The Venture Bros: “Spanakopita!”
Wikipedia informs us: “On October 20, 1968, Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Socrates Onassis, a wealthy Greek shipping magnate, who was able to provide the privacy and security she sought for herself and her children. The wedding took place on Skorpios, Onassis’s private island in the Ionian Sea, in Greece.” We now know that Jonas Venture, Sr and the rest of the original Team Venture were at the wedding. Jonas had spent the afternoon diving for treasure and then sped off with the boys to get drunk and experience some high society. In other words, “fortune and glory.” Of course, the seeking of fortune and glory necessitates the abandonment of Jonas’s son Rusty, the protagonist of our current narrative. Rusty, playing at being Theseus, “slays the Minotaur” (HELPeR wearing steer horns), and Jonas chides him for not learning “the classics.” The story of Theseus is, of course, about as classic as tales go, indicating that Jonas hasn’t been paying attention to Rusty on a couple of different levels.
Superman: Superman: The Movie part 4
What does Superman want? It seems like an odd question to ask at this point, but the movie Superman spends its first seventy minutes setting up a conflict between impulses for its title character, and now that he’s emerged, it’s a question worth asking. Once Superman shows up to save Lois Lane, the genie is out of the bottle, so to speak, and the movie, once again, does something odd – it stops for a few minutes for Superman to buzz around town doing Superman stuff. It’s a no-brainer for him to save Lois from a plummeting helicopter (he’s in love with her after all), but then we see him 1) stop a jewel-thief in the midst of a building-climb, 2) foil a robbery getaway, 3) rescue a cat from a tree, and 4) save Air Force One when it is struck by lightning in mid-flight. Saving people (and a cat) is an easy choice, but why does Superman necessarily foil criminals? And, once he’s made the decision to foil criminals, why does he foil only these criminals? Was there really no other crime happening in Metropolis that night? Was the city otherwise a peaceful idyll for the time he spent saving the cat? For that matter, to save Lois Lane is one thing, he’s in love with her (although the narrative has shown no good reason why), but when he makes the decision to save the president over other people (or a cat), he’s making a specific choice. Superman decides who is worth catching and who is worth letting go, and he decides who is worth saving and who is not.
How does this sequence funcion narratively? I’ll tell you, as teenager watching the movie in 1978 (he said, contemplatively stroking his long white beard) the feeling was “Finally, the movie is starting.” This sequence, beginning over an hour into the narrative, is like a title sequence for the rest of the movie. No plot emerges from Superman’s randomly-selected salvations and punishments, but tonally the sequence is a miracle, literally. It presents a world-changing night when suddenly there is a god on earth, nabbing the bad and protecting the endangered. As the first-ever sequence presented in a wide-screen, big-budget superhero movie, it’s a complete game-changer. It’s what we came to see, and the notion that there would be a god out there deciding who was worth imprisoning and who was worth rescuing was a brand-new, very powerful thing in the movies. Not even a Biblical epic could give an audience a secret god, Moses and Jesus and Noah (I can’t think of any others who got their own movies) could never disguise themselves to mete out punishments and rewards. In 1978, America very much needed a way to feel good about itself and Superman suggested that somewhere there was a man, a man with heavenly origins but Midwestern upbringing, who knew what made America great and could show us the way with politeness and good humor. And let it be said that Christopher Reeve rose to the challenge magnificently and became the image of Superman to my generation. When the authors of Kingdom Come dedicated their book “to Christopher Reeve, who made us believe a man could fly,” they spoke for everyone who saw Superman in the theater.
Superman: Superman: The Movie part 3
Superman is 49 minutes old and its protagonist has arrived at his fourth home: Metropolis, for which the movie doesn’t bother disguising Manhattan. Keep in mind, this is not the Manhattan of today, with the theme-park Times Square. This is the Manhattan of 1978, the Manhattan of Taxi Driver and Death Wish, the Manhattan of the 1977 blackout and the looting that followed, the broke Manhattan, the Manhattan Gerald Ford had told to drop dead. In the Manhattan of 1978, it was considered suicide to enter Central Park after sunset. As far away from Krypton as Kansas was, Metropolis is as far away from Kansas. The shift in production design is immediate and impactful: there are no vistas or lone figures in windswept fields, the streets of Metropolis are skyscraper canyons and the offices of the Daily Planet crowded and buzz with life. Lois Lane’s first line is “How many ‘t’s in ‘bloodletting?'”
