DOOM PATROL (SEASON 1, 2019)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

Of the various jejune devices this show's first season uses to ironically "deconstruct" its superhero subject matter, one of the most tedious is the fact that all 15 episodes have titles that stick some word or words in front of the word "patrol." Thus all the episodes have titles like "Jane Patrol," "Ezekiel Patrol," and even "Doom Patrol Patrol."

I have a title that I think would have applied equally well to all the episodes of the first season (and probably the other seasons as well):

"Snark Patrol."

History: DC Comics' original superhero title from the 1960s, THE DOOM PATROL, was a straight superhero-adventure title with large doses of comedy relief and with heroes who were all damaged in some way-- a cyborg with a human brain, a radioactive man swathed in bandages, and so on. In the late 1980s, British writer Grant Morrison, ostensibly a fan of the original series, produced a wild absurdist take on some of the original teammates, as well new additions. The Morrison tenure had ironic aspects to it, but its focus emphasized dazzling flights of the imagination.

Not so the four seasons of the DOOM PATROL teleseries. The writers incorporate various ideas from Morrison in the course of the first season, but shoehorned into a clunky plotline in which the four members of the current Patrol-- analogues of the comics-characters Robotman, Crazy Jane, Elasti-Girl and Negative Man-- are forced by supercriminal Mister Nobody to seek the missing scientist who brought them all together, Niles Caulder, a.k.a. The Chief. But at no point do the scripts incorporate any sense of wonder at all the bizarre entities the Patrol encounters. Instead, the writers substitute a repetitive "what the fuck now" attitude about everything, including the protagonists' own revelations about their own inner demons. 

The most I can say for the series is that once or twice a given episode improved on something I found weak in Morrison's original run. For instance, in keeping with the "gloom and doom" mood of eighties comics, Morrison changed the beneficent figure of Niles Caulder into a manipulative monster who changed the heroes from ordinary humans into freaks so that he The Chief could play God. In the interests of making the Chief viable for an ongoing series, the writers kept that trope but gave the Chief a somewhat altruistic reason for his actions. Still, the occasional improvement does not make up for all of the heavy-handed snarkiness.

More interesting for me than the series proper are speculations about why PATROL turned out so badly. The show was one of the last projects for the streaming service DC Universe, which perhaps inevitably ran out of money and was absorbed into HBO Max during PATROL's run. Prior to PATROL, two of the big-name producers attached to it-- Greg Berlanti and Geoff Johns-- had worked on a four-season series, TITANS. But since that was based on a more typical superhero title, its showrunner Greg Walker played things straight.

I won't put the whole burden of badness on the PATROL showrunner Jeremy Carver, since he was probably told by his superiors to incorporate more absurdist humor into this adaptation. But in the final analysis, he's probably mostly responsible for the repetitive tone and the lack of imagination. But then, DOOM PATROL is hardly the only superhero project of the 21st century to suffer from indifference to the sense of wonder.

Wrapping up, I may not like most of the characters, but all of the actors comported themselves well, particularly Diane Guerrero as Jane. There are some "woke" touches to the first season, such as blather about toxic masculinity (some of which is also found in Morrison) and in making the Jane character Hispanic for no particular reason. But those nods to political correctness didn't damage the storylines as they have many MCU streaming shows, and if I had to choose the lesser of two evils, I suppose I'd have to choose boring snark over tedious lectures.

THE SPIRIT (2008)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I've long put off reviewing THE SPIRIT, because it's difficult to talk about the process by which a Good Artist seeks to adapt the work of another Good Artist and ends up producing Bad Art.

When the movie debuted in 2008, most of the fan-reaction was negative. Will Eisner's SPIRIT-- a specialized type of comic book that ran for a little over ten years, from the early forties to the early fifties-- had started out as a straightforward adventure-strip about a domino-masked vigilante in the pre-war period. But what most SPIRIT fans favored was Eisner's so-called post-war period, when Eisner began utilizing his formidable gifts to focus on the literary forms of drama and comedy. 

In contrast, Miller hit the big time in the later eighties and the rest of the nineties with a variety of works-- DAREDEVIL, 300, SIN CITY, and two major Batman projects-- which all fit the form of adventure. (Elsewhere I've argued that ELEKTRA ASSASSIN best fits the form of the irony.) Miller often stated his admiration for Eisner, and the two artists were friends up until Eisner's passing in 2005. Because of these factors, I believe that Eisner-fans expected that Miller, when he wrote the SPIRIT film, would seek to emulate some aspects of the drama-and-comedy stories that the fans had esteemed. 

This was, to put the matter mildly, a false expectation; there was no way that Frank Miller, master of comic-book ultraviolence, was going to follow the sort of low-key SPIRIT-stories those fans wanted. Yet, all that said, I found my own experience of the 2008 movie left me less than enthused with the result.

The problem I see in Miller's adaptation is that since 2001-- the year that he came out with a fifteen-years-later sequel to THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- the artist became increasingly fascinated with the form of irony, which stresses a type of dark, potentially nihilistic humor. This YouTube video by one Salazar Knight puts forth a detailed analysis of 2001's THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN in which he argues that this limited series hugely disappointed Batman-fans because Miller delivered not a respectful take on the Bat-mythos, as had the 1986 KNIGHT, but a wild and confused parody of the superhero genre as it had developed in the 1990s (at least partly in response to Miller's influence). I won't pursue Salazar's argument in detail, but I believe that Miller had analogous motives in his approach to adapting Will Eisner's SPIRIT.

By 2008 Miller had accrued great Hollywood repute thanks to the successful 2005 adaptation of his 1990s SIN CITY stories. These stories, while not without moments of acerbic humor, were dominantly adventurous film noir narratives. Miller thus got the nod to write and direct THE SPIRIT on the strength of the SIN CITY movie's success. However, since 2001 Miller's creative priorities had changed.

If my terms for literary forms might seem a bit abstruse, I might also cite some better-known terms for the differing ways that Eisner and Miller treated humor. Eisner's SPIRIT hews closest to what film studies call "the screwball comedy," where the humor's very light and sprightly. But Miller's SPIRIT piles on overbaked noir-tropes so heavily that he creates a self-aware burlesque of the genre. When the film starts out with the hero (Gabriel Macht) leaping about the rooftops of Central City, fantasizing that to him the city is like a "good mother" that does not paint itself like a gaudy hooker (I forget the exact wording), clearly Miller's head is in a different place.

Technically Miller keeps the skeletal of a dramatic Eisner plot, from an early 1950s storyline in which the crimefighter met a long-vanished girlfriend, Sand Saref (Eva Mendes in the film), who showed up in Central City as a part of a new crime-scheme, thus setting up the conflict of the two former lovers. Miller had used elements of the "Sand" story for his "origin of Elektra" tale, and so it was perhaps natural enough that he would choose the same narrative for the SPIRIT film. And to the extent that the movie even comes close to an Eisner original, Miller's script is moderately faithful.

However, everything else is Looney Tunes. In the Eisner story, Sand came to the city seeking to sell a germ-warfare weapon, and something similar happens in the film's first half-hour. However, the Spirit is alerted that his frequent enemy the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) has some scheme going on. So when the hero shows up at Sand's entry-point, he's attacked by Octopus, who engages Spirit in a furious battle that culminates in the villain slamming an old toilet over the hero's head.

How does the hero survive? Well, Eisner frequently showed his vigilante protagonist getting the tar beat out of him, but in a loosely realistic manner. But Miller was hugely invested in ultraviolence, so he reworked both Spirit and Octopus into Wolverine-like beings able to heal rapidly from massive injuries. This rewriting was also Miller's way of justifying the hero's reason for calling himself "The Spirit," because he literally died but came back to life due to a super-serum. He even talks to a death-spirit named Lorelei (Jamie King), whose voice is heard only by "sailors and cops," and who continually bids him to return to her "cold embrace."

