At da hiatus! And the DCNU!

So now we've knocked out 3 out of the 4 superhero movies that came out this summer, and all that's left is my favorite of the bunch, Thor. My buddy Dom, NYU film student and professional youtube guy, wanted to write the piece on Thor for here, which is super great because he knows movie stuff that I don't and will offer his own unique viewpoint, something the ol' Junction needs more of. Since Dom is in the middle of post-production for his short film, The End, we're gonna take a brief hiatus on the At Da Moofies column until he's ready. Hopefully his post will turn up by the time Thor gets released on DVD/Blu-Ray/Netflix/brain injection on September 13, but it's gonna be tough to say.

Meanwhile, you've probably heard all the hubbub about the DC Universe relaunch coming into effect this Wednesday. What with this looking like the biggest comic book event in decades and all, prooker (it's his idea so you know he'll be posting!!) and I will start a series of posts offering an in-depth analysis on all things related to the New 52. We're your guide to the DCNU! And on top of all this I'm finally buckling down on that Jack Kirby post I kept talking about in my Spidey villain articles. You can expect it soon.

Here are the At Da Moofies articles for X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern and Captain America: The First Avenger. Your mileage may vary. You can watch Dom's cool youtube stuff here.

At Da Moofies: X-Men: First Class, or THEY'RE GOING TO START WORLD WAR THREE

Between the sparse, abysmal marketing campaign, rushed 10-month production schedule, and general lack of interest from the public, X-Men: First Class was in many ways the underdog in this summer's superhero race. All the better that it was the best-reviewed and, thanks to word-of-mouth, made a $350,000,000 killing at the box office. I saw it with my co-blogger prooker soon after it was released and we both agreed it was a refreshing, exhilarating ride. Director Matthew Vaughn pulls out all the stops with this one, delivering a sleek, stylish, dynamic product filled with a youthful vitality that's been long absent from today's superhero movies. Vaughn imbues the film with a distinct, forward-moving visual chic, setting it apart from the epic scope of Thor, the videogame vapidity of Green Lantern or the retro-nostalgia of Captain America. It's definitely the cool kid of the bunch.

What really seals the deal, however, are the performances of James McAvory and (especially) Michael Fassbender, who costar as younger versions of Professor X and Magneto, respectively. The rest of the ensemble cast ranges from satisfactory (Kevin Bacon impresses as Nazi/would-be world conqueror/evil fop Sebastian Shaw) to clearly-they-fucked-the-director-to-get-in-this-movie bad (January Jones as mutant whore Emma Frost), but it's McAvory and Fassbender who steal the show with their suave magnetism. The chemistry between the two is undeniable; it makes you wish the sequel will be a buddy comedy where they just bro out for two hours. In a perfect world...

Yet despite all this praise I may lavish on First Class, a mere two months after seeing it I find that I can barely remember anything specific about the 132 minute film. The details of Thor, which I saw two weeks before First Class, still remain fresh in my head, as do those of Green Lantern, which I saw only one week after. Its form is certainly laudable - strong and unique enough for the film to shine on these merits alone - but its content is sorely lacking. X-Men: First Class doesn't have anything particularly novel to say, nor does it - with the exception of McAvory and Fassbender's interplay - offer up anything we haven't seen before. Vaughn's brisk, efficient direction makes the movie seem a lot smarter than it actually is.

The film's plot concerns a covert team of mutants (the black guy dies first, natch), recruited by Charles Xavier and Erik Lenhsh...Lehnsh...Magneto on behalf of the CIA, and their efforts to thwart Sebastian Shaw's Hellfire Club - a James Bond-style secret organization with goals of world domination - during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Hellfire Club's plan, lifted straight from You Only Live Twice, is to ignite war between America and the Soviet Union and, after the two superpowers nuke everything to hell, conquering the planet itself. The way this ends up going down is a bit lazy and problematic, especially for a film franchise that prides itself on political allegory. The Soviets, for example, are generally portrayed as bumbling, plucky comic relief helplessly subservient to the Hellfire Club's whims. This characterization cheapens the entire film, deflating the credibility of its driving force - the prospect of total nuclear annihilation. Which, of course, was a very real threat throughout the Cold War. By the time Magneto starts drunkenly lobbing nukes back and forth at the height of the Crisis, the whole situation seems ludicrously funny. Something tells me that the filmmakers weren't going for the Dr. Strangelove angle here.

It certainly doesn't help that every other line is something along the lines of "I'M NOT GOING TO LET THEM START WORLD WAR III" or "WE HAVE TO STOP WORLD WAR III." Seriously, it's insane. Either the writers wanted us to think this whole thing is ridiculously silly or they never bothered to read through their script to check for repetitive dialogue. I GET IT GUYS, WORLD WAR III, IT'S A THING THAT COULD HAPPEN IF YOU GUYS DON'T STOP IT. NOW STOP FUCKING TALKING ABOUT HOW THEY'RE GOING TO START WORLD WAR III IF AND FUCKING STOP WORLD WAR III" It got so bad that I started counting how many times the phrase "start World War III" and its variants popped up; I got lost somewhere in the double digits. I smell an epic drinking game in the works!

But back to those zany Soviets. Worse than taking the punch out of the World War III doomsday scenario our heroes are fighting to avert, this portrayal paints a false image of the commies, who were in fact an extremely nasty, dangerous bunch. One of the greatest threats the free world has ever known, as a matter of fact, what with the oppression and mass killings and military strength and nuclear capabilities and iron grip over an enormous territory. This double-standard is particularly egregious when compared to the damn dirty Nazis at the film's beginning, who are portrayed, well, accurately: the kind of folks who'll gleefully execute a kid's mom before his eyes just for shits and giggles. Unlike Captain America, this movie has the balls to show what World War II was really all about.

Rather than introducing a new spin on what is anything but a black-and-white debate, X-Men: First Class retreads the same tired ideas fully played out in the original X-Men trilogy. Like Magneto in those films, Sebastian Shaw is a mutant supremacist who wants to wipe out mankind, while Charles is the nonviolent (as far as superheroes go) advocate of peace and equality between man and mutant. Those may be two opposing philosophies, but contrary to what First Class implies the argument itself is not inherently dualistic. The Hellfire Club's comic book incarnation is a testament to this; within its exclusive ranks are both men and mutants, who treat each other as equals. The Club attempts to impose this Utopian ideal by force in its quest for world domination. When its elite Inner Circle of humans, mutants, cyborgs and weird astral parasite things runs the show, the unwashed masses who aren't on board will get washed away in the Flood. Here, the Hellfire Club is no different than the X-Men trilogy's Brotherhood of Mutants. In fact it actually becomes the Brotherhood after Magneto exacts vengeance on Shaw and seizes control of it for himself. I'll admit there's a certain poetry to this, in having Magneto follow down Shaw's path at the end of First Class - becoming the very monster he sought to destroy - but letting Magneto come to his own conclusions instead co-opting someone else's would have been a more satisfying character arc and would have saved the film from being derivative.

While we're on the subject of mutants, boy did the writers pick a dumb fucking bunch to fill out the ranks. Riptide? Darwin? Azazel? Azazel? The X-Men universe is probably the most expansive in all comicdom, surely there are some far more interesting characters we haven't seen on film yet that they could've pulled out of the mythos. Like Dazzler. Wait. No. Anyway you get the point. But this is probably just the fanboy in me talking in the first place. I hate that guy.

