Posts Tagged optimism
The Golden Age of Cinema
I swear, more and more, whenever I visit the cinema something goes wrong with the projection. Bad print, wrong ratio, whatever. I don’t know if it’s getting worse, or if it just seems that way now everyone has big TVs, 5.1 sound, and crisp digital copies waiting at home.
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?
Superman For Everybody
Has there ever been an industry that treated its founding fathers as badly as comic books? And what would their superheroic creations think of these injustices?
This month, my Bookslut column looks at some of the grand ironies of corporate-owned superheroes. It barely scratches the surface, and there were a dozen other half-formed ideas and outrages that didn’t make it into the finished version.
The letter that inspired me – Joanne Siegel’s angry response to the chairman of Time Warner – can be read in full here. And in his book Our Hero: Superman on Earth, Tom DeHaven describes how Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel’s fury with DC Comics had begun decades earlier:
In October 1975 he sat down at his old typewriter and composed a screed of malice and grief, a cry for recognition and justice, and a thundering imprecation: “I, Jerry Siegel,” it began, “the co-originator of SUPERMAN, put a curse on the SUPERMAN movie! I hope it super-bombs. I hope loyal SUPERMAN fans stay away from it in droves. I hope the whole world, becoming aware of the stench that surrounds SUPERMAN, will avoid the movie like a plague.
Want more? The long history of court cases involving comic creators is summarised in this massively depressing article by Paul Slade.
(There’s an intriguing theory towards the end, too, wondering why we’re seeing more and more comics of Superman in black-and-white variations of his costume. Warner won a legal victory over an early monotone ad showing a preview of the famous cover of Action Comics #1 – so is DC now “already preparing for a world where it may wish to minimise any aspect of Superman it doesn’t fully own”?)
The Comics Reporter added some welcome comments to my piece:
Mainstream comics publishers such as DC and their communities have ascribed a real-world moral authority to these fictional characters for years now. Why shouldn’t that extend to broader ethical issues involved in their creation, publication and distribution? If Superman, Batman and Spider-Man are presented at times as moral agents capable of instructing and inspiring their readership, why wouldn’t the expectations they engender apply to a situation where the press of ownership concerns has taken precedence over the greater morality represented by treating people with compassion and gratitude?
And for some ideas of how public domain superheroes have always existed in the Marvel and DC universes, check out this piece on IO9, inspired by the release of Marvel’s new movie Thor. Of course, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s smash hit The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen forged a Justice League-style supergroup from famous fictional characters from around the turn of last century: Stoker’s Mina Harker, Wells’ Invisible Man, and so on. I wonder if we’d ever see something similar combining characters from Marvel, DC, and whoever-the-hell-else in a hundred years.
For my money, Moore’s best work on Superman wasn’t when he was writing the official version for DC Comics. It was when he was working with an obvious knock-off – still Superman, just with the colours changed and logo filed off – in Supreme. Imagine if he’d been able to tell these stories with the real thing. Wouldn’t they have meant more?
Writing this piece, I found it painfully difficult to reconcile this history with the unbridled optimism that powers the best superhero stories; with my childlike love of these characters and their worlds. I kept thinking of the court case over Flex Mentallo, Grant Morrison’s “Hero of the Beach!” from the pages of Doom Patrol. In the court’s ruling over the character’s copyright, it highlighted a particular line from the background material provided by DC Comics. It said that Flex “…represents Morrison’s argument for a space beyond critique”.
A space beyond critique: pure optimism, pure altruism, pure imagination.
Batman Cares
When I was chatting with Dylan Horrocks about his newly reprinted Hicksville collection, I quizzed him about his time writing Batgirl for DC Comics. The following didn’t make it into my Bookslut piece, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
“When I was writing stories set in Gotham City, I was very conscious that the whole Batman ethos presents a vision of the modern urban environment that I don’t think is true. I don’t mean that people dress up in tights and capes – people do! It’s that it presents the city as a kind of urban jungle, full of predators preying on innocent citizens. They’re poisonous, they’re corrupt, and so on.
“And the only way to protect innocents in that kind of setting is to be more violent than those predators. You have to become a predator who preys on the predators. That’s what Batman is. He uses violence – really nasty violence – and his stock and trade is torture.
“I was writing Batgirl at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal. I felt like this vision of how the world works presented by these comics went perfectly with the one the Bush administration was pushing on us. We’re engaged in a war on terror and, in the comics, Bruce Wayne is engaged in a war on crime. So it’s not just that I rejected Batman’s tactics – I rejected that whole view of the world.”
He’s not wrong. I mean, I love Batman – if pushed, I’ll admit that Batman might be my favourite character in the entirety of fiction – but he’s not wrong. One of the things about these iconic characters, though, is that they’ve been around so long that there can never be one coherent ideology throughout their thousands and thousands of stories. It’s how the Huffington Post can run a piece suggesting Batman would be pro-immigration and anti-jail for drug offenders, while conservative newspapers happily claimed The Dark Knight as a blockbuster with a Bush-friendly subtext.
So allow me to offer up proof that Batman cares, and from an unlikely source: the infamously grim Batman: The Killing Joke one-shot from 1988.
I know, I know. It’s the Batman story where poor Barbara Gordon gets crippled, right? And maybe raped? All in the Joker’s bid to convince Commissioner Gordon that the only thing between sanity and madness is “one bad day”? That’s the one. Even its writer, Alan Moore, doesn’t like it. He says it’s “a terrible book. I mean, it doesn’t say anything. It’s talking about Batman and the Joker, and says that yes, psychologically Batman and the Joker are mirror images of each other. So?”
Ignore all that – even Moore – and remember how The Killing Joke begins with Batman visiting the Joker, imprisoned in Arkham Asylum. “Hello,” Batman says. “I came to talk.” And he continues:
“I’ve been thinking lately. About you and me. About what’s going to happen to us, in the end. We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps later. I just wanted to know that I’d made a genuine attempt to talk things over and avert that outcome. Just once.”
Sure, it turns out that Batman’s not talking to the Joker at all, but just a stooge in white facepaint who’s taken his place while the Joker organizes the lovingly-drawn horror that follows. That’s not the point. I can enjoy the gritted teeth of near-fascist Batman; I can enjoy the gaudy and ludicrous BIFF! KAPOW! 1960s TV Batman; but my favourite Batman is the one who’ll do anything to avoid more violence and death…
…even sitting down with his psychopathic arch-nemesis in a heartfelt – and inevitably pointless – attempt at conversation.
My favourite Batman is the one who hates goodbyes.
Brightest Day and Dead Baby Birds
The first page of Brightest Day #0 made me laugh out loud. It’s the first volley of a more traditionally ‘heroic’ era for DC Comics superheroes – and it opens with a baby bird falling out of its nest and striking a tombstone with a spatter of blood, dead.
I feel better already.
Admittedly, Brightest Day co-writer Geoff Johns has said that the tone of the book is “not necessarily optimistic”. It does, however, arrive as a cheerier sequel to his hearts-torn-out-and-eaten-in-front-of-their-owners storyline Blackest Night, and showcases a dozen resurrected characters suddenly pardoned from the growing bodycount of recent superhero stories.
The narrator of the parodic Ambush Bug: Year None put it like this in 2008: “Squeamish, gentle reader? Then it may be time for you to give up reading graphic literature, since we have truly now entered… the Guignol Age of Comics.” Look, you really need to see the font for the full effect:
It’s not just blood and gore that make some squeamish, but also the actions of the heroes themselves. Marvel is promoting its new Heroic Age – a “throwback to the early days of the Marvel Universe, with more of a swashbuckling feel”, according to editor in chief Joe Quesada. Have comic books become so compromised that announcing “heroes will be heroes again” deserves a headline in the mainstream media?
Many trace this grim-and-gritty superhero trend back to comics like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen in the mid-1980s; Moore says he suspects “that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories…”
Everyone would have their own list of superhero stories gone wrong. Personally, I think that Kevin Smith’s Batman series The Widening Gyre seems to have been written just to prove that Frederick Wertham was right about creepy superhero sexuality. I cocked an eyebrow when the alternate-universe Captain America purposefully used a kindergarten full of children as cover during a firefight in Ultimate Avengers #4. Hell, DC just published a story in which a hero murders a villain while quipping “For justice” – a catchphrase associated with their kid-friendly Super Friends title.
I’m torn, though, whenever I feel the urge to complain about what’s being done to these superheroes. In my last column for Bookslut, I talk about alternative superheroes and “underwear perverts”, like James Kochalka’s Superf*ckers and Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys. I end up saying we shouldn’t be so precious about ‘perverted’ superheroes. It’s very difficult for a single story – or even a decent-length run – to do any lasting damage. Superheroes have “existed for too many years, through too many stories, at the hands of too many writers and artists to be corrupted by swear words or a sex scandal.” That goes for Marvel and DC’s own stories, too.
I don’t want to be a they’re-raping-my-childhood! hysteric. I’m all for violence, gore, and death – I’m actually murdering someone as I type! I’m just tired of the so-called “real world” intersecting with superhero stories in the most grim and least interesting ways. This quick, lovely piece by David Uzumeri summarises it best. Comparing Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto to Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly’s All-Star Superman, he writes:
“Books like Watchmen or Identity Crisis take that tack with American superhero material; they’re both about scratching under the shiny veneer and finding the rotten underside of a metaphorical golden age, about how, in a grown-up world, pragmatism trumps idealism.”
If idealism can triumph anywhere, shouldn’t it be in superhero stories?
(Oh: the baby bird in Brightest Day #0 is magically resurrected a couple of pages later! So, uh, no harm done.)