Brand X

In my ongoing quest to mess with myself, I've decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month. I haven't worked in prose for years, unless we count treatments, which I mostly don't. The purpose of a treatment is to get the story down in a plain and unadorned form, in such a way that it permits only one possible reading (and even that doesn't always work). Decently-written prose, on the other hand, does something else. It allows for more sprawling, more wordplay, totally different kinds of subtlety... it'll be a nice change after the enforced discipline of movie and comic book scripts.

Of course, by the very nature of the project, there's a whole different kind of enforced discipline. 50,000 words in 30 days is... well, plain crazy, frankly. But then, I've never been afraid of crazy. Just spiders with knives that steal my thoughts when I'm sleeping.

My novel is an adaptation of an idea I've been kicking around for a while, called "The Impresarios". At one point, I was thinking about it as a stage play, but there were issues with staging and performance rights (the story, by its very nature, contains snippets of existing popular works) that I never found good solutions to. The flexibility of prose means that I can go from one scene to another whenever and however I want, and rights only become an issue for me if I take it into my head to self-publish.

Basically, I feel like my existing writing pattern could use a thorough shaking-up, and I want to see what happens. Worst case scenario, I don't finish. Best case, I've got a first draft of what might be a decent novel. Either way, it'll be a nice change.

Labels: prose, writing

All right, that's an inaccurate post title. Because really, I'm not speaking of politics. Don't get me wrong, I like speaking of politics. I love arguing politics. Show me a guy who thinks the top income tax bracket ought to be lower, or that public schools should be funded by property taxes, or that television ought to be subject to content censorship, I'll argue with that guy all night. That's the rich and vibrant discourse of democracy; that's the whole point.

But you give me a guy who honestly thinks that the United States government ought to be in the business of torturing innocent people, that the United States president should have the power to, on his own authority and without any oversight, make American or foreign citizens simply disappear, vanish into a secret prison where they will never see the evidence against them and can be tortured or killed with no explanation necessary... I don't know how to talk to that guy. The first problem is, of course, that that isn't politics as I understand the term, that's whether you're still a goddamn human being or not. But more than that, where do you start arguing against that? What do you say? If someone doesn't understand why that is fundamentally anti-American, inhuman, and evil, how do you explain it? What terms can be used to bridge a gap that size and shape?

I suppose in some ways, I'm disturbed to discover that that gap exists between myself and so many of my countrymen. Because if the gap's there now, that necessarily implies that on some level, it always was.

It is never comfortable to learn that one has not been living in the world one thought one was.

Labels: politics

Blame Blogger (10%) and me (90%) for the lateness of this post; two previous versions were swallowed by software, the rest by the eternal inconveniences of real life.

So, as I was saying, there's a fundamental crossover that comics have dealt with a thousand times in a hundred (okay, a dozen) ways, and it sounds either weird or painfully obvious, depending on your take, when really it's neither.

Anyway, suppose Superman and Batman met.

To comics fans, this sounds too obvious to bear mentioning. To ordinary humans, it may sound odd. Both camps have a point, and both are wrong. Let's take a moment to review the characters. Superman, Kal-El, is not human, sent here from a dying world in a last desperate middle finger to death. He pretends to be Clark Kent, a human being, because what we wants more than anything is humanity, which will always be a bit beyond him. Bruce Wayne is a normal human, whose normal humanity was irrevocably destroyed when he was eight, and who has spent every waking moment since trying to become something other than human, seeking the invulnerable superhumanity that comes to Kal-El automatically.

Mark Waid characterized the distinction like this: "One, the zenith of human fortitude and ambition... the other the pinnacle of otherworldly power." Frank Miller, in a darker confrontation between the two heroes, had Batman narrating the difference thus: "Keep talking, Clark ... just like your parents taught you. My parents taught me a different lesson. Lying on this street, shaking in deep shock, dying for no reason at all, they taught me that the world only makes sense when you force it to."

The two superheroes inhabit Metropolis and Gotham City, respectively, which are both basically New York, but they represent the two faces of New York, which only touch in our own, inconveniently realistic, world. Superman lives in the glorious city of the future, the realization of the dreams of a suffering world, where industry and idealism meet in the glorious melting pot that is the collective dream of all those who seek to live on their own terms. Batman lives in a dark, decaying urban hell, the city as cancer, where greed and crime and corruption steal the hope from the lives of ordinary citizens. Again, far too many words for this space could be written about the similarities and differences between these two characters and their dozens of knockoffs, so for now let's take the following as given: Superman and Batman are fundamentally antithetical on about the same number of levels as they are fundamentally similar. Both are answers to different forms of the fundamental question of the superhero genre: "If you were able to do anything, would you choose to make the world a better place?"

So, given this fundamentally antithetical relationship, why have these two characters been hanging out together since 1940? In World's Finest Comics, as members of the JLA, and in a hundred other forms, they've been friends, allies, and frequently, as in the above-referenced "Dark Knight Returns" antagonists. This goes against much of the conventional wisdom about fiction. When two characters, and their associated themes, express two fundamentally different notions about the purpose and meaning of their associated stories, they don't meet. Humbert Humbert does not hang out with Anne of Green Gables (thank goodness) and Raskolnikov doesn't have to explain himself to Tom Ripley. And yet, there's 65 years of comics history demonstrating hybrid vigor in action.

Now, there has been talk of a Batman/Superman crossover movie. This makes sense; both characters have recently had their film franchises renewed with actually decent films, and it's not as though the idea's unprecedented. Kevin Smith's famously rejected SUPERMAN RETURNS script contains a brief appearance by Batman, predicated on the assumption that both coexist and know each other, and Andrew Kevin Walker's BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN script took the concept to its logical limit. I'm not in a position to say why neither of these screenplays was ever shot, but I don't think it's a bizarre notion to say that those in charge of writing the necessary checks didn't "get" the basic concept of the intrinsic crossover. Understandable; as observed above, it's a weird melding of dissimilarities, and perhaps more importantly, suspension of disbelief is a fragile thing.

Why do superhero movies tend to spend so much time on the hero's origin? Because they need to sell the audience on the notion of such a crazily, beautifully unrealistic thing as a superhero, and unless that sale is thoroughly and utterly closed, the audience isn't buying into your fiction, and you're boned.

And yet. And yet. For one thing, let's look at this photo for a second:

Now, I grew up with Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, and I've known them longer than I've known most of my human friends, so I can say with confidence that that IS Bruce and Clark. To a T. So there they are, large and life and twice as handsome, but it would kill us to put them in a movie together?

Let's look at another field test of this theory, shall we?




That’s the quick-and-dirty web version, those seeking a higher-quality version of the same fan film can look here. But never mind video quality, let’s cut to the chase; TELL me you wouldn’t watch that movie. Of course you would; it’s an alloy of pure cool with pure awesome.

There’s things I myself would love to do with such a movie, obviously; I think you could get a lot of mileage out of an opening montage comparing the two men’s childhoods. Clark at eight, beginning to realize that he’s not human, against Bruce at eight, having his humanity ripped from him in one horrible moment. Clark at sixteen, testing his powers in the privacy of horizon-stretching Kansas cornfields, against Bruce at sixteen, developing his skills in dangerous and secret places most people don’t know exist.

There’s a couple different ways you could structure it, of course. We won’t be happy if Superman and Batman don’t fight at some point, but given that they’re basically on the same side, we can’t just have them as implacable enemies, especially because we want to root for them both. We can start off with them as antagonists and have them end up as allies, but then we’re starting our movie with Superman fighting Batman, and where do we go from there? Do they end up fighting God? We can start them off as friends and have their basic differences force them to become enemies, but then one of them has to lose, and that’s to be avoided if possible. Sure, we can cast Batman as street-level fascism run amok, or cast Superman as authority from above stifling human potential, but turning one of our heroes into a villain seems like, at best, a limited strategy.

Perhaps, and with a nod to my slashfic-oriented readers out there, the most workable structure would be one analogous to a romance. Bats likes Supes, Bats dislikes Supes, Bats gets Supes back again. This allows for a great degree of freedom in contrasting their different worlds and philosophies, gives us our kickass fight between the heroes, and as long as we have a sufficiently terrifying threat at the end, they can reasonably overcome their differences and resume a friendship now more complex and uncertain. Certainly there’s room there to work with the basic concepts, no?

I’m aware that I’ve spent far too long on a profoundly fanboyish notion here, but forget the specifics for a moment and look at the deeper concepts involved. Genres can be bridged. Antithetical archetypes can be resolved if one focuses on both the similarities and the differences. We can, if we choose, stop painting only in primary colors and create new canvasses of purples and greens and shades as yet unused. There is good and useful and beautiful work yet to be done, and the audience is ready to see it.

Labels: movies, writing