This Slate article on the book that provides the model for most movies is quite interesting: where the twists show up, where the b-plot has to go. Worst of all, it recommends that someone announce the theme to the hero within the first five minutes. This does not seem like a recipe for anything good. Incidentally, the Dissolve has an essay on "forgotbusters" that echoes the Slate piece very well: the contemporary movie experience is devoted to making the blandest, most formulaic, most predictable movie possible, all the better to have the audience not realize that the twist where the antagonist allows himself to be captured seems familiar because it was also in five other movies they saw this year.

Relatedly, one of my first-level tests for a sophisticated movie or tv show is "no one ever announces the theme." You'd be surprised how many well-regarded things fail; you'd be surprised how often "I am announcing the theme" is presented as a profound bit of dialogue.

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.

The Hairpin kindly obliges and provides a lengthy discussion of Kanye filled with variations on the mistake I noted a few days ago: assuming that any 'I' statement on Yeezus must be a reflection of Kanye West's own personal thoughts, and cannot be in any way fictive. It's odd that this mistake is made in hip-hop, where embellishment and creative narrative reconstruction are frequently deployed, and West himself has demonstrated he understands this distinction, and occasionally performs it. If there used to be two voices going on in West's songs, and one of them appears to have dropped out, it seems obvious  (to a critic) that the remaining voice must be his real one, and not a fictional creation.

One might be tempted to lay this at the feet of cultural misunderstanding or, were one more provocative, the unwillingness to believe West is capable of such creativity. The roots are deeper and more pervasive than that: the audience of music critics are a group no longer possessing the ability to understand narrative, because contemporary alternative and indie music no longer embraces narrative at all.

Think of any major indie music group since the turn of the century. How many deploy a song whose purpose, primarily or even in part, is to tell a story involving characters and events? The White Stripes, The Strokes, Interpol, Radiohead (Jody Rosen took all kinds of flack for suggesting Thom Yorke surrendered some actual songwriting ability to drone nonsense phrases, which appears to me to be a factual description of what happened), Phoenix, Dirty Projectors, Vampire Weekend--none of them do it notably, and none of them do it centrally. There was once a long and venerable tradition of this--Dylan, Springsteen, Patti Smith--but a few days of thinking have come up with no example more contemporary than "Jeremy." It's not part of the cultural lexicon, and so no one knows what to do with it.

The only two genres where lyrical narrative are considered essential are also generally considered the two most juvenile genres of music--country and hip-hop. The ability to tell a story is one of the central skills for an MC: "I Gave You Power," "I Got a Story to Tell," "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and many, many others. But no one listening to Chuck D rapping from a first-person perspective is going to think he's narrating an actual event from his own life, nor is it his point to get you to believe that. The problem is not with the musician, it's with the listener.

Relatedly, but without much evidence, I would argue that this is connected to the decline of the short story and the rise of the pseudo-truthful essay. Short stories are all about narrative compression, having to do more with less, and are analogous to song lyrics which require the same technique. Instead, we have essays at various levels of truthiness which are nevertheless to be flatly understood as having been written by their 'authors.'

A note: my new critical obsession ("point of interest" is more accurate) has to do with thematic complexity. The basic thesis is as follows: the difference between sophisticated culture and popular culture is the difference between an aesthetic work which has themes and one which has none. The tip-off in critical discourse is the phrase 'raises issues': The Dark Knight raises issues of free will, order versus chaos, the price we'll pay for security, etc, and therefore is, or can be, art. Transformers does not, and so isn't. It hardly matters for contemporary audiences and critics whether, or how, these themes are developed: that they 'get you thinking' is sufficient.

Patient Zero is The Matrix, a movie that raises issues about free will and determinism in its first 30 minutes, and then spends three films drawing rapidly diminishing returns from those origins. The poster child is Christopher Nolan, who makes films about things but without any point or development. (The contrast is with someone like Ingmar Bergman, for whom the themes are earnestly explored and developed at great length--no one ever has a line of dialogue that encapsulates the meaning of the film--and someone like Jean-Pierre Melville, where the inability to access the interior mental states of the characters--and so make definitive judgments about the meaning of what happens--is the entire point of the film. The redemption at the end of Wild Strawberries is earned because we've seen the struggle to reach it; the frustration at the end of Jean Morin, Priest is also earned, because all that is most important has been left unsaid.)

This is an idea I've been sitting on for some time (since Phoebe brought it up in re: Frasier and Two and a Half Men, which I now see was quite a while ago), but it's recently begun to creep into my reading and viewing habits, so it'll make it onto the blog now, too.