Academic Cinematic in Book Seven: Reconstruction 2020

Perhaps this would be best placed in the intellectual book that I don’t write in much anymore, but I feel that this is less purely academic and more hobby-academic so why not place it here? That being said, I’m less of a comic book whiz than Pennyworth in most respects. So if he objects or clarifies any of the comic book points, I’d probably listen to him over me!

TOPIC 1

Whether you believe that entertainment reflects life or shapes it, the necessary truth of the modern age is that we cannot escape the reality that “entertainment is important.” You can read a million think pieces saying otherwise but we need only look around us with a dispassionate perspective to see that the opposite is true. A Reality TV Show Host is President of the United States. A famously idiotic but media-grabbing oaf is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. A comedian is President of Ukraine. Entertainers (comedians, actors, “influencers”) helped to raise more money for Australia than corporations, CEOs, and governments. And despite China’s brutal human rights record and practice of civilian torture and execution… if China doesn’t like something in the entertainment sphere… the entertainment sphere trips over itself to appease them. Looking at you Disney and Blizzard!

But even beyond that, we should understand that entertainment has value and is important. The films, television shows, and games that we create tend to represent us to the world. Likewise, the films, television shows, and games that other countries enjoy build our very expectations and stereotypes of other countries. For most of the people in the United States, the picture in their head when they hear the name of most foreign countries is the picture placed there by some form of entertainment. So to argue that entertainment is unimportant is naive at best.

I submit, however, that in these modern times where our social circles are scattered to the 7 continents and our reach is more tied to our High Speed Connections than to our face to face interactions, entertainment becomes even more important than we may still realize. In some fashion, our entertainment has always shaped some of our perceptions of social norms and the status quo. It is in this fashion that I would like to hope for our entertainment to be… not more hopeful but more positive.

I look primarily to our “regular programming” which often seeks to create “tension and drama” from human interaction. As a wonderful punching bag, I point to a show like The Big Bang Theory. The drama of the series seemed to stem largely from the main characters antagonizing each other. Penny and Leonard seemed to downright hate one another. Sheldon’s entire schtick was “mock the super nerdy and annoyingly socially incompetent one.” And the two tag alongs? Mute Nerd and The Perv. And such “eat each other” humor marks sitcoms throughout. Everybody Loves Raymond. Ray was a terrible husband but Debra was outright abusive. Not to mention the mutually abusive and unhealthy relationship between Frank and Marie!

I appreciate that script writers would be quick to jump in and say, “Entertainment, whether drama or comedy, needs tension. All we’re doing is creating that tension for purposes of comedy and drama!” But… I’m starting to think that is a lazy argument. Imagine the dynamics of a functioning friend group or family unit. Do you honestly think that those people’s lives lack drama or tension? Honestly?! And as our social interactions become more and more “digital based”; don’t we all deserve to have entertainment where the social interactions on screen are less “antagonistic” and more “shit happens, but we overcome?!”

Maybe I’m just watching the wrong stuff. But even take a workplace situation. Co-workers getting along but their own lives can have tension that needs to be dealt with and the co-workers try to walk that line between being friends and being professional. Co-workers getting along but they have a client that is too demanding and aggressive; so they have to figure out how to manage the client while producing results. I mean… if all we’re looking for is tension, drama, and conflict… life is full of it. And it would be nice to see television shows not using “friends that turn on each other, spouses that are mean to each other, and other socially destructive tropes” as their primary source of dramatic tension.

TOPIC 2

This is where I talk about Comic Books. A topic I love but a topic that… the older I get… the weirder things get in the world.

When I was growing up… I’d like to call it the Golden Age of Comic Book Cartoons. While they weren’t all genius… Batman the Animated Series, arguably the greatest comic book cartoon of all time… came out when I was 8 years old. The X-Men animated series, arguably the second greatest comic book cartoon of all time… came out when I was 8. Spider-Man: when I was 10. Superman: when I was 12.

So along with Comic Book Storylines like “Age of Apocalypse” “Onslaught” “Mutant Genesis” and Excalibur gearing into full swing in their British location… there were great older story arcs and characters being introduced, reintroduced, or retooled. It was a fantastic time!

