The Limitations of Comic Book Movies

This critique of superhero movies is interesting, but it conflates two different points:

First, the quality of the average superhero/comic book/genre movie is declining. This is not surprising. If the law of large numbers holds anywhere, it should be here: given that the movie business is increasingly driven by small numbers of very expensive movies, a fair number of those movies should be of middling quality, and they are.

The decline in quality is not a surprise. Genre movie fans have traditionally survived on sub-par product. What is the old "Even numbered Star Trek movies are good, odd numbered Star Trek movies are bad" if not an admission that 50% of the canonical, flagship material is terrible? Given high stakes and a veritable farm of excellent writers, directors, producers, etc, the lack of quality control is astounding. No one in their right mind will defend the third X-Men movie, or Daredevil, or Catwoman, or the mid-90s Batman movies. The movies continue to get made because the movies will be seen regardless of quality. If someone messes up a franchise too badly, the powers that be wait a few years and hand the project off to someone else, which is how three different actors played the Hulk over fewer than ten years.

Variations on an origin story are not new. The idea that problems with plot or execution can be handled by simply disregarding the material that came before is a staple of the very comic book and superhero narrative universes the stories are drawn from in the first place. This is the reason for so many origin stories: having to erase the previous generation's hold on the narrative arc. Trying to keep continuity within a messy world and tell an interesting story is much too complicated for the average writer. Admitting that the most interesting stories have already been told (or can't be told in a movie) is not an option for the people who make the films. From the audience's perspective, and from the filmmaker's perspective, better a middling piece of narrative than none at all.

Second, the problem with superhero movies isn't their origin stories: the origin is usually their only unique element. Superhero stories are burdened with superheroes, people for whom most narrative content is ruled out. A movie in this genre has to have an adventure of some kind, and an antagonist, and it must affirm the moral order of the universe. Batman might be a person of dubious virtue in the Nolan Batman movies, but he's obviously better than the Joker or Bane. The fix is in from the beginning: there's no way he won't win. Consequently, there are no stakes. Batman will win, so it's just a question of how. That film can be clever, but it can't be interesting.

Superheroes also cannot have the ennui that an average person has, the kind that provides the grist for a number of narratives. An average person has to grapple with the question of meaning and the question of vocation: what am I supposed to do with my life? From this one gets both the angst of the young and the uncertainties of advancing age. The superhero is faced with a question that is similar but lacks any frisson: should I accept my vocation or reject it? But the question is a dishonest one, because the hero will always accept it, even if late in the story: otherwise, there's no movie. Wolverine will never just walk away.

These films can't do mundane things for 90 minutes, or 150: there will never be a Tony Stark-Pepper Potts Before Midnight.* The movie studios wouldn't want it, audiences wouldn't want it. And it's not clear it would even be a superhero movie without the villains and the adventure. That's the catch. A superhero movie that stays within a comic book world will be some variation on beginning-threat-response. A superhero movie that attempts to move outside that becomes just a movie, and has to contend with the very best in those other genres.


*I suspect, for what it's worth, that the Stark-Potts banter is the equivalent of Itchy & Scratchy cartoons in the Simpsons: the sort of thing the writers are only capable of doing in 20-second bursts. At that length, it looks like a take on screwball comedy. At five minutes, they'd have run out of clever-ish things to say.

I concur:

Having said that, the ambiguity sometimes got a little annoying, if not downright insulting at times. Matthew Weiner says in a post-season interview conducted by Alan Sepinwall that not only did Joan land the Avon account, but that he assumes the audience understands that. This has always been the major flaw in Mad Men‘s writing and the problem that arises when subtlety and ambiguity are goals for the show: the writers sometimes lose track of what’s in their heads and what’s on the page. We’re reminded of either the commentary track or the “Inside Mad Men” video on “My Old Kentucky Home,” where Matthew Weiner goes on and on about what Betty and Don are thinking as they kiss each other at the end of Roger’s party; important, insightful bits of character information that inform the scene and put it in context – none of which appeared onscreen or would be knowable in any way by the audience. On the one hand, we appreciate a show that expects the audience to keep up and figure things out along the way without being spoonfed. On the other hand, the show’s pacing problems grew to epidemic proportions this season and it seems to us we could have been spared 30 seconds of  Dick Whitman’s Whorehouse Frolics in order to get one short line informing us that the most important and dangerous thing Joan did all season actually paid off for her.

...one of the things this analysis makes apparent is the extent to which many of the show's ticks are stalling tactics: flashbacks take up time in a story that would otherwise run short, which explains their haphazard appearances. Also: the tendency to omit crucial information that exists in the same universe as the telegraphing of thematic content: we won't tell you basic information, but we will make very sure you understand the obvious and not-complex theme we want you to take away from the scene.

Three examples of the same phenomenon:

1. Javier Marias is a Spanish author who taught language courses at Oxford in the mid-80s. He wrote a book written by a narrator who is Spanish and taught at Oxford in the mid-80s called All Souls. He then wrote a subsequent book, Dark Back of Time, in which a narrator called Javier Marias talks about the fallout from having written a book called All Souls, in which meets several people who were models for characters in the first book, some of whom he calls by their names in the novel. The narrator also insists--multiple times--that he has never confused reality for fiction.

2. Soren Kierkegaard writes most of his works under a collection of pseudonyms, each of whom has a mostly coherent approach, and each of whom stands in relation to the others.

3. Kelvin Mercer, David Jolicoeur and David Mason write and record an album under their individual stage names, Posdnous, Dove (sometimes also Trugoy), and Mase, collectively known as De La Soul, Three Feet High and Rising. On the album, Mase is also known as PA, and Posdnous and Dove are called Plug One and Plug Two, the leftovers from an original album concept that was discarded.

The first is a standard metafictional, postmodern trick. It might not be to everyone's taste, but it is recognizable as an attempt to do something sophisticated and complex. The second is one way of dealing with polyphony, by allowing each voice its own space within an author's oeuvre. The third is the same: metafictional, conceptual, with--as in Kierkegaard--each of the names having its own meaning and significance. Each also has its own voice. A savvy reader will partly distrust Marias-the-narrator when he claims to never have confused reality for fiction, and that the different pseudonyms in Kierkegaard don't mean he is contradicting himself, but speaking in different voices on different occasions.