, this time around?

Or that they even existed, or were we just sold a bill of goods. Not to beat a dead horse to death, but “Wrath Of Khan” and “Voyage Home” required nothing of any audience member but that they had heard of the show Star Trek. A friend of mine, on reading Watchmen for the first time, admitted that he felt a lot of stuff going over his head, because he wasn’t well-versed in the vocabulary of superhero comics. My mother didn’t know what the hell happened in Lord Of The Rings, even though I’d read it and ranted about it and tried to independently re-invent Elvish grammar (hello, Holly!) for about six years as a kid…until I told her “psst, Mum…the Ring is like Alberich’s Ring in The Ring…”

Then she said “OHHH!”

“I wondered what the hell everyone was going on about it for…”

But where was I.

Oh yes: the next movie.

Will it be Klingons?

I would be happy if it were, even though it’s clearly impossible for Mr. Spock’s time-travelling escapades to have produced new really new Klingons. But I am not one of the “bad fans”, Bloggers, and I would dearly love to see some new Klingons, no matter the justification so long as we the members of the audience don’t have to fuck around with knowing what a retcon is, or with having to have any opinion of it one way or another. I was in favour of a Hard Reboot, remember? And I still am; and maybe that could be the Ape Lincoln moment, the moment that fails to make sense but doesn’t matter: that the next movie truly and honestly won’t give a damn about that embarrassingly crucial pointless stuff. Just throw in some good new Klingons, and maybe I’ll choose to believe. Hey, there were a lot of new things in Star Trek 2009 I might’ve chosen to believe, actually!

But they didn’t give me the chance.

This stuff was well-made, back in 1966. Anybody could believe in it. It could go all over the world and be as famous as John Wayne, or Pepsi-Cola. There might even be movies made of it.

However, as yet, the “movies” thing is still part of the unwritten future.

I hate to tell you that it sucked, I really do. But it did.

But don’t shoot…!

Honestly, I’m unarmed.

Green With Irony

So…

I just watched Ang Lee’s Hulk, again.  And I seriously think I’m gonna buy the extended deluxe DVD, if there is one.  Because suddenly I am captured, virtually pinned to a metaphorical corkboard, by the irony:

They had every hope for the project.  Got the best technicians, the most creative scientists, got a GENIUS to run everything, and gave him his head.  And at every stage, everything looked like it was going perfectly.  So much money invested;  so much money would be generated.  Why the other movies had done INCREDIBLY well…!

And then…

The big boys got something, with Ang Lee’s Hulk, that they never anticipated, and din’t know how to deal with.  You know what his sin was?  HE LOVED IT TOO MUCH. He took it too seriously on its own merits.  He treated it for real on the one hand, treated it like a comic book on the other.  And he committed to both ways of seeing it.  This is the fourth time I’ve seen this movie.

Ang Lee’s a fucking BRILLIANT GODDAMN GENIUS.

He does everything right.  I’ve gushed before about his super-transgressive editing, his wish to capture what comics look like, the music he chooses, his informationally ultra-dense titles that made my friend Stella walk out of the theatre before Eric Bana’s face was ever seen…the lichens and the desert floor, the close sight turning to the long sight…I mean you guys, the only thing I never liked about this movie was the HULK!

On fourth viewing, that’s changed.  I think I like the Hulk best of all.  I like how his huge face signals emotions.  I like that he’s really Banner.  I think they did a terrific job on this.  My friend Ed told me, a few years ago:  “check out Sam Elliott in this, he is going to town on being Ross.”  I never really believed him, because I saw that fucking Roadhouse movie — I can’t stand Sam Elliott.

It’s taken me four viewings.  But I believe Sam Elliott read the comics.

And don’t get me started on perfection-girl Jennifer Connolly.  Just imagine this whole movie in subtitles.  No, wait, don’t imagine it:  because she delivers a FANTASTIC line.

“All I’m saying is:  frogs start raining from the sky…who’re they gonna come to?”

