Star Power

I went upstairs again and sat in my chair thinking about Harry Jones and his story. It seemed a little too pat. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.
-- The Big Sleep

Criticism through serendipity...



On this day, 28 years ago, The Empire Strikes Back was released in theaters. I think Jonathan nails it when he writes:

Back when I was a kid the blockbuster was an event. Each year promised a high profile movie that some studio would sink all their money into and everyone had to see it. Since the success of Star Wars was unanticipated by the movie going crowd (that is, we weren't waiting and waiting for it to be released, it just kind of happened) my first recollection of an anticipatory blockbuster was The Empire Strikes Back. Oh Dear Lord I couldn't wait to see that damn thing. My friend, Chris, had read the Star Wars fiction released in between the two and told me all about Darth Vader falling into a volcano and that's why he had to wear the suit. Wow! How cool was that? Little did I know when I finally saw it happen in 2005 I would be stifling yawns during the climax. And of course the Star Wars fiction made absolutely no mention of Vader's name or who he was so the whole "Father" moment was absolutely flooring (although since Vader actually means 'father' I'm curious why this was not picked up on sooner by the adults seeing the movie. Were people just that un-curious and intellectually lazy back then? Nowadays the 'Vader' thing would've been blown after the first showing of the first movie).

Star Wars is connected to my earliest filmgoing memories-- it was the first film I saw in a theater (at the tender age of four), and my memories of it are no doubt exaggerated, like Alvy Singer growing up beneath the Coney Island roller coaster in Annie Hall. Remembrances come in sensual flashes, quick cuts: rummaging through the closet for coats and shoes, standing in a long line outside the much-missed Beacon Theater in Kalamazoo, becoming engulfed by the massive darkness of the theater itself. I was four, so I was a Bad Cinephile, talking and asking my mom and older brother questions, roaming the aisles, hardly looking at the screen, whose bright colors and fantastic spaces seemed (if you'll pardon the pun) alien, anyway.

And then the moment burned in my memory: somehow, I've made it to the front of the theater, just as the famous Mos Eisley cantina scene begins, and (as if the screen calls out to me), I finally manage to look up and focus on the screen. And I'm terrified-- the various aliens in the bar scare the hell out of me. I remember yelling, and running back to my seat. It's a moment of simultaneous alienation and bonding: despite my initial terror, I somehow know I will be hooked on movies for the rest of my life.

And Star Wars becomes a big part of that. After catching the 1978 re-release (I'm am now a much more mature, worldly five-year old), my imagination becomes fueled by Jedis, dark villains, beautiful princesses, and charming scoundrels. Star Wars action figures, space ships, posters, comic books and novelizations fill my bedroom. Anything sci-fi-related, from Buck Rogers to The Black Hole, becomes a must-see. Even the snoozy Star Trek: The Motion Picture can't break the spell.

My fandom takes the usual boyish paths of play and make-believe (pretending to be the characters), but also spurs my interest in behind-the-scenes material: as I get older, I start to read books about the making of the films (and other movies), watch promo documentaries about Industrial Light & Magic, scour back issues of Starlog for more data. I don't know what a film scholar is when I'm seven or eight, but that's what I'm becoming, without even thinking about it.

The beautiful one-sheet for The Empire Strikes Back (which remains one of my favorite film posters) promises something magical, dark, romantic (the latter wouldn't have meant much to me at seven, but I am still struck by the central image of Han and Leia, which years later I will realize was borrowed from Gone With The Wind). I get lost in its shadowy, mist-covered corners. In an age before VCRs and the Internet, moviegoing still feels like an event, one that's larger than life, one you have to anticipate and imagine, one you can't predict.

Which is not to say I didn't try-- even at the age of seven, I am ravenous for spoilers, and somehow get my hands on a copy of The Empire Strikes Back storybook the day that I am going to see the film. I shudder at the memory now-- I couldn't have waited five whole hours to find out what happens?-- but I'm honestly not sure I understood the big twist revealed in the clip above when I read it on the page: I knew what it said, but not what it meant-- it needed the full power of its visuals, of sitting in a cavernous movie theater with hundreds of rabid fans gasping, to really signify its import.

My uncle and his girlfriend take my brother and I to the much-missed Campus Theater for the evening show.
As its name suggests, it's a gigantic theater on the WMU campus, packed with kids, adults and college students; within five years, it will have been converted to a dance club, a reminder that Star Wars was the the tail-end of an earlier cultural era. Cheers erupt when "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." come up on the screen. Empire is stranger, darker, more adult than the earlier film. I love it, but feel distanced from it at the same time-- it doesn't ingratiate itself the way the first film did (or the way Return of the Jedi will, ham-handedly, three years later).

Of course, this supposed "chilliness" is a red herring-- for all its visual and thematic darkness, The Empire Strikes Back is easily the most human of all the Star Wars films, the most gripping and involving, and the only one that truly convinces me, all these years later, of the wholeness, depth and rich feeling of its vision. When Yoda raises that X-wing out of the swamps of Dagobah, the visuals and special effects and John Williams' wonderfully delicate score combine to make you believe that there is, in fact, a whole universe unfolding before your eyes: if there is a Force, it's the power of cinema. I'll see Return of the Jedi three years later at the much-missed Plaza Theater, and while I'll enjoy it in bits and pieces, and love the energy of the crowd, something is missing (I'm already a very jaded ten-year old). I can't place my finger on it, and I certainly don't have the vocabulary at that age to articulate it, but I know that this is a half-assed, pandering conclusion to the epic of my childhood, that the narrative feels rushed, that the Ewoks are lame, that the Death Star imagery is a retread. Could George Lucas have let me down? I'll ask the same question a year later when I see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (also at the Plaza Theater, which, within a decade, will be turned into a clothing outlet store). A year later, I can better explain why the second Indy film disappoints: "Indiana Jones needs a stronger villain," I tentatively explain to my father. "Belloq is like...he's like his opposite, so it...it means more than the guy pulling hearts out of the chest." I will later shift my opinion on Temple of Doom-- it's deeply flawed, but I love its go-for-broke spirit-- but these two failures herald the next step in my transformation: from film fan and trivia geek to budding critic.