Octopus fails to get the item Sand brings to Central City, despite being aided by Doctor Silken Floss (Scarlet Johansson) and her crew of identical goofball clones. (The "Silken Floss" in the comics was not a villain, incidentally.) But I'll give away what the movie doesn't reveal until the last hour: Sand hasn't smuggled in a germplasm, but "The Blood of Heracles," which is supposedly the genuine blood of the Greek demigod. Octopus-- who seems to be the only person interested in this prize-- thinks that if he drinks this substance, it will transform him into a god who can conquer the world.

Yes, we're a long way from film noir here. And to keep up the Looney Tunes mood, Miller constantly gives almost every character bizarre lines, ranging from Floss making some comment about drugs that make people's "teeth turn into graham crackers" to Octopus frequently ranting about "eggs" for unknown reason. Next to some of these gems, the hero's soliloquy to the city almost sounds rational.

While the Spirit chases around trying to track down both Sand and Octopus, he's frequently waylaid by such beautiful women, where they're femmes fatales like Sand and the dancer "Plaster of Paris," or relatively good girls like Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson). In the comic she's the hero's faithful girlfriend, and here she's upgraded to a doctor who constantly cares for his wounds but is no less motivated to hogtie the vigilante to her alone. In fact, one of the few worthwhile things about Miller's version of the Spirit is that the crimefighter can't seem to turn off the charm when in the presence of hot women. Certainly, the hero's sex appeal works better than any of his exaggerated athletics.

Macht is decent in the role despite its problematic concept, and most of the actors deliver what Miller wanted of them. But Samuel L. Jackson is awful from start to finish. Perhaps he justified his wild histrionics with the idea that he had to be "the over-reactor" to Macht's "under-reactor," but he unlike other performers seems to relish all of Miller's absurd dialogue.

It's amusing that Miller somewhat name-checks his own creation by having a lady cop claim that Sand Saref suffers from an "Electra complex." However, the Spirit would seem to suffer from the opposing Oedipus complex, for instead of choosing any single female with whom he might "settle down" and protect, he devotes his existence, both at the opening and closing, to the Great Mother of the City. Some of these loose insights are what makes Miller's SPIRIT into "bad art," and not just your average "bad movie."

WATCHMEN (2009)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

So when Terry Gilliam said the WATCHMEN graphic novel was "unfilmable"-- more or less echoing the opinion of the novel's co-creator Alan Moore-- he was obviously proven wrong when the Zach Snyder adaptation appeared in 2009. Now, Gilliam, like Moore, may have meant that one could not do a GOOD film based on the multi-layered work by Moore and Dave Gibbons. But though Snyder's version has its problems, its shortcomings don't prove total impossibility of good adaptation.

It's fair to say that the time generally allotted to commercial feature films-- usually not over three hours, as WATCHMEN is-- does not allow all the details of an intricately layered prose novel like MOBY DICK or WAR AND PEACE, or a comics-novel of similar complexity. Indeed, in my own review of WATCHMEN, I forewent analyzing the entire scope of the graphic work, instead concentrating upon a major visual trope that played into the narrative's principal themes.

For similar reasons of space, I'm not going to break down the entire plot of the 2009 adaptation. I find it more interesting to explore how Snyder tries to compress the dense storylines of Moore and Gibbons' five principal characters--six, if you count the one who dies at the movie's beginning.

The graphic novel displays skillful syncopation between the main plotline-- the five heroes investigating the murder of their former comrade-- with flashbacks to their past experiences. Snyder is not able to shuttle forth between present and past nearly as well; his transitions range from adequate to clunky. Most modern film-audiences have a limited tolerance for flashbacks, since they interfere with the perceived need for forward momentum in a commercial movie. Snyder includes many of the same minutiae that play into the resolution of the main plot. but he's not able to make the characters play off one another well enough to sell the emotional significance of their past experiences. I tend to connect Snyder's failing in this quarter with his well-known penchant for visual bombast.

The character who gets the best exposure is Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a formerly ordinary scientist transformed into a godlike atomic superman. In fact, the script by David Hayter and Alex Tse builds up Manhattan's role with respect to the story's climax, and some viewers have preferred the way the Snyder version reworks Moore's resolution. Certainly I think the altered climax works better for a movie, since it cuts down on the number of extraneous details. However, the script also elides most of the human support-characters, which muddies the main theme: the way ordinary humans are bringing their entire existence to the brink of a nuclear doom.

The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is seen only in other character's flashbacks since he's dead from the outset. Still, his significance in illustrating Moore's dark view of America is crystal clear. The same is true of retired superhero Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), who is the most balanced of the five. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) proves a much weaker link, for though it's clear early on that he's something of a "Doc Savage" type of superman, not until late in the film does Snyder give the viewers a window into his nature. Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) has several good scenes as a costumed heroine seeking to find some normalcy after having been the live-in girlfriend of the aforementioned atomic superman. However, the script utterly blows her major revelation-subplot-- her discovery of her parentage-- by not foregrounding that part of her psyche early on. Finally, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) is the character the script utterly fails to capture, despite a vivid performance by Haley. Alan Moore's original story is partly at fault-- he wasn't able to make up his mind if Rorschach was a super-conservative or a Nietzschean superman. Ironically, many WATCHMEN readers embraced Rorschach as their favorite character, much to the consternation of Alan Moore. But clearly Snyder and his writers played down this character because they didn't quite follow what Moore and Gibbons wanted to communicate with this vigilante personality.

There are some scattered improvements. I was no fan of Moore's Brechtian asides in which he paralleled ongoing plot events to snippets from a gruesome story about piratical savagery. Happily, all those snippets were put aside and adapted into an animated motion-capture project. Moore and Gibbons, preoccupied with satirizing the superhero idiom, skimped on the depiction of the sort of spectacular violence of the genre. Not all of Snyder's violent scenarios work, but I thought he improved on the prison scene, in which Nite Owl and Silk Specter must punch and kick their way through a prison riot in order to liberate a captive Rorschach. Some scenes might have worked better if Snyder and his people had not lumbered them with a plethora of "golden oldies" tunes, all so overly familiar that they often distract rather than enhancing.

I'll wrap up by stating that though I judge the original graphic novel to sustain a high mythic concrescence, I ended up downgrading the "secondary concrescence" of the Snyder film to "fair." Snyder reproduced many of the symbols used by Moore and Gibbons, but he was unable to bring them together to make a strong discourse. If anything, Snyder overdoes the political elements, as if he thinks that's all his audience can understand. This is rather amusing, given that Moore is legendary in many of his comics-works for an political attitude of maximum acidity.

HARLEY QUINN, SEASON 1

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

In my remarks on MAD LOVE, I noted that during Harley Quinn's early appearances, co-creator Paul Dini avoided showing her commit any homicides, even when she might have tried to do so. Possibly Dini wasn't entirely sure what he wanted to do with the character. One of Dini's personal friends voiced Harley, and maybe Dini had some instinct that he might play the demented damsel as something other than just a duplicate of her murderous boyfriend The Joker. Within less than two years from Harley's television debut, Dini wrote MAD LOVE, and planted the seed that Harley might come to see her relationship with Joker as toxic, in strong contradistinction to her BFF bond with fellow super-villainess Poison Ivy.

Eventually Harley became so popular with fans-- at least partly because of her breakup with the Mountebank of Mirth-- that she got her own comic book serials, and, in 2019, her own animated show on stream-TV. The three writer-producers of the show-- I'm just gonna call them Three Guys-- not only center the first season on Harley's breakup with Joker, they justify Harley's rampages as a reaction against The Patriarchy That Keeps Women and Non-Whites Down. 

Three Guys' world is also a world in which the villains are the stars and the heroes are all a bunch of semi-competent stiffs who don't get the joke. It's an ironic reversal-of-values concept, strikingly similar to Mark Millar's equally meretricious graphic novel WANTED. As in the Millar work, ultraviolence and explicit language are the main attractions. In this world Harley is just as committed to wholesale slaughter as Joker, which, in one respect, is a logical development for a crazy woman in love with a mass murderer. The first episode of Season 1 shows Harley raid a ship full of rich pricks (who are tagged as "Whites," which means it's OK to kill them even if they're not explicitly lawbreakers). The only reason Harley doesn't kill the fat cats is because her egotistical BF intervenes to do most of the killing. This honks off Harley because she wants to establish her own super-villain rep, with the side-mission of joining the world's greatest villain-cabal, The Legion of Doom.

