Superman
Friday, June 30, 2006
A few words about Superman
Superman was conceived as a sort of democratic Gilgamesh, a buffer between the often referenced "little guy" and the nearly magical technological and bureaucratic forces lined up against him. He was the embodiment of big government at a time when big government worked. In his earliest incarnation Superman was as likely to rescue trapped miners and hang the bosses on telephone poles in retribution for their shoddy safety regulations as he was to foil the independents--bank robbers and their ilk.
The letters from fans started arriving in the 50's, and Superman's Mailbag answered them all: why doesn't Superman's cape get burned when he flies into the sun (the material was from Krypton)? Exactly how much Kryptonite exists on the planet Earth (it's all powering a single robot, since dismantled)? What is Luthor's first name (Lex, in continuing the double-L tradition started with Lois Lane, etc.)? These were questions asked by idle children for the sake of something to do, and each one was answered on the fly, but systematically, and with complete authority. These answers, bewildering in that their cast-aluminum logic led back to so soft and idle a source, locked the character into a mythology. The great red S was just a fun design choice. Knowing, as we do now (because we watch Smallville, or used to) that the great red S also harkens back to some ancient Native American prophecy makes the whole thing pointless and mysterious, that is to say, powerful.
The end result has been that Superman, like, say, the philosophy of Leo Strauss, is arbitrarily bursting with information, worshipped just short of religion, and in groping for meaning and relevance is devoid of either. Certainly there is a Superman for leftists and a Superman for ultraconservatives because there must be in a system which forces all meaning--and all superheroes--through a clarifying ideology. For the middle class, however, there are at least two Supermans. There is the Superman who is a rational (we hope, rather than ideological) gateway through which meaning is pushed. This Superman is a little bit like The New Yorker. He is for something big like world peace and acts on it instead of talking about it. They get meaningful results, too, since both Superman and the New Yorker have large subscription bases. And can hurl Nuclear bombs toward the sun. At least, as far as we know they can: after all, they are the best among equals and therefore know best. They absolve us of responsibility, since whatever we have to say about the issue of Nuclear Bombs is better better vetted by those who come from either an Ivy League school or Krypton anyway. It's a reflexive ideology, a bulwark against the two extremes, defined by being never quite as clarifying as the enemies that surround it but demanding fealty anyway. This Superman is essentially John Kerry.
The other Superman is less coherent, but it's the one I suspect we go to the movies to see. It harkens back to the original comics. As his alter ego Clark Kent he truly is weak--there's a strange way in which he's not just faking it. Hence, his indignation when the red S bursts out of his shirt and he starts throwing around car parts and bullies and mine owners. He gets caught up in faulty gates and pushed around by corrupt gatekeepers and then, the beauty of it is, he wakes into his true identity to smash them all, fantastically. No one would argue that this is a healthy fantasy. But the trick of having a liberal democracy has been and is one of keeping these unhealthy fantasies in equilibrium with one another, not in destroying or diluting them altogether. Only part of democracy is rational.
By the time Roy Lichtenstein caught up with comics--this is 40 years ago--Superman had long ago become information rich, which is to say it became unbearably stupid, unnecessarily rational. Even the kids had become bored with it. It seemed admirably spartan of Lichtenstein to strip comics of their literary context and to plug them into an art context, where at least a few people might have been as excited to see them. In a stroke he made them mean something, elegantly, just as ideology demands. This is the Superman Anthony Lane is thinking of when he says he wants it to be a "frothy entertainment" instead of what it is. But at the same time Lichtenstein was just getting noticed, the first batch of Marvel Comics were released, created in large part by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. They gave their characters Wagnerian-adolescent emotional states. They made hundreds of them and threw them all in the same universe, where they could battle meaningfully by representing, each of them, just a few priorities. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were greater artists than Lichtenstein because they refused to filter meaning through a single source, instead doing the rare work of creating a universe where different ideas could play. It's something we now see in rival DC comics--home of Superman--that wasn't there before Marvel Comics or Lichtenstein. Every ten years or so DC rolls out something called "The Crisis on Infinite Earths," in which the DC world is struck down and the characters forced to take on new identities. You may have read that Batgirl recently became a lesbian: that's how that worked, and it's quite brilliant. Superman is still the most information-heavy filter DC has, and thus harder to reform, in spite of John Byrne's attempt to scale him down back in the 80's. Today he constantly hovers between being the sort of reputable middle-class signifier who gives orders and one who acts freely within, around and against the limitations of others.