X-Men: First Class tries its hand at genre-blending, but it doesn't work out, and the film can't seem to settle on a tone. The picture inconsistently vacillates between Nazi-hunting revenge flick, 60s spy film send-up, traditional superhero origin, historical drama, team movie, bromance buddy comedy and erotic thriller. Vaughn's direction in each individual sequence is impeccable, but they don't mesh well together. And unlike those in Captain America or, say, Kill Bill (it was on AMC last night, what do you want from me?), these scenes don't appear to be making a statement about the tropes themselves, which would have made the jarring dissonance more forgivable.

But there's still a lot X-Men: First Class has going for it. Although most of the film is a blur to me, there is one image that I not only remember, but has vividly stuck with me from the moment I left the theater. That kind of thing is extremely rare, and it's a testament to just how affecting the imagery of this movie is. Here's the shot:

Or at least the best I could find on the interwebs. For context, this scene is part of the picture's "we're building a team" montage, where Charles and Erik track down and recruit members for their first class. Here, they find Angel Salvadore, a mutant working as an exotic dancer. There's something so incredibly eerie, so uncanny about the way Vaughn and cinematographer John Mathieson frame this scene. Between the saturated red colors, the unnaturally-precise symmetry, and our protagonists themselves, looking on from an alienating vanishing point with sleazy, chauvinist glee in their Mad Men duds...it looks like something out of a Kubrick film, doesn't it? I mean can't you imagine this scene coming from The Shining? Or Eyes Wide Shut? The Hellfire Club's front, after all - a classy, exclusive underworld where the ultra-rich and important can act on their seediest, most debauched fantasies - is essentially the depraved high society sex cult from that film, sans the kinky whipping each other with animal masks on and what have you. For me, at least, this scene produced the same incredible visceral reaction that Kubrick's signature techniques do.

And of course there's boatloads of David Lynch going on here, too - it has got such a creepy, vouyeristic feel to it, like we're seeing something we shouldn't be. The look on Charles and Erik's self-satisfied faces as they watch this bug-stripper hybrid thing showing off her mutant goods...the whole scene is both sickening and teasingly intriguing, leaving the audience uncomfortable even as it begs for more (and uncomfortable as they beg for more). It's a great shot, likely one of many in X-Men: First Class. A second viewing would have probably revealed more images with such staying power to me. I'm thinking the coin-through-the-brain scene probably had it.

X-Men: First Class is an undeniably well-made, energetic action flick that breathes new life into the sagging X-Men flm franchise. It is totally worth seeing, maybe more than once. It has got heart, dazzling effects and a killer visual eye. But while all that makes damn good weekend entertainment, it takes a strong, well-constructed story to make a truly great superhero movie, which despite some great moments is something this film doesn't entirely deliver. Is X-Men: First Class on par with Spider-Man 2, The Dark Knight or Iron Man, as some have opined? Nah, not in a long shot.

A Message to Dan Slott

Dear Mr. Slott,

I have been reading your run on Amazing Spider-Man for a while now. Through doing so, I have come to realize that you are unaware of two things. Firstly, most readers - such as myself - have been following the title for a while now, and know from constant reiteration within each individual issue that Spider-Man is on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end day job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ. More importantly, there's an intro page before the beginning of each issue that gives a crash-course on recent developments in Spider-Man's life. This introduction states that Spider-Man is on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end day job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ.

I bring these up to help you realize that you do not have to spend one-third of every issue telling us that Spider-Man is on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end day job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ. Which is exactly what it is, telling us. Describing it. Not offering insight into the effect it has on Peter's life, besides him continuously opining "doh boy it sure is crazy staying on top of all this busy stuff and not being poor anymore." It's just Peter saying to himself that he is, in fact, on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ. We all know about these things already. It has been made very, very clear to us.

It's getting increasingly difficult to trod through massive chunks of exposition that say the exact same thing issue after issue. I like the stories you've been writing during your tenure on Spider-Man, I like the way you handle the characters and the plots you put them in. "Spider Island" sounds like your coolest idea yet, I really want to read it. But I don't know if I can take another caption box of Spider-Man think-telling me about how he's on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ. I can use these things called pictures and this concept called character interaction to see that he's on two superhero teams, has a demanding high-end job and a girlfriend that isn't MJ.

Sincerely,

Everyone reading Amazing Spider-Man

At Da Moofies: Green Lantern is the Best Comic Book Adaptation of All Time

Bet that got your attention, didn't it?

So here we are, Green Lantern, the bastard black sheep of this summer's hero-fest. You don't need me to tell you that Green Lantern is a terrible movie. You don't need me to tell you it's a travesty of a superhero film. If you noticed the horde of marketing tie-in commercials (look Subway costumers, we have avocados now! They're green! GREEN LIKE GREEN LANTERN!) that mysteriously vanished two weeks after its release, or saw its box office results, or read any of the reviews for it, or know someone who saw it and engaged in awkward small talk with them, or (God help you) saw it yourself, you already know how relentlessly, hideously, mind-assaultingly bad it is. The first time I saw it, my friend Theo and I were so overwhelmed by the sheer cringe-worthiness of it all that about an hour in we resolved to leave if there was one more major groan-inducing moment. Less than five minutes later we walked out. I haven't walked out of a movie since Norbit. SINCE. FUCKING. NORBIT.

Interestingly, some of my close friends had dissenting opinions of the film. My habitually absent co-blogger prooker thought it was adequate for reasons I'm still not entirely clear on. I think it's something along the lines of Green Lantern being one of his favorite heroes and starring in a major motion picture. It could've been Hal Jordan sitting on an emerald toilet taking a two-hour shit in the middle of space - which isn't that far off in the first place - and he would've been satisfied. My buddy Dom, who I'm sure remembers he said he wanted to write a post on Thor for here, thought it was passable too, but I'm pretty sure he just wants to fuck Ryan Reynolds. And who can blame him?

I mean damn, look at him. The man is cut, ladies and gentleman. And funny too! OH GOD HE'S A DREAMBOAT. But alas, Ryan's rock hard abs and glorious pecs couldn't do shit to save this trainwreck of a movie. Nor could Blake Lively's (wait for it) lively assets. Get it? GET IT?!

Look it's four in the morning here and I am in no state to write puns. At this point all I can do is type something in all caps and pray that it even makes sense.

I'm not here to tell you how appallingly, insultingly awful this movie is. I'm not here to complain about how rotten the performances are, or how stale the dialogue is, or how sub-par the CGI the film hedged its bets on ended up being, or how poorly paced it is, or how it couldn't settle on a tone, or how utterly goofy and ridiculous everything they tried to make serious actually was, or how there's no character arc, or how irksome the exposition is, or how fucking horrible every aspect of this movie and everything involved in its creation from the first goddamn letter typed on its asinine script to the last day of post-production turned out. I'm here to argue that Green Lantern is the best adaptation of a modern superhero comic we've seen on the silver screen.

To understand what I mean, we need to take a brief history lesson. Superhero comics have been published for over 70 years. The history of these comics are categorized into a series of "ages," each roughly 15 years in length, based on the prevailing narrative and formal properties of comics during that time. The Golden Age of Comic Books lasted from the creation of Superman in 1938 until the early '50s; the Flash began the Silver Age in 1956, which lasted until the beginning of the Bronze Age in 1970; the Bronze Age would last until The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were released in 1985; the Dark Age, which hasn't been formally separated from the catch-all "Modern Age" taxon yet (I assume these things are decided by a shadowy council of comic book nerds from inside their moms' basements), went on until let's say, JLA: Earth 2 and JSA both came out in '99. The period we're currently entrenched in probably won't be delineated for at least another two decades, even though we've already mapped out its fundamental attributes so far - attributes that reflect themselves in Green Lantern.

