So I happened to be watching some Batman: The Animated Series the other day, and I felt compelled to talk about how much I enjoy the series’ version of the Joker played by Mark Hamill.
This might seem, at first glance, a little silly to write about. “Really?” you might respond. “You mean to tell me that one of the most celebrated interpretations ever of not only the Joker, but any comic book villain, is really really good? You don’t say! Perhaps you’ll favor us next with a post about how Citizen Kane is a pretty sweet flick, and that the Beatles wrote some cool songs.”
Yes yes, okay, but the reason I thought it might be moderately interesting to talk about the show’s version of the Joker is that he is so fondly remembered by fans despite being quite different from the way he’s portrayed in current comic books.
The modern day Joker (and by “modern day,” I mean you can actually trace this interpretation back decades, but it’s especially in the air today after the success of The Dark Knight and his portrayal in Grant Morrison’s Batman comics) is described often as “a force of nature.” That’s pretty much the standard characterization these days, right? Death on two legs, a man-sized natural disaster with a body count in the, what, thousand? A malicious, twisted trickster god raining blood and death and madness.
This is fine. It makes him a really powerful conceptual opposite for Batman, and it can hardly be argued that “man vs. force of nature” doesn’t make for terrific drama.
However, a thunderstorm doesn’t really make for an interesting character. I am, the record will show, a huge supporter of Grant Morrison’s superhero comics – one of those guys who’ll point to a character’s one-off appearance in an issue of JLA as that character’s definitive portrayal, etc., and you all roll your eyes. And yet, his nigh-invincible Joker personally leaves me cold, however well-done his portrayal is, because he really is just a thunderstorm. He just sort of happens, and you never know why because he is so far above you. Even his quest against Batman seems somewhat dispassionate – like he’s holding all the cards, he knows he’s going to win, and he’s just waiting for Batman to catch up. Works very well in The Dark Knight as one story, but in the ongoing narrative of superhero comics, at some point, there’s not a whole lot to do with him other than have him show up, kill people, mess with our heroes’ heads, and repeat.
Now, the animated series’ Joker is a far more human character. One of the episodes I watched recently was “Joker’s Millions,” in which a flat-broke Joker gets a massive inheritance from a gangland rival, clears his name, and blows a bunch of money, only to find out later that most of the money was fake; with the IRS after him for inheritance tax, he can’t admit that he was fooled or he’ll be humiliated. Can you imagine the Joker, as seen in most contemporary comics, being portrayed as so down on his luck? Living in a slummy motel, unable to afford food for his pet hyenas (oh yes, there are pet hyenas)? Desperately cobbling together a crime just to keep out of something so ordinary as tax trouble? Or the Joker as seen in “Mad Love,” worked up into a jealous frenzy at the mere suggestion that Harley Quinn came a lot closer to killing Batman than he ever did.
This is a Joker with highs and lows, who feels joy and disappointment, a Joker with honest-to-God passion. This is a Joker who wants things, and can’t always have them. This is a Joker who retains the grandness of his philosophical and conceptual war against Batman, but is also petty enough offended when he’s tossed out of the Gotham City Comedy Competition.
There is a guy I’d be interested to read more about on a regular basis!
Hello again, and welcome to another installment of “Looking Back at Comics”! This week, we’re going to take a look at the 1990s. Everyone who was around during the 90s now looks back at the era through a lens of somewhat sheepish embarrassment; although it was easy to get caught up in the hype and excitement of an era that was all about flash and excess. Even the covers of the 90s were big and flashy: Comic books back then artificially raised their value through so-called “variant covers” that the company hyped as being worth more than the regular ones. Fortunately, modern comics have completely ditched the variant cover craze and…um…well, except…I mean, those are legitimately rarer! And they aren’t shiny!
But it wasn’t just the covers that made the 90s so ludicrous. Those fancy variant covers frequently adorned comics that had over-hyped “shock” storylines. Who can forget the so-called “Death of Superman”, a story that actually got play in regular newspapers because foolish reporters actually believed that the character was going to permanently die! Of course, less than two years later, Superman was back, but fans at the time treated the mock “death” as real and vehemently debated the merits of replacing him with a grim and gritty cyborg version of the character. Thankfully, we’d never see a grim and gritty cyborg character replacing an iconic American…um…let’s move on. Let’s just move on.
