The Singularity Hits Hollywood: Transcendence and Chappie

Wally Pfister's Transcendence (2014) is a Frankenstein story--one that hews so closely to the plotline of Mary Shelley's book that there would have been some grounds for passing it off as a remake. The movie actually uses as a framing device the scientist who created the monster recounting the central course of events from after the disaster--a course which began with horror at the untimely death of someone close to him, and a desperate attempt to reverse it that initially seemed benign, but produced an intelligence that proved violent, and produced fear for the fate of the world.

If Transcendence treaded the familiar "Frankenstein complex" path--and did so in fairly solemn fashion--Neil Blomkamp's Chappie (2015) went in the direction of that great critic of the Frankenstein complex, Isaac Asimov. The story also revolves around the creation of an artificial intelligence--but one unconnected with the taboo about the line between life and death--and the result is no monster. Instead Chappie is a child--albeit a misunderstood child--just beginning to learn about the world, who inspires maternal feelings in the woman in whose care he winds up (just as in Asimov's "Lenny"). While saying very much more would mean more spoilers than I care to present in this post, consciousness uploading is not something monstrous here, but the happy ending to the tale.

I, for one, much preferred Chappie--in part because Asimov's outlook appeals to me much more than Shelley's, but also because the film itself is simply more intelligent and more entertaining. Those who follow AI research to any degree, or simply read a lot of science fiction about the subject, would be hard-pressed to point to a live-action Hollywood movie that is as open-minded about the subject, or as idea-packed in its treatment of it. And the truth is that the titular robot is a very engaging creation, whose misadventures manage to be thought-provoking, funny, and at times touching.

In fact, while less well received by the critics, I frankly preferred it to Blomkamp's prior films. Watching the Academy Award for Best Picture nominee District 9 and Elysium I got the impression that I was in each case watching two different films welded together. The first seemed to be the film Blomkamp really wanted to make--a film with big ideas and some human drama--which he attached to the second, an action movie that he made simply to give the project a chance in today's market, but which just didn't have the same inventiveness or vitality, as if Blomkap was only going through obligatory motions. In Chappie the science fiction drama and the action movie flowed together much more smoothly.

Still, different as their approaches were I couldn't help being struck by what Transcendence and Chappie also had in common in their being major, commercial Hollywood films dealing not just with the theme of artificial intelligence (counting these, and Her, and others, I think we haven't seen so much film about this since the '80s), but specifically the transhumanist and posthumanist possibilities the technology opens up (e.g. mind uploading), and that in the terms of contemporary discussion. Transcendence derives its title from Dr. Will Caster's preferred alternative term to "Singularity" (explicitly referenced in the movie), and while it ends up walking a very familiar path, the details reflect an attentiveness to the concept of an "intelligence explosion." And Chappie breaks with popular sf's usual horror story attitude in taking a more benign view of the possibility.

Does this suggestion that ideas about AI, intelligence explosion, Singularity, posthumanism and the rest are enjoying a greater popular currency say anything about the actual likelihood of these developments? The history of previous cinematic fascinations with technology would suggest this is unlikely. Certainly the '80s-era rush of AI-themed movies that gave us The Terminator (1984), Weird Science (1985) and Short Circuit (1986) was no proof that a breakthrough in strong AI (as was expected by some at the time) was imminent--and indeed it was not. (The history of efforts to produce a fifth generation computer at the time is today an obscure footnote.) But at the same time watching these films I was struck by their far greater sophistication in their treatment of their subject than the films of the '80s--perhaps hinting at our generally having a better handle on the issue. And that might be indicative of our moving in such a direction.

Of G.I. Joe and James Bond

Watching 2009's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, I was, of course, struck by the ways in which the film was derivative of the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me--in its undersea fortress and stolen missile scheme, and to some extent, even its tossing in an affair between Duke and Baroness.

While noting this in my book (shameless plug time) James Bond's Evolution, I didn't give the matter all that much thought. As is the case with most of the other cartoons of the 1980s I haven't seen since, I remembered little more than opening credits sequences and theme songs, a few character designs and quirks, the essential pattern of the public service announcements ("Knowing is half the battle!"), at most a small shred of a scene or two.

Still, more recently running into reruns of the old mid-'80s Sunbow-produced series (to go by what I see on fan sites, still the canonical, "real" Joe to most), I have had occasion to think again about the influences and resemblances, above and beyond the broad way in which the Bond film series was a model for later action-adventure (cinematic pacing and structure, the subject matter, scaling, photography and editing of action sequences) in general--and which seems less surprising the more I learn about the series' history.1

Larry Hama's creation of G.I. Joe is, after all, an outgrowth of an attempt to spin off Marvel's Nick Fury--Marvel's answer to the '60s era spy craze James Bond did so much to explode (however much the conception diverged in later years). And it shows in the similarity of the conception. Like James Bond, Joe takes a popular genre of globe-trotting action-adventure devoted to an over-the-top version of intelligence, covert operations and low-intensity warfare in the contemporary "real world" (as it was the '80s, paramilitary/techno-thriller action rather than spies) and turns down its usual political charge to the end of appealing to the widest possible audience. A certain amount of flag-waving remained part of the package, G.I. Joe highlighting its heroes' nationality, the subtitle in the Sunbow-Dic era "A Real American Hero," appearing on the screen as the main cast stands pumping its fists in front of a giant American flag at the end of the opening titles. However, as in the early movies about 007 the G.I. Joe series eschewed overt demonization of other governments and countries, in large part by centering the adventures on an imaginary villain carefully crafted to be acceptable as a villain to all--again, in much the same fashion as the early Bond films.