The two giants in the current era of mainstream superhero comics have been Brian Bendis (at Marvel) and Geoff Johns (at DC). Seemingly independent of each other, the two developed a remarkably similar writing style, one that quickly became the defining lexicon for how superhero books are written as of 2011. Most writers working at the Big Two derive their storytelling methods from the Bendis/Johns school (which is definitely too formal a term to describe it but, again, 4 am and all that); those few that do not are usually copyists of Grant Morrison and his kind. Good luck with that.

So what are the formal characteristics of a Bendis or Johns comic? For one, both are marked by heavy use of exposition and a belabored pacing. Bendis, for instance, makes excessive use of an artistic technique called "decompression." It's a stylistic choice - pioneered in American comics by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch in The Authority - where panels are allotted to portray subtle visual changes and character movements/interactions, in turn creating a slower-moving story. Decompression can be used to great effect, creating poignant moments that can just make a comic, such as throughout Joss Whedon (*squeal*) and John Cassady's run on Astonishing X-Men.

And then there's the way Brian Bendis uses it: as a vehicle to cram as many lines of dialogue as humanly possible into a single page. Bendis, you see, is the God of Verbose Exposition. I'll let his work speak for itself. Here's a scan from New Avengers #5:


I don't know how people can get through that. Reading this made me feel like I was cleaving my way through an Amazon jungle of exposition without the help of my trusty Bantu guide. Indeed, Bendis doesn't write characters so much as he does talking heads. Here's a two-page splash from the same issue:


For reference, splash pages are typically reserved for cool dynamic shit worth devoting an entire 1-2 pages to. Something like this:


Now which would you rather read? Which is infinitely more interesting than the other? Which conveys something actually happening?

Here is the second of a two-page conversation from Bendis' run on Daredevil, an example of decompression gone horribly wrong:


This one seated conversation takes two pages out of a 22 page, $2.99 superhero comic and I still have no goddamn idea what the fuck Ben Urich is trying to say. He sounds pretty cool saying it, I guess, but if there's something of genuine substance being discussed there I may have missed it amidst the sequence of slightly tilting heads and massive word balloons.

Bendis writes as if he were writing a play or a film script. He wants to be a Mamet or a Tarantino or a Sorkin. But he's writing a comic book script, which by the nature of the medium operates under completely different aesthetic parameters. Text and still image must be balanced to tell a complete story (or at least a complete chapter of a story arc) in a limited number of pages. It's all about synergy. Much more so than a film or play, comics are a "show, don't tell" medium; if anything, image is favored over text. Aaron Sorkin's breakneck conversations and lengthy monologues work magically in walk and talk motion, but they don't translate to comics, something Bendis simply fails to comprehend.

Over at DC Comics, Geoff Johns wields exposition like a Green Lantern ring. Johns made his career out of referencing, reviving, re-appropriating, or outright rewriting elements of the DC Universe's history. Retroactive continuity isn't a new thing - I mean there's even that term for it - but it has never been done to the absurd, wildly unrestrained extent that it has under Johns' pen. He's a history nerd - a made-up history nerd - and all his stories dig deep into the most obscure pockets of continuity. He loves that continuity with the obsession of the world's queasiest fanboy, even as he completely changes its convoluted timeline to suit him - to what he specifically wants it to be. To get what's going on in his comics, you would need an encyclopedic knowledge of the DC Universe's 70+ years of stories, so Johns goes through the trouble of detailing the forgotten events and situations his comics refer to. Through lots of expository dialogue.

Here's a page from Flashpoint #1, where a Flash villain has rewritten the history of the DC Universe and it's up to the Flash (Geoff Johns' favorite hero) restore it to his (Geoff Johns') vision of how things really are. In what is probably a poorly thought out apology for killing off most of DC's minority characters and replacing them with white folk during Blackest Night, in this alternate reality Johns makes Cyborg both the superheroes' token minority and their leader. Here we go.


Even in a tale where all the history was invented on the spot, Johns must go the whole nine yards to fill us in. So I guess the question here is "Cyborg, if, uh, if you say we all know why we're here then, um, why are you telling us why we're here?" It probably would've been kinda cool for us to see all that stuff Cyborg describes go down, but that's not how Johns runs his operation. Why show when you can just tell? That way it's so much easier to write!

Also, Africa is now "ape-controlled." Yikes. I guess Cyborg has too much good taste to touch that issue.

What I mean when I claim that Green Lantern is the best adaptation of a modern superhero comic book is that, uniquely among its genre brethren, the film recreates the formal aesthetic qualities of contemporary superhero comics for the big screen. Like a Bendis or Johns comic, Green Lantern is bogged down by heaps of unnecessary exposition and suffers from wildly uneven pacing. The movie begins with a shot of outer space as Geoffrey Rush narrates us a crash-course on the Green Lantern Corps. He goes on and on and on for what feels an eternity, and the only thing we see throughout the entire thing is that one shot of space. It's just agonizing from the audience's perspective. We're at the beginning of the film and already the writers are throwing their hands up and saying "ah, fuck it!" About 45 minutes into the film, when Ryan Reynolds is transported to the Green Lanterns' home planet, Rush gives him a tour packed with all the excitement of the Epcot Ball ride, all while re-explaining everything he already told us in the film's beginning down to the very last detail. It's a slow, excruciating experience, one of many trials that test the audience's willpower (HERPADERP SEE WHAT I DID THERE) to endure through the movie. By the time I left an hour into my first attempt at seeing it, not much had actually happened - Hal was just getting introduced to his future-Lantern buddies - but I felt like hours had passed since we took our seats. Such is the vacuity of Green Lantern.

There's another overriding quality that defines modern superhero comics, one again made fashionable by Bendis' and Johns' work: exploitation. The sensationalist portrayal of lurid subject matter that is A) unconcerned with exploring said subject matter and B) bereft of a discernible literary or artistic sense. Now exploitation has obviously been a prominent element in comics storytelling for ages, but it was never truly essential to the fabric of a comic book story. Until the past decade, that is. As expected from one whose influences include David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino, Bendis gleefully indulges in extravagant, borderline ridiculous excess. Mamet's over-the-top, fuck-ridden dialogue expresses an enormous vitality, reaching highs of sweeping triumph and lows of hopeless despair; the sadness belying our routine, obscenity-filled everyday speech becomes grand drama exploring the American working class. Tarantino uses an exploitation atmosphere in his movies to simultaneously homage, analyze and deconstruct the precepts of genre and structure, the distinctions levied between high and low culture, and the nature of cinema.

In contrast, Bendis' work isn't too concerned with anything other than, well, exploitation. He's trying to sell as many comics as possible, because he knows people line up in drones for bullshit like Final Destination 12: This Time Everybody Dies Again and Saw XX: DAYUM Lookit All Dat Blood. Accordingly, Bendis has no qualms with crossing boundaries that his inspirations would never dare tread without a damn compelling reason. So in Avengers #12.1 it's only natural that Bendis gives us some completely arbitrary torture-porn of Spider-Woman that doesn't factor into the plot at all: ladyparts sprawled out for us in the most graphic way imaginable for sexploitation's own sake. It's only natural that in Siege #2 he has the Sentry, a character who is in many ways representative of everything wrong with today's superhero comics, ripping Ares in half before our eyes.