Get serious, I kind of believe she’s a scientist for about thirty seconds in this movie!  But more than that:  superhero stories are all about the costumes and the colours — the Hulk being a hero wearing green and purple was an innovation, I mean do I have to say it once again that the Hulk is the perfect Marvel Comics version of Superman?! — and Betty Ross has a costume too.  I don’t want to come off like a dick about it, y’know.  But what I think is so brilliant about her costume is that Jennifer Connolly probably wears it in real life as well.  Well, don’t we all remember how the people we used to go to school with had their habitual “costumes”?  And what’s better for a pretty blue-eyed brunette super-scientist than an appropriately-distressed vibrant jean-jacket?  Look at the confrontaions Betty has with her father in this movie:  there’s real acting there.  Ed was right about Sam.  I’m right about Jen.  I could’ve watched those two just sit in a room together and squirm for two hours alone.  But for her, she gets some range:  supergenius one second, angry daughter the next, then she SCREAMS (beautifully, I might add), then she has a scene where she’s frightened, then she has a scene where she’s angry, then one when she’s determined…I mean who knew a crap comics movie could give an actress so many things to do?

ANG LEE.

Look, I’m gonna go on about it for the next couple of days.  I’ve got lots of good things to say about it.  You really need to see it four times.  It’s a terrific movie.  Just for now, I’m concentrating on something.  But it really is good.

Oh, they thought they could control the outcome, didn’t they?

But they couldn’t.

So they had to wipe the project, start all over with another project.

Control, control, control.  I’m telling you, folks.

Some things can’t be controlled.  That’s what makes Ang Lee’s Hulk such an awesome movie.

So…I’ll just say it, shall I?

“Within Each Of Us, Oftimes, There Dwells A Mighty Raging Fury.”

Go ahead;  watch it again.  Dude from “Crouching Tiger”, right?

Crowd-Pleaser!

Can’t go wrong.

“…Upon Your Mystery Ship”

HA!

Bet you thought I’d never get back to this one.

(I no longer like “the oughties”, by the way…)

Well, neither did I.  But then Ed brought over the Watchmen movie, so I figured “what the hell”…and who knew this extremely late review would turn out to be at all topical?  Huh.  Well, it’s probably just that the DVD came out, so that’s what’s driving rumours, possibly even will drive soul-chilling announcements, who knows?  But so anyway I am trying to watch it a second time now, and let me tell you it is slow going.  For the life of me, I can’t understand how non-comics people could’ve been interested in this, why they didn’t run screaming from it.  I mean, “realistic superheroes”, okay, that pump’s been primed already — in an obvious, if roundabout, way by Watchmen itself — but did anyone watching this really get a head rush from Dr. Manhattan’s history?  Weren’t all the “head rush” parts mostly taken out?  And so it seems too lackluster to really reach out and grab anyone by the throat, not just in the critical “Watchmaker” section, but in various bits and pieces throughout the movie that should have shone even with no polish on them whatsoever, but somehow didn’t.  Meanwhile most of these “realistic” things have probably been seen before, so what else gets added?  The best dialogue in the movie is still Alan Moore’s, but the worst thing that happens to it sometimes is that it doesn’t get changed when it oughtta, and (astonishingly!) it does get changed when it doesn’t need changing…with the result that many points of tension simply fall right out of the thing, along with the supersymmetry.  Which of course isn’t just about the way Dr. Manhattan sees things, but about the way all the other characters don’t see things.  When Laurie and Dan fight the muggers in the alley (and believe me, I’ll get back to that!) it has nothing to do with Jon’s TV interview, because words and pictures don’t synch up…which is fair enough, you can’t have everything, and as has been noted many of Watchmen’s coolest bits on the page would turn to trite conventionality on the screen, so there can’t be anything sacred about saving them.  Even the matter of supersymmetry isn’t absolutely essential, I guess.  From a certain perspective.  On the other hand, though:  tension.  Without the supersymmetry, there are so many ways in which it fails to be built.  Did anyone honestly not get the memo about who Laurie’s father was, when they saw this?  Did anyone not come away from that scene with Adrian and Dan, you know the one where Adrian looks out the window and says “by the way, it was me”, and not realize that, by the way, it was him?  Already in my head is a voice screeching that at some point you’re going to know it’s Adrian anyway, that it’s just the nature of the moviemaking beast…and that’s the same voice that says Watchmen always did show blood, gore, dirt, sex…that Moore is always toying with the darker notes hidden away in characters like these, that he wants you to see them…