These sorts of responses are why I've always taken the Biskindian myth about "Lucas and Spielberg killed American cinema" with a grain of salt. I get the evidence-- the rise of the blockbuster, the strangling importance of television ads, "concept" pitches and ancilliary marketing, the squeezing out of "more personal" cinema (on the other hand, I also remember the response of a friend when she finally caught up with one of those "personal movies," Midnight Cowboy, on DVD: "Wow..." she said, as she shook her head and relayed her impressions of the film's bleakness. "No wonder Star Wars was so popular a few years later"). But the Biskind reading is one that's as much generational as it is actual, driven by boomer nostalgia and a false binary between the "personal" and the "epic" (and a convenient overlooking of both the self-destructive excesses of that generation of filmmakers, and the more long-term affects that the Reagan administration's loosening of vertical monopoly rules with regards to theater ownership played in squeezing out crucial independent theater chains as sources for offbeat cinema). A critical response and methodology can start from a love of the sci-fi blockbuster as much as it can, say, the Western.



Anyway, it's not like a love of spectacle and glamour--at the expense of precious, precious narrative-- begins with Spielberg and Lucas. Take The Big Sleep, for instance. By odd coincidence, today is also the 63rd anniversary of the marriage of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, a ceremony which happened as they were filming that classic screwball noir. Famously hard to follow, The Big Sleep is a film carried almost entirely by star power-- not that of spaceships and light sabers, but no less able to distract, confuse, and allure in a deeply fetishistic way--and one which will confuse genre boundaries and audience expectations just as powerfully as Star Wars thirty years later.

Much of this was by design, and the various apparatuses which would build up around film studies (fueling the ideologies of that more "personal" seventies cinema, and later turned on the blockbuster landscape that Star Wars would help create)--including such approaches as auteurism, genre critique, industry analysis, and reader/audience-response--would often return to a famous anecdote in discussing the film.

“Who killed the chauffeur?” Bogart asks one day. It’s a reasonable question, seeing as the death of chauffeur Owen Taylor is a major plot point (and Bogart is, after all, playing the detective on the case). Director Howard Hawks admits to his star that, well, you see-- I have no idea. But if Hawks doesn’t know, he’ll go to those collaborators who should: screenwriters Leigh Brackett and William Faulkner. But this is proving a tough nut to crack-- they don’t know either (and how would they? The two writers adapted the film as if playing an Exquisite Corpse game, as recounted by one history of the film:

The morning that she checked in at Warners, Faulkner handed her a copy of the novel and said, “We will do alternate sets of chapters. I have them marked. I will do these and you will those.” And so it went. The two screenwriters labored alone in their separate offices; Brackett never saw what Faulkner wrote, and he never saw what she wrote. “Everything went in direct to Mr. Hawks,” Brackett recalled. “Beyond a couple of conferences, we never saw him”) .

Enough-- go to the source. After all, Raymond Chandler lives in Hollywood, even writes for the movies on occasion (his Double Indemnity was recently a big hit). Surely, he’ll be able to help. Chandler, like his alter ego Phillip Marlowe, doesn’t mince words: “I don’t know,” he wires back in response to the filmmakers’ query.

And there you have it-- at the heart of the mystery in a movie mystery, there lies a gaping hole. Even more surprisingly, it doesn’t matter-- The Big Sleep remains an enjoyable piece of commercial cinema, perhaps the most purely enjoyable (and certainly the sexiest) movie Humphrey Bogart ever made. And, like most of Hawks’ output at the time, it was a big hit with critics and audiences.

The anecdote related above is one of the most famous in Classic Hollywood history, told again and again in countless textbooks, case studies, biographies, and popular histories, to the extent that even those who have not seen The Big Sleep may still know this story. Auteurist studies of Hawks use it as an example of the way he transcends narrative and genre constraints to put a personal stamp on the work (a film’s story might not make sense, but we know it is “Hawksian”). Conversely, it is also recounted in histories of the studio system, as an example of the efficiency of the factory method (a film’s story might not make sense, but that doesn’t slow down production). It is registered in studies of audience reception, as an example of camp knowingness (a film’s story might not make sense, but we’re sophisticated enough to enjoy it). It is a funny, playful anecdote, one that seems to confirm the later statement of screenwriter William Goldman that, when it comes to Hollywood, “No one knows anything.”

Everyone loves this anecdote. But this anecdote isn’t true.

The producers of The Big Sleep knew who killed the chauffeur. When the film was re-released in 1996, it came in two versions—one, the 1946 print that everyone knew, with its playful banter superseding narrative clarity (the version that inspired the anecdote above), and the other a 1945 print tested for G.I.’s overseas. This version contained a scene in which detective Phillip Marlowe explains his theory of who killed the chauffeur Taylor. Supposedly, the scene was cut from the final release print because the soldiers felt it slowed down the action, and they demanded more of Bogart and Bacall. Another scene with Bogart and Bacall in a nightclub was shot, and replaced the cut footage.

The most famous scene in The Big Sleep, then, is a replacement-- an improvisation on an already written text, jammed after-hours. Appropriate, then, that it is scored on-screen by a small jazz combo. Captured in a long tracking shot, Vivian Sternwood (Lauren Bacall) walks into the nightclub to meet with Phillip Marlowe (Bogart), accompanied by the jazz band’s rendition of "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plans," composed in 1929 by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. The latter was trained as a lawyer and composed music on the side, eventually drifting, like The Big Sleep, from a strict interest in legal affairs to a more intense interest in stylish, witty entertainment. He initially wrote the melody to an earlier lyric by Lorenz Hart, and its redeployment by Howard Dietz with new lyric seems to match The Big Sleep's "rewriting" of Chandler's initial "melody.” While “Plans” remained a pop standard (reappearing even as late as 1953 in The Band Wagon), the quotation of a song from Prohibition days-- the height of gangster glamour and, just as important, the beginning of the sound period, and the modern gangster movies through which Bogart would become a star-- works to remind the audience of that earlier era, even as the film's radical deviations from that tough guy tradition suggest how much the cinematic world has changed.


