From Unwatchable to Unbreakable

Jacob Levy offers a measured defense of Daredevil against my stale movie review grousing. He is right that the movie looked good and was, on the whole, well-cast. There was even a sort of genius to Michael Clark Duncan as Kingpin - right shape, wrong color. Here's a funny thing. I thought at first it was Ving Rhames, and I had a sudden, glorious vision of a tongue-in-cheek revisit of his role as the fight-fixing Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction. The Kingpin lecturing Daredevil about how pride is messing with his head; Daredevil flashing back to the death of his father. Then they could brawl their way into, say, Mr. Fear's underground hideout; wake up tied to chairs, with Fear doing the patented Zed-on-the-Gimp 'bhrupp, bhrupp, brupp' finger roll on Daredevil's leather-clad head. OK. That would be too much. Never mind, never mind. But meanwhile: the Kingpin doesn't DO ANYTHING in the movie.

I will even go so far as to say that Ben Affleck did OK with what he had to work with. Which, plot-wise, was squat. So he was pretty much reduced to looking like Matt Murdock, and not bumping into the furniture, which he does. It's funny that Jacob complains about the relay runner jogging scenes. I agree that they looked very silly. The thing is: I have the sense that was about the only thing the makers actually TRIED to do, by way of giving the action a distinctive visual signature. Shoulders-straight, huffing and puffing might have hearkened to Daredevil's roots as the son of a boxer, and a gymnast/acrobat. It would have been kind of funny to show him, say, working out on the pommel horse. It would have been, at least, a break from all the Crouching Bullseye Hidden Daredevil wirework so painfully stolen from ... well, I'm repeating myself. OK. One more point. The cafe scene? Meeting Elektra then fighting in the playground? It was like an episode of "Friends" with no jokes, in which the characters discover that they are in the Matrix and know kung-fu.

Oh, and Colin Farrell was a good choice for Bullseye. (Can I think of anything bad to say about him? No. He was good.)

Why on earth am I going on? I'm going somewhere. Jacob writes: "One of the things that distinguishes the best comics movies is that they borrow plots, not just premises and character outlines, from the comics." Now this is very true; but one thing that's sort of sad about it is how low our expectations for 'best' are, that this would satisfy. After all what makes Alan "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" Moore the best - and he is - is not so much his plots as his endlessly inventive, overflowing re-imaginings of the genre. His elective affinity for superheros. His plots are always good: solid, well-balanced, proportioned, stream-lined affairs. But this is all just by way of erecting a frame. Then come all the wonderingly appreciative pinnings of caped and cowled butterflies to the board of these plots. Moore is so sentimentally attached yet clinically detached in his treatment of these subjects. He is so deeply understanding and precise. Every detail, every nuance of the genre for the last fifty years - all the tics and twitches; gestures and modes of speech; absurdity stipulated to be normality; cliches and childishness; tin-horn faux-Wagnerian 'if this be Ragnarok' bombast; blindspots and obsessions; superficial encrustations of successive decades. Tight drawers. No constitutive element of the superhero genre fails to be recorded and re-presented from a fresh angle somewhere in Moore's work. "Watchmen", "V For Vendetta", "Supreme", "Top Ten", "Tom Strong" and, of course, "League".

How to put it? It's as if Moore was the first to find a way to express how this silly, shallow thing - the superhero - is concocted of so many layers of manners that you almost think he could make Henry James a fanboy. Almost.

No, Moore is like Cervantes. He's writing parody and satire of a silly, brainless genre. And yet, somewhere along the line, he falls utterly in love with what he mocks, and he drags the reader into love after him. Just as the madness of the Don - his divine aspiration to rise above himself - redeems him from the laughter; so the sheer noble silliness of the cape ... aw, crap, I'm never going to dig myself out of this hole.

Which gets us back to Daredevil. It is certainly the case, as Jacob says, that a good plot would be enough, given that the thing looked OK. Yet this only shows how Hollywood has subtly broken the comic-loving spirit of this Volokh. What's truly disheartening is how obvious, in this case, is Hollywood's total disregard for the inviting challenge of transmuting the dross of superhero comics into some sort of gold. It's like they look and say, 'This makes no sense, and people like it? Gawd, that makes our job easy.' Whereas it is precisely the fact that it makes no sense and people like it that makes it wonderful and hard to make heads or tales of, let alone a movie.

It doesn't feel like such movies - yes, I'll rent "League" when it comes out - are made by people who have affection for comics. (And, of course, it is fine to lack affection for comics. Many good and decent people do. But many good and decent people don't make movies out of comic books.)

These are thoughts that have been rolling round in my head for some time. Daredevil was the rather accidental occasion for their ventilation. And this fine essaylet by Timothy Burke got me thinking. I like his last line: "Life in extraordinary fictions needs to be extraordinary in order for it to be identifiably human." I think Kurt Busiek has done the most to live up to that maxim, actually, with "Marvels" and "Astro City". (Burke seems to think otherwise. I won't argue about it tonight.) Daredevil casts the maxim to the ground and grinds its heel in with super strength. The very last think you would suspect of the character of Daredevil in this production is that he is in any way psychologically extraordinary. I mean: to the degree the leather would seem to demand. The superhero movie that really lives up to Burke's maxim (and I think he would agree) is M. Knight Shyamalan's Unbreakable. Lots of folks didn't like it, apparently. Well, they're wrong. It takes the impossible conventions and stiff artificialities of the genre and makes them supple and organic and serene. All superhero movies ought to strive to be as good as that (although they should feel free to be somewhat faster paced)

In the meantime, of course, we'd be willing to settle for coherent plotting, thank you very much.

Comments

[Jacob T. Levy]

Oh, I entirely agree. KBAC, Unbreakable, and the Moore oeuvre-- these are the gold standard, and for just the reasons you articulate. (Though I actually think that it's a little toughter to express just what Busiek and Moore have in common. Busiek himself has distinguished KBAC-- "what if real people lived in a world with super-heroes?", or words to that effect-- from "what if superheroes lived in the real world" stories, of which I think Watchmen is one.) As you noticed, my defense of Daredevil was against the background of low expectations set by moviemakers who had no idea what the genre's capable of.

[Mitch]

I actually thought Mystery Men did a pretty fair (and darn funny) job of portraying superheroes in the "real world," although in a very different way from Unbreakable, of course.

[Brian W]

If you want to toss TV into the discussion, I think the final word would be "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Or, actually, the final four words. "parody and satire of a silly, brainless genre. And yet, somewhere along the line, he falls utterly in love with what he mocks, and he drags the reader into love after him" describes Joss Whedon & his creation perfectly. Imagine a Moore/Whedon project... my heart goes boom!

[Jesse Baggs]

I actually hated "Unbreakable," but has anyone else noticed that Shyamalan is a Moore fan? In "Signs," Mel Gibson's wife is in a car crash that practically severs her body in two but she miraculously survives long enough to have a meaningful conversation, a la Moore's "Top Ten" #8. And then "Unbreakable" has the whole "we're the same, only opposites" thing from "The Killing Joke." I think there's another Moore-inspired Shyamalan moment that I can't remember right now. If I can think of it I'll let you know.