Joker leaves Harley in the lurch and she's confined in Arkham for the next year. Her friend Ivy tries to convince Harley that Joker's neglect shows his true lack of regard for his supposed girlfriend, but Harley takes a lot of convincing. After she finally breaks up with Joker, Harley attempts to carve out her rep independent of Joker, petitioning the Legion of Doom for membership and gathering a crew of ne'er-do-well super-crooks: Clayface, King Shark, and Doctor Psycho. Psycho, incidentally, is also used as a feminist whipping boy: despite being a villain who's committed countless crimes, he suffers societal cancellation and ejection from the Legion because he publicly uses the "c-word" for his nemesis Wonder Woman.

The level of satire here matches that of a vignette on ROBOT CHICKEN, where superhero tropes are slammed with loads of juvenile scat humor. I'm not sure how serious the Three Guys are in their condemnations of Evil White Patriarchs, but they say nothing of consequence about the subject. At times they come closer to exposing the extremes of ultraliberal rhetoric, probably unintentionally. The closest the Three Guys come to satire is when Harley visits her decadent parents in Bensonhurst, and is promptly betrayed by them, because their super-villain daughter cut off their path to social climbing.

I must admit the animation looks good both in the action scenes and in the "character moments," broad as they are. Sometimes the jokes about the comics-characters are funny, usually if they're executed quickly a la ROBOT CHICKEN, but longer sequences, like the evisceration of Commissioner Gordon, prove monotonous. I give the mythicity a rating of "fair" simply because the characters of Harley and Ivy have good chemistry even when put through a rhetorical wringer, though I found Ivy a little bit too "goody-good" compared to her comics incarnation. The mythos of this season is definitely that of irony, in which all values are mortified, as in being ground down in a mortar.

 

ROBOT NINJA (1989)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

If anyone had told me I'd give even a "fair" mythicity rating to a micro-budgeted superhero flick from the director of WITCHOUSE, I would have considered that a faulty prediction. It wouldn't have helped the case for ROBOT NINJA that, in addition to being written and directed by J.R. Bookwalter, it was produced by another purveyor of DTV junk, Dave DeCouteau.

Nevertheless, even though the titular hero is neither a robot nor a ninja, Bookwalter's bloody-minded hero captures the mood of American comics as they became fully committed to new, adult levels of sex and violence. This movement was foregrounded by certain developments in the seventies, such as the appearance of the claw-handed Wolverine in the new X-MEN comic, but in the eighties, the mode known as "the grim and the gritty" became dominant. Yet hardly any eighties makers of live-action superheroes showed any awareness of this sea-change. The one major exception to this generalization was Tim Burton, whose 1989 BATMAN transformed cinema's ideas about costumed crusaders. NINJA didn't transform anything, and indeed, Bookwalter's been quoted as saying he doesn't like the film these days. But NINJA deserves some credit for tapping into the mentality of the time, and for channeling it into an unusually ironic approach that looks forward to the cinematic adaptations of Mark Millar's KICK-ASS.

Leonard Miller (Michael Todd) has created the comic-book hero "Robot Ninja" out of a fierce passion for justice, though the script gives viewers no reason for his obsession. The hero is published by the rinky-dink looking "Savoy Comics," but Miller has a little control over the comics proper. However, he ceded to the company the right to merchandise the character, and the result is that Robot Ninja has become a hit TV show, but rendered as goony comedy, allegedly in imitation of the 1966 BATMAN. Miller expresses his contempt for the adaptation to publisher Stanley Kane (the redoubtable Burt Ward) and Kane's secretary (Linnea Quigley), but they don't care. Kane warns that he may replace Miller when his contract is up, which sounds like the publisher does have some provisional control, possibly like the arrangement Siegel and Shuster accepted for DC Comics to publish SUPERMAN.

Miller's real troubles stem not from corporate malfeasance, but from street-crime. The artist tries to intervene when a gang of hoods, led by a bulky woman named Sanchez, interfere with a young fellow and his date. The gang kills both innocents and leaves Miller wounded. Filled with a righteous desire for vengeance, Miller appeals to a scientist-friend, Doctor Goodknight, to build him a super-suit like the one worn by Robot Ninja, complete with huge claws extending from the gloves (note the probable Wolverine influence).

The rest of the film is devoted to a series of hit-and-run encounters between Robot Ninja and the street-toughs. In many similar heroic stories, the hero's thrashing of lowly punks is just a baptism of fire. But even though Robot Ninja kills at least one of the gang-members in the first battle, he takes quite a few hits. He escapes to his home, having had his first taste of the challenges of being a vigilante. More, the punks don't simply fade into the woodwork; they keep looking for the masked hero for vengeance. Miller has a falling-out with Goodknight, who thinks the artist is causing more harm than good. Miller does manage to destroy his opponents, but in the process he suffers so much that he can no longer live with himself, leading to an exceedingly depressing denouement. A vigilante's lot, contrary to the hype, is not a happy one.

I don't want to omit NINJA's many faults, the worst being the pusillanimous acting by all of the performers. But Bookwalter does use some interesting angled shots to cover up the paltriness of his budget, and though the budget's also too low for any of the gore-FX to be convincing, the gore does serve the purpose of the story, given that Miller has to find out that it's not all that easy just to put on a fancy suit and kick the ass of evil.

It's standard for low-budget filmmakers to include posters of their own earlier movies in their efforts, and so Miller's walls include Bookwalter's DEAD NEXT DOOR and DeCouteau's MURDER WEAPON. But it's not so standard for a filmmaker to show awareness of key comic-book products. Most film-people avoid specifics. You would never catch M. Night Shyamalan's "comic book movie" UNBREAKABLE mentioning the DARK KNIGHT RETURNS or THE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES. Indeed, Bookwalter probably gave his hero that nonsensical name in partial response to the success of the Turtles. When the artist (who may be named for Frank Miller) attacks the thugs the first time, a hoodlum speaks a line-- "don't do it, hero-man!"-- that sounds like it might have been written by some mainstream scribe like Len Wein. Bookwalter also mentions the term "graphic novel" at a time when not a lot of people had heard it, and exploitative publisher Stanley Kane seems named for two comics-professionals most often accused (whether fairly or not) for exploitation of talent: Stan Lee and Bob Kane.

DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

The name "Roger Corman" does not usually get paired with the concept of irony, and even the few movies he's made within that category, such as 1959's A BUCKET OF BLOOD, tend to be among his more cheapjack efforts. But DEATH RACE 2000 is actually a better satire than a lot of arthouse efforts, precisely because it wallows in the sort of spectacle with which Corman's name is synonymous-- lots of sex and violence. To be sure, viewers will never know how RACE would have turned out had director Paul Bartel not been forced to elide a lot of his preferred humor-scenes, almost certainly in favor of more breasts and blood. But the result is a balancing act between the priorities of Corman, the consummate carny showman, and Bartel the aesthete trying to eschew mere kinetic entertainment.

It's 2000, and the American government has become a totalitarian government which keeps citizens happy with bread and circuses in the form of the Transcontinental Road Race. The drivers in the race are not only allowed to kill one another if they can, they're also allowed to run down any citizens that get near the race track, for "bonus points." This combination of gladiatorial games and government-imposed euthanasia doesn't go over well with everyone, so a Resistance group led by Thomasina Paine (descendant of the Revolutionary War philosopher) seeks to undermine America's corrupt regime by sabotaging the race.

Most of the racers have become popular personalities with names approximating those of professional wrestlers: "Nero the Hero," "Matilda the Hun," and "Machine Gun Joe," the last being a guy outfitted like a thirties-style gangster and played by a young Sylvester Stallone. Machine Gun is the second most popular racer with the frantic fans, but the favorite is Frankenstein (David Carradine), a mysterious costumed combatant whose face-mask is said to conceal scars from many racing injuries. Each contestant drives with a navigator in the passenger's seat, and in Frankenstein's case, he gets a comely young woman named Annie (Simone Griffith) as his new partner.