To the villains! Yes! That’s certainly an era where the 90s got downright silly! They loved nothing more than to make good guys go bad and villains reform, simply for the shock value of seeing them change sides! You’d get absurdities like Iron Man turning against the Avengers and Venom becoming a good guy…crap. The point is, we’ve learned from the 90s. Definitely.
Because we wouldn’t have such an excess of grim, dark, anti-heroes. Back in the 90s, it was almost de rigeur to have “grim and gritty” heroes show up like Darkhawk, Night Thrasher, and Lobo. Back then, they even had a “Dark Speedball” character! Of course, at least they were self-aware enough to make it a joke, instead of actually trying to sell the character as an actual deep and meaningful character moment. I mean, come the fuck on! “Penance”? Who were they thinking this would appeal to? Speedball fans who said to themselves, “Hey, I love Speedball, but he’s not enough of an emo prick!” Or perhaps comics fans who said, “I dunno, I really like emo pricks, but none of them have the name recognition that would make me take a chance on them!” …sorry, breaking character there. The point is, Dark Avengers, Dark Wolverine, Dark X-Men, and Dark Reign are entirely different from Force Works and X-Force. And X-Force is entirely different from X-Force, too. Just like Fantastic Force is different from Fantastic Force. Because it’s not the 90s anymore.
What changed to break comics out of the 90s mindset? The arrival of Joe Quesada, that’s what! Quesada put an end to the numberless spin-off titles that were diluting the brand identity of Marvel’s classic titles (like X-Factor, X-Force, et cetera) and ended the practice of frequent, pointless crossovers that was eroding reader loyalty. Without that, it’s doubtful that Marvel would have survived to hit the motherlode of movie adaptations that have become the company’s financial lifeline. Yes, Joe Quesada’s innovations ushered in an era of true greatness at Marvel.
So, in order, my attempt at as many plausible explanations as possible:
1.) Why did the smoke monster kill the pilot? Pick one: killing off potential authority figure to create more confusion amongst survivors/killing pilot because he was in a bad mood.
2.) What did Locke see when he saw the smoke monster? A smoke monster isn’t scary enough on its own now?
3.) What’s with the polar bear in Walt’s comic? Green Lantern and the Flash have to fight it. Coincidences happen, you know.
4.) Where’s Christian Shepherd’s body if it’s not in the casket? Smokie took human form and tossed it somewhere it wouldn’t be found so when he assumed Christian’s form Jack would question it less.
5.) Why did the psychic insist that Claire fly on Oceanic 815 and why did he insist that Claire had to raise him? Jacob told him to do it in advance, having already identified Claire as a potential candidate.
6.) Why did the Others want Walt so bad? For the same reason Widmore wanted Desmond so bad.
7.) Who sent Kate the letter about her mother being treated for cancer? Jacob.
8.) Why does Walt appear to warn Locke about the hatch and how does he know about it? Because Walt is psychic and can’t control his abilities or even know when he’s using them, causing people to “see” Walt but instead of him telling them things, he merely echoes back their own worries.
9.) Why does the smoke monster make mechanical sounds? Look, if you want to complain about how the totally imaginary smoke monster doesn’t sound like all the other smoke monsters, go right ahead.
10.) How does Walt apparate before Shannon? See question 8.
11.) How does Walt communicate with Michael using the Swan computer? That was Ben, or someone Ben told to do something.
12.) What was the deal with Kate and that horse? The Island is a weird place, and Jacob has weird powers. That should be enough.
13.) Why are supplies still being dropped on the island after the purge and by who? The whole takeaway from the Dharma Initiative plotline is that they’re a bunch of well-meaning techno-hippies who are fairly brilliant scientists and totally balls at everything else, particularly organizational logistics. I mean, these are guys who literally made some guy who just showed up one day their chief of security. Is it really too hard to imagine them setting up supply drops with third parties, the drops paid for by trust funds, and those drops continuing long after the organization went defunct?
14.) What triggered the lockdown, and who on earth would design black lights to light up showing secret thingies during the lockdown? See question 13.
15.) What happened to the original Henry Gale Who the fuck cares?
16.) What happened to Libby in between the mental hospital and getting on the tail section of flight 815? She got better, mostly.
17.) Who built the four-toed statue? Probably the ancient whoever-they-weres at a much, much earlier point in time.
18.) Why does only one specific bearing get you off the Island? See question 12.
19.) What are the heiroglyphics on the Swan countdown timer about? Paranoid Dharma scientists decided to use a non-base-10 signature for certain elements and the heiroglyphics are the non-base numbers.
20.) Why does Tom feel the need to wear a fake beard? He thinks they’re stylish. No, I’m kidding: because the Others didn’t want the survivors to know how comfortable their lives were.
21.) Who was Libby’s previous husband who gave her a boat to give to Desmond? Henry Gale. Happy now? Christ.
22.) Why were there skeletons in the polar bear cave? Bears get hungry.
23.) Where did the toy truck come from? Anybody with kids knows that their toys get absolutely everywhere.
24.) How did Locke and Eko escape the hatch implosion? They got really lucky.
25.) Why couldn’t Locke talk after the hatch implosion? But not that lucky.
26.) Why did the smoke monster kill Mr. Eko and why didn’t they just do it the first time they met? Because Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje decided he wanted to leave the show after one season and sometimes writers have to cheat.
27.) What did Mr. Eko mean when he said “you’re next” after he died? He was trying to warn Locke that Locke was a person of interest to the smoke monster and wrongly concluded that, since the monster had killed him, it would similarly wish to kill Locke.
28.) How disgusting was it when Hurley was eating from that tub of ranch dressing? Fairly.
29.) Why did Yemi’s body disappear? Because the smoke monster likes to take away corpses to freak people out. It’s been there for millennia: it has to get its kicks somehow.
30.) Why does Danny say that Jack wasn’t on the list when he was? Because sometimes people are wrong about things. This goes doubles for underlings of Ben, who probably lied to them twice a day just to stay sharp.
31.) Why can’t women on the island have babies and what does that have to do with anything? Another of Jacob’s rules. He has weird powers, you know.
32.) What was that Russian letter in Mikhail’s typewriter? “Dear Mom. How are you? I am fine. I liked the borscht you sent me last month. It was very tasty…”
33.) Why is the supply drop menu hidden behind a game of computer chess? See question 13. (Admit it: if you could get away with putting something important behind a game of computer chess, you would be tempted to do it.)
34.) Why did Ben give Juliet that weird mark as a punishment? What was that about? Ben has a lot of issues.
35.) What’s the deal with Jack’s tattoos? They say “I boned your mother” in Thai.
36.) Desmond knew a monk? How did that monk know Eloise? It’s a small world.
37.) Why did Ben see his dead mother? See question 12.
38.) Who decided it was time to kill the Dharmites in a purge? Probably Ben. See question 34.
39.) What happened to Ben’s childhood friend? She moved off the island, got married to an accountant named Henry Gale, had three children, and then got divorced when it turned out Henry was sleeping with his secretary (who was not Libby). She now works as an associate professor at the University of Chicago. She likes cats.
40.) Why did Desmond have a false vision of Claire and Aaron leaving the island on a helicopter? Desmond’s future-sight was only accurate while it was still active; once it went dormant, his loss of ability to observe the state of the future meant that the future could now be changed. Basically, think that whole thing with the cat in the box with the poison, but in reverse.
41.) How does Mikhail keep coming back to life? Smoke monster killed him a looooooong time ago and nobody knows.
42.) Why does Walt tell Locke that he still has work to do? Because Locke is hallucinating.
43.) Whose eye appeared in the cabin? Good question! Although it should be noted that we don’t know it was the smoke monster, because although that silhouette looks like Christian, it was never confirmed to be. Hey, maybe it’s Christian’s corpse and the eye is the smoke monster! That’s scary! The smoke monster is fucking with people!
44.) Where did Miles get that picture of Ben? Dharma records, which were kept in a dusty, unlocked warehouse in Iowa (see question 13).
45.) Who’s the R.G. on Naomi’s bracelet? Royce Gale, Henry’s half-brother and her secret lover. Aren’t you glad you asked?
46.) Why is there a difference between the times? See question 12.
47.) Who is “the economist” and why did Ben want him dead? Ben wants lots of people dead.
48.) Why was Ben so surprised that they could kill Alex? For god’s sake, I don’t even have to make anything up here: Ben explicitly said that he had thought he knew all the rules of the Island and that it turned out that he didn’t.
49.) If the smoke monster can’t leave the island and Christian Shepherd is the smoke monster, how did Christian appear in LA and on the freighter? See question 12.
50.) How did the monster get into Jacob’s cabin? You mean the cabin that Ben called “Jacob’s cabin” when in fact we would eventually learn that he’d never met or seen Jacob and was just bullshitting? Perhaps this question should be “how did the smoke monster get into a perfectly normal run-down cabin?”
51.) Why ask Locke not to tell anybody that he saw Claire in the cabin? Because if Locke had told, say, Kate that he’d seen Claire, then maybe more of the candidates would have stayed on the island, which just makes the smoke monster’s job of “kill or remove all the candidates” more difficult.
52.) Why did Ghost Horace direct Locke to the cabin and tell him Jacob was waiting there? Because Smoke Monster lies to get his way.
53.) Why did the Oceanic Six name Charlie, Boone and Libby as the other three survivors? What’s the logic in that? I’ll give you three guesses and the first two can’t rhyme with “those three people were definitively dead, as opposed to others who might escape the island and disprove the Six’s story.”
54.) Why does Miles decide to stay on the island? Because he gets hunches about where might be a bad place to be – and is often correct – and he tends to follow them. Amazingly, he avoided going to a ship which then blew the fuck up.
55.) What is the deal with the frozen wheel? Heat gets absorbed from the room in the energy transfer which allows teleportation.
56.) Why does Ben insist that the Oceanic Six, as well as Locke, must return to the island? Because at that point he was still taking orders from Jacob (via Richard), who had planned this thing out well in advance.
57.) Why don’t the rules of time travel apply to Desmond? Huge bursts of electromagnetic energy will do that to you.
58.) Who were the people trying to kill Sayid and Hurley? Pawns of Ben trying to frighten them into doing what Ben wanted.
59.) Ben asked his butcher friend, who was holding Locke’s body, if Gabriel and Jeffrey had checked in yet – who are any of these people? Sayid killed Gabriel and Jeffrey one question ago, and “these people” are Jacob’s network of people he’s done favors for off the Island (Ilana being the most notable).
60.) What was Ben hiding when he took something out of the vent and put it in his bag? C4 to crash the plane if necessary. Alternately, his porn stash.
61.) When the gang was unstuck in time, who was that shooting at them from the outrigger? The rest of Rousseau’s band, gone crazy via smoke monster, before she managed to kill them.
62.) Who sent Sun a gun and pictures of Jack and Ben? Widmore.
63.) Who attacked Sayid at the hospital and why did he have Kate’s address? Another one of Ben’s flunkies, and because Ben gave it to him.
64.) Why was the smoke monster at the temple? Because.
65.) When did the temple become like an anti-smoke monster fortress? When Dogen moved the remaining Others there and did the ritual thingies Jacob taught him to do.
66.) How did the producers of the hit TV show “Expose” deal with the death of their two lead actors? They killed off both characters and then elevated existing characters in importance to compensate. Ironically, when the show ended after a hit six-year run, some dork put up a video of “one hundred unanswered questions about Expose,” which included things like “why did Steven drink an entire bottle of hot sauce? What was the point of that?”
67.) How did Eloise come to run the lab? Because she’s smart and a scientist and amazingly, sometimes qualified people get jobs in their field.
68.) Who figured out that a pendulum set up that way could predict the island’s movements? Who figured that out? Daniel Faraday, back in the 1970s.
69.) Why did those returning to the island need to recreate the circumstances of their first arrival? Because it’s easier to tell people to do the same thing they did last time than it is to do it a different way, and Eloise isn’t exactly patient.
70.) Why did Jack, Kate and Hurley go from that Ajira flight to the 70s, and why didn’t Sun? See, that’s a good question.