But the more I read X-Men and the X-Books… the more it seemed that they began to get… convoluted. Messy. Up their own ass. And this led me to going more strongly with DC Comics. Because in DC, I discovered… they had “catches” to fix these issues. Whereas Age of Apocalypse could have given the X-Men an opportunity to completely reboot and prevent some weird in-universe shenanigans… they incorporated their favorite characters from one universe into the other. As “dimensional stowaways” or “flung through time” or various other “matters of plot convenience.” Whereas DC Comics would straight up reboot everything. Golden Age to Silver Age. Infinite Earths, Crisis, Earth 2, the various multiverses. While Marvel accepted and stated there were multiverses; DC leaned in. Yes, Marvel had a “What IF!” comic to explore new ideas that were outside of canon. But DC had entire WORLDS like that. Gaslight. Red Star. A world where Super Girl has all the same abilities of Kal-El… a world where Super Girl is a shapeshifter… a world where there are NO super humans… a world where Christopher Columbus discovered Europe… a world where Lois Lane is the Kryptonian… all sorts of different iterations that can either be their own thing or interact through Crisis Events. That was MUCH BETTER to me than trying to fold reality in on itself over and over again. MUCH better than some other stupid and upsetting bullshit attempts to “reset and never be creative”… looking at you, Brand New Day!

But even DC has been bungling that a little by going to the other side of it. Flashpoint leading to New 52 was something I supported. I must say, clearly and in no uncertain terms, they did not execute New 52 well. Instead of doing a full system reboot; they tried to do a partial reboot where some comics were “at origin” and some were “five years later” and there were massive holes in the timeline where Batman had only been active for a few years but apparently had already gone through Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, and was now with Damian Wayne… and.... yeah. They tried to do something inventive and then shit the bed by refusing to change things too much. So a few years later, they pull New 52 into Rebirth. A bit of an attempt to semi-merge the pre-52 with the new 52 and create something different. Now “Doomsday Clock” isn’t exactly a new reboot as that is all directly tied into Rebirth but it still feels like they are once again trying to shift things, shake things up, make things new… like a reboot concept.

So why am I waxing about all of this? Why discuss how Marvel becomes an ouroboros of same-earth, same shit and how DC is becoming a New Worlds More Often entity?

Because I think those are two excellent examples of what is wrong in comic books and comic book movies today from different perspectives.

At the heart of it all, sadly, is BUSINESS. Some of the absolute BEST people in the industry (Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Frank Miller, Geoff Johns, Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale, Jim Lee, Alex Ross) were creative powerhouses and did work that was extraordinary and memorable and stand the test of time. But you honestly CAN’T have a “Days of Future Past” and a “Phoenix Saga” and a “House of M” back to back to back to back to back. Sometimes after everyone brushes off the rubble of surviving a time-travel Sentinel extinction-level event… you just need to have a few one offs where Juggernaut knocks down the X-Mansion or Magneto shows up to wax philosophical with Xavier or Hank McCoy develops a holo-projection device so he and Kurt Wagner can catch a movie in public. So, from this perspective… we acknowledge that in comic books there MUST be “down times” where while there is still action and fun and adventure… if every issue is a “64 issue arc crossover event involving X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force, X-Calibur, New Mutants, New Warriors, and The Defenders!” then… that is going to suck for the fans, the creative team, and really be a drag all around. So there are “down times” in the comics. Even worse, though, then “down times” is when the BUSINESS side of it all takes over. For example… lets say that Onslaught was considered a massive financial success because it focused on Wolverine’s psychological damage and losing his adamantium while also focusing on Jean Grey’s own complicated past with Charles Xavier. The Business side sees it less as a creative stroke that people were interested in… and more as a Formula that they need to duplicate for further financial success. SO now instead of leaving Wolverine and Jean in the pages of Onslaught doing their thing… they bring it over to the Wolverine stand-alone comic. Where Wolverine spends his time brooding and working on “bone claw” stuff. And they bring it over to the Jean Grey and Cyclops comic where Jean has personal asides every other page about “I love Scott, but can I trust my memories” or some shit. And thus… they take what was new, interesting, and innovative… and ground it into the fucking dirt.

MOVIE CASE IN POINT: WOLVERINE.

Don’t get me wrong. Growing up as a kid, one of my all time favorite mutants was Wolverine. Which should tell you exactly how far they took this bullshit when even I got fucking sick of Wolverine in the Cinematic Universe. Seriously. Other than the cartoon show that came out in 2009 it isn’t “Wolverine and the X-Men” it is “The X-Men”. You’re telling me that you don’t even want to discuss elements like “Blue Team” versus “Gold Team”? You’re telling me that Colossus isn’t interesting? Or that nobody wanted to spend more time with Storm? You’re telling me that we needed to devote almost ten full movies to Wolverine but most people still don’t even know who Omega Red is? C’mon!

