Here’s two epilogues (one old, one new) as part three of my ‘Morrison’s Muscle Mystery Versus Everyday Reality… and Other Parallel Worlds!’ from Routledge’s 2008 anthology The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. Here’s part one. Here’s part two.

In 2005, Grant Morrison was appointed as the DC Universe ‘revamp guy’: a creative consultant who helps to revise older, out of date characters to bring them back to popularity. This played into this year’s Infinite Crisis miniseries (2005-06), a sort-of-sequel to the original Crisis On Infinite Earths. The last page of Infinite Crisis #1 (2005) was packed tight with Muscle Mystery. Here, the long-forgotten, long-overwritten Superman from Earth-2 came back into current comic book reality using his own kind of ‘superhero poetry’ – punching not just through space, or time, but physically shattering the continuity barrier itself!

And the shockwave of this blow shifted continuity for other heroes, too. There was only one who mattered to me. Continuity, you see, fragmented around a member of the current Doom Patrol in a double-page splash in a crossover issue with the Teen Titans (#32, 2006). It showed us all their previous incarnations thrust back into the present: shards of the recent, rebooted Doom Patrol; pieces of the 1960s originals; moments clipped from Morrison’s strange, ludicrous, heartbreaking run. And hidden within this mosaic – tucked away so you can’t make out a face – one thing’s impossible to miss:

Familiar, skintight, leopard-print trunks, framed with beach as background.

That’s how I ended this piece when it was originally published. Now it’s 2012, and Flex Mentallo is finally back in print. The colours of the comic have been unexpectedly redone for its new edition, however, and the vivid dayglow of Flex’s worlds has been replaced with grim blues and greys.

(It also had the unfortunate effect of ‘whitewashing’ some minor characters. Accidental, I think, but still depressing, and happens pretty regularly in comics.)

In this great Mindless Ones piece, they say this new colour scheme manages to show us Flex “through the eyes of a Flex who has been dosed with a previously undiscovered sixth form of Mentallium, ‘Grey Mentallium’, a lump of dull moon rock that shows you all of life’s possibilities as filtered through the PRISM OF ADULT DISAPPOINTMENT.  And hey, maybe it’s only fitting that you find yourself freshly disappointed while reading your favourite superhero comic about how your perception of superhero comics change as you get older.”

It makes a horrible, monkey’s-paw sort of sense that this is the price Flex pays for his resurrection. To sit on our dusty, real world bookshelves again he must sacrifice some of his otherworldly optimism. This is what it takes to have his story read once more.

As Morrison has a character announce in his half-empty / half-full conclusion of Animal Man: “And every time someone reads our stories, we live again.” (Animal Man #24, 1990).

When Flex Mentallo’s fame spread, his musclebound morality was called into question. Was he pure of heart or brutish parody? The pinnacle of the masculine ideal or cruel mockery of same? Questions like these were posed in a court of law when the Charles Atlas corporation sued DC Comics for copyright infringement.

“There has to be a limit to how far you can let someone ridicule your trademark,” said Jeffrey C. Hogue, President of Charles Atlas Inc. “They took that character and made him into something that was not an Atlas man…” During the case, repeated reference was made to Flex ‘beating’ a woman in his Doom Patrol appearance. Flex does shove away his would-be girlfriend during his origin story, saying “I guess I was a brute!” (Doom Patrol #42, 1991). It’s a shame that they never read on to see Flex’s later adventures, and the hero that he became.

The court reached a decision on April 29 2000, with the judge failing to “…discern a substantive difference between ‘surrealism’ or ‘irony’ on one hand, and ‘parody’ on the other, much less do we find them to be mutually exclusive.” Charles Atlas’ lawsuit against DC was dismissed, but for Flex, it seemed a hollow victory. Perhaps because of potential future legal issues, the case did what Black Mentallium never could – and Flex disappeared from comics altogether.

Does our real world always have the final stamp of authority over fictional heroes? After Morrison made a guest appearance as an omnipotent author in his own Animal Man comic, a very familiar character showed up in the pages of DC’s Suicide Squad. He was called ‘The Writer’ and looked suspiciously like the comic-book Morrison. His power was to rewrite the universe as it happened – but since he’d once written himself into his own comic, now he was fair game for other writers to use in their books. Later in the issue he suffered from unexpected writer’s block and was, uh, eaten by a werewolf (Suicide Squad #58, 1991).

