Posts Tagged adaptation
The Walking Dead: Zombie Pathos
One: the pilot episode of The Walking Dead might be the best thing Frank Darbont has ever done.
Two: the subsequent episodes never quite lived up to the pilot, but remained pretty entertaining.
Three: it’s fascinating to watch how Mad Men-style classiness pops and fizzes when it comes into contact with the staples of cheesy, late-night genre TV.
I was already a fan of Robert Kirkman’s comic book. In fact, it’s about the only zombie narrative that still remotely interests me. I, officially, have zombie burn-out. I flinched when I saw that three of the unproduced screenplays on the annual ‘what’s hot’ blacklist contain zombies, so Hollywood’s obviously betting their popularity will last a few more years yet.
(Imagine dying, right now, and reanimating as a zombie. You stagger up off the ground, holding in your intestines, moaning incoherently… only to find that you’ve missed the zeitgeist and everyone’s moved on to being terrified of other, cooler monsters. You’d be so embarrassed you’d be glad that your higher brain functions were gone.)
I think I’m just tired of cannon fodder. Of zombies – dull as individuals, frightening as crowds – existing only to provide opportunities for what Zombieland called its “Zombie Kill of the Week”. The final battle of Zombieland was set at an amusement park for a reason, right?
Whatever resonant metaphors zombies usually provide seem to have grown stale. I did enjoy Chuck Klosterman’s recent piece in the New York Times, however, where he turns the metaphorical focus onto the audience, pointing out that a “lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies.” And, riffing further: “Zombies are like the Internet and the media and every conversation we don’t want to have.”
So far, The Walking Dead focuses less on killing and more on character. (Or, less favourably, more on bickering and camping and soap opera.) Despite some hackneyed dialogue and odd pacing, though, there’s one thing I really admire about it.
From the legless woman Rick (Andrew Lincoln) puts down to the once-mother, still scrabbling at the door of her family home on blind instinct – The Walking Dead’s zombies are just so goddamn sad.
Here’s the worst of it: Andrea (Laurie Holden) waits by the corpse of her just-bitten sister, Amy (Emma Bell). She refuses to let anyone dispose of the body. Eventually, her sister ‘wakes up’. Her eyes open. Her limbs twitch. Amy reaches out to Andrea, lost, childlike. We’re all waiting for the horror-movie moment where the reanimated Amy flies into furious action and chomps down on Andrea’s neck, but the moment doesn’t arrive. Instead, Amy claws ineffectually at Andrea’s hair, until Andrea says that she loves her, and then shoots Amy in the head.
It’s not like George Romero’s classic zombies were all opportunities for happy headshots, either. I feel like the satirical subtext of 1978′s Dawn of the Dead has been overstated over the years. The mall-bound undead riding escalators are good for a chuckle, sure, but it’s mostly just awful to see them blindly wandering the aisles. When the living clean out the mall, turning live corpses into dead ones, it’s hardly a victory. And it’s the polar opposite of Zack Snyder’s trigger-happy Dawn of the Dead remake.
The Walking Dead’s zombies stand for something other than contagion or consumerism or unwanted conversations. They’re your mourning; they’re your grief; they’re your old life and loved ones, kept alive by your wish to have them back.
My zombie apocalypse is a total buzz-kill, isn’t it? If it makes you feel better, here’s every zombie kill of The Walking Dead’s first season condensed into little more than a minute of mayhem.
You’re welcome.
Motion Comics: It’s Moving! It’s Moving!
Over at Bookslut this month, I’m talking about what I love about comic books. Buried in the middle, though, is a rant about ‘motion comics’. Here it is again:
More and more, comic companies are hoping to supplement sales by offering digital versions of their titles with limited animation and voice acting that sounds like a first take at best. They think it’s just adding a gimmick to an existing story, like, say, slapping 3D on an old film.
