...In Fair Marvelverse Where We Lay Our Scene: Hulk, More Or Less
I intended to write this closer to the "first half", but, well, I didn't.
My impulse as ever is to follow every digressive thread down the line to its logical conclusion, but I'll try to keep it to just one, this time, and have more focused posts on those other topics, tangential to the movie(s) at hand, when I have some other occasion. And, extra special benefit, I'll put my digression right up front. A preamble, more like.
In the other post I refer to The Incredible Hulk (that's the one with Edward Norton) presenting it's revamped origin story "quite artfully". By revamped I actually mean "more faithful to the comic," but I'll come to that later. It takes place entirely over the opening credits, lasts no more than a few minutes, and basically tells us what we need to know - in the unlikely event that anyone walking into that movie didn't know what it was about. There's a mania in the latest run, at least, of superhero movies to do the origin story; every hero has to have their origin laid out for us on film, and every villain needs to have the same, in somewhat less time, but preferably entertwined with the hero for maximum cinematic and thematic impact. Thus Sandman (not the DC character, or the other DC character, or, actually, the other DC character, by that name, but rather the Marvel character) turns into the guy who, pre-Sandman, killed Uncle Ben in Spider-Man 3 and the Joker is turned into the guy who, pre-Joker, killed Mr. and Mrs. Wayne in Batman (the Tim Burton / Michael Keaton film), neither of which is true to the comics. There are exceptions - the X-Men films have a cast much too large to give this treatment to uniformly, but the first one is about how Logan and Rogue come to join the team, and the second one is in part about exploring Logan's origins (plus one of the films offers a glimpse of young Magneto). This is actually all pretty true to the comic, in that one of the essences of the X-Men is that there's a lot of mutants, more are always being found, and they need to be helped/recruited/saved or what-have you. (Although I note with some wryness that the reason the original X-Men [Professor X, Cyclops, Angel, Beast, Iceman, and Jean Grey] were a team of mutants because Stan Lee figured making them mutants would free him from having to come up with clever ways for each of them to get exposed to gamma radiation.) Batman Begins is entirely origin story, and finds its justification in the fact that no portrayal in any medium had previously covered the period prior to Bruce Wayne's return to Gotham as a young man, so the story of how he determined to become Batman was actually completely fresh. (There are, actually, flashbacks scattered around the DC continuity that show him getting trained here or there, but I believe this is right.) The second half of the film draws heavily from Frank Miller's Batman: Year One, which also filled a gap by covering the period directly after Wayne returned to Gotham and his first adventures as Batman; the elements of the mob and the city-wide corruption are drawn from this canonical source, with the roles of the Scarecrow and R'as al Ghul being interpolations. But what I'm driving at is that these films are all taken up with origins and for the most part it's unnecessary. How the Hulk got to be the Hulk isn't important in any way for telling a story about him; the same goes for lots of characters. I haven't seen either Fantastic Four movie, but I know the first one takes the time to get through the origin onscreen, when all you need to know to get the necessary dramatic resonance is that: Reed Richards feels guilty for causing his friends' changes, and (optional but probably a good idea) Reed can be an overconfident and conceited dick (which is why he's guilty for his friends' changes). Unless there's something specially compelling about an origin (whether you show it literally or not, you can't get away from the murder of the Waynes or that of Uncle Ben), the audience, largely composed of people who basically know who these characters are anyway, is capable of picking up the explanatory history as you sprinkle it artfully through the actual story you're trying to tell. Triple goes for the villains; the obsession with not being able to throw a major super-character out unless he's gotten at least fifteen minutes of screen time to show us how he got to be super winds up reading to me like studio contempts for the audience's intelligence.
