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At the beginning of director Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300, we are told that that if the Spartans of ancient Greece decided that a newborn infant was physically unfit to grow up to be a warrior, they would throw him to his death. The baby we see onscreen doesn’t meet such a fate, but we do get to see a mound of infant skulls.

This sight leads me to contemplate my own beginnings. I was born prematurely, spent some time in an incubator, and suffered from eczema as an infant. While no one would ever mistake me for a warrior, I’ve led a healthy life and have never spent a night in a hospital since my infancy. But watching this scene in 300 makes me realize: if I had been born in Sparta in the 5th century B. C., I would have been killed like all the other “unfit” newborns.

I don’t find this to be a propitious opening for a movie.

Both the 300 graphic novel and the movie recount the story of the Battle of Thermopylae (translated as the “Hot Gates”) in 480 B. C., wherein King Leonidas of Sparta and three hundred soldiers sacrificed their lives in combat against the massively larger army of the Persian emperor Xerxes. But although Leonidas’s forces lost the battle, they inflicted surprisingly large losses on the Persian army.

Moreover, the Three Hundred’s brave resistance at Thermopylae became an inspirational story, as Miller shows in 300 through his emphasis on the role of Dilios, the soldier turned storyteller. Before the climactic battle, Miller’s Leonidas observes that Dilios has “a talent unlike any other Spartan.” Though Leonidas and Miller do not spell it out, it is that Dilios is a storyteller, a creative artist, in effect. Leonidas commands Dilios to “make every Greek know what happened here. You’ll have a grand tale to tell. A tale of victory.” Dilios appears in 300‘s framing sequence in his role as storyteller, and most of Miller’s 300 is thus presented as the “grand tale” that Dilios tells to all of Greece, and to generations yet unborn.

This reminds me of the end of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the dying title character prevents his friend Horatio from committing suicide, and instructs him to live on and to tell Hamlet’s story; immediately after Hamlet’s death, we see Horatio begin his task, telling what happened to the newly arrived prince Fortinbras. There’s a similar idea at work in the end of the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot, in which King Arthur, just prior to his final battle, knights a young boy and imposers a different sort of quest upon him: to leave the battlefield and devote his life to spreading the legend of Camelot.

The saga of Thermopylae was not only conveyed through succeeding centuries by historians but also through references by poets including Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot. Miller surely identifies with the warrior king Leonidas. Though he looks considerably younger in the movie, the 300 graphic novel establishes that Leonidas is in his fifties. Hence, he is yet another of Miller’s middle-aged heroes facing his last battle, like the Batman of The Dark Knight Returns and Hartigan in Sin City: That Yellow Bastard. But surely Miller also identifies with Dilios, since they are both artists telling the “grand tale” of the Three Hundred.

My question is just how well 300 succeeds in communicating the heroic spirit of the Thermopylae saga. Through the way in which they present their story, do Miller and Snyder distort the inspirational message they seek to convey? How justifiable is their idealization of the Spartans of 300, who, among other things, practice infanticide? I admired the graphic novel, though I never felt the affinity for it that I have to Miller’s 1980s work. The movie, however, through dramatizing and amplifying them, made me more aware of the troubling aspects of the book.

For example, take the infanticide business. In the graphic novel, this is dealt with in two tiny panels in Chapter Three. “We are born. We are inspected,” reads Dilios’s narration for a small panel showing a newborn who is mostly concealed from our sight by two enormous adult hands. Just what are those hands doing to the infant’s eyes? Is that blood? And why use the word “inspected,” as if human babies were livestock? Then, in the next panel, the narrator tells us, “If we are small or puny or sickly or misshapen, we are discarded.” We see the silhouetted figure of a man, standing on a silhouetted cliff, dropping a silhouetted baby from it. The small size of the panel deemphasizes the scene’s dramatic importance; the silhouettes prevent us from seeing clearly what is happening; and the word “discarded,” as George Orwell would point out, suggests that nothing more is happening than tossing out the trash. But what is really going on is the murder of a baby.

In the movie Zack Snyder can’t vary the size of the “panels,” and so the image of the adult “inspecting” the baby atop the precipice fills the screen. Not surprisingly, Snyder did not show the baby being dropped, but we see the remains of those who were killed before him.

I am reminded of 24, a television series which I otherwise enjoy, but which has reversed what I had thought was an immutable principle of entertainment. In stories it is the Bad Guys who torture. Indeed, in the most recent episode (April 21) of the commendable new Robin Hood series on BBC America, Robin’s servant Much is horrified that Robin intends to torture his foe, the traitor Sir Guy of Gisborne, and Robin does not go through with it. I presume that the series’ writers and producers had the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in mind, but I wonder if they were also thinking of 24, in which hero Jack Bauer tortures people without hesitation. In 300 the Good Guys kill babies, and there is no hint in either the movie or the graphic novel that this sullies the Spartans’ heroic reputation.

Actually, Wikipedia states that the babies “were abandoned on the slopes of Mt. Taygetos to die”. The 300 book actually makes matters worse by showing an adult actively killing a baby by dropping him off the cliff!

Miller has stated in numerous interviews that he was inspired to create 300 by seeing a movie about the Battle of Thermopylae called The 300 Spartans (1962) when he was a boy. That was the last movie version of the “grand tale” until 300, nearly a half century later. Obviously, the “grand tale” had faded from American consciousness in the interim.

Indeed, my understanding is that in the later decades of the last century, interest in ancient Greece and Rome declined in American schools, but it was still going strong when I was growing up. There were casts of the Elgin Marbles, the frieze from the Parthenon, on the interior walls of the prep school I attended; I wish I had appreciated them more at the time. What I did love since childhood were John Singer Sargent’s murals of gods, heroes and even monsters from Greek mythology above the grand staircase at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts: they fired my childhood interest in mythology, which would lead to my lifelong fascination with deciphering the mythic archetypes in comics. And it was in grade school that I first learned about the two great rival city-states of ancient Greece: Sparta and Athens. Right from the start, I felt an affinity for the intellectual Athenians and didn’t much care for the warlike Spartans.

