The Sunday Times (London)

June 18, 1995, Sunday

Reaching for the stars

Since Superman took off at the box office, Hollywood’s finest have been in love with comic books.Stephen Amidon sees this trend as a cue for increasingly juvenile audiences.
Upon receiving a special achievement award at the 1986 Oscars ceremony, Steven Spielberg made an impassioned plea for his Hollywood colleagues to look to the written word for inspiration. In humble tones that suggested the boy wonder of cinema had undergone something of a Pauline conversion, Spielberg urged his contemporaries to make books the source of their creativity. Nine years on, it is obvious that his appeal has been heeded. Many of the summer’s big films are indeed founded upon well-loved books. There is one small hitch, however they are based upon comic books.

This year, half-a-billion dollars of production and promotion money will go towards transforming those ephemeral, pubescent cartoon fantasies into full-blown cinema epics. First and foremost is Batman Forever, starring Val Kilmer as the masked crusader and Jim Carrey as The Riddler. This will be rivalled by Spielberg’s own contribution to his vaunted literary renaissance, Casper, based on the ”friendly ghost” comic strip popular in the 1960s. Cinema-goers hungry for more will also be able to choose from Sylvester Stallone’s Judge Dredd, Macaulay Culkin’s Richie Rich, Tank Girl and Asterix Conquers America. Add to these such recent comic-book flicks as Superman (parts one through four), Dick Tracy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Mask and Howard The Duck, and it becomes clear that the scribblers from Marvel and DC comics rank higher in Hollywood’s literary pantheon than Dickens, Dostoevsky or Shakespeare.
Where the comic book was only two decades ago deemed unworthy source material by A-list film-makers, the genre’s simplistic ethos now informs much of what we see on the big screen. Material that is literally comic book (or just seems that way) is attracting the big names and the big bucks. Producer’s scouts are just as likely to be seen reading one as they are a hot new thriller. Whereas films for adults used to marginalise kiddie fare to the matinee, now it is the movies for grown-ups that are being shouldered aside to make room for adolescent material.
This is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. Neither the pioneers of film nor its golden-age practitioners were influenced by comics. In fact, the comic book, as we know it, came into existence some 40 years after the Lumiere brothers cast their first motion picture on that virginal Parisian screen. There was a strong tradition of cartooning from Gilray in the 18th century, through Punch in the 19th, to strips such as The Katzenjammer Kids in the early 20th. But the independently produced comic book, with its superheroes and serialised storylines, did not come into existence until the mid-1930s, when DC, Dell and King Comics began producing works devoted to Superman, Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon. They proved immediately successful. The industry grew at a mind-boggling rate by the outbreak of the second world war nearly 50m people, mostly young males, were reading comics on a monthly basis.
Hollywood was well aware of this gushing source of material, though early efforts at transforming comics into celluloid were confined to children’s fare such as Flash Gordon. The notion of making A-pictures based on comic books was absurd, no matter how great the story’s popularity. It is impossible to imagine, for instance, William Wellman directing Clark Gable as the caped crusader, with Barbara Stanwyck as Lois Lane, Sydney Greenstreet as Perry White, and a script by Ben Hecht. Comic books were the domain of the pimply young who packed the Roxy for the Saturday morning show.
In the late 1940s, comics began to change, perhaps in response to postwar malaise and the threat of the atom bomb. They were less triumphalist in tone, laced instead with coded subversion and gory thrills. The horror story was pre-eminent. These tales of axe murderers and blood-drenched crypts were even more unpalatable to the big studios than their sunnier predecessors. Comic books remained B-movie fodder. Hollywood’s aversion to them was reinforced after the 1954 US Senate hearings in which they were blamed for an alarming increase in juvenile delinquency.
The pencillers at DC and Marvel soon responded by delivering a new generation of supermen to match the cold-war mind-set. A so-called Silver Age of the comic book was born around 1956, in which old heroes were spruced up and new ones born. 1962 proved the annus mirabilis of the genre, with the revived Marvel stable giving birth to Spiderman, Thor, The Incredible Hulk and The Fantastic Four. Once again, the superhero ruled. It was a trend that lasted until the end of the decade, when, under pressure from a culture that had seen the arrival of the anti-heroic dropout and witnessed what Sergeant Fury’s boys were up to at My Lai, masked avengers were once again exiled to their Arctic redoubts.
It was television, however, and not Hollywood that responded to the comic-book hero’s rebirth. The medium that had kept Superman alive during the 1950s would, over the next 15 years, place Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk and, of course, Batman, in hit series. Yet Hollywood continued to steer clear of comics, despite the fact that Marvel publications were consistently hitting the seven-figure mark in circulation. Key film producers still deemed comics as unsuitable for their medium. ”Comic book” remained a pejorative term, an arrow in the critic’s quiver that could be used to impale shallow characterisation, ludicrous plots and wooden acting.
