Les Revenants (They Came Back)
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS: Well, it doesn’t, not this time. But that’s not to say that everything is hunky dory, either.
SYMPTOMS: The dead come back to life. How, we don’t know. Why, we don’t know. They just come walking slowly, calmly, into town one day, everyone who’s died in the last ten years or so. Not everyone is happy about this.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? Well, we’re not going to panic, that’s for sure. These aren’t monsters, they’re our friends, neighbors and loved ones. They’ve come back to life for some reason and it’s a little weird, but that’s no reason to get excited. We’re going to accept them back into our homes and into their old jobs and do our best to help them acclimate to their special circumstances.
WHERE DO WE LEAVE THINGS? The dead, it turns out, have a mysterious plan of their own. I’m not saying that to be coy, I mean I really don’t know what their plan is. But they have one.
NOTES: As a zombie movie, this is the exact opposite of George Romero in every way. In a Romero movie, the zombies claw and bite and gnaw at living flesh, here they calmly, blithely walk around town, meet up with their shocked and sometimes dismayed families, and try to go back to work. In a Romero movie, the citizenry react with panic, dread and horror; here, they react with calm, level-headedness and careful planning. Meetings are called, refugee centers are erected, the army is helpful and benign (well, it is the French army after all), and people keep their heads even though the whole scenario is creepy as all get-out. In a Romero film the effects are flamboyant, the photography garish and the performances brash; here the effects are subtle to the point of invisibility, the photography lush and beautiful, the performances subtle and naturalistic. Where Romero’s films are frantic, loud and nerve-shredding, this is elegant, stately and chilling.
The dead here are a little sluggish and not that bright, but they are not the mindless, staggering zombies of old. They are every bit normal, regular people, just kind of “not there” to the same extent as the living. This allows a woman to reconcile with her dead husband, parents to come to terms with their child’s death (or not), an elderly man to catch up to his deceased wife. All the scenes of personal contact are unnervingand super-creepy.
A lot of time is spent discussing the logistical nightmares of housing the dead, providing them with jobs, giving them something to “do” in society instead of just wandering slowly around the city all day. The fact that this is all done calmly and rationally only makes it that much more disturbing.
Mysterious, dreamlike and utterly original, the movie offers no explanation for causes or effects. It’s not even a horror movie per se, more like a supernatural drama about the mysterious line separating the living and the dead.
The Crazies
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS: An army-developed virus escapes, somehow, into a small town in Pennsylvania.
SYMPTOMS: The virus makes people go insane. Pursuant to this, a town full of crazy people makes people go insane.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? The army is brought in to control the town and contain the virus. This is good for the rest of the world and bad for the townspeople. The good news is, the army is taking care of things. The bad news is, it’s the same utterly incompetant army that let the virus go in the first place.
WHERE DO WE LEAVE THINGS? As with many George Romero movies, nothing is settled, only abandoned. The plague begins mysteriously, there is a good deal of sound and fury, and the movie ends before we know what’s going to happen to the town. Or the rest of the world.
AND THE BEST DEATH GOES TO: Harold Wayne Jones, as “Clank,” gets the virus, or thinks he does anyway, and manages to take out a score of armed men in the woods before getting the movie’s most elaborate gore gag with a to-camera shot to the head.
NOTES: Romero’s typical problem is that the sophistication of his ideas and the ambitions of his goals is often all-but-undone by his cheerfully amateurish production values and community-theater level quality of his actors’ performances, never more acutely on display than here (Romero regular Richard French soars as a scientist who has apparently stayed up all night watching Orson Welles movies).
The concept is utterly brilliant; a virus makes people crazy, but as the movie goes on we absolutely cannot tell for sure who has the virus, who is responding sanely to a violent military takeover and who is using the situation as a license to act crazy (If I was writing a remake today, which I’m not, I would make it that it turns out there never was a virus, that the whole thing is a military operation to practice for a total martial takeover of the United States). The scenes of put-upon Army regulars bickering about supplies and bueraucracy and dyspeptic, bilious think-tank guys planning to drop an atomic bomb have a pungency today that they may or may not have had in 1973. I remember plenty of government-conspiracy movies from back then, but they always portrayed the government as a cold, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful machine, capable of anything. Here, the government is under-funded, under-staffed and completely incompetent, in over their heads and just as desperate as the people they’re trying to control. A movie ahead of its time.
The Big Reveal
The twist ending, the head-spinner, the fake-out, what M. Night Shamalayan calls “The Paradigm Shift.”