In no time the racers are flying down the track, callously running down any pedestrians-- even fans-- incautious enough to come close. At the same time, the rebels begin setting traps for the cars, and even Frankenstein almost falls victim. He begins to suspect Annie of colluding with the Resistance. Meanwhile, Annie learns that Frankenstein's supposed disfigurement is just a narrative designed to justify the wearing of the mask, since the government constructed the identity so that various wards of the state could assume the persona. (Thus, this "Frankenstein" is made up not of disparate body parts but of disparate people.) With all of this unburdening of secrets, eventually Frankenstein and Annie end up in bed together, though at first it appears to be something of a "wham bam" encounter. However, the taciturn road-warrior reveals that he shares the ambition of the Resistance: to get close enough to the President to kill him. But before this ambivalent hero can do so, he has to get past the blasting assaults of Machine Gun.

Since the script was produced by three primary contributors, I can't say which may have contributed the naive notion of being able to overthrow a regime just by killing off the head of state. But the way in which the notion is conveyed-- complete with Frankenstein and his bride Annie immediately assuming the status of the new rulers-- draws attention to the falseness of the trope, so that, like all ironies, it subtly undermines the myths it seemingly endorses-- though arguably doing nothing but making a different type of myth.

SOMEBODY'S STOLEN OUR RUSSIAN SPY (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In my review of the first film in this series, THE SECOND BEST SECRET AGENT IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, I went into great detail as to why I felt the arch humor in the movie qualified it for the literary category of the irony. At the time I had not seen either of the two sequels, both of which starred Tom Adams as secret agent Charles Vine, and I still have not seen the second in the series. I can't be sure if that movie maintained the ironic tone of the first one, but to my surprise, SPY does. The only personnel who seems to have been associated with all three flicks, aside from star Adams, is producer James Ward, so maybe the continued tone owes a lot to his co-writing credits on the third film-- all of which was shot in Spain and Portugal by a Spanish director, whereas the first two originated in the UK.

For once, the plot does not revolve around finding some vital super-weapon, but rather, the "Russian spy" of the title (actually, an ambassador). Vine learns that the Russian ambassador was kidnapped as part of a complicated plot designed by the Chinese and the Albanians to pit Russian and British forces against one another. This gambit gives Vine the chance to travel to various exotic locales and become inveigled with various exotic women, with only one or two fights to interrupt things. Eventually Vine is taken prisoner and shipped to a Communist refuge in Albania, where he's held not by Chinese but by their Russian allies. (A breakaway group? Who knows?) The Russians become overly preoccupied with forcing Vine to defect to their side, rather than just killing him, and they use on him both foul means (a torture device that spins him around in place) and fair (a sultry female spy who ends up liberating Vine from imprisonment). Once Vine and the lady spy (Diana Lorys) escape from the installation, they spend an inordinate time dodging the military on their way back to the free world. The pursuit-section doesn't have much to do with the main plot, but for a cheap B-flick the military tanks and trucks look impressive.

There aren't as many odd weapons here as one sees in SECOND BEST, but it's quite evident that the script regards such things through the lens of irony. At the beginning, Vine is summoned by his bosses by the "experiment" of having a female agent shoot him with a curare dart. Later, when Vine is being taken prisoner by the Chinese, the leader-- who claims that "all's well that ends well" is taken from Confucius-- shoots Vine with a similar dart, albeit from a blowgun concealed in a smoking-pipe. The action is just OK but the emphasis on Eurobabes is exemplary, particularly regarding Diana Lorys, who projects both hostility and allure in equal measures-- though she only gets to perform one measly karate chop during the escape section of the flick.

FANTOMAS (1964), FANTOMAS STRIKES AGAIN (1965), FANTOMAS VS. SCOTLAND YARD (1967)

PHENOMENALITY: (1,3) *uncanny,* (2) *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

Though the silent adaptations of FANTOMAS are lauded by many critics, the most accessible movies featuring the master criminal are these three French productions of the sixties. All were directed by Andre Hunubelle, and all star Jean Marais as this version of Fantomas, who still assumes many disguises but now wears an expressionless blue face-mask much of the time. Marais also plays the role of the evildoer’s most formidable foe, the journalist Fandor, while Mylene Demongeot plays his stalwart girlfriend Helene and Louis de Funes plays a very comical version of Inspector Juve.

A Wikipedia article assets that these movies were greatly affected by the then-current craze for superspy movies. There are dollops of Bondian content here and there, but on the whole the scripts don’t attempt to emulate the linear storylines of the Bond films. Though the trilogy places more emphasis on swashbuckling action than the silent films did, Hunubelle appears to be following the lead of Feuillade in showing the action evolving in a haphazard manner. I spotted a few srory-elements borrowed from the first “Fantomas” book—particularly the villain’s aristocratic mistress Lady Beltham-- but I tend to doubt that any of the films are direct adaptations.

The first book gives the reporter Fandor a personal reason for pursuing the super-crook, from whom the journalist takes his nom de plume. FANTOMAS dispenses with this conceit. Fandor, having heard of the criminal’s depredations, and to stir things up, files a phony interview with the fiend in his newspaper. The enraged Fantomas captures Fandor, rather incredibly railing at the journalist for abusing “the public trust,” and promising to force Fandor into a career of crime, in part by impersonating him. The first film starts off strong and shows Fantomas using some low-level gimmicks like the Bond villains, but falls apart with an overly long chase scene.

FANTOMAS STRIKES AGAIN is the closest thing in the series to a Bond film, since it’s the only one where the villain eschews his more limited operations and seeks to rule the world. He plans to usurp control of a scientist’s research, which can be applied to massive brainwashing of citizens, though the mind-control angle gets far less emphasis than the villain’s tricky masquerades. But there are far more Bondian gimmicks, in that Fantomas has a secret hideout in a volcano and a car that turns into a plane. Even goofy Juve gets in on the superspy action, using a cigar with a gun in it to good effect.

FANTOMAS VS. SCOTLAND YARD finds the villain returning to relatively penny-ante schemes, trying to force a cabal of rich businessmen to pay him tribute. This leads Fandor, Helene and Juve to rendezvous at a Scottish castle, where various spooky things happen. I frankly couldn’t follow whether or not the villain’s plans had been foiled by the time he made his inevitable escape.

Unlike the first novel and the silent film-series, all of which I’d class as subcombative dramas, the film series proves a little harder to pin down. All three films definitely fall into the combative mode, with Marais playing a very two-fisted reporter, even if his blue-masked foe lets his pawns do most of his fighting. Yet despite some impressive spectacles, the film never seems all that invested in the adventure-aspects. Juve is constantly played for baggy-pants comedy—which proves amusing in small portions—but the trilogy is not primarily a comedy either, and it’s certainly doesn’t have a dramatic angle. My finding, then, is that Hubesmith is playing all of this high adventure with the kind of arch, removed humor characteristic of the irony.

AEON FLUX: THE COMPLETE ANIMATED COLLECTION (2005)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*


Of all the mythoi to employ the combative mode, that of the "irony" is the least common. Of the hundreds of films or teleseries collections I've reviewed here since the blog's genesis, AEON FLUX THE COLLECTION is only the sixteenth combative irony.

In my review of the 2005 live-action adaptation of the cartoon, I mentioned that I hadn't seen the cartoons in some time and thus wasn't sure whether they hewed closer to irony or to adventure, although the live-action film was pretty solidly aligned with the latter. However, the summation I wrote of the Aeon Flux cosmos remains accurate:

The original “Aeon Flux” cartoons, produced in the 1990s by Peter Chung for MTV’s “Liquid Television,” became popular with viewers chiefly through their feel of enigmatic unpredictability. The scantily garbed Aeon, an inhabitant of a far-future civilization, engaged in assorted obscure missions, sometimes including assassination, against the forces of city-ruler Trevor Goodchild, sort of a futuristic Nero, albeit rendered with more irony.  On occasion Aeon was “killed,” but came to life by the next episode.