Just like the SPECTRE of the early films (which replaced the Soviet Union's SMERSH in Dr. No), Cobra is an international criminal organization with an agenda of pure and naked power-seeking, even the pretension of a higher cause or ideology absent. As the means by which it pursued this goal frequently called for the physical destruction of a large part of the world Cobra, like many a Bond villain, was a threat not just to a narrow "national interest," but the whole planet, with both superpowers pointedly included, and in cases, forced to cooperate (the Joes working with their Soviet counterparts in the October Guard on more than one occasion).

One might add that Cobra, like SPECTRE, is led by a villain whose face is kept carefully hidden (Cobra Commander), and whose organization, apart from his colorful senior staff (metal-faced Destro, the bad Bond girl-ish Baroness) and a few similarly colorful henchmen (the mercenary Zartan and his Dreadnoks), rests atop a foundation of vast numbers of faceless foot soldiers whose principal role is that of inexplicably willing cannon fodder. And of course, Cobra also shares the Bond villains' penchant for elaborate fortress-bases (at times, under the sea or in space), and for the wacky in their high-tech schemes for world domination.

That same imperative of toning things down also led G.I. Joe, like the later installments of the Bond films, to replace bloody violence with over-the-top gadgetry. (The Joes and Cobras fire laser bolts instead of bullets from their guns--and in the second season the Joes are apt to be firing them not at other people, but androids.)

Indeed, it is worth remembering that a conspicuously James Bondian agent "guest stars" in a Sunbow series episode, specifically "Matthew Burke" in the allusively titled "The Spy Who Rooked Me," which mixes up with the Joes a tuxedo-wearing British superspy who first appears outside a Vegas nightclub, subsequently drives a gadget-packed car (complete with ejector seat) and, while having to keep it G-rated, still manages to put enough moves on Lady Jaye to get (Our Man?) Flint jealous. In the end Burke/Bond does not come off so favorably as he might, but still accomplishes his mission handily, in the process getting the better of his allies as well as his enemies--so that in the end, it still seems fair to call the episode an homage to a crucial predecessor.

Why We Describe Less

A while back I happened on a blog post (regrettably, I haven't been able to track it down again) which raised the matter of authors' describing less than they used to, and asking its readers why this may now be the fashion.

One reason, clearly, is the swapping of the third-person omniscient narrator who sees and describes everything for us reliably for a host of narrow and fallible little subjectivities, and their limited perception of what there is to see, think, feel.

However, there is too the reality that we live in an age of visual media which has driven home to us just how difficult it is for the written word to compete with the camera as a way of conveying images in all their vibrancy, immediacy, texture, grandeur--leaving many of us less inclined to try, and perhaps with less sense that there is a need to try. (Whatever it is, you've probably seen it on TV before, and so it seems it is enough to evoke that.)

Perhaps more importantly, film and television have accelerated the pace of storytelling, too much so to allow any room for thick description--confronted with which we are apt to get impatient to move on.

And of course, many have made a virtue of describing less (one thinks of the enduring cult of Hemingway), while more generally the trend of recent decades has been toward easier-to-read, less demanding books of smaller words connected together in shorter sentences, compiled together in shorter paragraphs in littler chapters (even as books of doorstop size became more than ever the standards).

Have we lost something precious in all this? Certainly there are those who have put subjectivity, evocativeness, briskness, minimalism, accessibility to good use. Still, at their best there was something to be said for the lusher descriptiveness of the nineteenth century novels. Take, for example, Peter Washington's appraisal of Balzac as

a writer whose delight in appearances encompasses every mode from the interior decorator's passion for glitzy surfaces to the philosopher's interest in the hidden depths behind them . . . He has an extraordinary grasp on the materiality of the world, the sensuous quality of objects. All his books are filled with things . . . [and] Everything has its place in a complete vision of life at a particular time and place.

The vividness of his settings, the solidity of the world he imagines and the characters with which he peoples it, would be difficult to imagine without all this, while as Washington also noted, "[t]he dramatic virtues of this method--its distance from mere description--becomes apparent at critical moments in the novel." The details--the difference between a wax and a tallow candle in Eugenie Grandet, for example--are neither decoration, nor mere "symbolism" of the sort on which impressionable middle school students develop neurotic fixations, but the sorts of little things that make up the life he describes.

Novels like Balzac's strike me as more fully novel-like than anything we are likely to encounter today--epic depictions of life, worlds on the page such as Modernist and postmodernist narratives, in their smugly showy fragmentariness, obliqueness and unreliability rarely even try to deliver (and still less often, succeed in doing), no matter how much admiring theorists tell us otherwise. And so while it is well that leaner styles are accepted, the achievements of writers working in that other mode ought not to be slighted.

Of Balzac and James

I read little Henry James until recently, and most of that in a hurry for a long-ago graduate course. (Indeed, "Daisy Miller" is about the only piece of his that I felt myself to know well for a long time.)