…But this voice is an asshole, I think.  Hey, remember last week or something there was some fuss made over the Fantastic Four comic where Valeria calls her brother a “retard”?  The thing is, the casual use of this word offended some people.  In case you missed it, other people (including the writer) defended the word choice by saying “that’s just how kids talk”.  But if you boil it down, that’s the same sort of bullshit argument I outline above.  And don’t get me wrong, if I wanted to weigh in on how cautious we should be with potentially offensive language, I would have — that isn’t the part I’m identifying as bullshit.  But the suggestion that any writer of Fantastic Four, or Spider-Man, or Batman or whatever has some kind of artistic obligation to be real with his language is clearly bullshit, I think.  Because it isn’t society that’s on trial, here:  most of the words spoken in superhero comics are outrageously not-how-real-people-talk, never are going to be how real people talk…these aren’t documentaries, and it’s damned rare that controversial or realistic language does much for a story in this mode, but it’s even rarer still that a controversy completely unintended, that doesn’t even have a point it wants to make, can pull off claims of story-based value in “realism”.  And so it makes me laugh to think how little would be lost, if the writer had said something more like “jeez, I guess I didn’t think about that very carefully;  you’re right, it was unnecessary.”  I mean, people make mistakes all the time, right?  Sometimes they are small mistakes.

Other times, they’re bigger.  Now what I was thinking about, was how amazing it is that Dan and Laurie graphically kill and maim a few people in Watchmen, and then discuss going for a beer.  I laughed when the first bloody bone came shooting out of an arm, and I was kind of thinking “wow, just imagine if this was in 3D”.  It might as well have been.  And of course the whole movie is loaded up with gratuitously violent money-shots such as this, stuff that is just simply over the top, hard sells, hammer-blows, visual amphetamine.  Crank?  Crank.  But it’s not exactly a good sympathy-engine.  Meanwhile the little voice in my head says “it’s just explodey fun, why get uptight about it, hey you liked Crank, I thought!”  But that voice only finds it convenient to call me a hypocrite because misery loves company:  that voice wouldn’t care if it was Watchmen I was watching or it was Transformers 2, because that’s the voice that says “Oh, take it easy, personally I’m looking forward to reading Mark Millar’s adaptation of Pale Fire, just to see the trainwreck.”  But as I mentioned:  that voice is an asshole.  And furthermore, be it known:  trainwrecks aren’t really that much fun to watch.

Not really.

I liked Crank.  In contrast, I don’t think the voice ever genuinely likes anything.  So there’s that “retard” thing, I want to get back to that…because if the word-choice doesn’t flow from a commitment to “provoke” the reader by being unflinchingly honest, it certainly comes from somewhere, because word-choices don’t really just “happen”.  So, where does it come from?  I think it’d be uncontroversial for me to suggest that it doesn’t come from what kids say, but what adults say — hip language, pop culture, the zone of hyperactive inter-geek storytelling.  The shared frontier patois of we who accept our inner adolescents, our own shared experience/observational comedy stuff.  We don’t just pick it up out of our environment as kids do, we choose it:  the cheap thrills of lovingly-shot slo-mo mayhem, kickass show-off moments studded with (to paraphrase a friend’s recent comment about what twelve-year-old boys like) non-threatening action spandex girls with huge tits.  And so we should know better than anyone:  character really isn’t a major concern in this sort of thing, no more than being a veridical observer of How Things Are is a major concern.  So there’s nothing to defend, here;  the energy spent on this defence is wasted.  Concession costs nothing, because there’s nothing at stake.

Or…maybe there is?

Maybe there is just a little something at stake.  This movie’s got a shitload of little problems, that aren’t really “little” at all:  they’re basic problems, that range all over the map of “basic”.  But the voice wants me to know that none of this really matters, because if I think it does then it also means I think the voice is an idiot grazer whose only artistic criterion is whether or not its belly is full.  The “retard” thing, I think it’s safe to say, was just a mistake.  Dan and Laurie in the alley, slaughtering muggers:  oh, come on, that was a mistake too.  There’s a thing about this movie, that it makes a lot of mistakes — mostly you wonder why, you wonder how the mistakes came to happen.  Some of them are the result of Snyder ramping things up into the stratosphere, and that’s easy to see.  You want to know why, when Dr. Manhattan points his finger at somebody, they pop like balloons full of meat salad?  But the movie is full of such things, for heaven’s sake this is practically its sentimentality at work!  To the extent Snyder has an auteur-ish vision, here it is.  The SFX track is pumped way up for a reason.  Rorschach only kills the dogs incidentally, for a reason.