It's supposed be a shocking, appalling, intensely visceral moment, as evidenced by the reaction shots. It is. That's the point of exploitation. That's how it works. It's also supposed to establish the gravity of the situation our heroes are in, to accentuate the enormous power and depravity the threat before them possesses. It doesn't, because this kind of thing is the status quo. The previous issue of Siege begins with a football stadium full of people getting incinerated, an event that is never dwelt on or even brought up again in the rest of the story; gory dismemberment is just business as usual in today's superhero fare.

For his part, Johns rivals - and often even surpasses - Bendis at his most shameless on the exploitation front. Johns rose through the ranks of DC Comics writing epic, blood-soaked killfests between the Green Lantern Corps, their allies, and legions of baddies who seek to defile (in all the term's connotations) the memory of a simpler time where superheroes were the pinnacle of innocence and sanctity. Of course, through his extensive rewriting of DC Comics' history, Johns has made it so that simple time never existed in the first place - it was always the festering pool of idea-barren grim-n'-grit he's currently writing. His work nostalgically fetishizes the brightly-colored days of superhero comics, even as it drags them further away from those days than ever before. Johns' work is entirely devoid of any greater meaning, the countless mutilations within it are purely for entertainment. Sound and fury signifying nothing, like this space kitten who liquefies people with its acidic blood vomit in Green Lantern #54. I kid you not.


Or Infinite Crisis #6, where a villain dies by getting his metal face mask pushed through the back of his head by the eyeholes:

And of course we can't have a modern superhero book without a staggering amount of sexploitation, so on top of all this Johns gives us an army of Star Sapphires (the one whose costume is magenta goop covering her double-E nips and a star insignia over her cooch, for those not in the know) who harem-worship a man called "The Predator." Matt Seneca has written two fascinating posts on his blog - here and here - that investigate the relationship between Johns' work and exploitation in far greater detail. He tells it better than I ever could.

While gratuitous violence is absent from Green Lantern (the film borrows more from the form of modern comics than their content; Bendis and Johns revel in oppressive bleakness while Green Lantern is trivial, lighthearted fare), it is no less indebted to an exploitation film aesthetic. One of the biggest formal hallmarks of exploitation movies is that they have very low production values - they look poor-quality. In spite of a $200 million dollar budget, the film looks very, very cheap, something many critics have gleefully pointed out as they collectively tore it a new anus. One remarks that our protagonist's stomping grounds is a "flatly generic city...pasted together from random urban skylines." Others variously called the production "tacky" and "chintzy-looking," describing the earthbound scenes as "stilted" or "cardboard" set-pieces with the "staid artificiality that comes with extensive soundstage shooting." The CGI that would make-or-break the film has been even more harshly bemoaned, criticized as "a big bore...blandly digitally rendered, "not so special effects," "ludicrous, in an intricate, painstaking, seriously over-the-top way," "more like screen-savers than inhabited environments," "failing to take on the gravity and substance of real events," etc. Put bluntly, the CGI looked like something that would have been acceptable - just acceptable - half a decade ago. How do you blow all that money and end up with a product so schlocky?

Furthermore, Green Lantern indulges in the same over-the-top shock tactics employed in exploitation cinema, the kind that are so absurd they verge on self-parody. One example is the abrupt, out-of-place flashback where we see Hal's dad die in a plane crash. Little Hal asks his dad if he's afraid something will go wrong with the experimental jet he's test-piloting. Dad Jordan responds, "It's not my job to be." GROOOOOOAN. So here's how they filmed the inevitable crash: the plane goes up, then spends the next thirty seconds wobbling around as electronic stuff presumably malfunctions. After a precipitous fall, the plane lands...completely intact. Lil' Hal runs to the dud jet as his dad gets halfway out. Dad Jordan gets out a brief, melodramatic "Hal--" before BOOOOOM!!!! The whole fucking thing explodes right before lil' Hal in a fiery inferno about thirty times larger than the jet itself. I guess it was painted in several coats of rocket fuel or something. And of course neither the crash itself nor the implications of it are ever brought up again, save that, by virtue of the scene's inclusion, we are to believe Hal's reckless douchebaggy behavior throughout is somehow the result of undefined daddy issues. Ridiculous moments like this occur over and over again until movie's merciful end. Exploitation cinema at its cheesiest.

The film's script was co-written by two second-string comic book writers, both copyists of the Bendis/Johns style. It's content is heavily indebted to Johns in particular, whose work on the Green Lantern franchise for the past sevem years has propelled the writer to superstardom and made the character one of the most talked-about things in mainstream comics (though clearly he's still B-list to the general public). The film's plot is adapted from Johns' 2009 retelling of Hal Jordan's origin, while its main villain was conceived by Johns as a "space parasite" in a contrived explanation why Hal really turned evil in the early 90s. Johns was a producer on the film, and described his duties as being its resident "Green Lantern guru." Whenever the filmmakers had a question about any aspect of the mythos, they turned to him as the ultimate authority. So its no wonder that, like the material it's based off of with its harebrained Emotional Spectrum cosmology, Green Lantern revels in shallow meaninglessness. No matter how aggressively it alleges a good-vs.-evil duality between abstract "will" and "fear," its attempts at a moral message amount to literally nothing. It's all dressing so our guys in green can fight a yellow cloud monster with just as hazy motivations.

If I were to summarize the enormous appeal of Bendis and Johns' work, I would say this: Bendis' audience is the kind person who loves Tarantino movies because they have a lot of badass violence and their characters say "fuck" a lot, but doesn't know what they're actually even about, what truly makes them great films. Johns' audience is the foregone fanboy, hardcore continuity nerds like himself. The kind of people who will gladly overlook a story's quality because HOLY SHIT he brings up that one plot point from the 90s and re-introduces Vibe, those are insider things I know about and now I feel validated. Far removed from the brilliant work of their early Halcyon days*, both writers now get by appealing to the lowest common denominator, to separate aspects of the superhero fandom at its absolute worst and most stereotypical. They're both the most popular writers working in comics.

If Green Lantern was a comic book it would be one of the industry's best-selling titles.

Oh wait.




*Both Bendis and Johns produced some consistently fantastic work during their early careers, from ca. 2000-2003. On the Bendis side of things, Powers and Ultimate Spider-Man were revolutionary ideas that to this day remain influential for all the right reasons. Alias is his closest thing to a masterpiece and his run on Daredevil, for all its faults, still has many phenomenal moments. Johns produced some truly great - and vastly under-appreciated - work during this period as well. His stint on The Avengers and his relaunch of Teen Titans were both exemplary; his work co-writing JSA with James Robinson and, after the latter's departure, writing it himself unquestionably deserved every bit of acclaim it received. Hell, I even got a pretty big kick out of "Sinestro Corps War." For both Bendis and Johns, it seems as though it wasn't until they were given the keys to the kingdoms that everything went to shit. A pity.

I should also take this opportunity to point out that while Green Lantern is a hot steaming pile of shit, it ain't the worst superhero movie by a long shot. Elektra, Catwoman, Superman IV, Steel...there are quite a few comic book flicks that sit above (below?) Green Lantern in the echelons of bad cinema. Still, to see Hal Jordan and his pals suffer such a fate is a fucking bummer, man.