71.) How did Richard bypass the sonic death fence? Because the Dharmites assumed Richard was like the smoke monster. Interestingly, Richard is not a smoke monster, and can do things like, say, “tinker with controls on a sonic death fence” or “put up a ladder next to the sonic death fence and then go over it.”
72.) How did Ethan go from the Dharma Initiative to a member of the Others? The Others are pretty famous for trying to spare/recruit children. Ethan was a child at the time, if you recall.
73.) What’s with all the heiroglyphics under the temple? Presumably the ancient whoevers built the temple. And they like heiroglyphics. Did you really need this explained, Questions Person?
74.) Why did Widmore tell Ben to kill Rousseau and the baby, and then let Ben keep the baby anyway? Because Widmore was and is a power junkie and likes to be considered ruthless, but is not quite so actually ruthless that he can kill a baby in cold blood on his own.
75.) Why did Daniel leave the Island in the 70s, and why does he tell Jack that he doesn’t belong there? See question 68, and also remember that Daniel died precisely because he got a specific detail very, very wrong.
76.) Why does Richard think he saw everyone in the 1977 Dharma picture die? Because he saw the blast from far off and made an assumption.
77.) Who broke the circle of ash around Jacob’s cabin? A boar did it.
78.) Why can Jacob leave the island, but the smoke monster can’t? Because they aren’t Superman Red and Superman Blue. They have different powers. Yeesh.
79.) Jacob uses his last breath to say “they’re coming,” but who are they? Pick one of: the 1977 candidates and friends, or Widmore and his flunkies.
80.) What’s the deal with the pool bringing people back to life? See question 12.
81.) Why did it bring back Sayid with an English accent? Because Naveen Andrews is English and sometimes actors slip up.
82.) What is the infection? How did Claire get infected? How did Sayid get infected? Why did Sayid need to take a poison pill when all it took to uninfect Sayid was a simple argument from Desmond? Dogen is a mysticist who has trouble realizing post-traumatic stress disorder and others forms of mental illness for what they are. (Which is not unreasonable given that crazy people tend to end up allying with the smoke monster.)
83.) Why was the smoke monster surprised that Sawyer could see young Jacob? Because most people aren’t supposed to see dead people that easily and Jacob was already manifesting himself, as he did in the penultimate episode; the younger Jacobs were the “larval stages,” if you will, of Jacob’s final manifestation.
84.) What’s the magic lighthouse about? See question 12.
85.) How does Dogen being alive keep the smoke monster out? See question 12.
86.) What happened to the flight attendant Cindy? And the kids? Either they got killed in that mortar strike or they fled into the jungle and eventually Hurley saw to it that they got home safely.
87.) Why didn’t Sun tell Jin to leave so their daughter wouldn’t be an orphan? Because sometimes people don’t think clearly when they are in the middle of a sinking submarine, oddly enough.
88.) Where did Jacob and Smokie’s mother come from? A boat! Presumably a Roman one.
89.) Where did Jacob and Smokie’s other mother come from?The West Wing.
90.) Who finished the magic wheel that combines “water and light” and when did it freeze up? Somebody who came along later. (At a certain point these “nitpicks” just become a child going “why? Why? Why?” over and over again.)
91.) What is the nature of the light? It’s the magic at the heart of the world that binds us all. If that’s not good enough, you should probably just avoid fantasy literature altogether.
92.) Magic wine? Seriously? The water/wine isn’t itself magical; it’s just a binding ritual to tie the two people together that works well on the newer party who doesn’t understand the nature of the magic yet and needs a bit of sideshow.
93.) Why did Zoe want an electromagnetic map of the island? Because they needed to set up the electromagnetic fence without it exploding.
94.) Why did electromagnetism send Desmond into the afterlife? Because it nearly killed him.
95.) Wasn’t Sayid’s solemate Nadia?I did that one already.
96.) Why weren’t Michael, Walt, Lapidus, Eko, or any of the other characters at the church? Because they, like Ana Lucia, weren’t ready to leave yet.