And it’s in the reason, that one discovers the nature of the more obvious errors.  Look, from the opening fight in Eddie Blake’s apartment, things start to shoot themselves in the foot:  these people have some kinda extreme super-strength and resistance to injury, this isn’t Batman, not even Jet Li, this is Superman II.  And me, I think that was a dumb idea, but I understand the rationale.  Even if the rationale was sort of not quite right.  Still, it’s a little dicier when Dan and Laurie kill some ordinary people on the street and then smile about it though, eh?  They’re not even the right kind of nervous with one another.  One is concerned for the point, as one rationale necessitates another, and the whole thing picks up speed unrestrained.  Blake’s scar doesn’t figure into the symbolism, neither does Laurie’s finger on the dust of Dan’s equipment.  Of course these things could’ve been left alone about as easily as they were changed, but I think it is fair to ask:  left alone to what end, when the supersymmetry isn’t there anyway?  By comparison, the long shot of the Argyre Planitia — I can only image what the non-comics moviegoing public made of that.  Did they think it just came in from out of left field, did the words “as if” cross their minds?  The supersymmetry is not really there!

These are little things, but they do add up, and most of them aren’t just me nitpicking.  Me nitpicking would be like:  wow, Adrian’s personal worth is enough to buy Chrysler, Ford, and GM a couple times over?  It isn’t impossible — this could easily be a world without Microsoft or Apple, and APPARENTLY he’s some kind of whiz at genetic engineering — ha, maybe they left Bubastis in this movie because they’re planning of making her into an action figure? — but I’ve got to say, it was a bit jarring to hear him threaten to buy the entire North American auto industry.

Nitpicking!

But here’s some not-nitpicking.  The sex scene in the owlship is crazy over the top, don’t you think?  When Rorschach disposes of Big Figure, that just seems kind of laboured, doesn’t it?  But then there are things that aren’t over the top, they’re just sort of…huh?  Rorschach’s dialogue in the cell is changed just slightly, for hard-to-understand reasons — the method by which he kills Big Figure’s remaining goon is sort of repetitive.  Is that guy even supposed to be alive after having his head smashed through a toilet?

Can the psychiatrist really not recommend Rorschach being committed after hearing his story?

That in particular is kind of a Dark Knight level of inconsistency…so let’s just leave it to one side for a second, and concentrate on the day what was left of Walter Kovacs died.  This is a straight-up fumble, isn’t it?  Honestly I’m coming to really enjoy the Rorschach guy’s acting effort in this thing, and he knows how to read Moore’s words…but the killing of the dogs is the part where Kovacs finally checks out, isn’t it?  Well, it is;  but that dark moment — as dark as it gets! — is inexplicably undersold in favour of the bad guy’s punishment.  And it’s tempting to chalk that up to somebody’s misreading of the original text, except…come on, did anybody misread that part of the original comic?  So, no:  the guilty party here is the crazy ramping-up of spectacle, the adrenaline.  Rorschach breaking down and butchering the dogs isn’t any adrenaline-junkie’s idea of a fist-pumpingly good revenge trip.  Dan and Laurie’s porno-gone-wrong music video starts with Dan feeling impotent standing naked before his owlsuit (which doesn’t really look like an owl at all, but — nitpicking!), however the bit where he’s wearing the glasses is carefully omitted, right?  And anyway they’re the wrong kind of glasses, and come to think of it that doesn’t make sense — he’d look a lot more like an owl if the glasses were like Archie’s windshie…oh never mind, there’s so much to say it almost isn’t worth getting bogged down in every little specific.  We’ll be here all night.  Speaking of which, crazy to think poor old dead Jon still possessed vanity enough to reconstruct himself with both a steroidal physique and a huge schlong (superpowers!) — and yet the key is right here, eh?  The key to everything is that the world is no more ready for a superman with a tiny dick, than it is for a masked avenger of the night with real feelings like the kind we’ve got.

“Mommy, is that Jesus?”

Snyder unwisely lets the moment stand.  Though at least Mommy says “no”.