I should note here that only in the first series of "Aeon" cartoons-- ranging from 2-minute to 5-minute episodes-- did the heroine repeatedly perish. Since these shorts were scored but almost totally lacked dialogue, this facet of the heroine's history went unexplained. Then AEON FLUX became a half-hour standalone cartoon show with full dialogue, during which season the possibility of Aeon's having clones was bandied about slightly. However, creator Peter Chung's entire approach to the genre of that SF-genre one might call "future revolution stories" remained consistently elliptical and evasive even when the presence of dialogue gave Chung more opportunity for exposition.

The ten episodes of the half-hour series continually place the leather-clad Aeon in some peculiar situation, toss off a modicum of explanation, and then follow the heroine about in her vaguely defined missions, usually against the forces commanded by Trevor Goodchild. As in many revolutionary stories, villain Goodchild is identified with repressive government, while hero Aeon is lined up, at least in theory, with the forces of liberation. However, Chung may also have borrowed from ironic forms of the espionage genre, since the two sides are often morally ambiguous. Goodchild is often shown to be a scientist in the Frankenstein tradition, seeking to extend the power of humankind to explore new vistas of technology, while Aeon Flux urges caution and restraint. Further contributing to their ambiguity is their past history as lovers, a history that remains in play. Even in the midst of their conflicts, Aeon and Goodchild are occasionally given to embracing and fondling one another. In keeping with the MTV audience of the time, everything in the animated universe has a quasi-sexual vibe, but the sense of the erotic almost always is attended by elements of frustration.

For instance, in one episode Aeon becomes implicated in killing a female enemy agent, and then becomes interested in the dead agent's boyfriend. She pulls the fellow out of trouble, and the two of them sustain a sort of Bogey-and-Bacall badinage during their doomed relationship.

AEON: "Why would I be interested in hurting you?"
GUY (apparently regarding her leather attire): "You look as though you might."
AEON: "You look as though you might enjoy it."

But though couples in this cosmos can get off, no one can get a happy ending, and the short-run series ends on the same ironic tone of non-consummation as when it started.

Parenthetically, in a commentary track Chung addresses the matter of Aeon's skimpy attire. He never says outright that he designed the heroine's clothing to attract "the male gaze," nor does he mention whether or not he received any complaints about Aeon's leathers during the series. He does, however, aver that he avoided giving her many clothes because, in an animated project, the attempt to delineate garments often interferes with what he considered a more important value: that of capturing the expressivity of the human form, in keeping with the priorities of classical art. His explanation is certainly better than most of the lame defenses most artists make for depicting the unclothed female form, and though it may only be a partial truth-- like many of the truths one encounters in an irony-drenched world-- the truth-value has a conditional reality at the very least.

MODESTY BLAISE (1966)

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


Here's a mini-review I recently wrote on the Classic Horror board:

As I type this, I've almost finished watching MB on Youtube. I can appreciate Losey's use of vivid, primary colors and weird angles, but he's taken the story O'Donnell did and flummoxed it around for the sake of "artiness." Reportedly in the day he claimed he was going to "out-Bond Bond," but had never seen a whole Bond film, and so only had his own skewed perception of what the genre was about. OUR MAN FLINT is a much more successful spoofy spy-flick-- heck, even the obscure OUT OF SIGHT understands how to play on the tropes better. Why Losey thought his Antonioni borrowings would play in Peoria is beyond me.
I've seen a lot of criticism of Vitti, but I think she was just doing what she was told to do, to be airy-fairy and silly, and she did that well. It just didn't help sell the movie.

Of course I have a few more things to say about this famous misfire. The MODESTY BLAISE comic strip, written by Peter O'Donnell, debuted in 1963, and its success with the public coincided with the "Bond fever" unleashed by the 1962 movie DOCTOR NO. Technically the sophisticated Modesty Blaise and her partner Willie Garvin weren't any sort of espionage agents. But because they were reformed master criminals, they had a working knowledge of the subcultures of crime and espionage, and most of their exploits were only different from those of Bond in that they were independent agents who answered only to their own sense of justice. At some point, the franchise was optioned for film adaptation, and O'Donnell provided a screenplay, based partly on the first outing of Modesty and Willie. Though O'Donnell's screenplay was only marginally influential on the finished film, the author novelized his story in the first prose novel, MODESTY BLAISE. Though I haven't read the novel in many years, I recall it as a tautly-written adventure-story informed by humor and strong sentiment. The novel has no metaphenomenal elements, though other stories in both the comic strip and the prose adaptations employed such elements on occasion. The 1966 film does have a few uncanny devices-- gas-bombs and something called "antisonar"-- which place the solo film into the realm of the uncanny.

Director Joseph Losey, best known at the time for his 1963 arthouse success THE SERVANT, reportedly found O'Donnell's script boring, though he kept just the bare bones of the original story, in which Modesty (Monica Vitti) and Willie (Terence Stamp) take on master criminal Gabriel (Dirk Bogarde) and his small army of henchmen. Whereas O'Donnell provided a crisp adventure-tale involving stolen diamonds, this setup was for Losey merely an excuse for endless shots of Vitti fluttering around various exotic locales in bizarre costumes.

Twice blonde-haired Vitti is made up to look like the comic-strip character, complete with brunette hair and quasi-military outfit.  But at no time does Losey give either of the two heroes any resemblance to their tough-as-nails predecessors. Willie does a little bit of his signature knife-fighting, and Modesty does a little clumsy judo, but Losey seems utterly uninterested in giving the audience anything approximating thrills. Had he spent even a tenth of his costume budget on stuntwork, maybe MODESTY would've been improved slightly. As it stands, the only scene that offers some suspense is one in which Gabriel's perverse right-hand henchwoman beats up a mime and throws off a cliff. In the original story, the mime is an undercover man, but the script by Evan Jones (who had worked with Losey on three previous projects) doesn't even provide that rationale. I suspect that Losey only kept this scene true to the original because it tickled his love for surrealistic imagery.

While Losey shows no interest in the travails of Modesty and Willie, the villain Gabriel comes close to being the real star of the show, as Losey apparently instructed Bogarde to play the character as a flaming, effete homosexual. Thus the film is replete with countless scenes of Gabriel lounging around and making ironic pronouncements-- though none of his supposedly humorous asides are funny.

Speaking of irony, Losey certainly intended to undercut the straightforward adventure of the original narrative and replace it with something like "camp," although Losey apparently did not understand that true camp only mocks its narrative very indirectly. One can't call MODESTY "satire" either, since there's no target for any animus. So by default MODESTY becomes a free-form irony, mocking the supposed pretensions of adventure-fiction with yet greater pretensions.

The movie's sole virtue is its use of vibrant primary colors. But in many respects, even though it's an irony like the 1968 BARBARELLA, the later film took the opposite course: piecing together various sequences from the picarescque French comic feature and making them into a relatively tight whole.

ERIK THE VIKING (1989)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*


Wikipedia informs me that this Terry Jones-directed film was based on a children's book with a similar title, written by Jones, though the article asserts that the film bears no resemblance to the book. I would assume that the main purpose in making the film was not to keep fidelity to the source-novel, but to give the Monty Python troupe another shot at making another irony-laden costume epic, like 1975's HOLY GRAIL and  1979's LIFE OF BRIAN. I liked LIFE OF BRIAN but was not a great fan of HOLY GRAIL. For me ERIK falls in between, though it's nowhere near as quote-worthy as GRAIL.

Erik (Tim Robbins) is a young Viking who has just never warmed to his people's penchant for rape and pillage. He joins his comrades in raiding a village, but when he meets a woman who fully expects to be raped-- and to some extent, even encourages it-- Erik just can't work up the, uh, enthusiasm. The woman's killed shortly after, without being raped, but this just depresses Erik even more. He tries to get help from his grandfather (Mickey Rooney), who doesn't understand the youth's disenchantment with the Viking way. But Erik finds purpose when he talks to a seeress (Eartha Kitt), who tells him that mankind is doomed to eternal war since the fall of Ragnarok. The fact that clouds perpetually obscure the sun in Erik's world testifies to the fact that doomsday has already taken place, with the great wolf Fenris having swallowed the sun. Erik is then galvanized to gather a group of fellow Vikings and take them on a quest (he persuades them by the simple persuasion of knocking their heads together). Eventually, Erik and company leave their home in search of a great magical horn. With the aid of the horn, they can transport themselves to fabled Asgard, and petition the gods to save the Earth.

