For months and months the conventional attitude in the news media seemed to be that Ang Lee, who was such a highly regarded director of intelligent cinema, was certain to be a success directing the Hulk movie. Meanwhile, I was telling friends that I thought Lee was the wrong choice for the film and thought it would be a considerable disappointment. I very much liked Lee’s film of Sense and Sensibility, but his achievement there does not demonstrate that he is the right person to make what is basically a monster movie. Watching The Ice Storm feels to me like wading through molasses, and the characters were often so understated in their reactions as to be off-putting. Still, critics seemed to find that this directorial style fit the subject matter. I presume that opinion makers decided he would be great on The Hulk because he had already done a widely praised action movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. When that film was playing, I felt I might be the only person in New York who did not care for it: it was slow-moving, the narrative felt as if were meandering, the performances were too low-key, I did not empathize with the characters, and the battle scenes, however frenetic, lacked real suspense. (I told one friend that I found some of the martial arts battle scenes on Buffy more involving, and she gasped in shock. Okay, I like the battle scenes in Yojimbo and the first Matrix better, too.)
It seems to me that several of the flaws for which the Hulk movie is being criticized – the glacial pace, the lack of narrative momentum, the introverted performances (except for the scenery-chewing actors playing Banner’s father and Glenn Talbot, who head in the opposite direction) – were present in Lee’s previous films. In other words, one could have seen this coming.Something else that set off an early warning alarm for me about the Hulk movie was a short interview that Ang Lee gave to The New York Times in the early stages of his work on the film in which he said he was investigating the scientific basis for becoming the Hulk. It turns out that Lee’s wife is a microbiologist, and according to The New Yorker (June 30, 2003), he started investigating subjects such as molecular growth and blood cells in preparing the Hulk movie. But how necessary was this?In The New York Times (June 22, 2003) Ang Lee explained that. “The origins of the Hulk are in the Cold War, and we had to find a way to update these anxieties, but not duplicate them.” When The Hulk debuted, in 1962, it was during the Cold War, when Americans feared that tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union would lead to a nuclear conflagration. It made sense, then, that the Hulk’s origin was founded in fears of radiation and the nuclear bomb: scientist Bruce Banner was exposed to the radiation of an exploding “gamma bomb” during a test, much like the many such tests before the passage of the nuclear test ban treaty. (Decades later, writer/artist John Byrne updated the origin tale by subtly indicating that it involved a test below ground, which was still permitted under the treaty.)
Today, there are worries about the new science of genetic engineering: will people create terrible new diseases or alter their offspring to be genetically superior? Some people, like author Michael Crichton, warn of the potential dangers of another new science, nanotechnology. So it makes sense that these are the new potential terrors that would play a role in an updated Hulk origin. (I wonder, though, with the concerns over terrorists getting their hands on “dirty bombs” and the North Koreans building nuclear weapons, whether The Bomb will make a comeback as a source of fear.)
So as the Hulk film begins, we see a lot of starfish, presumably to explain the Hulk’s resistance to injury: he regenerates damaged flesh quickly. Banner’s crazy scientist father David Banner (named after the TV version of Banner, a fact no reviewer I’ve read has pointed out) performed genetic experiments on himself, and then Bruce inherited the result. There is nanotechnology involved, I take it, to help explain why Banner was not killed outright by the gamma radiation. And, of course, there’s a burst of gamma radiation that mutated Bruce’s altered genes. All of this to try to explain the Hulk’s superhuman biology.
And none of this explains a very big question. When Bruce Banner transforms into the Hulk, where does all the extra mass come from? This is a question that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby could more easily duck, since in his original stories, the Hulk was bigger than Banner, but not much bigger than a normal man. In one early story, the Hulk even disguises himself with a hat (pulled down over his brow) and coat (with the jacket turned up) and rides undetected on a passenger airplane in those long ago days before security made people take their shoes off to check for bombs. Of course the stewardesses and other passengers would all have to be color blind not to notice the Hulk’s visible body parts were green, but my point is that the Hulk was originally depicted as the same size as a tall, brawny man. (See, Lou Ferrigno was indeed well cast in the 1980s TV show.) But over time in the comics, especially since the coming of the Image Comics founders, the Hulk has gotten increasingly taller and more massive. Peter David did a story arc in which the Hulk, then intelligent, and Betty lived undercover in a small Southern town, with the Hulk disguising his face and hands with bandages. Hence, like H. G. Wells’s “Invisible Man,” he could pass himself off as someone undergoing medical treatment. Okay, but then how do you explain the fact that the artist draws him looking ten feet tall?
The movie makes matters worse by showing the Hulk growing bigger under provocation. It’s an interesting visual method of dramatizing the principle that the madder the Hulk gets, the stronger he gets: now he gets bigger, too. And seeing Betty with the gigantic Hulk made numerous film critics liken the Hulk to King Kong, a comparison I had never thought of until this movie.
But the problem is now even more glaring: where does all the extra mass come from? And when the Hulk transforms back into Banner, literally shrinking on camera at one point, where does all the extra mass go?
This isn’t a new problem for sci-fi films. During Turner Classic Movies’ recent weekend of films with special effects by Ray Harryhausen, I watched 20 Million Miles to Earth. Comics history buffs take note: the creature in this movie appears to be the inspiration that Roy Thomas and Gil Kane used for Gog, the rapidly growing, visually similar monster that Kraven the Hunter finds in the Savage Land in Amazing Spider-Man #103-104. In the movie, this Harryhausen critter hatches and is about the same size as a child’s doll, but then rapidly grows, becoming nearly man-sized within less than a day, without eating anything! (We later learn he eats sulfur, which is impossible since it’s not organic, but he hasn’t eaten anything leading up to these initial growth spurts.) Ah, well, you say, that’s just a quaint 1950s sci-fi movie; more recent moviemakers wouldn’t violate scientific laws so blatantly. Then how about this: in Alien the title character bursts out of John Hurt’s stomach and slithers off. When we see the Alien only a short time later, it has become bigger than Hurt! And there’s no explanation. (Did the baby Alien get into the food supplies and metabolize it really, really fast? Is that even possible? But no, there’s no effort to make this rapid growth credible. And the rest of the movie, as we know, shows how the Alien defines “food supplies.”)
As many of you know, I was one of the main writers of the late Mark Gruenwald’s The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Aided in large part by the technological expertise of another Marvel staffer, Eliot Brown, Mark sought to make the Marvel characters’ super-powers as firm a basis in real science as possible. After the first version of the Handbook, Mark decided that some of the explanations had grown too complicated, and asked me to simplify them. There’s a lesson right there: less is more, and don’t make matters unnecessarily complex.
When it came to the Hulk, a matter like the Hulk’s increase in strength as he grew angrier was easy enough to explain: obviously, it was like the way a surge of adrenaline can boost a normal human’s physical abilities. But as for the Hulk’s increases and decreases in mass, Mark effectively threw up his hands. The explanation he used was that the extra mass came from an “otherdimensional source” and returned to that other dimension when the Hulk reverted to Banner.
In other words, there is no explanation in terms of real science. It’s like when science fiction writers use hyperspace to explain faster-than-light travel. No one has discovered hyperspace, it’s just a hypothetical concept, but it solves the problem.
In an earlier time if storytellers had created the Hulk, he might have been a normal man who fell under a curse that magically changed him into a monster and back. (The Hulk is, after all, also a variation on the werewolf archetype, so it’s no wonder that in the early stories he changes into the monster at nightfall.) In modern times, magic has been displaced by science in the popular mind as the source of wonders (leaving major exceptions like Harry Potter and Buffy Summers aside). So it behooves writers to give a creature like the Hulk – or any super-powered character – a facade of scientific credibility. My sense is that ideally the scientific explanation for the powers should be convincing enough to satisfy the layman. Of course, in real life super-powers don’t exist so a trained scientist could eventually find the holes in the explanation.
Then there’s Bruce’s crazy father, David, whose experiments on himself ended up giving him the powers of the Absorbing Man. And there is no possible scientific explanation for being able to “absorb” the properties of materials one touches! In the Thor comics in which the Absorbing Man debuts (and shouldn’t he be part of the Thor license, not the Hulk’s?), he gets his powers from a spell cast by Loki, so the powers explicitly work by magic. Having turned David Banner into the Absorbing Man, the moviemakers don’t even seem to realize what the powers are for. Here’s David Banner held prisoner in handcuffs. Okay, so why doesn’t he absorb the properties of the steel in the handcuffs and escape? Come to think of it, since he is in contact with air, couldn’t he just turn into a gas and escape?
So, to explain the Hulk, Ang Lee and writer James Schamus come up with nanotechnology AND the mutagenic effects of gamma radiation AND the hereditary effects of genetic engineering performed by Banner’s father on himself. And this complicated chain of catalysts still cannot explain how Bruce Banner becomes, in effect, a rampaging storybook giant. Maybe they just should have stuck with one simple pseudo-scientific cause rather than tiresomely establishing all three. To some degree the scientific explanations for how Banner became the Hulk are MacGuffins, to use Alfred Hitchcock’s term, plot devices that fill necessary functions in the mechanics of the narrative but are not important to the real thrust of the story.
But from another perspective, the source of Bruce Banner’s super-powers is thematically very important indeed. Stan Lee has long said that he based the Hulk on Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and Frankenstein’s Monster.
Genetic engineering even reinforces the Frankenstein theme: David Banner is Frankenstein himself and his son Bruce is the monster. Add Betty Ross into the equation, and the Hulk also ties into the Beauty and the Beast archetype, including that classic variation on the theme, King Kong.And Bruce Banner fits another classic archetype: he is also Faust. In the comics version of his origin, Bruce Banner figuratively makes a deal with the devil. There he is, the impassive nuclear scientist, calmly presiding over the testing of his invention, the gamma bomb, a terrible weapon indeed, designed to slaughter the enemy through lethal amounts of radiation. Who is Banner doing this for? The United States government, as represented by General “Thunderbolt” Ross, arrogant, blustering, and contemptuous of civilians who do not live up to his standards of rampant machismo. Banner just takes Ross’s verbal abuse, not bothering to stand up against him. Does Banner ask himself about the morality of creating this weapon for Ross? No, he doesn’t, and seems to regard himself as just pursuing his scientific interests regardless of the consequences. Did Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, creating the Hulk in the midst of the Cold War, consciously disapprove of Banner’s project? I don’t know, and ultimately it does not matter. As in the case of scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the question of the morality of using scientific discoveries to create such destructive weapons was a subject of debate in the early 1960s.
And then Banner sights a trespasser on the test site, young Rick Jones, and suddenly it is as if the potential victims of the gamma bomb are no longer a theoretical concept but a real person in the here and now. It is as if Banner’s conscience has been awakened, and he rushes out to the test site to rescue Rick. But it is too late to halt the destruction Banner has complacently set into motion. Banner’s assistant Igor is actually a spy and disobeys his order to stop the countdown: Igor intends that Banner’s weapon will consume its creator’s life. And in a sense it does: Banner hurls Rick into a trench for safety (in those “duck and cover” days this apparently was sufficient) but is himself caught in the blast of gamma radiation.
Banner survives, but now he is cursed to continually transform into the Hulk, embodies man’s dark side, his capacity for rage and destruction.
Moreover, the Hulk is, in effect, the power of the nuclear bomb in a monstrous human form. In Entertainment Weekly, Jeff Jensen linked the Hulk to another green monster, Godzilla, who has long been regarded as a metaphor for the power of the atomic bomb that resonated with Japanese audiences after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus it makes sense that in the comics the Hulk swiftly evolved into a being strong enough to toss around tanks or to create small earthquakes or even to topple a mountain.
Recently longtime Hulk writer Peter David wrote the brilliant one shot The Incredible Hulk: The End, depicting a possible future in which the Hulk is the last living creature (aside from mutated cockroaches, to no one’s surprise) on an Earth covered by lethal radiation after a nuclear war. David explicitly portrays the Hulk as a dark version of Prometheus, the Titan of Greek mythology who brought fire from the heavens to mankind.
As punishment for so empowering man, the god Zeus had Prometheus chained to a mountain, and every day a great vulture would attack him, feeding on his inner organs. Overnight, the immortal Titan’s injuries would heal, and the torment would begin anew the next day. In The End Banner/The Hulk represents all those who brought nuclear fire – nuclear weaponry – to Earth, a force that in this story destroyed humanity. And now the Hulk suffers the punishment of Prometheus: each day assaulted by a swarm of mutated insects that he cannot fight, for whom he is their only source of food, and left virtually dead, only to regenerate and undergo the same horrors the next day. In this way the Hulk is humanity’s scapegoat, eternally undergoing punishment for man’s inhumanity to man, and never fully expiating humanity’s crimes.
This apocalyptic vision is really an extension of some of the basic concepts underlying the Hulk: The Hulk of The End suffers for humanity’s sins (yes, a strange kind of sinister Christ figure), just as Banner suffers in large degree because of his role in creating the gamma bomb. Peter David skillfully dramatizes these themes into an affecting tragedy in The End, something at which the Hulk moviemakers fell short.
In part, Banner is a victim – of fate, of his dysfunctional childhood, and of the cruelty of his fellow men. But in part, Banner also brought his curse upon himself: he created the weapon of destruction that destroyed his life. And now as the Hulk, he is a vastly powerful menace to humanity, just as his bomb would have been.
In Ang Lee’s Hulk, though, Bruce Banner is entirely a victim in becoming the Hulk. His father experimented with genetic engineering on himself, and Bruce inherited the genetic results. (And aren’t you tired, too, of the cliche of the scientist who tests his potentially dangerous new discovery on himself? What scientist in real life would be foolish enough to do that?) His father also murdered his mother, traumatizing the young Bruce, filling him with the inner rage that would later explode forth in the Hulk. The movie’s Bruce and Betty Ross are working in “nuclear biotechnology” (What does that mean? Can that possibly be a real scientific field?), working on a method of regenerating animal cells. Glenn Talbot wants to buy Bruce’s and Betty’s discovery so he can turn it to military uses, rendering armies immune to lasting injury. Bruce and Betty don’t want to sell out. In other words, the movie’s Bruce is not embarked on a morally questionable project: Talbot may be the Mephistopheles figure, but there is no Faustian bargain here, nor any attempt at redemption through Banner’s sacrificing himself to save Rick. Ang Lee complained to the Times (June 22, 2003) that in the comics Bruce Banner is a “wimp,” but the movie Bruce seems more acted upon than an active force himself.
In the Hulk’s origin story in his very first comic in 1962, Bruce’s race to rescue Rick, and the subsequent nuclear blast, are highly dramatic: imagine how vivid such a sequence would be on film. In the Hulk movie, Bruce gets an unprepossessing lab worker out of the way of a nuclear device in his lab and gets exposed to a burst of gamma radiation himself. It’s staged so undramatically as to seem like a throwaway scene. “That’s it?” I thought, watching it. And the character who is saved just disappears from the movie. How significant that Lee and Schamus use all of the 1960 Hulk’s core supporting cast – Betty Ross, “Thunderbolt” Ross, Glenn Talbot – and not Rick Jones, through whose friendship and loyalty the readers could better empathize with Banner. Moreover, if Rick were in the movie, and they did him right (like hiring Peter David as dialogue consultant?), no one would have accused the film of being humorless.
The Hulk’s strength and rage are in part metaphors for the psychological power of the repressed emotions within Bruce Banner, which date back to his dysfunctional childhood. In the movie, those emotions seem to consist of rage and pain over the murder of Bruce’s mother by his father, and presumably also anger over the child Bruce’s inability to prevent the murder. In the comic, however, Bruce’s father, (there given the alliterative name Brian Banner in traditional comics style) is also physically, emotionally and verbally abusive to young Bruce.
Somehow it makes more dramatic sense to me that the Hulk is the reaction to the baby Bruce’s inability to protect himself from harm, as well as his mother, rather than just the latter. (In comics terms, if you witness your parents’ deaths as a child, you become the vengeful Batman, not the irrational, uncontrollable Hulk!) To baby Bruce, Brian Banner was the violent, irrational giant with unlimited strength with which to hurt him; as the Hulk, the adult Bruce has effectively become that giant himself (and, as we know, the Hulk still hates Bruce, his other self).
Even so, it seems to me that Bruce Banner’s repressed childhood rage at his father, and even at the world, still does not entirely justify the sheer power of the Hulk in dramatic terms. It is when one adds the dimension that the Hulk represents modern man’s capacity for violence, his contemporary weapons of mass destruction, that the epic scale of the Hulk’s one-man battles against armies, and his capacity to level a city, seems completely appropriate. Keep in mind, too, that Bruce Banner’s dysfunctional childhood is a relatively recent addition to the Hulk continuity, but the atom bomb theme was there from the very start. (And hey, how come the movie shows the Hulk rampaging through San Francisco, and it never occurs to anyone that he could inadvertently trigger one of the city’s many underground faults?)
Here is a lesson: one tampers with classic comic book continuity at the severe risk of diminishing the mythic subtext that makes the stories work. By changing the Hulk’s origin, Ang Lee, James Schamus and company have made it more contemporary, but they have stripped it of much of its thematic significance and weakened its dramatic impact.
There are other things I like about the Hulk movie. For example, once the Hulk bursts free of captivity, the film brilliantly captures the Hulk in action as the comics artists have portrayed him; the Hulk picking up and tossing away tanks, the Hulk soaring over the countryside in enormous leaps, the Hulk pictured against vast desert landscapes, making me realize that the Hulk is, in his own way, a new version of the archetypal antihero of the American West, an outlaw of a different sort.
I don’t think that the Hulk movie works overall as an action-adventure film, principally because Lee’s storytelling style is to a large degree unsuited to the source material. It is not because Ang Lee and company have taken the material so seriously. They may worry needlessly about justifying the Hulk’s powers in terms of hard science, but I do not fault them for wanting to explore the thematic meanings of the Hulk series. In part, indeed, their errors lie in not entirely understanding the themes of the comics, as I have attempted to show. Understanding what motivates the characters should help bring those characters to dramatic life, aid the audience in identifying and empathizing with them, give the viewers something to engage their minds and their interests, and make this more than a one-dimensional monster movie to be forgotten as soon as one leaves the theater. Why shouldn’t these fantasy adventure movies be entertaining AND smart?
Last week my column dealt with the way many movie critics condescend to mainstream comics, and in some cases insist that superhero movies should consist of “dumb big fun.” The opening of the movie version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen presents us with even more evidence. Take a look at these contrasting reviews of League.
Collin Levey in The Wall Street Journal (July 11, 2003):”League is surprisingly good fun … The movie is based on the comic books of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, whose wit is dedicated to the sort of questions that have nagged eight-year-olds through the ages: for instance, who would win if Superman and Batman had it out?”But The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen succeeds the same way the original comic books did, by making the conflicts and dilemmas basic enough for a five-year-old, while giving the heroes and villains layers glamorous outfits and layers of complexity, to thicken the broth.
“Pirates of the Caribbean operates in the same spirit, by taking a cut-and-paste adventure script and making it campy.”
Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times (July 11, 2003):
“It’s a formidable task, bringing the comics’ dank, coruscating vision to the screen …. Mr. Moore’s melancholic and apocalyptic stories have a dour, murderous humor drizzling through the depressive clouds. … in his stories – from The [sic] Watchmen and V for Vendetta through League – the world is awash in brutality and ugliness, deserving of doom. Mr. Moore’s pleasure comes in serving up Old Testament balance …. Mr. Norrington and Mr. Robinson show glimmers of faith in Mr. Moore’s vision – that paranoia, suspicion and resentment as well as other major character flaws are more a part of the league’s bond than fighting for king and country.”
Which of these two critics actually read and gained some understanding of Alan Moore’s League comic books? And which one either didn’t read the comics or, if he did, didn’t begin to get what they were about, but confidently acts as if he did? The answer is downright obvious, and I will be tackling the subject of the comics and film versions of Moore’s League in a future column.
Presumably by sheer coincidence, within less than a week after my last column, the New York Times Arts and Leisure section published a piece by critic A. O. Scott entitled “The Pretentious Summer Superhero” (Sunday, June 13, 2003). Scott mentions Freud, Homer, and other “giants of Western thought” whose works influenced the makers of the Hulk movie and the latest Matrix film. Scott writes, “The Hulk and The Matrix Reloaded … are the latest, and perhaps the most extreme, examples of a new Hollywood subgenre, the summer reading-list blockbuster. This summer, millions of teenagers have been invited to experience the tedium and pedantry of graduate school in Dolby surround. … As someone who dropped out of real graduate school to spend my life going to the movies, I have to admit I’m a little perplexed…”
As someone who attended graduate school and earned two graduate degrees, I’m a little perplexed, too. I look back on grad school as one of the best, most tedium-free times in my life, with intellectually stimulating teachers and bright, good-humored fellow students, some of whom became my lifelong friends. And I saw plenty of films on the side. Maybe Scott was simply enrolled in the wrong subject.
Anyway, Scott raises the same question I addressed in my previous column: “If we risk taking certain pictures too seriously, are there others we don’t take seriously enough? The latter accusation tends to come from the more scholarly precincts of pop-culture fandom, from the comic-book, fantasy, and science-fiction aficionados … whose sensibilities have come to dominate large-scale, humor-deficient moviemaking in recent years. And they may have a point. But it has been a long time since anyone but a few unreconstructed culture snobs has denied that sci-fi and superhero stories can be illuminating, even profound, as well as entertaining. That argument is long settled….” I wonder what the writers for The Comics Journal, which has long dismissed the super hero genre as utter junk, will think of that. (Why do I get the sense that, in their eyes, Mr. Scott has just figuratively hung a bullseye around his neck.)
I’ve spoken to a couple of comics pros who tell me that absolutely everyone they meet who learns they work in comics thinks that’s “cool.” Perhaps they live in the same alternate reality as A. O. Scott, where comics, even superhero comics, have won nearly universal acceptance as genuine art! Why, in a world like that, the comics industry would not be in severe financial straits, comics critics and historians like me and many others would be writing regular reviews and columns for major mainstream newspapers and magazines (just as film critics do!), The New York Times would frequently profile leading writers and artists in the comics field (as it does for creative figures in film, theatre, television, classical and pop music, and other fine arts), its book critics would review new graphic novels every week, and its Arts and Leisure section would not give articles dismissive, contemptuous titles like “The Pretentious Summer Superhero”! Ah, to live in the dream world of A. O. Scott! If only it were real.
“But the fact that science fiction or comic book based movies are capable of exploring big themes does not mean that they do so automatically.” Who says that they do? No story genre does. “And in any genre it is dangerous to put the thematic cart before the narrative horse, which is what the makers of The Hulk and The Matrix Reloaded, so besotted with the allegorical dimensions of their stories, have begun to do.” Quite rightly, Scott points to The Lord of the Rings movies as successfully combining entertainment values with serious themes.
But I think it is wrong to write as if the filmmakers of Hulk and Matrix Reloaded are so “besotted” with the intellectual themes of their movies that they consciously downplay the importance of dramatizing them effectively. As noted above, Ang Lee made The Hulk in the same directorial style that he has made his past films, a style that critics have showered with praise in the past. I suspect that Lee was fully aware that he had to find an effective dramatic story structure for presenting the film’s themes. It is simply that his style happens not to be entirely suited to super hero action-adventure. The Wachowski Brothers fill The Matrix Reloaded with action scenes clearly intended to dazzle and enthrall the audience: it’s not that they have lost sight of the goal of entertaining, but that critics and much of their audience haven’t been satisfied with the results in their latest movie.
Moreover, whether or not a movie is “pretentious” has nothing to do with how successfully it works in dramatic terms. A movie is “pretentious” if the quality of the filmmakers’ ideas does not match up to their intellectual aspirations. And Scott is not addressing the ideas behind The Hulk, instead taking the pose that even a concept out of introductory-level Freud – the Hulk’s resentment towards father figures – is somehow one of those “unusually heavy intellectual demands” he dislikes.
Now Scott is worried that the success of Lord of the Rings will “increase the vogue for pretentious blockbusters. Their existence offers a convenient solution to the big studios whose craving for profit is accompanied by a nagging desire for prestige, and who market their movies in two categories: serious movies and summer movies. The advanced-placement blockbuster allows them to have it both ways – or it would, if the audience and the critics would only do their homework.”
Fear not, Mr. Scott. I suspect that the disappointing box office performance of The Hulk and The Matrix Reloaded (they’ve sold tons of tickets, but not as many tons as Hollywood’s powers perhaps unrealistically assumed that they would) will instead inspire Hollywood to dumb down future fantasy adventure movies. The real avatar of the future might be the dumbed-down The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, which critics hate because they see it as merely a loud, empty action flick with no ideas behind it.
It’s really rather sad that Scott, who every week writes eruditely about not only Hollywood movies but challenging independent and foreign films, seems to feel he has to engage in traditional American anti-intellectualism. Beneath his piece in the same Arts and Leisure section, another author, John Sellers, writing about a series involving gay people, assures us that he himself is a straight guy who has “been to Hooters more times than I’ve eaten sushi.” Sellers is making a joke out of claiming to be a “Regular Guy,” kidding cliches of male heterosexual life. Scott, though, seems dead serious in protesting that he too is a Regular Guy, defined in this case not in terms of sexuality but of intelligence. Scott didn’t like grad school, no sirree, so he dropped out to watch flicks! And he doesn’t want to see any “term-paper blockbuster” that makes him feel he has to do “homework.” He’s not one of them thar pointy-headed intellectuals, even if he does spend his career reviewing art house films.
No matter the lip service his article pays to the artistic potential of superhero and science fiction stories, I think Scott’s real feelings come out when he writes the following: “After the lukewarm notices for The Hulk and The Matrix [Reloaded], it has been interesting to note the praise heaped on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, for its refreshing (and relative) lack of pretension. The film … was hailed far and wide for its fidelity to the B-movie tradition of noisy, nonsensical spectacle … When I wrote that T3 was ‘loud, dumb and obvious.’ I, like many of my colleagues, meant that in a good way….” You see, in Scott’s view, Terminator 3 knows its place: it doesn’t aspire beyond being nonsensical and dumb.
While Scott worries as if having to think about themes in superhero movies might ruin the taste of his popcorn, only two days before (June 11), his Times colleague Elvis Mitchell wrote a review of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie that took for granted that adventure comics can have artistic merit and criticized the movie both for being an unsuccessful thriller and for not conveying enough of Alan Moore’s thematic vision. Mitchell notes that the “movie … suffers from its own anxieties – a dread of being too literate….” In the very same issue as Scott’s piece, the Times ran an article by Publishers Weekly critic Douglas Wolk, titled, “The Comic Book Was Better.” In it, Wolk not only skillfully analyzes Moore’s League comics but contends that the movie’s “greater flaw … is that it takes no notice of what Mr. Moore’s story is really about.” Indeed, one of Wolk’s points seems to be that the “fun” and “wit” of the comic book League is inextricably linked to its “delicious subtext,” however dark that proves to be. (It’s great that the Times ran a critique like this, even if it fails to mention Wolk’s article on the “Arts and Leisure” front page while making Scott’s disparaging piece a cover feature.)
Perhaps herein lies a lesson for filmmakers who delve into the comics-based fantasy adventure. In order to adapt source material from the comics, one must first more fully understand the themes and characterizations in the comics, and how the writers and artists bring them to dramatic life on the comics page. Once one understands the underlying meanings, he can better adapt them in cinematic terms.
Ang Lee told The New York Times (June 22, 2003) that “the reason the Hulk appealed to me is that I’ve never seen the comic-book genre as a movie genre; it’s not like film noir or screwball comedy. To me, there aren’t rules to follow.” First, of course, comics is not a genre but a medium, and it can be used for any genre, not just superheroes stories. However, superhero stories ARE a genre, and had Ang Lee paid more attention to its requirements, perhaps he might have adapted his filmmaking styles to the subject more effectively. In The New Yorker Lee is reported to have said, “I can’t make a comic book, but I can make a tragedy.” Had he understood the superhero genre more fully, he would have succeeded in both, as Peter David did in The End.
Ang Lee was well intentioned in seeking to use the Hulk movie to explore the underlying themes behind the character. It would be sad to think that because the Hulk movie did not meet commercial expectations, Ang Lee has actually thwarted other filmmakers from pursuing a similar path in comics-based movies. Not every comic or movie based on comics that attempts to deal with serious themes is going to succeed. Some will, and some won’t, but that is true of every genre. But just because some of these efforts fail is no reason to decree that the genre should not even aspire towards higher goals. For decades now comics have been maturing as an artistic medium, and that process cannot occur without mistakes being made along the way. To try to confine comics and comics-based movies to the confines of mindless escapist entertainments is like trying to stifle a baby in its cradle before it has a chance to grow.
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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