The impression I got, however, does not seem to have been different from most people's, George Moore nicely summing it up its outstanding feature in his Confessions of a Young Man--the overgenteel, cloistered, drawing room narrowness of it. A particular passage in that book sums it up so vividly that I cannot resist quoting it:

Mr James's people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition . . . in front of the reader nothing happens . . . human portraiture models are necessary . . . [but] the drawing room presents few accents and angles, conformity to its prejudices having worn all away . . . Is there really much to say about people who live in stately houses and eat and drink their fill every day of the year? The lady, it is true, may have a lover, but the pen finds scanty pasturage in the fact; and in James's novels the lady only considers the question on the last page, and the gentleman looks at her questioningly.

Recently reading Washington Square has only reconfirmed my impression. Indeed, after reading James' own critical writing, it has seemed to me that fully as he understood those French writers he so admired, and attentive as he was to their methods, he rejected what was best about them, what made their work so compelling--not least the interest that Honore de Balzac (hailed by James as "one of the finest of artists" in the essay he devoted to him) took in the "machinery of civilization," and the cold and critical eye he was ready to cast on it.1 Balzac's portrait of the brutal, vulgar, degrading, humiliating, painful, wasteful and ultimately hollow character of life in a society dominated by money and its pursuit (such a far cry from those who preach market values as the embodiment of efficiency, dignity and humanity!) was exactly the kind of thing from which James shrank in his work, instead glossing over the less seemly details to leave us with just those stately houses and that calm, polite twilight.

1. The essay appeared in the December 1875 edition of Galaxy--today's The Atlantic, and well worth a read by anyone interested in Balzac's body of work.

Reconsidering Fantastic Four (2015)

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

By the time I saw Josh Trank's Fantastic Four I had long since had an earful of the bad press--and as is so often the case on those occasions, I found myself wondering if it was not overly criticized. At least in the more important ways the film did not strike me as conspicuously lazy and sloppy in the manner of, for example, Iron Man 2. It managed to avoid the triteness so often part of the Marvel crowd-pleasers--particularly tiresome in, for instance, the middle third of the first Thor movie. And in fact, more than many of these movies (the celebrated first Avengers movie among them), it is not a collection of action scenes strung together by the thinnest semblance of a plot (or more precisely, masses of bits of action strung together by the thinnest semblance of being action scenes, in their turn strung together by the thinnest semblance of a plot), but offers an actual story with actual characters.

As it happens, there is a lot of Trank's prior film, Chronicle, in it--bleak suburbs, gray skies, alienated kids with bad attitudes from crummy homes who mess around with powers beyond their understanding and have to deal with the consequences, all depicted in a rather grounded, low-key, small-scale way. (Reed Richards is turned from a grown-up and well-recognized scientist to a geeky high school science fair entrant, with the rest of the Four changed commensurately; while the central event in the origin story is not a space flight, but interdimensional transport to a primitive landscape, generally seen at night.) There is a bit of Watchmen, too (another film criticized far out of proportion to any actual weaknesses it had) in the conception of the heroes as damaged people exploited by the System, and specifically the military-industrial complex, covert-ops side of it, the badness of which seems to go far beyond a few "bad apples."1

As all this suggests, rather than a movie for purists, or simply a less faithful movie still attempting to be a colorful, lightweight crowd-pleaser in the familiar Marvel mold (which the previous film version of this story fit to a tee), Trank's Fantastic Four gives the impression of a movie attempting to subvert its source material, and the form more broadly--and in its earlier portions shows some promise on that level. However in the last act the movie turns much more conventional as the heroes brush aside their previously deeply felt differences to come together and battle a vengeful supervillain posing a cosmic, physics-based threat to the entire world, the day is narrowly saved, and even if we had doubts (more than doubts) about the functionaries in the dress uniforms and three-piece suits, everyone puts that behind them, while our heroes get a sweet new deal in the form of lavish facilities in Central City, and speak bad one-liners intended to get a final laugh before we cut to credits.

Alas, the final display of action and effects falls far short of what was needed to save the movie from that perspective, not helped by the fact that the scenes are so ill-lit one can barely make out much of what is going on, and that the low-key approach endures. Perhaps more importantly, the sharp turn in the narrative, expected as it may be, rings false after what came before.

Consequently the film alienates those who like the more conventional take by being so low-key and measured and dark, who felt uncompensated by the finale; while at the same time in the film's turning much more conventional in the final act, it alienates those who had been intrigued by its doing something different and more subversive. In that I am reminded of something I thought about when watching Chronicle: the tension between the big-budget, crowd-pleasing form and the narrative aspirations of necessarily smaller-scale indie filmmaking. For better or worse Chronicle just about managed to cohere in spite of them, but it also did not have the expectations aroused by its connection with the Fantastic Four, or the obligation to turn a profit on a $120 million production budget adequate to launch a whole franchise of summer tentpoles.

1. One of the more striking aspects of this is the depiction of the changed bodies of the principals, not just the Thing, but Reed, whose stretching appears grotesque rather than zanily cartoonish.

The Twilight of the Action RPG?

Looking at today's games--I have in mind here the action RPG genre--I am struck by their breathtaking graphics, their rendering of vast, intricately detailed, elaborately interactive worlds, and the lushness of the storylines that all this enables.

Still, appealing as they are visually and conceptually, I have to admit to being one of those who feels that games have lost something in attaining this new level of artistic accomplishment.

The size and intricacy and interactiveness of their virtual worlds makes gameplay far less intuitive. The player has to endure elaborate tutorials to master the necessary physical skills. Then in embarking upon their quest I suspect that only the most hardcore players can get by without a strategy guide--genuinely book-length--in hand, playing becoming an exercise in "following the manual."1

I'll admit that I've never had much patience for tutorials of this type, and that I don't even like reading the manual for things I buy in real life. But clearly I'm not the only one who feels that way--or we wouldn't have wound up in this bizarre situation where people in developing countries toil at gold farming in postmodern cyber-sweatshops.

It all leaves me wondering if the gaming experience in this genre did not start to decline a few console generations ago, when the sophistication of the design had grown beyond its bare-bones beginnings (as with gameplay consisting mostly of seeking out random battles so one could level up), but not yet passed beyond that level of accessibility and manageability beyond which a game stops being fun. (Some time around the release of Final Fantasy 7, perhaps?)

What do you think?

1. Online few seem to admit to this kind of reliance--but they also belittle anyone who does admit to this, which leaves me doubtful.

On the First Person Point of View

Looking at popular fiction today it certainly seems that the first person point-of-view is more popular than it used to be, and one might wonder why.

Certain highbrow critics (I won't name names, but I've reviewed the work of at least one of them here, and not that long ago either) would have us believe that this is because third-person omniscient is "passé."

Such remarks say more about them than they do about fiction today--their Modernist prejudices, not least their love of unreliable narrators and ambiguity for its own sake.

It also reveals another failing of this type of critic: their utter obliviousness to and disinterest in the more practical aspects of the writing life--which seems to supply the real reasons why we are getting so much first person writing, two in particular:

1. Given the preference for "dramatic" rather than "epic" storytelling (I'm using the Goethe-Schiller terminology here), and the emphasis on being "relatable" above all, they are understandably looking to foster an intimacy that will make the reader identify with the narrator. Not a new technique, just one stressed more than it used to be.

2. The old problem of telling and showing. "Show, don't tell" remains the pat advice of those who don't actually write to those who do--and is followed much, much less often than we are led to believe, for good and obvious reasons. One is that, as compared with showing, telling is much easier to read--which is enormously important in today's market. It is also much easier to write--which matters all the more given the expectations increasingly placed on writers (low pay rates, longer books, lots of hours devoted to publicity, all without their getting to quit the day job save in a few, fortunate cases).

The result is that unless one really regards Flaubert as their Penelope (and ready to spend five days agonizing over one page in the manner of the man who gave the world Madame Bovary), setting aside all concerns but pure literary craft, they will, in spite of the conventional wisdom (truly conventional but never wise) serve up much more "tell" than "show."

But in fairness there's often a certain sleight-of-hand involved, and that's exactly what the first person point-of-view permits. Because of the pretense that we are in the narrator's head, directly listening to their voice, their telling looks a bit like showing--and most of those flogging the old "Show, don't tell" saw let them off the hook.

Review: E. Philipps Oppenheim's The Double Four

As The Double Four opens country squire Peter Ruff is summoned to Paris to meet with the mysterious old woman heading the titular organization, with which he has previously been deeply involved. At the meeting he finds the leader on her deathbed, from which she tells him that he is to be her successor--a charge he is reluctant to accept, though it is also clear that he has no choice in the matter. Afterward he is promptly set up in London as grandee Baron De Grost.

Over the course of the story we never get a comprehensive image of just what the origins, purposes and activities of the Double Four are, but it is quite clear that it was at least in part a notorious criminal organization, that it has since distanced itself from such activities, and that its primary concern is now espionage. By and large, this espionage seems to be conducted on behalf of the alliance of Britain and France, against Germany, and it is this which occupies Ruff's time--in particular, his successive battles with German agent Bernadine, the Count Von Hern.

The luxurious atmosphere, the genteel but ruthless and ultimately deadly duel between Ruff and Bernadine, are classic Oppenheim--and so are the plentiful melodrama, hokey plot twists and right-wing propaganda of yesteryear. Less familiar to me was the book's structure. A collection of short stories turned into a cut-up novel, the book is not just loose, but essentially episodic--between the first and last tales Ruff and Bernadine fighting out some issue to a conclusion, and then the book simply returning to them at the outset of the next battle. In fact, the order of several of the stories in the middle could have been rearranged without the reader's experience being compromised.

The fact that the book does consist of so many short bits was initially a bit jarring, so much so that I was tempted to charge them with being more thinly sketched than they should have been. (Like every other reader of my generation, I suppose I've simply--for better or worse--become used to taking my spy fiction in doorstop-length doses.) Still, it was a light, quick read with a pronounced retro interest, perhaps not so satisfying as The Great Impersonation but also suffering from less of that book's weaknesses as well.

Reconsidering Fantastic Four (2005)

I remember often thinking that the 2005 Fantastic Four movie was overcriticized. It was by no means ground-breaking--but it was entertaining enough as a lightweight, colorful crowd-pleaser.

The problem seemed to be that taking that approach with a superhero film was unfashionable at that time. In that relatively early phase in the comic book superhero movie boom, the more grounded look and feel, and more thematically involved approach of Bryan Singer's original X-Men, or Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (which preceded Fantastic Four to the theater by mere weeks), was, despite the colossal success of Sam Raimi's Spiderman, proving influential.1 (Indeed, it seems to have been important in selling the concept in those days.)

The Fantastic Four did not easily lend themselves to "grounded." The team's members (a guy with a stretchy rubber body, another who has turned into a rock-creature, stil another who turns into a creature of fire, etc.) and their interpersonal dynamic (as with Johnny Storm's obnoxious sibling-like relationship with the Thing), are singly and collectively flamboyant even by Marvel standards. And the Tim Story-directed, Mark Frost and Michael France-scripted version did not try to pretend otherwise. They created a movie that was relatively faithful to the original not just in its incidents, but its look and feel--and the opinion-makers objected to exactly that. (Arguably, this sensibility had its effect on the sequel, not least its depiction of Galactus.)

Of course, things have changed in the past decade. As the studios have relied more heavily on heaping helpings of the kind of spectacle that gets viewers to fork over the 3-D and IMAX fees, a flashier look and bigger action have become more prevalent--which are at odds with that more grounded approach. (Just compare Singer's far more flamboyantly science fiction-al version of Days of Future Past with his first X-Men film.) Meanwhile, after Nolan, after the new takes on Superman (which Singer helmed in 2006, and Nolan produced in 2013), after a great deal else, the darker, heavier approach has become banal--and excited something of a backlash, one expression of which was how Ant-Man became something of a surprise hit last summer ($500 million global), and praised precisely for offering something lighter.

Ironically, just as a faithful version of the Fantastic Four became an easier sell, the 2015 film version went in the opposite direction--going more grounded, ambitious, darker, and getting hammered for it by the critics, and at the box office.

1. Some of us thought the movies went a little too grounded--not least in the handling of the Dark Phoenix saga, which was not what the purists hoped, and which may just be getting a remake because of it.

The Small-Screen Superhero Boom

Just as we have been deluged by Marvel and DC superheroes at theaters, so have we been on network TV. This past season the CW, an obvious candidate admittedly, had not just Arrow, but The Flash and DC's Legends of Tomorrow--altogether, a substantial fraction of its prime-time line-up. FOX has Gotham. ABC has Marvel's Agents of SHIELD (which was followed by Agent Carter). CBS, stereotyped as stodgier, produced Supergirl (canceled here, though it has since found a new home on CW).

Unsurprisingly the list gets a lot longer if one looks beyond the bigger-named superheroes to more obscure or original figures, and the options afforded by cable and streaming. Alongside Gotham, FOX has the Sandman spin-off Lucifer. NBC gave Heroes another shot with Heroes Reborn (even if it hasn't worked out). Syfy Channel has Wynonna Earp. Netflix is serving up Daredevil and Jessica Jones, the Playstation Network, Powers.

And of course, more children and family-oriented programming can seem to offer nothing but superheroes. Nickelodeon has The Thundermans and Henry Danger, while Disney XD has had Lab Rats and Mighty Med and now a merger of the two in Lab Rats: Elite Force, and its animated offerings have included a barrage of Marvel-based cartoons.

Today a fairly avid TV watcher, assuming their taste in superhero material (and their range of cable and streaming options) is broad enough, can fill their viewing hours with nothing but first-run superhero shows.

The reasons for the success of superheroes in this medium seems a bit less obvious than on the big screen. TV's smaller screens and smaller budgets mean that the big, flashy action that is the films' stock in trade at theaters is less of a draw. Still, the sheer popularity enjoyed by the concept would seem to have had some spillover effects, above and beyond the not unimportant direct spin-offs and tie-ins (like Agents of SHIELD). And small screen superheroes do share an advantage with the big screen variety that pays an even bigger dividend here--the format's easy accessibility in comparison with other kinds of science fiction, which are in fact less evident than they used to be (much-touted "peak TV" not having brought about some new boom in space opera, for example).

At the same time, it is worth noting the limits of the genre's success in this medium--a far cry from the consistently box office-topping performance it has had. (Not one superhero show made the Nielsen's top ten this season, after all, or even came close to it.) In short, science fiction and fantasy television remains in its relatively subordinate place in the market, far behind reality TV (Dancing With the Stars) and procedurals (NCIS, Blue Bloods) and nighttime soaps (Empire)--with the superheroes notably not counted among those rare exceptions that buck the trend to become mainstream hits (The Walking Dead).

The Enduring Superhero Boom

Again and again I have been struck by the staying power of the boom in superhero movies--up to eight movies a year, with this looking like the norm through 2020 if the production schedules of the big studios over the next four years are anything to go by.

Of course, there are those who would slight the significance of such numbers--like Scott Mendleson at Forbes. And perhaps it would not seem so significant if this were a matter of one year, or two, or three--but we got started well along this trend way back at the turn of the century, and it has just gone on getting stronger and stronger. Already we have amassed over three dozen major live-action feature films based on the best-known characters from Marvel and DC--as well as dozens more such films based on properties less well-known to the mainstream (like the works of Alan Moore, Hellboy, Wanted and Jonah Hex), and atop that, dozens more original creations based on the superhero concept (like Sky High, Hancock and the film version of the Green Hornet TV show).

Moreover, the profile of these films has gone far beyond the large number of movies made. One reason is their consistently high financial grosses.

Consider the list of top twenty all-time earners at the American box office. Of the fourteen that have come out in this century, six are superhero films--just shy of half the total.1

Naturally this has reflected and been reflected in their prominence at key moviegoing times of the year, Gitesh Pandya recently remarking that "This is the tenth straight year that Marvel super heroes dominated the first weekend of May." (Ten years of that strategic weekend dominated not just by superheroes, but by the Marvel brand specifically! Think about that.)

In fairness, no other trend of recent decades can really compare with this.

Inevitably I have wondered "Why?" audience interest has been so consistent, and the answer seems to me the genre's not just affording a basis for the kind of flashy, action-adventure spectacle that only science fiction and fantasy can offer, but one more accessible than high fantasy, space opera or even contemporary science fiction of a more intellectually rigorous type (like the recent trickle of movies dealing with artificial intelligence). The audience does not have to cope with sophisticated premises (even The Avengers a slightly plotted film with an astonishingly generic MacGuffin), or with elaborate world-building (everyone lives in New York City). It is required to process much less information, and cope with much less in the way of the "alienation effects" Darko Suvin recognized as a significant feature of the genre--especially given how familiar the superhero concept (and many of the characters appearing in these movies again and again) have become.

Part of its appeal would also seem to lie in the intensely individualistic aspect of the genre, again at odds with so much of the rest of science fiction. Our attention is fixed on a single character with a distinctive appearance and powers rather than an intricately connected cast of less visually distinct types in the manner of so many disaster films--and still less, the fate of the world, much more often referenced as a reason for the goings-on than explored. (And of course, that individualism carries over to superhero teams like the Avengers, X-Men and Justice League--typically agglomerations of spiky personalities rather than harmonious groups.) And if anything, this is reaffirmed by the record of those ambitious films that have been less well-received (like Watchmen, a much more demanding, estranging film).

In short, the films give audiences what they usually find most engaging about science fiction (flashy FX), minus the brain-work. And if anything, the fact that the more successful among them are so concept-light--that the concept is relatively marginal to their appeal--may be helping to make the inevitable repetition of the broader ideas more palatable than they otherwise would be.

1. This list is, of course, not adjusted for inflation--but this is perfectly appropriate in this case as this is all about how large they have loomed at the box office in recent years, rather than a discussion of their all-time standing.

Reconsidering Watchmen

I would not account myself a particular fan of Zak Snyder's work, but his film version of Watchmen has always struck me as grossly overcriticized.

Frankly, I thought it one of the best superhero movies ever made--perhaps the best of the "darker" superhero movies made so far.

Naturally I had occasion to think about why my response was so different from "everyone else's."

Early on it seemed to me that the film received the opprobrium that it did for its being more adult than the usual fare, and subversive of genre expectations, and its particular political edge--all of which made it a tougher sell to a mainstream which judged it by the old stereotypes about the genre that most of the films made to date have reinforced.1 Of course, devotees of the comic also seemed unsatisfied, many making much of the liberties the film took with the resolution of the story (which I thought minor, and in some ways an improvement)--but it seemed easy enough to chalk this up to an excess of purism.2

Perhaps more important, there is the kind of intellectual demand that Watchmen made on its audience--its concern with the "bigger picture," its associated sheer burden of information-processing, and in a deeper and subtler way what Darko Suvin, drawing on Viktor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht, called "cognitive estrangement." This is, after all, a movie that, true to the original comic, gives us an elaborately worked-out alternate historical timeline (brilliantly depicted in those opening credits) terminating not in the present but what is from today's vantage point the past (the 1980s). It is also explicit in putting at the center of its plot what it might mean to be a superhero not in Stan Lee's version of New York but in the actual world we have known, the differing philosophies of its various heroes, the posthumanity of Dr. Manhattan and the problems of domestic and international political life, not least energy scarcity and the threat of a third world war.

The result is that Watchmen is concept-rich, concept-dense and genuinely wide in scope--far, far more so than we normally get in superhero movies, science fiction movies and our movies in general. Even if they have not read the comic, a really hardcore genre fan may be able to take all this in stride, and even enjoy it (certainly this was one of the things I liked about it), but to the mainstream this was unfamiliar and generally unpalatable, and even those who may be used to such things in print are, understandably, less accustomed to getting them on the big screen. The poor response was therefore as predictable as it was unreasonable.

1. Movies are less often forgiven for being political in something other than a clearly right-wing way when they are of the big, popular type.
2. Connecting the faked threat to the world with Dr. Manhattan rather than space squid, for example, made for a tighter story--while avoiding elements that would have looked very hoky on the big screen.

The Spy Fiction of Edward Phillips Oppenheim

The career of E. Phillips Oppenheim can seem an object lesson is how hugely popular writers can fade into utter obscurity, while relatively little-read auteurs come to enjoy an enduring fame. In his day Oppenheim was a titan of the publishing industry—enough so as to get away with immodestly dubbing himself "the prince of novelists."

