Noah Berlatsky | The Verge

HBO’s Watchmen is using Easter eggs to signal that it isn’t like the comic

2019-10-22T11:39:38-04:00

Easter eggs are a way for the people behind legacy films or television shows to demonstrate their love of and fidelity to its source material. When showrunners, writers, and directors stick a glancing reference to Luke Cage’s yellow shirt from his 1970s comics in the gritty 2016 Netflix series, it’s a way of nodding to the fans, of saying “We’re fans too, and we can be trusted with your beloved properties.”

That seems to be the intention behind the omnipresent Easter eggs in HBO’s new Watchmen series, helmed by Lost and The Leftovers co-creator Damon Lindelof. The visual, narrative, and thematic references to the original Alan Moore / Dave Gibbons comic are obsessive and ubiquitous. But they don’t show that the series is keeping the faith. The Easter eggs inadvertently highlight how different HBO’s Watchmen is from the comic. A Watchmen packed with Easter eggs doesn’t show how faithful Lindelof and crew are to the original. It shows the ways they’re striking out on their own.

As a sequel set in the same world as the original comic, the Watchmen series broadly references the original in plot and world-building. The white supremacist group the Seventh Cavalry has adopted Rorschach inkblot masks, inspired by the one worn by Watchmen’s vigilante hero. They quote from his journal, altering the text to make the fascist and racist subtext more explicit. Robert Redford, whose presidential campaign was just getting started at the end of the Watchmen comic, has been president in the series for some 30 years. There’s a miniseries event on TV about the 1940s superhero group the Minutemen, and it plays in the background of many scenes, reiterating, elaborating on, or parodying events from the comic.

But there are also a lot of gratuitous visual nods to the original series. These don’t contribute to consistent world-building; they simply wave to fans. Some of the most blatant ones in the pilot episode include:

Masked detective Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson) rolls his mask up over his mouth when he eats, in an image that recalls Rorschach rolling his mask up to eat beans in the comic.
Chief of police Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) tells Looking Glass, “Pull your face down,” again recalling the original Rorschach, who referred to his mask as his face.
Seventh Cavalry members are shown disassembling watches as part of a mysterious terrorism plot. The exposed gears recall the broken watch gears that, through a series of accidents, led Jon Osterman to become Dr. Manhattan.
One of the Seventh Cavalry members swallows a poison pill. Angela / Sister Night (Regina King) yells “Spit it out! Spit it out!” It’s a direct reference to a similar scene in the Watchmen comic, where Adrian Veidt wrestles an assassin with a poison pill.
Angela walks past a man carrying a sign that reads “The Future Is Bright.” It recalls a sign Rorschach carried in his secret identity which said, “The End Is Nigh.”
The last image of the first episode is of Judd’s badge, marked with a single slanted drop of blood, referencing the signature Watchmen image of the Comedian’s smiley-face button, similarly marked with blood.
In a scene where Angela teaches cooking to an elementary school class, there’s a shot up through the bottom of a glass bowl. Her dropped egg yolks form a smiley face, again recalling the Comedian button. This is (no doubt intentionally) an Easter egg literally made of eggs.

And those are only some of the references in the first episode. As the series continues (the first six episodes were provided to critics), there are many, many more, particularly paralleling the comic’s obsessive imagery around clock faces with the hands nearing midnight.

These Easter eggs aren’t thematically or even really visually integrated into the series. The egg-yolk smile doesn’t mean anything in the context of the show except, “Hey, fans of the original Watchmen! Here’s a smiley face!” It’s a fun wink, but that’s a radically different approach to image repetition than Moore’s careful, obsessive parallels in the comic.

The most famous example of Moore and Gibbons’ use of visual motifs is the Comedian’s smiley-face button, stained with blood. The first image of the first issue is of the button lying in the gutter. The last image of the last issue is of a man wearing a smiley-face shirt stained with a splotch of ketchup so it matches the opening image. The Watchmen graphic novel starts and ends in the same place. It’s a perfect closed system — a smiley-faced, bloody loop with no escape.

Watchmen the comic is remorselessly self-contained. Dave Gibbons’ nine-panel-per-page grid sometimes shifts, as two, three, or four panels fuse into one, but it never opens up. Ominous recurring or parallel images — a nuclear hazard sign, the inkblots on Rorschach’s mask, a butterfly in a frozen wasteland — appear and reappear, not as random in-jokes, but as signposts in Moore’s narrative maze. They’re a reminder that readers can’t get out. Watchmen is meant to put readers in the blue skin of Dr. Manhattan, who sees all time at once, and so is hopelessly frozen in his own destiny. He sees himself as locked in the grid of what he has done and will do. Superhero stories are usually about how remarkable individuals can transform the world. Watchmen is about how even heroes (and in Dr. Manhattan’s case, even god-like beings) can be stuck in the boxes the world creates for them.

And even though the comic’s conclusion points to a more peaceful future, it’s hard to see things really improving in its world, or even continuing. Watchmen is a complete and circular story, set in a grim world where inevitable cataclysm is eternally approaching. That uniquely airless sense of sadness and melancholy is one of its primary draws.

A Watchmen sequel was, by definition, never going to reproduce that sense of a world that couldn’t support a sequel. The television show is a looser, messier, more seat-of-the-pants affair than the comic, jumping from a recreation of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to police drama to domestic sit-com in a helter-skelter scramble of genre tropes. That’s part of what gives the series the sense of hope and open possibilities that isn’t much evident in the comic, with its slow, measured tread toward doom.

In Watchmen the series, Lindelof and company constantly let viewers know they’re riffing on a past product. That neatly fits the world of the show, which is dedicated to riffing and improvisation, too. President Robert Redford and Tulsa’s leadership are trying to get out of the grid of racism by introducing new policies and new ideas — most notably, reparations and an acknowledgement of racist history. The original Watchmen was a story about a world with no options. The new series is about how people can maybe get from nowhere to somewhere, if they have some imagination and an awareness of where they come from. And that theme is drawn more clearly in upcoming episodes.

Lindelof doesn’t drop a yolky smile in his show’s pilot to signal that he’s serving up the same meal Alan Moore offered. He’s showing us that he has an entirely new shell for this story. The TV show keeps nudging fans to remember the original comic so it can show off how it’s trying to go somewhere else. It’s a constant reminder that the show isn’t as thoroughly thought-through and self-contained as the source material. But we already have the Watchmen comic for that. The TV series breaks a few eggs to see what kind of omelet comes out.

In Search of Darkness sets out to be the definitive 1980s horror doc — and mostly succeeds

2019-10-07T13:50:15-04:00

In Search of Darkness: The Definitive 80s Horror Documentary is being billed as a film, but it feels more like a miniseries. Over a run time of nearly four and a half hours, it crams in discussions of dozens of films and a jaw-dropping range of interviews with top flight-directors (John Carpenter, Joe Dante), iconic actors (Barbara Crampton, Doug Bradley), effects artists, composers, pop culture commenters, and more. The overstuffed kitchen sink approach nicely captures a decade of gruesome excess in horror cinema. But in evaluating and analyzing his decade of choice, first-time writer-director David A. Weiner would have benefited from a bit less enthusiastic love and a bit more of a critical scythe and / or chainsaw.

