Posts Tagged spider-man
New York New York
I just arrived back in Melbourne after spending a few weeks in New York, recovering from our premiere of EXIT at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal. I feel like I haven’t been absorbing much popular culture: some reading, a couple of films, and hours marvelling at America’s pharmaceutical advertising on TV.
(Why are epic lists of awful side effects paired with actors smiling silently down the camera? It makes them look like they really, really want you to develop suicidal thoughts. Like they just they can’t wait for your liver to fail.)
Anyway, I was amazed to hear the receipt printers in New York cabs make a sound exactly like the Smoke Monster from Lost. When I mentioned this I was told the opposite was true: the Smoke Monster’s sound was sourced from NYC taxis.
New York is popular culture.
Australia has always been in an odd cultural position. With such a small population, relatively speaking, it’s always been cheaper to import media than to make it ourselves. A recent Screen Australia report says this is only going to get worse in the near future.
Given the choice, we seemed to pride ourselves on preferring classier British fare. Until recently, the most generic British crime drama was somehow considered more highly than the best American one. We’ll fight to the death for David Brent over Michael Scott in The Office. Our newsreaders, for years, had mostly British accents to give them a suitable sense of authority.
My childhood, though, was composed almost entirely of American cartoons, and sitcoms, and comic books. I never cared about seeing Australian stories on screen – no doubt part to a hefty dose of cultural cringe.
When I was young, I remember making jokes about Spider-Man’s abilities to always find something to swing from, any time of the day or night. Maybe there was a plane overhead! Or a blimp! Or a low flying (but sturdy) bird! Young Martyn wasn’t a particularly funny kid, admittedly, and seeing New York firsthand only proved that he was dead wrong, too.
Scott Bukatman explains why in his essay ‘The Boys in the Hoods: A Song of the Urban Superhero’. “Let me propose,” he writes, “that American superheroes encapsulated and embodied the same utopian aspirations of modernity as the cities themselves.” And, later: “The superhero city is founded on the relationship between grids and grace. The city becomes a place of grace by licensing the multitude of fantasies that thrived against the ‘constraining’ ground of the grid.”
Spider-Man only makes sense once you’ve seen his city. Superman might be “the mighty newspaper”, but as Spidey says in Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1: “I am New York.”
Now visiting New York makes me feel like I’m starring in a kid-friendly remake of Ringu and I’ve climbed inside the TV . And sure, the puppets might be people and the soundtrack by the Ramones, but staying in the East Village is like living on Sesame Street.
I’m never comfortable travelling. I subscribe to William Gibson’s theory of jetlag from the opening pages of Pattern Recognition: that it’s side effect of your soul, lost in the slipstream behind you, yet to catch up with your body. And I’m still stuck on how passports are faintly ridiculous, too. Little books of paper and cloth, stamped with actual stamps. Wielding one is like wearing a monocle or a pocketwatch on a chain.
But all my years spent in the middle of New York’s mythology – even from half a world away – makes visiting it a strange sort of homecoming.
The Superhero Curse
There is no Superman Curse.
Yes, TV Superman George Reeves was found dead by gunshot in 1959, whether from suicide or murder. And okay, fine, movie Superman Christopher Reeve was paralysed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse in 1995. But a curse? In his book Our Hero: Superman on Earth, Tom De Haven puts it like this:
For terrifying examples of the Curse of Superman, though, that’s about it. A lot of different actors have played the character over the past seventy-plus years, including Bud Collyer, who played him more often and longer than anyone, on radio and several different animated cartoon series, and he did just fine, becoming a famously affable network game-show host, died at a ripe old age.
There is no Batman Curse, either, no matter what the Daily Mail might’ve said during the filming of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight – even though many happily implied it was his role as the psychotic Joker that resulted in Heath Ledger’s death.
Cue ambiguous quote from an earlier Joker, Jack Nicholson: “I warned him.”
And now we have the ongoing parade of accidents in Broadway’s Spider-Man musical, awkwardly titled Turn Off the Dark. One performer was rushed to hospital after a thirty foot fall; the lead actress portraying the villain quit with the show still in previews; and other Broadway actors have made online statements like “DOES SOMEONE HAVE TO DIE?” Of course, there is no Spider-Man Curse. It’s ridiculous.
And yet.
And yet I can’t stop thinking of these accidents as modern echoes of ancient stories; myths of mortals impersonating gods and facing tragic consequences.
In comic books, ordinary mortals embodying superheroic abilities often ends badly. Taking the illegal, power-granting drug Mutant Growth Hormone can make your heart explode. In the collected manga Batman: Child of Dreams, ordinary people are transformed into Batman’s greatest foes like the Joker and the Penguin, but they can’t handle the strain. They burn out from the inside, weeping, physical falling to pieces. The “basic elevator pitch” of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents? “You get kickass superpowers for 365 days, and then you die.”
When super-team The Authority crashed into our reality – in Grant Morrison and Gene Ha’s short-lived, two-issue run of 2007 – the heroes were shocked to find that no one here had powers. What’s worse was they worried just being here would be too much for our fragile earth. As their team shaman explained: “Even in our weakened state, we’re still too strong for this place. We may as well be monsters, trampling over the laws of nature until they break.”
We can wear the costumes, and strike the poses, and say the lines. We can hope our CGI doppelgangers do most of the spectacular stuntwork for us and that we aren’t left, terrified, tangled high over the orchestra pit. There is no Superhero Curse.
But what if Spider-Man’s skill, Superman’s strength, or the Joker’s psychosis are too much, too big, to be safely captured in mortal bodies and brains? What if comic book characters are described as ‘larger than life’ for a reason?
Spider-Man: Shoot First, Write Screenplay Later
This week’s big superhero news is that Sam Raimi’s planned Spider-Man 4 is no more. It left me thinking about the three movies he’s made in the series so far – and also that yeah, it might be a good thing that he’s walking away.
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.