WITLESS PROTECTION, TOO
There are two off story moments in BYE, BYE BRAVERMAN, Sidney Lumet’s 1968 comedy of grief, moments that made no ripple in me when I saw the picture back in its theatrical release, but moments that made my ears prick up in a revisit a year or so ago.
In the first, Holly Levine, the sellout/commercial success of what been a quintet and was now a quartet of New York Jewish intellectuals, mentions casually to the others that he’s going to be teaching a course, at THE NEW SCHOOL, if I remember correctly, about comic strips and other aspects of popular culture of this foursome’s youth.
While Felix Ottenstein, the elderly mentor to this crowd, remains unconditionally disdainful of the very idea of elevating what he regards as pointless junk to subjects of intellectual interest, the early fortyish Moro Rieff and Barnet Weinstein allow themselves a moment of enthusiasm for Holly’s revelation, briefly indulging in exhilarating nostalgia for their own 1940s Lower East Side and Brooklyn boyhoods.
In the second moment, Barnet, the mama’s boy lothario of the quartet, shouts as he leaves to remind the others of a Randolph Scott film festival they’d all talked about attending the following week.
In 1968, eighteen-year-old me had spent so much of that brief life so completely subsumed with popular culture that these moments, these acknowledgments of shared interest by men representing my parents’ generation barely registered on me, in any way other than an acknowledgment of a fact I’d already filed, that once upon a time, old people dug their eras’ version of the same junk I did.
Now, seventy-one-year-old me recognizes the specificity and meaning of these moments as nods to, among others, Gilbert Seldes’ THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS, Manny Farber’s NEGATIVE SPACE, Robert Warshow’s THE IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE, and, perhaps only tangentially in this particular regard, but significantly nonetheless as I will soon elaborate, an acknowledgment of Susan Sontag’s NOTES ON CAMP.
For a number of reasons, besides its contemporaneity, Sontag’s piece is the most remembered, not the least of which because of its understanding and implication of the homosexual community, via Camp, first as a sensibility, then as a commodity, as consumers and to a certain extent gatekeepers of a knowingly and knowledgeably joyful interpretation of popular culture that went beyond nostalgia…but, significant for me, here, for the most part stopped well short of relativism.
In sum, in a very pop culture specific way, Camp said explicitly that it didn’t have to be good to be great, or even, I daresay, fabulous.
In that fifty plus year gap between my experience of those two moments in Lumet’s picture, I’ve come to understand, and to appreciate, the intrinsic but often buried cultural value of the products of popular culture discussed in those and other texts, and to further grasp the idea of genre material that in and of itself transcends its own genre.
In that regard, I know now for certain that those movies in “…a Randolph Scott film festival…” were of course B westerns, specifically those directed by Budd Boetticher and possibly Andre DeToth. Maybe.
It might be worth noting for those who missed it, either as a result of not being there, or simply as a result of that modern bane of cultural amnesia coupled with historical incuriosity, but it wasn’t that long ago, which is to say in my own lifetime, that film directors we now regard as giants in their field—Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh to name only four of the many—were considered merely competent makers of disposable genre product which made their studios’ fortunes, but were considered categorically unworthy of actual critical appraisal, as opposed to the studios’ A product.
The issue, of course, was the smug White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Overcult’s presumptions of the innate shittiness of genre material itself, which consigned the above creative talents to that gray area of “is it popular because it’s good, or is it good because it’s popular?—” while elevating well-meaning animated waxworks as a means to keep the cult in culture.
Manny Farber’s rebellious Boston Globe review of Raoul Walsh’s THEY DRIVE BY NIGHT in 1940 is the culturally acknowledged ice breaker, the piece that significantly pointed at the intrinsic value of genre material and opened the door to eyes ready to see value where no such value had been previously acknowledged.
But it was likely, to my mind actually, John Ford’s STAGECOACH of the previous year that opened the door we’re looking through here, although its value passed with little or no notice by the dull and gray gatekeeper grandees of acceptable midculture until much later.
This bunch laid the ground work for directors such as the above mentioned Boetticher and DeToth, as well as Anthony Mann, Ida Lupino, Jules Dassin, Robert Aldrich and others whose seemingly journeyman work often if not always transcended the genres—mostly crime and westerns—in which they worked. This material, regarded as throwaways, the bottom halves of double bills, have, to a huge extent, well withstood the test of time, leaving behind the forgotten A product that rode on their shoulders each week at the local Trans-Lux.
The problem arises when genre product in and of itself is reevaluated, granting an imprimatur of quality simply by dint of, for lack of a better word, its very genre’ness, and every lox with a viewfinder—or as Gore Vidal once cruelly dismissed directors, “the producer’s brother-in-law—” is venerated as a brilliant yet underrated talent in whatever genre he or she did his or her time.
Needless to say, it just isn’t so. This is when the very idea of the transcendence of genre is called into question, as relativism invades the discussion, ruining it for those of us who know genre material, regarding it with a critical eye to separate the potboiler programmer from material that has something special, often indefinable, but special nonetheless.
And of course, it isn’t just movies. Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake must be acknowledged as rising above what had been cultural standards in regard to contemporary crime fiction. Leonard and Larry McMurtry did the same for westerns—and yes, Larry McMurtry, regarded by the NYRB as a literary man, wrote more than one genre novel, transcendent in most cases, but westerns nonetheless.
Stephen Hunter, as well as Thomas Perry and Lee Child, demonstrated that thrillers, despite the hugely popularly successful awfulness of such shitmeisters as Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy and the like, might be worthy of merit and critical attention.
Paul Linebarger, Aka Cordwainer Smith, Alfred Bester, Joanna Russ, John Broome, Ursula LeGuin, Chip Delany, and, despite loathing him personally as I do, holding my nose figuratively as I type this, Harlan Ellison, brought depth to science fiction, a narrative genre that had before them been mostly about itself, meta before meta was meta.
I can’t speak to horror, which doesn’t interest me in any way as a reader or filmgoer, or romance fiction for that matter, the latter of which I understand outsells all the other genres combined, because I know nothing about it, and would welcome a recommendation of a talent who has done for this material that those mentioned above have done for theirs, if such a talent exists.
For all this, there still remains an audience for John Grisham’s southern fried nonsense, and Louis Lamour, and Piers Anthony, for fuck’s sake—not to mention Star Trek and Star Wars, the latter of which seems to have evolved into a separate and secular religion, despite, or perhaps because, of its utterly prissy and chickenshit puerility.
Mainstream comic books, the world I inhabit, once a medium, has become a genre, most specifically because of the recently discovered and acknowledged gold mine derived from ancillary uses of these long forgotten, and except in those ancillary uses, still ignored trifles. It’s all edgy, all adult, or, more specifically, gravity mistaken for enormity—to feed the arrested adolescents who maintain what little presence the stuff has on the landscape.
Now, of course, we live in a world in which genre product is the dominant cultural force on the planet, and I consider constantly that long ago and all too regular argument/spirited discussion/debate among colleagues and between critics about genre work, specifically about those who bring more to the familiar game and thus transcend the plateau created by such material.
While these genres persist in popular fiction, crime, western and war films are now exceptional rather than regular fare in the delivery system that defines the parameters of popular culture. Romance, in the form of Romantic comedy in theaters and the perpetual dreckfest that is the Hallmark network, remains, occasionally satisfying but mostly aspirational, usually at best too fucking cynically precious for its own fucking good. It’s possible that the very basic elements and tropes of the traditional romantic comedy have simply expired in the ongoing reevaluation of romance itself.
Science fiction, never a seriously examined genre in film with very few exceptions, persists almost exclusively in its pulpiest iteration, space opera, with those two abovementioned now sprawling franchises picking up the slack of western and war films, and of course, despite his often-quoted pitch’s deflection, Gene Roddenberry owes a shitload more to C.S. Forester than to Ward Bond.
Which brings us, of course, to that most unexpected wildly popular genre, the superhero movie. Unexpected, at least by the likes of me, since the number of people who read the comic books on which this material is based shrinks daily, as no new readers arrive and the regulars die, many of natural causes, having grown old with the same staples that entertained them when they were young.
Art by Andrew Robinson
None of us who came into comics when I did expected superheroes to survive into the 1980s, let alone be the source material for a billion-dollar business servicing civilians who wouldn’t be caught dead reading a superhero comic book after the age of thirteen, and even then only in a barbershop.
For what it’s worth, for good or evil, this genre has conquered mass media. Film, television, videogames, podcasts—the spectrum of modern delivery systems. As to why, I have to think it’s a perfect storm of timing, the coincidental collapse of adults actually reading adult things, as opposed to what are now called YA by publishers and chapter books by moms—and the advent of computer technology making everything visually possible, everything, of course, short of an interesting and compelling narrative of human scale.
None of this matters, of course. The civilians, for the most part blissfully unaware that comic books even still exist, customers for whom this material is a fresh and new distraction from the collapse of western civilization, show up and pay up for the latest two hours plus computer assisted slugfest, with acceptance and little comment about what they’re watching.
Rampaging through these green screens are actors, many if not most of whom are capable of doing far more interesting and infinitely better work in the service of infinitely better source material, but, like most of us, recognize the fragility of life and careers.
Let’s be frank–Fuck you money is an attraction that many cannot resist, and I never, ever judge. Really.
For me, speaking of Camp, and its unfortunate trickling impact on popular culture in its time, I recognized after witnessing with dismay the first half hour of the Batman television series aired in January of 1966 that my obsession with comic books was being coopted and compromised by a cadre of smirkingly contemptuous adults. Any expectations of seeing my comic book fantasies realized on a mass media scale, to my and my fellow enthusiasts’ satisfaction, had been royally fucked over.
And just to be clear, if fifteen-year-old me was around today for this spate of super stuff that’s packing the multiplexes, I’d be over the moon and batshit crazy with delight. But “fifteen” is the operative term here.
Parenthetically, it’s now the descendants of those smirkers, the people who used to beat us up for reading comics in high school, now making bank off this material, but hey, forgive and forget—since they get so much right in the transliteration.
Sure. Naturally. Right. Of course.
These days, while the civilians who are coughing up the billions to keep this stuff up and running just show up and shut up, it’s the enthusiasts, that infinitesimally tiny minority who have waited, often for decades, for their tastes in this regard to be validated, who are the plaintiffs here.
It’s not enough for this claque of aging (mostly) boys and (a few) girls that everybody is now onboard and party to their often lifelong misperceived as magnificent obsessions. The product now derived must be acknowledged for its excellence by all comers, despite any empirical evidence to justify this insistent rampage. As frequently noted, the universal mistaking of “favorite” for “best” just won’t go the fuck away.
Perfectly sturdy, utterly forgettable superhero movies are wildly overpraised for the usual reasons—intentions, inclusive representation, diverse encoding, leaden whimsy and unearned gravitas, among other even more pointless justifications for the demands made by those holding popular culture hostage.
Hours of banal superhero streaming stuff is regarded as mind blowing. I would venture a guess that this is because like so much of modern popular culture, many of these productions acknowledge the existence of ideas, as opposed to actually having an actually original idea to validate all that sumptuous praise.
Story, and its many components, have devolved, to a certain extent into what are now called “listicles,” laundry lists of concepts which imply cleverness but add up to nothing but that implication.
And when veteran filmmakers express uninterest, disdain or outright distaste for this material, the reaction ranges from the usual banal ageist “OK Boomer” bullshit, to what would seem to be the reasonable defense of the superhero movie as an acceptable genre, like westerns, or crime, or war, or musicals, or romantic comedy.
And, wait for it…they’re right.
As a direct result of the unexpected paradigm cultural shift that has made superhero movies the go to thing for the past decade and now counting, mainstream comic books have themselves transmogrified from a medium to a genre, with a specific paradigm.
With alarmingly few exceptions, the template for comic books, the source material for this billion-dollar business, bears a queasy resemblance to Chuck Jones’ ROADRUNNER/COYOTE cartoons, a moebius strip in which the pursuit of justice/order/revenge/whatever the motivation for these cardboard creations mistaken for character never actually results in closure.
On the other hand, the template for comic book movies is a bit different, derived, it seems to me, from the narrative armature of the old THE A-TEAM television series—each episode of which, to my stoned-out delight, would end with Armoring the Van. In that spirit, every fucking superhero movie seems to end with a twenty- to forty-minute-long CGI augmented beat down.
So yes, a genre. But no, there has yet to be a transcendent picture to do for the superhero movie what those directors above did for the genre movies, the B pictures of the past. No HE WALKED BY NIGHT. No SEVEN MEN FROM NOW. No HIS GIRL FRIDAY. Some have come close, or more to the point just close’ish, but still, no cigar.
And no, I have no idea what that transcendence might be, or look like. I’m not even sure I’d know it when I saw it. Nobody’s perfect. I have a suspicion it might be James Gunn who might accomplish this, as a fellow who has demonstrated a conditional love for the material at hand, on one hand, while taking a transgressive swipe at its tropes and rituals with the other.
Or maybe it’ll be Matt Reeves, whose THE BATMAN opens this week as I write this, and is generating positive reviews from not necessarily expected sources that indicate a potential new take on this fatigued and fatiguing franchise.
I can only hope.
All this said, what we are left with, what is being shouted to the rooftops as great, are, to a phenomenal degree B pictures with forgettably rote scripts, trope based performances and structure, movies often sprawling to nearly three hours of screen time—and no intermission, for fuck’s sake!—with budgets that are comparable to the GNPs of more than a few nations—and of course, the omnipresent and miserably misnamed easter eggs, which convince the credulous that they’re secret handshake hip, and privy to a private joke.
In other words, fan service.
And it’s that adherence to that service that has denied this blockbuster genre the transcendence it needs to be take seriously alongside the likes of what Eddie Muller programs on Noir Alley, not to mention that Randolph Scott film festival.
As long as received information, which is at core what that fan service feeds, is the tail that wags the dog, this stuff will remain middling, nothing new, all based on what’s come before, unworthy of comparison to the work done by those men and women who loved their genre source material just as much as fans love this—but felt that there were deeper places to go, and higher heights to claim.
And before you reach into the swamp of banality and embarrass yourself with “Tell me what you really think,” or liken me to the old man shaking a fist at a cloud/yelling at kids to get off my lawn, don’t waste my time or your breath.
As noted, I’ve been a comics man for over fifty years, and obsessed with precisely the popular cultural elements I mention here—including the super stuff—since I was four years old. My entire life is one obsessed with stories, with narrative, all derived from teaching myself to read from comics, mostly superhero comic books, before I entered the first grade.
I owe a debt to comics for my life, my career—and it would be lovely if someone were to bring some transcendence to the genre that underwrote that debt, a debt which can never be repaid.
As ever, I remain,
Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince, often transgressive, occasionally transcendent.
Trust me on this.
