When You're In A Rut

You're in a rut. Blogging the contents of my Netflix queue won't get me to stop reacting to comic-book superheroes if my Netflix queue is bringing me...comic-book superhero movies. I watched, over the past few days, three classics of the genre.

Taken as a collective, they blow.

Superman, the Richard Donner film with Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman, is alright. Reeve is really good, actually, and Margot Kidder is some kind of charming, and Hackman belongs in a different, yet highly amusing, film. Actually, Reeve is really good as Clark Kent and merely good as Superman, in my opinion; he handles the bumbling put-on with considerable panache, and the two or three moments across both films where you see him, dressed as Kent, drop the facade, are really cool. (Didn't even notice he was slouching, but he uncoils to full height and takes off the glasses and his whole face changes. I think one time they even cheated a hairstyle change, from Kent's goobery combover to Superman's iconic forehead curl.) Some of the Superman stuff, he comes off as smirking more than, well, Superman-y. Also, I'm not down with bringing Lois back from the dead, but they also weren't originally going to kill her anyway, so it's a pointless zero-sum game.

Superman II is awful. It's a miraculously stupid movie full of some miraculously stupid people, not least of whom include main characters who were not blithering idiots during Superman, which nominally speaking was scripted and partly shot at the same time as this abortion of a film. It's really bad from a storytelling craft standpoint, and salvaged only by some fine work from Hackman and the completely out of place yet enjoyable coda at the end, where Clark Kent returns to a moment of humilation, kicks a guy's ass in blatant Superman-y fashion, and then dorkily mimes doing a bench press while shrugging his shoulders and telling an awestruck onlooker, "I've been, you know [dorky bench press] working out."

Batman was coincidentally summarized by a coworker as "candybutt," which I guess is true. I liked it less than I remembered. Basically, it strengthened my impression that, as a director, Tim Burton is a really interesting production designer. His quasi-famous disdain for actual comics doesn't really help him out here; Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns was apparently highly influential to everyone on set (and it's easy to see why someone who otherwise doesn't care for comics would respond to it), and the movie's tone is basically TDKR crossed with the 60s TV show starring Adam West. Superdark crossed with high camp and we wind up actually in very Burton-y territory: the frighteningly whimsical, or whimsically frightening, that doesn't do much for me, even though I kind of dug Edward Scissorhands. The tone is all wrong because it's all mixed up; a campy Batman isn't what I want to see, but it's a valid and historically grounded take on the character and his world. Michael Keaton (nice job, by the way) isn't campy, but Nicholson is, except he's killing people. Nicholson's Joker murders people, horrifically, left and right, but plays the character for over the top looniness, and what's worse is that the movie follows him. If this movie is supposed to make me laugh, it shouldn't try to make me laugh at the death of innocent people.

Far superior, as a mashup of Adam West and The Dark Knight Returns, is this work of genius. Excerpts:

Housekeeping

When I started this blog it was my intention to have a bunch of posts which were primarily hidden on the main page - you know, where you can read the first paragraph or whatever and then there's an "click to read the rest" link. I didn't want all the posts to be like that, though, and I didn't like Blogger's options for executing a workaround where only some of the posts would be coded this way. In practice, however, it seems like almost every post I write is a miniature essay between four and seven screens long.

So I ask You, the Three People I Know Are Reading, does the format of my blog make your eyes glaze over? Or is the glazing solely due to content? Should I hide stuff on the main page for better readability? Also: I didn't explicitly say so in the post from last night, but I'm actively wondering if other people feel the same way about adaptations as I do, so I please encourage you to comment on the post directly below. Just scroll down for about fifteen minutes and you'll find the proper link.

Who Watches The Watchmen Adaptation?

This is, obliquely, another comics-y post, but with much more generic concerns.
 
I've often said that films should adapt short stories rather than novels.  As a matter of course, they do sometimes adapt short stories - I gather that this was more common several decades ago than it is now - and of course a very high profile recent Oscar nominee (Brokeback Mountain) was adapted from a "novella," I don't know how long.  The crux of my argument is that it takes, on average, two hours to experience a film, and depending on length it might take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours to experience a "short" story.  A 350-page novel probably takes me about seven or eight hours to read, less if it's breezy or I've read it before, more if it's got any kind of density.  You simply cannot put the contents of a novel into a film; there must be abridgements of something.  I think there is a real art to adaptation (I'll come back to this in a minute) and recognizing how the strengths of one medium are not the strengths of another, and what must be done to compensate.  But when "adaptation" means "cutting out at least 50% of the content" then something is wrong with your conception.  Or your source material.  One of my favorite movies, Fight Club, was adapted from a novel, but it's not in my estimation a very good novel.  Airport books, techno thrillers, and so forth can make compelling source material because much of the content winds up being purely descriptive and/or marking time.  A two-page disquisition on the merits of an Uzi vs. a H&K submachine gun may or may not be interesting in text but is ultimately best shed in the transition to film; likewise a lengthy explanation of a tactical team's deployment as they prepare to assault a warehouse/terrorist training center is effectively compressed into three seconds' worth of camerawork.
 
But for the most part either plot or characterization or dialogue - and the three are all caught up in each other, of course - needs to be severely compromised to make for a bearable running time.  And so: why?  The market for a particular book is much much smaller than the market for a movie adaptation of same.  I can't imagine that Wonder Boys, one of my favorite adaptations of a novel - and yet which cut my favorite scenes from the book - and which lost money while grossing about $33 million, rose or fell based on the book's status as a bestseller (which it was).  I can't at the moment find sales stats for the book (Evan? do you know where to look?) but it surely didn't gross $33 million for its publisher, which would imply that it sold well over a million copies.  I have a hard time imagining that it sold as many copies as the movie sold tickets, though I could be wrong (call it around 350K tickets?).  For the movie to have turned a significant profit its audience would have needed to be much larger than that of the book.  So even in the best case scenario, the popularity of a book (unless we're talking about a cultural phenomenon like Harry Potter) can't really have much to do with its success as a film.  What's the appeal, then?
 
I presume it's something like cachet.  Film culture is heavily invested (mistakenly, in my opinion) in turning to prose literature for its source material, and the novel is the prestige format for prose material (who reads short stories these days outside of MFA programs? and who writes them except people who went to MFA programs? I'm exaggerating, but only so much), and so that's where the film industry turns.  And why do all these books and their publishers/authors want to be turned into movies?  Well, $.  Excuse me: $$$.  But also because the feature film that opened in a cinema was and is the prestige format for the filmed medium.  I happen to think that to the extent there should be a prestige format at all vs. a recognition that different things work best in different circumstances, it *shouldn't* be the cinema, but the point isn't worth arguing.  I think it should be TV, but that's based entirely on what I perceive to be the potential of television vs. the reality.  It's only over the past fifteen or so years that (American) television has started cashing in on its artistic capabilities on a regular basis and routinely turning out product that's easily as strong as the best Hollywood has to offer, if not stronger. Still, the advertising mandates and seasonal structure that continue to undergird network prime time programming are semi-permanent barriers to television's full flowering as an artistic medium; so be it. The point remains that if you're going to adapt a story that took eight or ten hours to read, if you think it's worth adapting to another medium in the first place, shouldn't you want to preserve as much of it as possible? Why did the network TV miniseries die? (because they haven't done an interesting book since Roots, aside from all those late 90s classics adaptations like the Odyssey and Gulliver's Travels?) - why hasn't anyone done before now what the guy who wrote Generation Kill (a nonfiction book about Marines in Iraq) did, and spin it into, essentially, a one-season series for HBO?
...