For fans of 1980s horror, In Search of Darkness is a compulsively watchable delight. The documentary proceeds chronologically from 1980’s The Shining and The Fog through 1989’s Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Neither snobbery nor slobbering fandom is allowed to mar the proceedings, and the interviewees gamely tackle David Cronenberg’s high concept Videodrome with the same appreciation of craft and gore that they bring to discussions of open schlock like Chopping Mall or Stephen King’s cocaine-fueled directorial debut (and directorial swan song), Maximum Overdrive. There are a few glaring individual omissions (no Aliens?!), and foreign horror films of the era are completely missing. But given that it’s impossible to cover everything, the doc does a good job of hitting most of the era’s American highlights and many of the buried, fiendish obscurities as well.

Weiner intersperses his year-by-year surveys with thematic explorations of various ’80s horror topics, including VHS cover art, nudity in horror, and soundtracks and sound design. He also spends a lot of time on discussing how various effects were achieved, with puppetry, makeup, prosthetics, and a good deal of pre-digital ingenuity.

There’s enough information here, with so many films covered, that even hardcore genre fans are bound to find something new they’d like to see or something old they want to revisit. Among the lesser-known gems that get substantial attention is From Beyond, the companion piece to Stuart Gordon’s preposterously gory Herbert West: Reanimator, and The Society, a satirical political paranoid thriller with massive gross-out body modification and literal talking butts. It looks completely, marvelously bonkers.

In addition to pointing out obscurities worth watching, the documentary also includes a lot of terrific individual moments. The best is probably Joe Dante’s rueful evaluation of The Howling II, the follow-up knock-off of Dante’s famous werewolf picture. After doing his best to find something nice to say about Philippe Mora’s direction, he concludes, “It just didn’t make any sense.”

Stuntman Kane Hodder — who, at one point in his career, was hospitalized for serious injuries suffered doing a fire stunt — talks at length about how much he loves doing fire stunts because they just look so cool. Caroline Williams, of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame, drops F-bombs and seems giddily happy to be on camera. And practically everyone giggles about how completely alienated audiences were by the Michael Myers-free Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

The only misstep, interview-wise, is a heavy reliance on podcasters and fandom figures. One or two enthusiasts would have been fine, but the doc includes so many that their contributions sometimes feel repetitive and superfluous. The inevitable Joe Bob Briggs opines twice, for example, that Freddy Krueger is a better villain than Jason, an insight we probably didn’t even need to hear once.

In place of some of these commentators, it might have been nice to hear from a few critics or scholars. The absence of any academics is especially notable when the conversation strays into theoretical territory. A number of female stars, for example, explain how they dislike the term “Final Girl,” and would prefer just to be called “protagonists.” It’s a fascinating discussion, but it would have been useful to hear from Carol Clover, who coined the term, or from other scholars or critics who have found it useful.

The documentary does touch on feminist themes, but without critics or scholars, it has trouble putting the ’80s in context. How did the representation of women change over the decade? How did films engage with the contemporary feminist movement or the backlash to it? Similarly, the absence of representation of black actors in ’80s horror is barely mentioned — a glaring oversight, especially in light of this year’s amazing documentary on the African-American horror tradition, Horror Noire. The closest the documentary gets to touching on the issue is a brief discussion with actor Ken Sagoes, who talks enthusiastically about how his character survived Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and with less pleasure about how he was killed off in the opening minutes of Nightmare on Elm Street 4.

In Search of Darkness’ biggest missed opportunity, though, is probably its failure to address AIDS. A few people mention that the epidemic was possibly an influence on films like The Thing or The Fly, but no one takes a minute to explain the disease’s impact on the country, the queer community, or culture as a whole, much less to talk about how the era’s films addressed it or thought about it.

Part of the problem is that such a consideration probably wouldn’t be especially positive. The Thing is fantastic horror, but it doesn’t have an especially sensitive or compassionate take on the spread of infectious disease. One of Horror Noire’s great strengths is its willingness to tear some hunks out of the thing it loves in order to figure out how it works or doesn’t. In Search of Darkness, by contrast, is reluctant to say anything that might be seen as a bloody attack on its subject matter. It’s certainly an enjoyable documentary, and it’s highly recommended to any horror fan. But the best horror movies are a little more ruthless than this.

In Search of Darkness debuted at Beyond Fest 2019 in Los Angeles on October 6th, and it’s coming to Blu-ray on October 7th.

Carnival Row is the latest H.P. Lovecraft descendant to directly subvert his racism

2019-09-09T10:21:54-04:00

Warning: broad spoilers ahead for season 1 of Carnival Row.

H.P. Lovecraft is one of the most imaginative, singular, brilliant, and influential horror writers of all time. He’s also one of the most overtly, profoundly racist. Lovecraft’s fans and heirs have long struggled with the question of how to separate his particular vision of cosmic horror from the visceral loathing of non-white people he expressed in his work.

In the past, authors like August Derleth and Stephen King have mostly tried to ignore the prejudice, concentrating instead on Lovecraft’s vision of a grotesque universe bent on humanity’s destruction and the joys of his clotted, tentacular, Cyclopean prose. More recently, though, several writers have engaged Lovecraft’s racism more directly. These creators are turning Lovecraft inside out, exposing his wet, ugly innards for antiracist purposes. The new Amazon eight-episode fantasy series Carnival Row is one of the first indications that this strand of antiracist Lovecraft fiction is traveling out of genre fiction and into more mainstream entertainment.

Some apologists, like scholar S.T. Joshi, have argued that Lovecraft’s offensive views were only central to a few of his lesser works, like the bigoted poem with a title that starts “On the Creation Of” and ends with a racist slur. Those protests aren’t convincing, though. Racism permeates Lovecraft’s work. The vast, terrible cosmic horrors he wrote about are always connected to his fear that the pure, upstanding white race is being corrupted and overrun with foul emanations from the less eugenically pure. In Lovecraft’s classic 1926 story The Call of Cthulhu, for example, the Elder Gods from outside space and time are remembered and venerated by “Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans” — by non-white people, in other words.

By contrast, Lovecraft’s protagonist is Gustaf Johansen, a white Norwegian sailor. And when he and his shipmates encounter Cthulhu’s non-white human followers, they butcher them in a fury, which Lovecraft enthusiastically endorses. “There was some peculiarly abominable quality about [Cthulhu’s worshippers] which made their destruction seem almost a duty,” Lovecraft writes. In his view, the fanciful tale of mystic horror is also a call to genocide.

Most of the horror writers channeling Lovecraft’s style or subject matter haven’t larded their prose with slurs or calls to race war. But some contemporary writers are now going further by writing Lovecraftian horror that directly acknowledges and repudiates Lovecraft’s ugly bigotries.

Ruthanna Emrys’ remarkable The Litany of Earth, for example, is told from the perspective of one of Lovecraft’s fish-people from the story The Shadow over Innsmouth. For Lovecraft, the Innsmouth inhabitants were evil because they were associated with racial mixing, which tainted them and caused them to de-evolve. For Emrys, though, the shadow in Innsmouth is the evil white people bring with them when their government murders the town’s inhabitants for the sin of being different. The real horror in this story update isn’t fish-people; it’s violent prejudice, as seen from the monsters’ perspective.

Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country takes a different approach to antiracism. The book is set in the 1950s, and its lead characters are all black. Next to the constant threats of life inside an inherently biased, racist system, the various space creatures, curses, and ghosts that the protagonists encounter are almost a pleasant diversion. Lovecraft was imaginative and entertaining, the book suggests, but his racism and his whiteness meant he didn’t know much about fear. (Lovecraft Country is being turned into an HBO series helmed by Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams.)

Novelist N.K. Jemisin is also planning a novel about a multiracial group of New Yorkers who fight Cthulhu. As she put it in a publisher’s interview: “This is deliberately a chance for me to kind of mess with the Lovecraft legacy. He was a notorious racist and horrible human being. So this is a chance for me to have the ‘chattering’ hordes — that’s what he called the horrifying brown people of New York that terrified him. This is a chance for me to basically have them kick the ass of his creation. So I’m looking forward to having some fun with that.”