Everything changed in December 1978, when producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind brought Superman to the big screen. It was a distinctly rudderless time in American cinema, with the intensely fertile period that had flourished from Bonnie And Clyde (1967) to Taxi Driver (1976) recently concluded. Large corporations such as Gulf & Western were buying up studios with an eye toward big profits. This creative gap came just as Star Wars redefined the standards of box-office success, proving that hundreds of millions of dollars could be made from a single movie as long as it appealed to children as well as adults. Suddenly, a new generation of film-makers, with their extravagant technical gifts and penchant for childishly mythical material, were eager to look for stories between the covers of Marvel or DC classics especially since these tales had a proven track record of attracting the now-ascendant teen dollar. The superhero, banished first to the matinee and then to television’s wasteland, was finally allowed a seat at the Hollywood feast.
What this summer’s glut of comic flicks represents is the blossoming of the trend that started with Superman. Given Hollywood’s movement away from adult material toward the youth market, it was inevitable that they should raid the comic-book store in an effort to get those young bums on seats, especially with the added demographic bonus of nostalgic parents and even grandparents being drawn into the cinema to get a glimpse of what they are doing with the friendly ghost or that darned Richie Rich. Those disposable 15-cent rags that boys once read instead of doing their homework have become one of our most bankable cultural currencies. Seventeen years after taking the plunge with Superman, the American film industry’s infatuation with comic books is stronger than ever. It can now rightly claim to be Hollywood’s favourite genre.
One need only watch a few minutes of a SchwarzeneggerWillis Stallone action pic to realise its writers have Captain America and The Thing in mind as role models, not Raskolnikov or Jay Gatsby. As for the stars themselves, the comic book’s appeal is obvious Jack Nicholson made more money for hamming it up in Batman than he had for all his earlier serious roles combined, while one of Marlon Brando’s biggest paydays remains his cameo in Superman. And while Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino would have been laughed out of the Actors’ Studio had they auditioned for the Batman television series, both were only too eager to appear in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy two decades later. Where Hollywood’s elite once feared to tread, its biggest names now find safe haven.
This process has had a curious effect on comic books, meanwhile, driving them ”up” market. Where comics used to give us either straightforward good guys such as Captain America and Dan Dare, or harmlessly knockabout gangs led by Archie or Dennis the Menace, they now tend to depict a dark, cultic, thoroughly daunting netherworld. Even the horror mags of the 1950s that had parents and educators so alarmed are innocence itself when compared to what is currently available. Films have co-opted the comic book’s youthful brio, turning them into brooding, joyless artefacts that bear scant relation to their ancestors.
The Batman Chronicles, X-Men and Judge Dredd are gloomy, ultraviolent concoctions that owe their allegiance to the speciality shop and the obsessive fan rather than the casual teen purchaser. Their vertiginous angles, ultra-tight close-ups, thundering zooms and postmodern lines closely resemble a storyboard, the illustrated map a director uses to plan out the hundreds of individual shots that constitute a film, making one suspect that many comic-book creators are, in fact, frustrated movie directors. Wit and knockabout humour no longer exist, replaced by gnomic pronouncements and blood-curdling threats. Where we used to have Spidey cracking wise as he smacked a bad guy across the chin, we now have Wolverine of the Uncanny X-Men wordlessly using his foot-long fingernails to rip the guts out of a mutant foe. A typical Judge Dredd storyline might involve the vigilante hero summarily executing drug-crazed vandals against a blasted 22nd-century backdrop that makes Blade Runner look like The Sound Of Music. Everybody in these stories is tortured, ruminative, in need of massive doses of Prozac. Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of this ghettoisation of the comic is the graphic novel, which in most cases involves a curious hybrid of hackneyed prose and unimpressive artwork.
This newfound maturity in the comic book appears to inform films such as Batman, whose makers try to deepen their plots by creating dark ”back stories” to explain why the heroes are troubled and the bad guys are perverse. But this sophistication is spurious Bruce Wayne, as a young American millionaire with a tortured soul and a mansion full of secrets, may appear to be a latter-day Gatsby, but the similarities are not even costume deep. When push comes to shove, Wayne’s psychological complexities are tossed aside for the sake of simplicity and cheap thrills, while Gatsby’s remain vibrant and unresolved. There is no doubting which of them can be found searching for his true love across Sag Harbour at day’s end, and which will don tights and a mask to do battle with men wearing too much make-up.
It is unlikely that Hollywood’s appropriation of the form will end soon. As film-makers become increasingly puerile and their technical ability to recreate cartoons grows, the possibility of upcoming summers bringing films of The Green Hornet or Batman 12 becomes ever more likely. Hollywood’s hunger for material has even crossed the Atlantic, gobbling up British morsels such as Tank Girl and Judge Dredd. It is a strangely inverted process, in which variations on a uniquely American art form are now being redomesticated by the mother country’s film industry (note the choices of Lori Petty and Stallone to play the leads).
And should the comic-book supply dry up, it would hardly mean a return to a more mature ethos. The video game and the recycled sitcom promise to become increasingly potent sources of material, as this year’s release of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and The Brady Bunch Movie suggests. Never have the well-written word and the big motion picture seemed so at odds. One imagines a grey-bearded Spielberg sitting among leather-bound editions of Marvel and DC masterpieces in his retirement study, complaining to whoever will listen that the kids making films these days just don’t have the respect for books that his generation did.