The first thirty minutes of ERIK are the best part of the film. It's an intriguing setup, and suggests that Jones did some homework on Nordic mythology, even though he chose to see the myths through an ironic lens. The Vikings' first obstacle affords the film a strong, if ludicrous, battle, when the sailors meet a sea-dragon, which creature for some reason sports a light-globe on its head, like that of the real-life angler fish. However, after the strong start, the film starts bogging down in typical Python-esque routines set in archaic times. The film particularly bogs down when the heroes visit the island Hy-Brasil to get the magic horn. Jones's script throws in assorted complications, but the film never recovers from this boring sequence. (Reportedly Jones cut the theatrical version of ERIK considerably for VHS release.)

The climax recovers itself somewhat in the conclusion, and this time the plot successfully invokes Viking lore to make its satiricial points. Erik's Vikings reach the gods in Asgard, but they find that the deities don't care anything about what happens to "Midgard." There's a little visual surprise in that the Asgardian immortals don't look like any conventional representations, for they take the form of richly-robed children. However, Jones doesn't really do anything of note with this change-up. Worse, it's not clear what, if any, effect the Vikings' visit has. One minute, Child-Odin is claiming they won't do anything to undo Ragnarok-- and a little later, the Lord of Asgard announces that Ragnarok has ended and the Wolf Fenris has returned the sun to normal. It seems as if Jones was rushing past this point to deliver his ironic coup de grace: that the gods, being sticklers for protocol, won't recognize the mortals' courage in reaching Asgard, and prepare to hurl the Vikings down to Hel. Only dumb luck saves the heroes and returns them to their home on Midgard.

Based on the fact that these ironic protagonists do accomplish some heroic feats, despite their kvetching and ambivalence, I consider this a "combative irony." And though there's not a major fight-scene at the end, the film does conclude with Erik's quest indirectly causing the downfall of a mortal adversary.

THE SECOND BEST SECRET AGENT IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD (1965)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


Lindsay Shonteff, perhaps best known for MILLION EYES OF SUMURU, both wrote and directed this film, which originally sported the Fleming-derived title LICENSED TO KILL. Early in the film the bosses of the titular agent, "Charles Vine," make a few arch references to that other spy involved in the "Fort Knox business," but they can't get him, so they assign Vine to guard a prominent foreign scientist while the latter is in England.

With a set-up like that, SECOND sounds like it ought to be a silly spoof of the Bond films. Yet it's really not a comedy, but an irony, devoting itself to the proposition that "things are not as they seen." The script plays the spy-jinks fairly straight, but they're always a little "off." For instance, when Vine-- no relation to "James Vine" of TARGET FOR KILLING the next year-- is given his weapons for the assignment, they include a pistol so tiny that he can balance it on one finger. With a standard comedy, this would be treated in a silly manner and would eventually lead to some slapstick routine. Vine is rather taken aback by the miniature gun, but he keeps it on his person, and sure enough, it comes in handy in getting him out of a nasty scrape with bad guys.

SECOND isn't exactly a scathing satire of the superspy-subgenre, but some of the incidents are clearly meant to diverge from the usual course of things. In one scene, Vine gets into a conversation with the scientist he's guarding. It isn't funny or particularly dramatic. The scientist, having learned that Vine was once a prominent teacher of mathematics, wonders why Vine went into the far more dangerous profession of government agent. Vine makes no bones about the matter: government work pays well, and he Vine has expensive tastes. A later scene has Vine encounter what appears to be a sexy Asian woman, which seems to betoken the usual Bondian sex-scene. Instead Vine gets into a brutal fight with the "woman," who turns out to be an Asian guy in drag. At the climax, Vine gets into a running battle, through conveniently empty London streets, with an assassin from the other side, but the gunfight is handled dispassionately, as if it could go against Vine any moment. Vine does win the bout, but there's no adventurous sense of triumph going with it.

In contradistinction to the Matt Helm films of the period, the scientist here is a working on a science-fiction idea-- harnessing anti-gravity-- but the marvelous invention is never shown, much less used to make people float around. The miniature gun is nearly the only thing that makes this film metaphenomenal-- though the American release added an opening scene that qualifies as an uncanny "bizarre crime:" an assassin dressed like a nanny, killing a British agent with a sten-gun taken from a pram.

CABIN BOY (1994)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*


For years after CABIN BOY flopped, the film's co-producer David Letterman-- who had a cameo appearance in the flick-- used his scene as grist for his talk-show's comedy mill.

The movie, a vehicle for quirky comedian Chris Elliott, is a mixed beg. Like many 1990s films starring Saturday Night Live alumni, CABIN BOY plays like an extended sketch. Elliott plays Nathaniel, an overprotected aristocratic youth (implicitly a character much younger than the actor hismelf) who leaves his "fancy-man" college to go on a cruise. Like the protagonist of Kipling's CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS, this young scion of the upper class gets on the wrong ship; in this case a fishing-scow full of sailors who work for a living and can't be bothered with upper-class fripperies. Unlike the Kipling book, the hero's efforts to get back to civilization propel the ship into a forbidden stretch of ocean inhabited by bizarre fantasy-creatures like giants and ice-monsters.

Nathaniel is intentionally a one-note character. following a pattern that Elliott had established in earlier appearances and that he continued to play, with variations, in many subsequent (mostly supporting) roles. But Nathaniel is brought out of his narcissistic cocoon, not so much by the rigors of sea life, but by meeting a long-distance swimmer named Trina (Melora Walters). Nathaniel falls for Trina but she doesn't reciprocate-- at least, not as long as she deems him a silly-ass virginal boy. In the film's most psychologically interesting scene, as soon as Nathaniel manages to get his rocks off with a multi-armed goddess, Trina suddenly becomes interested in him.

The odd thing about CABIN BOY is that if one described the bare plot on paper, it would sound like Nathaniel actually does "toughen up" due to his life at sea and the rigors of the fantasy-land. The film even gives Nathaniel a heroic climax: when the goddess' giant-husband comes after Nathaniel to kill him, the giant is partly forestalled by one of Nathaniel's allies, a friendly merman (Russ Tamblyn). However, it's Nathaniel himself who managed to slay the colossus, by the heroic act of climbing up the giant's shirt, looping a belt around his throat and strangling him. Nathaniel is so seduced by the heroic life that after he's returned to civilization, he decides that he'll continue the arduous life of a sailor with his fellow sea-salts.

Yet, because everything Chris Elliott does is laced with an arch, fey quality, it's impossible to think of him actually "manning up" (and of course, the actor doesn't become any more physically formidable-looking at the film's end than he looked at the opening). In comedies, a serious story may be mocked with a lot of jokey situations but most comedies dont' undermine the protagonist's nature in itself. And arguably there's nothing intrinsically heroic about Nathaniel simply having killed a cuckolded husband, giant or not. Thus, since the script seems to constantly undermine both the protagonist and his wold so thoroughly, I consider it an irony in the combative mode.

 

BARBARELLA (1968)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*


I once made the following comment about this film's status as an "irony:"

BARBARELLA (1968)— Jean-Claude Forest’s sexy space-fantasy might have borrowed a lot of paraphernalia from FLASH GORDON, but the tone of Barbarella is more Rabelais than Raymond. At times Vadim’s best work verges on straight comedy, but the satirical elements dominate, particularly in the scene of Barbarella's most memorable combat-scene, where she out-orgasms a mechanical sex-machine.

After recently re-watching the 1968 film, I also re-read the original Jean-Claude Forest stories on which the film was based. All of these were translated into English for a 1960s volume from Grove Press, and this seems to be the sole English-language source for the curvaceous crusader's adventures, except for a much later 1970s sequence printed in HEAVY METAL.