Vivian finds Marlowe at the bar, captured in a plain americain shot, but before cutting to a two-shot of the couple together, Hawks places a group of mysterious-looking, grim-faced young people in the foreground of the shot. What intrigues me is the air of menace they provide—none look directly at the camera, choosing instead to toss one another conspiratorial glances, and in the midst of the bar’s glamour and relaxed elegance, it is notable that none of them smile, or seem particularly relaxed. It’s an odd moment, almost as if the extras from a Hitchcock film had somehow stumbled onto the wrong set. Like “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans,” this framing reminds us of an earlier, grittier style of crime film, while the quick cut to the shot of Bogart and Bacall indicates the film’s desire to push into other, more screwball realms.

After an exchange at the bar, a tracking shot carries the characters to a small table, and a slight reframing once again captures them together in a medium shot (unlike many noirs, The Big Sleep is not interested in visually isolating its characters—even the shot-reverse shots that follow allow for more of the figures’ frames to remain in the shot than is common, the camera shooting from the side rather than over the shoulder). Vivian and Marlowe banter, the smoke from their cigarettes curling like steam heat around their bodies. Their exchange is at once foreplay and self-reflexive commentary on the scene’s lack of narrative utility:

Vivian: Tell me, uh, what do you usually do when you’re not working?
Marlowe: Oh, play the horses, fool around…
Vivian: No women?
Marlowe: Oh, I’m generally working on something most of the time.
Vivian: Could that be stretched to include me?
Marlowe: Oh, I like you—I told you that before.

The banter, with its double entrendres about horse-racing and seeing whether or not jockeys “come from behind,” continues, until, realizing they have to end the scene somehow, the filmmakers take a sharp turn back to the narrative—Marlowe accuses Vivian of “sugaring” him off the case, she becomes indignant, and they get up to leave. As it was in the beginning of the scene, the importance of the group is emphasized at the scene’s closing—a man accidentally bumps Vivian into Marlowe’s arms, they smile and say their goodbyes, and Marlowe goes to make a phone call. There is a dissolve to the next scene.
So many elements of this scene--the Dietz/Schwartz song’s title, the banter, even the “accidental” bumping of Vivian and Marlowe at the end-- comment wittily on the filmmakers’ forced reworking of their text in light of the previews and studio pressure; even the lyrics of “Plans” seem like a great intertextual joke about the film’s many plot threads, dead bodies and cut footage: “I guess I’ll have to change my plans/I should have realized there’d be another man./I overlooked that point completely/before the big affair began./Before I knew where I was at/I found myself up on the shelf/And that was that.”

It was the stars that the G.I.'s wanted, far more than narrative clarity, but the success of Sleep's witty, self-reflexive screenplay and Leigh Brackett's ability to roll with the punches would not go unnoticed: she and Hawks would collaborate several more times, most famously on Rio Bravo. In 1973, she worked on another self-reflexive noir (and one of those damn "personal" films), the Robert Altman masterpiece The Long Goodbye. Their work together was inspired-- Brackett's Marlowe was classical in his sense of chivalrous values, but modern in how he carried them out, causing Brackett to change the ending of Chandler's book: "It seemed," she would later write, "that the only satisfactory ending was for the cruelly-diddled Marlowe to blow Terry's guts out . . . something the old Marlowe would never have done." This fearlessness was further reflected in Altman's style of filming: loose, witty, and improvisational, it is his most jazz-like film (Elliot Gould's line readings, mumbles and funky walk transform Marlowe into a living be-bop solo). One of the film's most famous conceits was Johnny Williams' score, which took the title tune and translated it into a number of different contexts: full, non-diegetic theme song, melody whistled by a security guard gate, pop song blaring out of a car radio. The pop-music-as-intertextual-joke of The Big Sleep has become, 27 years later, a methodology: all the world connected by a single musical thread.

Two years later, "Johnny Williams" will become "John Williams," and his insistent score for Jaws will transform him into the go-to guy for blockbuster music. George Lucas will make use of his talents in Star Wars, and call upon him again for The Empire Strikes Back. After the success of the first film, Lucas desires full independence from the studios, so he self-finances the project with the profits from Star Wars, and sets up a rich distribution deal with Twentieth-Century Fox. It's a tremendous gamble, and the slower working style of director Irvin Kershner, while drawing rich performances and creating gorgeous images (no other Star Wars film will look so good), drives Lucas crazy and will lead to delays and budget overruns. In the end, of course, Lucas's gamble pays off, and as Jonathan noted above, truly creates the template for future "blockbuster events."

In one area, Lucas's choices are strong; screenwriting. He outlined the film's narrative, but turned the scripting duties over to a veteran of both science fiction and the sorts of screwball relationships the film explores: Leigh Brackett. There's debate about how much of her draft survived in the finished film (Lucas would rewrite, and would also turn it over to up-and-coming writer Lawrence Kasdan for a polish; Kasdan's success would lead him to a similar position on Raiders of the Lost Ark, and eventually give him the ability to write and direct his own noir, Body Heat). Brackett was very ill, and never lived to see the finished film (although Lucas did give her screen credit for her work, for which she would win a Hugo). But it's not impossible to see Han and Leia as an integalactic Bogie and Bacall: as Alexa L. Foreman writes in her essay on Brackett's work, "When Solo attempts to kiss her, Leia says, 'Being held by you isn't quite enough to get me excited.' But the attraction was there, and like Vivian and Marlowe, and Feathers and Chance, it is only a matter of time." And in that coupling, the twin threads of two different star powers would finally, spectacularly, meet, suggesting that certain critical and cinematic galaxies aren't always as far, far away as we might sometimes presume.

Love Bites

For more than a decade, since he appeared as Darcy in the 1995 A&E Pride & Prejudice, Colin Firth has been tagged as the thinking person's sex symbol: smart, self-deprecating, smoldering-but-reticent. He's appeared in a variety of films in the thirteen years since (most winningly in The English Patient, the chilling HBO film Conspiracy, and the underrated, British adaptation of Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch), but his best-known performances have been spins on that Darcy persona: first as Mark Darcy in two Bridget Jones films, then as the stammering father in What A Girl Wants, and finally as the cuckolded writer in Love, Actually. Those are the good romcoms and dramas-- he's also been wasted in tripe like Hope Springs and Girl With A Pearl Earring. It seemed, at least in big mainstream features, that he was doomed to play the diffident lover-- smart and funny, but buried beneath the sorts of put-upon nebbishy personality ticks that his soft-rock haircuts and puppy dog eyes seemed to suggest.

The most refreshing thing about the comedy-drama Then She Found Me is how it plays with and against this persona. The movie, adapted from Elinor Lipman's 1990 novel, tells the tale of two broken-hearted divorcees who begin a tentative relationship (or as Salon de Frankie nicely put it, "It's a grown-up view of what can happen when you find exactly what you want and need before you're quite ready to handle it"). Co-adapted and directed by its star, Helen Hunt, this is a romantic dramedy with intelligence and bite: it's sweet and funny (sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious), but also prickly. It wants to cut a bit deeper than Firth and Hunt's recent screen work, and acknowledge the pain of love alongside its more uplifting qualities.

In that sense, it's very well-cast. Firth, as I mentioned above, radiates intelligence, but the revelation here is his anger. The screenplay really allows him to vent the fussy emotions that other films ask him to button up, and the result is a shockingly forceful presence: he's still a winning, sensitive guy, but that sensitive guy has a great three-dimensionality and heft (the puppy dog eyes flare up a lot). Hunt--whose best qualities on Mad About You and in films like As Good As It Gets were her searching eyes and scrunched up, "what the hell are you going on about?" face--matches Firth scene for scene in her willingness to be confused, selfish, and pissed as hell.

None of those descriptors are meant as negatives-- her character and performance are quite winning, precisely because as an actress and a filmmaker, she works hard not to settle for easy binaries or convenient shortcuts. The film makes good use of tracking shots and long takes, allowing the actors space to move and breathe, but also forcing the camera (and hence the audience) to linger on the less savory moments, the difficult fights or cringeworthy bad choices that the characters make: the aesthetic becomes one of both containment and release.

That release is best embodied by Bette Midler, as the biological mother Hunt didn't know she had (and isn't sure she wants). Vivacious, funny, utterly inappropriate and very touching, Midler energizes every scene she's in, without overshadowing the ensemble effect for which the film is striving (she's the film's balance to Matthew Broderick's pitch-perfect, emotionally withdrawn ex-husband). In that mixture of hope, fear, longing and enegry, Midler symbolizes the film's message: love is difficult, messy, joyous, uncertain-- and absolutely necessary.

The Great Leveler

Happy birthday, James Stewart!

Picking Up The Pieces

So, you've just come out of Iron Man jazzed up by Robert Downey, Jr., and you are interested in learning more about Marvel's armored hero. Where to begin?

Iron Man is a character with a 45-year history, starting as a feature in the anthology comic Tales of Suspense-- his ten-page stories shared space with science fiction and horror stories for nearly two years, until Marvel replaced the monster tales with monthly adventures of Iron Man's fellow Avenger, Captain America. By 1968, Marvel's burgeoning popularity and a new distribution deal with Cadence Industries led to the end of the shared Suspense and the start of the metallic hero's own title. Iron Man would run from 1968 to 1996, 332 issues, until Marvel's bankruptcy led to a restructuring of the company, and a series of revamped titles that came to be known as "Heroes Reborn." Written and drawn by then-hot artists from Image and Wildstorm, it consisted of four books-- Iron Man, The Fantastic Four, Captain America, and The Avengers-- that radically reimagined the characters, their histories and their appearances, "rebooting" their origins and offering adventures that were much darker and more graphic than those of the original books. Designed as a combination stop-gap measure and hopeful commercial boost during Marvel's period of receivership, the books received mixed responses, lasting only a year and eventually being explained as taking place in a Twilight Zone-like alternate universe. In 1998, Marvel came out of bankruptcy, regained the rights to their characters, and re-launched their titles once again. "Vol. 3" of Iron Man would last for 89 issues, until Warren Ellis once again restarted the title in 2005 at issue #1 (that title stands currently stands at #28).
In addition, there have been miniseries, one-shot issues, and guest appearances in numerous Marvel books, to say nothing of Iron Man's adventures in various Avengers titles. All told, even excluding those Avengers and guest appearance issues, Iron Man's adventures in his own books run to around 430 issues, a staggering number that could defeat even the most dedicated and deep-pocketed fan.

Thankfully, some of that material has been collected, although that's a relatively recent phenomenon: compared to big guns like Spider-Man and the X-Men, Iron Man has received a lot less attention from his parent company in terms of repackagings and trade paperbacks (TPBs). With the massive success of the movie, I suspect that's starting to change. Consider what follows to be a consumer guide-cum-review of the most interesting IM material in print. Spoilers might follow.