Seriously: beyond the problems of Walt and Eko, and the time-travel split of question 70 which smacks of writer fiat? Most of these aren’t really huge, important questions, or even really minor questions; they can be answered by a little bit of handwaving and a few basic assumptions, and then they’re just fine. A couple (like Mikhail) probably could have been stood to be answered during the series proper with one or two sentences and it would have been similarly just fine, but as it is aren’t crippling. Most of the rest are just “why does this show like to create an atmosphere of mysterious weirdness” and if you keep asking that maybe you should have been watching, I dunno, Desperate Housewives.
The big problems with the show’s enduring mysteries mostly stem from casting issues. The show’s creators admitted long ago that Walt was a mistake, made mostly because they initially assumed and pitched the show as happening over a number of years on the island, but hey whoops over the first thirteen episodes they realized that, no, this couldn’t be a “over the course of years” show when their narrative demanded one-right-after-the-next episodic continuity pretty much all the time. So they wrote Walt out. Better shows have done worse. The other casting fubars – Eko, Ana Lucia, Libby, Shannon, et cetera – stem from things the writers couldn’t have foreseen (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje suffering from depression/homesickness and being genuinely unhappy in his job, Maggie Grace being unreasonable about her salary demands and the network insisting on her being fired, Maggie Rodriguez and Cynthia Watros getting caught in a DUI incident and ABC getting puritanical) and they dealt with them as best they could.
This happens with serial television. it’s not all planned from the beginning. The writers left Sam Seaborn’s status open on The West Wing after his departure because they wanted to keep his slot open if his new show tanked and he wanted to come back (it did; he didn’t) and then just had to kind of shove it off to one side because it didn’t make sense to address the fate of a character half a season later when they had so many storylines that needed the time. Willow was never originally intended to be a lesbian on Buffy, and indeed they only decided to go that route halfway through season four practically as it was happening. Generally, the writers of Lost did a bang-up job mostly keeping a lot of disparate plot threads more or less in check, and most of the complaints come down to, as said, fans complaining that the writers weren’t explaining the creepy mysterious atmosphere enough.
One of the criticisms that makes me think people really weren’t watching the final episode of Lost that closely, which I’ve seen all over the place, showed up in comments today:
I agree with much of the criticism and I’ll throw in one of my own: Shannon. I know Sayid’s lost love from iraq wasn’t on the island, but she’s the one he should have wound up with.
See, here’s the thing: the entire point of the “afterlife” isn’t to make people happy, because what was evident from the entire season was that given a chance, some people are just going to keep punishing themselves for their sins, imagined or otherwise. Locke did it (stuck back in the wheelchair, and this time it was genuinely his fault as opposed to somebody else doing it to him). Charlie did it (hedonistic rockstar lifestyle which actually just made him desperately unhappy). And Sayid especially did it, giving himself an afterlife where not only was the supposed love-of-his-life not his wife but where he’d still done all the horrible things he felt guilty about, and on top of that he was forced to do things that would only isolate him further from her.
It’s obvious why Sayid constructed his afterlife in that way: because as much as he loved Nadia, the primary emotion she inspired in him was guilt, both for what he did directly to her/allowed to happen to her in their younger days and for allowing her to die when he got back from the island. That’s exactly why Nadia couldn’t be the one to help Sayid “let go” – the guilt she represented was what he clung to hardest. And that’s why it had to be Shannon who made Sayid remember again: because she was the only memory of happiness strong enough to make him do it.
And this is consistent with the other afterlives. Locke’s lady disappears once he remembers (triggered by feeling his feet again and suddenly remembering the first time he felt them again, not by Twoo Wub) because she was never really there, just like Nadia wasn’t really there. Jin and Sun’s memories aren’t triggered by their love for one another but by seeing their child again/for the first time. And so forth.
SCENE: A STUDIO BIGWIG and his three JUNIOR EXECUTIVES sit at a table.
BIGWIG: We have a problem, gentlemen. Looking at our upcoming slate I see nothing that will be in 3D. FIRST JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: Actually, I – BIGWIG: I know, One, but I looked into it and the technology to properly make Pogo Ball: The Movie In 3D is still five years away. FIRST: Awwwww. SECOND JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: Didn’t you say that five years ago? BIGWIG: It wasn’t going to be in 3D then. Surely Pogo Ball deserves nothing less than the best we have to offer. FIRST: I guess. I mean, who would want a Pogo Ball movie to be bad? THIRD JUNIOR EXECUTIVE: The Internet. BIGWIG: Who cares about the Internet? I remember the Snakes on a Plane fiasco. Have you already forgotten the lesson of Five? THIRD: No. No, I haven’t. BIGWIG: Right. People have heard Samuel L. Jackson say “motherfucker” many times already. They are not willing to pay for that experience again. They will gladly accept it as a bonus, but that is it. Where was I? FIRST: Pogo Ball! BIGWIG: Yes. And no. So what ideas do you have for our 3D slate? SECOND: I’ve got a beach volleyball flick we could post-convert to 3D. Imagine the titties. THIRD: That’s not a movie. That’s some home video you took. Without permission. SECOND: It works when Joe Francis does it. FIRST: Oh oh oh! I have an idea! Let’s do a monster movie in 3D! THIRD: That’s actually not a bad idea. BIGWIG: Indeed. What monster movie will we remake in glorious three-dimensional spectacle? FIRST: We could make our own brand new monster movie. BIGWIG: Don’t be stupid. SECOND: Godzilla? BIGWIG: That’s locked up for another decade. FIRST: King Kong? BIGWIG: Too soon. SECOND: Dracula? BIGWIG: Too played. FIRST: Frankenstein? BIGWIG: No Universal monsters. SECOND: Freddy Krueger? BIGWIG: No. THIRD:Piranha. The rights are available. BIGWIG: Can we make it work in 3D? THIRD: Fish swimming straight at the viewer? BIGWIG: Sounds possible. I believe this idea is suitable, but we need to be sure we can film it cheaply. SECOND: I know some locations in Arizona that owe me a favor. THIRD: Arizona? SECOND: Are you going to be all “a bloo bloo bloo what about the Mexicans” because last I checked we want to make these movies cheaply. THIRD: First, you’re a horrible person. FIRST: What? THIRD: No, not you. I mean he’s a horrible person and I have more than one thing to say. FIRST: Oh, that’s okay then. THIRD: The more important thing is that we are talking about a killer fish movie and you just suggested that we film it in a desert. SECOND: Arizona has lakes. THIRD: It has man-made lakes. How are we supposed to spring killer fish on people with man-made lakes? They stock the lakes themselves! SECOND: I dunno. Mad scientist. Geez, why do you gotta be picky? FIRST: Ooo ooo ooo I know! It’s not a mad scientist! There was an earthquake, and it opened up a fissure to the ocean! A pause. THIRD: But Arizona is very far away from the ocean, you know – BIGWIG: No, no – this could work. Zoological oddity, sort of a thing. Works better than the mad scientist idea. SECOND: Hey! BIGWIG: Now, now, Two. This movie is nearly there, but it needs your special something to make it work. SECOND: Here in front of everybody? THIRD: He means an idea. SECOND: Oh. Well, see, I like the idea of killer fish, but if you’re going to have killer fish, why not have tons of college girls in bikinis for the killer fish to eat? We just take that whole plot from Jaws and put it into our movie. Except instead of stupid boring families, we have college girls in bikinis. BIGWIG: That seems like an excellent way to add tension and also to rack up the body count when we need to do so. FIRST: And then the killer fish can fight the town sheriffs! And the town sheriffs will be all “HAH TAKE THAT YOU KILLER FISH” and they shoot them and stuff but then the killer fish are all BWAAMMMMMM and they jump out of the water and kill people and the town sheriffs have to fight them hand-to-hand! And then the piranhas make a giant whirlpool to suck people down into the water so they can eat them! THIRD: That makes no sense whatsoever. BIGWIG: But will it look good in 3D? THIRD: Does anything look good in 3D? BIGWIG: No, but will people believe it looks good? THIRD: …you realize his eyes have glazed over because he’s imagining the climactic fish-sheriff fight, right? BIGWIG: We’ll send him down to the storyboarding room later on. It’s more profitable to us then sending him into therapy. FIRST: …and then Christopher Lloyd says “gadzooks!”…
My take: people complaining that a show having an afterlife sequence when the whole thing was one extended religious allegory pretty much right from the beginning are a bit odd.
(Also, despite what people saying: afterlife sequence not explicitly Christian, nor even vaguely so. See Philip Pullman for alternate illustration of the concept of dead people “letting go.”)
Last week, in my post on character death, I mentioned that the one character who absolutely nobody will miss is the Sentry, Marvel’s attempt to see just how narrowly the courts interpret the laws against copyright infringement (and just how badly they can piss off Alan Moore. I sometimes suspect that the Big Two have some sort of secret engine hidden in their basement, fueled entirely by Alan Moore’s irritation with them, and they need to periodically stoke it by leaving copyright notice off of his work or making a shitty movie version of one of his comics.) But I didn’t get to the root of the problem. Why, apart from being a gigantic fucking Mary Sue and a blatant rip-off of Miracleman and apocalyptically uninteresting, is the Sentry such a goddamn terrible character that death wasn’t good enough for him?
Unfortunately for my attempts to be original and clever, Ragnell posted a very nice analysis on her blog that notes a lot of the key points. I’ll try not to repeat too much of what she said, because that’s what links are for, but basically she points out how the Sentry is portrayed as retroactively being the most awesome person in the whole Marvel Universe, the guy who was everyone’s best friend and mentor and helped Angel learn how to embrace his mutant gift and showed Reed Richards how to care and taught Rogue how to love and shot Uncle Ben…no, wait. Not that last one.
But she doesn’t get deep enough into the problem. She points to those things as being terrible in and of themselves, because they reduce the entire Marvel Universe to the role of supporting characters in the Sentry’s story, and she’s right, but the deeper problem is that those things didn’t happen. The Sentry is not a long-established, integral part of the Marvel Universe. He’s not the one guy who’s always been able to calm the Hulk down when he’s pissed, he’s not the one guy who Doctor Doom has always been afraid of, he’s not the one guy who Reed Richards can talk to and the one guy that Rogue can turn to for a booty call. He’s some total schmuck we don’t care about. We are not emotionally invested in the Sentry, because that’s something you have to earn over time. It cannot be imposed by editorial fiat.
Not that they haven’t tried. There’s almost an element of condescension to the constant retcons that shove the Sentry into an ever-higher profile within the fictional history of the Marvel Universe. “Oh, the Sentry is totally a major part of the Marvel Universe and always has been! You just don’t remember him. Stupid, stupid readers. Why don’t you remember how awesome the Sentry was?” But it doesn’t work because we’ve got the back issues. We’ve read the stories. They were an integral part of our childhood, and our transition to adulthood. And the Sentry wasn’t there. Having him show back up now is like having your absentee dad pop back up when you’re thirty and try to take you to a ballgame.
(Actually, it’s a bit like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Having an old friend of Indy’s betray him at a crucial moment, shattering their long-time friendship and setting them against each other? Good idea. Having the friend be someone we’ve never met and have no emotional investment in? Not so much. It’s hard to care about Mac’s betrayal, because he’s a total stranger to the viewer. The whole thing feels hollow.)
No matter how much history they make up for the Sentry in the Marvel Universe’s timeline, it’s history with the reader that counts. All the retcons have a faint stench of desperation to them, a feeling that they can compensate for lack of depth with an increase in volume. There’s no history between the Hulk and the Sentry? Howabout we just have everyone talk about how they’re the bestest friends ever! The Sentry’s never really achieved any kind of heroic triumphs? Howabout we have everyone remind each other about how he saved the world over and over and over again! The more they talk about how great he is, the more it reminds us that we haven’t seen any actual evidence of that supposed greatness, and the more hollow and useless he seems. Until at the end, we get a funeral scene filled with characters telling us how much he changed their lives forever with his brilliance and awesomeness…only to never ever ever mention him again the second the dirt is heaped on his grave.
Some stupid human has gone and injured themselves on a mountain! Whatever will they do? Perhaps they need the aid of a St. Bernard!
No, of course they don’t need no crap-ass St. Bernard. St. Bernards are for suckers. If you’re smart, you get the help of Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog.