As I’ve been observing for the last few weeks in this column, fashions shift over time, and perhaps now in the early 21st century American interest in
classical culture is resurging. There was HBO and the BBC’s recent Rome television series, for one thing. (The 300 movie, I suspect, is less a sign of renewed interest in Greek history than of the growing cultural influence of the graphic novel.)

Back in 1949, a director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided to convert its Roman court into a restaurant, thereby halving the space available for displaying the museum’s collection of ancient Greek and Roman art. This month the Metropolitan reopened the newly renovated Roman Court, transformed into a spacious sunlit showcase for Roman statuary. Turn immediately to the left as you enter, and you will find a bust of Herodotus, the “Father of History” (3480-430/420 B. C.), the Greek author who is the original source for 300‘s saga of the Battle of Thermopylae.

In 2001 the Onassis Cultural Center, which presents temporary exhibitions of ancient Greek art, opened in midtown Manhattan. Its current show, running though May 12, is, appropriately for this column, “Athens-Sparta,” which compares and contrasts the two city-states through artwork from both city-states. There is a large marble statue of a hoplite, or Greek soldier, who is said to be Leonidas himself, and the exhibit includes arrowheads and spearheads that were found in the battleground of Thermopylae.

But the opening wall text in the exhibit reminded me just why, even as a child, I preferred Athens to Sparta. Noting Sparta’s “strict training of its citizens,” the text states that Sparta’s “primary concern” was “the creation and maintenance of a mighty military force.” In contrast, Athens, was “imbued with a progressive worldview that promoted the individual” and “took a totally different direction that led to major intellectual and artistic achievements as well as to the unique phenomenon of the Athenian democracy, making the city the most important cultural center in the Hellenic world until the Roman Age.”

The wall texts in the Metropolitan’s new Greek galleries trace the cultural history of Athens, depicting the reign of Pericles in the 5th century B.C. as a Golden Age that produced extraordinary achievements in philosophy, democratic government, architecture, sculpture, science, philosophy, and literature. These wall texts ignore Sparta.

The Onassis Cultural Center’s show seeks to correct the imbalance by presenting works of art from Sparta. But, according to one of the show’s wall texts, “”From the mid-sixth century B.C. this burgeoning of the arts began to wane. . .The adverse domestic situation that had begun to take shape, with the gradual decline in the economy and trade, led to Sparta’s alienation from the rest of the world and to the dwindling of interest in the arts.” That “dwindling” strikes me as less ominous than Sparta’s “alienation from the rest of the world,” which seems an unhealthy attitude to have.

It also occurs to me that choosing between Sparta and Athens may be something like the red state/blue state split in contemporary American politics. The Onassis show does characterize the militaristic Sparta as “conservative and restrained” in a wall text, whereas Athens, presumably liberal by contrast, was the birthplace of democracy.

Considering my childhood affinity for ancient Athens, the leading cultural center of its time, it makes sense that I ended up spending most of my life in New York City, the cultural capital of the United States, and perhaps the world, filled with museums, theaters, publishers and educational institutions.

Athens was also the birthplace of drama, home in the fifth century B.C. to the first great authors of tragedy, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and the first great comic playwright, Aristophanes. With my own lifelong passion for storytelling in a variety of forms–novels, plays, movies, and, yes, comics–it’s no wonder that I regard Athens as a cultural Camelot of the ancient world. Why, wouldn’t anyone who loves storytelling feel the same way?

On the basis of 300, apparently not. Here’s Leonidas talking to the Persian messenger early in the 300 graphic novel: “Rumor has it that the Athenians have already turned you down, and if those boy-lovers found that kind of nerve. . . .” So here’s the Athenian civilization dismissed with a homophobic jibe.

It also turns out to be hypocritical on the part of the fictionalized Leonidas, although you wouldn’t know this from either the graphic novel or the movie.
Referring to 300‘s seeming characterization of Xerxes as gay, academic Ephraim Lytle of the University of Toronto comments, “This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan’s education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb “˜to Spartanize’ meant “˜to bugger.'”. Not only that, but according to Wikipedia, “In antiquity it was thought that a youth was expected to find himself an older lover, and that pederasty, a social practice common throughout most of Greece, was especially so in Sparta, where the ephors fined any eligible man who did not have chaste relationships with youths”.

As for heterosexuality in Sparta, by law each Spartan man had to marry a woman when he was twenty. According to the aforementioned Wikipedia entry, the wedding ceremony “consisted of the intended bride being abducted with simulated violence.” Doesn’t seem very loving, does it? But wait, there’s more. Wikipedia continues, “After the wedding night the husband remained living in his barracks and would have no further contact with his wife except for the purpose of procreation.” (Actually, as a lapsed Catholic, I’d have to say this isn’t that different from the Church’s traditional position on marital sex.) And what effect might that have on the psychological well-being of any straight young Spartan? No wonder they sublimated their libidos into the violence of warfare.

By the way, while the Onassis show acknowledges the “Spartan supremacy on land,” the Athenians were no slouches, despite their lack of a militaristic culture. The main villain in 300 is the Persian ruler Xerxes, whose father, Darius, did indeed intend “to create a worldwide empire,” according to the Onassis wall texts, which further state that Darius’s army “marched onto Marathon, where, despite being outnumbered four to one, Greek troops led by the Athenian general Miltiades achieved a remarkable victory over the Persians” in 490 B. C.. Lytle points out that while the Spartans were facing Xerxes’ troops at Thermopylae ten years later, “a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, “ In the 300 graphic novel Miller has Dilios acknowledge that “In the waters of Salamis, Athenian seafaring mastery led the united Greek navy to shatter the Persian armada.”

But look how Dilios describes the Athenians’ triumph at Marathon in the 300 book. “Armored men, Athenians, with their leather skirts and lovingly sculpted breastplates. What a pretty pack they must have been! Athenians. Amateurs. Foppish, frilly citizen soldiers. . . . and still they drove the Persians back to the sea and away!. . .How can we fail–against foes so fearful of combat they’d show their backside to Athenians?”

How many things are wrong with this? Rather than commend the Athenians for their courage and battle prowess in defeating the Persians, Dilios disparages them by “feminizing” their image, as if he were some bigoted adolescent saying, “They are SO gay!” (Of course, in contrast to the Athenians in “skirts,” the Spartan soldiers of 300 walk around virtually naked, but we’ll get to that later.)