At Da Moofies: Captain America: The First Avenger: Killing Nazis is the New Postmodern

COLON COLON COLON COLON COLON

Ahem.

With the final tent-pole in the Marvel Cinematic Universe secured at last, we here at the Junction figure it's about time we posted our thoughts on the summer of superheroes. In the next few articles, prooker and I - and hopefully a guest blogger or two - will be taking on Thor, X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern and Captain America: The First Avenger. Here I'll share my thoughts on the last of the bunch. Spoilers and such.

When I left the theater, my first impression was that Captain America was really cool to look at and really stupid. Now it definitely has some things going for it, namely Chris Evans, whose sincere performance makes Cap easily the most compelling hero we've seen in a while. The kid's got heart. The special effects and retro production design are also exceedingly well done, and Alan Silvestri provides the first truly iconic superhero film score since Spider-Man. The whole operation is charming in its straightforwardness, exuding an anachronistic optimism, earnest simplicity and joy that, at first glance, seems refreshing.

But being refreshing isn't a good thing when it hearkens back to something done better countless times before. Not everything needs to be groundbreaking, but nothing should be derivative, which is exactly what The First Avenger initially appears to offer up. I for one would have rather seen the solemn Captain America of the comic books. Cap via Saving Private Ryan - a WWII movie with a superhero in it instead of a superhero movie in WWII. In my mind, it would have been more interesting to see a period piece that took advantage of the wartime setting, one of the things that sets our hero apart from the other A-listers: (now imagine this narrated by one of those 40s newsreel guys) entrenched in the horrors of world war, in the face of unspeakable hardship, Captain America - the embodiment of everything our nation stands for at its purest ideal - triumphs over the Red Skull's hateful nihilism and learns what it means not just to be a hero, but a leader and a symbol.

Eh? Eh?


The ideas and themes we see in The First Avenger, on the other hand, seem to be FUCK THAT SHIT LOOK AT LASERS BLOWING STUFF UP and HEY YOU GUYS LIKE IRON MAN RIGHT WELL HIS FUCKING DAD IS IN THIS AND HE'S A GODDAMN BALLER! For me, at least, this was a big letdown. The defining moments of Captain America's origin - the super-soldier serum, the deaths of Dr. Erskine and Bucky, his romance with Peggy Carter, his battlefield endeavors, his confrontations with the Red Skull - are treated as bullet points, superficially glossed over and then immediately forgotten. Cap's rationalization of the war - "I don't like bullies, I don't care where they're from" - is endearing but disappointingly childish. The film's moral framework, that the "little guys" are better people because they can appreciate power while the "big guys" can only take it for granted and abuse it (or, uh, something), is beyond wobbly from any standpoint. It's also contradicted in Thor. So there's that.

Any possibility of historical authenticity or of ANY meaningful statement inherent to the material - about war, obedience, loyalty, comradeship, honor, freedom, oppression, discrimination, life in the 40s, the list goes on and on - is thrown out the window for the sake of appeasement. Unlike other WWII movies, Captain America conveniently sidesteps the unsavory side of the times. Which is to say, all of it; to my knowledge it's the only film set in the European theater where ne'er even a swastika is seen. Writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely choose to play it safe with the potentially controversial subject matter, striving to deliver little more than a light, accessible adventure flick: competent weekend entertainment to be mass-consumed, enjoyed and forgotten. I was surprised by how mechanical the entire thing felt, even with Chris Evans doing his best to make everything recognizably human. It's clear that the writers intended Captain America to exist, like Iron Man 2, solely as a set-up for The Avengers. Maybe the subtitle gave it away...

Luckily for us, director Joe Johnston doesn't settle.

Eventually I realized that my main beef with The First Avenger was simply that it wasn't the Captain America movie I wanted to see. What I wanted was a film about Captain America, a film that explored the entirety of his mythos - the depth of his psychology, the magnitude of his friendships, the gravity of his rivalries, and perhaps most importantly his unique status as comicdom's premiere period superhero. Only after I accepted that the movie isn't at all concerned with the Captain America story itself did I realize just how smart it really is. First impressions, after all, are more often than not deceiving.

With Captain America: The First Avenger, Johnston has created the first superhero metafilm; he uses the rich mythology and iconography of Captain America not as the heart of his movie (as nearly all other superhero flicks do) but instead as a broad framework to comment on the adventure film genre itself. A simple, unabashedly old-fashioned adventure story that's actually about adventure stories - their defining characteristics, their development throughout cinema history, their intrinsic meaning to audiences. While it's too bad that Cap's great mythos had to be compromised in the process, in this light it was clearly the best choice for the statement Johnston adapts it to make. After all, what's more American than the good ol' swashbuckling adventure movie?

So let's take a look at what's going on between the lines here. Captain America doesn't try at all to hide its stylistic inspiration: Raiders of the Lost Ark, the archetypal adventure film, itself heavily indebted to the pulpy film serials of the 30s and 40s. Like Spielberg, Johnston avoids grounding his picture as a period piece and instead creates the same feeling of timelessness that pervades Raiders. In addition, many of the tropes that define the Raiders plot have direct analogues in The First Avenger, such as the Ark of the Covenant finding a counterpart in the Cosmic Cube. Or Tesseract. Whatever. What makes all this important is that, despite quite obviously aping the retro style and conventions of Raiders, Johnston's feature retains its own character, what with the whole superhero origin story thing and all. In doing so, Captain America establishes a slick, self-referential genre savviness that only increases as the picture goes on - a sort of mission statement toward its exploration of the adventure film's nature, evolution and importance.

The picture begins with sickly, 90-pound weakling Steve Rogers being rejected yet again for military service. All the poor guy wants to do is join his brothers in arms against the Axis; Rogers is so determined to fight the good fight that by now he's attempted to enlist five times. Utterly defeated, Rogers seeks solace at the movies, where he watches a newsreel - the kind that played alongside Buck Rogers or any of the hundreds of other adventure serials during Hollywood's golden age - showing our boys at the German front. Inspired by what he sees, Rogers tries once again. Except this time, he's accepted! Here Johnston presents the New Deal/WWII-era "Saturday at the Movies" - where the serial and adventure feature reached the height of their popularity - as an empowering, even transformative experience. The genre in this early stage, with its prevailing sense of wonder, hope and optimism and its thematic stock in overcoming impossible odds is a vehicle for positively informing our own lives and inspiring us into positive action.

We soon move ahead to the Red Skull's origin, relayed to Steve by Dr. Erskine. A montage, the first of many, depicts the story as Erskine narrates, but it's not the kind we're used to. Multiple images, both literal and symbolic, are layered over one another, fading in and out in an indistinct, dream-like state. This montage is modeled after the prevailing style during the golden age of Hollywood, an adventure flick staple pioneered by Slavko Vorkapich throughout the 1930s. By employing Vorkapich's method, Johnston firmly anchors this section of Captain America in the serial/adventure aesthetic and its associated values.

The genre would continue more or less unchanged for the next few decades. It did, however, gain new tropes, additions reflected in Captain America as the narrative continues. The first big, catalyzing point in the picture's midsection - the rescue mission and subsequent "forming a team" scenes - are derived from elements popularized in 1960s war adventure films, most notably The Guns of Navarone, The Longest Day, The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare. The scenes are certainly unlike anything we've previously seen in The First Avenger, but stylistically they blend in well with what came before.