Yet today he is so little known that, apart from seeing him mentioned in Moonraker (and just as quickly forgetting him that first time I read the book) I never heard of him until I started digging into the history of the thriller genre--and even after that I wound up having to work out how he fits into it for myself. Not only is it the case that one can roam the Internet for a very long time without finding a really worthwhile review of even his least obscure books, but (as David Stafford pointed out) even scholars whose business it is to know about people like him generally don't seem to have done their job here.1

That said, just how did he fit into the genre's history? Fleming's mention of him in Moonraker affords a clue. The reference occurs as Gala Brand (the one Bond girl Bond doesn't get to bed) considers the book's hero:

Well, at any rate she had put [Bond] in his place and shown him that she wasn't impressed by dashing young men from the Secret Service, however romantic they might look. There were just as goodlooking men in the Special Branch, and they were real detectives, not just people that Phillips Oppenheim had dreamed up with fast cars and special cigarettes with gold bands on them and shoulder-holsters.

Phillips Oppenheim, one of the first writers to take up the modern spy story in its formative years at the start of the twentieth century, can safely be credited with having brought to the genre the glamour with which it is associated. Rudyard Kipling's story of Kimball O'Hara's wanderings through India in the company of a Tibetan holy man has color and charm, and Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands gave us our first "clubland" heroes in Carruthers and Davies . . . but neither is exactly a tale of high living. By contrast, in a book like The Double Four (1911) the international intrigue is thoroughly set within a world of Edwardian luxury--of well-staffed mansions and chauffeured motor-cars, of fine dining and nights at the opera, where it seems everyone is wealthy, titled or a celebrity, and often all three, and there is about the whole a sense of his offering the reader a glimpse of those high and seductive places virtually certain to be forever beyond their reach. Likewise, he afforded the reader a style of conflict characteristic of this kind of glamorous tale, in which hero and villain dance around each other in recurring meetings mixing murderousness and gentility (quite apparent in that novel's duel between Peter Ruff and Bernadine).

All of this, reminiscent of the sorts of adventure that had usually been set in safely distant historical periods (like Dumas' The Three Musketeers), carried through the genre tradition to Fleming's distillation of it in the '50s when he created his stories.

Striking, too, is Oppenheim's affinity for Gothic touches, on full display in what is perhaps his best known book, The Great Impersonation (1920). We get a protagonist given up for dead who has curiously and belatedly returned from the tropics, and may be someone other than whom he claims to be; we get a mansion with a mad woman in it, and haunted woods outside it. (And this, too, seems to have carried through the British spy novel tradition to a greater degree than appreciated, all the way up to Fleming's novels, which can appear surprisingly saturated with it, particularly in You Only Live Twice.)

Of course, all this sort of thing is more of interest from the standpoint of the genre's history than as an indication of his books' value as an actual reading experience--and it has to be admitted they have their limits there. It is not for nothing that the spy novels by writers like Kipling, or Joseph Conrad, or W. Somerset Maugham, have been so much more enduring. The books were conceived as shallow entertainments, and were not always well put together on that level. (The plot twists are often laughably hokey--as with the final reveal of who the protagonist is and how he came to be where he is at the end of Impersonation.)

And of course, Oppenheim's books have dated, in style and content. They are slight in their handling of the organizational and technical detail that for many is an integral part of the spy story's appeal, and those who have felt Fleming's books were disappointingly short on action (as I did when first coming to them) would find these even less impressive on that score. There is, too, the steeping of the tales in the headlines and prejudices of the day--standard to the genre, of course, but managed with differing levels of aplomb, and clumsier here than in many another tale. In The Double Four, for example, one episode's big reveal concerns what really caused the sinking of the Maine, which cannot but have a different and lesser impact on today's reader (with the event more distant and the mystery more or less cleared up), while the tales are replete with the cliche of the Edwardian version of right-wing hysteria. Time and time again we get a scheming and bestially aggressive Germany, a decadent and perhaps unreliable France, pacifists and socialists as foreign-controlled traitors poisoning the body politic with their creed, and an England saved in the end by its amateur gentleman-adventurers (material a contemporary reader is apt to find either grating or ridiculous).2

Still, if Oppenheim is trashy, he does not waste our time pretending to be anything else, and he is not without his measure of skill. His knack for atmosphere makes his evocations of high life and Gothic absurdities far more effective than they would be otherwise, while his ability to keep us turning the pages puts that of most of today's bestselling writers to shame (admittedly, a reflection of the fact that writers in his day were allowed to be brief). The result was that while I looked at his books for research reasons, I ended up enjoying them a good deal more than I had expected.

1. This was in his 1981 Victorian Studies article "Spies and Gentlemen." As far as I can tell, however, things haven't changed much since, Oppenheim (and the others to whom Stafford referred) not much more likely to get acknowledged.
2. Admittedly, this is one case where things haven't changed very much.

The End of the Action Movie?

Looking at Hollywood's run of product recently I find myself wondering if the action film genre has not seen its best years already--and is in terminal decline. I mean, of course, not movies with action, but movies that are structured around a multiplicity of elaborate set pieces which provide their principal interest.

This may sound like a very odd thing to say given their extreme predominance at the box office, greater than ever before. (Compare any list of the highest-grossing films of the past decade with that of, say, the '90s or the '80s.) But it is worth remembering that that kind of ubiquity often comes only very late in the life of an art form.

Let's trot out that same three-generation genre life cycle theory John Barnes offered up way back in his Helix article I've cited so many times just one more time. (You can find the quickie version here.)

I think it can be said that the action movie as we know it started with the Bond films of the '60s. They established the essential pacing and structure for such films (give people a bit of action even before the story gets started, make sure they get another something every few minutes, etc.), the basic range of types of set pieces (frogmen fighting it out underwater, ski chases with the bullets flying, even ninjas) and the manner in which it has since been standard to photograph and edit them (the heavy use of short takes, close shots, jump cuts, exaggerated sound effects and the rest).

