Before Rosebud

The following press release was issued this morning by Time Warner Entertainment:

This summer, Time Warner will begin filming all-new movies expanding on the classic film CITIZEN KANE. As highly anticipated as they are controversial, the five inter-connected sequel, prequel, and interquel films will build on the foundation of the original CITIZEN KANE, judged by many film critics to be the greatest movie ever made.  BEFORE ROSEBUD will be the collective banner for all five films.

“It’s our responsibility as scavengers to find new ways to keep all of our corporate-owned characters relevant,” said Time Warner executive producer Dank Vidio. “After almost a century, the cast of Citizen Kane is a group of classic characters whose time has come for new stories to be told. Which is why we sought out the best writers and directors in the industry to piss on the original.”

“The original film of Citizen Kane is the complete story that Orson Welles and my grandfather wanted to tell,” said Ben Mankiewicz, grandson of Kane co-author Herman Mankiewicz and co-host of Turner Classic Movies.  “However, I appreciate Time Warner’s reasons for this initiative and completely understand the motivations of the directors and writers who are publicly saying that they are just paying tribute to my grandfather’s work.  May these totally unnecessary films have the success they deserve.”

“Under the benevolent eyes of an army of executive producers with no talent at all, the individual vision of Welles and Mankiewicz is in the best hands possible,”  said Vidio.  “As filmmakers, we’d be remiss not to expand upon and explore these characters and their stories.  We’re committed to being an industry leader, which means making bold creative moves.  And there's nothing bolder or more creative than making sequels and prequels to a classic motion picture.  When you have a product like Citizen Kane that is as worldwide known as it is, and the fact that there are millions of DVD’s of it out there, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t go out and say, ‘Is there other ways (sic) we can grow new material from this?’  Because, in the end, original and unique works of art exist as great wonderful springboards for franchises, intellectual properties, and ancillary merchandise.”

The five films are:

The Girl In The White Dress. 

“Love.  It’s the only disease you never look forward to being cured of.”  An old businessman muses on the love of his life, whom he saw for a split-second in his youth, and then stalked for the next 50 years.  With Scarlett Johansson in the title role, and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein.  Written and directed by Woody Allen.

Em and Jed.

The untold story of the romance between Jedediah Leland and Emily Monroe Norton.  With Tom Hanks as Old Jedediah, Meryl Streep as Old Emily, Grace Gummer as young Emily, and John Cusack as Young Jed.  Directed by Stephen Frears.

In Xanadu: The Secret History of a House. 

A young female blogger finds the long-lost secret diary of Jerry Thompson, the reporter in charge of finding out the meaning of Kane's last word, "Rosebud".  By following the clues hidden in his journal entries, she uncovers the hidden passageways in Kane’s old house which reveal its terrifying history.  Starring Jennifer Lawrence as the blogger.  Screenplay by Stephen King and Joe Hill.  Directed by Guillermo del Toro.

The Three Jakes.

The rise and fall of Jim Gettys, as told through the eyes of his son Jake at three points in Jake's life: his 20's in New York, his 70’s in Las Vegas, and his 30’s in LA, where he changed the spelling of his last name to Gittes and became a detective.  With Jack Nicholson as Jim Gettys and Leonardo di Caprio as all three Jakes.  Screenplay by Robert Towne.  Directed by Stephen Soderbergh.

The Two Mrs. Kanes

After faking her death in a car crash, Emily Monroe Norton Kane takes her son and moves to Pine Valley, Pennsylvania, where she marries the chief of staff at the local hospital.  But her past comes back to haunt her when Susan Alexander Kane comes to sing at a hospital benefit and recognizes her.  With Meg Ryan as Susan Alexander  Kane, and  Meryl Streep as Emily Monroe Norton Kane/Phoebe English Tyler Wallingford Matthews Wallingford.  Originally slated to be directed by Nora Ephron; currently unattached.

"I told you that story to tell you this one."

Speaking of prequels, he said, as he began to ramble, . . . 

There must be something prequellian in the water because Prometheus opened the same week that DC Comics began publishing the first of their Before Watchmen cash-grabs, and Somebody Who's Not Martin Scorsese began filming  Raging Bull 2  in LA.  (I know, I know--that's a sequel--but "prequellian"--wow--I just invented a perfect rhyme for Orwellian.  Twenty bucks says Sondheim steals it before my birthday.)