Of course, if the Persians are supposedly such cowards that even the allegedly incompetent and girly Athenians could put them to flight, then the Battle of Thermopylae is really not such a big deal, right?

There’s something more subtle that I find disturbing, as well. In 300 Dilios and Leonidas speak condescendingly about the “citizen soldiers” from other Greek city-states, whom Dilios calls “amateurs.” When Leonidas encounters the Arcadian army in 300, he asks various Arcadians what their professions are. There is a sculptor, a blacksmith, and as baker, all creative artists of one sort or another. Leonidas and Dilios, however, prefer the Spartans’ full time professional army: “You see, old friend,” Leonidas says, “I brought more soldiers than you did.”

My father fought in World War II. He was an engineer, not a professional soldier. The vast majority of American soldiers in World War II were ordinary people who were drafted or who enlisted out of patriotism, not career soldiers, and yet they won the war. Amazing, eh? In fact, movies about World War II, those made during the war and right up through Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), celebrate the courage and endurance and skill of these “citizen soldiers”; you may recall that Tom Hanks’ character in Ryan was a schoolteacher in civilian life. In fact, this celebration of the “citizen soldier” seemed to be a celebration of the democratic spirit of America.

But 300 turns this ideal upside down. “Citizen soldiers” may be “brave,” as Dilios acknowledges, but 300 argues that they should leave the real fighting to the pros.

So, thus far 300 has badmouthed my dad’s wartime service and thrown me over a cliff. This is not looking good.

Well, what if I had been born in ancient Sparta and I hadn’t immediately been thrown over the cliff? According to the graphic novel, in Dilius’s words, “we are starved, driven to steal, and fight and kill. We are tested, tossed into the wild, left to pit our wits and will against nature’s fury. By rod and lash, we are punished, trained to show no pain.”

It seems that this is more or less true. According to Wikipedia Spartan boys started their compulsory military training, called agoge, at the age of seven (!), which “consisted for the most part in physical exercises, such as dancing, gymnastics, and ball-games.” That doesn’t seem so bad, but consider this. The kids also had to run what was called the gauntlet: “They would have to run around a group of older children, who would flog them continually with whips, sometimes to death.” And I thought the bullying I endured in grade school was bad. So had I not been thrown over the cliff, this is where I’d get killed.

Following the agoge “a select few young men were arranged into groups, and were sent off into the countryside with nothing, and were expected to survive on wits and cunning” and, yes, were expected to steal. Professor Lytle states that Spartan boys “were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground.”

So, from the age of seven, all Spartan boys are set on the same mandatory career path, and they remained full time soldiers until they were thirty. There doesn’t seem to have been the opportunity for someone like myself to become a scholar or a writer. If Frank Miller had been born in ancient Sparta, presumably he wouldn’t have been able to become an artist.

But wait! If all the men are soldiers, then who performs all the other jobs in Sparta? It’s not the women, who, even though they had more freedom than the women of other Greek city-states, were still confined to managing the home. Citizens made their money from their land, which was farmed by the helots, a class that Wikipedia compares to medieval serfs, who made up ninety percent of the Spartan population. Not only did helots have no civil rights, but according to Professor Lytle, the initiation rite for young Spartan soldiers consisted of “murdering unarmed helots.” Lytle dryly observes that “By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job. . . .” Before the Fifth Century B.C. Sparta pursued what the Onassis show calls an “expansionist foreign policy”: the helots were descendants of the other Greeks they conquered.

So, in the graphic novel Leonidas says on the eve of the Battle of Thermopylae that “Come tomorrow, we light a fire that will burn in the hearts of free men for all the centuries yet to be.” Miller’s Leonidas is well aware that he is the impelling force behind the “grand tale.” But just how free are the people of Sparta? They may not be under foreign domination, but ninety percent of the people living in Sparta are effectively slaves. Spartan male citizens are forced to become part of the military machine. And how much freedom did those abandoned infants experience?

Wikipedia states, ” From the earliest days of the Spartan citizen, the claim on his life by the state was absolute and strictly enforced.” Isn’t this the kind of overbearing government, restricting individual freedom, that Miller presents as the enemy in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, The Dark Knight Strikes Again (see “Comics in Context” #30-31, 34), Elektra: Assassin, Sin City, and the Martha Washington books?

Notice that right after Leonidas makes that speech about “the hearts of free men,” one of his subjects says, “We’re with you, sir, to the death,” and Leonidas replies, “I didn’t ask. Leave democracy to the Athenians, boy.” So much for liberty.

I shouldn’t go further without dealing with some unfinished business. I never did complete my discussion of the neo-noir movie Frank Miller’s Sin City and the graphic novels on which it is based (see “Comics in Context” #78-79, 83), and I should at least wrap up the storyline about Marv, The Hard Goodbye. Perhaps it’s just as well that I waited, because some things I’ve written about in subsequent columns have added to my understanding of Sin City, and that in turn helps illuminate the meanings of 300.

In The Hard Goodbye the brutish Marv is trying to find out who is responsible for the murder of Goldie, the one woman he says ever showed him kindness, and to avenge her. (Actually, Marv’s mother, his female parole officer, and his fried Nancy the stripper all like him, too; what Marv, who is grotesquely ugly, means is that Goldie is the only one who would have sex with him.) I left off just before Goldie seemingly returns from the dead to try to kill Marv, repeatedly hitting him with her car.

This isn’t Goldie resurrected, but her twin sister Wendy, who soon finds out that Marv didn’t kill Goldie and becomes his ally. It was clever of Miller to introduce Wendy, because she serves several important purposes. First, when she first appears, and is trying to kill Marv, she represents Marv’s own sense of guilt over Goldie’s death. When he discovered she was dead, he blamed himself for having lain there obliviously drunk and asleep next to her when the murderer struck. The male protagonists of the Sin City movie are driven by a kind of chivalry: they regard it as their duty to protect women, even though the women in some cases are quite capable of defending themselves. It’s possible that in beating up, torturing and killing various antagonists in his quest to avenge Goldie’s murder, Marv is displacing his own sense of guilt onto the various members of this conspiracy. In punishing them, he feels less guilty. Then again, perhaps his sense of guilt is on reason why it’s appropriate that Marv ends up in the electric chair: he subconsciously may feel that he must be punished, too.

