Somnopolis

I’ve successfully privatised World Peace.

Delivered with exactly the right amount of arrogance and bravado, Robert Downey Jnr confirms once again that he is the perfect choice to play Tony Stark. The scene in question features the creator of the Iron Man suit giving testimony under subpoena to US senators explaining why he should be entitled to operate as a superhero independently of the government. They see the Iron Man suit as a weapon. Stark disagrees and argues that it is in fact a full-body prosthesis.

The film itself seems to be having a similar argument with its fellow superhero films. Where they get bogged down in grim origin fables, Tony decides to head off to Monaco for a spot of race car driving. Where vigilantism is shown to be an outlet for personal trauma, Iron Man’s escapades are the perfect means of promoting Stark Ltd’s stock. Iron Man 2 feels like a digression into the life of a press appointed ’superhero’, who just happens to be one of the most powerful technology magnates in the world. Less a superhero, more a CEO.

Which is a great way for Jon Favreau to set his film apart from the also-ran costumed heroes. His two Iron Man
pictures have been fun, breezy affairs, with an occasional satirical sting in the tail. The improvised dialogue lends it an Altman-esque air that yields up some lovely gems. Sam Rockwell, playing the Tony Stark wannabe Justin Hammer, gives an amazing speech during a weapons presentation that includes the following wonder:

‘If it were any smarter, it’d write a book that would make Ulysses look like it was written in crayon. And it would read it to you‘

I feel Jon Favreau was smart to avoid taking on the challenge of helming an Avengers movie that ties all of Marvel Entertainment’s properties into one feature. His approach does not suit the more bombastic excess promised by a film that includes a Norse god, a cyrogenically frozen supersoldier and a giant green man in the cast. However, seeing as Iron Man’s success in effect has bankrolled the Avengers project itself, hints and cameos as to the emerging shared universe continues. I’ve heard complaints that Samuel L. Jackson’s sudden appearance in the proceedings as Nick Fury is jarring. Now he does enter the film, solve Tony’s whole ‘I’m dying’ dilemma and then head off again after a cryptic line about Stark Senior, so I can understand why people feel that way. On the other hand the appearance of a certain familiar shield was amusingly introduced and then the mandatory Stan Lee appearance gets a laugh out loud response when Robert Downey Jnr appears to mistake him for Hugh Heffner.

Justin Theroux’s script is surprisingly traditionally Marvel comics in other ways though. Tony’s problems are mostly due to his own personal quirks, a Marvel comics speciality with its stable of heroes to a man neurotic and crippled by indecision. The Avengers Initiative presents itself as a reminder to Tony that he doesn’t have to go it alone, although Favreau has given himself an out should he wish to pursue different stories to the Avengers movie. The failure of Tony to be snapped up by the proposed team also ties into traditional Marvel narratives. It seems he needs to prove himself before being accepted, which knowing Stark’s ability to screw up on a nearly epic scale most days should prove interesting.

As to all the complaints that ‘Demon in a Bottle‘, was only hinted at, or that the second act needed a big fight scene….did y’all miss the bit where Tony and Rhodey beat the crap out of each other to the tune of a Queen remix? I loved it!

Iron Man 2. Knows when to just sit back and deliver the fun. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it Dark Knight.

So Kenneth Brannagh has cast Idris Elba as a god.

Well of course he has, that’s perfect casting. I’ve had a sneaking man-crush on the bloke since Ultraviolet.

Turns out though that the deity in question hails from the Norse pantheon, that drunken bunch of viking fanciers, so some people got their knickers in a twist. Like so:

“This PC crap has gone too far!….Norse deities are not of an African ethnicity! … It’s the principle of the matter. It’s about respecting the integrity of the source material, both comics and Norse mythologies.”

Ah when comic book fanboys attempt to engage with the debate on race. It’s fun. You may recall many were upset when Michael Clarke Duncan was cast as Kingpin. I’ve even written before about the ‘Will Smith as Captain America’ furore. This amuses me for a few reasons. For one this notion of ‘integrity’.

We are talking about comics here right? I mean, there’s not even any point in discussing the issue on this front. Comics are written to be sold. No deeper meaning than that. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, the boys who built Marvel and created this comic book called Thor? They were just trying to distract you from the antics of Superman and Batman with whatever they could pull out of their ass. Not to say Kirby or Lee’s work is poor, but it is sensationalist and improvisational, to a wild degree. Attempts to imitate it slavishly do it a disservice. I take my hat off to Mark Millar for reinventing the Norse god as a possibly deluded environmental activist with a messiah complex and nary a hint of Ye Olde English dialogue.