It won't stay like that for long.

You see, by this same period in the 60s the Vorkapich montage that was once so prevalent had all but vanished in American cinema. The modern montage sequence - the really clichéd kind we're all too familiar with - proliferated during the 70s, the same time when Star Wars ushered in a new Renaissance for the adventure movie genre. Johnston uses this popular method for Captain America's last montage, and just as the first established a specific guiding aesthetic, so too does this one. The sequence portrays Cap, along with Bucky and the Howling Commandos, raiding numerous HYDRA bases as the war progresses toward its end. It's a really jarring, unsuspected moment that can't help but pull you out of the experience.

It is also, accordingly, a signifier of complete stylistic change. It indicates that we have now moved on to a different era in the genre's history, from its pulpy origins in the 30s-40s to its 70s-80s resurgence. It's a difference you can see and feel everywhere in Captain America's last half hour. We finally get some genuine emotional depth via Steve and Peggy's final farewell. The Red Skull's stock villain antics finally become an immediate threat as he prepares to bomb each major American city. His techno-armored HYDRA minions, before depicted one at a time, are now shown en masse, marching through Death Star-like corridors - what once appeared as lone anomalies out of Flash Gordon or King of the Rocket Men now has the character of the Imperial Stormtroopers. In the Star Wars franchise, they were an analogue to the Nazis; here, they ARE the Nazis. Of course in the comics HYDRA was a stand-in for Communism, but, y'know, whatever works. Now back on topic. The film's technology, which before had a retro Sky Captain-style flair, now seems like it was salvaged from Alderaan. There's even a Wilhelm scream and a motorcycle chase that directly pays homage to Return of the Jedi; this last half hour of Captain America explicitly suggests a deep familiarity with the mechanics of the genre - not as a rehash of its formula so much as a modern re-appropriation.

It all adds up to an effective portrayal of the 70s-80s adventure boom's defining elements, and what made those movies so popular. The production side was marked by technological advancement as well as a nostalgic but objective understanding of genre history and iconography, a combination that allowed the finished products to finally achieve a visual scope their stories necessitated. The stories themselves placed greater emphasis on the protagonists and the enormity of their tasks. This generation of movies was even more wide-eyed, but no longer as light-hearted; now something we had reason to care about was palpably at stake. They were still joyously fantastical enough to inspire people, while remaining grounded in truth enough for people to believe in them as more than mere escapement.

That self-referential genre familiarity I keep talking about makes itself apparent in the film's final battle. Long story short, the Red Skull tries to physically handle the Cosmic Cube...and, predictably, is promptly disintegrated. It's kind of a gaping plot hole. Throughout the film the Red Skull has been established as the world's foremost expert on this thing. It has shown him handling the cube with containers and robot grabber claw things, but never with his own hands; he knows damn well that if he touches it he's gonna explode or something. But here, nevertheless, he does. Because that is how adventure movies work. The villain must be destroyed by the very MacGuffin he has set out to harness - it's the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail and R2-D2's Death Star plans. So the Red Skull has to touch that cube and blast into aether simply because he's fated to by virtue of genre. Here it's worth noting that in the film the Cosmic Cube is an object from Norse mythology, which is marked by an overwhelming, pervasive sense of predestination. The Gods and mortals in Norse myths know exactly how it's all going to end, and most of their actions are motivated by a belief in that action's own inevitability. Take note, Johann: life is tough when it's prophesied by Norns, valkyries and the Edda. Bitch.

There's still one thing left to talk about, and it's probably the best thing about Captain America. In between the Red Skull's origin and Howling Commandos FUCK YEAH sequences there is a middle montage, showcasing Cap's time as a government marketing tool. Aside from being an extremely clever and well-executed sequence with an INSANELY catchy Alan Menken tune (all that was missing was this), it's also one of the most important pieces of the movie's overriding statement. The montage features Cap promoting war bonds on a USO national tour, starring in a popular Republic film serial, and having his image mass-marketed in an eponymous comic book. It's already an extremely meta five minutes, as the character did star in a popular Republic serial and the comic books featured are replicas of Captain America Comics #1 (which here in the real world came out before the movie takes place, but again, details). I think it goes even further, though. The sequence seems to be an analysis of the way entertainment industry companies treat their iconic or breakout characters, such as Marvel Studios' attitude toward Captain America: not as a fully realized individual, but as a brand. A multimedia franchise to be marketed and commercially expanded (exploited?) across a variety of different platforms, held together by a broad, vague junction of definitive features and symbols. This montage shows us the franchise in all its outrageous, 20th century glory.

But the times, they are a changin'. And the old media hasn't caught up. After waking up from his almost 70 year slumber and rampaging through SHIELD security in the film's epilogue, Cap stands, utterly bewildered, in the middle of 2011 Times Square. Poor Steve is a man out of time and he has no idea what to do. The nature of the franchise has changed drastically from what he's familiar with, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is paving the way; now instead of just having his own film (serial or otherwise), Captain America is expected to hobnob with superheroes from others. Once isolated franchises and brands now co-mingle with each other in a dizzying web of shared continuity and box office receipts. While that's great and all, this is an epilogue of the bittersweet variety. It's saying that the old ways are on their way out of Hollywood, among them the old-fashioned adventure flick. Much like Steve's own standing in this new and unfamiliar world, the future of the genre is uncertain, to say the least. It's going to be a long, arduous uphill battle both for Steve and the pictures he represents. We had Jurassic Park in '93 and Pirates of the Caribbean in '03. Those are both amazing movies, no doubt, but they didn't start a zeitgeist. When will the next adventure phenomenon come around?

Don't any one of you fuckers dare think Avatar. Takes more than swinging through space jungles to meet the genre classification. A goddamn story, for starters.

Above all, Captain America: The First Avenger seems to be saying, "hey, these kinds of movies are important to all of us - they're as much a part of our cultural identity as apple pie and childhood obesity - and unless we do something they could be gone forever." Conveniently enough, that something just happens to be seeing Captain America: The First Avenger.

So what are you waiting for?

Monday Review: Spider-Man Reboo...t!

Damn! So close to a rhyming title.

So last May I saw Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark with my friend Kullan on its second day of new previews, fresh off its month-long, completely-reworking-everything-after-being-universally-panned-and-hemorrhaging-millions hiatus. I imagine if this was the first time I saw the show, I would have found it pretty mediocre. But I had the dubious privilege of seeing the show pre-boot, and Jesus. Fucking. Christ. THERE IS SO MUCH IMPROVEMENT! Seeing Spidey 2.0 after witnessing the Taymor trainwreck is such an experience. The latter was the worst show in the history of Broadway; the former may not be great, maybe not even good, but it's far from the worst thing on Broadway THIS SEASON.

If you can't appreciate that degree of improvement on such a complicated production in a one month time span, then there is something wrong with you on a fundamental level. You should reevaluate your life.



So what's so different? Well the biggest thing is that former Turn Off the Dark mastermind Julie Taymor was completely dropped from the show, and with it her...umm, unique...vision of webhead, his mythology, and the larger nature of the musical theatre experience. With Taymor out of the picture, the story could molded be into something more recognizably Spider-Man. That insufferable Geek Chorus is gone, and Arachne - Taymor's authorial avatar and the big bad of Spidey 1.0 - is reduced to little more than a glorified cameo.

The book, resuscitated by comics veteran and celebrated playwright - that rare breed! - Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, is finally coherent. Sacasa removed the Arachne subplot that dominated the show's second act, instead opting to lengthen the more-or-less unrelated story of the first into the show's entirety. Gone are her eight-legged furies and her maniacal quest to steal shoes better than MJ's (...I, uh, I think that's what was in the old version. I'm still trying to work out what the hell was going on). Sacasa's plot is considerably more streamlined, cohesive, and rewarding to the audience; Sacasa gives Spidey and the Green Goblin much-needed breathing space to develop. In Taymor's crammed book, the first act ended with Gobby's death; in the new version, it ends with his origin.

Many of the songs were reworked, some were cut, and a new one was added: "A Freak Like Me Needs Company." It's an 80s-style dance-romp pastiche at the beginning of Act II, and probably the best song in the whole damn show. "I'm a 65 million dollar circus tragedy -- well maybe more like 75 million!" Osborn sneers as he mutates his two-faced colleagues in the same accident that birthed his villainous alter ego. It's a clever way to introduce the Sinister Six, who before were created on the half-baked whims of the Geek Chorus. God what a fucking lazy narrative device.

For what it's worth, I chuckled at the self-reference, too. Meta is handled pretty sloppily in musical theatre these days, so I appreciate when it can elicit an emotion other than facepalm.



The best part about Sacasa's new song is that, unlike the Bono-penned tunes in the rest of the show, "A Freak Like Me" actually advances the plot, which is kind of what a song in a musical is supposed to do. And speaking of the insufferable Irishman, you'll all be happy to know that "Vertigo" was removed from the club scene, replaced by generic untz-untz rave music. Unfortunately, "Bullying By Numbers" remains. Ears bled. I just wish "bullying by numbers" was an actual phrase so the song would at least make a nugget of fucking sense.

A number of other additions and changes were made to the production. True Believers will be happy to know that, through the magic of prerecorded lines blasted through speakers (TRULY WE ARE IN THE FUTURE), Spider-Man now cracks jokes as he swings through the Foxwoods Theater. I squealed at that a bit, not gonna lie. Also that scene early in Act I where Peter's home life - where he whines and angsts because he gets bullied at school and his parents who aren't his actual parents just don't know what it's like to be a teenager, maaaan - is juxtaposed with Mary Jane's - where she's verbally and physically abused by her alcoholic father - is made a little less appallingly awful. Now the father is a drunk of the sad, pathetic, harmless variety, the kind you simultaneously pity and root for. In other words, Tony Stark circa 1979. COME ON MJ'S DAD YOU CAN GET OFFA THE STUFF IF YOU JUST TRY. Anyway the implication that Peter and Mary Jane's lives are equally tragic works a bit better. A bit.

Of course, Turn Off the Dark is not without its problems, namely its inability to completely reconcile the new, less fantastical narrative with Taymor's astronomically expensive vision. This was inevitable; they spent all that fucking money creating vaguely racist masks, blow-up doll Bonesaws and LED screens for shitty Sinister Six music videos, of course they can't afford to scrap any of that stuff. Sacasa does the best he - or anyone, I imagine - can integrating all the overpriced incoherence into the story, but the dissonance is jarring. Arachne is the most obvious casualty; there's really no reason for the character to remain in the show, besides her spider suit probably costing a few hundred thousand dollars. As a "guardian angel" that confers with Peter in two dream sequences, the role serves little purpose, existing only to belt out "Rise Above" and for some cool Cirque du Soleil stuff (itself another out-of-place Taymor remnant irrelevant to the plot) at the beginning of the musical. I almost wish Arachne had more stage time, if only to better integrate her into the story. Y'know, give her a reason to be in that list of characters or something.



One final thing I noticed was that Sacasa's book contains a lot more insider references to life in New York City, which is another really interesting and well done metafictional element to Spidey 2.0. The show has, after all, become part and particle of the city, the talk of the town in virtually every circle. Turn Off the Dark reached fruition during my first year living in Manhattan, and the notorious production was always in the headlines, always THE topic of conversation. This "65 million dollar circus tragedy" may have had a much larger influence on NYC than people currently acknowledge, one that may have lasting effects on its culture, economy, and society. Only time will tell.

God I can't wait to leave boring, touristy D.C. and get back there. I'll be able to bow my head in embarrassment as I admit to all my elitist drama major friends that I kinda liked how Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark 2.0 turned out.

And Reeve Carney still rocks that ballin' Spider-Man jacket. In these trying times that's all anyone can really ask for.

...He's Probably Just Like Me: A Mother. F***ing. Goblin.

Excuse the title, I've been getting into Tyler a lot lately. Just like every suburban white kid.

Well it has been a while, hasn’t it? Schoolwork and women and a few nasty medical issues have kept me away from here – life likes to throw wrenches in our routines with crazy stuff like that. The other blogger on here is just super lazy and spends his time drunk go-karting in drag at weddings. Oh Gabriel, you and your antics. But that’s a story for another time, and I pwomise I’ll be posting more often in the coming months. Now I swore to myself that I would stop with these damn Spidey villain posts, I'm just so tired of them. But this one, this one I had to bang out -- it was born out of necessity. NECESSITY!! And besides, why not cap these off with a post on web-head's baddest baddie?*

*Personally I always thought Doc Ock was a better candidate for archenemy status. Stan agrees with me, so yeah. But, y'know, whatevs...

So here's how it all started: a couple months ago my friend Dom and I were watching the first Spider-Man movie with his buddies Tim and Seth. Right around the part where Willem Dafoe croaks out "Back to formula?", Dom turns to me and asks: “So what's Green Goblin’s deal, what makes him so significant as a Spider-Man villain? What makes him the archenemy?”

Good. Question.

A lot of the true believers have a really tough time with the Green Goblin. On one hand, he's supposedly the web-slinger's greatest nemesis. No other foe has made such an indelible mark on the mythos, has caused our hero so much grief and torment. On the other hand, he's so out of place with the rest of the rogues. He's a total anomaly; not a consciously boisterous showman, not a team player like the guys in the Sinister Six, not an animal-themed totem or a symbiote Doppelgänger - nothing about him syncs up. Worse still, Gobby simply seems to lack any deeper thematic significance, possessing none of those weighty opposites or parallels that drive the best superhero-villain relationships. He just doesn't appear to riff off of any aspects of Peter/Spidey in the way that a great supervillain, archenemy or not, should. Better men than I have tried to wrassle with GG with a good deal of success (here and here, you guys should read 'em and stuff), but every analysis I've come across can't help but fall a bit flat against the sheer enormity of the spider-goblin rivalry. It can't all come from the soap operatics and father-figure underpinnings - from the initial mystery of his identity, his personal connection to Peter and Harry, and the Night Gwen Stacy Died. There's got to be something about Osborn and his demon at the conceptual level that appeals to people, right?

Don't worry, there is! There is in spades!! And once we dig it out, you'll totally understand why this guy is Spider-Man's one true nemesis in the eyes of most fans.