“And it turns out that, the whole time…”
The antagonist is really the protagonist’s other personality. The murderer was in the room from the very beginning. It was all the dream of a man who’s been cryogenically frozen for two hundred years. They were on Earth the whole time. The protagonist is really a ghost. It turns out it’s not the past after all. Everything is happening in the head of a dying man’s last moments.
What are your favorites? When do they work? When do they not? When do they satisfy, when do they frustrate? When are they the final piece of the puzzle and when do they come out of left field? When do they make you want to see the movie again and when do they make you say “What the hell did that have to do with anything?”
And, we’re all professionals here. Spoil away.
28 Days Later
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS: Science project gone wrong. Ultra-contagious CrazySerum set loose by well-meaning animal lovers.
SYMPTOMS: People go crazy and turn into crazypeople. Everyone dies. Cities of England empty.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? For now, just try to survive. That’s bleedin’ hard enough, innit?
THE MILITARY, SUCH AS IT IS, HAS A PLAN, SUCH AS IT IS: Lure people to their military base and forcibly impregnate any females who wander by. Who knows? In a few weeks maybe all the crazypeople will keel over from starvation. Good plan, huh? Huh? Hey, where are you going?
WHERE DO WE LEAVE THINGS? We learn, in time, that the crisis is passing, that the crazypeople, if not starving to death, are at least getting weaker and less scary, and that England is, seemingly, the only affected country. Ah well.
NOTES: I love, love, love the first 75 minutes or so of this movie. It’s deeply upsetting, haunting, nerve-shredding entertainment. The creatures are wicked scary and unpredictable and the movie bristles with unexpected moments of beauty and poetry. I love everything up to the point in Act III where the Army Guy In Charge mentions in passing that he intends to toss the women to the army guys. What had, up until that point, been a really, really smart movie about resourceful people doing their best to survive in a really, really fucked-up world then becomes a movie about how the Military Is Bad. Which it is, don’t get me wrong. But for instance, we’ve got the female lead, who has proven herself to be an astonishingly effective badass with a machete, and in Act III she’s reduced to Protecting The Innocent Girl, Wearing a Party Dress (!), and Being Rescued By The Male Protagonist Who Learns To Kill And Thus Proves His Manhood (sigh).
I’m also not sure about the decision to shoot this on video. I think it’s supposed to add “realism” to the event, and it certainly helps with the discomfort level, but for me it just keeps taking me out of the story because it doesn’t look like a movie, even though it is, obviously, a movie. It feels self-conscious.
Day of the Dead
THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS: Well, no one knows. It just kind of happens one day.
SYMPTOMS: The dead come back to feast on the living. This creates problems.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? A group of scientists have been teamed up with a group of army guys and put into an underground storage-facility-cum-laboratory for the purposes of studying the zombie problem and coming up with some solutions. Solutions have not, as yet, been forthcoming and this is stressing everyone out a little.
THE ARMY GUY IN CHARGE says “Forget about our mission, let’s just get out of here.” (By “us” he means himself and his fellow army guys.)
THE OTHER ARMY GUYS say “Yee haw! Let’s kill some zombies!”
THE MAD SCIENTIST says “Let’s socialize the zombies as we would children or domestic animals.”
THE RATIONAL SCIENTIST says “We have to figure out a way to reverse the process. That will take time and patience.”
THE JAMAICAN HELICOPTER PILOT says “Why you want to waste your time wit’ dat, mon? Scientific knowledge an’ record keepin’ ees pointless mon, let’s jes’ find a nice island somewheres, make some babies an’ enjoy the rest of the time we’s got ‘ere on dis Eart.”
THE IRISH GUY drinks whiskey and says “Jaysus, Mary an’ Joseph” at every opportunity.
WHERE DO WE LEAVE THINGS? George Romero is a populist and secular humanist. His head is with the rational scientist, but his heart is with the Jamaican helicopter pilot and the Irish guy. (Strangely, the Jamaican and the Army Guy both have the same plan, but the Army Guy is a selfish, autocratic bully whose plan includes shooting everyone else before escaping, so we don’t like him.)
AND THE BEST DEATH GOES TO: It’s hard to top the Army Guy whose eyelid gets torn away and the Other Army Guy who keeps screaming after his head is torn away from his body (not to mention the zombie who’s decapitated with a shovel-blade — man, I’ve always wanted to try that — but the winner has to be the Army Guy In Charge who lives to see his own intestines dragged away by zombies and still has the gumption (and the lucidity) to scream “Choke on ’em!” before he succumbs.
