Yes, I’m an idiot.

It somehow didn’t click that the thousands of comics, say, dropped on Iraq in the early ‘90s were more likely show Saddam Hussein cutting off his own head than a cheery selection of Calvin and Hobbes.

I was planning to discuss psy-ops and propaganda comics while writing about Joe Sacco’s Footnotes In Gaza for Bookslut, but Sacco distracted me with his hundreds of pages of heartbreak. Would it have been too tenuous to compare his work with Captain America punching Hitler back in 1941? They’re both designed to win hearts and change minds, after all. And comics have a long history of being used as propaganda – whether to rally support at home like Hitler’s glass jaw above, or loaded into cluster bombs and dropped on the enemy to destroy morale.

Sometimes, however, the pretty pictures can have the opposite effect. During World War II, the Japanese reportedly dropped leaflets designed to convince American soldiers their wives were busy being unfaithful at home; they were illustrated – ahem – graphically enough that they became collector’s items. “Our guys loved it,” says military historian Stanley Sadler. “They’d trade them like baseball cards.”

That same article by Ian Urbina references a failed use of superhero-specific propaganda, too. In 2000, DC Comics made special Superman and Wonder Woman comics in multiple languages to illustrate the dangers of land mines. But… umm… what were those weird, word-filled clouds hanging over the heroes’ heads? Urbina explains:

“Though widely understood in some contexts, thought bubbles appearing above a cartoon character’s head left some readers, especially rural ones, completely baffled, according to press accounts.”

The perceived simplicity of comic art is what makes it so appealing for cross-cultural propaganda. Unfortunately – and setting aside the possibility that this story is another example of the “caveman panic” rumour circulating around the Lumière train – it’s never that simple. Read this fascinating piece on the attempts to cure “The Forever Problem” at a New Mexico nuclear waste vault. Once you set aside a shared written language and a shared visual vocabulary, how do you communicate grave danger to humans living a thousand years from now?

Comic books have hundreds of specific visual conventions, from the wavy lines above an angry man’s head in the newspaper funnies to the ornate font Marvel’s currently using to imply that Thor and their other Norse Gods sound kinda ‘Ye Olde’.

And superhero comics may be many things – daft, adolescent, awe-inspiring, overtly sexist and conceptually daunting – but they’re rarely simple.

THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS

Directed by: Grant Heslov

Starring: Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges

Country: USA

The Men Who Stare At Goats starts with the statement: “More of this is true than you would believe.” And that’s both what’s wrong and what’s right with the movie.

It works best when it’s showing the secret history of the US Army’s unit of psychic spies, trained in paranormal abilities by a Lebowskiesque guru played by Jeff Bridges. These flashbacks, though, are intercut with a tacked-on storyline in the present about a journalist (Ewan McGregor) stumbling across a man who claims to be a member of “Project Jedi” on a secret mission in Iraq (George Clooney).

Sounds awesome? It’s inspired by Jon Ronson’s wildly entertaining book, but it misses the point that the book’s fascinating precisely because it’s non-fiction. (I mean, the soldiers are trained in something called the “sparkly eyes technique”!)

While The Men Who Stare At Goats is intermittently entertaining, it turns everything into farcical comedy. It should’ve realised that when your source material is this batshit, you play it straight.

Just one other review this month: the bizarre Twilight Zone-inspired Pontypool.

Issue #37 on sale now.

Glee prides itself on its underdog status. It’s constantly announcing that the members of the Glee Club are losers and outcasts. One promotional tagline was “A biting comedy for the underdog in all of us.” They’re even planning an upcoming competition to find new castmembers via Idolish auditions; one of the show’s creators, Ryan Murphy, told Variety that “anybody and everybody now has a chance to be on a show about talented underdogs.”

Blame my own torturous high school years, but I wholeheartedly empathised with the pain inside every single character in Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks. And before Josh Schwartz’ The OC pulled off the unlikely feat of transforming Seth Cohen from a friendless nerd into a bonafide heart throb, Seth’s hatred of high school felt genuine, too.

(There’s a heartbreaking moment near the end of The OC season two where Summer – the school’s resident princess and now, amazingly, Seth’s girlfriend – is looking through their yearbook with fond nostalgia. Then she notices that Seth is friendless in every single picture, and that she’ll never understand.)

I don’t feel any actual high school angst sitting under the loser-labels that Glee loves to throw around. The show effectively mines emotion out of Kurt’s coming out to his working-class father, yes, but otherwise it relies on its powerballads as sentimental shorthand. The slushie-to-the-face is meant to be quick visual iconography for unpopularity – but it’s a mostly empty gesture.

The recent movie Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief pushes this desire for a token underdog even further. We’re told Percy’s a loser. He admits it. We get one short scene of him supposedly struggling in school and, uh, that’s it. Other than that maybe half-a-minute of film, he seems like a together, popular, even cocky teenager. The screenwriters might as well have just given him a t-shirt with UNDERDOG written on it, dusted off their hands, and considered Percy’s backstory complete.

Do we like the idea of rooting for the underdog, but find actual losers a little too… loserey?

Jennifer’s Body – the teen horror film penned by Diablo Cody and starring Megan Fox – made a massive miscalculation when it choose its victims for Jennifer’s demonic tendencies. When Carrie eviscerated her prom back in 1976, it was the bloody revenge of the powerless against the powerful. Jennifer, however, is the most popular girl in school. Where’s the joy in watching her horribly maim her unpopular classmates? That’s not fun, fantasy, or vicarious thrills. That’s just high school.

(There is, however, plenty of fun to be had in seeing Adam Brody – The OC’s Seth Cohen – all evilled and eyelinered as the film’s true villain.)

Glee is witty and good-hearted enough that I do still enjoy it, despite the hesitations above and many others, too. (Lazy writing! Haphazard plotting! Bizarre song choices with nothing to do with the scene at hand!) After all, Jane Lynch’s delivery as the surreally wicked Sue Sylvester is enough of a reason to watch.

Even if it never becomes the Heathers: The Musical like I secretly desire, I hope it lives up to its potential. Don’t stop believin’ just quite yet.

Cigarette lighters. Cassette players. Unlikely knowledge of the next solar eclipse.

I couldn’t help thinking of those poor cavemen when I read this paragraph in a recent piece on cinema and horror in The Guardian:

“It seems obvious now that one of the inherent functions or opportunities that always faced the movies was scaring the living daylights out of us. When the train came into the station in the Lumiere brothers’ early film programme, some in the audience ran out of the theatre screaming. They thought the engine was going to come out of the screen and hit them!”

Everyone’s heard this story, over and over again. In 1895, Louis Lumière showed his short film Arrival of the Train and terrified the audience, causing them to shout, scream, and leap from their chairs in panic. This wasn’t a documentary; it was black magic.

Writing for The Moving Image journal in 2004, Martin Loiperdinger says that as the crowd’s reaction has been told and retold, it has become “the founding myth of the medium, testifying to the power of film over its spectators.” He concludes:

“Paradoxically, Arrival of the Train has come to represent both the modernity of Louis Lumière’s first documentary films, their visual power to shock audiences, and a precursor of Direct Cinema. However, neither attribute really stands up to film historical analysis.”

So maybe the crowd weren’t frightened after all, and a few excited ooohs and aaahs have been exaggerated, purple-monkey-dishwasher-style, into something more memorable. I can see why we want to believe. It’s not only an object lesson in cinematic oomph; it also lets us feel superior to those primitive audiences, sitting in the dark, screaming endearingly at the flickering images before them.

In a subsequent issue of the same journal, Ray Zone writes about a fact that seems like something everyone but those cavemen and me must’ve already known.

Why is it never mentioned, he wonders, that only two months before this infamous screening of Arrival of the Train, “a runaway locomotive at the Montmartre Station in Paris broke through a second story wall and plummeted down into the street”?

This allows the crowd their own history, rather than requiring them to be blank-faced witnesses of oncoming modernity. Maybe they weren’t thinking: oh god, this Lumière wizard has conjured a train from thin air that now rushes forth to kill us one and all!

Maybe they winced and thought: too soon.

ANTICHRIST

Directed by: Lars von Trier

Starring: Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg

Country: USA / Denmark

After watching Antichrist, all I wanted to do was get Lars von Trier drunk and ask him: “Really?”

He has Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg give incredibly raw, honest performances as a couple dealing with the death of their young child; but he puts them in a film so over-the-top it often seems like a Flying High-style parody of art cinema. And that’s before a talking fox arrives to announce that “chaos reigns!”If you were too squeamish to see Antichrist on the big screen, don’t worry. Once things turn violent, it’s still not that bad – well, except for the bit with scissors, anyway. (Shudder.) It’s just the way he’s mixed violence with explicit sex that makes it shocking.

Antichrist is full of beautiful, nightmarish imagery: you could freeze it at random and create a perfect oil painting. Sometimes the movie seems like it’s inching close to saying something profound… only to run away giggling again.

So, Lars: should we take this psychodrama seriously? And how about that drink?

Other reviews this month: Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, Hillcoat’s The Road – more on that here – and Final Destination 3D.

Issue #36 on sale now.

Just before Christmas last year I had the chance to chat with everyone’s favourite dirty uncle of cult cinema, and there’s a lengthy chunk of the interview now online.

Even when I haven’t thought much of one or two of John Waters’ films, I’ve always admired him for how excited he remains about other artists’ work, and not just his own. Film, theatre, fine art, you name it. So in the grand tradition of the Heathers lunchtime poll I asked him the following: if 1950s-style aliens arrived on earth to destroy all our movies and you could only save one film, what would it be?

