Posts Tagged superheroes
X-Men First Class: Mutant TV
After I saw Wolverine: Origins, I actually defended it. Kind of. I said that it was so haphazard, nonsensical, and oddly-shaped it provided perhaps the most accurate recreation of what it’s like read mainstream superhero comics. In two hours, it made me feel like I’d read a year’s worth of issues in one sitting – with a few different writers, some rushed fill-in art, and a helping of editorial interference.
Now X-Men: First Class achieves something similar, only much more successfully. A 1960s-set prequel to Bryan Singer’s first two X-Men movies – with Singer back on board with a story credit and as producer – this is a welcome return to the thematic material that makes mutant stories interesting.
Admittedly the characters are sometimes forced to announce these themes out loud, but that’s a small price to pay.
Director Matthew Vaughn (Kick Ass) does very well in some smaller moments, especially in the striking reverse-angle transformation of an innocuous office to a torture chamber; he also knows that the movie’s power comes from James McAvoy’s Charles and Michael Fassbender’s Erik, and the scenes they share are the movie’s highlights. If only the same could be said for January Jones as Emma Frost, who is embarrassingly lifeless here. The comic book version of Emma would be appalled by this pretender wearing her lingerie.
Vaughn struggles in the movie’s special effects-heavy sequences, though. Towards the end, things take on the look of a big-budget Smallville finale. That’s not a compliment. (I know fans, situated both in and out of Hollywood, can easily become obsessed with fidelity to their source material. I maybe just fell prey to it talking about Emma Frost, above. But including Banshee’s flying-with-flappy-wings-and-screaming-towards-the-ground? Yeah, that was never going to work.)
In fact, the whole movie looks a little cheap. A little made-for-TV. And that got me thinking: why not?
In some ways, First Class does mimic the structure and feel of comic books. For example, it begins with the same sequence that brutally kicked off Singer’s first X-Men film, and then adds another twist to it. This is common practice in comics as new writers pick apart heroes’ origin stories, always returning to embroider them with new, painful details. But with its small-screen spectacle, cast of thousands, and overstuffed plot – this ends up feeling less like comic books and more like mutant television.
As critic Paul Verhoeven wrote in his review: “Really, what they should have done was give it the Game of Thrones treatment and make a big, detailed, character-driven story all about the early Academy days.”
I couldn’t agree more. Charles and Erik, travelling the globe, recruiting mutants! Having zany adventures and philosophical disagreements on their ideological differences! Killing an occasional nazi along the way! That’s a season’s worth of entertainment even before they begin their mutant academy and lifelong rivalry. As enjoyable as this movie is, its second half feels like a clipshow of episode highlights to come.
Watching First Class also made me realise something has shifted in what I want from TV and what I want from film. It’s now television that seems to give me stories with truly epic scope. At the cinema, I’m leaning towards more singular spaces, driven less by narrative and more by a character’s subjectivity or particular mood.
It also made me realise, as so much television now looks so ‘cinematic’, I should probably stop saying ‘made-for-TV’. Then again, ‘straight-to-video’ is still in my vocabulary…
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.
Superman Saves The Day. (Really.)
Recently in The Stranger – a Seattle newspaper that itself sounds like a mysterious vigilante – Paul Constant railed against the phenomenon of so-called ‘real life superheroes’. You know: those who dress up and wander the streets, claiming to prevent crime. Constant writes that they’re “attention whores who will stop at nothing to get a couple inches of print”.
Why do these ‘heroes’ seem more interested in press coverage than helping those in need? What happened to following a good deed with a quick, humble disappearance? Don’t these guys remember the theme song to the old Spider-Man TV show? “Action is his reward”!
I’ve written before about the one thing Superman – the perfect, original superhero – says he cannot do. He laments that he can’t cross into our world, our reality, to save the day when we need him most. And if these men (yeah, pretty much just men) are the best we can do when it comes to real life superheroes, we’re doomed if we’re attacked by anything worse than an evil costume party.
In a rare burst of optimism, here are three examples I’ve found to prove Superman wrong about his limited abilities in the real world.
You might remember a story from last year about a family, facing foreclosure, who were packing up their belongings when they found a copy of Action Comics #1 in their basement. That happens to be the first appearance of Superman from 1938, and it’s worth a frightening amount of money. Here Superman was, 70-something years later, appearing again to save the day.
