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| "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" -Mark 8:36 photo courtesy of http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ |
In spite of my disappointed expectations over Prometheus, in the long run I learned almost nothing. The very next year, nearly the same thing happened all over again.
In March or April, I was perusing a social media site when I happened upon a post from a friend of mine. He predicted in no uncertain terms, on the strengths of the trailer attached to his post, that the film being advertised would be a particularly excellent one. The film in question was the superhero reboot Man of Steel.
Pish tosh I thought. For years, I had been decrying the very concept of a rebooted Superman franchise, especially one made along the lines of the popular Dark Knight films. It seemed like the height of stupidly applied Studio logic: Batman was dark and realistic, Batman was successful. Therefore if we make Superman, a light and far less realistic character, dark and realistic, that must also be successful. And it was to be directed by the man who brought us the shoutingly underpowered 300 and the weirdly over-faithful-yet-emotionally-empty Watchmen. Were they picking ideas and names out of a hat?
All this besides, it should perhaps be noted that I was not then and had never been a Superman fan. Superman Returns, the strange 2006 attempt at making something new by reviving all the old, had attracted my attention and had been fun in a half-melancholy way. It lead me to getting hold of and watching the 1978 film, which was certainly worthwhile but hadn’t stuck with me in any significant way.
When I was much younger, at the age when superheroes seem to be an imperative, it was Batman that received the lion's share of my devotion and analysis (with my preteen interest later going instead to the X-men).
Superman was too perfect to be interesting, too powerful to play in a compelling story. Now they were trying to bend him into a shape even I could see wouldn’t didn't fit, just to sell him all over again.
Never any new ideas, I thought. I clicked on the trailer.
When it was finished, I'd decided that my friend had overestimated the work's promise. The cinematography was unexpectedly understated and nostalgia-filtered, the effects when present were either tastefully minimal or well-executed, but it didn't seem to add up to much.
But there was something there. Something stuck in my head, that billowing cape over the ice, the bittersweet cardinal red, the angle of the sunlight. Without realizing it, I began a research project. I don't think I ever really expected the movie to be any good; if I ever had a rational thought on the subject, it was something like "most likely it won't be any good, but just in case it is good, I may as well find out a little about the whole thing." It started as a curiosity: who is this character, does he warrant revisiting in the first place?
I got the idea to write an article comparing Superman with Don Quixote, a character with whom I was better acquainted and had useful opinions about which I could support from the text. I thought maybe it said something about our culture that, instead of an elderly neighborhood man with infinite optimism but cripplingly realistic weakness, our character of choice was this distant Kryptonian, a man with both infinite optimism and infinite capability to match. I started looking into what made Superman Superman, why he had become so popular and lasted so long, with an eye to considering whether he could hold up to the Manchegan’s 400-year record. The article was eventually mostly abandoned, but once the research started, it became self-sustaining.
I read some of the comics, both the internet’s elect best-of and the back catalog, together with endless Wiki and Wikia articles, film trivia, fan blogs, the history of the various radio and TV shows. More than I ever had with Batman, I tried to understand the history of the character. What were his best stories, who had created them, why were they so good?
My wife was somewhat more amenable to this particular fad than others, and bore up under the constant fun facts and road trip questions. In addition to this she managed to bend the craze to a road she could share, in that Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman was one of her favorite shows in the 90's, and we were able to find copies of the four seasons cheap. It's worth watching at least the first season, if for no other reason than John O'Shea's Lex Luthor, possibly the best version of the character and certainly my favorite.
I think at heart I was trying to prove to myself that this hype was unjustified, so I could see it was a waste of time and detach and move on. But to my surprise the pull of that image got stronger the more I learned.
The guy began to take on weight and substance in my imagination. Soon I had some definite opinions of his nature and native strengths and weaknesses, as both a character and as a subject of weaving stories. Most Superman stories, for instance, seem to take the shape of a "guy gets strong, villain gets stronger, guy gets stronger still and wins" scenario, much like a very similar franchise I'd loved in my adolescence, Dragonball Z.
The best stories either acknowledged this by playing directly against it, or focused on the real core of Superman's strength: that his greatest power is knowing the right thing to do.
But beside all this, over and beyond it, something was happening in my mind that had not happened under the Prometheus hype.
When I was under the spell of its long, shadowy thumb, which arched high into stars after emerging from HP Lovecraft's weedy tomb, the feeling wasn't as happy-making as my Superman obsession. It was as if I were indulging in the acceptance that the world is an essentially baffling and often vile place, and that it was somehow adult and sophisticated to believe so, that it was a doorway to regrettable if wickedly sophisticated insights.
You swim through a black sea of slime and strangling tentacles, you get to the hidden treasure of the origin of man, or earlier than that.
So if I were out and about, and I saw a collection of H.R. Geiger's excellent paintings for sale in the coffee table section of the big box book seller, I would feel a little flicker of recognition and feel like my name had been said, because I was tolerant and in-the-know about that sort of thing.
In the end, whether or not Prometheus itself had anything by way of a worthy insight to share varies with each person's mileage. The trailer had exactly the same excellent art direction as the film itself.
With Superman, it seemed like there were triggers everywhere, not just lurking in the corners of the internet that I chose to wander down. I would walk outside on a sunny early summer day, take a breath and want to just rise into the air, get to wherever I was going the way my new adopted hero did.
As the release date of Man of Steel grew nearer, I once again barred myself from Rotten Tomatoes and did my best to avoid potential spoilers, but with nothing like the fever I'd felt over Prometheus the year before.
I remember thinking when it was time to go and see the show, that it might or might not be any good, but that I was genuinely glad that I'd taken the time to get to know the guy, as the personality of the character had a lot of good to do in my ever-aging heart.
Obviously, the film could not live up to my expectations because of this. Even though I had tried not to form any, my ideas of what the character should be had an overwhelming impact on how I saw the story unfold.
What pleased me about the Superman/Man of Steel experience is that my goals had shifted. I was disappointed by the film, but not by the character.
About eight months after we saw the movie, I found and started flipping through my copy of All Star Superman, and soon I found that I was reading it again, cover to cover. It didn't feel like trying to recapture the spark of the obsession of the summer before. It felt like simply visiting with an old friend.
This sort of revisiting the material never happened with Prometheus. I'm pleased that I learned as much as I did about the Alien movies, which are still excellent, but I haven't felt particularly compelled to watch them since I saw the more recent movie.
What had changed in my self-hype pattern? What was different about this time? Was it simply the subject matter, or had the process been a different one this time from the start?
Unlike with Prometheus, I had not gone to Man of Steel with the goal of seeing what ideas the people smarter than me had come up with from the sea of ideas forever floating in the science fiction universe, or even the goal of finding out whether I'd guessed correctly what the story would be.
My expectations were not the key part of the experience. Or rather, what I’d expected had had nothing to do with what I was going to see: I was in possession of content that I knew would not disappoint me, because I had successfully made it a part of me, of my own worldview.
Instead of going to a movie to see if my goals would be fulfilled by what was on the screen, I went in with my real goal already accomplished: that of combining, only in very small ways, what I think makes Superman Superman with what I think makes me me.
And in the bigger picture, I had made the first step toward freeing myself of the hype-disappointment cycle altogether.
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