Anyway, the question here is, is Superman Returns any good? No, not much. He's just as top heavy and managerial as you'd expect a hero to be in the post 9/11 world. But in that moment when he sees that the jumbo jet on television is doomed, and he reacts in a crowded bar as everyone else reacts, and then disappears, and then there he is suddenly in tights, in tights!, yanking on the doomed plane's wing some 40,000 feet above the earth, well, there are some moments in the movies that just work, and this is one of them.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:16 PM, ,
Two Silents
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Two Silents
Maybe everything that approaches a representative act of either Dada or filmmaking becomes the best possible representaion of how they get confused. Dada is not the refutation of reason but the refutation of reasonable action: it shares its logic with that of the military and the sciences, which both have horrifying but socially acceptable cutting edges looming busily over the public sphere. Dada was the first instance of poeticizing that cutting edge. Viewed this way, nothing comes close to approaching the Dada program of forward motion except the movies. The only thing that sets movies apart from all this is their lack of purity (Dadaism had lots of that, and, tragically showed enough good taste to die an honorable death in museums): both Jean-Luc Godard and Jerry Bruckheimer are able to produce an undifferentiated slurry of films in spite of having dead aesthetics, because they know--they have witnessed with their own eyes--the constant resucitation of the medium in which they work, along with its single moral lesson: burn everything down.
This means that dadaist filmaking is almost always good, but Rene Clair's Entr'acte is the best among equals as far as this goes. It has only a touch of the dumpy, naive (but great!) arbitrariness of Man Ray's machine-aesthetic films, as when the delicate ballet dancer turns to reveal a false beard, ba-dum-bump. The rest is pure pacing and rhythm in the service of a clarifyingly irrational destruction, as singular in its effect as one of Marcel Duchamp's hypnotically spinning disks. You can see it at the MOMA.
More destruction: Louise Brooks as Lulu in Pandora's Box made just a few years after Entr'acte's 1924 premiere, but owing nothing to it. There is a clear one-to-one advantage in comparing the faces of blasted-out soldiers returning from the First World War to the Dadaist collage being done at the same time, but what to do with Brook's face? Her tight and vaguely malevolent angles slip off the screen into a sort of playworld where the sandbox is hers and she makes all the rules. She has her director to thank partially for this. Pabst seemed to understand how to sexualize his expressionist effects: he better defined what they were there for, and gave Sternberg something to shoot for and miss when he made The Blue Angel a year later. Fritz Kortner, having just engaged himself to Lulu, framed in a doorway with his eyes glittering, the dark devouring his face: "I've just signed my death warrant." Two days later and Pandora's Box is still rolling around in my mind.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:18 PM, ,
Oh man. The summerish bad-times feeling is here, announced by my having caught whatever bad-times bug is going around that puts you to sleep all the time and makes your lymph nodes swell up like dirty pancakes. Summertime in New York, when humanity spills out past the slurry wall and begins touching everything with sweaty palms, rubbing hepatitis on subway handholds. Life, they call it. I get so depressed when the thermometer peaks past 80 for any significant amount of time I become another person. I forget who I am, that I'd rather be writing. Vibes everywhere, and greasy faces, and me without the cash to get out of town.
What are these movies? Crime film after crime film. I'm not cut out to be a cinephile, film nerd, whatever, one of these grey, semi-dentated people who show up at the Film Forum with three-year-old Tower Records bags full of newspapers and take up two theater seats while preparing a sandwich as the credits go up. I can't do it. I couldn't even enjoy Sam Fuller's The Naked Kiss the other day, and it's the sort of thing I suspect I might have enjoyed if it had been fall. Well, I couldn't help but enjoy the opening scene where the hooker starts beating a john up and then loses her wig and casually fixes it back on her stark bald head. That was great.