The original 1960s stories have been accurately praised as a breakthrough for comic books of the period, in that BARARELLA, however derivative of the FLASH GORDON mythos, seems to have been the first attempt by a major publisher to issue comics with mature sexual content. In addition, whereas FLASH GORDON was all about the hero's continual attempt to overthrow various tyrants of Mongo, Barbarella's exploits are more in the tradition of the picaresque novel, with the heroine merely bopping about from peril to peril-- many of which, naturally, imply sexual encounters.

Despite the allegation that Roger Vadim's script had at least fourteen contributing writers, and that Vadim himself was more interested in stunning visuals than in story, the movie does manage to cull many of the more sensational elements of the Forest stories-- often combining elements from different stories-- and unite them in a plot with some degree of consistency.

This means that Barbarella, rather than simply drifting from one adventure to the next, is given A Mission at the film's beginning. The heroine hails from a far-future Earth which has become so over-civilized that its natives use "exaltation transference pills" to achieve sexual ecstacy. It's not clear why Barbarella, who possesses no special training, is selected to go to Tau Ceti, where she's expected to find missing scientist Duran Duran and prevent his positronic ray from falling into enemy hands. Indeed, this may be one of Vadim's key ironies; that Earth entrusts its future to a female astronaut, without their even being aware that her primary skill is her ability to seduce males (and one female) with her feminine charms. To be sure, in Barbarella's first encounter she initially offers to reward her first male conquest with sex in the Earthling manner. But once he converts her to the old-fashioned method, Barbarella never "goes back," as she uses sex to seduce an angel and a queen, as well as destroying the aforementioned ecstacy-machine with her own erotic capacity.

To be sure, during the course of Barbarella's peripatetic adventures, she does occasionally show that she can use a ray-gun. which is about the only reason I can countenance this film as belonging to my "combative irony" category. Her shooting-skills don't play a major role in the plot, contrary to the many iconic posters showing her brandishing various weapons. Given that in the 1960s a woman handling a gun would have instantly connoted "penis envy" to the Freudians, it's kind of surprising that Vadim never goes there. But Barbarella's greatest weapon is dumb luck, which more or less accounts for the way she encounters the evil queen of Sogo, the resistance movement headed by Dildano (who, despite his name, DOESN'T have sex with Barbarella), and the scientist Duran Duran, who plays only a small role in the comics but becomes far more central in the film-- which surely led to the co-opting of his name by the famed rock band.

Fonda's wide-eyed approach to heroism doesn't much resemble the rather cynical and knowing attitude of Forest's protagonist, but the latter approach probably wouldn't have played any better in the 1960s, given that the film was a box-office flop. The effects are minimal by modern standards, but the excellent costume-work makes up for a lot-- which was also the primary visual appeal of FLASH GORDON, for that matter. Fortunately, over the years the film has become a cult movie, and Vadim's ironic accomplishment has retained its appeal for a small, select audience ever since.

HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (1973), PALE RIDER (1985)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: (1) *irony,* (2) *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*


So from what "high plains" does Clint Eastwood's "stranger" drift? If it's supposed to be heaven-- and Eastwood, directing his second film, is said to have altered the Ernest Tidyman script to emphasize the supernatural-- then it's a heaven that's more than a little comfortable with the sins of rape and murder.

DRIFTER is clearly indebted to some of the darker visions of the Old West, like 1952's HIGH NOON and 1953's SHANE, in that DRIFTER focuses upon a lone gunfighter who metes out justice in a corrupt western town. But the towns are redeemable in the earlier films, and the hero's actions are meant to cut out the poisonous criminal elements and make possible new growth. The Stranger (Eastwood) comes to the town of Lago to destroy it for its complicity in the murder of a marshal-- who may or may not be identical with the Stranger-- and he leaves very little standing, any more than did the Biblical angels who visited the city of Sodom.

The narrative unfolds in elliptical fashion. Eventually the audience learns that the townspeople arranged for their marshal, one Jim Duncan, to be killed, and that they allowed the three killers who did the dirty work to be condemned to prison. Now the three owlhoots are on their way back to Lago for vengeance. The townspeople hire three other gunfighters to protect the town, but the protectors take a dislike to the Stranger, pick a fight with him, and are killed by the lone gun. The town must then turn to the Stranger for protection from the gunfighters, but the Stranger runs roughshod over the cowardly townsfolk even while training them to defend themselves. Only two people-- a dwarf named Mordecai and a woman named Sarah-- show any sort of decency, and when the Stranger has finally visited his vengeance on both the town and the killers, it's hard to say if even the two good people will enjoy any future. For this reason I deem HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER to be an "irony," in that it depicts a world that is either completely or almost beyond the sphere of morality and justice.

The aforementioned "sins of rape" are perhaps the most striking here, since they are both committed by the hero, albeit "with an explanation," as the saying goes. Given that Tidyman's vision of Lago was reputedly informed by the murder of Kitty Genovese, a woman killed during a New York mugging, it's odd that women's deceptiveness with regard to sexuality makes them a target of the Stranger's attentions. Early in the film, a woman named Callie tries to provoke a reaction out of the stoic Stranger by bumping into him on purpose, obviously expecting him to apologize and give her the upper hand. Instead, he divines that she really wants to get with him, and when she slaps his cigar out of his mouth (here's one of the times when a cigar isn't just a cigar), he pulls her into a barn and takes her in the haystack. She shoots at him later, though her bullets miraculously miss him, and she ends up sleeping with him again, only to betray him to some of the aggrieved townsfolk.

Sarah, although she's seen in a flashback trying to prevent Marshal Duncan's murder, fares only a little better. To foil the attack on his hotel-room, the Stranger blows up most of the building with dynamite. Following this incident, Sarah remarks to the Stranger that only the room she shares with her husband has been left standing. He gives her a look, and then drags her, protesting greatly, into the room with him. She prepares to defend herself from rape, but the Stranger shifts gears and professes disinterest, which prompts her, like Callie, to attack him-- and this too ends in his assertion of dominance, though again, with the excuse that on some level the woman sought to provoke him to assault her. I tend to think that such incidents, though, were less about demeaning women and more about satirizing the image of the simon-pure western champion.

The Tidyman script provides a somewhat logical reason for the Stranger's animus toward Lago: that he is actually the brother of the slain marshal. Eastwood excises this explanation, though reputedly it survived in foreign versions of the film. Yet even if the Big Explanation had appeared in the American release, other elements continually suggest that the Stranger is more than a mere human being. I've mentioned the incident of the attempted shooting-- where Callie tries to shoot the Stranger in his bath, and he simply ducks his head under the tub-water, which should be no defense against point-blank gunfire even from a clumsy shooter. A similar incident occurs later, when a man standing behind the Stranger begins to draw a knife, and the gunfighter tells the knife-man, "You're going to look pretty silly with that knife sticking out of your ass." Moreover, in a scene that would seem to contradict Tidyman's Big Explanation, the movie lets the audience see into the Stranger's head just once, when he sleeps and dreams of the death of Marshal Duncan, though the Stranger was not present for the event-- unless, in some metaphysical manner, he and Duncan are one and the same. None of the incidents are unquestionable demonstrations of supernatural power. But when a film couples such ambivalences with copious references to religious concepts or rituals, it yields the effect I've termed the '"'ambivalent uncanny,' where one may be able to read the narrative in a naturalistic fashion if one pleases, but where the narrative is oriented toward presenting something wondrous despite that possible reading." Given this propensity, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER functions as a "phantasmal figuration," one of the few in which the source of the phantasm is the protagonist who may or may not be a ghost, rather than some hooded figure pretending to be a ghost.

Eastwood also directed a "kindler, gentler" version of DRIFTER in 1985. PALE RIDER hews more closely to the model of the redeemable community, Where SHANE has a gunfighter take the side of a group of poor homesteaders against a ruthless cattle baron, RIDER has an enigmatic traveling preacher, nicknamed Preacher (Eastwood), who takes the side of impoverished tin-pan miners against the owner of a big mine who wants them off their land.