Second, Wendy’s role in the story underlines the extent to which Marv’s Goldie is not so much the real person as a figment of his imagination. At first Marv thinks that Wendy is Goldie, and even after he learns the truth, he continues to confuse one for the other. In a sense Wendy is no more Marv’s Goldie than the real Goldie was. The Goldie he is in love with, whom he seeks to avenge, is his image of the ideal woman, which he projects onto the real Goldie. Even as he learns Goldie’s true motivations, and that she wasn’t in love with him, he keeps saying that it doesn’t matter: he is still loyal to the death to his idealized conception of Goldie, and he won’t let facts get in the way.

When Wendy visits Marv on death row just before his execution, he thinks again that she is Goldie. And at this point, symbolically she is: Wendy is expressing the gratitude to Marv that presumably Goldie would have felt had she lived.

Recently watching the Sin City movie again on television, I connected it with my long commentary on Dr. Peter Coogan’s book Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (see “Comics in Context” #162-166). (See, I warned you that this book would keep popping up in my column.) Coogan pointed out that superhero stories fit into the literary mode that the late Northrop Frye designated in his book, Anatomy of Criticism, as “romance.” By that term Frye meant a story of extraordinary adventure in which the protagonist is “superior in degree to other men and to his environment,” but is still a human being, who “moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended.”

This explains some of the improbable things in Miller’s Sin City comics, which seem even more improbable on the movie screen. Wendy repeatedly hits Marv with her car, yet he suffers no serious injury, and is barely slowed down. Ultimately Marv is sentenced to the electric chair, but not only survives the first electrocution, but is able to mock his captors: it takes two to kill him.

But if you perceive Marv as a hero of “romance” who is somehow “superior in degree to other men” and the world around him, and who exists in a world “in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended,” it makes sense. Sin City sends mixed signals, since the setting, the urban underworld, is what Frye would consider a “low mimetic” milieu, in which we would not expect blatant elements of fantasy. Nor do we expect the characters of film noir to be stronger or more resistant to injury than normal people. But although Marv is not a character in the superhero genre, he is to some degree superhuman, and in my earlier review I compared him to the Hulk, both physically and temperamentally.

Since Sin City is a Frye-style romance, that also explains the odd science-fiction element: in That Yellow Bastard Hartigan shoots off Roark, Junior’s hand and genitals, but unusual treatments somehow enable him to grow them back! This may also explain certain characters’ resistance to bullets. Hartigan can sever Roark Junior’s hand and genitals with a single gunshot apiece, yet in the same scene Hartigan is shot repeatedly, without losing any body parts, and, despite his heart trouble, manages to survive. This is why the serial killer in The Hard Goodbye, who looks like an ordinary preppie, displays strength, agility and speed on the verge of impossibility.

There are also elements of Frye-style romance in 300, especially the movie. As I reported in this column, at last year’s San Diego Con, Miller “pointed out that sometimes Snyder changed the speed of the cameras to make the Spartans look “˜superhuman’ during the fighting” (see “Comics in Context” #146). In the movie one of the principal Spartans is impaled by a spear and nonetheless manages to keep on slaying enemies until he finally dies: he too is “superhuman.”

In that Robin Hood episode I mentioned, Much does not want his master, Robin, to lower himself to the moral level of the bad guys by torturing Gisborne. In The Hard Goodbye Marv not only kills people but tortures antagonists in the course of his quest for vengeance. Marv even cuts off the arms and legs of the cannibalistic serial killer in Hard Goodbye and lets a dog eat him. Hartigan tears off the Yellow Bastard’s new genitals with his bare hand and then kills the Bastard by beating his head to a literal pulp. However awful their antagonists’ actions, surely Marv and Hartigan have gone beyond the bounds of moral justification in taking their revenge.

Marv ends up being killed in the electric chair, and Hartigan commits suicide. I wondered whether Miller gave them these fates as an acknowledgment that Marv and Hartigan had each gone too far, and had to suffer punishment themselves. They were both like the classic hero whose violence ensures the safety of society, but for that very reason cannot be a part of it: that’s why Alan Moore’s V effectively commits suicide, leaving Evey to guide a new, freer British society.

Is this the subtext of Miller’s 300? Are we meant to be horrified by the Spartans’ militaristic society? Are they sacrificing themselves, like V, in order to assure the rise of a better world, of which they could never be part? Does Miller mean us to deconstruct 300 in this way? Or does he mean for us to accept his heroic portrait of the Spartans at face value, warts and all, offering no moral condemnation of those warts? Are we meant to excuse Marv’s and Hartigan’s violent excesses, as well? We shall look into this further in the near future.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
This spring Art Spiegelman has been an artist-in-residence at my alma mater, Columbia University. For the latest edition of Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week, I wrote a report on a lecture that Spiegelman recently delivered on campus.

And congratulations to fellow Quick Stop columnist Fred Hembeck, whose column will celebrate its hundredth anniversary within the coming week!

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing about the fate of the creative artist, in both real life and in animated films, who takes a new, innovative path only to suffer rejection and failure. Last week I also referred tp essayist Paul Graham’s characterization of the innovator’s new ideas as “heresies,” as far as the conventional wisdom of the time is concerned. But with the passage of time, the truly talented creative artist receives the recognition he deserves, and his “heresy” is accepted as truth.

DIsney’s latest computer-animated film, director Stephen Robinson’s Meet the Robinsons, provides new variations on these theme. Along the way, the film propounds a “heretical” notion of its own: that failure is good.

The protagonist of the film is a twelve-year-old orphan named Lewis who has a talent for technology, but whose inventions keep malfunctioning. Transported into the future, Lewis meets the title characters, the Robinson family. When another of his inventions goes awry, Lewis believes he has failed again. But the Robinsons celebrate his failure, acting as if it were his birthday. They explain to the bewildered boy that failure is good, because it enables us to learn from our mistakes.