It was a timely reinventiong of a tired and backward looking character concept. The shameless raiding of Brewer’s Dictionary of Myth to come up with antagonists for the mealy mouthed Norse god got tired years ago. Furthermore, even if you consider Mark Millar the comic book antichrist, look to the much welcomed J. M. Straczynski revamp of Thor. There the guardian of Asgard was revealed to be using the form of an inhabitant of New Orleans, who berates Thor for his inability to help the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Once again, not exactly the same ol’ same ol’.
Furthermore, for all the claims of stunt casting and PC gone mad (now there’s a meme I wish would curl up and die), I leave you with the perfect rejoinder. Morgan Freeman – Shawshank Redemption. After all, did Stephen King not write the character as an Irishman? Frank Marshall has Freeman smirk as he replies to Tim Robbins’ question – why is he called Red – with ‘Maybe it’s because I’m Irish.’

And that’s that.

In the end, Idris Elba is a fine choice and frankly the fanboys should be thanking their lucky stars the film has attracted actors of his talent. Here’s another comic adap the man is starring in, Andy Diggle and Jock’s The Losers!

Some months ago the rumour broke that Will Smith was being considered for the role of Captain America. Harry Knowles weighed in, producing yet more ‘intelligent debate’ amongst his talkbackers. Cue dismay and alarum.

I didn’t get it.

Why can’t a black man be Captain America? I’m not even talking about the casting of the film – which has been batted around for some time now. Brad Pitt was seriously considered for the role I believe (Leonardo Di Caprio’s name has also been mentioned by Marvel). But then these are the folks that wanted Tom Cruise to play Iron Man. Marvel Entertainment is looking to establish itself as a movie studio. They want a big name donning whatever mask they have in the offing. If Will Smith has become the biggest action star out there, he is a contender.

There are two general arguments raised against this. First Marvel already produced a book about a ‘Black Cap’ – Truth by Kyle Baker. This miniseries conflated the idea of the Super Soldier trials, which eventually produced Steve Rogers, with the Tuskegee Experiments. I enjoyed Truth: Red, White & Black at the time, though it served to turn me on to the work of Kyle Baker more than Marvel. For one thing the sheer outrage provoked by the miniseries’ depiction of casual racism in the treatment of the black test subjects for the serum being considered ‘unfair’, really put me off. I also find the argument that the idea of a black Captain America being null and void because that ‘box was ticked’, with Truth disengenuous.

The second argument, which has perhaps more merit, is that Cap was a propaganda figure from the 1940s. Would the American Government have chosen a black man to represent their armed forces in those racially divided times before the Civil Rights Act.

How soon they forget

My personal solution to this apparent gordian knot is not to have Captain America emerge in the 40’s. For one thing, sticking with the films, Marvel Entertainment has this curious focus on loose realism. So the X-Men films open with title sequences touring strands of CGIed DNA. Peter Parker is exposed to genetically modified spiders. Blade fights vampires using ‘anti-coagulants’ (that’s not how they work!!).

Wouldn’t it therefore make sense to have this ’super soldier programme’, take place in the present day? Are we saying some fluke accident allowed scientists to create a genetic superhuman back in the 1940’s and we haven’t been able to figure it out since? That of course is the conceit behind Cap and the reasoning for his anachronistic nature, but Occams Razor time – dump all that. Have him be a test subject in the here and now, offering a stronger chance of scientific versimilitude and avoid any historical bugbears about having a black man becoming a superhuman.

After the tremendous success of Iron Man (oh Richard Corliss from TIME ruffled a few feathers by lauding it over the Dark Knight) which used the conflict in Afghanistan to even-handed effect, I also believe setting Cap’s adventures in the present day could work. I understand the focus on WWII. It’s the last ‘good war’. It was also the site of the Holocaust, the dropping of two atomic bombs on another sovereign nation and resulted in Europe being carved up by the two emerging superpowers for the duration of the so-called Cold War. There was nothing ‘good’, about any of these things. Yet the Allies were faced with what we would consider a truly evil force, the Nazis and they are so easily equated with supervillains.

Captain America exists as a symbol. He is meant to represent a better hope for the future of America and in the work of Steve Englehart he was also used to criticise the fallout from the Watergate affair. I truly believe that in the present-day there is a role to be played by a fictional character who can engage with the atrocities happening in our world and offer a solution. Why can’t Captain America offer hope for a better tomorrow? Why can’t the character be used to symbolize a new America? Why can’t he be a black man?

Joe Quesada poster for Truth: Red, White and Blue

This week the final issue of Mark Millar’s Civil War was published. A Marvel crossover, the book centred on a conflict arising over whether superhero identities should remain secret, between ‘Pro-Registration forces’ led by Tony Stark/Iron Man and ‘Anti-Registration’, led by Captain America.

See here for the best possible summary:

It was a comic book story, were men in tights beat the stuffing out of one another. But there is some serious teeth gnashing going on over this series.

Mark Millar has a reputation for being critical of the Bush administration. So instantly folk assumed that Stark was a parody of George Bush, with Reed Richards and Hank Pym as his neo-con supporters. See the Superhero Registration Act has been compared to the Patriot Act, with all the attendant loss of privacy and security that implies. Then there was the invention of ‘42′. A prison in another dimension where heroes who merely refused to sign up were locked away….without trial or representation. Sound familiar? A superhero Guantanamo was certainly a new one on fans and this was where things got interesting.