NOTES: This movie is a lot more compelling than I remember it being. Especially since it doesn’t have much of a plot, or very good acting. It’s pretty much: Act I: introduce everyone and delineate the situation they’re in, Act II: gather and sort theirconflicting viewpoints and theories, Act III: set the zombies loose and see who survives.
The scenes of zombie carnage still carry an undeniable punch of profane revulsion.
This is the way the world ends
Favorite post-apocalyptic scenarios. Let’s not worry too much about the quality of the movie, what I’m looking for is ideas — is it a virus, a nuclear war, invaders from Mars? What are the symptoms of that apocalypse? Is it flesh-eating bacteria, zombies, intelligent insects, people living underground?
Bonus points for uniqueness.
Extra-special bonus points for a surprise twist ending.
*bonus points not redeemable for cash or merchandise
The Departed casting notes
The Departed, on top of being riveting entertainment and superlative filmmaking, offers an excellent opportunity to look at the casting process and how the right actors can really help to get across the ideas of the movie. Each actor brings a wealth of associations with them to help raise the tension of the narrative and the expectations of the audience.
MATT DAMON, we know, was already a genius Boston guy in Good Will Hunting, so we not only buy his accent, but we know he’s really smart. Plus, he played both Jason Bourne and Tom Ripley so we know he’s good at lying to people and can kill with a cold heart.
LEONARDO DiCAPRIO we know was in Catch Me if You Can so we know he’s good at fooling people, and he was in Gangs of New York so we know he can take care of himself in gangland, and he was in Titanic so we know that he’s operating under a terrible burden of guilt and shame. Kidding. Sort of. But you know, ever since then he’s kept scrunching up his brow and looking really pissed off, never more so than here, where regret and anxiety waft off of him in waves.
JACK NICHOLSON is more sui generis. He carries so much baggage with him that he presents a case all by himself. No one comes within striking distance of Nicholson’s work in Hollywood today, especially since Brando died. He shows up and you pay attention. From Jake Gittes to Randall McMurphy to Jack Torrance to The Joker, he’s a steamroller of associations and innuendo.
MARK WAHLBERG we know is tough from The Perfect Storm and Three Kings, but we know he’s vulnerable too from those same roles. So we know he can hold his own against the stars in the short run, but we don’t know if he can go the distance.
MARTIN SHEEN we know is tough because he killed Marlon Brando, but he was also President Bartlett so we know he’s wise and fair. (This part, I’ve heard, was originally supposed to go to DeNiro, which would have lent a lot more surprise and tension to those scenes. Martin Sheen killed Marlon Brando, but he kvetched a lot about it beforehand and he struck him from behind when it came down to it. DeNiro would take your head off like swatting a fly and not even stick around long enough to watch your corpse drop to the ground.)
RAY WINSTONE we saw stand up to Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, so we know he’s tough (they put a scar on his face for extra toughness), but we also saw that he ultimately lost that battle to Sir Ben so we know things can’t end well for him.
VERA FARMIGA we’ve never seen before so we don’t know what the hell she’s gonna do.
ANTHONY ANDERSON we know was in Kangaroo Jack so we know that he’s capable of doing anything.
ALEC BALDWIN we saw chew out Al Pacino in Glengarry Glen Ross and pull the rug out from under Leonardo in The Aviator. We saw him bomb Tokyo in Pearl Harbor, bomb Vietnam in Path to War and boss imaginary trains around in Thomas and the Magic Railroad. He boned Kim Basinger in The Getaway and Teri Hatcher in Heaven’s Prisoners. Alec’s no chump, he can take care of himself. Unless the bear from The Edge comes around, then he’s screwed.
KEVIN CORRIGAN plays fuckups and losers. I mean that as a compliment.
Venture Bros: Showdown at Cremation Creek, Part II
Everyone needs a story; it’s how we define ourselves. Our lives are meaningless without a narrative to transform them. Without a narrative, a human life is seventy years of haphazard coincidences. With a narrative, they become poetry, drenched in meaning and drama.
Some people take this idea further than others.