The Walt Disney Company recently purchased Pixar, the studio that has created so many successful computer-animated features over the last twenty years (See “Comics in Context” #120), and made Pixar’s John Lasseter the chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation. So this sequence made me think of another Pixar animated film, writer-director Brad Bird’s The Incredibles (See “Comics in Context” #62), which takes a very different point of view.

As you may recall, Bob Parr, alias the superhero Mr. Incredible, complains that “They keep finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity” in contemporary society. When public opinion forces the government to prevent super-powered individuals from using their powers as superheroes, The Incredibles presents this as an indictment of society for allegedly refusing to allow talented individuals to excel. Bob and Helen Parr’s son Dash says to his mother, “Dad says our powers make us special.” Falling back on society’s conventional wisdom in the film, she replies, “Everyone’s special, Dash,” whereupon he retorts, “Which is another way of saying that nobody is.” Indeed, the ultimate scheme of the movie’s villain, Syndrome, is to make it possible for everyone to gain super-powers, because, he says, if everybody is super, then nobody is.

In an article titled, “Take a Bow, Loser, the Spotlight’s Yours,” in the April 8, 2007 issue of The New York Times, drama critic Charles Isherwood contends that there is a “new mood abroad in America. A country renowned–for good or ill–as the land that enshrined success as a prize to be cherished above all others has lately evinced a sneaky fascination with failure. “ Among other examples in current popular culture, Isherwood points to last year’s indie film success Little Miss Sunshine, stating that “the ethos of the movie argues that winning isn’t really anything. Better to be a happy misfit, like the rest of the family, than a soulless success. . . .”

That, in fact, sounds like the philosophy of Pixar’s 2006 release, Lasseter’s own Cars (see “Comics in Context” #137-138). Its protagonist, Lightning McQueen, is no “loser,” but ultimately chooses the virtues of empathy that he has discovered over his ambitions for “soulless” success. He sacrifices his chance of winning the big race in order to aid an older, injured competitor. McQueen becomes part of a community of outsiders, just as the misfit Lewis finds happiness when he is accepted by the Robinsons, who are a clan of outright eccentrics who are also a warmly loving family.

I see from Googling that I’m not the only person who saw a similarity between the Robinsons and the similarly happy, caring family of nonconformists in the 1936 stage comedy You Can’t Take It with You by George S Kaufman and Moss Hart, which was adapted into a 1938 film directed by Frank Capra. According to an interview with director Stephen Anderson published in The Los Angeles Times on March 26, 2007, the analogy is intentional. Anderson said that William Joyce, who wrote the book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, on which the new animated film is based, told him “You have to watch this movie. It was a huge influence on me in creating the family in the book.” As a result, Anderson told the interviewer, “Several times throughout the process, as we were trying to crack this family and come up with moments for them and how Lewis would interact with them, I would pop in the movie and use it as an inspiration.” He continued, “I love how accepting and free they [the family in the Capra film] are. “˜Freedom’ is the word to describe that family and [the Robinsons]. There is no normal. There is no abnormal. It’s whatever makes you happy.”

According to the play and film of You Can’t Take It with You, Grandpa Sycamore, the head of this extended family, one day decided to quit his job. Except for the heroine Alice, no one among the Sycamore family and their live-in friends has a conventional career, and they obviously don’t have much money, though they somehow have enough for leading a simple lifestyle. The play and film thus clearly define two alternatives: the pursuit of “soulless” success and the decision to achieve happiness by “failing” to seek such success. (Presumably Alice and her boyfriend follow a path between the two extremes.)

Cars and Meet the Robinsons don’t make the dividing line so sharp. They contend that one need not singlemindedly pursue “success as a prize to be cherished above all” in order to achieve a more profound and emotionally rewarding sort of success. Lasseter said in an interview that in Cars “the message is not that life in the fast lane is bad, it just needs to be in balance. . . . If you don’t have friends and family for the sake of a career, when you’re a success you have no one to share it with. It’s much more satisfying to have people around you to share in your successes, and to help you through your difficult times. That’s what life’s about.”

McQueen’s act of charity during the climactic race actually makes him more popular with the onscreen audience than the actual, amoral winner. His new friends in the community of Radiator Springs are examples of talented individuals who have fallen from current fashion, like certain real life creative individuals whom I have mentioned over the last few weeks. Once McQueen, a current racing star, directs public attention to Radiator Springs, the enduring values of that community are again recognized, and the little town prospers once again.

Meet the Robinsons deals not with the talented individual whom the world has forgotten, but with the brilliant innovator whom the world has not yet recognized. Let’s go through the screening I saw step by step, and along the way I will show you how Meet the Robinsons develops this theme.

I saw a screening of the version of Meet the Robinsons in “Disney Digital 3-D,” which struck me as looking far more impressive than it had with Disney’s previous computer-animated release Chicken Little (see “Comics in Context” #110). Following the inevitable irritating series of onscreen commercials and trailers, we were alerted onscreen to don our 3-D glasses. Then there was a short, amusing sequence in which Carl, the Robinsons’ robot, welcomes the audience and demonstrates 3-D effects, as he abruptly seemingly moves from the flat screen right towards our faces, justly earning delighted vocal reactions from the kids in the audience.

But before the feature began, we got to see Working for Peanuts, a 3-D Donald Duck cartoon that was released in 1953 during the original fad for 3-D movies. The 3-D effect here is interesting, but hardly convincing. Everything still looks flat, but it’s as if the characters and the backgrounds are on separate planes, one in front of the other. In contrast, in the computer-animated main feature, everyone and everything possesses a convincing sense of three-dimensional volume. The 3-D version of hand-drawn animation emphasizes the flatness of the drawings and hence underlines the unreality of the cartoon. The 3-D version of computer animation gives the figures and objects and backgrounds onscreen a heightened sense of reality, so that it’s easier to suspend one’s disbelief.

My favorite 3-D effect in Meet the Robinsons came at the very beginning, in a scene set during a driving rainstorm: it was as if the rain was falling not just in the world of the film but around me, as well.

Working for Peanuts is nominally a Donald Duck cartoon, but he’s really only the fourth most important character in it. It’s really about chipmunks Chip “˜n’ Dale trying to steal peanuts from a elephant in the care of zookeeper Donald. In this cartoon Donald must be on Prozac or something, since though he gets characteristically annoyed, he never launches into one of his famous all-out temper tantrums, which are highlights of his earlier vehicles. (John Byrne has described Donald as Disney’s Hulk.)