Carnival Row is just the latest narrative to repurpose Lovecraft’s tropes into an antiracist story. Still, the way it uses Lovecraft’s legacy is innovative, not least because it’s so casual. The series is set in a steampunk alternate fantasy Earth. Pixies, fauns, centaurs, and other faerie creatures (or “critch”) live in the segregated neighborhood of Carnival Row in a London-like city. Humans generally hate the critch, and one man with a hammer has started to murder them indiscriminately. Police detective Rycroft Philostrate (Orlando Bloom) is determined to bring the killer to justice despite his department’s indifference to the killings.

Philo does catch the murderer, “Jack,” in the first episode. Cornered, the guy starts to spout ominous gibberish in the tried-and-true manner of many of Lovecraft’s half-mad, Elder-God-touched sailors and riffraff.

“Think I’m mad?” Jack rants. “I know darkness. I’ve been to the twilight edge of the world and dredged up things from the sunless deep that would turn your blood cold. But nothing like what I saw in the dark beneath our very feet. You’re ill-prepared for the darkness that lies ahead. There is more here than you can fathom. While you go about your life so sure that this little world belongs to you, some Dark God wakes!” That’s a nicely baroque variation on Lovecraft’s famous line, “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

Sure enough, Carnival Row meets the dark god: a slimy, shambling horror, with tentacles hanging from its face. It looks a good bit like Cthulhu fan art. But it resembles Lovecraftian beasties in other ways, too. The critch are marginalized people from a foreign land. In the series, they’re a metaphorical stand-in for immigrants, sex workers, and people of color — all the chattering hordes Lovecraft hated. “They come from a dark place and they haven’t come alone. They’ve brought something with them,” Jack warns. As in Lovecraft’s work, non-white people are a threatening, indistinguishable mass, embodied by the ugly cosmic horrors they bring to the sane, rational foundations painstakingly built by white men.

Carnival Row’s dark god is a creation of critch magic. But it wasn’t raised as a weapon against humans. It was brought to life by one of those humans. The Cthulhu-thing is sewn together from dead flesh, but it’s just a puppet. Someone has to magically pull its strings. It’s a mask some human wears, just as Cthulhu is a mask Lovecraft wore.

Carnival Row sets the audience up to think that marginalized people have birthed a monster, in standard Lovecraft fashion. But then it reveals that the actual monster is built by those in power, who create an ugly caricature of the race they hate, then use that caricature for murder. The clear suggestion is that Lovecraft’s real racism, rather than his fictional monsters, was the threat facing a civilized society.

Lovecraft isn’t Carnival Row’s primary focus. Unlike Emrys and Ruff, the show’s creators deal with and dismiss Cthulhu off to the side of the main romance and intrigue plots. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and the fantasy genre are all arguably more important influences on the series than Lovecraft.

But that makes the antiracist twist on his work feel even more significant. We seem to be reaching a tipping point in Lovecraft influence where even works not explicitly devoted to addressing his racism will still have to contend with his legacy and find ways to acknowledge and subvert it. Carnival Row is more evidence that the smartest, most successful uses of Lovecraftian tropes don’t avoid or ignore his racism. Instead, they confront it and use it to enrich the narrative and surprise the audience. They’re making something bigger and better from his work.

Preacher is unwatched, unloved, and doomed — but Tulip O’Hare goes on

2019-08-14T11:42:45-04:00

In the fourth and final season of AMC’s comic book adaptation Preacher, tough female lead Tulip O’Hare (Ruth Negga) is subjected to a Rorschach test psych evaluation. She tries her best to pass it, looking at each image and eagerly describing the grisly murders she sees in every inkblot. After she’s done, her kind doctor nervously explains, “The test results indicate that you’re an uninhibited deviant with a personality disorder prone to psychopathic outbursts. And a gun fetish. And unresolved abandonment issues.”

Tulip, who was painfully hopeful when talking about disembowelments and headshots a moment earlier, sinks into herself and acknowledges that the diagnosis fits. When the doctor tries to comfort her, she just gives him a sad little smile, like she’s trying to cheer him up. “It’s okay. Some people can’t be helped.”

The scene feels like a Monty Python skit with a heart, a lovely encapsulation of why Preacher has been such a wonderful show. It may also explain why the series has been largely ignored by critics and gradually abandoned by viewers. The setup for this scene — Tulip’s preposterous, hyperbolic blood-and-brains reactions to a simple association test — is an absurdist sketch comedy gag. But Negga is so fully committed to the bit that it doesn’t feel like a cheap punchline. It’s more like she’s coming to terms with the joke that is her life. Her combination of cynicism and sincerity, of ironically fantastic narrative and natural, nuanced acting, seems almost designed to alienate every potential audience.

Preacher is based on the famously profane Garth Ennis / Steve Dillon Vertigo comic about small-town Texas preacher Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper) who’s inhabited by Genesis, the most powerful entity in the universe. Genesis gives Jesse the power of command, meaning he can make anyone who’s listening to his voice do whatever he says. Angry about how messed-up the world is, Jesse sets off on a quest with his girlfriend Tulip to find God and make him explain himself.

The comic was an exercise in blasphemous nastiness, and over four seasons, the television show has taken that foul baton and gleefully run with it. The first season ends with virtually every character dying in a giant fecal explosion when the safety systems malfunction at a pig shit management facility. One person who escapes is named Arseface (Ian Colletti) because his face, badly disfigured after a botched suicide attempt, looks like a giant anus. Meanwhile, God (Mark Harelik) has come to earth to listen to jazz and participate in unspecified sex acts while wearing a full-body dog fetish suit. In the fourth season, the gross-out humor doesn’t let up. Jesse’s vampire friend Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) is captured and tortured by having his foreskin repeatedly removed. (Vampires regenerate.) The foreskin is then processed, packaged, and sold as a high-end anti-aging cream.

Preacher stages these kinds of nasty setpieces with a joyfully mean-spirited inventiveness. A recent episode opens with a pitch-perfect ad for that Cassidy-foreskin cream, complete with fashion-shoot gowns and a cutesy tagline. Asked what the secret for young skin is, the model whispers, “I’ll never tell.” Cut to Cassidy screaming as a machine like a grocery meat cutter circumcises him over and over. (Yes, there’s a shot of the bloody bits getting bagged up.)

In the comic, Jesse is a fairly typical tough guy with a code; he’s a sympathetic cowboy hero. In the television show, though, he’s a religious megalomaniac who is convinced of his divine destiny. He’s also a jealous, controlling boyfriend. He’s not very sympathetic. And that means that the main focus of identification in the series shifts to Cass and Tulip, who ends up trying to come to Cassidy’s rescue as Jesse, characteristically, skips out to pursue his own quest.

Gilgun is wonderful as Cassidy. He doesn’t play the vampire as a lovable rogue, but as someone pretending to be a lovable rogue. His true self-periodically shows through, with flashes of sadness, confusion, and murderous self-loathing. But Negga really steals the series. Strong female characters are generally unflappable badasses. Alternately, they go the Buffy the Vampire Slayer route, showing their vulnerability by agonizing about whether their strength makes them abnormal or unfeminine.

Tulip is different, though. She loves to fight and break things. She’s confident in her ability to beat the tar out of any antagonist. But at the same time, she’s deeply insecure about her own judgment and lovability. Her uncertainty and self-mistrust are subtly tied to racism. Jesse’s family despised Tulip’s, and that rejection still rankles. Also, Tulip’s father was killed by the police. She’s the product of a society that has sent her the lifelong message that she’s no good and that all her projects and dreams will end in failure.