Fanboys are notoriously unable to express themselves. Everything is excessive, you have ‘haters’, and ’shippers’, with no middle-ground between them. They are also by and large fantasists. I read a lot of message boards and what’s worrying is the average age of most of these fans seems to be somewhere in the mid-twenties to thirties. As a result fanboys are also remarkable insulated politically. If politics does ever arise in a conversation, it usually turns into a flamewar of name-calling. “Republican fascist”, “Liberal douche” etc.

Yet with Civil War, once the battle lines were drawn, all of a sudden these inarticulate fanboys were having ongoing debates about the merits of Registration, the ethics of 42, whether or not Reed Richards et al were being written out of character or were actually being prudent. Was Captain America a terrorist?

Unable to discuss the real world, these fictional characters were suddenly lended a weight they might not warrant. Captain America is a soldier and a patriot, so choosing him to lead up the Anti-Registration movement got a lot of attention. It was a return to his stories under Steve Englehart in the 70’s, when the character resigned in disgust over Watergate. Millar’s clever little idea was to bring ‘real world politics’, home to roost in Marvel.

But that ending. Well it has upset a lot of people.

In fairness I would say – this is a comic book. It had nice art. The dialogue was a bit hokey and men punching each other in sequential panels is not something I can take that seriously. Still the conclusion was downbeat and ironic. The ‘utopia’, presented seems utterly doomed by short-sightedness, which is the flaw of utopias in general.

It was a comic book. It had some good moments. I only wish people engaged this much with the crap that’s going on right outside our doors.

Mr. Stafford kindly passed on tickets to see this little gem. I’d recommend it to everyone once it is released. It’s a documentary on the eponymous Daniel Johnston and his descent into mania(and resultant ‘fame’), though for the most part it feels like a cast off Philip K. Dick novel.

Johnston appears to have been obsessed from an early age with being ’seen’, which translates into fame. So he has always performed for little films he made, sang songs on tape, drawn fantasy comics featuring himself as a superhero. The film does not attribute a direct cause for his fall into mania, but the multiplicity of roles he adopted eventually appear to spill over his own personality – to the point were the dividing line between performance and direct action became completely blurred.

Johnston’s life is quite strange, all the stranger for much of it having been directly recorded by himself. He blagged his way onto MTV in the 80’s singing his love songs to the girl he could never have, Laurie. He won awards for best folk singer in Austin, Texas, though he couldn’t actually play guitar. We witness his breakdown in New York and members of Sonic Youth hunting for him across the city (it’s extraordinary that they were complicit in his myth by filming this themselves). Kurt Cobain took to wearing a t-shirt with his self-drawn tape album cover.

His conflict with his family, his frustration with his own longing for fame, his failing mental health – have all coalesced into what he appears to see as an ongoing conflict between Daniel Johnston and the Devil. In this way his life could almost have been a Philip K. Dick story from the Valis years. It has all the requisite elements. Religious fundamentalism, drugs, a lost girl, popstars and damnation. It’s no surprise to me that he landed in Austen, the site of Richard Linklater’s Slacker, a town seemingly built up of weirdos and hippies (is it any surprise also that Linklater himself is attempting Dick’s A Scanner Darkly?)

He’s a strange cat and he’s still out there. The question is is the attention he’s receiving encouraging his madness, or allowing for whatever talents he has to come to the fore.

Radiation guilt?

Just a notion and perhaps others can point me in the right direction, but I was thinking the other day about how Manga/Anime has dealt with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It echoes through most of the dystopian storylines produced by Japan. There is a recurring story trope of nuclear holocaust ushering in a darker civilization, be they demons, vampires, religious zealots or the Akira dystopia.

In the sixties in the states we had veterans like Kirby illustrating and writing comics. As a member of the Marvel stable, he was among the contributors who created characters whose ’superhero’, identities were the result of radiation. The Hulk is exposed to gamma radiation and becomes a creature of unfettered strength. Captain America is dosed with radiation in order to stimulate his body to become enhanced. Spider-Man is bitten by a radioactive spider, mutants were originally the first generation to be affected by ambient radiation I believe (in keeping with the novel ‘Children of the Atom’), though now we are led to believe it was due to evolution. Even Daredevil receives his powers due to domestic toxic waste.

So were these comic superbeings created in order to assuage public guilt over the atomic bombings? Not in a conspiratorial sense – men in a dark room deciding to brainwash the children of America with Atomic Propaganda – no, I mean more in the sense of cultural synchronicity. There was a general sense of unease over the use of atomic weapons and fantasies were constructed that used atomic power in a beneficial way.

However, being constructed as fantasies this may well have been a self-reflexive admission of ‘guilt’.

Now European comics, as well as Jodorowsky, Bilal etc….don’t see this ‘atomic dystopia/enhancement’, theme so much. DC comic characters acquired before WW2 are aliens, magicians, master strategists and vigilantes. With the ‘Marvel Age’, we have the power of the Atom being employed.

Just curious myself.

Review of Serenity to follow shortly.