Morrison said he wanted more than simply to have himself drawn onto the page, to ‘fake’ our world, as he did in Animal Man. Instead, he wanted to explore “…the two dimensional surface of the comic itself and at the point of interface where 2-D becomes 3-D and then touches 4-D.” But how could he be alive to say this after becoming werewolf-food? Remember the advice given by the Chief back in Doom Patrol #21 (1989):

“Reality and unreality have no clear distinction in our present circumstances, Cliff. It might help to consider the Zen koan, ‘first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is’.”

It does help. So does the term ‘krypto-revisionism’, referring to moment when the comics audience actively ignores certain plot twists, choosing to believe their own versions of stories instead; in a terrible and touching pun, the term is named for Superman’s own ridiculous, kitsch, often out-of-continuity super-dog. As does how the court’s ruling in the Flex Mentallo case highlighted a certain line from the background material provided: that Flex “…represents Morrison’s argument for a space beyond critique”. These distinctions – between fact and fiction, between official and imagined, between the page and the world that sits around it, above it – might not matter.

That’s no excuse for nihilism. Flex says: “Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism.” (Flex Mentallo #4, 1996). Morality, again, is called into question in Flex Mentallo. Someone tries to commit suicide, reassured that somewhere out there they have an antimatter twin who will live. This is countered by Morrison refiguring parallel worlds into conscious choices. Flex Mentallo’s narrator, the once-psychic child who first created Flex, tells this story while dying of a drug overdose. At least, he might be dying. In one reality, the pills are killing him, but in another they’re just M&Ms. The decision appears to be his.

It’s not that nothing is real. It’s that everything can be. Flex Mentallo wouldn’t be bothered by Alan Moore’s famous statement in the Superman story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?: “This is an imaginary story… aren’t they all?” It’s not that all fiction is just fiction; it’s that my story, out here, is imaginary too. I’m just another in a long, long line of ridiculous narrators who’ll disappear from continuity the moment the page is turned. I suppose I should watch out for werewolves. Radioactive spiders. Cosmic rays.

Anything can happen in an imaginary story.

Next: the Return of Flex Mentallo!

It was also the subject of my first published academic chapter – bearing the unwieldy title ‘Morrison’s Muscle Mystery Versus Everyday Reality… and Other Parallel Worlds!’ – in Routledge’s 2008 anthology The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero. My chapter was also an odd mix of analysis, autobiography and flat-out fiction, and I’m still amazed that they saw fit to publish it.

With Flex Mentallo now back in print, I thought I’d put up some excerpts of my chapter over the next few days. (The analysis, not the autobiography. I’ll spare you that much.) I began by asking what Morrison’s offbeat stories in Animal Man, Doom Patrol, and even Justice League of America meant for superheroes used to solving every crisis through action. A blast of heat vision, or ice breath, or an uncomplicated left hook…

Super-muscles are untrustworthy at best. Regular human weightlifters have more muscle mass than Superman but they can’t pull a moon out of orbit. And when Animal Man absorbs the power of flight from a passing bird, how come he doesn’t have to flap his arms to fly? This jaw-droppingly obvious fact was finally pointed out to the hero during writer Tom Veitch’s post-Morrison run on Animal Man. “What’s this so-called ‘bird power’ you talk about? The birds don’t have it! The poor creatures have to flap their wings!” The response? “Uh… you’ve got a point there.” (Animal Man #35, 1991).

Morrison’s Justice League of America aren’t his Doom Patrol, and they didn’t fight men with clocks for heads and nursery rhyme monsters – but the surreal logic of superheroes still questioned the validity of the body as a way to resolve conflict. Entire issues take place in dreams with bodies left, inert, waiting impotently for minds to return (JLA #8, 1997). Or in other worlds where the heroes are flattened into two dimensions, the same way we see them on the page (JLA #31, 1999). In one memorable scene, an enormous superbody is the host to an entire miniature world with a population that must die out of natural causes before he can be rescued (JLA #30, 1999).

Morrison once had the Flash remembering that “…with powers like ours, you have to learn to fight like a science fiction writer writes.” (Flash #130, 1997). It means rethinking conventional morality, too. Superman now has a reason for refusing to kill beyond the fact that it’s wrong. Superman berates rookie heroes who were happy to kill their enemies, saying: “These ‘no-nonsense’ solutions of yours just don’t hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel.” (JLA Classified #3, 2005). And you know? He’s absolutely right.

