on
5/18/2002
I'm sick, so I don't feel like writing much, but there's a topic I feel like giving a few paragraphs to.
Our topic this week is the superhero movie.
I'm going to try to establish a little context without coming off as an intellectual snob. We've always had superheroes, we've just never been as honest about it as we got the first half of the last century. We got honest about it when we took the heroes out of mythology and pretended they could occur in real life. In science fiction, the fantastic becomes real, not because of magic (which no one can understand, by definition) but because of science (which we can all understand, if we work at it). The superhero is a function of science fiction; both have been with us forever, we just gave them names in the 20th century.
Compose the hero out of our modern society's greatest storytelling medium, film, and you'll find a problem. Modern society has no heroes. We've bullshitted ourselves into thinking that we can do without them. We believe that there's no such thing as perfection so that we don't have to strive for it. In doing so we conveniently ignore the fact that perfection, like infinity, is not a location but a direction.
Finish the statement "Absolute power..." and then tell me who Superman is. You can do both, can't you? Six-year-olds can do this. Six-year-olds know that Superman is the most powerful man on Earth, fighting for truth, justice and the American way, and know the phrase "absolute power corrupts absolutely." The really sick thing is not that we carry these two conflicting ideas around with us unquestioningly, but that the one we're more apt to question is Superman.
There's a Superman movie coming along in the next couple years. It's being directed by a young music video director who insists on being called "Mc D" (yes, to his face -- you can imagine how much hope I have for this project). Chances are, we're going to see another big blockbuster with no actual weight or substance to it.
Of course, the best of the recent crop we've had was Spiderman, which was entertaining, but couldn't help falling into the trap of becoming self-parodying about how over the top its premise was. Frankly, if a movie's premise is "over the top" -- and frankly I'm not sure what that means -- I'd like to see the film at least run with it. Christ, Shakespeare was over the top -- wars, ghosts, murders, madness -- and he founded modern English literature. Get some balls.
Two-thousand's X-Men had even less blood, in the metaphoric sense, flattening its very 3-dimensional premise into a cartoonish match between a stupid villain and a crack team of industrial designers. Before that, we had The Matrix, a delightful little western about the training of a terrorist, that I wouldn't mind so much if it hadn't pretended to be about something profound, rather than just an ultraviolent escape fantasy. (Want a good ultraviolent escape fantasy? Here, read one....)
The truth is, I can't think of a good superhero movie, and I fear that my thesis holds up. We can't make films about superheroes because we can't believe in heroes. Okay, maybe we can believe in heroes -- I don't know if we'd be able to function without the concept -- but we can't share that with people anymore. If we make a film about a superhero, we have to make it either comedic or pessimistic.
We know we're supposed to chuckle after we say "but I must use my powers for good, instead of evil," but we can't. Inside, we just can't. Everything falls apart if we do.
Touch the Toast