But first, digression! So in one of my drama classes this year, Voice & Speech, we all had to recite a Shakespearean sonnet. One of the shier students was rehearsing hers for our teacher in front of the group, and to get her to project better the teacher asked her to sing the sonnet. This backfired rather ingloriously: the student’s voice began to diminish and waver with hesitation. She became apprehensive, started to choke up. The teacher kept pushing her and pushing her until eventually she broke down and started to cry – as we were all soon to discover in the coming moments, this girl was super self-conscious about her singing voice. So much so, in fact, that the whole ordeal was like a nightmare come to life for her. The class necessarily turned into a group therapy session, with the teacher taking the reigns: “We all have that voice in the back of our heads that just wants to get us down sometimes, and it can be hard. I have it too: 'Your boobs are too small.' 'You're getting old, getting ugly wrinkles on your face.' 'You're not a good actress.' But you know what? It's not helpful at all, and it's just plain wrong, so you've just got to find that little bastard telling you 'you're a bad singer' and tune it out. Get that goblin out of your head.”

“Get that goblin out of your head.”

That, that right there is what Osborn’s monster is all about.

You know those quirky indie dramadies where the protagonist’s insecurities manifest as physical people he can have a dialogue with? The Green Goblin is that for Peter. He’s the personification of all Peter’s nagging self-doubt, the voice in his head from where all his inner anxiety arises. We all have it to varying degrees, telling us there is something fundamentally wrong with your body or personality or thought process, etc. that makes you undesirable, inadequate, worthless, inferior.

And until you stop trying to fight it, that voice says, I’ll always be here, in the back of your head, to remind you again and again and again. Just when life seems to be getting good, I’ll be there to tell you all the reasons to hate yourself. I’ll be there to destroy everything you love and make your life miserable.

I’ll be there to drop your true love off a bridge and turn your best friend into a schizo suicidal junkie. Oh, and the Clone Saga, that too. Everybody lost out with that one.

Of course, while those guys in the movies are figments of some paranoid schmuck’s imagination, Gobby is a living, flesh-and-blood proxy, so he takes on a much more threatening antagonistic role. On the elevated plane of superheroics, where big ideas duke it out in the streets of Metropolis or Gotham, the inner conflict becomes externalized – the fight in Peter’s psyche is literalized into a physical brawl between two entities. That’s probably why GG won’t stay dead; you can triumph over your inner demons, but you can never quite get rid of them entirely.

Maybe that’s because they can be so damn tempting sometimes. The same voice that points out your perceived faults and misfortunes also has a habit of demanding retribution for them. To make others pay for the unfairness, the injustice of it all. It’s a bad emotional place that’s all too appealing to go to, encompassing jealousy, envy, anger towards the ex that cheated on or dumped you, resentment towards the bully that emasculates you, etc. etc. All that nasty Columbine-fuel.

Too soon? Too soon…

As you might expect, GG also embodies this aspect of Peter’s inner life. And so here, for context's sake, we find a relation between web-head's two most essential foes: if Doctor Octopus is what Spidey will become if he compromises his principles and succumbs to his own heaping angst, the Green Goblin is the voice in Spidey’s head telling him to do just that. He whispers into Peter’s ears: there’s always a way out, a way to free yourself and vent all your self-loathing away. Give up the good fight, don’t try to go against the tide of a cruel, apathetic world. Surrender to your frustration, your bitterness – let life make a cynic out of you. Lash out! It’s liberating! Just ask Norman, he’s so much better now…

And how does Norman factor into all this? It’s important to remember that Osborn was a nasty guy even before the accident, but he was motivated by a profound sense (more accurately misunderstanding) of responsibility. Like the rest of us, Norm had a goblin in his head too, reminding him over and over again of the enormous responsibilities he had - to his corporation, his thousands of employees, his clients, his son - all of which he was failing to meet. A mid-life crisis didn't do him any favors, either. So the pressure got to him and the voice in his head started calling the shots. When that serum exploded in his face and messed up his mind, his inner goblin took complete control...but not in the way it usually goes down. He didn’t succumb to it, a la Doc Ock with his never-ending insecurities, so much as he actually became it. And through this almost shamanistic process, he learned something: with great power comes freedom from responsibility!

So Gobbs puts on a crazy costume befitting his nature, and just like that he's a boogeyman straight out of some neurotic loser's nightmares, an embodiment of all his fears and doubts and emotional/psychological baggage. Problem is, GG doesn't have that neurotic loser to torment yet. But from the start he knows Spider-Man is the one. I mean look no further than the Goblin's debut in Amazing Spider-Man #14, where he tracks Spidey down and proposes that the two of them star in a Hollywood blockbuster together...which Spider-Man accepts!! It's so ridiculous, I love it. God those comics are fucking great. Their connection borders on supernatural or predestination, like that other great superhero rivalry. One simply can't exist without the other.



There's a concept that describes the relationship between the Green Goblin and our hero perfectly: duende. It's a term coined by Federico Garcia Lorca, borrowed from the mythical goblins (OH HO SEE WHUT I DID THAR) of Spanish/Latin American folklore. He describes duende as a mysterious, inexplicable force that arises from within us as a raw physical and emotional response. The kind of idea invoked by a Movement Techniques teacher when she wants you to do weird abstract performance art stuff (no one said drama majors take real classes). In Lorca's context, the duende is a demonic spirit who allows an artist to see the limitations of rationality. It brings the artist face-to-face with death and pure emotional experience, all to help him produce truly great art. The artist does not simply surrender to duende, however, but skillfully battles it in hand-to-hand combat; through this process the art is created (all of this has been ripped pretty shamelessly from In Search of Duende, if anyone's interested). Replace duende with Gobbs and the artist with Spidey and you've got some seriously meta shit going on there.

Duende actually popped up in Batman Inc. #3 last March, where Bruce Wayne described it more generally as "the fierce lust for life when we feel and express when we know death is near." Among the elements that comprise duende are irrationality, diabolicalness and a heightened awareness of death...all of which also describe Gobby pretty well, don't they? He's certainly diabolical, and anybody who rides on a glider like that without a goddamn helmet has the death drive thing down. He's obviously irrational, too - we're talking about a guy who spends his nights in a lab building grenades that look like pumpkins, like actually taking the time to make sure they look like pumpkins. What kind of fucking freak does that?

Maybe the kind who spends his nights in his foster parents' basement building wrist-mounted devices to shoot high-tensile silly string? (Don't even get me started on that organic webbing bullshit) Spider-Man was a hero conceived with a deliberately icky edge, and most of Spidey's rogues are extensions of his murkier dimensions, extensions which must at least potentially exist deep within Pete's psyche. Like a corrupt, malicious version of duende the Green Goblin wants to bring all that darkness out, which is why he brings Peter face-to-face with irrationality and diabolicalness and death. Ever since his first appearance in Amazing #14, where Ditko drew the Goblin as a carnivalesque monster, his cartoonish features grotesquely incongruous with the sickly realism that informed the rest of the art. Ever since his master plan in Amazing #39 which, as simple as it was, to this day remains one of the most demoniac in supervillain history. Ever since his apparent demise in Amazing #122, when Gwen Stacy snapped her neck and everything changed forever.

I imagine the Green Goblin finds this renewed-self-confidence-nobody-dies phase going on in Peter's life right now to be so adorably quaint. You can bet that he'll be the one to end it. Sometimes just when you think you've conquered your demons, they come back stronger than ever before.

Tune in next time for a review of the revamped Spidey musical, fresh off its month-long hiatus. Guess what guys, it's not that bad anymore! I mean, it's not great, I'd hesitate before even calling it good, but it's a far, far cry from the shitshow trainwreck I saw in February. Hooray!!