New York suffered an infamous blackout in 1977: 3,400 arrested, 558 cops injured, 851 fires, and $1 billion in damage. Those statistics come from the New York Daily News – the newspaper that managed to go to print during the blackout. How? Because Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie was shooting its Daily Planet scenes in the building, and the newspaper borrowed the film crew’s generators. “The newsroom was bathed in generator-powered klieg lights,” as the New York Times described it, “which made it more difficult than usual to distinguish between fantasy and reality.”
(Like I’ve mentioned earlier: it’s not just that Clark Kent happens to be a reporter. It’s that Superman is “the mighty newspaper”.)
One more? In Joe Kubert’s award-winning graphic memoir Fax from Sarajevo, he mentions the cars that served as volunteer ambulances during the Serbian siege. They needed to carry the critically wounded through sniper-filled streets of Sarajevo to a makeshift hospital, not far away, but far too far. The inside of the cars were lined with comic books – because “two or three copies can stop a bullet or a bomb splinter.”
I don’t know the details of that family’s near-foreclosure; maybe it was too perfect a story to fact check too thoroughly. And maybe getting a newspaper out during a crisis isn’t exactly a miracle on par with flying around the earth so fast that time turns backwards.
Look closely, though, and you can see that Kubert’s drawn Superman on the covers of the comic books that served as ambulance armour. I hope the Man of Steel stopped a sniper’s bullet by letting it burrow deep into his paper chest.
Everybody Hates Skyler
At the excellent panel on Breaking Bad at ACMI a few weeks ago, one point became alarmingly clear: everybody hates Skyler.
Skyler is the long-suffering wife of Walter White, Breaking Bad‘s chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin. She can be whiny, and moralistic, and passive-aggressive – but others on the show are overtly horrible and aggressive-aggressive, and they’re not attacked in the same way. Lurk on any online discussion of the show and you’ll find furious ranting about how Skyler is a stupid bitch who should, like, die.
Is this sexism? Well, yeah, of course. But I’d argue it’s sexist for more complicated reasons than you might expect, and that characters like Skyler are being badly served by the basic building blocks of their respective stories.
First, families – mostly wives and children, of course – are often on these shows to motivate their men. To give them something worth fighting for. Although, as David Surman pointed out at ACMI, one of the fascinating things about Breaking Bad is how Walt’s protests that he’s doing everything “for his family” so quickly become unconvincing.
Beyond that, these women can exist as a show’s voice of morality – and unfortunately, the alchemy of TV dialogue seems to inevitably transmute this into ‘nagging’.
Rita on Dexter, for example, began as an interesting character in her own right. She was a broken woman, and romanced by the emotionally-dead Dexter specifically for that fact; as an easy cover story for his serial killer’s lone wolf tendencies. As she became more confident, though, her character broke in a different way. By the end of season four, she only existed to tell Dexter that he needed to pick up the kids from school, and maybe look disapprovingly afterwards.
(An aside: was this same sort of hate circulating for Carmela on The Sopranos?)
Anyway, being nominated as a show’s moral guardian just a side-effect of these characters’ primary function: to stop the protagonist doing things.
Apparently, Billy Wilder once explained a three-act story like this: in the first act of a story you put your character up in a tree and the second act you set the tree on fire and then in the third you get him down. I think TV morality is often just another way of setting the tree on fire.
So Rita prevents Dexter killing. Skyler prevents Walt cooking meth. And this is where the hate comes in – because death and drugs are exactly what people want to see! I mean, it’s like a whole issue of Spider-Man where Peter Parker is trapped in the house by Aunt May and doesn’t get to punch Doctor Octopus in the face, right? God, I hate Aunt May!
There’s another common role for women, and it’s one especially prevalent in superhero comics. Years ago, Gail Simone referred to it as “Women In Refrigerators”. She realised how female characters always seemed to be injured or killed – just so their heroes had a reason to seek revenge. (A dead wife is even better motivation than a live one!)
The sexism, though, kicks in before the female characters are butchered. It starts when the hero is created. Male heroes tend to have female love interests; those love interests are the easiest to maim for maximum emotional impact; voila! Dead superwomen.
If we had more female superheroes, wouldn’t their boyfriends be the ones in danger? And the same goes for Breaking Bad and Dexter. If we had more females in active leading roles, would there be men doing the nagging-but-necessary plot-blocking?
Maybe. Or maybe gender is now so deeply embedded in these narrative structures that writers simply wouldn’t allow their male characters to fulfil the same function. And even if they did, I suspect that male Skylers simply wouldn’t generate the same levels of hate.
But why don’t we give it a try?