S P L I N T E R E D | L I G H T

Well, this summer’s blockbuster season is off and running with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. Not being a big fan or very knowledgeable of either superhero I had to psych myself up based solely on opening night vibes and a little hype that was floating around. Now, having seen both films, I must confess that they exceeded my low expectations but I remain underwhelmed.

Iron Man was clearly the better movie from a critical standpoint. When we first meet Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) he is not yet Iron Man, but by the end of the film he has undergone the transformation and survived his first great trial. Two things made this movie the success that it is. First the casting is perfect and unexpected. Following the same basic principles as Johnny Depp in Pirates of The Caribbean, Downey is the scoundrel that we all love. His charisma wins our allegiance and makes us laugh. Less obviously but no less importantly Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges, who also strike me as bold casting choices, flesh the film out. The second thing they did right was to keep the plot as streamlined and conservative as possible. There was really a minimum of explosions, love-interests, and pseudo-philosophizing–all the things that tend to kill the superhero film.

The Incredible Hulk, on the other hand, had some serious problems as a film. Sloppy narrative and pacing plus some seriously dull scenes between Norton and Tyler kept it from being a grade ‘A’ B-film. Ingeniously, they gave us the origin story in stills while the credits rolled and started right in with Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) hiding out in Rio de Janeiro. By casting Edward Norton, Marvel forecasted a smart, dark, psychological superhero movie ala Batman Begins. On this point they did not really deliver. The Incredible Hulk, like the green behemoth himself, doesn’t do dialogue. . . or character development. But he does do ‘Hulk smash!’ and for that we can be truly thankful. Harder punches have never been thrown in CGI. The medium normally works better than a sleeping potion to make me loose interest, but I was wide-eyed till the credits for this one. Interestingly, despite it’s flaws I enjoyed The Incredible Hulk about as much as Iron Man.

Now, I have made it my goal to meditate this summer on the value and quality of popular cinema, and the superhero movie in particular interests me. I must admit that if I indulged my inner literary snob I would quickly dismiss these films and the small amount of pleasure they provide for being ‘just entertainment’ and therefore not worthy of my time. But I try to fight the literary snob in me whenever I catch him, and I strive for truth not pride, so I am left searching for value in superhero films.

The most prevalent argument in favor of superhero movies and comics is that they are really complex moral tales, with psychological spider-webs, good and evil in sharp contrast, and characters that go much deeper than their facades suggest. I am more than willing to concede this about the libraries full of comic books that have been written, but with a very few exceptions, I have yet to see it transferred to film. Nevertheless, my search has led me to statements like this by Paul Asay of www.pluggedinonline.com, a subsidiary of Focus on the Family. “Stark’s path to becoming Iron Man is, in many ways, as spiritual as you can get without reciting Bible verses. He is an archetypical woeful sinner who wasted much of his life on wine, women and weapons. While he doesn’t find God, specifically, he does find what he considers a purpose when he has what one might call the Marvel Comics equivalent of the Apostle Paul’s Damascas Road experience. The film’s underlying messages—that being virtuous is better than being rich, that we all have unexpected callings, that we, like Stark, live for a reason—are inspiring, biblical and, in today’s fame-and-fortune-at-any-cost society, downright countercultural.”

First and foremost: morality does not equal Christianity. In fact they are opposing world-views. Not ‘finding God specifically’ is not finding God at all. To call Iron Man biblical is a much bigger stretch than calling it altruistically humanistic, which has long been an enemy of ‘biblical’ when you strip them to their fundamentals. As Christians this is the wrong way to approach cinema. We cannot afford to pick and choose art based on what we can pull a Sunday-school lesson out of. There needs to be a standard for judging films that supersedes plot elements and deals with films wholistically. One that takes in all aspects of the art of film–acting, editing, cinematography, writing, directing, pacing, costume design, make-up, music, and even special-effects.

This is not an exact science. It is still going to be a value-judgment on the part of every critic or casual viewer. What’s more good acting, cinematography, writing etc… does not look the same in every good movie. Take The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly as opposed to Casablanca for example. Everything about them is different except for the fact that they are both great films.

Superhero films are still art whether they aspire to it or not. There is no such thing as a distinction between art and entertainment. If something is entertainment that does not give it a permit to be poor. Art and entertainment, even for the masses, are not mutually exclusive. The Godfather ranking number one on so many viewer’s-choice-top-100-film polls (such as IMDB.com) is maybe the most obvious evidence for this. There is no reason why we should have to give up characters for explosions.

So what defense of these films can be given? Another, much better, articulation of the morality defense comes from the (in)famous Christian apologist and man of letters, G.K. Chesterton. He once wrote an article called “A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls.” Penny Dreadfuls were “boys’ literature of the lowest stratum,” basically the comic books of their day. They too were despised by the literary elite. Chesterton fights this elitism with ferocity. He writes, “The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important . . . These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all . . . The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared.”

Chesterton is right to point out that we need ‘heroic truisms,’ and there is nothing ‘essentially evil’ about the modern superhero movie. But that is in general. In specific Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk seem to fall short of the pure expression of heroic truisms that Chesterton describes. There seems to be too much other stuff dragged in. They seem all veneer–iron suit and green muscles with nothing concrete hanging in the balance. Give me John Wayne and Frodo over Tony Stark and Bruce Banner any day. Those are ‘sentimentalist’ heroes if I have ever seen any. They do not scrimp on happy endings or tight pinches. And the history books will show that both the ‘ordinary man’ and the critic were in awe.

Chesterton’s defense cannot be applied in its full force to our 10-dollar dreadfuls today, because in Chesterton’s day the critique of ‘boy’s literature of the lowest stratum,’ really had to do with what the literary establishment felt was the baseness and vulgarity of stories about outlaws and criminals. “Now it is quite clear,” he writes, “that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit.”

I am fine with the moral content–my critique is entirely base on literary merit. I am not arguing for high art but for good art. John Ford’s films staring John Wayne cannot be labeled ‘art house’ or ‘indie’ by any stretch of the imagination yet his films, appealing to people across generations and cultures, are powerful and well told.

So, I will concede that there is often elementary moral value in superhero movies, and this is better than not. But, I cannot concede that they are really good films. The best I can say is that maybe Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk are shallowness done well. As I recently heard professor, author, art critic, and musician Harold Best say, shallowness is not the problem–shallow water can be fast-flowing and clean–the problem is a refusal to ever leave. The problem is clinging to shallowness in the face of depth, or worse mistaking shallowness for depth. I am afraid that as a culture we do this far too often. We are ruining our taste buds and developing an addiction to sugar. I think we would find that if we examined our diets and trained ourselves to like meat and vegetables our taste for garbage would wane and we would be healthier, more robust people as a result.