His reply: Boom!

It’s the best failed art film ever. Elizabeth Taylor plays Sissy Goforth and Richard Burton plays the Angel of Death, a gigolo who comes to live with rich ladies before they die. It is staggering to see this movie. I could watch it over and over and shout out all the dialogue. It has Richard Burton saying for no apparent reason: “Boom… the sound of knowing the next moment you’re alive…”

(He gave me some good advice about surviving Christmas, too. While he loves it, he said he “understands people hating it. I think the biggest mistake you can make about Christmas is ignoring it.” Next Christmas, as Stephen Colbert would say: pick a side! We’re at war!)

Go read it, because he’s awesome. There’s some more of the our conversation – including why he thinks the Marquis de Sade is more famous than the Beatles – in the latest jmag.

Send me a mysterious package tied with yellow string and sealed with wax.

Fill said package not only with your book, but with an audio CD, some instant coffee, and a handful of Yo! MTV Raps trading cards.

Include reading instructions, after presumably intuiting that, yes, I am easily confused.

Make me feel like I’m a unique snowflake. (Happy star optional.)

See? It’s that easy. Now I can’t wait to read the book inside. I just hope it lives up to the genuinely gleeful experience I had unwrapping it. You can read more about it at the Outside Writers Collective.

I don’t mean for the film studios, because for them the point is the Daffy Duck-style dollar signs appearing in their eyes. A quick calculation by SlashFilm found that only two of the top 30 grossing films of last decade were original stories: Finding Nemo and Kung Fu Panda. Adaptations are great business decisions. They come pre-hyped, risk-reduced, and with a built-in audience ranging from curious onlookers to rabid fans.

And if you haven’t read the book in question? You probably don’t care where it came from. You might feel some of the pitfalls of books-to-film adaptation – too many characters, bloated running times, plot points stuffed in until the screenplay is oddly shapeless – but you might not.

No, I’m talking about the specific sensation of watching a faithful adaptation of a book you’ve already read. For example: you couldn’t say Hillcoat’s The Road is a bad movie. In many ways, it’s great, and some of the problems I had with it were those I already had with the source material. (Yes, I’m someone who thinks that the ending is a cheat, and one that’s almost on par with “he woke up and it was all a dream…”)

I’m a book-rereader and a movie-rewatcher, so it’s not knowing what’s going to happen that bothers me. The movie of The Road was faithful enough that I knew how it would happen, too.

I’ve ranted before about how movies like Watchmen suffered from too much fidelity, and would’ve been better served by taking more chances. That would help make them more medium-specific, but it’d also give them more of a reason to exist in the first place. With comic book adaptations, it’s not enough to just get to see the pictures move. With adaptations of a novel like The Road, it’s not enough – for me, at least – to create a visual landscape that matches the one the prose planted in my head.

(Which the movie did, without doubt. It’s one of the most convincing apocalypses ever put on screen.)

So: what’s the point? Is it to have an excuse to enjoy the story again? To see how it matches against what flickered in your imagination as you were reading? To spot the small, inevitable changes to the narrative? To hear how the dialogue sounds, spoken out loud? Is it curiosity about whether or not the movie got it ‘right’? Or that the movie experience is an upgrade, flat-out superior to the one offered by a novel?

Or are the two mediums so different that you don’t feel redundancy in even the most faithful adaptation – and I should just shut up about it?

Jack’s fate is typical of how the never-ending stories of TV series and comic books guarantee these violent heroes will never know peace for more than a few minutes or pages at a time. At the end of 24’s (admittedly terrible) season six, Jack Bauer had had enough. After all these years of torture and gunplay, he wanted his “life back”. He was told in no uncertain terms:

“Jack, simply getting your life back isn’t gonna change who you are… and you can’t walk away from it. You know that. You’ve tried it. Sooner or later you’re gonna get back in the game…”

We’ve seen this in endless Hollywood Westerns: the hero, the only one capable of Doing What Must Be Done, has to walk away from the domestic life he dearly desires. In 1992, Clint Eastwood’s meta-mythic Unforgiven bundled up every cowboy he’d ever played into the story of William Munny, dragged inexorably away from his family and back to the gun. The coda says that he returned home, sure, but I’m not entirely sure we’re meant to believe it.

At least once the credits roll, William Munny’s story comes to an end. While ratings hold, Jack doesn’t have the same option to put down his gun. Somehow I don’t think Jack Bauer: Kindly Grandpa has the same network appeal. (Opening voiceover: “The following visit to the zoo takes place between 11am and 12pm.”)