All of this is in response to the newly available trailer for the movie adaptation of Watchmen, coming out next March:



The trailer says it's the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time, and you might quibble about Maus, which after all won a damn Pulitzer, but I'll quibble back and say that Maus is to some ostensible extent nonfiction. Watchmen was also included in Time's list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923, which is a grossly stupid thing to do, but I guess we're supposed to take it where we can get it. (Watchmen is, in my opinion, better than any number of great novels, but it's not a fucking novel; it's also better than any number of great paintings, movies, albums, and so forth.)

So: Watchmen is really fucking good. It's not my personal favorite work in the comics medium, but I (neophyte fan yet) haven't yet read anything that I would critically argue surpassed it. The trailer also looks pretty good; I'm not crazy about some of the aesthetic updates in the costuming, but several of the shots are ripped straight from the panels as drawn by Dave Gibbons. I'm also, a priori, impressed that they chose to keep the period setting. However, first we can turn to the author, Alan Moore, who is famously curmudgeonly about his work being turned into movies, but if you'd written V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all highly acclaimed works in the comics medium, and watched them get turned into, well, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you'd be a curmudgeon too. Moore: "You get people saying, 'Oh, yes, Watchmen is very cinematic,' when actually it's not. It's almost the exact opposite of cinematic...I didn't design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn't." He's, oh, at least 95% right about that.

I should also say that if they actually manage to get the ending from the book into a major theatrical release, I'll have to tip my hat to them regardless of how shitty the movie might otherwise be. I don't believe they'll do it, but I guess I could be wrong. Supposedly the ending scripted and shot is faithful to the book, but I wouldn't be surprised if the studio "tinkered" with it between now and March. Let me put it this way, in no uncertain terms: I'm fairly certain that if they faithfully reproduce the true ending to Watchmen it will be the most unsettling, morally confounding, dark, potentially divisive conclusion to a (semi) major Hollywood film. Ever.

But anyway: Watchmen was twelve issues of 32 pages apiece. Total of 384 pages. Out of those 384 pages, 46 are primarily prose text (with some illustration), non-story elements inserted at the end of each issue which enrich the overall texture of the work and provide some background, but I guess you could skip them and not miss anything you "needed to know". So that's 338 pages of actual comic. Out of those 338 pages, roughly twelve to fifteen pages' worth tell the intertextual "Tale of the Black Freighter," which is being animated for a feature on the DVD but excised from the theatrical release. This comic-within-the-comic is thematically and aesthetically tied into the rest of the work and comments on it, but you can cut it out and, again, "not miss anything". Let's say we've got an even 320 pages of comic left. I would have guessed that it took about a minute on average to faithfully reproduce the action and/or dialogue of a page, which would leave us with 320 minutes, or 5 hours and 20 minutes, of film. However, I'm obsessive enough on this point that I've actually, on several different occasions, acted out one or more of the twelve chapters, trying to be honest to what I think it would take up if you filmed everything (and, look, in Watchmen, and really in anything of Watchmen's caliber, in my opinion, in any genre or medium, everything is important). I came up with about 20 minutes per chapter, which is a little shorter than the real content of a 30-minute program on network TV (22 minutes and [I think] change, by standard; the "hour" is canonically something like 44:20 or 44:40). That would translate to a total of 240 minutes, or 4 hours. I do think I probably short-changed what you'd need to make some of the quieter passages work effectively. But let's say 4 hours; Zack Snyder's first cut was apparently three hours, and to make the film more topical he introduced a subplot about energy resources. So we're already short of my proposed time for a faithful adaptation and yet there's been other material added. The final cut is supposedly going to be 145 minutes long. That paces out to twelve minutes per chapter. I'm really not kidding about the time it takes to do this justice.

So if Zack Snyder loooooves this material so much, why is he cutting it in half? If he wants to make a movie (and not, say, a miniseries) that reflects his love for this material, why not write and direct his own script where he touches on the things about Watchmen that are important to him? Because Hollywood wouldn't want to bankroll some newly created "superhero" movie? If everyone who's read Watchmen goes to see this movie in theaters twice it will not break even; I can't believe that a clever marketing campaign couldn't create comparable buzz for a movie with no pre-existing source material. Why not just write a fucking movie that captures what you love about this comic in a format and length that works for film? Why butcher the thing you're so in love with you just had to make it into a movie, even if that means you can't make almost HALF of it into a movie?

Sighs.

Apparently I'm trying to turn this into the Most Under-Qualified Comics Blog on the Internets.

I haven't yet seen The Dark Knight. I very very much want to. I want to enjoy it to a degree that's almost painful and probably guarantees disappointment; the last film I wanted to see this badly, The Departed, was a monumental let down because, basically, it wasn't the best movie I'd ever seen. It's a good, strong film, but it should have been my favorite movie of all time (that cast, that setting, that subject matter, that director). What I do want to express to the void, here, are two reactions I have to the cycle of reading online reviews and then reading comments on them.

(1) You cannot post a negative review of the movie, even a mildly critical one, without being flooded by, literally, dozens to hundreds of comments, about half of them anonymous, from people who by and large have never previously commented on your blog. It's really upsetting, especially because these comments so routinely whirl around nothing but insult and idiocy. If you wrote a negative review of the movie it's because you're trying to get attention for being contrary, or because you know nothing about film and aren't qualified to be a reviewer, possibly both. It's also quite likely that you abused your thesaurus in the composition of your "review" and aren't aware that masturbating over the dictionary doesn't constitute film criticism.

You think I'm joking about the characterization here; I'm not. This is the clearest example yet of the various iterations of the equation that "normal person + opinion + internet + anonymity = fuckwad."

(2) Many of the reviews evince some levels of ignorance about Batman or the history of the character and his characterization. There are a lot of reviews which seem to question the darkness of the film (often in relation to the question I'm still not getting into about the value of trying to make superhero comics realistic and/or take them seriously) or question the presentation of the character. Look: for better or worse there is no unitary "Batman" characterization. The character first appeared in May, 1939, and in the 69 years of publication history since then there have been at least five major interpretations presented in the comics, let alone the tie-in media:

(a) Batman as ruthless vigilante in pulp crime stories w/semi-frequent supernatural overtones. This is the character as introduced in 1939, a Batman who occasionally kills people (!) and on a regular basis semi-advertantly causes their deaths, and is happy to watch them die without helping them (!!!). The comics are crude and brightly colored, but the morality on display here is, somewhat childishly, much darker than any presentation of the character since. I've just bought a book that collects the first year or so of Batman stories; I haven't yet gotten to the first issue of Batman itself, which introduces the Joker, but I'm running through his initial appearances in Detective Comics. In the first ten stories (including one two-parter for eleven different appearances) he: knocks a guy into an acid tank which almost certainly kills him, kicks another dude off a roof, may or may not kill someone when he snares their neck with a lasso, breaks a guy's neck with a kick, kills two vampires, is semi-responsible for someone getting killed by a death-ray, causes someone's plane to crash into a bay, where it presumably kills him, causes a guy's car to crash and go over the side of a bridge, presumably killing him, throws a man onto another man's sword which may or may not kill him, throws a small but heavy statue at a guy's head which knocks him out a window and kills him, allows someone to get stabbed to death so he doesn't blow his cover, and punches a dude so hard that he falls backward onto a sword which had previously been run through a door. That's, in the most expansive counting, thirteen deaths (including the vampires) that are directly or indirectly Batman's fault in one year of publication, which is probably more deahts of that sort than appeared in all the Batman comics of the 60s combined. I'm glad Batman was revised away from being the sort of guy who's happy to punch a guy into a vat of acid and call it "a fitting end for his kind" - the dialogue isn't so much with the goodness, here - but there are dark, dark roots to the character.

(b) Batman as campy adventurer with lots of supernatural/silly foes. This was a big influence on the Adam West TV show, dominated much of the 50s, and this is where everything Batman uses has a Bat-prefix, he's got a Bat-dog, etc. All but one or two of the Batman comics I read as a kid were originally my dad's, and half of those fell into this category.

(c) Batman as the world's greatest detective, in somewhat more grounded stories with a darker tone but still relatively kid-appropriate. The fantasy aspects as such are cut way back and there's a lot of Batman saying things like, "Hmm, this tire tread can only be found on Ford automobiles manufactured between 1957 and 1959!" Subsequent Batman-as-detective representations sadly tend to get away from the investigative heritage the creators, especially in this era, had him share with Holmes and Poirot, and for the past twenty years his detective skills are largely based on knowing who to beat up for information which will lead him to the next guy out of whom he can beat some knowledge. This presentation was prevalent in the 60s and maybe the 70s, and constitutes much of the rest of the comics I read as a kid.

(d) Batman as superhero in the DC tradition of superheroes; this is a thread that runs throughout the history of the character, but probably came to the fore in the 70s, which was apparently (I'm less personally familiar with this era) when the character started being brought out of the confines of Gotham and made more of a worldwide figure. Though not superpowered, this is the Batman who's on par with Superman and Wonder Woman inside the fictional world of the comics, and though I just said he came to the fore in the 1970s, this is also how I think of the Batman who showed up in various crossover, Justice League type titles. Comics genius Grant Morrison refers to this Bruce Wayne as a globetrotting hairy-chested love god. My personal take on Batman is a combination of (c) and (d) with a judicious smattering of:

(e) Frank Miller's Batman, and the semi-regrettable twenty years of post-Miller influence that have largely dominated the character since. This is an attempt to take Batman dark dark dark again. And he is dark - if we think of what I've said about talking the comics seriously and at face value, what happened to Bruce Wayne is superdark, and the decision to funnel his rage into a hopeless quest to defeat Crime in the abstract speaks to some serious mental imbalances.* However, Frank Miller's monumental The Dark Knight Returns - which is not a story set in the DC continuity - is about a Batman at the end of his life, and even Miller himself seems to have ignored that going forward. Batman in TDKR is broken and bitter and nasty, because he's been choking on his own rage for at least the decade since he "retired". There's no reason to believe that this is what he was like thirty years ago, but that's the direction the character was taken in the wake of this story. The idea becomes that Batman is the real man and Bruce Wayne is the alter-ego, and the many voices who deride this characterization say (funny, true) things like "Batman's superpower is being more badassed than anyone else" and "Batman's true power is being a massive dick." I, personally, like the idea of a Bruce Wayne who's idly given some thought to what he'd do if for some reason all his superpowered friends went bad. I don't, personally, like the idea of a Batman who's actually developed plans for how he'd defeat Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, The Green Lantern, and all the rest. It's a little too much like the idea that the US continues to maintain plans for invading Canada - you know, just in case.

So who's the "real" Batman? Even as a fictional character, there isn't a "real" Batman in the way that there's a "real" Sherlock Holmes or a "real" Quentin Compson or whomever. That the Batman portrayed in one movie or the other doesn't match the reviewer's conception of the who the character is cannot be considered a failure of the film. There is no Ür-Batman to compare to, so the films' portrayals must be considered on their own merits as they relate to their own goals.

* Some, maybe lots, of people don't like this idea either, considering it part and parcel of the unpleasant notion that Bruce Wayne is the mask and the real man is the psycho vigilante who roams the streets dealing out nonlethal but highly unpleasant violence. I'm OK with it as long as it's not pushed too hard; the Joker is enough irredeemable psychopath for one story. Someone suggested a storyline where while investigating a murder a young detective never finds out that Bruce Wayne is Batman but does find out that Wayne's actually got his fingers all over Gotham in highly questionable ways, with the implication that Wayne's real goal isn't an ethically questionable and practically unreasonable quest to end crime, but an ethically questionable and practically achievable quest to turn Gotham into the sort of city that no longer needs a Batman. It's a neat idea. I like my Bruce Wayne pretty much how Christian Bale presents him in Batman Begins - clearly not 100% psychologically healthy, but a man doing constant war with his demons, never consumed by them.