Maybe Donald seems so tame because this is one of the Disney studio’s animated shorts from the 1950s, when they usually seemed low key in comparison to the Warners and MGM cartoons of the period. Donald, who at his animated best embodies this irrepressible splenetic force, has been relegated to a supporting role in his own cartoon. This cartoon represents the Disney studio of Walt’s time in a more easygoing, less ambitious middle age. There are good gags here and there, but the cartoon is more charming than funny, and it comes to a stop rather than building to a proper ending.

On the other hand, I was impressed by how good even such a mediocre cartoon from Walt Disney’s lifetime looked. The character designs were appealing, the animation was pleasing, the colors were bright and cheerful, and I found myself thinking that this minor Disney product looked so much better than most recent animation I see. The standards of Disney animation were so high that even a disappointing cartoon like this one now seems like a minor gem from a lost Golden Age.

Those audiences who attended the non-3-D screenings of Meet the Robinsons got to see a different introductory cartoon instead, Boat Builders (1938), a genuine classic from the true Golden Age of the DIsney animated shorts, teaming Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy.

According to a December 3, 2006 article in The New York Times by animation historian Charles Solomon, Pixar’s John Lasseter, now that he is in charge of Disney animation, was the driving force in instituting a new series of animated shorts at Disney as a training ground for rising talents, just as CGI shorts have served at Pixar. So the shorts accompanying Meet the Robinsons presumably are to accustom audiences to looking forward to the new animated short subjects yet to come.

It seems to me that the shorts accompanying Robinsons serve other purposes as well. For one thing, they’re fighting back against the new conventional wisdom that contemporary audiences only want to see computer-animation on the big screen, not traditional hand-drawn animation.
Now here’s a prime example of important works of art–the great hand-drawn animated films from Disney and other studios–that have currently, unjustifiably, fallen from fashion!

Further, the shorts shown before Meet the Robinsons serve to introduce a new generation of kids to classic Disney characters. Meet the Robinsons began with a new logo for Disney animation, which incorporated a clip from the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928). My pleasure in seeing this tribute was suddenly interrupted by a kid’s voice from the audience yelling, “Who’s that?” Luckily, another child responded almost immediately, and nearly as loudly, “Mickey Mouse.” I know that the Disney Channel has the new Mickey Mouse Clubhouse for preschoolers and that its sister network Toon Disney features Mickey in the clever and entertaining House of Mouse animated series. Still, this little incident served as a reminder that even iconic cartoon characters have to be exposed to new audiences. Let’s not let them fall from fashion just because the new generation doesn’t know about them!

It’s also important to keep the classic Disney cartoon shorts in public view. Certainly I’m grateful that so many of them are available on DVD for aficionados. But when the Disney Channel started, these shorts were prominently featured, notably through the Mouseterpiece Theater series, wherein George Plimpton introduced them. That was an intriguing gimmick, since it was simultaneously parodying Alistair Cooke’s introductions for PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, while simultaneously making the point that these cartoons are indeed classics that are worthy of formal showcases. I continue to be amazed that nowadays neither the Disney Channel nor Toon Disney finds time to show the classics, not even as a late night show. So I’m grateful that Mr. Lasseter and company have released two of the classic shorts from the vaults to be shown with a new animated feature.

I’m even more surprised that at present Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies made from 1948 on aren’t being shown anywhere on television. This is something that I never thought would happen. Turner Broadcasting owns most of the pre-1948 shorts, while Warner Brothers retains ownership of the later shorts, including most of the best work of directors Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Robert McKimson. After Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting, Turner’s Cartoon Network would show Warners theatrical animated shorts from both sides of the dividing line, but, after the commercial disappointment of Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the Warners theatrical cartoons were all banished to the less widely seen Boomerang digital network. And now, even though Boomerang is owned by Time Warner, it still had to license use of the post-1947 cartoons and let the license lapse (see here for explanation) . And yes, I have all the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVDs, I appreciate that Warner Home Video includes cartoons as special features on DVDs of films made during Hollywood’s Golden Age, and I know about the new Looney Tunes website, but I still find it astounding that, after so many decades, so many Warners cartoons are no longer on television. Maybe Warner Brothers should follow Disney’s lead and pair classic shorts with new animated releases. Warners’ Happy Feet could have been accompanied by 8 Ball Bunny, a 1950 Chuck Jones cartoon with its own show biz penguin (which turns out to be the cleverly chosen bonus feature on the March of the Penguins DVD).

Now, as for Meet the Robinsons itself, in the dark, moody opening scene in the rain, an unidentified woman leaves the infant Lewis on the steps of an orphanage.

Sometimes I will see a critic figuratively throw up his hands in the course of a review of a story, exasperated that the supposed cliche of the hero as orphan is being used yet again. It’s not a cliche; it’s an archetypal situation, and there are good reasons why we see it used everywhere from the works of Charles Dickens to the Harry Potter novels to the origin of Batman.

For one thing, the orphan’s situation symbolizes that of all of us once we emerge from the protection of our parents in our childhood and have to strike out into the world on our own. There is a longing for lost security and a sense of aloneness, coupled with an awareness of the necessity for taking responsibility for our own lives.

Second, orphanhood connects to the individual’s quest for his identity, whether in Oedipus Rex or H. M. S. Pinafore or the origin of Superman. The protagonist searches for his past, in the hope that learning who his parents are and where he came from will define his role in life.

It turns out that in the case of Meet the Robinsons, orphanhood is a literally autobiographical element; director Stephen Anderson is himself an orphan.

When Lewis has grown to the age of twelve, he has proved to be brilliant in science, and is continually inventing new devices, most or all of which, it seems, do not work. Moreover, the film makes the point that he is long overdue for being adopted, and that, since he is on the verge of turning into a teenager, if he isn’t adopted soon, he probably never will be. (Since he’s on the verge of adolescence, Lewis is about to leave childhood behind, and start on the path to self-reliant adulthood; this, therefore, is the proper place for this contemporary fable to begin.)