It’s worse for violent comic book characters – and aren’t they all? Wolverine, for example, is basically immortal. His mutant healing factor keeps him in fighting shape, year after year, so he looks just the same now as he did fighting in World War II. In New X-Men #148 (2003), there’s an example of how all this death has taken its toll. “All I’m good for’s killing,” Logan thinks at the telepathic Jean Grey. “If you knew what I was, you’d hate me.”

Recently, he too had a moment of peace, albeit in a story called ‘Old Man Logan‘ set in a grim possible future. And he was older, too, finally, a grey-haired pacifist and family man. But – you guessed it – he was forced away from his spartan home for one last job. It’s an utterly shameless steal of Unforgiven, except with all Eastwood’s well-earned heartbreak replaced with pointless Marvel Comics trivia for long-term fans. I don’t think William Munny would approve.

Back in regular comic book continuity, the needs of the status quo have been crueller to Wolverine than most. After his debut in 1974, he seemed to be on a decades-long character arc to a better place. He turned from an amnesiac, animalistic killer to a more noble sort of warrior: self-controlled, samurai-influenced, and even a mentor to young X-Men like Kitty Pride. Wolverine’s readers don’t want to give up their favourite hack ‘n’ slash antihero, though, so Logan is never allowed to put his berserker rage behind him once and for all.

But Jack Bauer’s lack of a mutant healing factor is, in fact, his secret weapon. Day by day, his mortal host – Kiefer Sutherland – is getting older. At some point, suspension of disbelief will snap and he’ll be judged too decrepit to be kicking ass on 24. Only then Jack will get some well-deserved peace.

Don’t get me wrong. I love his first Spider-Man (2002). It might still be the best straight superhero film ever made. (Sorry, Dark Knight! Please don’t yell at me in your growly, growly voice!) In retrospect, Sam Raimi’s cartoon tendencies and hyperkinetic camerawork had just been waiting for the right superhero all along.

And some of my favourite movies have come from similarly left-field decisions to fit ‘alternative’ artists with more mainstream stories. Like: putting Brian De Palma on Mission: Impossible? Genius. Paranoid, hysterical genius.

While many prefer Spider-Man 2 (2004) to Raimi’s first, it never quite worked for me. It had some amazing sequences, no doubt – mostly effects-heavy action scenes, but great idiosyncratic moments like Spidey’s awkward elevator conversation, too. The problem was that the film seemed to be missing the connective tissue to fuse these moments together. Without it, it clunked from one set piece to the next, less than the sum of its parts.

The rumours that they’d started shooting without a script suddenly made sense. Shoot first; write screenplay later. No matter what writer they brought on to finish it, they’d be tasked with finding narrative excuses to stitch together already-rendered set pieces.

I saw Spider-Man 3 (2007) on opening night in New York. The whole city was celebrating Spider-Man Week. There were banners everywhere saying A HERO COMES HOME. (Forgive my blurry photography below.) The day of the premiere, one newspaper even ran the headline “See You At Midnight!” on the cover – because where else would anyone be but at the first screenings?

But even the hometown audience was so disappointed that the riotous applause that welcomed the opening credits was completely absent by the film’s end. Slice it into pieces and there was still some beautiful stuff in there – the ‘Birth of Sandman’ scene alone was worth the ticket price – but it was a mess of disjointed scenes, glitchy character motivations, and weird tone shifts.

Sitting in that packed crowd, all of whom were getting more bored with every passing moment, I remember seeing a burst of skewed camera work and thinking “There you are, Sam.” I’d completely forgotten Raimi was the director. I know I was just complaining about the ridiculousness of auteur theory – but that doesn’t mean I want to give up the feeling of a distinct creative force at work. Even if that feeling is an illusion, and the composite result of a dozen hands working together.

As films become bigger and bigger, featuring special effects sequences requiring new technology and terrifying man-hours, I’ve been getting that Spider-Man 3 feeling more and more: disconnected scenes, some amazing, some less so; clunking awkwardly one into the next without a unifying narrative thread or sense of style to hold them together.

Maybe we’re approaching the time when multiple directors need to be credited: action scenes by X, quiet character scenes by Y, romantic moments by Z. Screenwriting already can work that way – “Hey, let’s bring in that funny guy to add some, you know, funny stuff!” – only without knowing exactly who did what.

Years later, Raimi came out and said that he didn’t have the control he wanted on Spider-Man 3 and that he was disappointed with it, too. So I’m not disappointed he’s moving on rather than be pressured into making the movie before he thinks it’s ready. He gave us an amazing Spider-Man story, and now that he’s had Drag Me To Hell to clear his throat, creatively speaking, I hope whatever he does next kicks ass.

Today’s news is that the Spider-Man franchise will be rebooted, not even a decade later. It’ll have a new cast and more of the angsty high school focus of the Ultimate Spider-Man series. It’s not a bad idea. Let’s just hope they finish the script first.