But the point remains:  this isn’t nostalgia, it’s mawkishness.  And the violence is the most mawkish of all.

Christ, I feel a little bit like I’m picking on a little kid, though.  Does the world really need another excoriation of the Watchmen movie?  I mean I want to make my point, but I don’t want to be an asshole about it myself, you know?  There are just lots of little mistakes in this movie, that’s all.  But it isn’t more deserving of scorn than other Moore-derived movies.  “From Hell” was actually far more shortsighted than this is.  The Watchmen motion comic was far more horrendous.  So, this hasn’t ruined the original experience for me like seeing the Star Wars Special Editions did.  Good God, but in the age of computers haven’t we been well enough educated to know that “Special Edition” is the mark of death?  I’m through with Star Wars now, man.  Star Wars and I are done, finished.  But Watchmen and I are fine.  So what am I saying, it wasn’t as good as the comic?  Well, I never thought it would be.  Am I accusing Snyder of hubris or something, is that my point?

Am I saying it was shitty?

It wasn’t exactly shitty, but it was a bit WEIRD.  If I had to think of a recent superfolks movie to compare it to, I’d probably pick the first Fantastic Four movie, honestly.  Which makes sense:  because I had the same sort of feeling of aversion to seeing it, as I did with that one.  It wasn’t hate.  It wasn’t fear.  Maybe it was embarrassment?  Or more likely it was a kind of sympathy after all.  Christ, I couldn’t even make a Watchmen movie that I’d like, you know?  In the end, the squid didn’t matter as much as Dan telling people he’d be seeing them all the goddamned time.  That was one of the inexplicable mistakes.  The ludicrous gore was more understandable, as was the loss of the supersymmetry.  But it was the B-grade “understandables” that were really frustrating.  Most of Rorschach’s journal came across like the Architect’s speechifyin’ in the second Matrix movie:  as text, totally fine, but as spoken dialogue WHAT?  I do understand the necessity of having the journal end up in Seymour’s hands, with us knowing what it is, but…seriously, someone says “abattoir of retarded children” aloud, that’s not arresting, that’s either hilarious or it’s disturbing as shit, or it’s both.  But are we supposed to think of Rorschach that way, really?  Well, I think it was not really considered, I think the question never came up in a serious way…like I said, it’s a bit weird.  Do we need to have the name of the military base that houses Jon and Laurie narrated to us, after seeing the sign almost a whole minute before the voiceover gets around to it?  In the comics, lots of things can be made to work, that are radically superfluous in film.  “Obsolete Models A Specialty” is not necessary in film — and stripped of supersymmetry it looks ham-fisted.  Listen, here’s the absolutely AMAZING thing, okay?  Movies already trade on supersymmetry. Nobody in a movie ever has a dream that isn’t prophetic.  Movies put the foreshadowing in your face ten times a minute.  All this shit’s completely normal to movies.  Which is why Hollis’ sign is something that won’t make anyone go “ahhh! how clever!” in a movie — in a movie, no one will see the places the camera goes as anything but totally intentional.  Hollis’ sign isn’t brilliant decoration in the movie as it was in the comic, “In Gratitude” would be grating even if it were set up properly, there is nothing brilliant about filling spaces in a movie with movie-type-stuff, no one looks at Orson Welles movies and says “that’s so innovative how he has the actors scold the camera like they can see us”, they just DON’T.

And so this may be another key to this movie, specifically to its weirdness:  that the comic already looked like a movie, just not enough.  Or occasionally:  just a little too much.  So much hammering, but somehow — somehow — we lose the details of “Watchmaker” that attach us most powerfully to Jon’s experience of time.  Little trivial pieces of nothing, they’re just words, so easily replaced…yet without them something’s lost.  And why are they not there, if they’re so trivial?  I’m not saying we need whole scenes back, although I don’t think it’s very hard to see that Billy Crudup would’ve hit the “photograph lies at my feet” business right out of the park, I mean look what he accomplished just with “perhaps nothing is made” and “it’s too late” — as Jackie Earle Haley would’ve crushed the audience to tears, no doubt, with the dogs — but I love it when he scratches his head later on, you know? — I mean I’m not asking for the whole wide world, but where is the sense that Jon is reassuring Janey in one room, can hear her swearing at him in another?  Not all of Moore’s prose is deathless, but the technical fine-tuning is fairly impeccable, and doesn’t take any more time than anything else…that someone made the choice to get rid of it astounds me.  Did the non-comics folk in the audience really get Jon’s perspective?

