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They're out there, readers. In your nation. Your community. Your city screams; your subway (or applicable mass transit unit) shudders. Maybe they're even in your own family. Your bed. It's coming from inside your house, friend.
Yes! I can only mean one thing, one terrifying class of citizen: people who
liked The Spirit!
Imagine. You're driving to a special one-time only showing of some potential nerd culture touchstone, maybe a screening of
L: BRokEn caPsLoCK, and the conversation turns to recent superhero movies. You cover
Watchmen. You hit
The Dark Knight. You even touch on that print of
X-Men Origins: Wolverine you leaked online. Suddenly, there's no turning back. Someone's mouth opens:
"Y'know, that Spirit movie wasn't half bad…"
Silence. For the rest of the ride!
Or how about your local comic shop. Three men shooting the breeze while you're trying to peek at the last page of
100 Bullets. Before you know it, one of them's insisting "that Frank Miller movie" was okay. Voices rise. Bones crack. Blood everywhere. Blood in extraordinary quantities. That may have been the wrong comic right there, but better that than the wrong movies. Superheroes are serious business, but superhero movies are life and death.
Well here comes trouble, internet comic book-related movie column fans - I sort of liked Frank Miller's
Will Eisner's The Spirit! Kind of! I thought it was a good deal better than
Watchmen, at least, which actually isn't saying a lot, in that I thought
Watchmen was kind of crap, but it's still something! Beyond the grave! Beyond the law! Beyond traditional notions of quality!
Now, you and I know the movie wasn't all that well received. And I don't mean that in the ‘Frank Miller in comics' sense, which would involve the heated criticism being accompanied by top-ranking sales. No, I mean the movie got smacked up and down online, grossed under $40 million worldwide -- which, provided the budget was comparable to prior Miller-related projects, isn't very good --
and currently logs a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
But you know - a lot of critics also praised
Sin City to the heavens (RT rating: 77%), and that wasn't nearly as fun or lively a movie. Of course, a lot of folks still have fond memories of
Sin City the comic, but not me; I'm a late period Frank Miller kinda guy, the sort of aesthetic pervert that thinks he only really started cooking in the last decade and a half with
The Dark Knight Strikes Again. It's so odd to me that people keep playing the ‘self-parody' card;
Sin City was the self-parody era, a reductive take on supercharged, half-superhero noir motifs processed through a largely superficial derivation on the sort of high-contrast art that
José Muñoz was working on a decade prior.
DK2?
All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder? That was where he
embraced the absurdity, where he became
defiant. Maybe he went nuts or lost control of his faculties or forgot how to make comics, sure, maybe, but it strikes me as closer to an oscillation between the parodic and the operatic, which is essentially how
Miller himself describes his DK2 approach. None of that renders the work magically impervious to fault (oh lord no), but it does place it on a different tonal level than some readers seem prepared to acknowledge.
The Spirit is a product of
that Frank Miller, the current Frank Miller. It may look sort of like the
Sin City movie -- although not nearly as much as you've probably heard -- but it's just not the work of the guy frozen in carbon via that earlier picture's madness of fidelity. Plus, it's not even a translation of Miller's own work, it's him applying his values to another artist's creations. And as luck would have it, there isn't even a solidified storyline to adhere to, since Eisner's comics were just that: short-form comics, light on continuity, with a deep history to fiddle with.
It's almost the ideal forum for the digital backlot stuff the Frank Miller movies have been into, with the added bonus of being written, storyboarded and directed by Frank Miller in person. It's a
personal picture too; you know you're in Miller territory when sweet love interest Ellen Dolan is introduced wearing a blue veil so as to suggest the Virgin Mary… Madonna/whore complex ahoy!
I liked a lot of small touches, like how the Spirit knows all the policemen in town by name, or how he bleeds solid red animated cartoon blood, or how even the snowflakes in the sky somehow look like Frank Miller drawings of snowflakes. Some of the grimy white rotoscoping (like on the Spirit's shoes) makes it look like a Ralph Bakshi movie. It's very cartoonish; the Spirit gets whomped with a gigantic wrench, and then he punches Samuel L. Jackson as the Octopus in the face at least two dozen times, over and over. There's a cliffhanging scene where the Spirit's pants fall down and Benny Hill music plays. Eggs are discussed, often. A pederast is named after DC comics robber baron boogeyman Harry Donenfeld. There's zany cloned henchmen who die a lot, an elderly man who asks the Spirit to marry him, and the dad from the
Wonder Years as Commissioner Dolan.
Heavy-duty Eisner devotees may well dislike the picture for its many deviations, from combining femme fatale P'Gell and lost secret agent love Sand Saref into the same character (with the latter's name) to sprinkling bits of origin villain Dr. Cobra onto the Octopus, whose face is always shown and whose mania and disguises are played for laughs. The Sprit has a healing factor, Ebony White is nowhere to be seen and the even-tempered sophistication of Eisner's broad comedy is replaced by, er, the stylings of Frank Miller circa 2008, which also winds up super-charging every other aspect that ever lurked in Eisner‘s work, even the ones that maybe weren't meant to share the same episode.
Still, that's the thing for me - witnessing Miller process all of this through his own current developments in style, as translated to the cinema medium. It does no good to compare this film to other superhero movies, even the stringent adaptation of
Sin City or the glossy evocation of
300, let alone
Iron Man or whatnot. This is more along the lines of Gilbert Hernandez's
The Naked Cosmos, or Mike Allred's
Astroesque, or some other absurdly individual project by a comics artist diving into filmmaking, even though Miller had a far larger budget. It's still uniquely redolent with singular vision, one that doesn't conform to what today's superhero movies ought to necessarily look like.
You see, people might point to the success of superhero movies as proof that the wider public has an appetite for such genre product, and that the genre is special and so on, but I'm not sure that's fully true. By and large, superhero movies have found success in emulating the rhythms and aesthetic triggers of time-honed summer blockbuster movies, which have already proven popular with the public, as well as conducive to various fantasy genres. Superhero movies work in that way, in that the ‘superhero' in them doesn't get in the way of the loud action and realism matched with explosions and digital effects and thundering music and big-ass vistas. Name recognition is good, naturally -- same goes for James Bond, or Jerry Bruckheimer -- but I'm not convinced it's primarily the ineffable appeal of superheroes filling up seats.
The Spirit doesn't act like those other movies; something like
Watchmen does, in contrast, which is the key to its failure as an essentially transformative work that's ‘faithful' in precisely the most self-destructive ways. If there's any zone of action movie Miller's project looks toward, it's probably the Japanese
tokusatsu film of the costumed hero type, very self-evidently artificial in special effects and gangly in action stylization - realism is often not the goal. Look to animator Hideaki Anno's 2004 adaptation of Go Nagai's
Cutey Honey (speaking of an infamous artist wrestling with the legacy of one of his beloved elders!) and you've nearly got it.
We'll be needing more films like
The Spirit if this situation is ever going to change. It'll also help if those films are good, which, regardless of everything I've just mentioned,
The Spirit is not really. I've isolated three compelling reasons why:
1. Frank Miller Apparently Cannot Direct Actors: This isn't entirely a knock on Miller; I haven't seen
any digital backlot movies where the human performances cohered very much. That's too bad, since instituting an overwhelming visual style (often the point of shooting everything before a screen) logically requires appropriately modulated acting to ensure the people of the digital world seem to
fit.
Unfortunately, everyone in this movie seems to be giving some sort of odd private performance, which slashes right through those impressive computer backgrounds. Samuel L. Jackson might know how to fill out his Nazi costume, but poor Scarlett Johansson seems completely lost as Silken Floss, imbuing every line with a monotone breathy purr despite the character being written as woman delighted to adopt the persona of a supervillainess as a means of living as a more exciting person, which demands a more complex take.