Bigger questions are emerging. How to get out of Iraq without leaving an apocalyptic gap in our wake? How to do it in the best sense of the pragmatic process, and not in the worst? In the heart of every ideologue is a murderer, someone who dreams of a historical cleansing. So here's the sense that, if the death of Zarqawi meant the death of a murderous ideologue, which ideologues are left, which ones are not murderous enough to remove from the context of retribution? Will Bush make the cut? Can ideology be reconciled to pragmatism? It's getting hotter out. The brain puts on shorts and eats a hot dog. Poetry. I've been working on sestinas all week and can't keep either Don Rickles or Celtic Frost out of them. This isn't a bad thing, but it's hard to use To Mega Therion seven times in a recurring pattern just because you thought you might like the challenge. And why is it that every new article that come out on the subject of poetry puts me on the defensive? The question of whether or not poetry is best expressed as the heroic mimicry of forms and emotions or as a flawed conjuration of them to me was settled long ago: why sideliners keep insisting on the former instead of the latter baffles and alienates me.
Anyway, this is the last week of the Film Forum's B-Noir festival. I'm going to make one last push, but the Tally of Mayhem is over (my program fluffed out on the last post and devoured it, at which point I did the old cost-benefit analysis and said forget it.) Movies, eh. I'll see if I can't pull it together.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:46 AM, ,
Mission Impossible 3
Friday, June 02, 2006
Mission Impossible 3
Mission Impossible 3 begins a little too jarringly for its own good. A battered Tom Cruise, strapped to a dentist's chair, engages in some banter with his enemy--too "intense" to be well written--and watches as his frightened girlfriend gets shot in the face. The cartoonish, terrific dice-in-a-tin-can theme song rolls, and we're supposed to be picking ourselves up off the floor, or something, when the film cuts backwards in time to Cruise's engagement party. I'm still not sure which scene is more horrible, the party or the assassination. The party must be Tom Cruise's idea of ordinary domestic bliss: even the part about the preordained death. The whole thing is lit like a Golden Delicious apple, and at one point, as Cruise passes by, a severely manicured woman turns to another severely manicured woman and blurts, "I'd marry him." The peacetime world of Mission Impossible is essentially a Hollywood wrap party at which everyone would marry Tom Cruise, and if this is what the Impossible Mission Force serves to protect I guess I prefer total annihilation on both sides. Stir the ashes and make sure nothing's left.
The major myth about Hollywood is its risk-aversity. If Hollywood were risk-averse it would be in real estate. Either that, or it would engage with real gangsterism (where "relevance" is so codified as to be a moot issue) instead of letting itself be portrayed by gangsters in the parallel universe of the movies. Thus the appeal of the Mission Impossible movies to the people who make them. They celebrate an unbelievable amount of hyperefficiency, and feature eminently qualified middle managers crawling around on their bellies and proudly whispering into headsets about how they don't have time for real relationships. Mission Impossible 3 (I refuse to write it as the anti-literate scribble--M:i:3--it seems to demand) is the fever dream all addictive gamblers eventually come across, the guaranteed money-making system, something that will defeat chance with the application of a little elbow grease and critical thought. Or scratch that, it's not so much a fever dream as a powerpoint presentation. You can almost hear the guy with the thumb-sized ponytail and the thousand-dollar suit pointing out setpeices in this movie and saying, the numbers were phenomenal on this, this tested through the roof. And sometimes even this sort of front-loaded manipulation feels okay in a scummy, Glengarry Glen Ross kind of way, like watching a good salesman work the room, or like it did back when Micheal Bay was emboldened by power and full of his own bullshit, and before we all knew that he originally went to art school and thinks of himself as Warholian or something. But not this time. Mission Impossible feels like someone sticking something in your pocket you don't want there. And like a robot from another, better special effects movie, it has grown self-aware.
I hate the Mission Impossible movies. They alienate me even further than the vapid collegiate interiority of art films. I find it a great pleasure to lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass, etc., and I try to, whenever the middle managers aren't watching me. It's in this spirit that I go to see the summer blockbusters, to see gamesmanship and aliens and, to paraphrase Frank O'Hara, anything, any of the few things at all, that let me know people don't completely regret life. So it sticks hard in the craw to spend money on a movie so exactly the opposite of the precarious life I try to inhabit, one which sees my world and wants to put little beeping things behind the walls of it, either to blow it up or employ everything in it to some end.
From what I hear, the numbers were not so great for Mission Impossible 3. Did people suddenly start hating Tom Cruise, or this kind of movie, or what? Didn't they always? Doesn't everyone hate the movies their bosses like? Or--and I would believe this--maybe everyone is the boss now. If so, perhaps the nature of management has changed.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:17 AM, ,
