I haven’t written a lot about comic book movies this year, because, although there have been a fair number of them, they either happened before this project began (Black Panther) or they were part of my long-term commitment to never watch Ant-Man or the Hulk (Ant-Man and the Wasp). I have a strained relationship with comic book movies like most people I know whose judgement I trust about films.
On the one hand, this phenomena has got out of hand (what director Iñarritu calls “cultural genocide”) and in a few years we are going to have to explain to our children why we did this to ourselves, why we sucked out all the air from the room on funding interesting standalone films in favor of massive sequel-machine franchises. Even Ironman himself said in 2014 that super hero movies were “getting a bit old,” “showing the beginning signs of fraying around the edges” (and that was BEFORE the largest grossing Marvel movies of all time had come down the pike). I cringe when Chris Hemsworth or whoever openly raises a glass at Comic Con to twenty more Marvel movies in the next five years (can someone get me the link to this?).
I sometimes enjoy them because they are basic and simple and go well with popcorn. The problem is that sometimes they purport to be profound, based on some Greek mythological kind of thing. And they are honestly very right wing. I always see them as killing people because they do not believe in what you believe, or they are not being who you want them to be. I hate that, and don’t respond to those characters. They have been poison, this cultural genocide, because the audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and shit that doesn’t mean nothing about the experience of being human.
Director Alejandro Iñarritu is asked in a Deadline interview from 2014 about what he likes about superhero movies.
On the other hand, there’s no shortage of myth theorists out there trying to show how this genre of storytelling is baked into our cultural DNA. Notable dickhead Henry Cavill isn’t wrong when he says that 1) he didn’t start this and 2) Superman is America’s Hercules. I’m beyond the point of labeling actors as sellouts when they sign on to do multi-picture deals with Marvel or DC studios (except Michael Keaton, who seems like he should know better–seriously, how do you go from being schlocky Batman to self-aware Birdman back to shlocky Spiderman villain?). Superhero films can and probably should be a force for good, and painting them with too broad a brush neglects exemplary films that buck toxic trends. Broad-brushing aside, I can still remember the day Jon Stewart tells JJ Abrams in an interview that he never liked Star Wars as much as Star Trek because it always felt like Star Wars was too enamored with violence (I wonder how he feels about the most recent reboots).
I know no one has asked me for credentials to prove that I’m not just jumping on one of several bandwagons, but I just want to point to the fact that when the Avengers: Age of Ultron came out a few years back, I bought tickets for a three day marathon of all of the Marvel movies up to that point and then abruptly took off from Wednesday to Friday from work and invited my girlfriend-now-Wife to come along with me as one of our very first official couple dates. She was devastated and near-tears when I invited her. I said, you don’t have to come! I’ll find someone else. And she said, “If I don’t go, you’ll just find someone to replace me,” to which I responded, “Exactly,” which I guess meant different things to both of us.
Which is just to say, I’ve grudgingly attended every Marvel event as it’s come along (except Antman and Hulk), even really enjoyed the first few Ironmen with my dad back when they were an annual affair without any cross-marketing. We started with the X-Men franchise way back when I was a teenager, and I’ve dutifully grown up with those as well, even the terrible ones where everyone explodes, because they give a structure and rhythm to my otherwise meaningless existence. Before I detour too far, I just want to add at the tail end of this preamble that part of my phobia of superhero movies has always been my shortcomings as a comic book reader. I, like a lot of people outside of the orbit of comic book fandoms, am more than a little intimidated by the sheer volume of story that I’m missing out on, and alternatively feel both fomo and too-behind-to-start (GoT: same).
Throughout the years, I’ve become comic book adjacent, read some of the cultural touchstones of the DC universe and can nod vaguely at the term “retcon,” but still can’t really tell the full oral history of any particular hero. I look up to people like Glen Weldon and Gail Simone for their ability to distill decades of story into a single metanarrative. I feel like a lot of my reading is from the Silver Age, the stories of people who grew up on the stories of the Golden Age. Snarky intertextual references I don’t quite catch and reboots of failed heroes I don’t know (China Miéville’s Dial H for Hero, Alan Moore’s The Swamp Thing, Sandman and Black Orchid, Amanda Conner’s Harley Quinn, and Loeb and Sale’s take on Batman, in no particular order). The more I learn the more I appreciate, but at the same time the endless nitpicking and dick-thumping about adherence to the series is nauseating. So, that’s me and my journey.
A long time ago, I met a friend who totally charmed me with his odd combination of swagger, sociability, and nerdiness, and he led me to a transformation in the way that I think about a lot of things about literature and teaching and just being a human; about high status and low status performances; and about comics and comic book movies. His aesthetics about the poetic anxiety of super hero movies shaped a lot of my feelings toward the genre. He told me once that he had a set of three criteria he used to judge whether or not a comic book movie was success or not:
- The characters in the story must not have cultural amnesia about what a super hero is. It’s the 21st century. Spiderman cannot be unaware of the eighty years of literature about Spidermen that exists, otherwise how can our culture’s values possibly align with those of this alternate reality? Also, we’ll be doomed to repeat the same discovery storyline we’ve been telling for thirty years.
- Villains must be more powerful than heroes. If not, you’re just watching strong guys dunking on noobs. The power imbalance between good guys and bad guys is what contributes to power creep in sequels–that disappointing feeling you have in the pit of your stomach that all the angst from the last movie was really uncalled for compared to current troubles. I want to slide into this an unofficial addendum: heroes shouldn’t win because they “want it more”. This is 90% of resolutions in fantasy movies, either visualized by a tug of war of electricity or a sudden burst of berserker energy. If there are no stakes and no cost to a struggle, it’s not a heroic act to resist.
- When heroes meet, they must be able to do things together that they can’t do alone, show us powers we haven’t seen before. Only boors go to a film for the familiar. Pikachu uses the water sprinklers to defeat Brock’s Onyx at the very first gym in the anime. You can be sure as fuck that you can’t do that in the video game. Ensemble superhero movies should be a process of discovery for the heroes and the audience.
Into the Spider-verse, is the rare comic book film that meets all of these criteria.
I should mention that I consider myself a high bar to meet for Spiderman films in general, because I’m predisposed to not like Spiderman. Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield are the purest distillations of Spiderman for me, and even as a small child I resisted the Tobey McGuire films. Tom Holland can suck on a battery for all I care. I don’t like the debate behind webs being synthetic or organic. The villains are cheesy. I know that’s the point but I don’t have a lot of patience for cartoonish villainy these days. I was also pretty skeptical of the inclusion of the Spider-pig meme, mostly because it seems like it dooms the film from joining canon and relegates a potentially imaginative film to fan fiction purgatory.
Wife was one of the people who signaled to me that this was going to be interesting: her notes when she saw it were that the art is ambitious, the way that the story conveys humor through its form (the “clickety-clack” of the keyboards written out, the inner monologue displayed as bubbles overhead), and also the illusion of depth. My mom, who has no patience for most films, commented on that as well. Wife said that two friends of hers had really different reactions to the film: one said he cried at the end and the other said she laughed the entire time. Wife liked the way the fish-out-of-water metaphor held for Morales’s character, as both a smart kid feeling out of his depth in a new school and growing into new powers. Wife liked the way in which origin stories were told and the staggered pacing of those introductions. I liked that there were stakes and costs associated with the Spider-plan. Even some side characters lose a lot in the fight. There’s a moment of ineffability between father and son that’s well-handled, and a few juicy twists.
If this is cultural genocide, it sure feels like some new form of inhumanity. Worth a look, despite my worst expectations.
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