But it seems that Lewis keeps being rejected by potential foster parents. We are shown how one interview with prospective parents goes awry. This couple is put off by the intense fervor with which Lewis describes his latest invention, and then the machine spectacularly malfunctions, creating a mess that infuriates the would-be adoptive parents.

In this sequence the film teeters on the brink of labeling Lewis as an obsessive nerd or geek, but it never crosses that line. Lewis remains a sympathetic figure, and the prospective parents come off as narrow-minded, unpleasant, and even anti-intellectual.

Though he is an inventor, Lewis can be regarded as a creative artist, following his muse, attempting to turn his imagination into reality. Computer animation involves both art and technology, so Lewis’s vocation is appropriate to the film. He’s also the artist as lonely, struggling innovative, who so far meets with only rejection and incomprehension. The world rejects his work, just as sets of potential parents keep rejecting him as a person.

One of his few friends is a fellow orphan nicknamed Goob, who likewise has never been adopted. Goob’s interests lie in baseball rather than science, but he seems rather sullen, joyless, and unimaginative. But the fact that Lewis and Goob are presented as roommates should alert the perceptive viewer that they may metaphorically represent two sides of the same person.

Focused on his past, Lewis invents a “memory scanner” device in the hope that he can use it to learn his mother’s identity. Lewis exhibits his invention at a science fair, where it is sabotaged by a mysterious villain known as the Bowler Hat Guy, whose hat is a sentient, sinister robot known as DOR-15 (alias “Doris”). Thus another of Lewis’s inventions causes a disaster, and the Bowler Hat Guy makes off with the memory scanner.

Another enigmatic stranger, a boy named Wilbur Robinson, shows up with a time machine. Lewis, still focused on the past, wants to use the time vehicle to go into the past to learn who his mother is, but instead they crash land in Wilbur’s own time period, decades into the future. There Lewis meets Wilbur’s large, eccentric family, the futuristic counterparts of Kaufman and Hart’s Depression-era Sycamores.

I found the first third of the film more expository than entertaining, and found my attention wandering during the start of the second third, set in this future three decades hence. On a second viewing I may find myself more interested in this section, which introduces us to the idiosyncratic members of the Robinson family.

But on this viewing I did like the bright, sunny, retro-futuristic look of this future world, whose buildings are designed in the “Streamline Moderne” style of the 1930s. According to Wikipedia, this is “a late branch of the Art Deco style. Its architectural style emphasized curving forms, long horizontal lines, and sometimes nautical elements (such as railings and porthole windows).” (That makes me wonder if that the giant porthole-like windows at the San Diego Convention center, home of Comic-Con International, may be references to the Streamline Moderne style.) According to my research, Streamline Moderne was a style used for the fantasy architecture in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) and, coincidentally or not, another Frank Capra movie, Lost Horizon (1937).

It doesn’t really make sense that the architecture of the Robinsons’ world would have so completely changed in merely three decades. Look around any American city and you’ll see buildings from many different decades coexisting. My own neighborhood is a historic district, with apartment buildings designed in imitation of the Tudor style, and even an Art Deco building. Similarly, the Robinsons wear clothes that are wildly different in style from those of the present day. Radical shifts in fashion can take place–compare women’s clothing in the 1890s to what they wore in the 1920s–but the extreme change in style posited by Robinsons seems unlikely.
Recently visiting my alma mater, Columbia University, I again observed that, apart from the cell phones and laptops, the students there look and dress just like they did in the 1970s.

But the thorough changes in clothing and architectural styles is actually essential to the theme of the film, as you shall see.

My attention revived when the Bowler Hat Guy and his nasty hat turned up in this future world to send a ferocious tyrannosaur from the Cretaceous Period after Lewis. Just as the BHG proves to be more of a pathetic incompetent than the master villain he seeks to be, the tyrannosaur turns out to be more charming than dangerous, and quickly turns into the Robinsons’ tail-wagging pet. Thus the family succeeds in incorporating another outsider into their charmed circle.

The head of the family is strangely absent, but the family takes to Lewis, and Mrs. Robinson offers to adopt him. When it is revealed that Lewis is from the past, however, she withdraws the offer, presumably because she now sees the big plot twist coming. (And if you don’t want to know about it, this is your spoiler warning, and come back after you’ve seen the movie.) Distraught and angry by yet another rejection, Lewis joins forces with the Bowler Hat Guy, who, as I suggested earlier, represents his dark side.

It is in the film’s final third when the movie finally comes to life for me. The long set-ups in the earlier part of the film finally pay off handsomely. I could see the Big Plot Twist coming: Lewis is actually the missing Mr. Robinson as a child, and the Robinsons are his future family. But I was caught off guard by the second Big Twist: the Bowler Hat Guy is Lewis’s sullen roommate Goob as an adult.

It turns out that by falling asleep at the wrong moment during a baseball game, Goob failed to catch a ball, dooming his team to defeat. Goob was paralyzed by his sense of failure, was never adopted, and led an empty life, putting the blame on Lewis for keeping him awake the night before the big game. So as an adult, he became the Bowler Hat Guy and went back in time to get revenge on his former roommate. The bowler hat itself, DOR-15, turns out to be one of Lewis’s inventions, which the adult Goob stole.

Like Lewis, Goob is fixated on the past, but Goob has taken this to obsessional extremes. Goob is tormented by his sense of failure, but is unwilling to take responsibility for it, and instead displaces the guilt onto his former roommate. You could easily interpret Lewis’s own fixation with learning about his mother as rooted in his own sense of failure and inadequacy: surely he wonders why he was abandoned. Was it somehow his fault? The fact that Goob’s primary weapon, the robotic bowler hat, is Lewis’s invention is a further symbolic link between them.

The BHG imprisons Lewis in the future; the side of Lewis’s personality, which the BHG represents, is now dominant. That side may not be so much the dark side as the weak side. The true villain is the robotic hat. The BHG goes back in time to the present day, Lewis’s own time, in order to forge a deal to mass produce the robot hats. As a result, in the future, the Robinson family’s time, the hats, following the familiar Frankenstein scenario, are taking over the world. Everyone who wears one of the robotic bowlers is mentally controlled by it. (This seems to be an archetypal science fiction scenario, like the Mad Hatter with his mind-control devices in Batman: The Animated Series, and the mind-control variations on iPods in the new Doctor Who series’ revamped origin of the Cybermen.) The mind control exerted by the hats seems to me symbolic of the way that Goob’s obsession with the past and with revenge dominated his own psyche. It’s as if the hat is usurping the role of the well-balanced human mind.

In this altered future, the bright, beautiful world of the Robinsons is altered into a dark, nightmarish dystopia. Reviewers have likened the plot to the Back to the Future film trilogy, but if we pursue the Frank Capra analogy, it’s like the metamorphosis of Bedford Falls into Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

Lewis escapes captivity (his good side symbolically reemerging from domination by his anger and self-pity), and uses the time machine to travel back to the present. In a clever bit, Lewis alters history simply by declaring that he will never invent DOR-15, whereupon the evil bowler hat simply dematerializes from existence. Lewis takes the BHG (now hatless and symbolically free from DOR-15’s influence) back to the future, where they witness the dark dystopia’s transformation back into the Robinsons’ sunny utopia. The BHG repents, and later in the movie, Lewis changes the BHG’s own history by waking Goob up during the fateful baseball game, enabling him to catch the ball. The treatment of Goob/BHG shows the generosity of this movie, which ultimately has no human villains: Goob is granted redemption.

In the future Lewis meets his older self, a successful scientist and inventor. Young Lewis may be an orphan, but the adult Lewis, who is actually named Cornelius, is the central figure in his large family. Rather than seek our a lost parent, he has created a family of his own. Moreover, through his inventions, he has greatly changed the world in which he lives. That’s why it’s symbolically important that the world of the Robinsons looks so different from the present day. Cornelius has not only made a family for himself, but he has also reshaped his world. (Young Lewis has done so too, by banishing the dystopian alternate timeline and reinstating the Robinsons’ future.)

This is a metaphor for how every individual creates his own life through his actions. Lewis/Cornelius did so productively, benefiting the whole world. Goob/BHG took a different route, first turning his life empty through inaction and obsession with the past, and then having a destructive influence on the world through seeking vengeance.

But also the world of the adult Cornelius represents the ultimate triumph of the creative visionary. Whereas Lewis as a boy was not taken seriously as an inventor, three decades later, the adult Cornelius has won recognition and success, and, indeed, he has remade the world according to his vision. That is a metaphor for how innovative “heretical”: thinking can eventually overcome opposition and become recognized as truth.

Wilbur (who is now revealed to be the adult Cornelius’s son) takes Lewis back in the time machine to that rainy scene from the opening of the film, and Lewis is tempted to tap his mother on the shoulder, learn who she really is, and perhaps even somehow change his own history. But Lewis resists the temptation, and history proceeds as before.

This is an intriguing decision by the filmmakers. In other works of fiction it is both important and right that the orphaned protagonist discover his heritage. Harry Potter learns the truth about his parents, and thus goes from being an abused orphan to becoming a heroic magician. The revelation of the identity of Oliver Twist’s parents gives him a new identity as the wealthy Mr. Brownlow’s adopted son.

It reminds me of the end of John Byrne’s 1986 The Man of Steel miniseries, which rebooted and reinterpreted the Superman mythos. Whereas the Silver Age Superman could recall his childhood on Krypton through his “super-memory,” Byrne’s revised version could not. In the final issue of The Man of Steel Superman was confronted by an image of his father, Jor-El, which downloaded information about his Kryptonian origins into his mind. Yet on the final page, Superman, though grateful to have solved the mystery of his origin, asserts that it has changed nothing. He has lived his life on Earth, his foster parents were Earthlings, and he considers himself not an alien but an Earthman. Many have stated that the Superman myth is in part about the immigrant experience. In this regard Byrne’s version was sharply different from the Silver Age Superman, who longed nostalgically for his native world.

Byrne’s Superman is very much like Lewis in Meet the Robinsons. Both of them have made the decision that their past doesn’t matter; what matters is their present and future, which they are creating for themselves.

Just as Lewis revisited the scene of Goob’s failure and made it turn out right, he then returns to the science fair, and this time his memory scanner works. That’s because there’s no Bowler Hat Guy to sabotage it this time around. Perhaps it’s also symbolically because Lewis himself is no longer fixated on his past; maybe the destruction his inventions caused reflected the psychologically destructive impact of his own fixation. Now that Lewis is looking ahead to the future that he visited, his invention works.

Moreover, his triumph at the science fair sets dominoes falling that he and we know will lead to that future. Lewis is adopted by the science fair judge and her husband, who he realizes are the grandparents in the future Robinson family. (Actually, everyone in the audience should have recognized the raucous white-haired grandmother as the science fair judge long before.) And a girl at the science fair turns out to be the future Mrs. Robinson.

Just as Robinsons opened with a clip from Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie, it closes with a quotation from Walt himself, “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things”¦ and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” This connects the philosophy of Robinsons to that of Walt Disney himself. Goob remained stuck in a rut, obsessed with past failure; once he overcame his own fixation with the past, Lewis moved ahead as an inventor of “new things.” Possibly it is also a signal from Lasseter as to his hopes for the future of Disney Animation. The quotation also underlines once more that Meet the Robinsons is about the life and goals of the creative artist, whether he is a child prodigy inventor or the founder of a great animation studio.

And isn’t Walt Disney a prime example of a creative visionary who, despite early setbacks, literally transformed the world? Steamboat Willie premiered within the memories of people who are still alive, and yet I think it is difficult for those of us who belong to younger generations to imagine what American popular culture would be like had there been no Walt Disney.

The next Pixar animated feature, arriving this summer, is director Brad Bird’s Ratatouille. In the same interview that I quoted from earlier, John Lasseter describes the new film thus: “It is about a rat that wants to be a fine chef in a top French restaurant in Paris. It is a wonderful story about following your passions when all the world is against you. A rat to a kitchen is death; a kitchen to a rat is death.” In other words, Ratatouille follows Happy Feet and Meet The Robinsons in exploring the theme of the creative artist who pursues his muse in the face of universal opposition. When I review Ratatouille this summer, I’ll be returning to this theme as well.

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–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson