THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011)

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

On one of my ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE posts, entitled THRILLER KILLING, I wrote:

the SILENCE OF THE LAMBS film also seems to have more in common with the suspense genre than that of horror. Hannibal Lecter is certainly mad, but it's questionable as to whether his madness is as grotesque and transformational as that of Norman Bates. Both characters inhabit essentially realistic worlds, but Hannibal's madness has far less mystery to it.

If I ever get around to reviewing the 1991 SILENCE I'll be reversing the above judgment.  Though it's true that in narrative terms SILENCE owes a lot to the structure of the "serial-killer thriller," I've determined that the madness of "Hannibal the Cannibal" is just as grotesque, etc., as that of Norman Bates, and that both SILENCE and PSYCHO belong in the ranks of metaphenomenal "psycho-films."

Not so THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, however.

I viewed DRAGON (henceforth the abbreviation for the David Fincher-directed version only) without having either read the Steig Larsson novel or seen any of the earlier Swedish film adaptations. Immediately I found myself intrigued at seeing how many tropes of the serial-killer thriller have been inverted in the Fincher film.

For instance, as I've brought up Jonathan Demme's SILENCE already, I may as well use it as a counter-example (though I'm not proposing any direct influence between it and any version of the Larsson story).

Whereas many psycho-films have involved female victims relentlessly pursued by mad murderers (usually though not invariably male), SILENCE's female lead is FBI agent Clarice Starling, who makes her business to pursue the psycho known as "Buffalo Bill."  However, to do so, she must play a game of "quid pro quo" with another serial slayer, the charismatic Hannibal Lecter.  Lecter's help does enable Starling to bring down her target, though by film's end Hannibal escapes to "bite another day," so to speak.  One leaves this particular film with the sense of a strange hero/villain relationship having been forged between Starling and Lecter.

DRAGON allows no such romanticism.  The "girl" of the title, young Lisbeth Salander, ends up helping her co-protagonist Mikael Blomkvist expose a psycho in the latter half of the film, but she never has any love-hate relationship with this serial killer.  Initially Lisbeth pursues the killer because Blomkvist has hired her to help him research the fate of a young girl who disappeared from a wealthy Swedish home forty years ago.  However, as Lisbeth and Mikael make connections between the missing girl and a rash of unsolved serial killings, Lisbeth becomes an avenger of All Wrongs Done to Women.  The psycho-killer, for his part, isn't a compelling figure like Hannibal or Norman Bates; his lust to kill women, at least as portrayed in Fincher's DRAGON, seems less his particular psychology than the embodiment of All Patriarchal Oppression. 

I don't capitalize these storytelling tropes to make fun of them; I could do the same to the personas involved in Demme's SILENCE as well, or with pretty much any other narrative.  I invoke the capitals to make clear how much Fincher, following Larsson, departs from the more standard narrative opposition of the Psycho and the Lady Victim-- who not infrequently a version of what academic Carol Clover termed "the Final Girl," the female who survives the rampage of a modern-day Bluebeard.

Indeed, the psycho in this film receives far less narrative attention than a more mundane figure of Patriarchal Oppression.  Because in earlier years the punkish Lisbeth got into trouble with the law, a government caseworker manages to gain control over her. This oppression culminates in Lisbeth's violent rape by the caseworker, a scene which Fincher dwells on in gruesome detail, presumably to prevent the viewers from dismissing it as one of many generic-looking fictional rape-scenes.  Lisbeth gains the upper hand over her oppressor, and subjects him to a punishment that fits (but does not extinguish the reality of) the crime.  In a sense, when the psychotic killer dies in the film-- indirectly due to Lisbeth's actions-- the psycho suffers the fate that the audience would like to see befall the caseworker as well.  But because Lisbeth doesn't trust the law to avenge rape, she has to satisfy herself with a less emotionally satisfying revenge.

Fincher's DRAGON is a strong thriller, although at times even he can't find that many ways to spice up the many talking-heads scenes influenced by the novel.  However, Fincher serves the source material here much better than Dan Brown was served by the cinematic adaptations of his even talkier thriller-novels.

Another note on the phenomenality employed here: late in the film, the killer employs against Blomkvist that old standard of Saturday-morning serials: the Chamber That Fills With Gas.  And if this sort of gadget were presented as a marker of the narrative's "irreducible strangeness"-- as I argued that similiar gimicks were in ACE DRUMMOND-- then such a device could qualify DRAGON to be a film of "the uncanny."  But DRAGON's villain not only isn't in a league with Hannibal and Norman, he's not even in the same league with Ace Drummond's villain-- who, by coincidence, sported the name of "The Dragon."

FEDERAL AGENTS VS. UNDERWORLD INC./ RADAR PATROL VS. SPY KING (1949)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

In between Kirk Alyn's two Superman serials he made two G-man serials for Republic.  In both serials, although the majority of the narratives are naturalistically oriented, there's just enough metaphenomenal content to edge them into the domain of "the uncanny."

Of the two, there's less to say about RADAR, which was the second of these two 1949 Alyn serials, so I'll start with that one.  Four years after the end of WWII, U.S. agent Chris Calvert (Alyn) is busy overseeing the construction of an up-to-date radar defense project, leaving the technical side to a rare (for serials) female scientist, Joan Hughes (Jean Dean).  The evil "Spy King" Baroda (John Merton) is out to sabotage the project, creating his own "counter-radar" among other stratagems.  Baroda doesn't seem to be employed by any country in particular to commit these acts of sabotage, and some of his dialogue with female accomplice Nitra (Eve Whitney) implied to me that he was doing it all "on spec," to impress potential employers.

John Stanley's CREATURE FEATURES GUIDE claims that Baroda's arsenal includes a nifty sounding "electro annihilator," but if it's in there I must've blinked and missed it.  I only noticed two "outre devices" that went beyond the usual mundane guns-and-fists battles.  The first is the aforementioned "counter radar," which is a marginal SF-notion, while the other involves a clever sort of gas-trap.  In the serial's best scene, Nitra conceals the gas-gadget in a hollowed-out fake encyclopedia and gives it away to Joan as a promotional item.  None of the heroes perish from this or any other stratagem by the villains, and most of the cliffhanger-resolutions are pretty weak tea. 

FEDERAL follows roughly the same approximate pattern, but generates its uncanny aspects via references to the past rather than to futuristic technology.  FEDERAL begins in the made-up country of Abistahn, where villainous revolutionary Nila (Carol Forman) seeks to obtain two artifacts-- human hands made of gold-- which can be used in conjunction with an ancient statue so as to reveal a massive treasure.  With that treasure, she plans to found a criminal organization of mammoth scope, "Underworld Inc."  It sounds like something on the scale of Fu Manchu's "Si-Fan," but unfortunately Nila's only allies are dimwit gangster Gordon (Roy Barcroft) and a few other plug-uglies.  Still, Nila's mini-organization is only matched by a couple of "federal men" and a female ally, so the sides are evenly matched.

The fights are better staged than those of RADAR, and Alyn's character is a little more breezy, but the cliffhangers are still lifeless, until the last few chapters, by which time the action has moved back to Abistahn.  The introduction of a new villain at the eleventh (serial) hour injects some added life in the story, as he dopes out how the "golden hand" artifacts can be used to activate ancient mechanisms in the statue so that it will disclose the treasure.  The doom of Nila comes about due to the activation of the statue, which also contributes to the final chapter's stronger showing.

In terms of Campbellian functions, both hew toward the sociological, though it's more evident in the ancient-vs.-modern clash of cultures in FEDERAL.  Since Baroda, the terrorist-villain of RADAR, seems not to have any particular nation behind him, might one deem him a forerunner of this century's "terror cells?"

For a fuller writeup of FEDERAL MEN, check this post at Todd Gault's Serial Blog.

SOYLENT GREEN (1973)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

In the early 1970s one saw many films as slow-paced as Richard Fleischer's SOYLENT GREEN, possibly due to the influence of the European New Wave on some filmmakers.   Compared to the relentless hell-bent-for-leather pace seen in most contemporary films, such a leisurely approach is often pleasing.

However, even keeping in mind the excesses of the Jerry Bruckheimer era, I found SOYLENT pretty dull.

Fleischer had long ago proven his skill with well-paced narratives, whether in the domain of the isophenomenal (THE NARROW MARGIN) or the metaphenomenal (20.000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA).  Since he had long ago shown his chops on many previous films, I tend to believe that Fleischer's normal talents were compromised by the demands of the dystopian script.

Like many people, I've probably heard the famous quote (or some variation thereof)-- "Soylent Green is people"-- more often than I've seen the film.  Like the true identity of Mister Hyde, it's hard to remember a time when one didn't know the Big Reveal of SOYLENT, the last of Charlton Heston's three big-time SF-features of that period.  In all of them Heston's characters are often depicted , often conferring Christlike motifs of suffering.  As I've not read the Harry Harrison novel on which the movie's based, I don't know how strongly such motifs appear in the novel.  However, the protagonist's name in the book is not "Thorn," which name by itself suggests Christlike suffering, as does the last shot in the film: Thorn's bloodied hand reaching toward heaven as he's carried away by the men who are about to betray and slaughter him.  In addition, I'm informed that there is no theme of cannibalism in the novel, which suggests that the screenwriter may have contemplated extending the myth of communion into the theme of a novel on the overpopulation theme.

That said, the police-procedural scenes of the film, in which Heston slowly seeks to ferret out the reason for the murder of a high official, didn't sustain my interest.  I felt that the film made its basic point early on-- overpopulation is bad-- but it never managed to score any deeper insights.  The scenes in which lowly cop Heston seduces (or is seduced by) high-rolling call-girl Leigh Taylor-Young lack either tension or eroticism.
Far better in terms of character are Heston's scenes with his quasi-mentor figure Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson in his final film-performance), though in a sense I thought Robinson's scenes would have played better against a younger actor, who might've seemed more in need of counseling than fifty-year-old Heston.

However, SOYLENT does sport one magnificently surrealistic scene, in which police disperse unruly crowds by turning "the scoops" loose on them. In contrast to the overly slow resolution of the mystery of Soylent Green, the sight of the scoop-vehicles indifferently catching up hapless human beings and dumping them into their interiors-- implicitly for recycling as processed food-- remains one of the most striking images in all of science-fiction cinema.

WILLOW (1988)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

Scripted from a George Lucas story and given a John Williams-sound-alike score by James Horner, WILLOW proves that Lucas and director Ron Howard should have stuck with taking inspiration from serials.  Even calling WILLOW “Tolkien-lite” might insinuate that it possesses even a fraction of the complexity of THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

WILLOW is best regarded as a lively sword-and-sorcery opus with a higher budget than most such efforts.  As with most S&S, the film builds its fantasy-scape out of all sorts of mythic odds’n’ ends. The main character Willow Ufgood (Warwick Davis) is one of a race of dwarfish people called “Nelwyns,” but the rest of the fantasy-peoples are taken from the same European folklore Tolkien raided, yielding the usual crop of elves, trolls, and brownies.  However, human beings are called “Daikinis,” a name lifted from a species of Hindu fairies.  Some names, like Willow’s, are meant to sound vaguely Celtic, but as in most S&S tales other names sound borrowed from a potpourri of sources, as with “Sorsha,” “Bavmorda,” and “Madmartigan.”

The film begins on a “slaughter of the innocents” theme, as the tyrannical sorceress Bavmorda seeks to find an infant who, according to prophecy, will bring about the evil queen’s doom.  The special girl-child, Elora by name, is spirited away by a midwife and sent on a Moses-like journey down a river, where she’s found by Willow’s family.  Unlike Frodo of LOTR, Willow has a wife and two children, so he isn’t too keen on getting involved in the affairs of the oversized Daikini people.  When one of Bavmorda’s beasts attacks Willow’s community, the Nelwyns send a “fellowship” composed of Willow and a few others to give Elora back to the first Daikini they meet.

Much to Willow’s disgust, the first Daikini they meet is a thief penned up in a cage, name of Madmartigan (Val Kilmer).  The Nelwyn fellowship breaks up almost immediately thereafter (so much for that bit of Tolkien-imagery!), for most Nelwyns are eager to let this disreputable human take charge of the infant. With great reluctance, Willow acquiesces and lets Madmartigan take Elora, but the infant is summarily snatched by brownies and Willow once more goes in search of her.  After a few more adventures he partners up with Madmartigan once more, who’s also taken a reluctant shine to the wonder baby.  Meanwhile they encounter one of Bavmorda’s military detachments, led by Bavmorda’s swordswoman daughter Sorsha.  The two heroes spend most of their time dodging soldiers and making new allies before their inevitable confrontation with the evil sorceress.

The overall plot of WILLOW is pretty shaky: though the tale begins by claiming that Elora is supposed to overthrow Bavmorda, in truth her only role is to motivate the two heroes and their allies to oppose the villain.  Willow, unable to fight on the level of his allies, manages to hoax the enchantress.  Yet Bavmorda’s ultimate defeat comes about because of the chance intervention of a lightning bolt, which was a melodramatic cliché back when Sade made fun of it in JUSTINE.

The best parts of WILLOW are the light-hearted character bits.  Madmartigan and Sorsha initially seem to despise each other, but their true feelings are liberated when the hero is exposed to a “love-dust” courtesy of two brownies. (Actors Kilmer and Whalley were married following completion of the picture.)  The brownies Rool and Franjean, who talk with Cajun accents, provide consistent and often much-needed humor whenever the action gets a little too routine.  Ron Howard’s direction of the splashy action-scenes is competent but no single scene is particularly memorable.  Bavmorda is a cardboard villain, evil purely for the sake of being evil. Lucas’ story might have dwelled a little on the unusual relationship of a tyrant-sorceress with a swordswoman for a daughter.  But the script never allows the slightest reflection on how Sorsha feels toward her witchy mother, either while serving her or betraying her.  As with most sword-and-sorcery films, there are no deeper metaphysical themes to the concept of magic: spells are just another weapon.

At its core, WILLOW is a “buddy film.”  The titular character is a husband and father who is marginalized by his own community.  A wealthy Nelwyn disparages Willow as both a “farmer” and a “clown” (the latter because Willow performs feats of stage-magic).  Willow aspires to learn real magic, but even when he gets his own wand in the course of his quest, he never successfully performs a spell.  Ironically he achieves his greatest success with the use of “phony magic.”  In contrast, Madmartigan is a tough fighter, and so much a loner that his only acquaintance disparages him for being loyal to no one.  This is perhaps the strongest borrowing Lucas took from Tolkien.  In LOTR Frodo is a humble figure forced to take extreme actions, while Tolkien’s human protagonist Aragorn is a more glamorous hero-type who in a sense plays second fiddle to Frodo.  Willow and Madmartigan interact more personally than do Frodo and Aragorn, but the formula of pairing humility and glamour remains constant.      

    

DEMOLITION MAN (1993)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

If nothing else, DEMOLITION MAN is frank about its literary swipes.  Not only do characters reference the twin inspirations for the story—“Rip Van Winkle” and “Brave New World”—Sylvester Stallone’s sidekick is even named “Huxley” after the author of the dystopian novel.  But whereas Aldous Huxley was expressing his mixed feelings over the benumbing effects of advanced technology, DEMOLITION MAN is just having silly fun with the idea of turning loose non-costumed versions of Batman and the Joker loose on such a world.

To be sure, the film has to stack the deck to make such a rampage more appealing. For instance, DEMOLITION’s future-earth of 2032 doesn’t allow recreational sex as the Huxley book does; citizens can only have the illusion of sex through a sort of “virtual reality” experience.  The film posits that following a monumental earthquake—one so great that the remnants of San Francisco and Los Angeles are merged into “San Angeles”—society makes a major shift toward extreme political correctness.  Or at least the society of San Angeles does: one never really gets any sense of what happens in the rest of the world.  In this respect DEMOLITION is a lot like 1996’s DOUBLE DRAGON, which seems hermetically sealed within a wonder-world version of L.A.

To be sure, it’s eventually revealed that this future-scape—in which money has ceased to exist and citizens are automatically fined for the action of cursing aloud—comes about due to the influence of one megalomaniacal manipulator, not in response to the normal pressures of technologized society.  By film’s end, once the manipulator’s plot is exposed, it’s intimated that the future will soon drift back in the comfortable direction of 1990s culture—or at least a Hollywoodized version of same.  In essence, “San Angeles” feels like a Hollywood scripter’s sardonic idea of what reality would look like if it were neutered in the manner that censors try to neuter films.  There’s no depth to this dystopia, but it does make an amusing backdrop for hero John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) and madman Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) as they try to tear apart both each other and the city.

The battle of these archenemies starts in 1996, with cop Spartan attempting a Dirty Harry-like feat: saving a busful of hostages from the murderous rampage of Phoenix.  Unlike Dirty Harry, Spartan not only fails, he gets framed as being complicit in Phoenix’s scheme.  Both are sentenced to imprisonment not in jail but in a cryogenic facility.  This ‘don’t-think-too-hard-about-it” notion sets up makes it possible for both the villain and the mistreated hero to be reborn a generation or two later.

Phoenix is the first to rise, because the aforesaid manipulator, having created a neutered society, needs a “primitive” to assassinate the leader of a rebel movement.  Strangely, the master manipulator—hailed by San Angeles citizens as the savior of society—is given the name “Cocteau,” which sounds strongly like an addled reference to the visionary surrealist filmmaker Jean Cocteau—addled because one wouldn’t normally associate the French director with any sort of repressive activity.  Eventually Cocteau finds himself outmatched by Phoenix as the supercriminal seeks a way to take control of the neutered future.

John Spartan is defrosted to stop Phoenix.  He’s opposed by many of the current constabulary, one of whom keeps calling him a “caveman,” even though Spartan’s only been on ice a little over thirty years.  However, junior police officer Huxley—played by Sandra Bullock one year before she made a name for herself with SPEED—becomes Spartan’s ally and guide through the maze of politically-correct customs. Spartan’s moments of “culture shock” are funny, albeit in a very silly and superficial manner. Taco Bell is the only restaurant in San Angeles because it alone survived the quake; the citizens' idea of music is bopping to the tune of old commercial jingles—stuff like that.

The muscular battles of Stallone and Snipes are the film’s saving grace, in part because, as mentioned before, the makers did such a good job of borrowing the Batman-Joker aesthetic.  Spartan, a grim white guy, is always seen garbed in dull blue or black hues, while Phoenix, a black guy constantly laughing at his own jokes, is clad in brilliant primary colors, including his spiky ‘fro hairdo, colored Dennis Rodman-blonde. The mere fact that Spartan sports the peculiar sobriquet “Demolition Man” should be enough to demonstrate that the screenwriters were trying to “do” superheroes without bringing in capes and cowls as such.            

 As noted above, none of the film's satirical barbs at modern-day repressive forces bite very deep, least of the ones found in a long rant by the leader of the rebellion, a guy who's is more or less the Che Guevara of the Indulgent Lifestyle.  To demonstrate the basic superficialty of the film's societal critique, I added one line to the rebel leader's rant: see if you can guess which one.

 "I WANT high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon and butter and BUCKETS of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I want to run through the streets naked with green Jell-o all over my body reading Playboy magazine. And I want to look at pictures of naked little girls! Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to, okay, pal?"

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN (2011)

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

In one of my ARCHIVE posts I caviled at R.G. Young, author of THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FANTASTIC FILM, for being too careless in his (unexplained) judgment of what he chose to label as "fantastic."  His tome contained dozens of thrillers, melodramas and adventure-films that in my view did not in the least shade into the domain of the fantastic (or, as I constantly rechristen it, "the metaphenomenal.")

Nevertheless, there are some adventure-films that are so wildly cavalier in their near-defiance of rationality that I can see the temptation to include them under in the ranks of "fantasy films," particularly swashbucklers like THE BLACK PIRATE and THE CRIMSON PIRATE.  Yet in my estimation such films finally fail the test of "irreducible strangeness" that should be characteristic of metaphenomenal works.  And despite the medium of Steven Spielberg's THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN-- in essence a cartoon, however computer-generated-- it too essentially lacks that "strangeness."  To reference a remark by C.S. Lewis-- examined in depth in this essay-- Spielberg's TINTIN is all about the threat of tigers, with no ghosts or gods even suggested.

This is not only an interesting contrast to Spielberg's previous high-adventure brainchild Indiana Jones-- who was usually if not invariably stumbling across arcane magical doodads-- but also to the original TINTIN stories, many of which included metaphenomenal fantasy or SF concepts.  I'm told that ADVENTURES OF TINTIN reproduces (with some reshuffling) and combines the events of three separate TINTIN albums. Not having read these for many years, I can't comment on the artfulness of Spielberg's adaptation, but for the most part the film's basic logic and clarity of events is admirable, particularly in a film-market where FX-films are assembled out of incoherent bits and pieces (2004's VAN HELSING, for example).  Given that Spielberg had held the rights to TINTIN since 1983, it would seem he had more than a little time to map out just how he wanted to do it.

Like RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, ADVENTURES is a treasure-hunt film, with young reporter Tintin (Jamie Bell) seeking to find the lost pirate treasure of Sir Francis Haddock before the evil fortune-hunter Sakharine (Daniel Craig) and his hired thugs can do so.  Tintin makes common cause with the modern-day descendant of the famed privateer, but said descendant, Captain Haddock, is a drunken reprobate whom Tintin must constantly watch over and chastise in order that they may reach their common goal.

From my recollection of the French comics, I believe that Spielberg does a good job of realizing the "child playing father to the grown man" aspect that made the Tintin-Haddock relationship so fruitful, but it's arguable that Spielberg's version of Haddock represents a type that the director has often favored.  Haddock is in Blakean terms the face of "experience:" man at the end of his tether, symbolically one with Sam Quint of JAWS and Roland Tembo of LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK.  Haddock, fortunately, is redeemed by an avatar of innocence in Tintin, and for the most part manages to pull himself out of the bottle (although his sottishness is played for all the humor it's worth) and become a hero like his much-envied ancestor.  The backstory of Sir Francis Haddock even references a curse put on the Haddock line by a contemporaneous enemy-- pirate Red Rackham, the ancestor of modern-day Sakharine-- but in the end the curse is shown to have no substance.  Whatever effect it's had on Haddock's mind is banished when the captain chooses to follow the example of the indomitable boy reporter.

Tintin is, in essence, the incarnation of youthful beliefs in one's own immortality.  Thus, in the show-stopping Bagghar chase-scene, the young hero indefatigably pursues a flying hawk with such cavalier disregard for his own safety that one would almost think that he had knowledge of his own cartoony invulnerability.  But in essence these feats of derring-do may have less in common with those of Indiana Jones than with those of Buster Keaton.  Tintin isn't as flamboyantly skillful as Jones or similar swashbuckling heroes; rather, he seems to master all the realms he encounters-- the skies, the desert, the seas-- by a Keatonesque force of will.

None of the follow-ups to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK equal the first film for thrills and fun.  However, ADVENTURES is very nearly the equal of RAIDERS in sheer kinetic terms, though it lacks some of that film's deeper philosophical touches.  Again, I'm not sure what if any sequences in ADVENTURES are original with Spielberg, but even when channeling the spirit of Herge through the magic of computer animation, the director shows that his skill at blending humor and suspense remains undiminished.

FLASH GORDON (1980)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

“I love you, Flash, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!”

I probably hadn’t watched Mike Hodges’ FLASH GORDON straight through since seeing it in the theater in 1980.  On watching it again I had most of the same reactions to the film that I did back in the day.  I loved the opulent costuming, which almost but not quite made up for the lack of good visual FX.  Lead heroes Sam J. Jones and Melody Anderson, as Flash Gordon and Dale Allen, still seemed pretty awful.  In contrast Max Von Sydow made a Ming as fearsome and regal as the classic version by Charles Middleton, and Ornella Muti made one sexy Princess Aura. 


On the other hand, I remembered FLASH ‘80 as a very fast-paced film, but this time I noticed an awful lot of slow talking-heads scenes.  This FLASH-film was almost certainly greenlighted on the strength of the serial’s influence on the mega-success STAR WARS, but director Hodges doesn’t come anywhere close to duplicating the breathless quality of either Lucas’ film or the original FLASH serial.  Some of the talking-heads scenes are devoted to portraying all the high intrigue at Ming’s court and in the land of Arboria, so it may be that Hodges and screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. were trying to impart a little more realism to the fantastic manner in which the determined Earth-hero manages to rally the dissident tribes of Mongo against the tyrant Ming.  Given the two-dimensional characters involved, though, those static scenes drag badly.

By the time I saw the 1980 film, I was well aware of Semple’s reputation for campy scripting on the 1960s BATMAN teleseries.  I had ambivalent feelings toward the series, but though some of the camp-humor worked for BATMAN, I remember groaning at the overly obvious humor Semple used in FLASH.  This time, however, I noticed that Jones and Anderson are the only actors saddled with the lame humor.  As Hans Zharkov the actor Topol gives a twitchy but essentially believable performance, and all of the villains—both the classics like Ming and Aura, as well as new creations like Kala and Klytus—play it straight.  In contrast, during the teleseries such villains like Penguin and Catwoman were permitted, not infrequently, to camp things up.  It’s true that Brian Blessed, as Vultan king of the Hawkmen, gets to play a very hammy character, but his performance fits the character.  In contrast Flash’s other “friendly enemy” Prince Barin—who has a mad on for Flash due to Aura’s crush on the Earthman— is a bit over-serious, and might have been better depicted here as a cavalier Han Solo type.

For many years FLASH GORDON was a key myth of the early 20th century.  Alex Raymond learned well the lessons of the TARZAN books and comic strip, for the first year of the FLASH strip show the hero running around slaying copious monsters the same way Tarzan slew jungle-beasts.  That trope was soon set aside to emphasize the struggle of democracy against tyranny.  Hodges and Semple are never able to put across this theme with any consistency, possibly because they chose to focus on Flash as a somewhat airheaded “regular guy” rather than an ultra-principled aristocrat filled with a sense of “noblesse oblige” to other (possibly lesser) races. 

The Hodges FLASH still uses a little of the “Yellow Peril” imagery associated with Ming and Aura, including a scene in which Ming allows his rebellious daughter to be tortured for her disobedience, which reads like various similar scenes in the FU MANCHU books.  Frankly, I prefer the outright use of the original paraphernalia to some more politically correct version (as seen in the 2007 FLASH teleseries).  As always, Ming and Aura exist to threaten white sexuality, though just for a change it might be nice to see a version in which Ming is just as attractive to Dale in a “forbidden fruits” manner as Aura is to Flash.

Among the many Mongo-tribes seen at Ming’s court is a party of black men, one of whom sacrifices his life in an attempt to kill the evil emperor.  The name of this character, “Thun,” was an interesting tip of the hat to the early years of the strip, when for a time Flash ran around with a “lion-man” ally of that name.   However, this tribe never plays any significant role in the story, which focuses largely on Flash’s winning the Hawkmen to his side.  Given that the film wasn’t able to render the troops of winged men realistically—they “fly” at their enemies with rigid and unmoving wings—maybe Hodges would have done better to stick with some down-to-earth “lion-men.”

FLASH ’80 may have also been produced with an eye to the success of 1978’s SUPERMAN.  However, like a smattering of other “comic-book” films produced in response to the Man of Steel’s success—POPEYE, LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER—FLASH crashed and burned at the box office.  Thus the (?) at the end of the film, suggesting a possible sequel, never came to pass.  It’s still enjoyable, though, on the level of good eye-candy, and for the magnetic villainy essayed by Max Von Sydow.