But maybe they weren’t really supposed to — maybe they weren’t supposed to dwell on it that much.  Rorschach with the dogs, that would’ve stuck in the mind like a splinter.  Could I have appreciated him scratching his head, after that?  The movie’s only so long.  Jon’s story could fill twice the space it took up, and probably more.  I saw the Director’s Cut, it was skinny at a hundred and sixty-eight minutes.  In the theatrical release, you wouldn’t want people just zoning out thinking about Dr. Manhattan, would you?  And as for Laurie’s parentage, my goodness.  It isn’t pretty, the way we get to it.  But at least I saw the snowglobe.  And you can’t have everything.  You can’t have all of it.

And it’s too late now, anyway.

But there are definitely some negative things to say about it all, that deserve saying, deserve hearing, deserve something anyway.  Because I may’ve said that nothing really needed to be held sacred in this movie, but then again the movie itself is all about what needs to be held sacred and what doesn’t…and I, myself, am actually so very fondly attached to the book that if given the chance to make this movie I probably wouldn’t've.  Sacred, I dunno.  It’s funny what cooks down as essential, here.  It’s very wobbly.  The logic of physical damage, punishment both dished out and taken, is tough to make work…if you care about that sort of thing.  It’s so exclusively tonal:  Dan pounds on Adrian’s face and makes a little scratch.  I have to tell you, it set me back a little:  earlier we saw teeth floating in a bloody mouth.  This is the logic of bodies and how they work, what they can endure, what they symbolize, how they suffer and why.  Adrian’s little drop of blood is meant to touch us.  His fight with the Comedian is supposed to fill us with desperate urgency.  The violence is the music, here:  emotional texture.  Watchmen needs a lot of it.  Well, that’s what realism is, for heaven’s sake!  Dan’s gawping after Laurie is so empty that it needs something, and it was either brutal over-the-top ultraviolence, or it was gonna be “Oh Yeah” by Yello…

Oh yes, folks, don’t kid yourselves!  These same choices could’ve been made much, much more poorly!

As for the Comedian himself, his funeral is confusing;  camera looks down as rain falls on the mourners, we’ve seen this before, okay, it’s not exactly pure genius but it isn’t unendurable…still, if they’re gonna do that, why didn’t they do the bit where the mourners’ posture at the grave recalls their posture when the Comedian messed with their heads?  I mean, I don’t really care a whole lot, but I also don’t understand the choice.  Not when Rorschach gets to play with the “fine like this” callback-dialogue thing, and my GOD when did that shit become so de rigeur in American movies, I really really really would like to know.  I’d like to have someone to blame for it.  I mean if they can do that stuff, why couldn’t they do any of the other stuff, that’s better and less hackneyed?

Although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like how he delivered the line…heck, the way it ended up, I didn’t even mind the song.  But you know, this is like “The Golden Army”, this is just somebody’s fan-fic, like a backhanded review of the source material rather than an adaptation of it.  There really are music-video parts — like those long-form videos people used to do, it’s sort of like six or seven of those strung together, with bridges made of “movie”.  I’m going to say this is not the most heinous thing there ever was:  music does indeed add texture to poses and shots, possibly is the only thing that might add back tension that script revisions removed.  The score, the shots, the dialogue in voiceover…that’s the symphonic aspect of film, and it isn’t forceless, it isn’t valueless.  Maybe it’s even where the seeds of adaptations take root, translating something difficult from another medium into a kind of Universal Donor form of artistic dynamic, a plug that fits all sockets…”music video”, I mean how did anybody ever even come up with this idea?  I remember reading X-Men comics while listening to the Red Album, and it fit weirdly, just as all this does.  In the old mixed-tape days, I wrote down themes I was trying to get across, flows for a rainy day, a bad breakup, a party.  On to the sampling and mixing of today, and even I, Mr. Old-And-Tired, have just plugged part of the opening of “Ziggy Stardust” into a song’s middle-eight like an insane person, to switch the “logic” track over from Words to Music, a temporary inversion of how meaning is delivered in an ordinary song.  We shouldn’t just discount this.  This is how we make our own personal fan-fic in our heads, isn’t it?  How we play our games of “what would I do”, “what would I match”…