Hulk is the poster-child here; it's positively steeped in origin. Probably ten minutes go by before we see the adult Bruce Banner, let alone the Hulk (who shows up somewhere around the forty minute mark, if i recall). Moreover, the origin is drastically altered so that Bruce Banner's father plays a huge role in the story, both of how Banner came to be the Hulk, and by eventually become the film's final antagonist. This is one of the central problems with the film; there's a lot to be said, and I won't say it here, about the push and pull between people who want comics to be serious or not, "realistic" or not, and so forth. I don't think trying to make a comic "realistic" is the same thing as trying to make a comic that "takes itself seriously" (and taking itself seriously has nothing to do with how funny or dull it is), but the Hulk script confuses taking the idea of the Hulk seriously for trying to make a self-consciously serious movie. Therefore it's not enough to explore the rage that drives the Hulk - and by implication the rage that's in Banner - and take seriously Banner's feelings about who he is and why. An Oedipal (in the father-killing, not the mother-fucking, sense) dimension is added for Serious Dramatic Heft. Now, Bruce's dad is, canonically, an abusive asshole and he did kill Bruce's mom, and he was a genetic researcher who believed (the film makes clear he's correct, which I believe the comics do not) that his experiments had infected his son, but he never becomes a supervillain as Nolte's character - named in the credits only as "The Father" [eyeroll] - does at the end of the film. (On the other hand, before the final battle Nolte provides the most interesting acting moment in either Hulk film, when he mocks Bruce by making a face at him, going "nyaaehe," and stomping his feet like a petulant child. It's a weird and arresting choice that almost redeems a lot.) It's not enough for Bruce Banner to be an angry guy, and it's not enough for him to be angry because his dad was a horrible person, he has to literally fight and kill his dad, who made him not only as Bruce Banner but also made it possible for him to be made as the Hulk.
Okay, to be fair I'm reaching a little bit because Bruce Banner, in comics, does kill his dad, accidentally, during a fight at the late Mrs. Banner's grave. The point isn't to deny that Bruce's dad was a major asshole who played, in the end, a major role in shaping Bruce's personality, the point is that this was something that came out over a long time in a comic that's been running for forty years, and it isn't one of the dozen most important things to know about the character of the Hulk. The canonical conflict between Bruce and pére must be inflated and elevated to operatic heights for the movie to become "serious." This is no better an aspiration than The Incredible Hulk's desire to be completely lightweight; neither film is content to take the character and his story in his/its own terms and play them honestly and true.
What makes Hulk a much more interesting movie than its non-sequel is its technical and formal ambition. Not the ambition of the script, which confuses dramatic heft for added ponderance, but the ambition of the camerawork and the editing. This is why I think Hulk is worth watching, for the most creative and ambitious use of the camera I've ever seen in a comic book movie. It almost doesn't matter that the ambition fails and falls flat. I'm not a particular fan (or non-fan) of Ang Lee as a director, but Hulk reminds me of something I often say about Spike Lee, which is that even in the movies of his that I can't stand (Mo' Better Blues, e.g.), I'm captivated and feel my time was well spent, because Spike Lee's failures are braver and more interesting than most director's successes. What Hulk tries to do, with a variety of focus tricks, cutting tricks, split-screen montages, and so forth is replicate the panel structure of a comic book. It's a brave and clever idea and I'm honestly surprised no one ever tried it before - at least, never to such an obvious degree. It's fascinating stuff and a lot of the technique Lee developed here could surely be put to good use in a more successful film, more moderately. Because the problem is that it doesn't work; in trying to recreate the page of a comic book, the film actively and explicitly subverts the experience of reading a comic.
Despite presumptions that, being marriages of image and word, comics and films are a lot alike, they're not, because the method of experience is so different. A filmed work substitutes the camera for the viewer's eye; sure, we can look around in the frame, particularly on still shots, but what the camera does is force us to look here and not there, and most importantly it does so in time. You can't look at the expression on a face we just cut away from, because it's not there anymore. This is where the moving split screens don't work as well as you'd hope, because the eye/brain hookup is, by eons of design, keyed in to movement, so suddenly introducing a new window on the movie screen forces us to look at it at the moment of introduction, and we're always pulled one way or another by wherever the most new activity is occurring. The panels on a comic book page, by contrast, are there to be read as we please, sped or lingered over as the impulse strikes, and most importantly they control time in a very different way than a camera does. Shutter speed can accelerate or decelerate, and jump cuts to somewhere or somewhen else are viable film techniques, but a sequence that, in five seconds of audience time, goes into slow motion, then fast-forward, then freeze frames, then cuts to a memorable image from a character's past, then back to the freeze frame, then back into regular time, would be near-intolerable. Its use, if effective, could only be to force the audience to experience a character's subjectivity, and we would process that subjectivity primarily as confusion. Comics do this sort of shit all the time and do it well. The possibilities inherent in sequential and/or overlapping panels of illustration provide for an incredibly rich variety of effects that can be exploited for storytelling and emotive purposes, and most of them are completely unique to comics. In some ways the quintissential comic-book effect, the thing that only it can do, is interpose a panel in which nothing is, image-wise, different from the one before or after it (or both), save that there is no text. As in: in panel one, we're closeup on a character's face and he says something; in panel two, we're in the same closeup and nothing is said; in panel three either we stick to the closeup but something is said again, or we move on to something else. What happens in that middle panel? He's thinking (or remembering, or feeling, or, zen-like, just existing in his own moment of stillness). But it's a completely unique method for portraying this fact. Why? Because the second question is How long did that panel take? and the answer is "as long as it needed to". !!! This is what film emphatically cannot do, because time is always in motion. The camera cannot hold a literal freeze frame for more than a second or two without antagonizing the audience, but a comic book panel can use that image to represent an hour's isolation or a vital nanosecond in which the character decides his new course of action, the moment of stillness in a storm of activity. Prose can't do this either, because it can't communicate indeterminate time without telling you it's communicating indeterminate time, which is almost always on the nose and doesn't work. And the other point is that unless the rest of the context clearly forces you into making a presumption about how much time that panel took, there is no answer. It takes as long as it needed to, which means as long as the reader wanted or needed it to. Comics can render time as indeterminate in a way that film cannot, and trying to use the techniques of comic layout in a film's editing room robs those techniques of most of what they can do while compromising much of what makes film effective.
But it's a really cool idea, Ang.
Wrapping up (!) this Hulk of a post, let's come back to the last thing I didn't say in the prior post. I indicated that the movie's third failure was one of technical capacity: the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk just doesn't look that good. Neither, really, does the Hulk in Hulk. If "not that good" is taken to be "doesn't look realistic in the context of the rest of the film's visual texture," both films fail. Hulk, though, intentionally or not, renders the big green fella as a cartoon; he looks a lot like something you'd see in the pages of Marvel comics dropped, Roger Rabbit-style, into a live action movie. Whether it works for you or not - my attitudes are mixed - the film made a virtue of its inability to get a "realistic" Hulk. The newer film's Hulk, despite five years' worth of CG advances, doesn't look any realer, and fatally it clearly so much wants to. The Incredible Hulk, so to speak, isn't remotely on par with Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies as a fully integrated and lifelike CG character. Partly that's because I don't like the character design and partly that's because, I think, CG characters still struggle to convincingly look like they're obeying the laws of physics. Gollum was like a seventy-pound wraith, insubstantial except in his moments of hissing aggression. Gollum is physically there (storywise) in a literal sense, but he's rarely a physical presence. The Hulk is supposed to be huge, to walk heavily, and to lift heavy objects. That physical presence just doesn't come across. This might actually not just be a CG problem; in general film struggles to portray superstrength. The movie Hulk is about nine feet tall, but he's much much much stronger than the proportional relationship to a normal adult male that would imply, even accounting for his outsized musculature. Buffy the Vampire Slayer never really sold Sarah Michelle Gellar's punches well because even if the stunt was brilliantly executed, the eye doesn't want to believe that those arms and shoulders could generate that effect; the leap of suspended disbelief is a little too far (whereas her kicks, equally improbably in objective terms, are much less troublesome). Wolverine is supposed to be like 5'3" or something, but the movies were probably right in casting Hugh Jackman, who stands a foot taller. Not only could you not find a white actor with the appropriate physique to portray the Wolveirne of the comics - a male gymnast would come closest - but an audience is just not going to believe the presentation of a 5'3" guy who's also supposed to weigh 200 pounds (all that adamantium fused to his skeleton) and be able to lift multiple guys over his head simultaneously. Wolverine's superstrength is modest by the Hulk's standards, but he's much much much stronger than a normal person could ever be, and a burly 6'3" Aussie simply sells that to the eye better than a burly 5'3" dude. This is one of many problems live action has over illustrations or animation; the eye is more skeptical about the realism of what it sees.
My impulse as ever is to follow every digressive thread down the line to its logical conclusion, but I'll try to keep it to just one, this time, and have more focused posts on those other topics, tangential to the movie(s) at hand, when I have some other occasion. And, extra special benefit, I'll put my digression right up front. A preamble, more like.
In the other post I refer to The Incredible Hulk (that's the one with Edward Norton) presenting it's revamped origin story "quite artfully". By revamped I actually mean "more faithful to the comic," but I'll come to that later. It takes place entirely over the opening credits, lasts no more than a few minutes, and basically tells us what we need to know - in the unlikely event that anyone walking into that movie didn't know what it was about. There's a mania in the latest run, at least, of superhero movies to do the origin story; every hero has to have their origin laid out for us on film, and every villain needs to have the same, in somewhat less time, but preferably entertwined with the hero for maximum cinematic and thematic impact. Thus Sandman (not the DC character, or the other DC character, or, actually, the other DC character, by that name, but rather the Marvel character) turns into the guy who, pre-Sandman, killed Uncle Ben in Spider-Man 3 and the Joker is turned into the guy who, pre-Joker, killed Mr. and Mrs. Wayne in Batman (the Tim Burton / Michael Keaton film), neither of which is true to the comics. There are exceptions - the X-Men films have a cast much too large to give this treatment to uniformly, but the first one is about how Logan and Rogue come to join the team, and the second one is in part about exploring Logan's origins (plus one of the films offers a glimpse of young Magneto). This is actually all pretty true to the comic, in that one of the essences of the X-Men is that there's a lot of mutants, more are always being found, and they need to be helped/recruited/saved or what-have you. (Although I note with some wryness that the reason the original X-Men [Professor X, Cyclops, Angel, Beast, Iceman, and Jean Grey] were a team of mutants because Stan Lee figured making them mutants would free him from having to come up with clever ways for each of them to get exposed to gamma radiation.) Batman Begins is entirely origin story, and finds its justification in the fact that no portrayal in any medium had previously covered the period prior to Bruce Wayne's return to Gotham as a young man, so the story of how he determined to become Batman was actually completely fresh. (There are, actually, flashbacks scattered around the DC continuity that show him getting trained here or there, but I believe this is right.) The second half of the film draws heavily from Frank Miller's Batman: Year One, which also filled a gap by covering the period directly after Wayne returned to Gotham and his first adventures as Batman; the elements of the mob and the city-wide corruption are drawn from this canonical source, with the roles of the Scarecrow and R'as al Ghul being interpolations. But what I'm driving at is that these films are all taken up with origins and for the most part it's unnecessary. How the Hulk got to be the Hulk isn't important in any way for telling a story about him; the same goes for lots of characters. I haven't seen either Fantastic Four movie, but I know the first one takes the time to get through the origin onscreen, when all you need to know to get the necessary dramatic resonance is that: Reed Richards feels guilty for causing his friends' changes, and (optional but probably a good idea) Reed can be an overconfident and conceited dick (which is why he's guilty for his friends' changes). Unless there's something specially compelling about an origin (whether you show it literally or not, you can't get away from the murder of the Waynes or that of Uncle Ben), the audience, largely composed of people who basically know who these characters are anyway, is capable of picking up the explanatory history as you sprinkle it artfully through the actual story you're trying to tell. Triple goes for the villains; the obsession with not being able to throw a major super-character out unless he's gotten at least fifteen minutes of screen time to show us how he got to be super winds up reading to me like studio contempts for the audience's intelligence.
Hulk is the poster-child here; it's positively steeped in origin. Probably ten minutes go by before we see the adult Bruce Banner, let alone the Hulk (who shows up somewhere around the forty minute mark, if i recall). Moreover, the origin is drastically altered so that Bruce Banner's father plays a huge role in the story, both of how Banner came to be the Hulk, and by eventually become the film's final antagonist. This is one of the central problems with the film; there's a lot to be said, and I won't say it here, about the push and pull between people who want comics to be serious or not, "realistic" or not, and so forth. I don't think trying to make a comic "realistic" is the same thing as trying to make a comic that "takes itself seriously" (and taking itself seriously has nothing to do with how funny or dull it is), but the Hulk script confuses taking the idea of the Hulk seriously for trying to make a self-consciously serious movie. Therefore it's not enough to explore the rage that drives the Hulk - and by implication the rage that's in Banner - and take seriously Banner's feelings about who he is and why. An Oedipal (in the father-killing, not the mother-fucking, sense) dimension is added for Serious Dramatic Heft. Now, Bruce's dad is, canonically, an abusive asshole and he did kill Bruce's mom, and he was a genetic researcher who believed (the film makes clear he's correct, which I believe the comics do not) that his experiments had infected his son, but he never becomes a supervillain as Nolte's character - named in the credits only as "The Father" [eyeroll] - does at the end of the film. (On the other hand, before the final battle Nolte provides the most interesting acting moment in either Hulk film, when he mocks Bruce by making a face at him, going "nyaaehe," and stomping his feet like a petulant child. It's a weird and arresting choice that almost redeems a lot.) It's not enough for Bruce Banner to be an angry guy, and it's not enough for him to be angry because his dad was a horrible person, he has to literally fight and kill his dad, who made him not only as Bruce Banner but also made it possible for him to be made as the Hulk.
Okay, to be fair I'm reaching a little bit because Bruce Banner, in comics, does kill his dad, accidentally, during a fight at the late Mrs. Banner's grave. The point isn't to deny that Bruce's dad was a major asshole who played, in the end, a major role in shaping Bruce's personality, the point is that this was something that came out over a long time in a comic that's been running for forty years, and it isn't one of the dozen most important things to know about the character of the Hulk. The canonical conflict between Bruce and pére must be inflated and elevated to operatic heights for the movie to become "serious." This is no better an aspiration than The Incredible Hulk's desire to be completely lightweight; neither film is content to take the character and his story in his/its own terms and play them honestly and true.
What makes Hulk a much more interesting movie than its non-sequel is its technical and formal ambition. Not the ambition of the script, which confuses dramatic heft for added ponderance, but the ambition of the camerawork and the editing. This is why I think Hulk is worth watching, for the most creative and ambitious use of the camera I've ever seen in a comic book movie. It almost doesn't matter that the ambition fails and falls flat. I'm not a particular fan (or non-fan) of Ang Lee as a director, but Hulk reminds me of something I often say about Spike Lee, which is that even in the movies of his that I can't stand (Mo' Better Blues, e.g.), I'm captivated and feel my time was well spent, because Spike Lee's failures are braver and more interesting than most director's successes. What Hulk tries to do, with a variety of focus tricks, cutting tricks, split-screen montages, and so forth is replicate the panel structure of a comic book. It's a brave and clever idea and I'm honestly surprised no one ever tried it before - at least, never to such an obvious degree. It's fascinating stuff and a lot of the technique Lee developed here could surely be put to good use in a more successful film, more moderately. Because the problem is that it doesn't work; in trying to recreate the page of a comic book, the film actively and explicitly subverts the experience of reading a comic.
Despite presumptions that, being marriages of image and word, comics and films are a lot alike, they're not, because the method of experience is so different. A filmed work substitutes the camera for the viewer's eye; sure, we can look around in the frame, particularly on still shots, but what the camera does is force us to look here and not there, and most importantly it does so in time. You can't look at the expression on a face we just cut away from, because it's not there anymore. This is where the moving split screens don't work as well as you'd hope, because the eye/brain hookup is, by eons of design, keyed in to movement, so suddenly introducing a new window on the movie screen forces us to look at it at the moment of introduction, and we're always pulled one way or another by wherever the most new activity is occurring. The panels on a comic book page, by contrast, are there to be read as we please, sped or lingered over as the impulse strikes, and most importantly they control time in a very different way than a camera does. Shutter speed can accelerate or decelerate, and jump cuts to somewhere or somewhen else are viable film techniques, but a sequence that, in five seconds of audience time, goes into slow motion, then fast-forward, then freeze frames, then cuts to a memorable image from a character's past, then back to the freeze frame, then back into regular time, would be near-intolerable. Its use, if effective, could only be to force the audience to experience a character's subjectivity, and we would process that subjectivity primarily as confusion. Comics do this sort of shit all the time and do it well. The possibilities inherent in sequential and/or overlapping panels of illustration provide for an incredibly rich variety of effects that can be exploited for storytelling and emotive purposes, and most of them are completely unique to comics. In some ways the quintissential comic-book effect, the thing that only it can do, is interpose a panel in which nothing is, image-wise, different from the one before or after it (or both), save that there is no text. As in: in panel one, we're closeup on a character's face and he says something; in panel two, we're in the same closeup and nothing is said; in panel three either we stick to the closeup but something is said again, or we move on to something else. What happens in that middle panel? He's thinking (or remembering, or feeling, or, zen-like, just existing in his own moment of stillness). But it's a completely unique method for portraying this fact. Why? Because the second question is How long did that panel take? and the answer is "as long as it needed to". !!! This is what film emphatically cannot do, because time is always in motion. The camera cannot hold a literal freeze frame for more than a second or two without antagonizing the audience, but a comic book panel can use that image to represent an hour's isolation or a vital nanosecond in which the character decides his new course of action, the moment of stillness in a storm of activity. Prose can't do this either, because it can't communicate indeterminate time without telling you it's communicating indeterminate time, which is almost always on the nose and doesn't work. And the other point is that unless the rest of the context clearly forces you into making a presumption about how much time that panel took, there is no answer. It takes as long as it needed to, which means as long as the reader wanted or needed it to. Comics can render time as indeterminate in a way that film cannot, and trying to use the techniques of comic layout in a film's editing room robs those techniques of most of what they can do while compromising much of what makes film effective.
But it's a really cool idea, Ang.
Wrapping up (!) this Hulk of a post, let's come back to the last thing I didn't say in the prior post. I indicated that the movie's third failure was one of technical capacity: the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk just doesn't look that good. Neither, really, does the Hulk in Hulk. If "not that good" is taken to be "doesn't look realistic in the context of the rest of the film's visual texture," both films fail. Hulk, though, intentionally or not, renders the big green fella as a cartoon; he looks a lot like something you'd see in the pages of Marvel comics dropped, Roger Rabbit-style, into a live action movie. Whether it works for you or not - my attitudes are mixed - the film made a virtue of its inability to get a "realistic" Hulk. The newer film's Hulk, despite five years' worth of CG advances, doesn't look any realer, and fatally it clearly so much wants to. The Incredible Hulk, so to speak, isn't remotely on par with Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies as a fully integrated and lifelike CG character. Partly that's because I don't like the character design and partly that's because, I think, CG characters still struggle to convincingly look like they're obeying the laws of physics. Gollum was like a seventy-pound wraith, insubstantial except in his moments of hissing aggression. Gollum is physically there (storywise) in a literal sense, but he's rarely a physical presence. The Hulk is supposed to be huge, to walk heavily, and to lift heavy objects. That physical presence just doesn't come across. This might actually not just be a CG problem; in general film struggles to portray superstrength. The movie Hulk is about nine feet tall, but he's much much much stronger than the proportional relationship to a normal adult male that would imply, even accounting for his outsized musculature. Buffy the Vampire Slayer never really sold Sarah Michelle Gellar's punches well because even if the stunt was brilliantly executed, the eye doesn't want to believe that those arms and shoulders could generate that effect; the leap of suspended disbelief is a little too far (whereas her kicks, equally improbably in objective terms, are much less troublesome). Wolverine is supposed to be like 5'3" or something, but the movies were probably right in casting Hugh Jackman, who stands a foot taller. Not only could you not find a white actor with the appropriate physique to portray the Wolveirne of the comics - a male gymnast would come closest - but an audience is just not going to believe the presentation of a 5'3" guy who's also supposed to weigh 200 pounds (all that adamantium fused to his skeleton) and be able to lift multiple guys over his head simultaneously. Wolverine's superstrength is modest by the Hulk's standards, but he's much much much stronger than a normal person could ever be, and a burly 6'3" Aussie simply sells that to the eye better than a burly 5'3" dude. This is one of many problems live action has over illustrations or animation; the eye is more skeptical about the realism of what it sees.
posted by medrawt at
18:47
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