Post by Gary Ancheta on Apr 19, 2011 15:53:01 GMT -5
Some thoughts on Superheroes:
1. Deconstructionism and Superheroes: If we're really going to look at "when did the tone shift in comics movies?" I think you have start earlier than X-Men. The Batman series in 1989 by Tim Burton could easily be seen as the first "deconstruction" of the genre where many of the elements were taken from Alan Moore's "Killing Joke" and Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" for the story. What is interesting about this story is that while it does take the strangely neo-fascist parts of Miller's Dark Knight Returns and the self-awareness of the Joker from the Killing Joke, a large part of the undercurrent of the story is really deconstructed by Prince and the NPG's songs that actively dismiss and critique what happens in the movie. It questions what Batman is doing and even "Bat-Dance" questions the criminal justice system and the electric chair.
People easily dismiss this outright as just being goofy 80s stuff "with no wire-work and a stiff Batman", but it really does set the Derridian tone. X-Men really doesn't do that because even though it takes itself seriously, it never actively questions its agenda of being superheroes. Its just allegorical (i.e. being a Mutant = Minority). In Grant Morrison's X-Men, he actively questions why they're superheroes and does a nice deconstruction of why these new hatreds are repackaged older hatreds and why the X-Men are more like EMS workers instead of Superheroes.
2. The main reason why there are a plethora of Superhero movies is two-fold. #1 A large group of people who grew up with comics are now at a position to actively push through comic texts because there are many people who purchased comics during the 90s boom that still wanted to watch movies based on the same texts today. This is a built-in fan-base of support of 20-30 somethings. No one could draw that fanbase from the late 80s crowd when Batman started up the whole rush for superhero movies. It took the comics boom of the 90s to show that this fanbase (Generation X) could be profitable.
Furthermore, technology has caught up with audience expectations. If you remember the movies that came in the wake of Batman (Dick Tracy and The Rocketeer), both movies had very limited special effects and stars that had very limited physicality. Since comic books portray very physical, very fit people shooting lazer blasts or performing feats of amazing strength and agility, it would have been very tough to portray the X-Men with just blue screen, stuntmen and special effects and get the same "bang" that the comic books could give you. If there is any doubt, take a look at some of the "superhero group" movies of the late 80s/early 90s like the Justice League, The Roger Corman's Fantastic Four, or Generation X. Horrible and very visually limiting.
3) Superman (as well as the genre of superhero comics) comes from very Jewish roots. Many comic artists were set designers for Jewish theaters, on of the main pushes by FDR to create jobs for the many depression-era kids who were just becoming men after WW1. Many writers (like Stan Lee) were Jewish actors working the Shakespeare in the Park. Almost all of them were urban youth because the pulps and comic strips were hiring Jewish kids and weren't hung up on ethnic background like other jobs. Siegel and Shuster created Superman as this "modern hercules" that was sort of a homage to great strips like Flash Gordon or pulps like Doc Savage, but subsequent Jewish writers and artists made Superman more of a response to the Nazi Superman by making Superman a Moses-like figure as well as an FDR-like figure.
What was interesting in the development of Superheroes was Mort Weisinger who was the jerk editor of Superman. He was hated in the business, but he put out best-selling Superman comics during his tenure. Later, it was revealed that he used the Superman line as a way to talk about Jewish Diaspora and his life as an American. You have periods where Superman would spend extended periods of time on Krypton learning about his father and mother and his Kryptonian (Jewish) heritage.
What Superheroes represent is this sort of "dual heritage." Many characters have two personas...the one persona that interacts with people on the subway and the private persona that has secret heritages or secret lifestyles. Superman is the model because he shows you (especially as a child) how to navigate between your Public Persona (Clark Kent), your Historical Persona (Kal-el) and your Lifestyle Persona (Superman). Every superhero story is derived from that conceit of balancing these different lives that only modern convenience in America affords us. No other country, up until then, has had to deal with these sort of multiple personas in modern life.