If you ask me, all this so-called creative writing has more to do with product placement than actual creativity, which adds the latest Spider-Man reboot into the conversation, since the only reason Sony made the movie in the first place is because, if it didn’t, then the rights to the character would revert back to Marvel.  So if you read any interview where one of the thousands of executive producers on Spidey says that they made the movie because they wanted to tell a good story, try not to yell “Bullshit!” too loudly, okay?  

Ditto whenever DC editor Dan DiDio says something laughable like this:

After twenty five years, the Watchmen are classic characters whose time has come for new stories to be told.

TRANSLATION:  We’re taking the one piece of comic book fiction that everybody points to as exceptional and making it as run-of-the-mill as Superman.

Or like this:

The big selling point is that this material is true to the source material, but it gets the chance to examine all the aspects of ‘Watchmen’ that made it great.

Selling point is right.  It makes me want to yell out, “Hey DiDiot--you know what made Watchmen great?  It had a beginning, a middle, and an end!  You know--like literature?”

But comic books are not literature (which is why Watchmen has always been the exception).  And superhero comic book publishers (aka Marvel and DC, the Big Two) are, at the moment, in the business of churning out corporate-sponsored fan fiction based on intellectual properties owned by Time Warner and Disney.  Batman is not a character any more; he’s a brand--he’s a franchise--he’s something you market; and because he’s a product, you can’t really make any major changes to him.  (Which is why what Christopher Nolan has been allowed to do with Batman is nothing short of miraculous.  And it’ll look even more miraculous when the new Batman origin movie comes out in six or seven years, he said cynically.)

 

But again, this is what corporations do when they own products.  They slap NEW AND IMPROVED on the label and stock the shelves with them, which is exactly the same thing DC did when it re-started its universe last year, and exactly what Marvel is going to do when it re-starts its universe later this year.   In which situation the words NEW AND IMPROVED are meaningless, because the only new thing is the packaging, and the only improved thing is the artwork on the package.   

Think of it this way: as far as superhero comic books go, it’s literally a supermarket.  When a publisher says he’s trying to tell new stories and keep those characters relevant, it really means he's going to hire different writers and artists to revisit the same old avenues and maybe map a new alley or two in the same old city with the expressed purpose of increasing product sales.  He's not going to create a new city.  But if, in the course of working for him, somebody DOES create a new city, then he owns it, and everybody in it, and gets to market it to whoever he thinks will buy it.  Which is pretty much the Hollywood business model these days, no? 

And a pretty good example of Matthew's Third Law of CultureDynamics: "Everything decays into Hollywood."  Or in physics terms, if literature is radioactivity, then Hollywood is lead.  (Case in point: Raging Bull 2.  I mean, really?) (And what's the over/under on me living to see the inevitable Taxi Driver remake?)

THE SUPREME COURT: A lot better, now that we've passed Obamacare!

Remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels--none of those are the rules of literature.  And maybe that makes me a book snob, but there's a reason certain stories and characters appeal to successive generations of readers.  It's because they embody something, they epitomize something, they say something.  And then they shut up.  The fact that they actually do stop existing at the end--that their story is self-contained--adds weight and significance to the work in which they live.  Weight and significance which is diluted like Bretton Woods diluted the gold standard when you have remakes, reboots, sequels and prequels.

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE:  Says the guy who reads every new Sherlock Holmes story he can get his hands on.

ME:  Not every one, he said defensively.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: Says the guy who wrote a sequel to Hamlet.

ME:  Okay, okay--but that still doesn't mean I'm going to buy a single issue of Before Watchmen.

DAN DIDIO:  Why not?

ME:  Because I don't want to read Before Bovary or The Rise of Gatsby or Getting The Car Ready For The Road any more than I want to read what Rorschach did either before or in between those Watchmen panels in which he appears.  Because if I'm going to be sold a product, I want something that survives beyond its shelf life.  If you can promise me that you won't restock the Watchmen aisle with sequels, prequels, and side-stories--if you swear to me that your company is committed to NOT creating a whole Watchmen Universe--then I might reconsider.

DAN DIDIO:  I wish I could do that. 