Perhaps it’s not that the overmuscled superbody is obsolete against the ontological threats of parallel universes and antimatter twins. It’s just that it must be stronger, faster, and harder than ever before to fight these forces of postmodern angst. I mean, how does the Flash move smoothly between parallel dimensions? He just moves really, really, really fast.

In a moment of genius by Morrison, a Superman ancestor visiting from the future attempted to return home by virtue of his superhuman strength alone. He actually punched his way through time (DC 1,000,000 #4, 1998). This pushed the boundaries of the superhuman body, and the credulity of comic fans. When asked to explain it, Morrison said: “It’s superhero poetry.” Readers should “bask in the audacious, absurd beauty of a man literally battering his way through the time barrier…”

That’s how Animal Man flies like a bird but without wings. That’s how Superman’s biceps can lift an oil-tanker and still be smaller than his head. Their bodies are superhero poetry. It’s Muscle Mystery.

Enter Flex Mentallo, Hero of the Beach. He’s too much of a man to question how his muscles function; it’s enough that they do. And it’s a good thing he’s not bothered by these same existential questions as his origin is more confusing than most. He was born as an imaginary friend of a young psychic boy, then brought forward into DC Comics ‘reality.’ His story provides multiple points of origin: he’s the childhood creation of psychic Wallace Sage; he’s the fictional brainchild of Morrison himself; he’s the wimp from the faded Charles Atlas commercials from my childhood half-memories. Will Brooker, in a discussion of the ambiguous signs of Flex’s sexuality, points out that these multiple origins themselves also suggest a ‘queerness’ present in the narrative structure itself.

Does Flex whine about his unreality, like Animal Man’s Buddy Baker? Does he wail about whether or not he’s even human, like The Doom Patrol’s Cliff Steele? No. “I’m a superhero,” he says, and that’s everything he needs to know (Flex Mentallo #4, 1996). In Morrison’s work, it’s the characters that are clearly labelled as ‘imaginary’ that can most easily withstand the shock of parallel worlds.

The possibility of parallel worlds colours everything in Flex Mentallo. Is it all a writer’s delusional drug trip? An elaborate supervillain hoax? The terrifying effects of Black Mentallium? A pocket universe of paper where the world’s ‘real’ heroes have been hiding? It’s all about leaving these possibilities open rather than shutting them down; not destroying parallel worlds but instead keeping them alive. Morrison is much more interested in the infinite earths than in the crisis.

Flex is pulled apart, put back together, and his very existence questioned again and again – but he never doubts himself. His Muscle Mystery holds him together. He’s so strong that when he strikes a pose, the words ‘Hero of the Beach’ actually appear above his head like in the old Charles Atlas advertisement. His biceps have conceptual powers all their own. Flex narrates:

“So I summoned up the power of Muscle Mystery – activating the occult of each musclecord, each tendon. Above my head, my famous ‘hero halo’ shimmered into view. And I flexed, reaching out to probe the interior of the bomb with my bodymind.” (Flex Mentallo #1, 1996).

His ‘bodymind’ suggests that his muscles and his heroic subjectivity are indivisible. Flex’s invulnerability isn’t a brittle costumed shell that could crack, allowing disruptive energy to escape or dissipate. He’s all man, through and through, and his boy scout morality remains absolute. When an admiring woman says to him “Boy, I just adore all-male he-men!”, he humbly answers: “And you’re a fine, hardworking woman.” Even when the story’s villain is unmasked, Flex doesn’t want revenge. He offers him the same chance we all had, reading the advertisements in those old comics, and tells the villain:

“Gamble a stamp! I can show you how to be a real man!” (Flex Mentallo #4, 1996).

Next: Flex gets dragged into the ‘real world’ of our legal system! Can even he prevail?

Here goes:

Over the years, Watchmen has become something I admire more than love. When I first read it, however, it absolutely amazed me. If I try, I can still remember the sick, breathless sensation I felt reading its grim climax.

Anyway, Watchmen survived Snyder’s film and it’ll survive these Before Watchmen prequels too. It is a little sad that someone will have to wade through all the prequels on the shelf to purchase the original. If DC was serious about this, they’d do a single 12-issue story – something to sit proudly next to the Moore and Gibbon’s collected Watchmen – instead of these scattershot miniseries.

Corporate comics will always focus on characters rather than stories because it lets them produce more material and make more money. (The idea that Rorschach has been sitting, unused, for decades must’ve been making DC executives wake up in cold sweats.) As Josh Flanagan wrote for iFanboy, DC have the legal right to make more Watchmen against the wishes of Alan Moore, and “morality and what’s right doesn’t come into it.” But why shouldn’t morality come into it? Isn’t the whole point of morals that they come into everything?