What they don’t understand is that forcing this motion onto sequential art actually breaks something fundamental about comic book storytelling. It suggests a group of executives throwing a comic on the ground and poking at it with sticks. “Look!” they say, jabbing at the page. “It’s moving! It’s moving!”
Every time I see another attempt at selling motion comics, I’m surprised at how many ways they find to fail. First there’s the dialogue. A lot of what sits happily in word balloons sounds utterly ridiculous when spoken out loud by even the best actors – and the quality of actors featured on these animations is, uh, variable. Yes, let’s be polite and say “variable”.
There’s also the problem with redundancy, as illustrated by the Watchmen motion comic. It has an actor speaking the narration and dialogue – at the same time as the words are appearing on screen. Transmedia theorist Geoffrey Long points out that this could be because one narrator is doing all the voices, much as they would in an audio book, and the visual component “thus gives viewers a sense of who’s talking”. That’s true – but unless it’s a children’s read-along affair, you don’t usually read a book while also listening to its audio equivalent at once.
(Geoffrey Long’s piece is a much more even-handed survey of motion comics than this one, so go read the whole thing. Now back to my ranting…)
Problems like these are secondary to something much more problematic. In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, he declares that if you want to paint a world full of motion, “then be prepared to paint motion!” And sequential art has developed an astonishing number of techniques to imply motion, both within a single panel and between them. Not just the closure required by two panels in sequence, but speed lines, dialogue placement, panel size, and endless others. (For the academically-inclined, I wrote more about this last year for Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal.)
Introducing literal moments of motion into these panels somehow doesn’t add to these techniques – it just replaces them. Look, I’ve clocked up so many years of comic reading that I’m as conditioned to the idiosyncrasies of sequential art as anyone. And yet the moment I see art creak into motion, something inside me feels like when Homer Simpson saw someone in a wheelchair:
“Hey, they have chairs with wheels and here I am using my legs like a sucker!”
It might not be rational, but there it is: if the pictures can move on their own, why am I bothering to turn stillness into motion in my mind’s eye?
Anyway, Marvel’s Astonishing X-Men motion comic is the most ‘animated’ I’ve seen. It loses the speech-and-text redundancy and makes much more effort to find cinematic segues. It’s almost a cartoon, but it’s still less effective than any fully-fledged, traditionally animated TV episode. At best, it is still – as comic commentator Chris Sims recently put it – “a comic for people who will do anything they possibly can to avoid reading”.
Hollywood is still learning the hard way that comic art doesn’t function as easy storyboards; now animators need to discover sequential art doesn’t provide instant keyframes. And I agree wholeheartedly with Long when he says that “while motion comics may offer interesting differences from both animated shorts and actual comics, they arguably offer real advantages over neither.”
If nothing else, motion comics should try a new name. ‘Motion’ only draws attention to something they do rather unconvincingly. And ‘comics’? Once they move, I’m not sure they’re comics at all.
Superheroes (If You Squint)
Last night, Joss Whedon spoke at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Whedon fans get a bad rap online – obsessive, evangelical – so I first want to say that this Q&A was the most sane I’ve ever seen at the festival.
(According to my rigorous statistical math, this proves regular book nerds are much, much crazier than Firefly fans.)
Whedon spoke a little about taking on the Avengers movie for Marvel. He said that until Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, he wasn’t convinced you could do a true superhero film – but also that Hollywood’s now jumped far too quickly to films like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Dark Knight. He wanted to enjoy more examples of ‘straight’ superhero movies before we started deconstructing them, and tearing their poor heroes apart.
It made me remember how superhero films used to be a rarity. Franchises were kicked off by Donner’s 1978 Superman and Burton’s 1989 Batman, of course, but nothing like the avalanche of onscreen superheroes we have now. Some of the best comic book movies weren’t based on comics at all, just inspired by them: Raimi’s Darkman is one of my all-time favourite B-films.
Sometimes, though, there’s nothing to do but squint if you want movies featuring your favourite superheroes.
Like David Fincher’s Se7en. (Do I really have to type the number in the middle?) It’s secretly one of the best Batman movies ever made. It has the endless rain, portentous dialogue, villain with a ridiculous gimmick, and the hysterical masculine dramatics that good Gotham City stories require. There’s only one difference: in a true Batman story, Brad Pitt’s detective would soon return as a grim new villain, out for revenge.
It was about halfway through the Bourne trilogy that it hit me: an amnesiac, capable of great violence, tortured by that same capacity, struggling to uncover his past but soon realising he might not want to know? If only Matt Damon had less height, more hair, and pointy retractable claws, these would’ve been ideal Wolverine films.
I’ve always thought Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop perfectly captured the mix of arresting violence and blacker-than-black comedy that defines Judge Dredd. There’s a new Dredd movie coming, and they’ve promised to never take off his helmet. It sounds superficial, yes, but it’s a good start. Still, Dredd is such a strange character (so political, so funny, so British) it’s hard to believe even a well-meaning American-filmed version could do him justice.
And it might’ve taken Buffy the Vampire Slayer until recent issues of her new ‘Season Eight’ comic books to become faster than a speeding bullet, but she was never less than a great Spider-Man. She suffered through secret identity blues in exactly the same way, and her regular-life-versus-heroic-calling provided a perfect example of Uncle Ben’s “with great power comes great responsibility” curse.
Whedon said being offered Avengers was a thrill because he remembers reading the comics when he was eleven years old. Comic book influences have always been obvious in his writing. TV shows like Heroes would later take on the trappings of superhero stories while getting everything else about them horribly wrong, but Buffy showed the real meat of Marvel Comics.
The Hulk as Hamlet
“I look at it as my generation’s Hamlet.”
That’s Mark Ruffalo on playing The Hulk. He’ll be the third actor to embody the character – or, more accurately, the Hulk’s puny alter ego Bruce Banner – in just three films. First there was Eric Bana in Ang Lee’s misunderstood masterpiece Hulk in 2003. (Yes. You heard me. “Masterpiece”.)
Bana was replaced five years later by Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk, a fairly terrible film I once reviewed as resembling “a panto acted out by action figures”.
Now, in Joss Whedon’s upcoming Avengers movie, Mark Ruffalo will step into the role. He’s a great choice, I think, but that’s not really the point. Some fans are annoyed – there are even online petitions demanding Norton return to the role.
No one seems to be questioning Ruffalo’s acting. The objection is simply to changing an actor mid-franchise. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to apply to supporting casts. Poor Katie Holmes was replaced between Nolan’s Batman Begins and Dark Knight and no one seemed to mind.)
It comes down to this: Bruce Banner should look the same in each movie, right?
Frankly, I’m not sure why.
It expects a visual continuity that comic books don’t possess. Look at these random examples, above and below. Does Kelly Jones’ Bruce Wayne really look anything like Denys Cowan’s Bruce Wayne? We might feel a discontinuity if the art shifts mid-comic, but radically different styles sit quite closely in other issues, other series, and it goes unnoticed.
The rules do shift once human actors embody these characters. I’ve written before about what celebrity logic does to these heroic alter egos. It makes the secret identity as famous as the costumed one, and results in heroes whipping off their masks at the slightest provocation.
Nevertheless, I think Ruffalo is right. The Hulk is Hamlet – or, at least, he should be.
Masks, costumes, and an obsession with alternate identities mean that if any screen characters can be played by multiple actors, it’s these superheroes. It’s not like replacing Michael J. Fox between Back To The Future sequels.
And just like I’d prefer more radical, auteuristic movie adaptations – Burton’s Batman, Lee’s Hulk, whatever – instead of a generic ‘house style’, I’m happy to see different actors coming to these roles. The many faces of multiple actors don’t make the heroes’ interchangeable. They make them less human, and more mythic.
A weird question for you: are comic readers willing to accept shifting facial features because we instinctually think they’re only different artistic interpretations of the one, concrete, real-world face? A ‘secret identity’ that we’ll never actually get to see?