In this concluding episode, David Bowie fulfills his promise as a symbol of transformation. He transforms all over the place in this episode — into Iggy Pop, Dr. Girlfriend, an eagle, a pack of cigarettes. In real life, Bowie took the idea of narrative as a transformative device to baroque extremes, creating a new persona with each new album. It’s difficult, I imagine, for a modern audience to understand how audacious and exciting this was back then. Madonna puts on a new hat with each of her reinventions, but for her it feels more like a marketing decision, a way to keep the old perpetually new. With Bowie, the transformation was the subject of his art itself. And what’s more, he transformed himself every year for 15 years or more, a decision that would make today’s marketing executives shudder in horror; no sooner would he acquire an audience but would then shed it immediately the next album (or, famously in one instance, even in the middle of the tour promoting the current album/persona). Now he has settled in to his still-current permanent persona of “David Bowie,” classy British guy with a reputation for brilliance. (How ironic that Bowie’s most recent album is titled Reality.)
The woman he’s giving away, Dr. Girlfriend, comes all this way without finally transforming herself: she pointedly never gets to say “I do” to The Monarch. She hasn’t completed the commitment ceremony, she’s still the woman of a half-dozen costumes and personas. Would that make her spiritual father Bowie happy, or would he be saddened to know that his spiritual daughter hasn’t yet found herself, is still gathering meaningless personas, is still, in essence, pretending to be something she’s not? Lady Au Pair, Queen Etheria, Dr. Girlfriend? Who is she, finally? Who could she be if she can’t even settle on a narrative to define her life? If she’s not careful, life will decide her narrative for her.
That is, after all, what has happened to Dr. Venture. He’s decided that narrative is for babies. Burned by narrative at an early age, he’s thrown it on the trash heap and decided to face life on its own terms. As a result, he is in control of nothing in his life. He has no ideas, he’s haunted by the ghost of his father, he’s dominated by his twin brother. In this episode, while everyone else is busy heroically pursuing their narratives, he gripes, carps and eats a sandwich. Thrust into an actual heroic journey, Dr. Venture can only retreat into the most mundane details of life.
(A friend of mine once told me that, in psychoanalytical terms, one has until age 30 to decide who one is. After that, one is stuck, reinvention is impossible. This is how we know that Elvis Presley is dead — one cannot crave wealth and fame for 23 years and then, at age 42, decide one does not care for them after all.) (Elvis Presley — speaking of people who live their life according to an invented narrative — his being Dr. Faustus.)
But look at Dr. Girlfriend’s boyfriend, The Monarch. He has chosen the butterfly, the ultimate symbol of transformation, as his narrative device (which he calls “a theme thing”). Who knows, after all, if his absurd story of being raised by butterflies (back in Season 1) is true or not? It must have seemed true to him at the time; in any case, he’s picked his narrative and he’s sticking by it, regardless of the apparent inconsistencies and the scorn his decision brings. (If The Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend have a baby, that baby’s lullaby can only be David Bowie’s “Kooks.”)
Brock, like Dr. Venture, doesn’t have time for pretense; he just wants to get on with it. Yet he has defined himself by another, more subtle narrative, that of the protector of the innocent. He transforms himself in this episode, donning the hated butterfly wings (Brock gets his wings; his tatoo of Icarus, ironically, does not), to do what, exactly? Not to protect Hank and Dean or Dr. Venture. Hank he only protects as an afterthought, Dean’s protection is left in Hank’s hands (“Am I my brother’s keeper?” quoth Cain) and Dr. Venture is left in the hands of his arch-enemy The Monarch.
(The Monarch, in a telling moment, when faced with certain death, invites Dr. Venture to escape with him. Why? Why not escape by himself and kill his arch-enemy? I’m guessing because, as I’ve said earlier, The Monarch defines himself by who he’s arching; without Dr. Venture, he’s nothing. This is borne out by the end of the show, where The Monarch gripes about Phantom Limb being his “new” arch-enemy — as though he would have it any other way.)
No, Brock drops all his obligations in order to rescue Dr. Girlfriend, the damsel in distress. This is, of course, one of the oldest narratives in existence, which could be why Brock falls back upon it when faced with a crisis.
It certainly explains what happens to poor Dean in this episode. Left alone in the engine room, filled with anxiety and feelings he cannot define or control, Dean conjures up the grandest narrative of all, involving a melange of “heroic journey” tropes, including a damsel in distress, a magic ring, a white, bearded deity, magical animals, enslaved innocents, an evil robot overlord and a giant flying dog. Why does he retreat into this bizarre, ridiculous narrative? Because otherwise his life has no meaning. This all comes out in the final moments of his delusion where he frees the enslaved orphans (symbol of his trapped innocence) and rants not about an evil robot overlord but about his own father and the absurdities heaped upon his young life, the monsters and yetis and evil scientists he must contend with every day. Dean’s “real life” makes no sense and he doesn’t have the tools to fashion a useful narrative for himself. Instead, he fashions an un-useful narrative as a weapon against his doubts and pain (and, interestingly, puts his father’s life in danger as a result). (How Dean manages to change from his butterfly outfit back into his street clothes is another question entirely.) (The dog-dragon, of course, is from The Neverending Story, in which a motherless boy, guess what, disappears into a narrative in order to deal with his grief.)
Meanwhile, Dr. Orpheus and co. have found themselves stuck against reality’s brick wall. How will he and the Order of the Triad rescue Hank and Dean, when Dr. Orpheus can’t even buckle his seatbelt? With the aid, of course, of a fictional character, a minor character from Star Wars, conjured not from the movie but from a trading card. The Alchemist worries that the creature is an abomination that should be killed; Dr. Orpheus opines that, whether the creature fictional or not, it is still a living thing. And, it turns out, their salvation. (Of course, no one in the Venture universe ever really learns the lessons they’ve been taught — no sooner are they rescued by a fictional character than they roll their eyes at Dean for retreating into a world of fantasy.)
The need for a narrative in life reaches its bleakest, most terminal point with the death of the Monarch henchman in Brock’s arms. Spitting blood onto Brock’s shoulder, he confesses that the time he’s spent under his command have been the finest of his life. This is, of course, the narrative that every soldier tells himself as he goes into battle, that his actions have meaning, that he’s risking his life for something meaningful and worthwhile — without it, what he’s doing, throwing his life away, is the ultimate in perversity. The soldier’s lie withers as his body is transformed into a hunk of meat, from a living thing to an object. And Brock, who has no use for pretense in the first place (or sentimentality for that matter), listens to the harmless lie, then uses the body to jam the engine of an approaching aircraft: finally, in death, the unknown soldier becomes useful.
(Or maybe I’m wrong; maybe the henchmen is sincere in his statement to Brock, maybe he finally has found meaning through serving under Brock — after all, one would have to have a pretty empty life indeed in order to find fulfillment dressed up as a butterfly.)
Hank wants that henchmen’s narrative so badly he can taste it. He disobeys Brock’s command to take care of Dean (“Why do you have to be the screen door on my submarine?” he pouts) and joins the henchmen’s fight. When faced with the reality of it, of course, he recoils in horror and screams like a little girl. Hank wants that narrative but in the end he doesn’t have the guts for it. (“Again, again!” he blurts after his near-death experience, clearly not understanding the meaning of the dying henchman’s story.*)
Henchmen 21 and 24 have long functioned as Shakespearean clowns in this show, speaking in malapropisms that nevertheless reveal theme and authorial intent. Here, they talk about a group of lost henchmen and reference the phenonmenon of the “urban myth,” underscoring humanity’s need to make up narratives out of thin air in order to deal with the chaos and absurdities of life.
Dean finds his purpose by recycling a heap of pop-culture detritus and fashioning it into a meaningful narrative. The Venture Bros does something quite similar, turning over bits of trash to find the wriggling, bleeding humanity underneath.
And it’s very funny.
*With the dying henchmen, and Brock’s treatment of him, I keep beingreminded of Snowden, the dying airman in the back of the plane in Catch-22. “Yossarian heard himself scream wildly as Snowden’s insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out…Yossarian screamed a second time and squeezed both hands over his eyes…He forced himself to look again. Here was God’s plenty, all right, he thought bitterly as he stared — liver, lungs, kidneys, ribs, stomach and bits of the stewed tomatoes Snowden had eaten that day for lunch…He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret.” And Snowden (and Yossarian) signed up to fight and die for one of the worst kinds of narratives, that which insisted that the United States was the handsome prince rescuing the princess of Liberty from the evil clutches of the Fascist overlords. Perhaps it all come back to David Bowie, who notes, in his song “Soul Love:”
“Soul love, she kneels before the grave
Her brave son, who gave his life to save a slogan
That hovers between the headstone and her eyes
For to penetrate her grieving.”
The Departed, explained to a 5-year-old
left: DiCaprio and Nicholson, by Scorsese. right: Plastic Man and Hawkgirl, by Sam.
The movie, plus previews, plus travel, is three hours long, so my wife and I don’t get home until 11:15. Sam (the 5-year-old in question) has been left with an untested babysitter. He is still awake, and delighted to see me as I take him back to bed. My wife and I are still kind of buzzed from the movie, which is a feast.
Sam: How was the movie?
Dad: It was great!
Sam: What was it about?
Dad: It’s, it’s for grown-ups, dude. Time for bed.
Sam: But what was it about?
Dad: It was about gangsters and policemen. Cops and robbers. Good guys and bad guys.
Sam: But what happened?
Dad: Sam, it is, currently, three and a half hours past your bedtime.
(Dad can feel that his buzz from the movie is transferring directly to his son, who is picking up on the vibe. And, since the movie is also about fathers and sons — real and metaphorical — it’s hard for Dad to break it off.)
Sam: But what happened in the movie?
Dad: Well. (beat) There are the police, right? And they’re the good guys. And then there are the gangsters, they’re the bad guys. Right?
Sam: Sure. And they wear different outfits.
Dad: That they do. That they do.
(Dad is stunned by this logistical leap from his son. They do, in fact, wear different outfits, but probably not in the way that Sam is thinking. Sam has, for his part, spent the evening watching Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, which also features gangsters, so he knows all about gangsters.)
Dad: Okay. So the police want to get the gangsters, so they send a policeman dressed up as a gangster to go spy on the gangsters.
Sam: Okay.
Dad: Now: at the same time, the gangsters, they want to know if the police are going to catch them, so they dress one of their guys up like a policeman to go spy on the police. So the police have a spy with the gangsters and the gangsters have a spy with the police.
(Sam’s look is drifting into incomprehension. Dad should probably let it do so. But his status as a storyteller is at stake. He seeks clarity.)
Dad: It’s like, let’s say, the Joker wants to spy on Batman. So he gets one of his guys and dresses him up like Robin and sends him over to spy on the Batcave. Meanwhile, Batman, without knowing what the Joker is doing, takes that ridiculous outfit off of Robin and dresses him up like one of the Joker’s guys and sends him to go spy on the Joker. And so through the whole movie you’re worried about whether both guys are going to get caught.
(Comprehension achieved. Sam’s face swims with the sudden illumination of possibilities.)
Sam: Wow. So what happens?
Dad: Well, what happens is that everybody gets into a whole heap of trouble.
Sam: Yeah, but what happens?
Dad: I’ll tell you what. It’s a great movie, and you can see it when you’re older. Like, when you’re a teenager. Hey, how about you and me go out for a milkshake?
___________
PS. I’ve read a couple of reviews that complain about Jack Nicholson’s performance in this movie. Or worse, they sort of sniff in disdain about some imaginary unhinged, undisciplined “crazy Jack” performance instead of a measured, finely observed characterization. As though they’re disappointed by seeing the greatest movie star of our time, and one of the greatest of all time, give a performance equal to the character’s importance in the story. I have no patience with these people. The acting in the movie (and the casting I might add) is uniformly excellent. In a time with few movie stars, here is a movie filled with movie stars, from the leads down to some blindsiding supporting roles, all doing really great work with a kind of energy I can’t remember seeing before, like they’re all eager to show us what they’ve got.
Justice League (part I)
The Justice Lords would like a word with you.
My son has turned me into a geek.
I never read comic books as a kid. I think the first comic book I ever read was Watchmen in 1985. I read Dark Knight Returns after Tim Burton’s Batman movie came out. I didn’t start reading comics until Joel Silver asked me to work on the Wonder Woman movie in 1999. Even then, it was all “just research.” It was more fun than reading Dickens (mostly), but I never considered it a pursuit in and of itself.
My son has changed all of that.
He loves superheroes. He can’t get enough of them. When he wakes up, his first thought is about someone he needs to look up on Wikipedia so that he can draw a picture of them. The Marvel splash-panel I posted last week is only one of dozens of superhero drawings that lie scattered in heaps around the house. His walls, floor and shelves are plastered and stacked high with drawings and figurines. (Strangely, every time I’ve tried to interest him in an actual poster showing the same superheroes, he’s never interested; they never “look right” to him.)
Part of it, I know, is related to his interest in dinosaurs, which recently reached its saturation point. That is, like the dinosaur world, the superhero world comprises another world of tiny pieces of information for his rapidly-expanding mind to categorize. In dinosaurs, you have plant-eaters and predators, in superheroes, you have good guys and bad guys. Among plant-eaters you have long-necks and short-necks, among predators you have therapods and oviraptors; among good guys you have metahumans and “regular guys in costumes,” among bad guys you have aliens and robots. And all combinations of the above. (His interest in dinosaurs supplanted his interest in trains, which occupied the first half of his life.)
So a conversation between us will go something like this:
S. Dad, what do you know about Magneto?
D. Magneto can control metal with his mind.
S. Is he a good guy or a bad guy?
D. Magneto is a bad guy.
S. And does he have superpowers or is he a regular guy in a costume?
D. He has superpowers. He can control metal with his mind.
S. Yeah, but he’s not super-strong, and he doesn’t have, like, heat vision or anything.
D. Yeah, but he can control metal with his mind. That’s his super-power.
S. But how did he get like that?
D. He was born like that. He’s a mutant. That’s the difference between X-Men and The Avengers. The X-Men were all born with their powers, the Avengers are all regular people who had accidents.
S. But what about Wolverine?
D. Wolverine is an X-Man.
S. But he’s in the Avengers! And so is Storm!
(one trip to the Marvel Encyclopedia later)
D. Okay, but Wolverine and Storm were in the X-Men first.
S. And is Elektra a good guy or a bad guy?
D. Elektra is kind of like Catwoman. Sometimes she’s a good guy and sometimes she’s a bad guy — it kind of depends on where you happen to be standing at the moment.
And so on.
(Of the many differences between DC and Marvel, one of the most striking, from an “adult trying to explain comic book heroes to a child who can’t read yet” point-of-view anyway, is that the lines of good and bad are drawn much more clearly in the DC universe; in Marvel, characters are zipping back and forth over the line all the time. How do I explain that the Punisher, who slaughters people with guns, is a good guy, while Batman, who despises guns and never kills anyone, is also a good guy? Or for that matter, how do I explain that the Hulk is a good guy, when no one, not even the Hulk, thinks he’s a good guy? And how do I explain how the media in Spider-Man’s world shapes the public’s perception of him, making a good guy look bad?)
Anyway, long story short, there’s this show, Justice League, that a year or so ago just hit my son like a truck.
I can’t explain it. He liked the Bruce Timm Batman show, but it was always a little too scary for him. He liked the Bruce Timm Superman show, but the plots were a little too complex for him (typical conversation: Sam: Who’s that? Dad: That’s Lex Luthor. Sam: Is he the bad guy? Dad: He’s the bad guy. Sam: Then why isn’t Superman fighting him?). But Justice League hit him just right. Something about the family dynamics of the group, Superman and Batman and Flash and Green Lantern and Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter and Hawkgirl all in the same show, bouncing off each other and having their own adventures, somehow that clicked in his brain in a way that the individual heroes’ shows did not. The complications, which I would have thought would have made the show more difficult to follow, instead gave him more to feast on.
Now then: none of this means that I’ve been watching all these shows with him. Normally, these shows exist as something for Sam to watch while mom and dad get to spend 23 minutes having a conversation or eating dinner. But one night a few weeks ago, I called my wife to dinner and she didn’t come. Ten minutes later she wandered up from the TV room as though in a daze and said “I’m sorry, I got caught up in Justice League.” And I made a sound like Scooby-Doo does when he’s confused, and when after everyone went to bed I stayed up to see what the hell was so interesting about this episode of Justice League.
Check this out: the episode (it’s a two-parter) is called “A Better World.”
The show begins like this: Lex Luthor has somehow become president and is, apparently, about to destroy the world. Superman busts through White House security and confronts him in the Oval Office. Lex sneers at him and says “Go ahead, arrest me, put me in jail, I’ll just get out again, I always do, you’ll never be rid of me, you know that,” and Superman sighs and says “Yeah, you’re right,” and kills him. Just kills him. Just turns on his heat vision and zaps him, right there in the Oval Office. And Luthor falls over in a heap. Because Superman could totally do that, you know. Who would stop him? No one can stop him. Why didn’t he do it a long time ago?
And Superman just stands there over Luthor’s body. There’s no triumph or release, just grim silence. And Wonder Woman comes in and sees the dead body and says “…Oh. (beat) Well, I guess it had to happen at some point.” And the crisis is over, poof, all the world’s problems are solved.
Fade out. Roll titles.
Cut to: two years later, and the Justice League has all new uniforms, a new name (The Justice Lords) and they never leave the Watchtower (that’s their spaceship), because they never have to, because there is no crime. There is no crime because, as we come to find out, the Justice League has lobotomized all the criminals. We visit Arkham Asylum and find Joker and Poison Ivy and Two-Face and everyone else cheerful, model prisoners, milling around the grounds like pleasant, happy zombies. Gotham City is so clean and bright it looks like Metropolis. There’s an incredible scene where Justice Lord Superman is battling Doomsday (whom, aficianados will know, once killed Superman in the comics) and, just as Doomsday is about to go into his “MWAH HA HA” victory laugh, Justice Lord Superman zaps him in the forehead and we watch his brains melt down the sides of his face and Doomsday gets a queer, disconnected, disappointed look in his eyes as he slumps to the ground, still alive but no longer dangerous; somehow, it never occurred to him that Superman possessed the power to lobotomize him.
With no crime to fight, Justice Lord Batman has turned to science and has made an important discovery: he’s stumbled across a parallel dimension, where the normal, regular old Justice League with their colorful costumes and bickering ways are still wasting their time, struggling through a world filled with supervillains. The Justice Lords take pity on the poor old alternate-dimension Justice League (who we realize, in time, are our dimension’s Justice League; that is, the whole first part of the show is taking place in an alternate dimension and the protagonists don’t enter until the beginning of Act II) and, in a gesture of kindness, kidnap them and take them prisoner so that they can clean up the other dimension too. And so Act III has the Justice League taking on the Justice Lords, which, you can imagine, is difficult because they are, in fact, the exact same people, only a teeny bit more ruthless. And on the one hand, you don’t like the Justice Lords because of that ruthlessness, and on the other hand, it’s like — well, how come the Justice League took this long to get their act together? And the tension is unbearable because, as the title suggests, the Justice Lords have truly made their world better, and the Justice League is actually fighting to make it more chaotic and dangerous.
Bizarre enough? It gets better. To solve the problem of the Justice Lord Superman, whom no one can subdue, the Justice League must turn to Lex Luthor, who is still alive in this world, and who has the scientific knowledge to build a super-power-sapping device (“device” being the operative word here). Luthor will zap the Justice Lord Superman so that the good-old Justice League can take back control of our world (or, rather, relinquish control of our world). In exchange for his super-power-sapping device, the Justice League grants Lex a full pardon for all his past crimes and makes him a free man.
In the epilogue, we see a sobered, grateful Lex at a press conference, vowing to give up crime forever and — you knew it had to come — announcing his bid for the presidency. And the cycle begins again.
And I’m sitting in front of the TV with my mouth hanging open. This is a far cry from Superfriends. In the span of a 45-minute superhero cartoon, Bruce Timm and company have just told me more about society, civilization and justice than I ever learned in a season of Law and Order. Sure, Superman could just kill Lex. Of course he could. Why doesn’t he? That would make everything better. All it takes is the will to do so. And that goes for all the Justice League. Why bother negotiating with murderous thugs? Why not just kill them? They obviously have the power to do so. Why put up with giggling psychopaths who have nothing to contribute to society? Why not just kill them? And then, dumb as it sounds, it hit me: that’s why they call it Superman’s “Never Ending Struggle for Truth and Justice.” The whole point of the Justice League (and their real-world counteparts) is not to rid the world of crime, but to be vigilant in the fight against it. And then I was reminded about something regarding God as well. The DC superheroes were always modelled after the Gods, were they not? Well here’s the answer to the great question, Why do the Gods allow evil to exist?
Okay, enough for now. I’ve barely scratched the surface of my thoughts about this show. There’s a three-part episode where, get this, the Justice League goes back in time to World War II, in order to…restore Adolf Hitler to power.
Suffice to say, it’s no longer Sam saying “Hey, let’s watch Justice League!” Instead, it’s him saying “Can I watch Scooby-Doo?” And I’m saying “No, c’mon, let’s watch Justice League!” Now I know who all the characters are and what their backstories are (Did you know Hawkgirl was a detective on her home planet?) and what’s more, I care about them in ways I never have before. And I will get into the reasons for that in Part II.
I leave you for the moment with what is probably my favorite moment in the series, and emblematic of its genius. There’s a robot (AMAZO) who has the ability to imitate the powers of any superhero it sees. If it sees the Flash, it can run at the speed of light, if it sees Green Lantern, it can fashion a magic power ring, etc. It sees Superman, and acquires all his powers, and starts smashing stuff up. Batman, who has no powers to acquire, is the only one capable of fighting it. Thinking fast, he takes a lump of Kryptonite out of his pocket and lobs it at the robot, who collapses like a ragdoll and falls into the river (Batman reasoning that if AMAZO has acquired Superman’s strengths, he might also have acquired his weaknesses).
And Wonder Woman comes out from under a piece of rubble and says “So, what, you just always carry around a piece of Kryptonite with you?” And Batman scowls and mutters “Call it insurance,” and dashes off into the night.
Because he’s seen the “Better World” episode, probably.