Good morning to all, and welcome to our first-ever Film Fight. Not sure what I’m talking about? Go here for a thorough explanation. But in brief: My film critic compadre Josh Rosenblatt and I will spend the week duking it out over comic-book movies. I like ’em; he hates ’em.
And … go.
Okay, actually, first, a little context before we get the ball rolling:
I’ve never read a comic book before.
I, like you, Josh, come at this purely as a filmgoer. We’re not here to argue about which comic book movies show the most fidelity to the source, ‘cause neither of us have a clue – and in that, I think we’re representative of the majority of audiences watching comic book movies. Which is to say, most of us have a glancing relationship to comic books at best.
Are we missing some of the nuance? Sure. But a lot of this stuff is so deeply imbedded in our pop culture now that we can get by without knowing the source.
So, moving on:
I got a beef with your basic argument, Josh. I mean, sure, we’ve all got our biases – neither of one of us will touch torture porn with a ten foot pole (and while we’re on the subject, may we send a shoutout to our compatriot Marc Savlov, without whom Josh and I would have to get a whole lot closer than ten feet to said genre). But given the awesome scope of comic books (and the more elegant-seeming graphic novel form) … well, to reject the whole passel seems like crazy talk, pure and simple.
But we’re not here to talk, are we? We’re here to FIGHT.
The reason comic book movies – and I’m referring here to those of the superhero bent (I imagine we’ll get to the nonsuperhero stuff later) – the reason why the BIG ONES – you know, the Supermans, Batmans, and Spidermans – work even without a fan’s obsessive knowledge is that these stories – their source myths and special gifts, arch-nemeses and star-cross’d love affairs – are firmly imbedded in our pop culture.
You don’t have to have read the collected works of Shakespeare, or the whole of Greek mythology, to have absorbed it. And you don’t have to have followed the superhero sagas since day one to get the gist: There’s a boy, and he’s either born with a gift or somehow stumbled into it (Superman, Spiderman), or he’s still a regular (non-genetically mutated) boy who takes it upon himself to fight for some bigger cause (Batman). This is the bedrock. These are the archetypes. The characters are larger than the actors that portray them, which is why we can run in 20 years time through 5 different guys in the Batsuit, and why the likes of Olivier and Ethan Hawke can take on the same tortured Danish prince to wildly different effect.
Okay. I figure I got a few more hours before you wake up, so I’m gonna mainline some coffee and get back soon with part 2 of “in defense of the comic book movie.”
This article appears in July 4 • 2008.