The most depressing thing about Before Watchmen for me isn’t the cult of nostalgia or corporate greed or wondering why Darwyn Cooke said yes. It’s seeing how – yet again – so many comic book fans automatically take the side of the company over the creator. Do they think Marvel and DC are the ones protecting these characters? And unhappy creators could cost them the new stories they desperately want? I don’t know – but if superheroes teach us anything, I’m pretty sure it’s not “morality doesn’t come into it”.

It seems like summer blockbusters have the opposite problem. In films like Transformers: Dark of the Moon and The Darkest Hour we see entire cities crumbling and destroyed – but what about the humans? These movies still want to rack up a decent bodycount but can’t have bloody bodies lying around. They’ve got to avoid a rating that’d prevent young audiences from buying tickets, after all. And stories about alien invasions don’t get to play the Saving Private Ryan card of historically accurate, ‘important’ violence.

The weaponsmiths of the evil Decepticons of Transformers and the invisible aliens of Darkest Hour reached the same solution: disintegration. No blood, no gore, no bodies left behind. Just show bodies turning to ash, show the ash spiralling in the wind, and then show them gone. Vanished. Now your next cool action set piece won’t be choking on leftover corpses!

Old westerns used to be mocked for the way that cowboys would just clutch their chests and die instantly and painlessly – but at least we saw them fall. They didn’t just flicker away like cannon fodder in a videogame. A PG-rated Hiroshima is its own kind of hell.

Daniel Clowes’ comic The Death Ray is a sort of decoder ring for the violent, adolescent urges behind Michael Bay’s Transformers. Not only does its titular weapon not leave anything behind; we don’t see the disintegration at all. Instead Clowes tucks all the violence into the gutter between panels, leaving only a bloodless there-one-moment, gone-the-next. Andy, the boy who becomes a vigilante named for the gun, has a recurring nightmare:

“There was this street with these big white berries growing on it, and as soon as a person ate one they would start to disappear. This process seemed to be both physically painful and super-terrifying.” He says that no matter what, he “couldn’t get away from the nothingness.”

The nothingness. Most sane. Super-terrifying.

Steven Spielberg made his own post-Private Ryan sci-fi film: War of the Worlds. Its aliens were also fond of disintegration. (Blame H.G. Wells.) But the way Spielberg visually linked the leftover ash to the aftermath of 9/11 gave it gravity – and he was respectful enough to ensure something was left. Even if it was just the victims’ clothes, fluttering to the ground.

The good news: the movie’s very enjoyable. The concept used to introduce brothers Gary and Walter – one human, one muppet – is a clever one; the songs are mostly great; Jason Segel’s excitement at being surrounded by these puppets is palpable. I laughed, I cried. And yet…

The bad news: the voices are wrong. For the first hour of the movie I cringed every time Fozzie or Piggy spoke. It’s like seeing your favourite band play but hearing a cover song boom out of the speakers. It made me feel a little bit like I was going mad.

This isn’t the first time. When Jim Henson died, and Kermit’s voice changed forever, I remember thinking that maybe the character should’ve been retired. But that’s a selfish thought – why shouldn’t new generations enjoy Kermit, just to spare my feelings? New voices won’t matter to the kids who see the film. That’s how it should be.

It’s harder to take in The Muppets because Frank Oz – the man who gave life to Fozzie and Piggy – is still alive. The fact that Oz was unhappy with the script and worried it didn’t “respect the characters” did affect my viewing experience. Couldn’t they find some way to allay his concerns and get him on board?

It doesn’t always serve art to give creators the final say over their creations. Everyone alive agrees the Star Wars universe would be much improved if someone had found a way to ignore George Lucas’ whims. Everyone except Lucas, anyway.

It comes down to this: what is a muppet? Is it a character that should stay an extension of its creator or creators? Or is a muppet a Robin Hood or a Sherlock Holmes or a Batman, kept alive by dozens and dozens of different interpretations by artists good and bad?

(Or, as Homer Simpson once said, a muppet might be “not quite a mop and it’s not quite a puppet… but man! So to answer your question, I don’t know.”)

My favourite new Muppet story isn’t the film. It’s the muppet comic book by Roger Langridge from a few years ago. They mimic the format of the 1970s Muppet Show, keeping its anarchic humour while managing some beautiful character moments. His muppets are pencil-and-ink abstractions of already abstracted foam-and-felt, but they’re absolutely alive.