It's utterly disjointed, defeating the harmony of artificiality so carefully managed by the visuals. On the plus side, though, there is the occasional jaw-dropper like Stana Katic's genuinely
surreal portrayal of a rookie cop, either the result of some deliberate planning or Miller opting to use only her worst takes every time for comedic impact, a la Richard Dunn in
Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Also, if you've got the special edition DVD, note how Frank Miller sounds almost exactly like John C. Reilly as Dr. Steve Brule. Coincidence? No, but at least you'll never un-hear that, ha ha ha.
2. The Editing is Odd and Distracting: Kind of the piling of the building blocks of filmmaking here. It's big and small things, from scenes with running music cues cutting mid-movement to silent bits, to dialogue moving back and forth from face to face just a few seconds too slow. Some evidently deliberate choices jar, with semi-naturalistic scenes suddenly cutting to solid reds and stylized shadows for brief flourishes, then back again. Inconsistent application of the style leads to a sour result.
3. The Story Fails to Cohere, and Isn't All That Compelling Otherwise: You're no doubt aware I haven't really gotten into the plot yet. There's a reason for that, but it's not because the story is complex or anything - the Spirit is the deathless crime fighter of Center City, taking on the equally deathless Octopus for the blood of Heracles, which can grant immortality, all while tracking down his childhood sweetheart, Sand Saref, who wants Jason's Golden Fleece because it's pretty, but it got mixed up with the Octopus' vase of plasma. Many other supporting characters appear; the day is eventually saved thanks to gunfire and hitting.
But this is a rambling 108 minutes, prone to curious digressions and extended dollops of exposition - I swear the Spirit spends half an hour tied to a chair while the Octopus recites his secret origin. Some of this adds to the work's charm, but it eventually renders the whole a mess of notions and metaphors orbiting a simple, coincidence-powered plot. Heaven knows where Miller was going with his citations to Greek gods and adventurers, save for the creaky old ghost town of superheroes as Our Modern Myths.
There's a snap of self-awareness to some of it, audible in the Spirit's fights with the Octopus, explicitly positioned as only the latest conflicts among many between invincible foes; it's not for nothing that the Spirit heals fast. He's every continuing franchise character, running though the same stuff - Miller's film sets out to show him who he is, and define him for us, though it's nothing all that striking.
Unless, of course, you go to the women.
I don't think this film will do much for Miller's reputation among audiences who've taken his portrayals of female characters as offensive. The Spirit loves all women in this iteration -- a compression of the many women he meets in Eisner's work into one opus -- but he commits to none. A distinctly amoral subtext creeps in, with sweet Ellen Dolan's heart broken by her Spirit's infidelity, but she smiles at the end - don't worry guys, the ladies secretly love it when you screw around!
Oh, Miller tries to contextualize it as superhero workaholism - work that involves hooking up and breaking hearts. Sometimes it's creative, as in casting little-used, fan-favorite siren Lorelei Rox as the specter of death, which naturally Our Invincible Hero won't commit to, but there's cruelty to it as well, and Miller essentially frames it as boyish escapism. The most laborious of the film's metaphors posits the Spirit's greatest love as that for his city, also female, but symbolized as (eek!) a cat that loyally follows him around, to be occasionally scooped up and cradled, sweet and inhuman and female and only then worthy of a superhero's paternal devotion. HOLY CRAP.
But you know what? I'll still take Miller's sincerely gross personal issues over the mechanistic objectification of otherwise interesting female characters as practiced by Zack Snyder & co. At least it's part of a distressing organic whole with Miller, part and parcel with the idiosyncratic outlook that pervades all of his film. I don't know if he'll ever direct again, but let the thing stand as a totem of strangeness in the face of big money superhero movie products. Some plainer, stiffer stuff got the praise, and here Lucifer came to collect, and it was undoubtedly something that happened, goddamn right.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
