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May 26, 2017 5:03 AM   Subscribe

The Nerdwriter examines the recent film Logan using popular culture critic John G. Cawelti's essay on Chinatown(PDF) as a jumping off point to see where it fits in the life-cycle of genre films. (Nerdwriter previously)
posted by octothorpe (37 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite


 
That explanation of what happened to the family that took them in makes a lot more sense to me now. At the time it just seemed unfair and unnecessarily brutal. I haven't seen "Shane" and didn't know the parallel there.

It's interesting to watch this progression in the movies as someone who's been a comics fan for over 30 years. In the '90s I was fond of saying that Watchmen would never become a film, not because there wouldn't be an audience for it, but because film studios were incapable of adapting a comic book film without making it "comic-booky", and you can't do that in a mass market film with grisly prison murder scenes or blue penises.

It seemed like it took forever for them to figure out that they could just adapt the comics and play them straight, and even when they did, a bunch of them took a sort of "now we punch robots" downturn in the third act after 90 minutes of building a really good story. The Wolverine was a textbook case. Now those genre burlesques, deconstructions, and reaffirmations are finally starting to come around, 15 or 20 years after comics first did them.

You could argue that it started with the Watchmen adaptation, not Logan, but Watchmen exists to me as a curiosity. I've seen plenty of bad adaptations before, but I don't know that I've ever seen another one like this where the filmmaker more or less slavishly followed the plot of the source material, yet somehow mangled and inverted the whole reason for the story's existence, revealing that he didn't understand what he'd read. The idea that you can do a paint-by-numbers adaptation of a story and completely pervert its soul stands as a testament to what a complicated and spiritual thing a story is, that it's far more than merely what the characters say and do.
posted by middleclasstool at 5:37 AM on May 26, 2017 [33 favorites]


I think it's worth thinking about them as movies, and films. This video is about how we go from movie, to film.

The names are arbitrary but the distinction is meaningful.
posted by Sebmojo at 6:26 AM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


That's absolutely true about Watchmen. Zach Snyder is simply too hamfisted to do justice to some of the quieter parts of the book. The late Dave Gibbons alternated between an elegant evocation of Moebius-style Eurocomix SF and more gutbucket 50s EC crime/horror stuff in the art, but Snyder only really succeeded at aping the latter, and not even that well. One of my favorite parts of the adaptation was the video interview version of Under the Hood, Hollis Mason's autobiography, but that got shuffled off into a supplementary "extra features" thing, and the people on the streetcorner got eliminated entirely.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:31 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


Mrs. Wombat and I go to our local movie theatre for our Date Night. Going to the movies is fun, and we always end up with the "Gold Class Grin.' We chat about the movie over a drink in the pub downstairs. It's a civilised way to do Date Night.

The last movies we watched were Passengers, Rogue One, Logan, and Life. Spoiler: Everyone dies.

We're skipping Alien:Covenant. "Rocks fall, everyone dies" gets a bit depressing.

If you spend the whole movie getting your audience emotionally connected to your protagonists, then drop rocks on them, well, your audience might spend the next movie dollars in the pub.
posted by Combat Wombat at 6:36 AM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]




The late Dave Gibbons

You mean "the great", right? He replied to someone's tweet half an hour ago...
posted by effbot at 6:44 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


I wonder if the current superhero genre wasn't mature enough to do a good job for Watchmen. It certainly wasn't deconstructing the superhero film genre the same way Watchmen deconstructed silver and bronze age comics. But they also didn't seem quite as codified back then as they are now - you had iron man and iron man 2, two Nolan dark knight movies, an X-men trilogy everyone was trying to forget, and some disposable spider-men.

I mean, you'd need a different director, too, but there just wasn't the glut of superhero films that there is now in 2009.
posted by dinty_moore at 6:46 AM on May 26, 2017


Argh, sorry, confused him with Steve Dillon. Growing old is hell, kids. (Plus we lost Darwyn Cooke and Bernie Wrightson within the last year or so.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:47 AM on May 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


The late Dave Gibbons

You mean "the great", right? He replied to someone's tweet half an hour ago...


Perhaps Gibbons has become unstuck in time, and exists outside of normal causality.

I had no idea that Logan was already out on disc; I think I might pick it up after work and do a double feature with Shane tonight. After seeing how trivial the rest of the X-Men film universe has become over the last few movies (exception for Deadpool, which exists to be silly), it was great to see Jackman, Stewart, and company putting the franchise to rest with something that resonated with my evolving fan-relationship to X-Men in such an affirming and transcendent way.
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:51 AM on May 26, 2017


Oh, and speaking of Logan, I've started watching it in the "Noir" (B&W) version, and it really does work quite well. Stewart, in particular, looks ancient in B&W.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:04 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


I've long wanted a superhero/supernatural movie to end with its chosen one lead defeating the Big Bad via some completely quotidian, utterly human way. Like "I have all these magical powers but the best part is that I get to destroy using you via the most insultingly pedestrian way possible." Like "I could kill you, supervillain, with my laser fingers in this epic battle. But instead, I'm turning you over to the IRS! And I'm releasing your masterplan to destroy the world on Twitter so people can see how stupid it is!"
posted by thivaia at 7:15 AM on May 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


The First Guardians of the Galaxy sort of ended that way, with the heroes defeating the villain through the power of dance and holding hands.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:19 AM on May 26, 2017 [9 favorites]


It certainly wasn't deconstructing the superhero film genre the same way Watchmen deconstructed silver and bronze age comics.

A proper Watchmen film wouldn't just be all the things that are in the book, but do for comic book films what the book did for comic book books.
posted by beerperson at 7:42 AM on May 26, 2017 [7 favorites]


The First Guardians of the Galaxy sort of ended that way, with the heroes defeating the villain through the power of dance and holding hands.

Considering that the movie opened with Quill's greatest regret (failing to take his mother's hand as she dies), the end where they hold hands is incredibly charming. That movie had way more heart than expected.
posted by Groundhog Week at 7:47 AM on May 26, 2017 [11 favorites]


I think that's the most important part of the reaffirmation thing, really. It's all well and good for the reaffirmation to be "aw, come on, camp is fun!" but the ones that really stick the landing are the ones that are not embarrassed by sentiment or the concept of altruistic heroism. The current comics movies that have failed most horribly are the ones that are drowning in that embarrassment. Guardians has a bunch of con artists and killers save the galaxy by holding hands. The last Star Trek wins the day through the power of Art and Togetherness. Logan ends with one of comicdom's more cynical and violent heroes tearing himself apart for a little girl that he loves. And also has Patrick Stewart saying "fuck" a lot. That's good too.
posted by middleclasstool at 7:59 AM on May 26, 2017 [9 favorites]


I have little interest in superhero films but a lot of interest in how genres develop, so this was a good thing to watch. Thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 8:33 AM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


I think that's the most important part of the reaffirmation thing, really. It's all well and good for the reaffirmation to be "aw, come on, camp is fun!" but the ones that really stick the landing are the ones that are not embarrassed by sentiment or the concept of altruistic heroism.

What's especially sad about this statement is that the first Christopher Reeve Superman film showed the way almost 40 years ago.
posted by Gelatin at 8:46 AM on May 26, 2017 [6 favorites]


Yeah, I didn't mean for that to sound as snarky as it did; I liked Guardians, in large part because it was more character driven and took itself less seriously than most superhero movies do. My favourite part of the entire movie was Ronan shouting "WHAT are you DOING???" (his character seemed simultaneously genuinely baffled and angry that the gravitas of his moment of triumph was being ruined) at Quill as he danced, because the scene gently poked fun at the ridiculousness of superhero movies while also moving the plot along in a way that was internally consistent with the tone of the rest of the film.
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:52 AM on May 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


A proper Watchmen film wouldn't just be all the things that are in the book, but do for comic book films what the book did for comic book books.

You mean work together with a story about Batman called Dark Knight to unleash a decades-long wave of grimdark ultraviolent superhero movies by and for people who thought Rorschach was just the coolest badass ever? Like Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and Suicide Squad? It looks to me like the Watchmen film accomplished exactly the same thing as the comic book did.
posted by straight at 8:54 AM on May 26, 2017 [10 favorites]


I hope the superhero films transition to science fiction films. With the coming wave of genetic manipulation, there's a lot that could be said and speculated about the present and the future.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:57 AM on May 26, 2017


I've long wanted a superhero/supernatural movie to end with its chosen one lead defeating the Big Bad via some completely quotidian, utterly human way.

There's a Grant Morrison Superman story that more of less fills that bill. From CBR's discussion of Final Crisis: "Darkseid’s incorporeal form taunts Superman, saying 'It is over,' as 'the walls are coming down' around him. But since Darkseid is nothing more than a vibration, Superman knows how to dispose of him. 'Everything’s just vibrations, really,' says Superman. 'And counter vibrations cancel them out.' Superman sings, and Darkseid is gone."
posted by Paul Slade at 9:08 AM on May 26, 2017


> defeating the Big Bad via some completely quotidian, utterly human way.

"I'm glad you changed your last name, you son of a bitch."
posted by RobotHero at 9:13 AM on May 26, 2017 [4 favorites]


I've long wanted a superhero/supernatural movie to end with its chosen one lead defeating the Big Bad via some completely quotidian, utterly human way.

Christopher Reeves' Superman 2. He has to lose the battle to defeat the villains.
posted by Billiken at 10:02 AM on May 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


defeating the Big Bad via some completely quotidian, utterly human way.

Does the ending to Jessica Jones Season 1 count? Not to spoil anything but I think JJ uses a tactic common to ordinary women.
posted by CMcG at 10:03 AM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


And I have heard someone cite Shane as a bridge between the classic westerns and the spaghetti westerns, which seems noteworthy if we're talking about how a genre can transform.
posted by RobotHero at 10:18 AM on May 26, 2017


You mean work together with a story about Batman called Dark Knight to unleash a decades-long wave of grimdark ultraviolent superhero movies by and for people who thought Rorschach was just the coolest badass ever? Like Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and Suicide Squad?

no
posted by beerperson at 10:28 AM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


MetaFilter: saying "fuck" a lot. That's good too.
posted by hippybear at 10:30 AM on May 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


I am not normally someone who raves about superhero movies, but I really, really liked Logan so this an A+ conversation topic. That was also a very interesting essay and it could stand as its own FPP. As a big fan of 70's films in particular, I was impressed by the last few sentences; the author seemed to have a pretty clear view of things.

The video says that Logan is a result of the public's exhaustion with superhero films, and I'm not sure whether I disagree with that, or just don't understand what he's saying. The story for the film was written by the director, James Mangold--whose work I have adored almost without exception since Heavy--and while he has made films about cynicism, he is not a cynical filmmaker, and he doesn't just make movies based on audience demand. He has been forthcoming in interviews about Logan being the result of him just wanting to tell a dramatic, adult story about Wolverine. I feel like maybe that part of the video was written with a more studio-centered idea of filmmaking in mind, when the writers for Logan were actually able to tell the story the way they wanted to with "absolutely no interference."

Because it is a society and not just a single individual that is corrupt, the official machinery of law enforcement is unable to bring the guilty to justice. The hard-boiled detective must decide for himself what kind of justice can be accomplished in the ambiguous urban world of modern America, and he must, in many instances, undertake to see this justice through, himself.

The video skipped right over cop movies, but this function the essay describes was served by westerns, then cop movies, and now superhero movies, right? The great power/great responsibility thing is true for all these genres. One of the things I loved about Logan is that while it is obviously indebted to Shane and other westerns, it also seems to ask questions that are more commonly visited in horror and science fiction. What if you can't control your own lethal powers? If you can't even remember everything you've done anymore, what does it mean? What do you retain? These questions don't even recall other superhero films to me--it's stuff like Akira, Shin Godzilla, The Man from Earth, Near Dark, and American Werewolf in London or Bad Moon.

The video asks whether we are ready to demythologize superhero films, and I say no. I was impressed with how shockingly bloody and dark this film was, but it left younger mutants alive, free, and righteous at the end, and that counts for plenty. I've read that there was originally going to be a sequence near the beginning of the film in which you saw the Westchester incident, so that the audience would know precisely what is tearing Xavier apart in this film; they decided to cut that out because it redefined Logan as an X-Men story instead of a story simply about the characters you see. I think it felt clear that they wanted this film to be small in that way, to be about people. Hollywood may stop making so many superhero movies... eventually... but I think some other concept of a person-in-power will need to supplant it in the collective consciousness.

The essay mentions the concept of genres becoming creatively exhausted, and I'm not sure that really happens. Many genres have been "done to death," but you can't really kill them, because our frames of reference are constantly changing, so you can return to old concepts to tell new stories. I'm sure that long after we think superhero movies are done, someone will write one that reframes them completely, and maybe uses the ideas more meaningfully than anyone has before. Late entries into old genres--such as Seven Samurai or Unforgiven--are often most rewarding.
posted by heatvision at 12:48 PM on May 26, 2017 [7 favorites]


Setting Logan aside for a moment, it is interesting to cite Watchmen in this context. It is obvious when you watch that film, and especially true of the extended version, that its creators have a deep reverence for the source material with the film's slavish devotion to the production design, narrative & dialogue of the comic. However, it is very noticeable that it is missing a vital part of the source material’s soul and raison d'etre. Something that I think audiences picked up on, whether or consciously or not.

While it is true you can read Watchmen as a superhero comic, yet another grim adult super hero romp, but it is clear in the text that it is a commentary on superheroes and in fact I think it is exactly a creative work that reflects the idea conveyed in John G. Cawelti's essay above – it was a cultural event of its day where “comics grew up”; Moore & Gibbons subverted the genre to give us something much more mature and ambitious. So to turn a film adaptation of the Watchmen comic, an intertextual work which comments on its medium while also reveling in it, into a grim & violent soap opera with capes misses the point of the book. The film’s devotion to the literal text and unquestioning seriousness comes off as camp as opposed to thought provoking or even enjoyable. And audiences for the most part stayed away because of it.

A better tact to take would have been to attempt to do the same thing that the Watchmen did for comics but instead to do it for movies, to at least get the spirit of the book right if not the narrative. A Herculean task at any point in time but especially in 2009 when I’d argue audiences weren't ready for that kind of reflection in their superhero genre films – Dark Knight & Iron Man were only the year before and X-Men Origins: Wolverine was only a couple months away. Audiences I think are required to understand a genre before it can be subverted. We couldn't have say Scream before we had any of the Slasher films of the 80s for instance. So superhero movies hadn't saturated the mainstream of 2009, though the relatively conventional but successful Dark Knight and Iron Man showed that audiences were hungry for the genre. But by 2017, the huge buffet of super hero films & television has now mainstreamed the genre. Audiences understand the genre better than in 2009. As a result of that understanding and desire for broader & more interesting takes on the genre, films like Logan or Deadpool or even Guardians of the Galaxy can find a wide audience.
posted by Ashwagandha at 1:12 PM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


I hope the superhero films transition to science fiction films. With the coming wave of genetic manipulation, there's a lot that could be said and speculated about the present and the future.

AV Club says that the New Mutants movie will be a horror flick.
posted by middleclasstool at 1:16 PM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


Oooh, that's interesting. Hopefully they'll be reaching back to the Bill Sienkiewicz era for inspiration.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:42 PM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


(Just wanted to express disappointment that the material credited to "Nerdwriter" concerning an essay, film, and writing was presented as a video. Obviously we are long past the need to flag YT and vlogger posts based on presentation media, so no opprobrium intended toward OP. But having successfully avoided Nerdwriter video content in the past by being able to infer that the presenter relies primarily on time-motion media to present content I was taken unawares. Duly noted; URL examination moved up a few notches in my clickthrough criteria. The Nerdwriter clearly writes as a step in the development of the material and I applaud the cultural identification as a nerd; but, geez, Nerdvideocommenter would be a more accurate and descriptive handle. Less appealing, certainly. Water under the bridge, I suppose.)
posted by mwhybark at 3:46 PM on May 26, 2017


Probably Spoilers for a movie that's been out for a while.

To add the the comments earlier about "superhero wins by not using his super power but being all human and stuff" - I would add Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier. There is the full on superhero fight and stuff, but when Bucky ends up trapped under a fallen girder, Cap goes and lifts the girder off him. And immediately Bucky goes and starts fighting again, and Cap just gives up. He accomplished his mission, no need to fight anymore, and Bucky is still his best friend, no matter what. "I'm with you until the end of the line," was the line I think. And it's over. No more fighting. Bucky even pulls the unconscious Cap from the water and leaves him on the shore and then just leaves. That was some seriously powerful writing and directing in my opinion.

I do really appreciate that this review and commentary do treat movies and the stories in movies as our modern myths. I've always said that in 1000 years, archeologists from the future from some new and distance culture will rediscover our movies and call it our religion and pantheon of heroes and gods.
posted by daq at 3:54 PM on May 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


You mean work together with a story about Batman called Dark Knight to unleash a decades-long wave of grimdark ultraviolent superhero movies by and for people who thought Rorschach was just the coolest badass ever? Like Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and Suicide Squad?

That's not a very useful description either of the comics or of the movies that followed them. Alan Moore has publically disavowed the grimdark trend, and went to some pains to convert Rob Liefeld's Supreme, a would-be grimdark version of Superman, into an extended pastiche/homage of Silver Age Superman. Frank Miller, on the other hand, may have doubled down on the grimdark, repeatedly, but he's been long regarded as basically having become a parody of himself. Just looking at Batman, you've got everything from Joel Schumacher's over-the-top, campy version, to Christopher Nolan's trilogy, which takes some plot points from Miller (as well as others) but is considerably more thoughtful and nuanced, to the various animated series, which I'm not as familiar with but by all accounts are quite good, and not really in a grimdark way. (The adaptation of The Killing Joke was not considered great, but that's yet another thing that Alan Moore has publicly regretted doing in the original.)

The only real solid connection between TDKR and Watchmen and the movies, then, is with Zach Snyder, whose "decades-long wave" has extended thus far to about four years, between Man of Steel and BvS. You could also count Justice League, but since Snyder has stepped away from it following a recent personal tragedy, there's been some talk that this may be the excuse that Warner Bros. needs to edge him out of the franchise in any sort of direct creative capacity, since his movies are not only very poorly reviewed but haven't been making them as much money as they possibly could. He's obviously a fan of grimdark, but only in its crudest, most derivative form, the kind that's been used by countless comics creators (such as the aforementioned Liefeld) who fall back on the excuse that "well, TDKR and Watchmen did it" without really understanding the number of levels that they worked on.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:43 PM on May 26, 2017


I'm a little loopy and jet-lagged right now, but if I remember that video correctly, it's sort of saying that LA Confidential is in a sense the Wild Bunch of cop movies. Which seems very right and a connection I hadn't noticed before. (I just hope that it still makes sense when I've had a chance to get some sleep.)
posted by Zonker at 7:37 PM on May 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


That's not a very useful description either of the comics or of the movies that followed them. Alan Moore has publically disavowed the grimdark trend,

While I was mostly joking about the equivalent legacies of the Watchmen movie and comic (for one thing, I think the darker tone of DC movies is built entirely on the success of Nolan's Batman movies; Snyder's Watchmen wasn't successful enough to get studios wanting to follow it), I kind of wonder if the grimdark trend in comics wasn't an indication that Gibbons & Moore's Watchmen was something of an artistic failure. From the reaction of the industry and a lot of readers, Moore might as well have been celebrating and fetishizing Rorschach just as much as Snyder did. I guess it's sort of the "there's no such thing as an anti-war movie" dilemma.
posted by straight at 10:33 AM on May 27, 2017 [1 favorite]


I kind of wonder if the grimdark trend in comics wasn't an indication that Gibbons & Moore's Watchmen was something of an artistic failure.

Only if you're conflating "art" with "an unambiguously didactic exercise that leaves absolutely no doubt as to the author's intentions"; I've seen examples of the latter, and they are the sort of thing for which TVTropes came up with the entry "Anvilicious". And, for that matter, I don't think that Moore was being particularly subtle in what he thought of Rorschach, the apparent admiration of Snyder (and Ted Cruz) notwithstanding.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:04 PM on May 27, 2017


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