ME:  And I wish I could live forever.  But it's against the law of nature.  Like corporations being creative.

DC AND MARVEL: Hey! We hire creators all the time!

ME:  I rest my case.

 

Sucker-r-r-r-r . . . . 

Secret Origins 2 of 2: Green Lantern

(Continued from this post on X-Men:First Class)

While X-Men: First Class feels like it was created, Green Lantern feels like it was manufactured.  

It’s the third movie in as many months to contain a creation-of-the-universe segment (after Thor and Tree of Life), and it’s the least mystical of them all. Plotwise, we're told right from the top that a bunch of immortal blue aliens created a super police corps to enforce law in the universe with rings that channel and project will-based green energy. We’re introduced to the villain, who channels fear-based yellow energy and escapes from his prison and plots vengeance. We meet a couple of aliens called Abin Sur and Sinestro. Wounded and dying after the villain attacks him, Abin Sur crash lands on Planet Earth, and when he commands his ring to find a worthy successor, the ring, which is never wrong in its choices, picks hotshot test pilot Hal Jordan, who’s been introduced to us as a rule-breaking haunted-by-tragedy womanizer. 

I count three problems in that set-up.

1--Instead of learning about the Green Lantern Corps when Hal Jordan does, we're told about it. 

2--Introducing a character with a villain name like Sinestro, and then not making him the villain, is more than a little confusing if you don't know who he is. 

3--If the ring never makes a mistake, then why, when Jordan shows up for training, does Sinestro think he's unworthy of replacing Abin Sur? 

Sadly, the answer to problem number 3 points to the problem with the movie as a whole.  The premise of the ring’s infallibility is ignored because if it wasn’t, then the hero wouldn’t have to Prove Himself By Overcoming An Obstacle.  This is fake drama at its best, where you get connect-the-character-beats instead of a story.  Hal Jordan can’t just BE heroic--he has to overcome the doubts of his peers, the doubts of his girlfriend, and his own doubts, which stem from the fact that Hal's test-pilot father died in a plane crash when Hal was a kid--which is why he’s a test pilot in the first place.  (I don’t know about you, but if my test pilot dad died in a plane crash, I would become a bus driver.)  He also has to overcome two villains (shades of Spider-Man) and in his first public appearance, he prevents a helicopter crash (shades of Superman)--all of which, when you throw in the shades-of-Batman death-of-the-father, makes Green Lantern feel like its body parts were stitched together in an echo chamber for continuity-porn addicts.  

Continuty-porn example: Sinestro.  Like Magneto, Sinestro has a comic book backstory that established him as a good guy before he became a bad guy--but he goes by his bad guy name in the movie, which is all kinds of dumb.  Couldn't they have named him Nestro Natu or something?  It's like naming your kid Jack The Ripper; what the hell do you think he's going to grow up to be--a gardener?  (Which is a bad Green Lantern continuity-porn pun.)

Other thoughts: Mark Strong’s Sinestro will make a great villain if there’s ever a sequel, Ryan Reynolds does a better job as Hal than he does as GL (they should have made him wear a real costume instead of applying it digitally--it’s the Halloween Law, wearing a costume ALWAYS makes you embody it) and Blake Lively tries her best, but her part is as confusing as Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes. Is she an equal, an appendage, or just there to be rescued? (All three, actually.) The talk-to-action ratio feels like it's 7 to 3, which shows you how uninteresting the talk is. The score sounds like it was lifted from some low-budget 1980's Erik Estrada action flick. And for a movie about interstellar cops, we spend far too much time on planet Earth, which is like creating a fabulous city and then setting everything in a studio apartment.

So if you haven't seen Green Lantern, and you haven't seen X-Men: First Class, go see the X-Men movie, because in a way you already HAVE seen Green Lantern. The people who made it have forgotten the same thing that the people running DC Comics have forgotten--superheroes don't have character beats; superheroes have adventures.

Why reading comic books will always be a sign of immaturity -- Part 2

From today's New York Daily News about the resurrection of Barry (Flash) Allen:

"That's the point of comics - they don't have to die, because they're fictional creations," said Grant Morrison, one of the writers behind the comeback. "We can do anything with them, and we can make them come back and make them defy death," Morrison said. "And that's why people read comics, to get away from the way life works, which is quite cruel and unheroic and ends in death."

Note to Grant Morrison: I define "unheroic" as any situation where death is meaningless. If so-called "characters" can be brought back from the dead, then they are risking nothing, and your so-called character-driven universe is populated by the superhero equivalent of sitcom regulars who never change. And I read comics for the same reason I read serious fiction: not to escape from the way life works but to experience the way life works from a different perspective.

Congratulations, Grant. In three sentences, you have confirmed that your chosen field of "creativity" is the equivalent of a computer game with an eternal reset button.

And with that thought in mind, which Wayne are you going to reveal as the villain behind Batman RIP: Thomas or Martha? And tell us again why we should care when J'onn J'onzz gets burned to a crisp in Final Crisis #1?

Why reading comic books will always be a sign of immaturity

Those of you with real lives may not have heard that Peter (Spider-Man) Parker's 20-year-old marriage to Mary Jane Watson has been retroactively erased from current Marvel continuity. Why? Because stories about married guys are not as dramatic as stories about single guys who could be sleeping around.

You think I'm kidding? Check out this interview with Marvel Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada, and try to think of all the unspoken things which the phrase "soap opera" is code for:

The golden era of Spider-Man gave us things we had never seen in a comic before. We had a lovable loser as the hero, a character with some incredible failings, but an amazing amount of heart. “With great power there must also come great responsibility” was his motto, but at the very core of what made Spider-Man stories great and, more importantly, different, was the fantastic soap opera and the cast of characters and villains in Peter Parker’s life. Spider-Man stories revolutionized the comic book super hero because the stories were about Peter Parker; Spider-Man was secondary. This was a big shift from a world in which Superman and Batman were what was important. Clark and Bruce were just facades. And let me add, sometimes Spider-Man would lose against the bad guy and sometimes Spider-Man wouldn’t make the right decision. These were revolutionary ideas for a super hero comic at the time.

What really made Spidey unique wasn’t so much his powers or his costume, sure those were cool things, but what really made him unique was that it was about the guy inside the costume and the soap opera that was his life. Peter could have had a whole different set of powers and it still would have been a ground breaking comic because in the end, that’s not what made Spider-Man stories different. So, with every little bit of the trappings of his life that got chipped away, more and more of the soap opera dwindled.

When Peter Parker got married, it caused the character to be cut off from many of the social situations and settings that put him at conflict with his family, friends, and especially the girl he was dating. Suddenly, something as simple as the tension he had with Felicia Hardy was completely defused; if Peter ever gave in to temptation or even considered it, he would be, in the eyes of the fans, the lousiest guy in the world. It became harder to place Peter in situations where he could hang out with other single characters, without him seeming like the oldest person in the room, even if he wasn’t. And whatever nerdish sex appeal he possessed, we had to tread very carefully. He became the perpetual “designated driver.” Sure, Peter could hang around with other married folk -- I bet that would be exciting!

Let me try to put this as plainly as I can, and let’s be really honest here, let’s really look at marriage for a second. I'll get personal, for a moment. I have an incredible marriage and a fantastic kid, but there is no question that my life was much more story-worthy when I was single. Was I happier? Absolutely not. Was my life a better story from a drama sense? Ummmm, yeah. It had many more twists and turns and theater and was a bit of a mess. Now let me say, not everyone, but for most: When people get married, they tend to settle down -- life slows down and you gain different responsibilities, grown-up responsibilities, boring responsibilities. You go out to dinner less, see fewer movies, your social life is curtailed and revolves, as it should, around your significant other. In short, life hands you a mini van. While marriage makes for an okay story, there is less drama in a (healthy) marriage than in a single relationship. That’s one of the many reason we get married -- we want stability, we want comfort, we want kids, etc., etc. No one gets married because they want more drama in their life. What’s good for one’s life doesn’t always make for great stories when the heart of your character’s universe is drama. From a writer and artist’s point of view, the people who are creating the stories, it’s like giving Daredevil his eyesight back. It works for a short time and eventually erodes at the foundation of the character and what makes them unique. We all want Peter to catch a break and to settle down and have happiness in his life, but that isn’t really what we want. If that actually happened, people would stop caring about Spider-Man.

Bottom line, there are so many things that twentysomethings are doing with their lives that a married Peter can’t. He needs to be a single guy. Sure, he can have a girlfriend -- that adds something to his story -- but a married Peter just cuts off too many avenues for good soap opera. Could you have soap opera within a marriage? Sure. But after a while, there’s only so much tension you can bring into Peter and MJ’s marriage before you make him seem like a louse of a husband, or her, like a bickering wife. In contrast, you can only play them as a happy-go-lucky couple for so long -- that adds up to zero tension within the relationship and takes away a crucial element of Spider-Man stories: the soap opera.

Where to begin? No one gets married because they want more drama in their life. Okay, but that doesn't mean there is no drama or no soap opera in a marriage. For instance: guy with secret identity marries actress model and watches her career take off while his alter ego still gets slagged in the Daily Bugle. You don't think there's drama in that? Or how about this: guy with radioactive blood gets wife pregnant and there's a chance the kid will (fill in horrible blank here). That's not dramatic? Of course it's dramatic. It's just not adolescent drama. It's adult drama. Hence the title of this post.

Someone please tell me how "with great power comes great responsibility" is not dramatically enhanced by taking on the responsibility of a marriage. And the responsibility of fatherhood. If the soap opera is Peter Parker as a single guy, and marriage has been totally ruled out by editorial fiat, then your so-called "drama" is a succession of affairs that will never lead anywhere because Ye Editor has decreed that Spider-Man is not Spider-Man unless he's 20 and single. Which says to me The Powers That Be who are currently in charge of Marvel stopped relating to the real world when they were 20 and single. Hence the title of this post.

Look--I understand that these characters are marketable properties, I understand that you have to make them (how I hate this word) relatable to new audiences. And having six or seven decades of continuity means you have to figure out an accommodation between real-world time and comic book time. DC has chosen multiple universes and multiple reboots (the latest of which is next year with the laughable word "Final" in the title). Based on what's happening at Marvel, they're going with reboot (Spidey) as well as Next Generation (Bucky becoming Captain America. Maybe). There is of course a third choice neither of the Big Two has considered: anchoring certain characters in a strict real-world timeline, so that the JSA and Captain America would always be in the 40's and 50's, Dr Strange would be (so totally) Sixties, and Dazzler stuck in the 80's (duh). Do you want to see The Shadow anywhere but in the 30's? Not me. Certain characters only work as reflections of certain time periods; I say you should take that into consideration when creating/rebooting/adapting some of those properties.

But what about the tentpoles like Superman or Batman? Will we ever see Dick Grayson wear the cowl? Hell no-- and given Dan Didio's dislike of the character, we're lucky to be still seeing him alive. The bottom line here is that, in certain cases, what you think is going to be a symphony with movements will always end up being a broken record, and the words "an event which will change everything" will continue to be as accurate as "I did not sleep with that woman" or "I am not a crook."

What does this mean for the future of comics? Stagnation and irrelevance. (And let's not talk about what it means for all the female supporting characters in the upcoming Spider-Man soap opera, who have now been relegated to the status of those who sleep with Peter, those who don't sleep with Peter, and those who want to marry Peter but it'll never happen. Yeah, like that's gonna attract female readers.)

What does this mean for me? I'll be reading more novels, thank you. Novels about married people.

And what does this say about the current editorial direction of both Marvel and DC? It says they both have the ongoing opportunity to make their characters grow and change like real people and they consistently and constantly refuse to do it. Such a great opportunity, too--a chance to do something dramatically that no one has ever tried to do before. And it will never happen. Hence the title of this post.

Face it, tiger--you just lost your fan base.

As If

I’ve been mulling over the DC vs. Marvel thing for a while now, but it wasn’t until I saw this piece of news that it all became crystal clear.

By acquiring the comic book rights to Worlds of Warcraft, DC has produced what we in theatre call a character revelation. It’s totally fitting that a comic book company whose current major storylines require a detailed knowledge of 60 years of continuity will now publish a title based on an obsessively-detailed multi-level online game. Because, when you come right down to it, the DCVerse in its current state is the comic book equivalent of a badly programmed obsessively-detailed multi-level computer game.

And by having continuity issues drive stories across the line, DC is in effect saying two things:

1) “Hey—fanboy—yeah, you—the one who knows every incarnation of the Legion of Super Heroes. This universe is for you.”

(2) “New readers? Sorry—we’re selling to our base.”

And what are they selling that base? Footnotes instead of stories.

The first comic book I remember reading

Cover date October 1957, which means it probably came out in the summer sometime. Don't remember where it was purchased, but if it was summer, then I was in Ocean Bluff, Massachusetts, which means it was bought either at Bessie's General Store or Winship's (both of which, like my innocence, disappeared ages ago).

I still have a vivid memory of the 8-page cover story, in which Batman and Robin hopped from country to country chasing a villain who disguised himself by wearing the head of an alligator. I read it over and over again till the staples came out of the spine. At some point I let my 4-year-old brother Kevin borrow it and then yelled at him for bending the cover back, thus passing the one infallible test which separates the collector from the dilettante.

The Funeral of Captain America

So Cap gets his Arlington funeral this week, as the Associated Press reported, complete with stunning John Cassaday art:

It's not the first time Cap has died (Steranko killed him off in a memorable arc in which it was revealed that the God of Thunder is susceptible to knockout gas), and it may not be the last, but give Marvel (and Cap writer Ed Brubaker) credit for giving this death the kind of weight and significance that makes it feel like it could be the real thing.

Will Marvel bring him back? Well, they brought back Bucky. And you can make a case that Steve Rogers has done nothing but come back from the dead since he was reintroduced to the MarvelVerse in Avengers #4. When I bought that issue, I didn't know who the hell he was. But my Dad did. "Captain America? Christ Almighty!" he said, "I used to have all those comic books when I was a kid, until your grandmother threw them out." (This was about two years before my mother threw out all my comics. Some experiences truly are cross-generational.)



At the time, there was a 20-year gap between Cap's last official appearance at the end of World War II and his revival as an Avenger, which is next to nothing in comic book years, and that's probably why the man-out-of-time facet of Cap's character took another 20 years to be played with by writers like Frank Miller, who refers to Cap as "the soldier" in his Daredevil run and portrays him as a man for whom the sound of helicopters is a constant reminder of how out of place he feels in these days of modern times. He is, after all (as my father would be the first to remind me), a man who made his entry into the world by punching Adolf Hitler in the face:




Talk about your wish-fulfilment fantasies, huh? I guess something analogous would be like, oh, I don't know--maybe seeing Batman hunt down Osama Bin Laden. (Like that's ever gonna happen. Oh wait.)

What's interesting to me is that, since Cap is a child of the 40's, his death implies a critique on a set of values from that era in a way that his resurrection and survival never did. Created during a time of war, Steve (Captain America) Rogers wasn't a symbol of anything more than the national desire to kick Nazi ass. It's only after the war is over that his symbolic nature becomes confusing or questionable. So perhaps it's fitting that the week of Cap's funeral (which also occurs during a time of war) sees the reissue of one of the best, if briefest, re-envisionings of Steve Rogers, the Roger Stern/John Byrne run:

Why did I like this run so much? Because it not only dealt with Cap's history and continuity, it dealt with the idea-of-America part of his character that, to me, is what makes him interesting, inspirational, and potentially tragic. It opens up all kinds of stories revolving around the nature of patriotism, nationalism, and obedience to authority; and whatever your opinion of Civil War, putting Cap on the anti-government side feels exactly right. (My opinion of Civil War? Great concept; lousy execution. For something that was supposed to be politically relevant, it's totally ironic and fitting that it's the epilogue--Cap's death--which is resonating more with the public-at-large than the actual issues leading up to that death. Although, can I just say? Tony Stark is a dick.)



To my mind, the flag and the shield make Cap's death more (shall we say) thought-provoking and socially relevant than the death of Superman. Is it a symbol of the death of the New Deal? The death of conscience? The end of nationalism? --patriotism? --jingoism? The death of the dream? (What dream?) Or is it, like an amendment to the Constitution, part of an ongoing, on-growing experiment in government?

In the end, it's like any other life--now that it's over, we try to figure out what it all means.


So where do I stand on the "Will they bring Cap back?" question. I'd like to think that Cap will stay dead because freedom demands sacrifice--because soldiers give their lives in every age for the values of this country. But mostly, I'd like him to stay dead because that's what happens to real people. And to me, Captain America was real.