4) Captain America and American Politics: Captain America is an interesting case because I always believed he always works as a political critic during times of great economic and cultural stress. When Nixon resigned, there was a storyline where Captain America witnesses the president of the Marvel Universe shoot himself in the head for being a leader of the Marvel equivalent of the KKK, causing Captain America to resign his commission as Captain America and rode around the US on a motorcycle under the name Nomad, man without a country. When Reagan was elected, Captain America was forced to give up his shield and costume when he refused to take orders from the government. His equipment was given to someone who was a soldier that was suffering PTSD, who subsequently went nuts. After 911, Captain America has given up his Shield and Costume to help workers dig people out of the wreckage of the Twin Towers. He is shaken out of his reverie by Nick Fury and sent to tackle homeland terrorists. Even today, Captain America is still being challenged by Tea Party-style government extremists and the things that he has done in his own past that cast a bad light on what he believes today.
5) Presidential Fitness and Superheroes. Kennedy was a big proponent of personal fitness and he asked comic companies to put together stories to really push his Presidential Fitness initiative. Marvel put together a story with Captain America and personal fitness. Superman actually included Kennedy in the story about fitness. Both stories came out after Kennedy's assasination and both were published in honor of JFK.
6) On Batman and the Campy 60s. Batman was pushed out of the more violent tendancies of the characters when Superman became popular in the 1940s. Now that National Publications was DC Comics and had a popular character in a hit TV program, they needed to make sure that their comics characters adhered to the standards of Radio Broadcasting. They introduced Robin to "lighten" the Batman character and give him a sidekick that the kids could relate to. Once the comics code and the Wertham comic Burnings started up in the 1950s, DC writers were very restricted in what they could create. You couldn't have stuff like Crime or Violence as titles for stories, or stories where the villain won or any point where children were put in danger. It really compromised comics superhero writers so much that superheroes lost favor to romance and cowboy stories that gained and held ground in the comics genre well into the early 1960s. The only DC titles that remained part of the mix were Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, whose stories were strangely absurd and whose art was, putting it lightly, very trippy.
The 1960s had a revival of the Superhero genre, mostly because of Marvel Comics who, at their last gasp, introduced Spiderman into their dying publication. This revitalized the superhero line by creating superheroes that weren't necessarily superheroes. Spiderman donned on a wrestler's mask and was burdoned by his power. Thor was a god. The Fantastic Four were scientists and adventurers. Iron Man was a crippled man. The Hulk was a tragic Nuclear Frankenstein.
As a reaction, Batman was sort of reconstructed as this very Pop-styled character...the zenith being when Batman became a television show. The 1960s also had the "Mod" Wonder Woman and Lois Lane becoming a Black Woman. While many people deride this version, I think something is lost by outright rejecting this version of Batman. This was one of the first comic book characters to gain huge popularity in the 1960s through the TV Show and its fashion and campiness reflected the time as well as the place it was written (NY in the 60s).
When the 70s rolled around, Batman changed but I think this is more due to the populartiy of James Bond. The Batman of the 1970s battled Ras Al Ghul and fought with his mind as well as his fists. This was a very Ian Flemming Pulp Batman, and I think that, over the reasoning to make him "less like the TV show", this was the reason why Batman became more of the "detective" instead of the "batusi guy."
Batman changed again in the 1980s, but that can be attirbuted to Frank Miller's interpretation of Batman. In The Dark Knight Returns, Miller recreates Batman as a reaction to Reaganomics, Dirty Harry Movies, Taxi Driver, and New York of the late 70s. Miller's mode for writing Batman was treating a Batman like a Dirty Harry style cop that was reacting to PTSD.
In each case, what brought Batman to the forefront was his reaction current media trends rather than trying to "darken" or "lighten" Batman.
9) Captain America is an american patriot. Tony Stark is a futurist. Hulk is an anti-hero. Thor is somewhat of a fascist (meaning that he believes in stength in numbers). These characters are meant to be contradicting because Stan Lee always aimed Marvel as this comic line where the heroes have disagreements. Stan Lee was a Shakespearean Actor so he always brings in Shakespearean themes and ideas into Marvel Comics.
X-Men are an interesting case. Professor X = MLK Jr. and Magneto = Malcolm X is a more recent development. The original impteus of the X-Men vs. Magneto is more about the generation gap (Magento is much older than the X-Men, while Professor X is portrayed in the original stories as only slightly older). You can tell in the early stories where they're basically hanging out in Greenwich Village with a Doiby Gillis look-a-like reading beat poetry. This shifts into the more racial allegory when we get the "All New, All different" X-Men with characters from their newer markets (Banshee = Scotland, Storm = Africa, Sunfire = Japan, WOlverine = Canada) in the 1970s. In the 1980s, everyone became punks in leather vs. the older establishment Hellfire Club. In the 1990s, it became Baby Boomers vs. Generation X, with lots of characters on the run and dismissing a lot of the rules of the Baby Boomers. In the 00s, it became a book about multiculturalism and the implosion and fear of multiculturalism after 9-11 with a lot of gay allegories too (most notably now because the X-Men lived for a while in the 00s in San Francisco).
Peter Parker isn't necessarily anti-establishment. Peter Parker is basically a nice Jewish Boy with a very Jewish mother taking care of him. This is how Stan Lee Wrote him and his Aunt May. This is how Brian Bendis now writes him in Ultimate Spiderman. And I think this is how Sam Raimi envisioned Peter for the big screen (he's jewish too). Peter's not socially conservative, he's just a good mensch.
10) I think Tim Burton's Batman is just another type of Tim BUrton character. Tim Burton's Batman has basically a Bruce Wayne that is out of touch and cannot quite understand how people interact, much like Edward Scissorhands. Christopher Nolan's Batman is a man-child who does not who he is and has the world define him until he actually makes a choice and defines the world through drastic means. This is also the main characters in Inception and in Memento. I think the Superhero movies are more of a reflection of the director rather than the source material.
11) The strength of comics is that they are immediate. You didn't have to wait 10 months so that 24 could relate to you a life in a post-911 world. Comics have to come out monthly so their narrative response can happen that next month. The weakness of comics is that there are certain things on the page (like dialogue or closeup shots) that are specific for a book format and which draw you to read the page. When you place that stuff on the big screen, it looks like the actors don't know where they're looking and the dialogue is wooden and stiff. Nolan had it right in adapting the story rather than just taking stills from the comics and putting it up on the big screen.
I'm sorry about the very long response. I didn't mean to write so much but I'm very passionate about the superhero genre (something I've researched in length of my dissertation) and in the discussion that is Battleship Pretension.
- Gary Ancheta
1. Deconstructionism and Superheroes: If we're really going to look at "when did the tone shift in comics movies?" I think you have start earlier than X-Men. The Batman series in 1989 by Tim Burton could easily be seen as the first "deconstruction" of the genre where many of the elements were taken from Alan Moore's "Killing Joke" and Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" for the story. What is interesting about this story is that while it does take the strangely neo-fascist parts of Miller's Dark Knight Returns and the self-awareness of the Joker from the Killing Joke, a large part of the undercurrent of the story is really deconstructed by Prince and the NPG's songs that actively dismiss and critique what happens in the movie. It questions what Batman is doing and even "Bat-Dance" questions the criminal justice system and the electric chair.
People easily dismiss this outright as just being goofy 80s stuff "with no wire-work and a stiff Batman", but it really does set the Derridian tone. X-Men really doesn't do that because even though it takes itself seriously, it never actively questions its agenda of being superheroes. Its just allegorical (i.e. being a Mutant = Minority). In Grant Morrison's X-Men, he actively questions why they're superheroes and does a nice deconstruction of why these new hatreds are repackaged older hatreds and why the X-Men are more like EMS workers instead of Superheroes.
2. The main reason why there are a plethora of Superhero movies is two-fold. #1 A large group of people who grew up with comics are now at a position to actively push through comic texts because there are many people who purchased comics during the 90s boom that still wanted to watch movies based on the same texts today. This is a built-in fan-base of support of 20-30 somethings. No one could draw that fanbase from the late 80s crowd when Batman started up the whole rush for superhero movies. It took the comics boom of the 90s to show that this fanbase (Generation X) could be profitable.
Furthermore, technology has caught up with audience expectations. If you remember the movies that came in the wake of Batman (Dick Tracy and The Rocketeer), both movies had very limited special effects and stars that had very limited physicality. Since comic books portray very physical, very fit people shooting lazer blasts or performing feats of amazing strength and agility, it would have been very tough to portray the X-Men with just blue screen, stuntmen and special effects and get the same "bang" that the comic books could give you. If there is any doubt, take a look at some of the "superhero group" movies of the late 80s/early 90s like the Justice League, The Roger Corman's Fantastic Four, or Generation X. Horrible and very visually limiting.
3) Superman (as well as the genre of superhero comics) comes from very Jewish roots. Many comic artists were set designers for Jewish theaters, on of the main pushes by FDR to create jobs for the many depression-era kids who were just becoming men after WW1. Many writers (like Stan Lee) were Jewish actors working the Shakespeare in the Park. Almost all of them were urban youth because the pulps and comic strips were hiring Jewish kids and weren't hung up on ethnic background like other jobs. Siegel and Shuster created Superman as this "modern hercules" that was sort of a homage to great strips like Flash Gordon or pulps like Doc Savage, but subsequent Jewish writers and artists made Superman more of a response to the Nazi Superman by making Superman a Moses-like figure as well as an FDR-like figure.
What was interesting in the development of Superheroes was Mort Weisinger who was the jerk editor of Superman. He was hated in the business, but he put out best-selling Superman comics during his tenure. Later, it was revealed that he used the Superman line as a way to talk about Jewish Diaspora and his life as an American. You have periods where Superman would spend extended periods of time on Krypton learning about his father and mother and his Kryptonian (Jewish) heritage.
What Superheroes represent is this sort of "dual heritage." Many characters have two personas...the one persona that interacts with people on the subway and the private persona that has secret heritages or secret lifestyles. Superman is the model because he shows you (especially as a child) how to navigate between your Public Persona (Clark Kent), your Historical Persona (Kal-el) and your Lifestyle Persona (Superman). Every superhero story is derived from that conceit of balancing these different lives that only modern convenience in America affords us. No other country, up until then, has had to deal with these sort of multiple personas in modern life.
4) Captain America and American Politics: Captain America is an interesting case because I always believed he always works as a political critic during times of great economic and cultural stress. When Nixon resigned, there was a storyline where Captain America witnesses the president of the Marvel Universe shoot himself in the head for being a leader of the Marvel equivalent of the KKK, causing Captain America to resign his commission as Captain America and rode around the US on a motorcycle under the name Nomad, man without a country. When Reagan was elected, Captain America was forced to give up his shield and costume when he refused to take orders from the government. His equipment was given to someone who was a soldier that was suffering PTSD, who subsequently went nuts. After 911, Captain America has given up his Shield and Costume to help workers dig people out of the wreckage of the Twin Towers. He is shaken out of his reverie by Nick Fury and sent to tackle homeland terrorists. Even today, Captain America is still being challenged by Tea Party-style government extremists and the things that he has done in his own past that cast a bad light on what he believes today.
5) Presidential Fitness and Superheroes. Kennedy was a big proponent of personal fitness and he asked comic companies to put together stories to really push his Presidential Fitness initiative. Marvel put together a story with Captain America and personal fitness. Superman actually included Kennedy in the story about fitness. Both stories came out after Kennedy's assasination and both were published in honor of JFK.
6) On Batman and the Campy 60s. Batman was pushed out of the more violent tendancies of the characters when Superman became popular in the 1940s. Now that National Publications was DC Comics and had a popular character in a hit TV program, they needed to make sure that their comics characters adhered to the standards of Radio Broadcasting. They introduced Robin to "lighten" the Batman character and give him a sidekick that the kids could relate to. Once the comics code and the Wertham comic Burnings started up in the 1950s, DC writers were very restricted in what they could create. You couldn't have stuff like Crime or Violence as titles for stories, or stories where the villain won or any point where children were put in danger. It really compromised comics superhero writers so much that superheroes lost favor to romance and cowboy stories that gained and held ground in the comics genre well into the early 1960s. The only DC titles that remained part of the mix were Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, whose stories were strangely absurd and whose art was, putting it lightly, very trippy.
The 1960s had a revival of the Superhero genre, mostly because of Marvel Comics who, at their last gasp, introduced Spiderman into their dying publication. This revitalized the superhero line by creating superheroes that weren't necessarily superheroes. Spiderman donned on a wrestler's mask and was burdoned by his power. Thor was a god. The Fantastic Four were scientists and adventurers. Iron Man was a crippled man. The Hulk was a tragic Nuclear Frankenstein.
As a reaction, Batman was sort of reconstructed as this very Pop-styled character...the zenith being when Batman became a television show. The 1960s also had the "Mod" Wonder Woman and Lois Lane becoming a Black Woman. While many people deride this version, I think something is lost by outright rejecting this version of Batman. This was one of the first comic book characters to gain huge popularity in the 1960s through the TV Show and its fashion and campiness reflected the time as well as the place it was written (NY in the 60s).
When the 70s rolled around, Batman changed but I think this is more due to the populartiy of James Bond. The Batman of the 1970s battled Ras Al Ghul and fought with his mind as well as his fists. This was a very Ian Flemming Pulp Batman, and I think that, over the reasoning to make him "less like the TV show", this was the reason why Batman became more of the "detective" instead of the "batusi guy."
Batman changed again in the 1980s, but that can be attirbuted to Frank Miller's interpretation of Batman. In The Dark Knight Returns, Miller recreates Batman as a reaction to Reaganomics, Dirty Harry Movies, Taxi Driver, and New York of the late 70s. Miller's mode for writing Batman was treating a Batman like a Dirty Harry style cop that was reacting to PTSD.
In each case, what brought Batman to the forefront was his reaction current media trends rather than trying to "darken" or "lighten" Batman.
9) Captain America is an american patriot. Tony Stark is a futurist. Hulk is an anti-hero. Thor is somewhat of a fascist (meaning that he believes in stength in numbers). These characters are meant to be contradicting because Stan Lee always aimed Marvel as this comic line where the heroes have disagreements. Stan Lee was a Shakespearean Actor so he always brings in Shakespearean themes and ideas into Marvel Comics.
X-Men are an interesting case. Professor X = MLK Jr. and Magneto = Malcolm X is a more recent development. The original impteus of the X-Men vs. Magneto is more about the generation gap (Magento is much older than the X-Men, while Professor X is portrayed in the original stories as only slightly older). You can tell in the early stories where they're basically hanging out in Greenwich Village with a Doiby Gillis look-a-like reading beat poetry. This shifts into the more racial allegory when we get the "All New, All different" X-Men with characters from their newer markets (Banshee = Scotland, Storm = Africa, Sunfire = Japan, WOlverine = Canada) in the 1970s. In the 1980s, everyone became punks in leather vs. the older establishment Hellfire Club. In the 1990s, it became Baby Boomers vs. Generation X, with lots of characters on the run and dismissing a lot of the rules of the Baby Boomers. In the 00s, it became a book about multiculturalism and the implosion and fear of multiculturalism after 9-11 with a lot of gay allegories too (most notably now because the X-Men lived for a while in the 00s in San Francisco).
Peter Parker isn't necessarily anti-establishment. Peter Parker is basically a nice Jewish Boy with a very Jewish mother taking care of him. This is how Stan Lee Wrote him and his Aunt May. This is how Brian Bendis now writes him in Ultimate Spiderman. And I think this is how Sam Raimi envisioned Peter for the big screen (he's jewish too). Peter's not socially conservative, he's just a good mensch.
10) I think Tim Burton's Batman is just another type of Tim BUrton character. Tim Burton's Batman has basically a Bruce Wayne that is out of touch and cannot quite understand how people interact, much like Edward Scissorhands. Christopher Nolan's Batman is a man-child who does not who he is and has the world define him until he actually makes a choice and defines the world through drastic means. This is also the main characters in Inception and in Memento. I think the Superhero movies are more of a reflection of the director rather than the source material.
11) The strength of comics is that they are immediate. You didn't have to wait 10 months so that 24 could relate to you a life in a post-911 world. Comics have to come out monthly so their narrative response can happen that next month. The weakness of comics is that there are certain things on the page (like dialogue or closeup shots) that are specific for a book format and which draw you to read the page. When you place that stuff on the big screen, it looks like the actors don't know where they're looking and the dialogue is wooden and stiff. Nolan had it right in adapting the story rather than just taking stills from the comics and putting it up on the big screen.
I'm sorry about the very long response. I didn't mean to write so much but I'm very passionate about the superhero genre (something I've researched in length of my dissertation) and in the discussion that is Battleship Pretension.
- Gary Ancheta