Iron Man: Beneath The Armor : Published in April to tie in with the film, Andy Mangels' glossy, lavishly illustrated paperback is a suprisingly rich and detailed history of the character. It's full of detailed character histories, informative (if slightly spoilerish) summaries of important narrative arcs, tongue-in-cheek glances at Iron Man paraphenalia, and wonderful interviews with artists, writers and editors that don't shy away from the frustrations and anxieties some of them felt in dealing with the mighty Marvel machine. While I could quibble about a few errors here and there, or wonder why certain runs didn't get more attention, I'd have to say that overall, this is a great one-stop source of information, which imaginatively places the character within both Marvel and pop cultural history while avoiding self-serious fannishness.

The Invicible Iron Man Omnibus: The most expensive book on this list (although it's heavily discounted on Amazon), this is the place to start if you have some cash to spare. It's a gorgeously designed, dictionary-thick hardback collection of Tales of Suspense #39-83 and Tales to Astonish #82 (thoughtfully included to complete the two-part story in one of the Suspense issues), reprinted in full color and including letters pages and pin-ups; the book also includes essays by IM writers Stan Lee and Bob Layton, and a nice remembrance of IM artist Don Heck. These are very much tales of their time, which is not at all a bad thing-- I get a little exhausted with the trope of "that's so old!" that circulates in far too much hipster cultural critique, and I treasure these stories precisely because that feel so evocative of 1965, with their exaggerated Communist stereotypes, melodramatic plot twists, Harlequin Romance characters, and patented Iron Man boot skates (no, I am not making that up). It's also a lot of fun to see both characters and art develop: Don Heck is a wonderful penciler, but when Gene Colan comes to the book in the mid-sixties, the art takes a quantum leap, as both layouts and figures become far more sophisticated and sensual (Colan's pencils are enhanced by the lush brushwork of inker Gary Michaels, who makes the night scenes look like something out of Connery-era Bond).

Essential Iron Man, Vols. 1-3 TPBs : If you can't afford the Omnibus, the obvious place to start is with these highly affordable TPBs-- you lose the neat extras and higher paper stock, and you also lose the color, which is something of a bummer given the character's status as the "Golden Avenger," but you gain in sheer number of tales. These three books take you through all the Tales of Suspense material and up through Iron Man #38 (my hope is that the success of the film will spur Marvel to release these Essential volumes at a quicker, more regular rate, the way the success of the Spider-Man films did for that character's repackagings). Iron Man would hit some rough times in the early seventies-- a drop in popularity caused the title to move to bi-monthly status, and this up-and-down era also saw the introduction of dubious girlfriends and the short-lived mask nose. But it also saw the development of key supporting character Whitney Frost, the resolution of the Tony-Happy-Pepper triangle, the introduction of important new foes, and the ramping up of the kinds of corporate intrigue that would become Iron Man's trademark in the late 70s and early 80s. Whatever their flaws, there's a free-wheeling quality to these late sixties and early seventies stories that remains appealing.

The Many Armors of Iron Man TPB:For those fans who lust for technology more than character, this is the TPB to get, as it documents the many specialty armors and changes to the more standard IM armor that have occured over the years, by collecting seven issues published between 1963 and 1987 (although, oddly enough, not issue #174, which provides the book's dramatic cover image). It's a lot of fun to see the imaginations of various artists running amuck here (especially that of techno-whiz Bob Layton, whose stories with David Michelinie account for six of the eight issues reprinted), although the leaps in time between some stories means that you are often coming into a larger arc somewhere in the middle, or near the end, which undercuts their dramatic impact. If you can tolerate the narrative vertigo, though, it's an enjoyable ride.

Demon In A Bottle TPB: Without question, David Michelinie and Bob Layton are the most important creative team in Iron Man's history, and this paperback collects nine issues from their first run in the late seventies. The disco fashions are dated, and Michelinie's poetic narration boxes might feel a bit old school in this age of dialogue-sparse, decompressed action, but these tales have aged extremely well. Micheline and Layton's most famous innovation was introducing Tony Stark's alcoholism to the book (in the issues covered in this TPB), but his addiction was only one example of their greatest achievement: making Stark a three-dimensional hero instead of just the mannequin in the armored suit. By emphasizing their hero's flaws, they paradoxically made him more heroic than ever, offering a witty protagonist whose grace under pressure and desire to do right is tested as much by his own obsessive-compulsive behavior as it is by corporate rivals or superpowered villains. Michelinie and Layton would stay on the book for nearly four years, introduce several important plot threads and supporting characters, and then walk away, haunting every team that followed them. Given the influence of the changes on display here, this trade paperback is as much an "origin story" for Tony Stark as Tales of Suspense #39.

Armor Wars TPB: Following the first Michelnie-Layton run, writer Denny O'Neil would take over the book for four years, offering an epic run whose sweeping changes would make it both beloved and controversial. Oddly, very little of that run has been collected, despite its importance to the new film (the movie's villain, Obadiah Stane, first appears in these issues in a slightly different form, and the James Rhodes of the movie is also shaped by O'Neil's innovations). I like O'Neil's run a lot (collect it, Marvel, collect it!), but was also happy to see Michelinie and Layton return for another three-year run in the late 1980s. The most famous eight-issue arc of that run has been collected in this TPB, and is often pointed to by hardcore fans as a high point in the character's history.

I'm not sure it's as good as its reputation would suggest: penciler Mark Bright's figuration leaves a lot to be desired, and the action scenes can feel slightly repetitious after awhile. Still, I love the way Stark's obsessions get carried to their logical extreme here, and how that facet of his personality is fully explored without falling back yet again on his alcoholism. Initially called "Stark Wars" in the single-issue floppies, "Armor Wars" reveals that Tony's armor and weapon designs have been stolen in an act of corporate sabotage, and used by villains througout the Marvel Universe. Guilt-ridden and angry, Tony finds his legal options closed off, so he goes on a one-man spree as Iron Man to reclaim the various armors. The result is fractured friendships, strained alliances, loads of action, and a brand-new armor in the end. Not as emotionally rich as some of the other TPBs on this list, but if you're looking for one single book to summarize mainstream superheroic battle in the late 80s, this is the one to get: Michelnie's sense of pacing, and Layton's sure hand as an inker make this a smooth, state-of-the-art ride.

Iron Man vs. Doctor Doom: Doomquest TPB:The last bit of the Michelinie-Layton runs to be collected, this TPB collects the first two parts of their Iron Man-Doctor Doom trilogy (the final part is currently being published as a monthly miniseries, Iron Man: Legacy of Doom). The Layton-John Romita, Jr. art is detailed and elegant, and Michelinie has a lot of fun with the supervillain's innate snobbery towards Tony Stark's "lackey" (at this point, Iron Man's secret identity has not been revealed). The first half, initially published in Iron Man #149-150, is more assured-- it was the climax of M&L's first run in 1981, and shows a team in full command of their gifts; the second half climaxes their second run, in 1989, and shows the signs of strain and editorial interference that would soon end their run on the title. But both are well worth reading, especially if you like tongue-in-cheek historical adventure.

Iron Man: War Machine TPB: At one point in the new Iron Man movie, James Rhodes looks at a suit of unpainted armor and mutters, "Next time, baby..." For those wondering about the comics backstory to that remark, this volume begins to fill in the pieces. Rhodes initially takes over the Iron Man identity from Stark during Denny O'Neil's run, when Stark's alcoholism overwhelms him and he loses control of every facet of his life. From issues #169-199, Rhodes is Iron Man, but only intermittently puts the suit on after Stark reclaims his superheroic identity in issue #200. It's not until several years later, due to narrative complications too long and convoluted to explain here, that "War Machine" is born, and Rhodes once again becomes an armored Avenger. Writer Lem Kaminski and artist Kevin Hopgood's vision of the two men is much darker and more violent than those of the past, as befit a more Punisher-driven Marvel in the early 90s, but Kaminski also has a firm grasp on character, and his narrative takes the tensions between the two friends to a logical, ruthless conclusion. Brutal but essential.

Civil War and Iron Man: Civil War TPB: Among Marvel comics readers, Iron Man has had a mixed reputation lately, and this ambitious-but-fumbled miniseries/crossover epic is the reason why. Designed as what one friend might called a "sub-tle" allegory for the Patriot Act and post-9//11 America, Civil War begins with a tragic accident caused by a superhero-supervillain melee, which leads to public outcry, which leads to the creation of something called "The Superhero Registration Act"-- any superpowered Marvel U. hero now has to reveal his or her secret identity and register with the government as an agent. Naturally, this divides the superpowered community down the middle, and each side is led by a different icon: Captain America leads the resistance, while Iron Man becomes the spokesman for the pro-registration forces.

It's not a bad idea: it feels like the logical culmination of Tony Stark's political and economic connections, his far-reaching vision as a "futurist" inventor (as he keeps referring to himself), and the constant theme of pragmatism and compromise that has run through his many titles: if this is the situation, what's the best way to deal with it. And as an event to tie the whole Marvel Universe together, it's rich with political possibility and character-driven storylines. Sadly, despite writer Mark Millar's many gifts, its execution feels rushed, heavy-handed, and slanted in some odd directions: I know our sympathies are supposed to be with bad-ass libertarian Cap, but I found his single-minded self-righteousness distinctly Travis Bickle-like, and longed for a more balanced series of confrontations and arguments (for a better example of Millar's abilities with the same characters, pick up his two Ultimates collections). At least the Iron Man: Civil War volume fills in some of those gaps, but overall, this feels like a very empty and disappointing "event." It did do its job of getting people to talk about the characters, though, as the comics blogosphere exploded in arguments for two years (my favorite take on the whole debate is Steven Colbert's):



Ultimate Iron Man TPB: Having had success by bringing in other writers from outside comics (Joss Whedon, Kevin Smith, the Knaufs), Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada probably thought it was quite the coup to snag noted novelist Orson Scott Card for this "Ultimate Universe" reimagining of Tony Stark; unfortunately, like one of Tony's inventions, it hasn't quite worked out the way its creator probably intended.

(For those who don't know, Marvel's Ultimate 'verse is a parallel universe to the Marvel U. proper, containing the same characters, with often similar origins, but also allowing a greater degree of leeway in reimagining them. It started as a commercial response to forty years of Marvel history, and concerns that newer readers couldn't get caught up on all that backstory-- why not just give them new titles with the same characters, but without all that baggage?
This has resulted in some great work, like Ultimate Spider-Man, and also in some less-than-great work, like Ultimate Iron Man).

Some of Card's innovations are interesting, and I'm willing to give him leeway with his wrenchingly different origin story. The main problem is that he doesn't seem to have any feel for, or real interest in, the characters that he's writing: the Ultimate universe works best when its writers work jazzy riffs on canon-- different enough to be interesting and new, but familiar enough so that we know what song we're listening to. Card's Iron songs have nothing to do with the character-- he might as well just invent a wholly new figure and tell his stories through him (and even then, readers would have to struggle through tin-eared dialogue and anvilicious plotting).

You know which science fiction novelist might write a cool Iron Man? William Gibson, whose paranoid technoverse mysteries suggest someone who could write a very eerie, adult Tony Stark. But Orson Scott Card? Meh. Skip it and read Invincible Iron Man instead.

Iron Man: The Inevitable TPB: In the last thirty years of Iron Man adventures, it's fair to say there are two major models for new writer/artist teams: that of David Michelinie and Bob Layton, and that of Denny O'Neil. Both did landmark runs between 1978 and 1990, but their takes on the character were different. While both ultimately read Iron Man/Stark as heroic, M&L were optimists (searching for the chararcter's humor and grace under pressure), while O'Neil was a pessimist (finding the ambivalence, pathos and muddier shades in the tale of an alcohoilc industrialist with a hero complex). Since those runs ended, I think it's fair to say that, whatever lip service is paid to the historical importance of M&L, more teams have followed the O'Neil route, choosing to plumb the character's contradictions and darker impulses, especially in a post-Cold War, post-9/11 world (where the intersections of commerce and politics are muddier).