Superman: Superman: The Movie part 2
So Jor-El sends his son Kal-El to Earth because his planet, Krypton, is destroyed. Yesterday I was talking about how Krypton doesn’t seem to be that great a place, and it occurs to me that, if Superman is an immigrant allegory and a krypto-Jew, then Krypton is Poland and Jor-El’s clan are Jews among Poles: outcasts even among their own people. Or, rather, they are what David Mamet calls “our Jews,” part of the Kryptonian establishment but not really considered true Kryptonians and mistrusted when the going gets rough.
In any case, Jor-El sends his son away from the icy sterility of Krypton and into Kansas, the breadbasket of America and the place Dorothy was so sick of. So the people who find Kal-El’s set-adrift basket in the rushes are not high-level Egyptians in the capital of the state, but precisely no one from nowhere, Ma and Pa Kent from Smallville, “the people” mentioned at the top of the US constitution and the least Jewish people in America’s least-Jewish state.
At the end of Tarantino’s superlative Kill Bill, we finally meet the titular Bill, and the first thing he does is regale us with his opinion of Superman. Superman, he says, is the only superhero who puts on a disguise when he’s not saving the world. Superman is his real identity, says Bill, Clark Kent is his opinion of what an Earth-man is: clumsy, oafish, meek, skittish, terrified of girls. Tarantino is one of our greatest living directors, but in this he is dead wrong: Superman is Clark Kent, and that’s his defining characteristic. Born a god, he is raised as a human, a Kansan no less, which makes him more human than most people. The answer to “Why doesn’t Superman just take over the world?” is: because his parents raised him to be polite. The brilliant graphic novel Red Son asks “What if Superman had landed in the Soviet Union instead of Kansas?” because yes, Superman may be from Krypton, but he is not a Kryptonian, he is a nice young man from Smallville. Yes, his homeland was destroyed, but his homeland wasn’t even a homeland to his own family – Kansas is the only home he’s ever known.
Superman: Superman: The Movie part 1
The thing to remember about Superman: The Movie is that it was the first of its kind. Made in 1978 by middle-aged men, it was poised between nostalgia and hipness, gravity and camp, cutting-edge verisimilitude and old-fashioned Hollywood spectacle. It wants to take its subject matter seriously, but can’t quite commit to it fully.
I was 17 when it came out, and theoretically its target audience. The advertising, John Williams score and space-bound title sequence made it clear that it was going after the Star Wars audience, which included children who didn’t know about Buck Rogers serials and nostalgic grownups who did. Having never read the comics, my concept of Superman in 1978 was limited to the syndicated reruns of the George Reeves show from the 1950s (which had borrowed heavily from the radio shows of the 1940s). The stunning Fleischer Superman shorts were a long-gone artifact at that point, not yet available at the counters of every drugstore in America. Only one, “Superman and the Mechanical Monsters,” had been shown to American audiences in recent decades, in the 1977 Fantastic Animation Festival, which was, in and of itself, a cultural touchstone in the pre-cable days of American geekdom.
The George Reeves show never went to Krypton or dwelled on Superman’s tragic backstory (much as the 1966 Batman show never once mentioned why Bruce Wayne dresses up as a bat to fight crime), so the idea of a movie presenting, with grandeur, “serious” actors, a large budget and state-of-the-art special effects (that look laughably terrible today) was breaking new ground for a viewer like me. And the first couple of acts really hammered home the weighty mythology and came to form the idea of Superman in the minds of my generation.
So the movie opens with a shot of curtains opening to reveal a 1930s movie screen, with standard 1:33 aspect ratio. The curtains, in an of themselves, were significant in 1978 because that was the moment that multiplexes were exploding, and curtains in movie theaters were becoming a thing of the past. The curtains in the movie palace were there to remind the audience of the ritual of the theater, of the glamour that awaited the audience on the other side of those curtains – the multiplex did away with glamour and ritual. They turned moviegoing into a transaction, not a passport to adventure. By opening with a shot of curtains, black-and-white curtains at that, the movie seeks to frame its presentation in a sense of tradition, of promises made and kept.
(The theater where I saw Superman was, in fact, a converted vaudeville house from the 1920s, complete with stage, dressing rooms, orchestra pit and fake “Spanish Piazza” decor. When the curtains opened to reveal a movie that begins with curtains opening, it made the moment doubly somber.)
The Venture Bros “SPHINX Rising” part 2
In order to gain access to Rusty’s basement, the Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend undergo a transition unlike any other: they become improvisers. The man who dresses as a butterfly says he’ll “just wing it” when they get to the Venture compound. I wonder what their vague, ill-conceived plan was before the Monarch accidentally revealed his “Beaver Inspector” t-shirt? It’s a good measure of how little Rusty thinks of the Monarch that he doesn’t recognize their distinctive high-nasal/low-guttural voices. Improvisation is surprisingly effective, and a stark contrast to the Monarch’s earlier acid-magnet attack, which telegraphed his intent so strongly that Gary could decipher it from a mile away.
The Venture Bros “SPHINX Rising” part 1
“SPHINX Rising” presents a new protagonist for this season, Henchman 21, or “Gary” as he’s more commonly known now. In keeping with The Venture Bros theme of transformation (which is also, of course, the theme of all the fantasy texts The Venture Bros derives from) Gary has transformed from henchman to commander, from butterfly to sphinx. (The Monarch’s choice of identity is not a coincidence – born ungainly as a caterpillar, he soars as a butterfly. So intoxicated is he with the notion of transformation, he overlooks all the inherent contradicitions: butterflies are fragile, delicate creatures, less like the Monarch’s poses of strength, more like his tiny, quailing ego. That’s why his nemesis is Rusty Venture, a man who refuses to transform in any way whatsoever.)
The Venture Bros “Venture Libre” part 2
Hopped up on coffee beans, suffering from intense delusions of gradeur and, most important, without a brother to stabilize him, Hank contracts jungle fever and becomes the man he’s always wanted to be: Batman. Or, at least, his own version of Batman. His origin differs from Bruce Wayne’s, because his father is still alive and he never knew his mother (he adopts “the jungle” as his mother), so his Batman is correspondingly different – a hand-made Batman, a very Venture Batman, one who has to take frequent diarrhea breaks.
The Venture Bros: “Venture Libre” part 1
A few years back, I was talking to a woman from Pixar, who explained to me the logic of Finding Nemo. Finding Nemo, she said, is about, and only about, a father’s relationship with his son. The problem presented by the narrative is that, at the end of Act I, the son is abducted. How could they make a movie about a father’s relationship with his son if the son vanishes at the end of Act I? The answer, they found, was to replace the son with another child, the forgetful fish Dory. The father then plays out the conflict with his son with this surrogate. It’s a simple yet brilliant device, and if you remove the forgetful fish and put in a reanimated corpse, it’s the same device that fuels “Venture Libre.”
The Venture Bros “What Color is Your Cleansuit?” part 4
Sgt Hatred, in his second-act low-point, finds himself bound to a St. Andrew’s Cross and whipped, something his BDSM-loving ex would have understood. Martin has now transformed into his final mutation and assumes the position of, ironically, liberator, forcing Sgt Hatred to come to terms with who he really is (in a scene, for us old people, lifted and inverted from the 1977 miniseries Roots — The Venture Bros is nothing if not free-ranging in its references). Spoiler alert, Sgt Hatred’s given name is “Courtney.” While only developing breasts now, it seems Sgt Hatred has had a feminine side all along, and now the villain-turned-good-guy must wait to be rescued like a common damsel.