Tulip has internalized that message, and she could easily succumb to despair. Negga lets the audience see her thinking about it. When Jesse leaves her, she’s not angry at him (as she should be), but at herself for failing him. Her anger and sadness are turned inward; she thinks she’s gotten what she deserves. But her reaction to despair, inevitably, is to pick herself up and do whatever she thinks is right anyway. She may be useless and unlovable, but she can still love, and she can still be a hero.

Of course, her plans don’t work as they’re supposed to. Cassidy is also a messed-up mass of insecurity, and when Tulip tries to rescue him, he kneecaps every attempt. But that doesn’t mean Tulip’s goals are misguided or wrong. In season 3, God himself (wearing that dog costume) tells her she’s a fuck-up. She thinks about it for a moment and responds that he better get out of her face or she’ll kick his ass. It’s false bravado, perhaps, but God does look nervous. After all, the world is just absurd enough that maybe she could do it.

Preacher’s absurdity is deliberate and philosophical. Jesse, Tulip, and Cass fight and drink their way through a world that isn’t just indifferent, but actually malevolent. In season 4, God gratuitously arranges the unlikely death of everyone Jesse tries to help, including cute dogs and children. It’s funny the way Kafka is funny, albeit with more car chases and explosions. Like Sisyphus, the characters go on because they don’t have any choice, but also, perhaps, because they’ve decided that a stone isn’t going to beat them.

In the same way, Preacher the series has made it to a fourth and last season, even though no one seems to be watching it or writing much about it anymore. It’s unclear how the series will wrap, though it’s already obvious that the end will be significantly different from the comic’s conclusion. Will Tulip find happiness, hopefully with someone other than that asshole Jesse? Probably not; this is an unhappy, God-damned world, and it doesn’t hold out much hope or help for anyone. Few television shows acknowledge the bitter things in life with such imaginative humor, and few characters face this kind of cynicism with the two-fisted grace of Tulip O’Hare.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is surprisingly scary and insightful

2019-08-09T11:57:12-04:00

With the success of Stranger Things and the new film version of Stephen King’s It, nostalgia feels like something of a current horror trope. In these stories, the evocation of childhood fears mixes with pleasurable memories of childhood pop culture, adding a bit of sweet to horror’s usual bitterness.

At first, the theatrical film Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark looks like it might be following in Stranger Things’ footsteps. The first scene is set to the background music of Donovan’s wonderful “Season of the Witch,” played by a never-seen DJ who recalls Wolfman Jack from American Graffiti. These period touches aren’t winking celebrations of childhood, though. The film is set in the past because director André Øvredal has something specific to say about that era and the children who lived in it.

The movie is loosely based on Alvin Schwartz’s famous collections of short horror stories for kids. A group of friends led by Stella (Zoe Colletti) investigates a haunted house on Halloween. There, they find and take an old book left behind by a long-dead child from a wealthy family. Sarah, now a ghost, starts writing new short stories in the book and the stories come true, resulting in horrible fates for Stella’s friends. Stella and her love interest, an out-of-towner named Ramón, try to learn about Sarah’s past in order to stop her before her stories do them in.

The stories Sarah writes in the book are the parts of the movie based on Schwartz’s work. These setpieces are excellent. They have the nightmarish, inevitable illogical logic of folk tales or urban legends. Fans who were terrified as children by narratives of spiders hatching where they’re not supposed to hatch will not be disappointed, nor will those who fondly remember the creature who assembles itself from its own severed bits. Harold the scarecrow is particularly effective. Øvredal reminds viewers that you don’t really need spectacular makeup or gouts of blood to create a good scare. You can just walk by the same straw-stuffed figure a couple of times and then notice it’s not there anymore.

The frame story, by contrast, isn’t based directly on Schwartz’s writing, and it’s very different. The narrative of Stella and her friends abandons the book’s taut economy for a meandering supernatural slasher. It’s like Nightmare on Elm Street with a less visually compelling villain.

It’s true that the frame is fairly ruthless in its willingness to do in its characters, especially compared with something like Stranger Things. But it also has themes of reconciliation, forgiveness, healing, and even anti-racism, all of which sit oddly beside the source material’s straightforward, scare-the-kids-so-badly-they-never-sleep-again ethos. Colletti and Garza have excellent chemistry; their scenes together sizzle. But is anyone going to this film to see a teen romance, no matter how convincingly portrayed? It was always going to be a challenge to adapt a book of short stories, but Øvredal really seems to have gone out of his way to irritate his core audience. It’s an odd choice.

Odd choices aren’t always bad choices, though. Gradually, it becomes clear that the story Øvredal wants to tell is about childhood trauma — specifically, about what parents do to, and expect from, their children. Stella’s mother abandoned her, which is part of why she forms such a quick, unhealthy connection with Sarah, whose parents abused her. One of Stella’s friends is attacked after his parents decide to leave him without notice overnight; another is pursued by a hideous, bloated creature who looks like a parody of a pregnant woman. Parents, the movie suggests, are writing their kids’ stories, and what they write is death.

That may seem paranoid. But in 1968, it was literally true. Those televisions in the background often show images of Vietnam. One shows Richard Nixon, lying as per usual, as he talks about how he doesn’t want to drop bombs. This background tale about the necessity of war and the need for men to fight entangles a number of the male characters. One high school kid who disappears prompts his peers to speculate that he may have just gone off to the army early because he was so eager to kill communists. A war story substitutes for a horror story, and at least one of them is the true tale of why a boy isn’t coming home.

The 1968 setting isn’t a fun retro jaunt. It’s part of the film’s meditation on how the world is made up of stories and how those stories trap people. Placing the film in the past is a way of framing it as fiction; it’s occurring once upon a time. The true story of the 1968 election is slotted in beside false stories of the supernatural, even as Stella and her friends try to research Sarah’s true history, which is eventually written down, then received as a fictional story. Truth and lies slide around each other, tying knots around children’s lives.

”You don’t read the book. The book reads you,” Stella declares, in a campy, melodramatic line. But Scary Stories is remarkably insightful and sober in its assessment of the way stories control people, rather than the other way around. “This person is insane, so we can torture her.” “That person must go overseas and shoot a stranger.” Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was supposed to be the summer’s virtuoso meta-fiction, but its rewritten happy ending, musing on the impotence of writing, seems a lot less bleak than Scary Stories’ acknowledgment that some scripts will take you far away where you’ll never be seen again.

That’s not to say that the ending, which clumsily gestures toward a sequel, is perfect — nor, for that matter, is the film as a whole. Like the title says, the movie has more than one tale to tell, and the disjunction in tone and purpose is sometimes jarring or just inexplicable. (Why is there a car chase in this movie?) But Øvredal is to be commended for simultaneously staying true to a beloved franchise and twisting its head around to face in an unexpected direction. Thanks to him, the film isn’t just a collection of scary stories. It’s a meditation on why the stories we tell ourselves shape us and why that’s the scary bit.

Netflix’s Wu Assassins series lacks the Hong Kong cinema magic

2019-08-08T11:43:03-04:00

The first episode of Netflix’s Wu Assassins opens with a kinetic, preposterous, thoroughly enjoyable Hong Kong cinema throwback fight scene set in a series of halls and stairwells. Railings are hurdled, bullets are dodged, people are pinned to walls with their own knives. It’s a ballet of violence set to over-carbonated electronic music, culminating with the hero snatching a thrown knife out of the air. “Who are you?” the man he’s rescued asks in wonder. “I’m a chef,” he quips. End scene, cue applause. It’s everything fans want in a retro martial arts flick.