It’s sort of a kink, you see.  “Oh, if I could do whatever I pleased, I’d do this…!“  Hmm…something to be said for a job where all you do is cross your own boundaries, make illicit fantasies into normative behaviour…

Let’s see…what else?  It is of course nice to see drinking buddies and old professors getting work.  What else?  Under The Hood is absolutely awful.  SURPRISE!  Bet you expected it to be good, huh?  Me too.  But it really wasn’t.  The Black Freighter made me laugh, though.

What else.

God, I don’t even know.  The Nixon is like a Sin-City Nixon, remarkably like a Nixon in a comic-book…for some reason I grew not to mind this.

Ah.  And of course, there’s the matter of “was it worth it” and “was it enjoyable to watch” and so on and so forth.  You do have to be happy for Dave Gibbons, who got to see some of his masterful artwork diligently recreated by someone who obviously understood just how good it was.  How many comics artists get that kind of compliment?  How many, who’ve accomplished something as stunning as what Gibbons did in Watchmen, have been so ignored and denigrated by the very people who claim to love his work the most?  On the higher plane of human beings getting the respect they deserve, Watchmen’s a success in this sense:  Dave Gibbons is in every scene, his name is on it and he got paid for it and people went out and bought his book because of it.  And he was happy with it.  Good for him.  So does it matter if it was any good, if I thought it was “worth it”?

Well, sure it does.  I just don’t know if I do think that, because my “review” of the source material is considerably different from the one Snyder’s given me to chew over.  Watchmen the book and Watchmen the movie were always going to be miles apart from one another in terms of content — no one thought we were going to get the Gordian Knot, surely?  The inside of the Bestiary?  The Black Freighter?  Blood From The Shoulder Of Pallas?  Even the outstanding colouring.  Watchmen doesn’t even mean the same thing to me as it did back in ’86 — like me, it’s aged well, but it’s aged nonetheless.  The movie, by contrast, is never going to age at all — it’s going to be stuck in the summer of 2009 for all eternity, pinned ruthlessly to the corkboard of this time, this place, this cultural concern.  The special effects will one day look primitive.  The politics will look as glued-on as the costumes.  The story will stay pretty much linear.  The particular humour and particular seriousness of Moore and Gibbons will always be absent, as will the true character of their accomplishment.  What we were always looking for here was an interesting failure;  that really was all we were ever going to get, that really was the best we were ever going to get.

So…was it interesting?

Dave Fiore thought it was.  Focussing on the political dialogue between the comic and the movie, he thought it was worth it to consider an Adrian who was more than just an extradimensional-squid inventing madman.  And he has a point:  in the comic, Adrian’s far madder than Rorschach, more inhuman than Jon, more pathetic than Dan…his life more damagingly composed of lies than Laurie’s.  Of course it’s just this that causes the Comedian’s sense of humour to shatter, in the end — a fucking space squid!? — and as Jog noted at the time, Veidt’s apocalyptic landscape is a pretty sanitized one in the film.  Very little horror, very little blood.  He says he’s made himself feel every death, but in the comic you know he hasn’t;  you know he couldn’t.  Whereas in the movie he’s allowed to get away with saying this — well, he is the smartest man in the world, after all!  Maybe he knows something we don’t!  Because we can’t make ourselves feel every death, can we?

So, is it deck-stacking?  In the comic we know something Adrian never will, because we’ve been to the bloody Lovecraftian deathscape of New York with Jon and Laurie — so “smartest man in the world” won’t cover anything, for us.  It just won’t wash.  In the movie we aren’t confronted with this sort of perspective, though, so we do get Dave’s interesting political dialogue coming at us in a more unforced way…the only question is, what should we say about the difference?  In the dialogue between movie and comic, a principal difference becomes how much judgement of himself Adrian is permitted — how much certainty he can afford, or manufacture.  In the comic he yells “I DID IT!” in childish triumph, but then looks to Jon to solve his dreams of the Black Freighter…and finds no solution forthcoming.  One in three go mad, in the new Millenium.  However in the movie there is no triumphant schoolboy shout, but there’s no madness either, so…I don’t know, is it enough?  True, we can grapple with the same problem Adrian grapples with, using the same tools, and decide for ourselves if his results are reproducible…or worth reproducing…but it’s only Adrian’s tools we’re given, and not (as the fellow named Kieran points out in that long-ago comments thread of mine), Moore’s.  Which is to say:  our own.  We are not really shown anything but what Adrian can see on his TV screens, so naturally we, like him, think the tools he’s got are up to the job.  And for myself, I think this constitutes a shortfall in meaning…

…But, yeah:  it’s probably interesting enough to argue about, anyway!

And anyway, as I said, we knew we wouldn’t really be getting Watchmen.  So maybe the argument is all there is?

I don’t know.  There are few scenes that don’t have something to quibble with in them.  It’s hard to get around Adrian having an Egyptian statue standing there with Yeats’ lines scribbled beneath it, even though at this point one pretty much expects it.  It’s tough to feel bad for Laurie when she could’ve just taken the cab and not killed that guy.  The little voice argues that this is just how kids talk, this is just how real-world superheroes would be:  they’d be horrors, they’d be fascists, I mean look at their suits.  It says:  hasn’t Moore made a big enough meal of this in his other comics, for you to accept seeing it here?  And yet I did not think Dan was such a big hypocrite in the comic, so…was I supposed to?

Was that the message I missed?

Was it all just a big joke, from the beginning?

Nah.  All that hyperviolence stuff, y’know…that’s new.  They stuck it in there on purpose, because they needed it.  Dan and Laurie in the alley?  You think of all the things that sequence was for in the comic;  it isn’t for any of that here.  It’s for quite another sense of proportion.  Nothing “sacred” about it!  And so that explains why the defence of this movie seems not to have been centred around the question “did they hold it as sacred”, but around the question “did they blaspheme against it” instead…with the corollary question being “is it even possible to blaspheme against it?”  So we’re into the Frankenstein questions here, appropriately enough:  is it just a matter of reassembling the pieces in the correct order?

Perhaps Dave is right, and the dialogue between movie and comic is interesting enough in itself, to make the movie worthwhile.  I only wish I knew if he saw it a second time, though!  Because when I finished my second viewing of it, all these words just about went flying out the window.  Depressing?  It surely was:  largely empty-hearted, dripping crocodile tears, a series of nods to scenes that were presumed to have something in them just because they were there.  Snyder drops most of what is in Watchmen, to show us what is on it:  owlship crashes spectacularly on Antarctic cliffs, ACTION sequence!  But where’s the meaning in it?  Dan and Laurie lose my sympathy in the alley, but for what?

Here is a thing about meaning:  it’s about thinking globally, and acting locally.  One scene doesn’t mean all by its lonesome, but it’s part of a tapestry of cause and effect — a cause and effect whose nature the scene reveals, through being a part of it.  So by themselves — and even together! — the scenes in Watchmen might mean anything, you see?  And so it always is, with superficial copies — their perceived faithfulness depends on how low they can set the value of faithfulness.  Is Watchmen, the comic, any good?  Why do we even like it so much?  After all, it’s just a bunch of scenes of people doing stuff and saying things, hell I can get that out my front street…so what’s the difference?  Thus from Mary Shelley we move off further back in time, to Rene Descartes…

What is “mind”, anyway?

You can’t touch it, or taste it!

And don’t a live body and a dead one have the same number of particles in them?

Structurally, there’s no difference…right?

Well…maybe there’s just a little bit of difference.  Mark Kardwell told me, in the last comments thread, that it would be awful and that I would complain bitterly, but that I would still wind up enjoying it…because at the end of the day it is Watchmen.  I think he was probably right, when it came to my first viewing:  for all sorts of reasons, I felt involved and invested in what would happen, what Snyder would do…how I myself would respond, and what I’d discover from that response.  The second viewing absolutely swept all that excitement away, however;  as I began to realize that the movie was actually mostly crap.  And yet, you know, Mark’s still right.  I didn’t enjoy it on second viewing.  Quite the opposite.  But somehow I have still wound up having something to say about it…because at the end of the day, it was Watchmen.

By which I mean:  the comic was.

And of course, it still is.

…But I think that’s all the time we’ve got for today, to talk about it.