But let’s now look at the DC model. DC has gone full tilt towards the “We need everything to be a massive cross over event” and so I’ve stopped reading DC as much, too. Before? When it was like… maybe one massive event periodically? That was cool. Each hero doing their own thing until they were needed for something bigger. Hell, DC’s original (waaaay back in the day) concept was that the heroes didn’t even share universes! It was long considered that Batman and Superman didn’t work in the same “shared earth” until they made it a business decision in the 50s (I think, my dates may be wrong). Because it avoids the New York Problem of Marvel. But Flashpoint led to the New 52… and since the New 52 needed to establish itself, they threw in several “multi-title arcs” to try to hurry through a re-establishing of the world period. And then since New 52 kind of failed… REBIRTH, requiring multi-title arcs to explain how the universe changed again so much. And then “Doomsday Clock” because we needed to explain REBIRTH so a universe-spanning multi-title arc to deal with how the universe has shifted so many times in a matter of a few years.

And let’s look at the DC Movies! Oh look… it is essentially what they are doing in film, too!

We’re going to ignore the Nolan-verse and make our own Cinematic Universe. Zack Snyder… shit fucked up Man of Steel.... shit fucked up Batman versus Superman. We’re uh… are we still doing the Justice League film? Yeah? And Snyder is doing that one, too? FUCK! Okay. Fuck. What else are we doing? Wonder Woman. Did that succeed? Yeah? Really? AWESOME… don’t have her do anything in the “modern age” though, cuz we may need to reboot Snyder’s bullshit but if Gadot is working, we don’t want to reboot her shit specifically. Wait… Aquaman worked? Fucking AQUAMAN?! Oooookay, weird. But… uh.... shit. Okay, Wonder Woman and Aquaman are okay. Reboot Gotham and Metropolis. We’ll do… fuck, we can’t do a Batman one again already. Suicide Squad. Gotham is awesome because of the villains so we’ll do that. What do you mean the movie was terrible? SERIOUSLY?! Okay, fuck it. We’ll reboot that shit too!! We’ll do a Girls of Gotham movie and pretend Suicide Squad never happened. Then we’ll do a Joker film that’ll be set in like it’s own completely different universe! Yeah, then* we can reboot Batman. Yeah, yeah. This’ll work. THEN we’ll be a match for Marvel’s Cinematic Universe.

Except, guys? Not. Because you done fucked up by not learning the secret genius of Comic Books and Movies.

Marvel did. Strangely.

Think about all 23 films. How many did you “absolutely LOVE”? Were they all “the best thing ever” or were some of them “okay to mediocre?” Were some of them, maybe, even bad? Or boring? So from that perspective… we can review the film direction much in the same way that we reviewed Marvel Comics.
(1) Genius. Like a Chris Claremont. Does something spectacular and creative that totally works.
(2) Business Side tries to make it into a formula and ruins it. (See Iron Man 1 to Iron Man 3)
(3) Business Side tries to grind a popular element into the fucking dirt (MCU had a massive over reliance on Tony Stark).
(4) But as these mis-steps naturally create the “lulls” between larger more massive moments, they provide the creative opportunity to experiment and potentially exhibit some creative genius (like Taika Waititi) who does something spectacular and creative that totally works.

In this way, the MCU creates a self-sustaining feedback loop. BOOM to Bust to BOOM. NOW… that being said? I think what they are planning for Disney Plus as far as the MCU is making the primary mistake of Marvel Comic Books. They are going to get convoluted, messy, mixed up, and like a media ouroboros of same earth, same shit, eating its own tail. BUT I could be proven wrong.

THEREFORE

… not that my opinion matters but… if I were to walk in to the Warner Brothers/DC Headquarters and tell them one way to specifically and expertly fix the shit that has become their Cinematic Universe? I would tell them to conform to the traditional DC Comic Book format and focus on arcs.

Each superhero has a trilogy of ONLY THEIR OWN CONTAINED STORY that fits a character arc format.
Superman, for example, could do a three movie arc dealing with his (1) inspiring people; (2) being considered a hero; then (3) dealing with The Elite. Hell, Superman vs. The Elite could be two movies on its own!

Batman, for example, could do a full Batman Year One bridging to The Holiday Killer story line.

These arcs would exist as independent stories that simply establish who the characters are, their universes, and who they are day to day.

As the arcs end, each film could have a separate clue/insight/alert that bridges to the larger Justice League film. And then that film would be the big One Off Everyone Needed fight. Like… maybe THAT is where you can do the Doomsday fight (since all of the League fought the beast before Superman and Doomsday effectively hit a draw). Then the Superman film arc afterwards could be “The Age of Supermen” and “The Resurrection of Superman” and “Superman versus Mongul” or something like that.

Just an idea.

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