But after five minutes or so, it’s done — and then, alas, the plot kicks in.

That plot manages to be both predictable and nonsensical. Aspiring chef Kai Jin (played by celebrated stuntman Iko Uwais) is trying to get his food-truck business off the ground while occasionally working at the restaurant of his romantic interest Jenny (Li Jun Li). Then he discovers he’s the heir to mystical martial arts powers. He must use them to defeat a bunch of villains with elemental magic, including his adoptive father, Uncle Six (Byron Mann), the leader of a criminal triad. In addition, the show desperately but ineffectually wants viewers to be interested in the undercover work of blond white cop C.G. (Katheryn Winnick) who’s trying to prevent a gang war between the triad and crime boss Alec McCullough (Tommy Flanagan).

Genre fans of various flavors have seen this all before: the father / son tension between Kai and Uncle Six, the assassin who doesn’t want to be a killer, the magical visitor who tells the reluctant chosen one he’s chosen. Even the mystical out-of-time training sequences and visions of the future are so rote that they spark resigned acquiescence instead of wonder.

The most frustrating part of Wu Assassins, though, is its straight-faced grimness. The clichés, plot holes, and stilted dialogue would all be forgivable if there were more fight scenes, and if the show wasn’t so often soaked in its own sodden seriousness.

Martial arts cinema has a tradition of light-hearted absurdity, from Jackie Chan’s adorably corny clowning to Stephen Chow’s hyperbolic camp masterpieces. Even John Woo has been known to punch through seriousness and on into giddy bombast in films like Face/Off, where Nicolas Cage and John Travolta teeter on the edge of self-parody, and then gleefully jump off that edge, guns blazing.

On film, some Americans have captured those high spirits, as Kill Bill and John Wick demonstrate. But recent American tributes to Hong Kong television tend to treat the genre as if it’s an exercise in heartfelt blather and tragic backstories. Netflix’s wretched Iron Fist, like the other Marvel Netflix shows, largely abandoned the humor of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in favor of a gritty, downbeat landscape of dimly lit hallways, furrowed brows, and supposedly intense monologues. Even the action sequences were badly handled. AMC’s Into the Badlands did better with the fights, but its dystopic-future setting is still mired in drearily convoluted plot machinations. The stunt performers spin, jump, and kick with weightless improvisatory brilliance, then pass the baton to the actors, who immediately sink into a bog of melodrama.

Wu Assassins is better than Iron Fist if only because Uwais is a better lead than Finn Jones. But the show’s acting is weaker than Into the Badlands, and its writing is even worse. The writing issues could actually be a strength if the showrunners were willing to lean into their inadequacies. The first three episodes available for preview are filled with scenes that could function as enjoyable punchlines, if only the tone weren’t so deadeningly dour.

For example, in one sequence, a physically unimposing woman suddenly turns out to have amazing martial arts abilities, which is exactly the sort of setup that Stephen Chow staged in films like Shaolin Soccer with a high-octane wink. But in Wu Assassins, the reveal is set in a drug-addicts’ hovel, and it’s played completely straight, with all the fun drained out of it. In another Chow-esque conceit, Kai’s powers make him transform into an old bald guy when he does martial arts. So the triad decides to kidnap every bald chef in Chinatown, which should obviously cue the apocalyptic battle of the bald chefs! Instead, the show just gathers a bunch of bald chefs in a room, then has them leave.

In another sequence, C.G. explains that she never listens to music in cars because her father was arrested while listening to Kiss at high volumes on his car stereo. It’s an egregiously bone-headed version of the trope whereby all characters in action dramas must have a secret pain in their pasts; she might as well have said that her parents were kidnapped and murdered by background music. But again, this seemingly ridiculous detail is presented without any joy or flair. Kai expresses no incredulity, and barely any interest. He was apparently expecting a tearful tale of dead fathers when he casually asked why he couldn’t turn on the car radio.

Kai’s profession is also a wasted opportunity. Perhaps the best non-fight sequence in the first three episodes is a montage of Kai and Jenny preparing a meal in the restaurant. They chop, they spice, they flame, they flirt. The choreographed moves around the kitchen act as a nod to the choreographed battles. Watching the dance-like food preparation, it’s possible to see the outlines of an alternate Wu Assassins, which really embraced a love of food, with Kai making complicated dishes in every episode and explaining each recipe and how to prepare it. Reality TV cooking shows and martial arts dramas are both built around delicious, kinetic setpieces. Why not combine them in a single dish?

The reason we can’t combine them in a single dish is obvious enough. Show creators John Wirth and Tony Krantz don’t have an adventurous palate or, for that matter, a sense of humor. Hong Kong martial arts cinema at its best is exhilarating because of its sense of possibility — watching those movies means feeling that bodies can do anything. Recent American television adaptations like Wu Assassins, though, are stuck in their own solemnity, so eager to pay sincere tribute that they trudge where they should leap and gesture ineffectually where they should instead unleash their deadly soccer powers of doom. At some point, the age of peak television should unleash a show with great martial arts and an entertaining story. Wu Assassins does pretty well with the first, so viewers may want to fast-forward to the fight scenes. Even with the power of the Wu Assassin, though, sitting through the whole series may be an almost impossible challenge.

Wu Assassins launches on American Netflix on Friday, August 9th.

In season 3, Stranger Things’ celebration of ’80s pop culture becomes a political ideology

2019-07-08T15:23:22-04:00

Warning: spoilers ahead for season 3 of Stranger Things.

The third season of Stranger Things, like the first two seasons, revels in the fun, funny, nostalgic detritus of 1980s pop culture. Much of the series’s action is set in a mall, the center of teen life before the advent of iPhones and Amazon. In the shopping emporium, the kids buy colorful ‘80s clothes and watch movies like Back to the Future and George Romero’s Day of the Dead. Glimpses of classic Dungeons & Dragons manuals and period issues of Penthouse are scattered around the screen. Running jokes include references to ‘80s teen sex symbol Phoebe Cates and the bombastically maudlin theme song for The Neverending Story. Most horror stories surprise the audience with terrifying monsters that leap from the shadows. Stranger Things is more invested in surprising viewers with a wave of nostalgic touchstones.

Season 3 is different from its predecessors, though, in that its retro impulses extend not just to pop culture, but to geopolitics. The season’s plot is steeped in Cold War paranoia. The nostalgia for a threatened Russian invasion is as comforting and cutesy in its own way as references to New Coke or the X-Men. But it’s also an indication that the obsession with the past can indicate not just ongoing affection, but ongoing anxiety. Sometimes, art looks back to the ‘80s because people love the ‘80s. And sometimes it looks back there because the ‘80s, like Stranger Things’ Mind Flayer, has its tendrils in the brain of American culture and won’t let go.

The Cold War casts its chilly shadow over season 3 in a couple of ways. The most obvious is via the presence of the Russian army. The USSR wants to use the alternate dimension known as the Upside Down for its own nefarious Cold War purposes, and it has discovered (perhaps by watching previous episodes) that the space between worlds is weakest in Hawkins, Indiana. Soviet spies build a giant scientific facility beneath the Hawkins mall and are buying up land throughout the town with the semi-unwitting help of Hawkins’ corrupt mayor.

The second somewhat more subtle evocation of the Cold War is via horror tropes. The evil Mind Flayer from the Upside Down uses its powers to take over the wills and bodies of various people in Hawkins. It infects them like a virus and turns them into bloody gelatinous blob-things that form part of a single giant monster intelligence.