Ignore the funk revelations of the decade-old Muppets in Space movie. Langridge provides the definitive answer to Gonzo the Great’s true identity, completing an emotional journey that began in 1979’s The Muppet Movie as he sang ‘I’m Going To Go Back There Someday’.

Scooter asks Gonzo: “Tell me… please… what the heck are you??”

And Gonzo replies: “Oh, Scooter. I thought you knew. I’m an artist.”

I interviewed writer / director Andrew Haigh about his enormously moving drama Weekend and asked him what movie he finds genuinely romantic.

Inspired by Hugo and The Artist, I wrote about other films that wistfully look back at their own ancestors.

I talked to nomadic French filmmaker Vincent Moon about how his famous ‘Take Away Shows’ capture music in a way that regular concert documentaries can’t.

I reviewed the docos Bill Cunningham New York and Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard.

Something non-film: I profiled the inspirational Father Bob Maguire about 38 years of fighting the good fight.

And my favourite – because it did what all my favourite interviews do and exposed me to a world I’d never really considered before –  I was taken on a walking tour of Melbourne’s cinema graveyards:

According to Dean Brandum, the multi-storey car park next to the Forum theatre is “hallowed ground”. It was once the enormous Majestic Theatre, retooled and refurbished as The Chelsea in 1960. By the mid-70s, however, The Chelsea had become Melbourne’s home of exploitation cinema. “Lots of pornography,” says Brandum, “and lots of European horror like Giallo films. The story goes that you could always see more rats than customers.”

Check out Time Out Melbourne here.

Your Tucker and Dale co-star Alan Tudyk [from Firefly and Dollhouse] has that crazy Joss Whedon love behind him!

We just went to Comic-Con. I’d never been before. It was nuts there. I was like a superstar – and Alan is like the God of Comic-Con. It was insane! Those fans are the best fans you could have. If you get in with them, you’re good for life.

Was it particularly hard seeing Reaper cancelled when you knew this passionate audience was out there? Absolutely loyal to the show?

We were really hitting our stride, critics were pricking up their ears, our ratings were actually really good for the CW – so we were like ‘what the hell was the problem?’ To this day, I still don’t know. We didn’t fit into the idea of what the network wanted and got the axe. And it sucks because when a show’s cancelled, the actors are the ones left to deal with the fans. I ended up on another show right away, and to some fans it looked like I’d jumped ship…

Like you’d betrayed them?

Yeah. These people who’d been my fans were suddenly, like, “you suck! You’re an asshole! I can’t believe you have another job!” The show had been canned for months – they just didn’t know it yet, because we weren’t allowed to announce it. It sucks. And I myself was a fan of the show, regardless of my involvement. I thought the show was supercool. I would’ve watched that show even if I wasn’t in it. So that kind of pissed me off. But also Reaper was like my fifth television series, so I understood how TV is a fickle bitch. Onwards and upwards I guess, you know?

The problem with loyalty is how it can so quickly sour into feeling betrayed. Fans give so much to these stories. They just expect the cast and crew and creators to do the same. Treating a role just like another job won’t cut it: it has to be a passion, a calling, the dream of a lifetime. Everyone on set must be the best of friends, too.

Remember the  outpouring of anger  when Michael Rosenbaum said he wasn’t going to appear as Lex Luthor on the final episode of Smallville? Or the ire directed towards George R. R. Martin for not writing his next Song of Ice and Fire book fast enough? At least that resulted in Neil Gaiman’s fantastically quotable clarification of the contract between writers and readers: ”George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.”

Neither’s Tyler Labine, damn it.

Even ignoring the soft focus and muddy sound of well-watched VHS, I can remember when anything seen outside of a cinema was inevitably cropped. Panned and scanned for 4:3 TVs. It meant faces of less important actors on the sides of the frame were split down the middle. Climactic Leone shootouts were butchered, turning wide shots of two men in the corners of the screen into one man, standing alone, staring at nothing while ominous music played.

I was working at a video store when the first trickle of widescreen VHS copies arrived – for ‘collectors’, of course. I was constantly explaining to customers that they weren’t missing anything under those black bars now at the top and bottom of the screen. In fact, widescreen meant they’d actually be seeing extra footage on the left and right! At least half the time they couldn’t be convinced. They didn’t want to ‘waste’ any of their TV.

And in Australia, watching TV was even worse. We’d get shows months after the rest of the world. One channel stopped playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer halfway through season two, a voiceover announcing that it was the season finale. (Did I say announcing? I meant lying. Lying!) Our networks would ignore the usual TV act breaks to stuff in commercials wherever they liked. When we got shows at all, they were played completely unpredictably: I remember scrabbling for tapes to capture the last two-thirds of shows like Homicide: Life on the Street as they bounced around in ever-changing late night summer slots.

Writing in The Guardian, Peter Preston said that time-shifting has ruined the ‘water-cooler moments’ of collective TV watching. “It sounds somehow empowering as the habit grows,” he says, “but it also leaves you feeling alone…” In the UK and US? Maybe. In the rest of the world, downloading means we can finally be a part of popular culture almost as it happens, and join in the subsequent conversations online.

There are always articles pointing out cinema’s quality is rapidly declining. Mark Harris, in his celebrated GQ piece ‘The Day the Movies Died’, said: “…put simply, things have never been worse.”

Let’s say he’s right. (He’s not, I don’t think, but let’s say he is.) With correct aspect ratios, and multizone DVD players, and cheap imports of foreign films, and TV full-season box sets, and tiny, downloadable subtitles… isn’t this still the best time in history to be a movie fan?

I interviewed Spurlock about this little while ago for triple j magazine, and found him A) very charming and B) pretty candid about the film’s goals. Here it is.

So this interview is just part of the ‘media impressions’ required by your sponsors, right?

That’s right. You’re complicit in this whole process.

I feel like a DVD extra or something.

You are a walking, talking DVD extra! But it’s not just you. What I love about the film is that it shows you how things are marketed, how that marketing turns into awareness, how that awareness turns into attendance…

In Greatest Movie, we see you getting your Don Draper on and trying to sell the concept to brands. Is this something that comes naturally, or do you hate the business of movie-making?

What I’ve learned is that if you’re going to be in this business, you really need to understand how to manoeuvre in this business. Pitching is one of those things that they don’t teach you in school. You’re thrown into the deep end as a filmmaker when you graduate from college and you’ve got to figure it out. I made it up as I went along.

Your last film, Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden…

Question answered by the way. President Obama, you’re welcome.

…that movie was also a kind of sales pitch, just one for tolerance and understanding. Greatest Story feels different because you’re compromised from the start.

Yeah. That’s part of what makes the film work. You see the corruption take place. After making this, I told people that when you get into business with a brand it’s not a 30% or 40% chance – it’s a 100% chance they’ll somehow infect the content.

“Transparency is the new objectivity”. Do you agree?

I think we live in a time where people have been jerked around and lied to for so long that the new thing is just to not jerk people around and lie to them. To finally say: “You know what? I’m going to do something nuts and tell you the truth.” We’re at the end of that rope, and people are tired of being bullshitted.

Is that really where we’re setting the bar? “I know you’re going to screw me, but at least you’re honest about it”?

Yeah! I think it is! That’s exactly where we are!

The movie shows how everyone has their own line between ‘what’s okay’ and ‘what’s selling out’. Where’s your line?

The line I didn’t want to cross was giving up control of the film. The greatest asset they got out was the movie marketing their products, but the greatest asset I got was the film itself. The minute I gave final cut over to a brand or a company, I compromised my ability to tell the most honest and open story I could.

Did a number of sponsors want final cut?

All of them. Every single contract.

They should at least put more money on the table. “Final cut? Ten million dollars!”

I would happily have given it to them for ten million dollars.

Are you worried the film makes product placement seem sort of fun and harmless?

There was a great thing that happened after the premiere of the movie at Sundance. We got a standing ovation for the brands. It was one of the most insane things you’d ever seen. A woman came up to one of the brand representatives and said “First I want to thank you, all your companies, for supporting this movie. I’m going to buy more of your products because you did – but I’m conflicted about it.” Luckily the irony wasn’t lost on her. And I hope that when people watch the movie, just like her, the irony of the situation isn’t lost.

While a lot of the doco is funny, I found the last ten minutes strangely moving, especially with that OK Go song rising up behind it.

What I love about the film is how it comes full circle. Everything I’m critiquing at the beginning of the movie are the tools I’m using to market the film at the end. So you see the snake eating its tail. The lyrics of that OK Go song are “We solved all our problems with bigger problems”. That’s the American way.

This interview first appeared in triple j magazine #53.