Preacher is certainly a less demoniacal presence than the Stranger. He's called "Preacher" because he wears what looks like a clerical collar, but he keeps his philosophizing to a minimum, in keeping with the Eastwood Hero's "strong, silent" reputation. He does argue a little with corrupt mine-owner Coy LaHood, telling the rapacious miner that he can't serve both God and Mammon. Like the Stranger, if he is supernatural-- and he only comes into town after being figuratively "summoned" by Megan, a teenaged girl from the mining-camp-- his "supernatural" acts are again ambivalent. A couple of times the Preacher escapes from dicey situations with no clear explanation, and when LaHood brings a gang of crooked enforcers to town to kill the Preacher, the enforcers' leader is astonished when he recognizes his foe from some previous encounter. But if it was an encounter like that of DRIFTER, where Preacher has returned from an inconvenient death, the enforcer gets no chance to expatiate on the matter, as Preacher kills him before he can say more.

 RIDER does not strive to create DRIFTER's horrific mood, nor does it use the earlier film's range of spooky musical effects. Yet though there's no rape-by-the-hero here, the sexual politics may still be a bit problematic for some viewers. After the Preacher shows up at the camp of the put-upon miners, he ends up staying with Megan, the teenaged girl who "summoned" him, and Megan's mother, who just happens to share the name "Sarah" with the character from DRIFTER. Whereas the protagonist of SHANE is idolized in a non-sexual way by a teenaged boy, Megan eventually professes something more than admiration for the considerably older man (Eastwood was 55 at the time of the film's release, and the actress playing Megan was about sixteen). Preacher is suitably restrained at this juvenile protestation of affection, even when Megan accuses him of being in love with her mother. However, Preacher does not end up either seducing or being seduced by either of the women. Perhaps the extraneous romantic elements were only present to keep up the reputation of the Eastwood Persona.

Of the two films, RIDER is the less ambitious and the more derivative. Its evocations of Christian morality are at best half-hearted, since it goes without saying that turning the other cheek would have deprived this decent time-killer of its shoot-em-up climax.

THE TENTH VICTIM (1965)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

THE TENTH VICTIM is one of the few films that decidedly improves upon its source material.

That source material was a 1953 short-story by Robert Sheckley, "The Seventh Victim." It's probably not the first story to translate the key idea of Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" into SF-terms, but it's become one of the best-known.

From Sheckley's mordant story about a future where it's legal for people to hunt one another, director Elio Petri and his scripters take the basic setup while casting aside the short story's ironic twist: that after the protagonist falls in love with his intended victim, she reveals that she's tricked him in order to turn the tables and kill him.

This quickie "reveal," while appropriate for a short story or the episode of an anthology-series, was too thin to sustain a commercial film. In addition, love makes the world of commercial films go round, so that here, leads Marcello (Marcello Mastroanni) and Caroline (Ursula Andress) genuinely fall in love with one another.

However, even the validation of love doesn't take anything away from the irony of the overall situation, and in some ways, the survival of one value in a crazy world makes that world seem even crazier.  The romance never detracts from the looniness of this future culture, which seeks to avoid the chaos of war by allowing citizens to sign up to be "hunters" or "victims"-- a status which each entrant must accept equally, in order to obtain a big pay-off.

Similarly, Sheckley's short tale throws in a few shots at the banality of capitalistic marketing, even in the manufacture of murder-weapons. But VICTIM improves on this trope tenfold. For some time, Marcello is uncertain whether or not Caroline is his pre-designated hunter. She, for her part, holds off on revealing her status, having been intrigued by the fact that in all his years he's only married once.  But once they both know the score, they vie to work out their quarrel with the full cooperation of television sponsors.

Happily, Marcello and Caroline don't end up killing one another, though there's enough of a battle at the climax that I rate this a "combative irony."  The coda ends humorously, with Caroline maneuvering Marcello into marrying her-- though it becomes debatable as to whether she was ever really trying to kill him in the earlier scenes.

THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN (1988), THE SONG OF HIAWATHA (1997)

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: (1) *good,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: (1) *irony,* (2) *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*


Here we have two films that exist on the verge between the marvelous and that particular species of the uncanny that I call the "phantasmal figuration."

Both films are modern-day takes on narratives that are unequivocally marvelous. The original source for the 1988 Terry Gilliam film are a group of sixteenth-century tales which portrayed the real-life Baron Munchausen doing all sorts of extraordinary things, like riding on a cannonball or climbing a vine all the way to the moon.  The original source for the 1997 film is Longfellow's 1855 epic poem, in which the feats of the Native American warrior Hiawatha-- particularly fighting with an evil magician-- are also taken at face value, until the poem concludes by having the warrior meet, and endorse, the religion of the Christian newcomers.

In contrast to this straightforward fantasy-approach, both of these films appear to be hedging their bets by creating "fallacious figments" in which real-life characters merely relate fantasy-stories, after the fashion of the 1987 film of William Goldman's THE PRINCESS BRIDE.

From the inception of SONG OF HIAWATHA, the film takes the viewpoint of a group of white traders (including a Christian priest) who are traveling in the Great Lakes region to trade with the tribes. For most of the film this group is told of the great marvels of Hiawatha, but up until the ending the narrative suggests that the real Hiawatha is long gone and that these are only stories. Then, at the last moment, there is an ambivalent suggestion that Hiawatha still exists in some supernatural form. Thanks to this last-minute flourish, SONG is disqualified from being simply a story in which marvels are related in story-form. Because there is a suggestion of some marvelous presence-- even though it is left ambiguous-- SONG becomes more properly a instance of the "phantasmal figuration" trope.

Gilliam's MUNCHAUSEN seems for most of the story to be an outright marvelous narrative. It begins in an unnamed city in the 18th century, a city being beseiged by Turkish forces. An acting-troupe attempts to distract the panicky populace by putting on a free adaptation of the purported adventures of the famous Baron, full of cheesy stage-effects. The performance is interrupted by the real Baron, now an aged man (John Neville), who tries to tell them about his truly fantastic adventures. He then conceives of trying to save the embattled city by seeking out his former comrades, all of whom possess bizarre powers, like Herculean strength, super-speed, etc.  For most of the film, it appears that Munchausen actually does re-encounter his supernormal allies, as well as visiting the god Vulcan and the King and Queen of the Moon. However, just as Munchausen suffers a tragic death, Gilliam reveals that the whole narrative has been related by Munchausen to the rapt theater-audience.  This edges the film toward "fallacious figment" territory-- but then, in a conclusion that has left many viewers scratching their heads, it's revealed that something-- one never knows what-- has routed the Turkish troops and saved the city. Thus it too becomes a film not of the outright marvelous, but one which leaves the marvelous as a possibility that is never entirely verified-- though the possibility is strong enough to move my marker from a possible "naturalistic" verdict to that of "the uncanny."


Having spent so much time categorizing these films, I won't critique them in depth.  ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN is for me Terry Gilliam's most accomplished work, but I say that as someone who was not a big fan of either BRAZIL or THE FISHER KING.  The FX-work is pleasingly eye-popping, and Gilliam certainly succeeds in capturing the elusive feel of European "tall tales." The film's biggest weakness is that the script attempts to justify Munchausen's marvelous journeys in terms of altruism. But the motive of trying to save the city pales very quickly, precisely because Gilliam has portrayed it as a sinkhole hostile to imagination. The ambivalent ending, while justifiable as Gilliam's take on the conflict of reality vs. fantasy, inclines the film to the form of the "irony," somewhat undermining its own conjuration of marvels.  But this remains a vast improvement over a later, very inferior Gilliam work like THE BROTHERS GRIMM.

In contrast, the sole merit of SONG OF HIAWATHA is that it is a movie of a *faux* Native American epic that actually stars a lot of Native American actors, including Graham Greene and Irene Bedard. Unfortunately, though the film retells most of the highlights of the Longfellow poem, the script is dull and the direction-- the only IMDB credit for one Jeffrey Shore-- is entirely pedestrian.