The plot references Invasion of the Body Snatchers and (more explicitly) John Carpenter’s The Thing, both of which were paranoid Cold War metaphors for communist infiltration and corruption. These were stories in which good Americans lost their individuality and freedom and became incorporated into an evangelical hive mind, reflecting anti-communist fears of Soviet imperialism and collectivism.

The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers both had downbeat endings. At that time, it was at least imaginable that the Soviet Union might win, and America would be swallowed by “the ant heap of totalitarianism,” as President Ronald Reagan memorably put it.

From our own vantage in 2019, though, we know that the US won the Cold War. In that context, revisiting old fears is also a way to revisit old triumphs. In season 3, a Soviet scientist is seduced to the side of good, righteous Americanism by the quintessential capitalist display of a tacky Fourth of July carnival, complete with stuffed animal prizes. The Mind Flayer is defeated on the 4th in that monument to capitalism, the mall, by a bunch of kids shooting it with fireworks stored in a shopping basket. The US military (portrayed as the enemy in earlier seasons), rushes in as the cavalry to clean up at the end.

Stranger Things’ celebration of ‘80s pop culture is more than a goof. In season 3, it becomes an ideology. All of these capitalist touchstones are a reminder that the nation that is free to buy stuff defeated the creeping socialist horde. Under interrogation by the Russian military, Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) repeats over and over that he works for the ice cream chain Scoops Ahoy. He’s telling the truth, and by doing so, he’s telling those looming officers that the real enemy of the USSR is the triumphant employees of capitalism — the kids in tacky sailor suits who will out-consume the dripping, toothy maw of the communist assimilator.

Stranger Things, then, is a patriotic victory lap, as you might expect of a series released on Independence Day. But when American pop culture is still taking that lap some 30 years later, it starts to raise some questions. Why do we need to reassert our Cold War triumph right now? And why, if we won, does that Mind Flayer keep coming back, season after season? Shouldn’t the dead stay dead at some point, rather than rising from their graves, begging to be killed again?

Victory in the Cold War was supposed to mean an end of history. The good guys kicked ass, and we were promised we’d get to ride off into the sunset. But instead, communist defeat turned out to mean stagnating wages at home and a ramping up of multiple wars abroad, not peace and prosperity. Our present is the Upside Down, a topsy-turvy world in which triumph is indistinguishable from defeat.

Stranger Things keeps going back to the ‘80s to escape an unpleasant present, but it also keeps going back to the ‘80s to try to somehow get to the better future we were promised. The series is caught in a kind of Groundhog Day time-loop. It defeats the monsters and creates a better future. Then it looks around, sees Donald Trump’s shadow, and has to wearily jump to the past to try to get back to a better future all over again.

That idyllic present is out of reach, in part, season 3 suggests, because the enemy in the ‘80s was never really the communists. The Russians in Hawkins are, after all, set up beneath the mall; they’ve become America. The Mind Flayer is built of good, normal, melted-down US citizens, including the sexist assholes who run the local newspaper. Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the Romero zombie movies could be read as anxious warnings about the communist takeover, but they were also parables about American conformity: the dead groupthink of consumerism and Red Scare anti-communism. The fear that the Soviets will assimilate us is also a fear that our nightmare vision of Soviet deindividuation is, in fact, simply a reflection of our own culture. When we chase that Russian spy through the hall of mirrors with the intrepid Sheriff Hopper, we’re really shooting at ourselves. Who tortures dissenters now or launches wars or corrodes democracy? It’s not the USSR.

Stranger Things, season after season, returns to a fun 1980s small-town rural heartland that is filled with good, friendly pop culture references. And season after season, that sunny nostalgic vision of America’s greatness splits open, and something darker crawls out. Hawkins can’t defeat the monster once and for all because, here in the present, where Hawkins is filled with Trump voters, we know the monster wasn’t defeated. It just grew. America still eats its young, and repetitive reenactments of past victories aren’t going to change that. Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer love the ‘80s, but they also realize that something in that idyllic past went horribly wrong and needs to be fixed. Alas, time travel doesn’t exist. If you want to kill the Mind Flayer, you need to kill it now.

Spider-Man: Far From Home is saving the MCU by ignoring its continuity

2019-07-08T10:50:24-04:00

Anyone who goes into Spider-Man: Far From Home hoping that the Marvel Cinematic Universe will keep exploring and extending the tragedy of Avengers: Endgame will be thoroughly disappointed — but it’s a good kind of disappointment. The MCU’s continuity has gotten more and more convoluted and interconnected over the course of more than a decade of movies, as space aliens mingle with Sorcerers Supreme and cosmic threats alter the future, the past, and time itself. If Marvel insisted on tight continuity in its world-building, the narrative burden on creators could be suffocating. Far from Home shows that while Marvel wants to respect its own increasingly preposterous backstory, it doesn’t intend to box its franchise in with it.

The main way Far From Home deflates that preposterous backstory is by acknowledging up front that it’s preposterous. As true believers will remember, in Avengers: Infinity War, the purple titan Thanos snaps his fingers and evaporates half of all intelligent life in the universe. In Endgame, set five years later, Bruce Banner/Hulk snaps his fingers, and half the people on Earth come back to life at the same ages they were when they first disappeared.

So, in theory, Far From Home is set on a vastly changed Earth. After the “Blip,” as it’s now known, half of the planet’s population lived through a worldwide genocide and has been struggling for five years with crippling grief and a devastated global infrastructure. The other half of the population has to deal with the fact that everyone they know is suddenly five years older, and history has moved on without them. In short, every single person on the planet should be brutally disoriented and traumatized. The basic institutions of society would be thrown into chaos. Governments would fall, new religions would spring up. Earth would be unrecognizable.

That’s a script for a downbeat dystopian tale like HBO’s series The Leftovers, which explored the vast changes in society that were caused by just 2 percent of the population disappearing. (It’s essentially a dark mirror of Endgame that concluded years before Endgame.) But Far From Home’s creators wanted it to be a rom-com goof, and they weren’t going to let previous movies get in their way — no matter how many tickets those films sold.

Far From Home opens with Peter Parker’s Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) essentially doing a stand-up routine about how the Blip led to sitcom-style shenanigans because she disappeared for five years, and when she came back, someone else was living in her apartment. Similarly, Spider-Man / Peter Parker’s school is essentially unchanged, except that some kids are now five years older, so they have new positions in the social and romantic pecking order. Peter is severely struck by the death of his mentor, Tony Stark. But beyond that, no one seems worse for wear after what would be, by any objective standard, the single most devastating event in the history of the world.

Science fiction buffs might be put off by this refusal to explore the impact of vast technological and cultural change. Those who like thoughtful politics in their art might feel the adamant insistence on resetting everything to the status quo seems glib. And fans invested in the MCU’s world-building may resent the way Far From Home cheerfully turns Endgame into a punchline, then ignores it. Meg Downey at GameSpot, for example, criticizes the film’s “weird logical hangnails” and wishes it didn’t pretend Spider-Man is the only hero left on Earth.

But the truth is that the MCU has always had hangnails, and its world-building has never made much sense. Early on in the MCU’s decade-long history, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) developed clean renewable energy. He creates fully functional artificial intelligence as well. Later, we learn that Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) has technology that allows virtually anything to be shrunk down to the size of a bug. Wakanda has miraculous medical science and military capabilities that are vastly superior to any nation on Earth. And in Endgame, the Avengers develop time travel. Any one of these inventions would revolutionize the world economy and the geopolitical balance more completely than the introduction of the automobile or the nuclear bomb.

But the world economy in the MCU never experiences a massive economic boom. Transportation and energy infrastructure aren’t transformed or even mildly altered. No wars are sparked. America doesn’t experience an existential meltdown when it is no longer the sole superpower.

Superhero narratives are generally built on the premise that a handful of people have abilities and powers beyond the norm. Super advanced technology is reserved for making a handful of superheroes super. It never changes everyday life, just as the Blip didn’t change everyday life. People gasp at Iron Man and Thor, but the real miracle in the MCU isn’t hammers or repulsor blasts; it’s the fact that hammers and repulsor blasts don’t change anything significant about the world.

If they did — if the Marvel universe were truly consistent in any systematic way — many of the MCU’s best moments would disintegrate under their own contradictions. Jessica Jones’ first season, for example, works because the villain, Kilgrave, has mind-control powers that make him an uncontainable, terrifying, overwhelming threat. But his powers only work when he’s close to his targets. Iron Man, with his AI and remote-control robot suits, could take Kilgrave out in 30 seconds without breaking a sweat.

In a universe where multiple deus ex machinas are just a phone call away, any threat below god level isn’t a threat at all. That is why smaller-scale narratives, from Jessica Jones to Ant-Man and the Wasp, selectively forget that the big guns are out there. Or else, as in Far From Home, they offer unconvincing excuses about why Captain Marvel and Dr. Strange can’t be bothered to save the planet this time around.

Individual films have ignored or tweaked MCU continuity in smaller ways. In Captain America: Civil War, Ant-Man becomes an international criminal, but Ant-Man and The Wasp avoids most of the implications by casually fast-forwarding past his trial and sentencing to the end of his house arrest. Thor: Ragnarok carefully avoids explaining how the Hulk got into outer space. What happened to Peggy Carter’s former marriage and kids if Captain America went back in time to insert himself into her life again? Are the Netflix shows really part of the MCU or not? Marvel and its many associated directors — who are focused on telling stories, not explaining the stories other people wrote before them — don’t have to answer those questions if they just shrug and move on.

In superhero comics, decades of intertwined storylines have repeatedly led to creative impasses, prompting companies like DC and Marvel to try various fixes to clear out the continuity deadwood. In the 1980s, DC tried to clear up all its contradictions and confusions by rebooting the entire universe in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Marvel tried an analogous move in the 2000s by creating the Ultimate universe, which featured modernized versions of old characters without the burdensome tangled backstories. But both companies are still so wound up in catering to continuity buffs that they’ve had trouble figuring out how to capitalize on the most successful film franchise in history.

The MCU hasn’t gotten itself into the same bind as the comics — yet. But Far From Home is an indication that Marvel leadership is aware of the dangers. They’re willing to throw in enough crossovers and continuity shout-outs from film to film to keep hardcore fans interested. But they’re also trying to let individual creators have the freedom to set different tones for different stories, without making it impossible for casual viewers to wander into a lighthearted action movie and enjoy the fun.

Together, Endgame and Far From Home provide a blueprint for the MCU to keep doing what it’s doing indefinitely. Marvel Entertainment can have its massive periodic crossovers with epic consequential sweeps. And then it can have smaller filler films that don’t worry too much about the impact of those bigger films. Films like Far From Home effectively undo all of the consequences of MCU history by quietly pretending they don’t actually matter. And that’s the right decision for everyone. Who says your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man can’t save the Marvel universe?

Since season 1, Jessica Jones has struggled to mix horror with superheroes

2019-06-18T14:33:18-04:00

Significant spoilers ahead for season 1 of Jessica Jones.

The horror and superhero genres approach the world from opposite directions. Horror is meant to make the audience feel disempowered and terrorized. Superhero stories, by contrast, make viewers feel empowered and triumphant. Both genres often set out to give the audience the same thing — a big, satisfying burst of catharsis — but in different ways, and for different reasons.

But at the same time, the genres draw liberally from each other. To heighten the empowerment sensation, the superhero genre often uses horror elements. In the recent film Shazam!, the hero is menaced by oozing, hulking nightmare monsters, and his victory is sweeter because he’s initially terrified by what he has to overcome. Horror, on the other end, often includes a final victorious, empowering reversal. An aging Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in 2018’s Halloween remake survives a seemingly fatal fall and comes back to brutalize the villain, Michael Myers. She might as well be the Punisher, taking a brutal beating and coming back for more. Empowerment and disempowerment in these stories aren’t opposites: they’re complements. The superhero and horror genres fit into each other, creating a single monstrous or heroic amalgam.

Netflix’s Jessica Jones television series has been particularly fascinated with the line between superheroes and horror. The series’ title character (played by Krysten Ritter) is nominally a superhero. She has super strength and can make super-leaps. But she isn’t that strong; she can bust locks, not tear apart buildings. It’s difficult for villains to convincingly threaten Superman — that requires heavy special effects intervention, or obvious plot fixes like Kryptonite. But threatening Jessica is easy: she isn’t much harder to damage than a regular person. In the show’s most recent season, she’s wounded and has to have her spleen surgically removed, which has to be a first in a superhero story. Jessica is an empowered person always teetering on the edge of disempowerment.

Jessica Jones’ initial season brilliantly exploited the tension between horror tropes and superhero stories by pitting her against a terrifyingly powerful antagonist. Kilgrave (David Tennant) can control minds — whatever he says, people do. Jessica was under his influence for years, but eventually developed an immunity to his power. But everyone around her is susceptible. Kilgrave can manipulate Jessica’s friends and lovers, her neighbors, the police, even random bystanders in the streets.

Jessica Jones’ first season is essentially an extended slasher movie. The virtually omnipotent Kilgrave stalks Jessica through 13 episodes, orchestrating elaborate nightmare scenarios and murdering whenever the whim strikes him. Around Jessica, daughters smile while they kill their parents, and boyfriends set themselves on fire. The show is even more viscerally disturbing than most horror films because the sense of disempowerment is so absolute. As in horror films like The Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave, that sense of futility is explicitly linked to sexual violence. Kilgrave has raped Jessica before, and the threat that he will do so again hangs over the series. Like an abusive spouse or parent, Kilgrave controls the entire world. There’s no way out.

And that makes Jessica’s triumph all the more satisfying and empowering. Like Ripley in Alien, or Laurie in Halloween, or many other Final Girls before her, Jessica snatches victory from defeat, facing the undefeatable and becoming undefeatable herself. Her final confrontation with Kilgrave is a perfect encapsulation of the empowerment / disempowerment dynamic which links horror and superhero narratives. She seems to be completely defeated, losing her self and soul. The threat of further sexualized violence is obvious. And then she suddenly has the power, and her enemy doesn’t. The series has repeatedly questioned whether it’s all right for heroes to kill villains, but there’s no question that Jessica has to kill Kilgrave. She’s a superhero, but he’s put her in a slasher story.

After Jessica Jones’ brilliant first season — easily the best single season of any of Netflix’s Marvel shows — showrunner Melissa Rosenberg has struggled with ways of balancing its horror and superhero leanings. The second season used a Frankenstein-type story, with Jessica’s mother Alisa (Janet McTeer) gaining super strength much greater than Jessica’s after undergoing medical experiments. Those same experiments leave Alisa unable to control her anger. The story unfolds as a kind of tragic horror melodrama (again, Frankenstein-like), with Jessica powerless to prevent her mother from destroying herself and others.