Which is what makes writer Joe Casey-- and this gorgeously painted graphic novel-- so refreshing: Casey is an unreconstructed Michelinie-Layton partisan, and with his sure ear for dialogue, has a tremendous amount of fun rethinking that paradigm for the 21st century. References to both M&L runs abound, and the TPB's narrative-- about corporate espionage, the cost of technological exploration, and the definition of "hero"--does a lot of in-jokes about the occasionally strange places the character's been taken over the last ten years. A lot of folks objected to the Frazer Irving art, but once you get over the shock of a very different-looking Tony, it's pretty easy to groove on his lush background images, expressive action scenes, and Kubrickian eye for sci-fi detail.

Iron Man: Extremis TPB: The most imaginative and important rethinking of Iron Man, his origins and his meaning in recent years has come from writer Warren Ellis, who wrote the first six issues of the rebooted Iron Man title in 2005, and immediately made the character his own. This is not surprising: Ellis is one of the most gifted writers currently working in comics, and Tony Stark's combination of money, power, single-minded obsessiveness, technological know-how and political ambiguity is right in the bailiwick of the creator of the techno-dystopic thriller Transmetropolitan. In a revamped origin (borrowed by the film), Tony Stark's heart is damaged in Afghanistan rather than Vietnam, and Tony is once again an arms manufacturer (something that hadn't been true for decades). He's also a darker figure than we've seen in some time, although that doesn't mean he's not also witty and heroic (anti-heroes are often Ellis's favorite characters). Ellis ratchets up the political context and commentary, and this more adult tale is well-matched by Adi Granov's gorgeously hued, painted art, which immediately became the model for all new IM artists. The most dramatic change, though, was also the most Ellisian: the "Extremis" power that Stark absorbs, that allows him to speak to and control virtually any electronic or electromagnetic source on the planet with just a flick of his brain. This would quickly become a cliche when Iron Man appeared in other books (and it's eerily reminiscent of Brian K. Vaughn's Ex Machina, although the two writers do very different things with it), but in Ellis's hands it's a lovely metaphor for control, paranoia and knowledge in a postmodern age, and it once again made Iron Man what he had been in the 1960s: the avatar of a stranger, more imaginative future.

Scheduling snafus meant that Ellis didn't stay on the book long, and eventually, the Knaufs were brought in as the new writers. I was underwhelmed with their first arc, collected in the TPB Execute Program: it felt rushed and uncertain, and it didn't feel like they could handle the metaphors Ellis left behind. Since then, though, they've made the title their own, by focusing on the politics of the post-Civil War landscape, and Tony's place within them. I wrote a bit about their Iron Man: Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. TPB here, and since then, the title's only gotten better, full of cinematic action, rich character development, and an increasingly sure sense of character. Right now, Iron Man once again feels like the most enjoyable read in the Marvel Universe.

Lion's Roar, Lion's Snore...Whichever

I'd like to believe this story (linked at Deadspin) isn't true, but I lived in Michigan long enough to know that the epithet hurled by the Detroit Lions executive is an accurate summation of how ownership has treated fans and players for the last twenty years, at least. Can someone explain to me how Matt Millen, the Lions GM currently sporting a gaudy, W.-like 31-81 record, still has a job?

He'd Never Want To Belong To Any Club That Would Have Him As A Member

Drawing a crowd roughly the size of that at a Fingerbang concert, Ralph Nader rallies his troops in Washington, DC. I especially think the Washington Monument shooting up into the sky is appropriate, since Nader's campaign is, at this point, mostly about fluffing his ego and his masculinity.

Archeologies

The gifted journalist and critic Andrew O'Hehir has been posting witty dispatches from the Cannes Film Festival, and his most recent article examines the delirious reception that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull received from the crowds on the Croissette:

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas' long, long, long awaited fourth chapter in their big-budget-imitating-low-budget, self-consciously old-fashioned boys' adventure serial screened here for the first time before an audience on Sunday afternoon, and it was far and away the biggest and craziest media circus I've seen in three years at Cannes. Spielberg, Lucas and Harrison Ford (at a collective age of 190) will see your Brangelina hubbub and double it...

On Sunday morning we woke up to cool, brilliant, ice-blue skies, and by that afternoon I was watching a plump English photographer teeter dangerously above me on his little ladder, wailing amid the boiling throng around us like a middle-school girlfriend deserted at the mall: "'Arrison, please! 'Arrison, please! 'Arrison, plee-ee-ease!"

I'm not sure whether that guy ever got his snap of 'Arrison, but Ford worked both sides of the rope line avidly on his way out of the post-screening press conference, signing autographs, shaking hands and consenting, with avuncular grace, to being kissed by comely young women. You can say that his regular-guy shtick is shtick, but it's working for him and he clearly buys it himself. When a reporter asked him how he felt about the literally hundreds of people standing outside on the Croisette with hand-lettered signs, hoping to beg, borrow or steal a ticket to Sunday night's red-carpet screening ("Un billet Indy Jones S.V.P.?"), Ford said: "It's very gratifying. We're a service occupation, as I see it. People have to be interested in the stories we tell, or we're out of luck and out of business."

O'Hehir's a witty writer with a good eye for detail, and I enjoyed the humor and tactility of his descriptions. But I also noticed these passages, which stood out like a hipster's sore thumb:

Jim Jarmusch received an award called the Carrosse d'Or late on Saturday night here, and if it's not one of Cannes' big-name prizes it's a coveted one among film directors. It's given by the French directors' guild during the Directors' Fortnight sidebar festival, and it's a lifetime achievement award given to a non-French filmmaker of world renown. (Previous winners have included David Cronenberg, Clint Eastwood and Ousmane Sembène.) During his potent speech about the power and limits of cinema, Jarmusch reminded us that Sunday would mark 40 years to the day since the student uprising of May 1968 invaded the Festival de Cannes, bringing that year's edition to an early and abrupt conclusion.

