Mimsy Were the Borogoves

I read All*Star Superman recently; it was so evocative I’ve been having Superman dreams. Last night’s was a bad movie that I only watched because it supposedly had a good commentary track. Superman was still Superman, but he was turning evil—this was Warner’s dark reboot. Superman’s father was still alive, an alcoholic in a one-room apartment played by Paul Reiser. To symbolize the merging of Superman with Batman’s darker universe, Michelle Pfeiffer played his mother; she was an author; I awoke before I found out what her role was, but she was working with the FBI to try to rein in Superman.

It was not a good dream. Superman’s best stories haven’t been the dark ones. Not the Death Of or the Goes Crazy. They’ve been Last Son of Krypton; Miracle Monday; Superman: The Movie; Superman Returns, All*Star Superman; The Sandman Saga. They’ve been Superman Uplifting.

Superman II is a bit weird on that score. It’s a rambling movie, due mostly to political machinations in Hollywood. Superman is still Christopher Reeves’ smiling hero from the first movie, but the nebbish is taking over. In the good stories, a Superman who loses his powers will retain a Super outlook on life; will retain the Super confidence. Not here. Clark Kent isn’t an act. Clark Kent is who Superman wishes he was.

The Salkinds had always wanted more camp, and Kent’s incompetence is emphasized even more here than in the first movie. While Superman II doesn’t go as far into slapstick as the third movie would, it does begin the slide, especially during the blowhard section of the fight scene.

Nuclear weapons figured prominently in both movies, mainly because of the decision to drop the original director and change the ending of the first movie. Specifically, they ended up using the ending of the second movie in the first movie. The movies were originally set back to back, with the nuclear explosion in Superman I freeing the criminal Kryptonians to wreak havoc in the second movie. Parts of the second movie were already filmed—including some expensive parts—so they made up the terrorists with nukes story.

A little light reading for Bob of Bainbridge.

I had heard of The Dresden Files when it came out, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. Mainly because I don’t get cable, but also because I had no desire to learn any more about the bombing of Dresden than I already know. In fact, the television series had nothing to do with Dresden, Germany, or World War II. It’s a noir detective wizard series set in Chicago in modern times.

The show only lasted one season, which is unfortunate. It was a good series, and had a lot of room for growth. It was sort of a cross between The Night Stalker and The Rockford Files. I enjoyed both of those series, so it isn’t surprising that I really enjoyed watching the Dresden Files on DVD over the last few weeks.

The strangest part watching it, and seeing those references, was the age difference. When I watched these shows in the seventies, the starring roles were all “really old people”. Carl Kolchack was fifty. Jim Rockford was forty-six! Today, I’m older—Jim Rockford would be my contemporary, and Kolchak not too far off; and starring roles tend to go to younger actors than they did then. So these hard-boiled detectives and police officers seem to be wet-behind-the-ears rookies at first. But they’re not: both Paul Blackthorne (Harry Dresden) and Valerie Cruz (Lieutenant Connie Murphy) were in their thirties.

Lieutenant Murphy, Harry’s contact and friend in the Chicago Police Department.

There’s a strong sense of “monster-of-the-week” here; each episode brings in a new bit of supernatural lore. That probably would have changed if they’d gotten a second season, but it works fine. In fact, while I would have loved to see another season or two, the Dresden Files series ended well. With the exception of the crammed-together off-kilter semi-pilot, the show presented a nice arc, electrical and otherwise, between Harry Dresden and Lieutenant Murphy.

One really nice thing about the show is the near-lack of an opening title sequence. Rather than waste the minute or more that over shows do, they did a couple of quick anchoring shots of Chicago and went right back into the story.

The stork had a rough landing for Mrs. Kent.

Superman is different from most superheroes. He really is Superman; Clark Kent is his assumed identity. And he wears no mask. When he switches from Clark Kent to Superman, he takes off his glasses, he stands straight, and a curl drops over his forehead. Over the years, writers have gone to amazing lengths to explain why no one recognizes the obvious, that Clark and Superman are the same person. Everything from Superman using continual super-hypnosis to convince people they’re not the same, to using super-speed to blur photographs whenever they’re taken.

The usual explanation, which made so little sense that writers kept trying to come up with more convoluted ones, was that Superman acted different as Clark Kent. Because they acted different, no one guessed they were the same. In Superman: The Last Son of Krypton, Elliot S! Maggin wrote about Clark Kent doing a news broadcast¹ about Lex Luthor fooling Superman.

Somewhere out in space, Clark often thought, there was someone who would receive these television broadcasts that flew off the Earth at the speed of light. Somewhere somebody would figure out that Clark and Superman were the same person. Somebody whose mind was not clouded by human perceptions and prejudices would notice without a touch of effort that two men were one. If that someone was also capable of grasping the idea that no one on Earth knew it, that this was a disguise and a very effective one, that someone would probably catch the irony in Clark’s first words today.

But it seemed silly that acting could fool people into not realizing the two were the same. Christopher Reeve changed that. If there was any one thing that made us believe that Superman was real for the duration of the movie, it wasn’t the flying or the crystal Krypton, it was the simple act of Christopher Reeve standing straight, smiling, and taking off Clark Kent.

Reeve understood the smile that Maggin described as glowing with life and power. Clark Kent didn’t have the glow; Superman did. And Christopher Reeve knew how to get it. It was pure confidence.

The actors made this an amazing superhero movie. Besides Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman was great as quirky genius Lex Luthor and Margot Kidder was perfect as ambitious reporter Lois Lane. But the script, direction, and editing also contributed heavily, by focussing on the character’s growth as a hero and not on flashy villains. That becomes obvious watching this extended cut, which added some of the flash back.

Mort Todd’s The Super-Hero’s American Exceptionalism, is mostly right, I think, but he paints with too broad a brush. He’s right about Spiderman; though I still enjoyed the third movie it failed to reach the heights that the first two promised. It’s as if Raimi looked at the first two movies, realized he was saying that any red-blooded New York kid who got these powers would choose to be a hero, turned around and decided, nah. But he never came up with a replacement story and ended up with a meandering nothing.

X-Men is different. Bryan Singer’s an odd one, and here’s where I disagree with Todd. Singer’s movies are about exceptionalism and American idealism. It may not have been what Singer meant, but it was inescapable. Describe the X-Men and describe the Brotherhood, and in any modern movie the Brotherhood are the heroes. And yet here come the X-Men, defeating evil with their exceptional powers even though the rest of the world hates them. I doubt Singer realizes it, but they are the USA.

Did Singer know, for example, that he was making a pro-gun statement when evil Senator Kelly said “you support gun control, don’t you?” How can you support individual rights and still support gun control? You can’t. If I were forced to guess if he knew he said that, I’d guess no. But it’s an inevitable result of Singer’s understanding of heroism and exceptional power.

This is what was missing from the third X-Men, and I don’t think Singer would have let it go. The third movie should have been about whether the exceptional should give up their exceptionalism to be liked and fit in. But it wasn’t. It was barely mentioned. Wolverine just sends Rogue on her way alone across country to become unexceptional.

It’s looking more and more like we’ll never know what Singer’s Superman was going to finish as, either, but it certainly looked like it was going to be about the responsibility of exceptionalism and about the difficult necessity of individual freedom.

Alan Moore is another writer whose work is about individual exceptionalism. If you look at this three greatest works—V, Watchmen, and Promethea—they’re all about what a person should do if they find themselves with super-normal power. Take a look at Promethea. The Five Swell Guys are a bunch of pointless, bickering powers. They’re the United Nations. They do a lot of talking; they do a lot of monitoring; but they can’t see and they can’t act. They never trust their own judgement or their own ability. Promethea takes on evil at its source, ushering in a new world order of individual freedom. Did Moore mean it to sound like noblesse Americana? Probably not. But that’s what it is.

For a more extreme view, look at his unfinished Twilight. The superpowers isolate themselves; what happens when they shirk the responsibility of power? The end result of isolationism is endless war.

Looks like a fascinating documentary on public schools. “Education is a business that has a monopoly. When you have a monopoly you can do whatever you want.” The producer is Bob Bowdon, who is also an occasional reporter for The Onion. This movie’s a lot more serious.

“They’ve been pimping our children for a very long time.”

I just finished watching Superman Returns again. It is brilliant, more so every time I watch it. It has a depth far surpassing the two great originals from the seventies and even Singer’s own great X-Men movies. What I said at first blush about it being “not as good as I’d been hoping for, but it was very good” was probably just over the hype. Whatever the reason, I was wrong about the first part, and right about the second.

This is a beautiful movie that builds with every viewing, and it sets up what promised to be an epic tale of heroism and the responsibility of power, a clash between the farm and the city, of good intentions and freedom. It’s too bad it looks like Singer won’t get to finish it. This could have been a story for the ages. It almost is even unfinished.

I saw Mike Judge's Extract over the weekend. It's a very funny light comedy, intelligently written and played. If you enjoyed Office Space and Idiocracy, I think you'll enjoy Extract, too. It isn't as sharp as Idiocracy or as cubicle-friendly as Office Space, but it was a lot of fun. I’d almost call it a throwback to the days when light comedies where witty fare for adults. You won’t come out of this movie thinking you need to quit your job, nor will you come out of it thinking you have to help the human race evolve by having more children. It was just an enjoyable movie.

“Are telling me that we’re not gonna get a room because you’re saving money for Christmas presents? In the middle of June?”

What statement better defines the eighties than that saving money in June for Christmas presents in December is a symptom of not living your life to the fullest? Saving for the future is so silly its embarrassing as soon as it’s pointed out to Charlie Driggs.

Something Wild embodies the dreams of the high school graduates of the mid-seventies who are now working in the mid-eighties. The male pornographic fantasy dreams, to quote Dazed and Confused, but dreams nonetheless. The high school graduates of 1976 are six years out of college in 1986. Life is not the sixties renaissance they grew up expecting. It’s all about the future: sacrificing now for December, investing in long-term municipal bonds in 1981 for 15% annual return to impress the chicks.

Life is not walking down the street and meeting a beautiful woman in beads and bangles while upbeat music plays in the background, and driving away in her re-upholstered green convertible for an afternoon of scotch and sex.

Something Wild starts with a beautiful montage of New York City, coming in from the river, with David Byrne singing in the foreground. The music in this movie is, in general, quite good. It is also all “real” as far as I can tell: it is provided by characters in the movie, either through radios and cassette players, or by walk-on characters actually singing it, such as hitchhiking musicians.

“Yeah, I’m writing this down!”

Most of the “live” music is provided by people who have nothing to do with the film itself. Oddly enough it works. The point appears to be that life has a soundtrack if you but listen for it.

And speaking of strange musical choices, I love the harpsichord. Audrey’s mother plays it, and it has such an archaically beautiful sound. I seem to recall more harpsichords in the eighties. Some things are worth bringing back: we need more harpsichord today.