Season 3 has shifted back toward the slasher storyline of the series’ beginning. The main villain is a Hannibal Lecter-like super-smart serial killer named Salinger (Jeremy Bobb). He doesn’t vastly outmatch Jessica as Kilgrave did, so the horror aspects don’t come through as clearly. Rather than running for her life, Jessica spends most of her time trying to figure out how to get evidence for the police. Justice by the book is sometimes a concern of superhero shows, but it’s not something slashers generally worry about much.

Still, as Samantha Nelson points out in her Verge review of season 3, the genre confusion does raise interesting questions about heroism, and less explicitly, about horror. Salinger constantly sneers at Jessica for “cheating” by getting her superpowers through luck, rather than earning them. But Salinger didn’t work for his brains either. Empowerment isn’t really about fairness in superhero or horror narratives. It’s a rush, not a deserved achievement.

And to heighten that rush, to bring home the sense of power, someone else needs to be disempowered. Both horror and superhero stories require unfairness and imbalance. In superhero stories and horror stories alike, there are strong people and weak people. The main difference between the genres is which group viewers are supposed to identify with. Salinger’s resentment of Jessica in season 3 echoes the reactionary bitterness of white male entitlement: he’s angry because he’s used to feeling powerful, and he finds it unfair that someone else — a woman he’d otherwise feel superior to — has more power than him, without “earning” it in a way he approves of. But he’s also angry because he’s a horror villain who’s stumbled into a superhero story. He sees himself as in control, until the darn superheroes get in the way.

Jessica Jones, for her part, often feels like a superhero who’s wandered into a horror narrative. She tries to fight for truth and justice, but like most people’s powers, hers are limited. She’s cynical, bad-tempered, and often drunk because she’s trying to be a hero in a world that has its teeth more than half-sunk into a different genre. It’s appropriate that the show has been the last Marvel Netflix series to be canceled. Jessica is a superhero familiar enough with horror to know that sometimes empowerment is just being the final girl standing.

The Latinx superhero film El Chicano is a long Latinos for Trump ad

2019-05-08T15:35:32-04:00

Superheroes are basically cops in tights and capes, plus some enhanced abilities and generally minus any oversight or accountability to the law. As a result, they don’t always look so heroic from the perspective of marginalized communities, where people are disproportionately on the receiving end of violence from law enforcement. That’s a problem for Ben Hernandez Bray’s new movie El Chicano, which is billed as the first live-action film with a Latinx superhero in the starring role. Bray wants the film to be another straightforward superhero empowerment narrative. But he keeps stumbling onto complicated questions he doesn’t want to acknowledge or resolve.

The first scenes encapsulate the problems with putting a superhero in the East Los Angeles barrio. The movie opens from the perspective of three kids: twins Paco and Diego Hernandez, and their friend Shotgun. Shotgun is the son of a notorious gangster named Shadow. As the kids watch, a bunch of cops roll up to harass Shadow, who they say has been involved in the deaths of some fellow officers. After the police leave, El Chicano, a masked vigilante, rides in on a motorcycle. He throws Shadow from his wheelchair, then stabs him to death in front of his family, his friends, and the kids.

If this were the Netflix Punisher or Daredevil series, audiences would know exactly who they were supposed to be identifying with: the familiar face with a long history as a hero. The superhero is El Chicano, and he’s disposing of the bad guys, so obviously viewers should be on his side. But here, El Chicano is a frightening masked stranger, murdering a friend and family member while terrified children look on. Is he Batman, or the thug who killed Batman’s family? Superheroes are supposed to be rescuers and saviors. But in the barrio, violent, merciless police allies look more like oppressors.

That ambivalence about superheroics and policing surfaces again when the adult gangster Shotgun (David Castaneda) tells the adult Diego (Raul Castillo), now a police detective, “The LAPD has robbed you of your heritage.” But otherwise, the film abandons its questions and embraces the viewpoint that law enforcement officers are heroes, justified in bending or breaking any rules if they can bring down a criminal in the process. Diego discovers that a Mexican cartel led by El Gallo (Sal Lopez) is partnering with Shotgun to take over East LA. The gang kills people Diego is close to, and to take revenge, he dons the mask of the semi-mystical vigilante El Chicano. From there, the plot runs as expected, with a minimum of wit and effectively workaday gritty filming, with Diego strewing bad guys and fight scenes behind him on his path to inevitable triumph.

El Gallo has the potential to be a Killmonger-like figure. He’s a vicious thug, but he also has a revolutionary vision. He believes California and the Southwest were illegally taken from Mexico, and he wants to expand his cartel into the US to right that historical injustice. “The illegal alien is the gringo,” he says, which sure sounds like an implicit critique of Donald Trump’s demonization of Mexican immigrants.

Black Panther gave Erik Killmonger’s critique of global racism, and even his call for global revolution, a fairly sympathetic hearing. Bray doesn’t treat El Gallo’s critique of US imperialism and racism with similar respect. Instead, El Chicano is in the tradition of Death Wish or a Dirty Harry movie. It depicts a crime-ridden dystopian city that must be cleansed through hyperbolic vigilante violence. Along those lines, it embraces a Trumpian view of Mexican violence and criminality. The hyperbolic violence and cruelty of the drug cartel — which comes after the police with bombs, nooses, and chainsaws — could easily have been inspired by a Breitbart article emitting racist dogwhistles about the imminent danger of mass invasion by MS-13.

In El Chicano, the evil Mexicans are an invading horde. Diego the hero, by contrast, is a red-blooded patriot defending the border. For Diego, being a superhero means emphatically rejecting his connections to a pan-Mexican identity and fighting against El Gallo’s revolutionary vision. “I stand for the Barrio… For I am Mexican-AMERICAN,” Diego says, quoting his twin brother’s diary, which specifically wrote that “American” in all caps.

For the Latinx hero, being an American means murdering evil Mexicans (“you will bleed out on American soil,” he tells them) and embracing the history of white Manifest Destiny. The only people who object to this anti-immigrant nativism are the bad guys. No one in Diego’s community speaks in favor of immigrants or criticizes American racism, unless you count Diego’s chief complaining about the white FBI agents horning in on his murder investigation. ICE is never mentioned; concentration camps for immigrants are never mentioned. Diego certainly never dons the El Chicano mask to rescue immigrant children from cages.

The fact that Diego fights immigrants rather than helping them underlines the superhero genre default. Every so often, a narrative like Cleverman will flip the script in an intelligent way. That show has a superhero fighting on behalf of indigenous marginalized people in New Zealand, against a near future totalitarian police force. Sometimes stories like Captain Marvel or Black Panther raise questions about who the good guys are and how they present themselves to the public. But law and order stories about punching out criminals are still the superhero’s bread and butter. An inventive film and an inventive filmmaker might have used the relationship between the Mexican American community and the police to question the superhero genre and push against the idea that people who cops define as criminals are always the bad guys.

Unfortunately, El Chicano isn’t equipped with that kind of savvy or awareness about the world around it. The inevitable final battle involves Diego and his childhood friend rolling around the barrio in the mud, beating the tar out of each other, both motivated by vengeance. One of them is supposed to be good, one of them is supposed to be bad. But as they struggle and gasp and kick, it’s hard to see how the outcome is going to materially improve things for their neighborhood, their community, or their nation. What is this fight about? Why are we supposed to be cheering?

In theory, viewers are supposed to be cheering because Diego is a superhero and an American. Americans are superheroes, superheroes are American, El Chicano tells us. That’s supposed to be inspiring. But instead, it leaves behind a queasy unease about both the genre and the country. American superhero stories don’t have to be so xenophobic or so accepting of the status quo. But El Chicano suggests that, without some effort or genius, that’s where they end up.

El Chicano is currently in theaters.