Successful as the Bond films were, early imitation of them tended to focus on their most superficial features (secret agents, gadgets, never mind how all this was put together). Filmmakers were rather slower to adopt the deeper techniques. However, the field had definitely arrived by the late '70s, and was a Hollywood mainstay by the '80s--which, naturally, led to a much more intensive exploitation of its possibilities.1 In the course of this some territory was exhausted (the silly finale of Rambo III spoke volumes about this), and the genre moved on to other, more fertile soil. Over the course of the '90s the "mundane" cops and commandos and paramilitary plots that epitomized the field during that decade (Rambo, Die Hard) gave way to science fiction and fantasy characters and themes (and practical effects to computer generated imagery) not simply because of changing tastes (important as these were), but because this was the only way to provide something new, and certainly the only way to provide something bigger than what had come before--super powers, alien creatures, fantastic vehicles.

A generation on it seems plausible that we have arrived at certain, intrinsic limits. The tendency to keep scaling action movies up has already mooted the whole idea of the disaster movie, because every action movie (the typical superhero movie, for instance--Avengers, Man of Steel, Thor: The Dark World) is for all practical purposes a disaster movie by the time the final, city-wrecking showdown is underway. Meanwhile, the continued intensification of action sequences through ever-quicker editing has produced increasing incoherence. (Remember when Michael Bay movies were actually novel enough to warrant reviewers noting this?)

Three years ago I wrote that

It strikes me that this sort of action film may be approaching a technical plateau as Hollywood bombast bumps up against the limits of human nervous systems, and of filmmakers' creativity . . . that one simply cannot go bigger, faster, flashier or more intense to any effect worth achieving, while the inventiveness of the application may be running into diminishing returns.

Nothing I have seen since then has made me revise that opinion--while the level of inventiveness within this limits has waned. For all the giant budgets and all the frenetic technical activity it has been quite a few years since the last time a major action movie offered anything really new--a fact only partially concealed by the tendency to show the same old thing in 3-D and I-MAX formats so important to Hollywood profits this past decade.

I think, for example, of the major genre events of recent years. Watching Skyfall it struck me that while the film was full of competently staged, entertaining action, in contrast with not just the classics of the '60s but those predecessors announcing the series' return after a longer-than-usual absence, it failed to deliver a sure-to-be-classic set piece of the kind that befit the occasion. (Even Casino Royale had that parkour bit!)

I seem to have been virtually alone in that opinion--but this was not the case with Episode VII. This was, after all, a follow-up to two trilogies which had each revolutionized the special effects field, made with the expectation that this would launch a whole new mega-franchise for its new owners, and perhaps also be the highest-grossing film of all time. However, as John David Ebert noted in his review, the earlier "sense of visual innovation" as it stands. (Indeed, this even drove him to say nice things of the prequels--and Lucas' own, alternative ideas for Episode VII.)

Meanwhile, the prospect of innovation originating in the more narrative aspects of these stories seems dim due not just to the film industry's attachment to the same old IPs, but the rooting of action-adventure in genres which appear thoroughly played out after as much as a century of use (like the spy story or the comic book superhero genre), an issue that goes far, far beyond Hollywood. The sorts of trailblazing works that open up new territory to exploitation by artists--to put it bluntly, those works that found new genres (or even subgenres) for writers to work in--have been very scarce as of late all across the media spectrum.

1. Prior to that point what we got were apt to be crime dramas with an occasional set piece--like The French Connection (1971).

Defining the Novel: The First Few Pages of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

Those who offer a straight answer about just "What is a Novel?"--beyond its being a "book-length" work of prose fiction--are (as previously pointed out here) apt to point to three qualities distinguishing the modern novel in the narrow sense from other kinds of long prose fiction, not totally unprecedented, but previously relatively rare, and much less likely to appear together in combination:

1. Its centering on the life of everyday, middle class persons, who had in pre-modern times received much less attention of this kind from storytellers, much more inclined to offer chivalric epics, royal tragedies and comedies of low-life.
2. What we might term a pseudo-documentary quality to the proceedings, which are supposed to appear realistically detailed in a straightforward fashion rather than conspicuously embellished and ornamented in the fashion of a romance or a picaresque.
3. An individualistic and indeed intimate approach to the tale, peering into an individual's private life, and even their innermost thoughts--which may not be limited in the manner of an occasional Shakespearian aside to the audience, but part of the "normal" way of telling the story.

You can find all these in the brief preface to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the first two in particular specifically referenced. As he remarks, it is "the story of . . . [a] Private Man's Adventures in the World," while "The Story is told with Modesty, with Seriousness . . . The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it." The third is implicit in these, but becomes apparent soon enough when we turn the first page and hear the protagonist relate his upbringing, his aspiration to go to sea, his dialogues with his parents about this idea--in the course of which dialogue Robinson's dad also gives him a long lecture about the great virtues of "the middle state," into which he was born, for which he seemed destined, and which his father also thought most likely to make him happy.

Of course, the tale takes a more exotic turn than Robinson's settling down to the cozy bourgeois existence his father intended for him, but these fundamentals of the story define what follows nonetheless.