So how did Cannes celebrate the anniversary of that near-revolution, which had such a profound effect on French culture and French history? With "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," bien sûr! Hey, isn't it the Frenchies who have some saying about how the more things change, the more they stay the same?

and later:


The joy of the original Indiana Jones series lay in its discovery or rediscovery of the audience's love of cinema as pure adventure, unadorned with social issues or character psychology. In other words, they were meant to take you back to childhood, and perhaps not even your own childhood but your parents' or grandparents' childhood, or America's childhood.

Can that kind of rediscovery keep happening over and over again? And should it? Yes, it's rude to bring this up, but Ford, Lucas and Spielberg are all a lot older than they once were, and so are the rest of us. Furthermore, when Lucas and Spielberg launched this series in 1981, they were pioneers. Adventure movies had been left behind by the self-serious American cinema of the '70s, and they were the guys who were bringing them back. In the years since then, the world's filmgoers have gorged themselves on adventure movies, cheap ones and mind-blowingly expensive ones and every gradation in between. Asking the audience to remember how delighted they were by a swashbuckler made 27 years ago is like asking a diabetic to remember an awesome piece of chocolate cake he ate in high school.

In a sense, "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" has to get by on its nostalgia appeal -- nostalgia for an earlier style of filmmaking, nostalgia for an aging and beloved character, even nostalgia for an older and more innocent form of nostalgia -- which is an odd path to success for a $125 million motion picture. At the press conference, Spielberg compared these films (for roughly the bajillionth time) to the old Republic Films serials, which were already old-school in his 1950s childhood. The secret of the Jones movies, he said, was to "shoot a compact and economically told story ... and do it with real stunts and real people. We don't say we'll go and make the most amazing chase scene ever. We ask what the story demands and how we can make that funny and exciting."

O'Hehir is no snob-- he also notes that "even in its inflated and creaky fourth incarnation, the Indy series retains a certain unassuming quality, at least compared to Hollywood's recent monstrous productions," a comment that seems to jibe with a lot of the immediate commentary on the film. He also admits that

Part of me thinks that some flea-bitten Parisian radicals should come and close this shit down right now. And part of me thinks: You know what? Cannes needs Indy. We've had five days here of earnest and serious filmmaking, ranging from mediocre to outstanding, but nothing that feels like a movie that will rock the world. (And the locals will get their chance to revisit '68 when French counterculture hero Philippe Garrel shows up with his first-ever competition film.) Couple that with the unseasonably dreary weather on the Riviera, and the pent-up demand for celebutainment and sunshine was becoming unmanageable.

I won't be able to see the new Indy film until at least Thursday, when it opens over here, so my point isn't to defend the film, nor is it to attack O'Hehir, who does a good job of balancing out the positives and negatives in his review.

Instead, what caught my eye and continues to fascinate me is the split between the detailed, intelligent exploration of nostalgia around the Indiana Jones films, and the seeming cognitive dissonance of framing that discussion with a remembrance of May '68, whose mythologies are no less driven by nostalgia. O'Hehir isn't wrong to suggest that a lot has happened in the 27 years since Raiders of the Lost Ark (a point Jonathan also made in stylish fashion on his blog), but hasn't even more happened since May '68? I bow to no one in my New Wave fetish, but what gets the latter off the hook, while the former must remain hanging there? Is it the Francophilia that infects a lot of cinephilia (including mine)? The outdated myths of outsider 'authenticity' in the face of corporate blockbusters? Or does our nostalgia merely need a patina of radicality in order to be read as fresh and daring and not-at-all-navel-gazing? Wasn't one of the theoretical lessons of May '68 (especially for media studies) a reminder that, as Sigfried Kracauer said of photographs, they “stir up the elements of nature...reminiscent of dreams in which the fragments of ”daily life become jumbled,” thus revealing “the provisional status of all given configurations"? There's something ironic about revolution being naturalized, isn't there?

In a recent post about teaching, Jeff wrote

The value of Joyce over Lost is one of aesthetics or taste, not of inherent quality. The instructor’s narrative is a cliched one. “Why don’t these students (regardless of age) understand how wonderful these classic novels or poems are?” I am an English professor. I don’t understand the value either. I read these books once, I don’t read fiction anymore (or much). Fiction, story telling, is not the key to being able to think anymore than washing your car is.

That’s not to say there is no value to literature. There is as much as any kind of expression may have value. I just don’t get the highbrow value of Sinclair Lewis over James Bond, Sylvia Plath over Stan Lee. Even more, I don’t get folks like this teacher who cling to such beliefs as “natural” while working hard to dispel students’ beliefs (what the student thinks is “natural”) in the name of critical thinking.

Change a few of the names and titles, and that could stand in as the ghost that haunts a lot of contemporary film criticsm, which often casts itself as being on the barricades, as the cinematic equivalent of those May '68 students (writing of the battles surrounding Henri Langlois and the Cinematheque Francaise in March '68, Francois Truffaut described them as "the coming attractions for May '68"). It's become so ingrained that it can occasionally take some odd forms: witness all the critics who complained about Juno's stylized dialogue while simultaneously drinking PT Anderson's hyper-stylized milkshake. There's nothing wrong with the "to the barricades!" position, but it's certainly not the only one, and not necessarily a useful one anymore for the action film (only because condescension is so predictable). These are notes without a definitive answer to what a new form of critiquing such films might take, but it seems like it could be smart, sensual, self-aware and action-packed itself, especially if we take that beloved New Wave as a model. Or as Truffaut said of cinema (and as we should say of film criticism), "Today, I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not interested at all in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse."