GONE WITH THE WEST (1969/1974)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In 2012 I did a quickie review of this film, but on rewatching it this year, I decided to write a new one. After I finish this one I'll delete the previous version.

By all accounts director Bernard Girard completed this western, starring James Caan and Stephanie Powers, under a different title in 1969, when the influence on Italian spaghetti westerns on American cinema was at its height. It was finally released in 1974, probably to play off Caan's rising star, and then recut with a frame story and re-released under the title LITTLE MOON AND JUD MCGRAW. Over time a lot of fans have dubbed GONE as one of the worst westerns of all time. However, while it isn't good, it did pick up on the social anomie seen in the original Sergio Leone movies, and formulated the same basic situation seen in 1973's HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER-- that of a pitiless avenger destroying a corrupt town-- long before HPD went into production. I imagine there were other possible ancestors for both. not least Dashiell Hammett's 1929 RED HARVEST.

Also, GONE is not an adventure-story as I previously labeled it, but an irony, just like DRIFTER. One or two IMDB reviews complained of tonal changes in GONE, when it seemed to shift between comedy and ultraviolent adventure. But GONE is an irony, in which everything is meant to have a double meaning. I'm not saying GONE is a good or incisive irony, the way that DRIFTER is. But a lot of the tropes I identified as "fallacious figments"-- like the cutesy end-scene where Caan's character Jed shoots the film's cameraman-- are meant to convey a pseudo-artsy sense that anything-can-happen. 

The flick begins mundanely enough, with Jed being released from prison for some unspecified crime. His mental flashbacks tell us that he holds a man named Nimmo (Aldo Ray) responsible for his sufferings, as well as for the murder of Jed's wife and child. Jed makes a beeline for the unnamed town where Nimmo rules with an iron hand. Jed watches from afar while the corrupt townsfolk carry on at a cockfight, and pitilessly watch as a young Indian female, Little Moon (Powers), is raped. Later Little Moon retreats to a craggy area overlooking the town, where Jed has made his camp.

Jed watches as Little Moon washes herself in a mountain lake. He doesn't watch her nude display too long, for he announces himself by tossing a rock in the water. Moon gets dressed and attacks him, only to be dissuaded by a threatening fist. But because he doesn't show any desire to rape her, she starts hanging out with him, even though she only speaks Spanish. 

Jed makes a few opening assaults on Nimmo's henchmen. This doesn't seem to upset Nimmo, though one of his cronies seeks out the ridge-area. This guy does try to rape Moon, claiming he didn't get his chance earlier. We then get another "fallacious figment" as Jed comes down like Tarzan, swinging down on a rope attached to who-knows-what. Nevertheless, Moon gets the victory because she just happens to have a sling and kills the rapist with a stone.

The rest of the film is just, as others have said, just a smorgasbord of incoherent violent scenes, though one does have the distinction of being among the best catfights in cinema. In short, Nimmo's regular hooker-girlfriend (Barbara Werle) takes objection when another whore (Elizabeth Leigh) tries to get with Nimmo. It's a really well choreographed fight, and I like to think the participants were doing their best to boost their careers as stuntwomen with this big fight. On a minor note, Sammy Davis Jr has a few scenes as a slick gunfighter employed by Nimmo, but Davis has no real impact on the story.

Jed and Moon attack the town with rocks flung by catapults that they whipped up out of nothing. Then Nimmo's men find and capture Jed, which is the first time Nimmo even learns who his nemesis. He's tied to a cross in the center of town, but Moon comes to his rescue, riding into town and lassoing the cross, so as to drag it away. No one seems able to pursue her. Finally Moon somehow devises a kite from which she can drop sticks of dynamite (how?) on the town. This clears out all the corrupt maggots and makes possible a final fatal clash between Jed and Nimmo. Then the triumphant hero kisses his damsel before they walk toward the horizon-- aside from shooting the cameraman, that is.

Though it's naturalistic aside from the injection of "figments" you're not supposed to believe in, the arty approach still places GONE in my category of "weird westerns."      

PIRAHNA-MAN VS. WEREWOLF-MAN (2010)

 

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

I guess Streaming has finally outpaced both the commercial TV of my youth and the days of video rental stores, if it can summon forth, as from the vasty deep, a fifteen-year-old monster-mash crapfest I never heard of.    

Now, ordinary when I raise the specter of--

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

-- it's usually because I'm revealing detailed plot points. But for PIRAHNAWOLF, I'm going to reveal the story that the crap-movie probably could have told adequately, at least as far as crap-moves go:  

Reporter Lexi Glass (Carrie Long) thinks she may have hit the big time. Stuck doing routine local news in Anytown U.S., she hears about two brutal slayings of blonde women, and witnesses think they heard the howling of a dog or wolf. While investigating, Lexi starts having weird dreams. Sometimes she feels herself experiencing the serial murders, as blonde women are attacked by a werewolf-killer. Less often, she also dreams herself swapping spit with a handsome bearded man she's never met. The two forebodings come together when Lexi learns more about her family background. Her mother had an affair with a man who was a werewolf, and by him she conceived a son, also a werewolf and a half-brother to Lexi. Lexi realizes that she's been experiencing the murders through her brother's eyes, and when she meets him in his non-werewolf persona, she's immediately attracted to him, dinner and a movie be damned. So they swap spit, because evidently as the child of her mother Lexi just can't resist those wolf-boys. However, she realizes she really doesn't want either to protect a killer or to raise little lupine babies, so she strangles Wolf-Brother to death without so much as a "one who loves him enough to understand" sentiment.   

Now, that's a serviceable if unremarkable plotline for a werewolf movie, and maybe if I'd read a summary that covers those points, I would have watched that movie more quickly than about a dozen other lycanthrope streaming-flicks that I haven't yet watched. But I have to admit I was lured in by the title PIRAHNA-MAN VS. WEREWOLF-MAN, even though I didn't expect much.

Trouble is, the two artistes behind this dreck thought they'd enhance the simple premise of their werewolf story not only by shoehorning in a Pirahna-Man (who's also Lexi's father), but also a convoluted origin in which (1) the original werewolf killed all hands aboard a nuclear submarine, (2) the submarine gave off nuclear waste that contaminated some pirahna-eggs, which (3) Lexi's father ate so that he became a "piscathrope." ALSO, the werewolf tends to kill lots of people in Lexi's social circle, a la Original Frankenstein's Monster, though not for any particular reasons I could suss out. AND ALSO, Lexi has some sort of spirit-guardian who wears a papier-mache mask over his face and who guides Lexi through some of her backstory-revelations, as well as enlisting Lexi's horny roommate to serve as the reporter's guardian.

On occasion I like flicks that throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix, but here it's just low-energy and tiresome. All the extraneous material makes me wonder if the writers thought they were doing an absurdist take on monster-movie tropes-- and that leads me to label the film an "irony." It's also a combative irony thanks to a few minutes of fighting between the title monsters, though it's a poor example of both categories.    

        

HARLEY QUINN-- SEASON 3 (2022)

 

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

In my review of Season One, I left things open as to whether the writer-producers of HARLEY QUINN really believed all of their rants about White Patriarchy, and by extension, all other such cant, such as the un-ironic use of the term "cisgender" in Season Two. It was at least possible that these raconteurs were simply trying to make a buck by playing to an audience that wanted an ultraliberal version of SOUTH PARK, with loads of naughty language and hardcore violence. But if Season 3 of this show demonstrated anything, it's that only true believers could pen a line like this one:

Harley Quinn (speaking to another female): "Congrats on freeing yourself from the chains of hetero hell!"

The showrunners make other dubious decisions-- the Riddler is gay, and Catwoman had a lesbian encounter with Poison Ivy but can barely tolerate the "hetero hell" of an ongoing relationship with boring billionaire Bruce Wayne). All these things demonstrate that the producers have goneg full tilt boogie into a trope I'll call, "Gay Always Good, Straight Always Bad." Before this, the scripts focused almost entirely on celebrating one particular lesbian hookup: the written-in-the-stars romance of BFFs Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. Season 2 particularly burns up a lot of episode-time leading up to the inevitable union. But the apparent success of the HBO series evidently made the showrunners convinced that they could get away with anything-- just like SOUTH PARK, but with absolutely no wit or style.

From a very limited POV, Season 3 doesn't suffer from exactly the same crippling inevitability as Season 2. Once all the sexy pyrotechnics have been executed, Harley and Ivy have to deal with the pressures of an ongoing relationship. I don't mean to imply that the scripts show any logical progression of even very limited melodramatic characters; I'm only saying that the change of pace COULD have been allowed for better stories than those of Season 2. One big change comes from Ivy, who for two seasons of this show, put aside her forceful personality from other iterations and became a "shrinking violet," the better to play "femme" to Harley's "butch." Now, in order to play up the very different personalities of the lovers, Ivy starts to return to her eco-terrorist mode. Harley initially approves-- anything to make her leafy lover happy-- but at some point, even the empty-headed maniac realizes that Ivy's obsession is too extreme, even for her.

Season Two broadly implied that the main reason Harley launched a murderous campaign to take down most of Gotham's other villains was because she had no good lovin' in her life, and had never had even when she cohabited with the Joker, because well, "hetero equals hell." But once she's bumping nasties with Ivy, Harley conveniently forgets about her queenpin-ambitions and even starts making noises like a hero, which includes keeping Ivy from massacring large quantities of Gothamites. Of course, in the world of the fanatic, it doesn't matter than Harley herself has quite a few murders on her rap sheet, and not just villains-- unless we're supposed to believe that her attack on Earth with the forces of Darkseid conveniently cost no innocent lives. Being gay makes everything okay.

But in one sense Harley's dream of becoming a queenpin comes true, for in order for her to rise, the Big Bat must fall. Yes, the previous two seasons repetitively dragged Commissioner Gordon through the mud for a laugh, and other heroes were mocked, but the fanatics mostly left Batman alone. However, to him he's a straight white male hero, so he must be removed to make way for a gay (but also white) female villain with heroic aspirations. To be fair, in the comics Harley does undergo a psychological change that puts her mostly on the side of the angels. But the showrunners here have no interest in psychology except in the form of tedious bromides. "Batman has a savior complex. Bruce Wayne turns off Catwoman because his parental issues make him clingy." But in addition to all the factors that make the Big Bat a weak-ass white guy, he also belongs to the "one percent," and for that crime he must be punished, so that Killer Harley can take his place and check more boxes.

I confess I laughed at one joke that involved the Riddler running a danger room. However, the scripters lost that one point and more by making the Prince of Puzzlers gay for no reason but to create more pink representation. For TV animation, HQ is competent, particularly with respect to the violent fight-scenes. I'm aware there are two other seasons and another on the way, so I guess someone likes it. I won't be in any great hurry to review more of these turd-productions.

                          

HARLEY QUINN-- SEASON 2 (2020)

 

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

As was the case with my review of Season 1, I still have not read more than a tiny number of the DC comic books that promoted Harley Quinn to starring status. Prior to this review, though, I did listen to a couple of podcasts on the subject. One, by a podcaster known as "JesterBell," asserted that in the early 2000s, DC wanted to engineer a competitor to the runaway success of Marvel's "merc-with-a-mouth" Deadpool, and that the editors chose Harley for that honor. I could not find any other fans advancing this theory, however, but I tend to believe it.

The Deadpool theory at least has some applicability to specific iterations of Harley. Deadpool's raison d'etre is that he's a mercenary who conveniently only kills bad guys and says a lot of goofy things while so doing. Season 1 pursued a similar course for Harley, in that the moment she became estranged from the Joker, she decided that she wanted to become as vicious and violent as he is-- but only toward other Gotham criminals. For a time during Season 1, she wants to become a member of the Legion of Doom, but her rejection there further embitters Harley, and so in Season 2 she becomes obsessed with disposing of the "big guns" of Gotham, such as Riddler, Bane, and Penguin. However, if QUINN's writers ever read Deadpool, they learned nothing of that feature's trademark snarky humor. QUINN's humor is, to repeat a comparison I made before, like that of ROBOT CHICKEN, predicated on loading familiar pop-culture icons with extreme quantities of sex and ultraviolence. Thus the first episode of Season 2 begins with Harley besting the Penguin by biting his nose off, so that the criminal bleeds to death.

  Still, despite the show's girl-boss rhetoric, the stories never really sell-- or even try to sell-- the idea that Harley Quinn possesses some inherent talent to become Gotham's new crime-queenpin, and the fact that most of her crew consists of goofball losers like Clayface and King Shark confirms that impression. If anything, the script suggest that much of her crusade is a deflection from the thing that truly motivates her, the subconscious desire to become entwined with her gal-pal Poison Ivy. Ivy, for her part, has committed herself to marry another loser villain, Kite-Man, though on two or three occasions Ivy and Harley somehow fell into bed together. The consensus is that both of them are repressing their lesbian tendencies, and that their previous dalliances-- one with an amiable idiot, the other with a murderous psychotic-- prove that Girl-on-Girl Power is far more meaningful than the pitfalls of heterosexual entanglement. And though not every female in the QUINN world is a lesbian, one certainly doesn't get any ringing endorsements of male-female encounters. Catwoman's in a few episodes of Season 2, as is Baman, but they never meet, as if alluding to one of the best-known hetero relationships in comic books might muddy the waters for the ideology.

 In the end, both Harley's quest for queenpin-power and her conversion to lesbitude seem forced and superficial. Later in the season she gets the idea to appeal to Darkseid himself to give her enough power to conquer Earth, and the Dark Lord does so, though he requires that she pass a test by duking it out with the gargantuan Granny Goodness. Harley thus spreads untold devastation to Planet Earth, but hey-- it's OK, because she's reacting to her repressed passion for her best gal-pal. Harley's least worshipful acolyte, the dwarfish Doctor Psycho, attempts to undermine Harley by also petitioning Darkseid for power, but in this case, Psycho ends up facilitating the writers' goal of championing the irresistible amour fou of the two super-villainesses.

I can't deny that the animation on HARLEY Season 2 is top-notch, as much as Season 1, and I liked this or that bit of voice-work, like Michael Ironside for Darkseid. But ROBOT CHICKEN's style of humor works because each vignette exploits its shock-value very briefly before moving on to the next target. Within the context of a melodrama about costumed heroes and villains, that style wears out its welcome very quickly. And I absolutely cannot forgive these pinheaded ultraliberal writers sticking an idiotic word like "cis-gender" into the dialogue of a classy villain like Mister Freeze!    

SERENADE FOR TWO SPIES (1965)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                              SERENADE is one of the few West German Eurospy films that has a strong Germanic character, though Italy had something to do with the production. Most of the major characters are played by German actors, with only minor contributions from "names" like the American Brad Harris and Italian Tony Kendall, and even though large parts of the story take place in the United States, it's very much a European's treatment of "America as exotic locale." The rambling narrative even wanders from San Francisco to Nevada just so that the hero can contend with guys in cowboy hats.                                 

  The story begins in a farcical mode as John Krim, Agent 006 1/2 (Helmut Lange), gets his assignment, with lots of daffy references to James Bond and Goldfinger. But SERENADE isn't really a comedy with lots of joke-setups, but what I consider an irony, devoted to loosely satirizing the tropes of the superspy genre. Director/co-writer Michael Phlegar doesn't come up with a very pointed satire, but I have the impression that he was focused on inverting just one major superspy trope: that of the spy as a Don Juan who never gets tied down to one woman. To counter this favored trope, the story puts Krim more or less in the hands of the mystery girl Tamara (a radiant Barbara Lass). Is she an ally who keeps giving Krim romantic overtures, but still plays coy, or a foe working for the villains? She seems to want to vex and confuse the hero, and there's even an amusing scene in Nevada where Tamara dresses up like a cowgirl and lassos Krim, just to mess with him. Since Lass's Tamara is so central to the plot-- essentially a co-star to Lange's Krim-- I'm not giving much away to say that she's one of the good guys. But her real threat is not that she's going to murder him, but to marry him, and the goofy ending implies that Krim's going to get hog-tied by matrimony no matter what. A lot of spy-flicks loosely end with the secret agent bonding with his leading lady, so that there's at least the possibility of connubial bliss, but few if any really show the hero getting dragged to the altar.                                                                             

  There's also another duplicitous damsel whom Krim names "Goldfeather" because she never mentions her actual name. She shows up in his hotel room as a maid and delivers him an exploding breakfast roll (which is the most uncanny thing we get in the film). But it's not clear that she knew the roll was really a bomb, and later on she saves Krim from death, so maybe she's one of those bad girls who turns good due to the hero's sex appeal. It's almost impossible to follow who the villains are, and though they're said to be pursuing some sort of "laser rifle" tech, we never see so much as a prototype, so I think the script just threw in a laser reference because there was a laser in the GOLDFINGER movie. Though Krim doesn't have any secret agent devices, he can fight passably well, though an early sequence shows him running from a rumble with a bunch of garishly clad henchmen. Toward the end there's a hallucinatory scene in which Krim and a few allies seem to be standing around on the floor of a lake with no ill effects, shooting it out with enemy spies, but this is clearly just the director's brief visit to Surrealism Alley, with no relevance to the main story. I can't say I found SERENADE as funny as I think its creators thought it was, but I have to appreciate that this is one time the male spy doesn't get to be the cock of the walk-- though Goldfeather does get a pretty good look at an unclad Krim in his bathroom.               

ZEBRAMAN 2: ATTACK ON ZEBRA CITY (2010)

 

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

I've only slightly sampled the original manga from which both of the ZEBRAMAN movies were adapted, so I don't know whether or not the source material falls into the literary category of the irony. But the six-years-later sequel supports my theory that director Takashi Miike definitely wanted an approach that allowed for uncertainty and absurdity, even in the midst of real heroics.

Miike's sense of humor might have been stoked by the fact that the first film, released in 2004, took place in the fictional future of 2010, while the sequel was issued in real-world 2010 while the narrative purports to take place fifteen years after the events of the first ZEBRAMAN. In any case, the triumphal ending of that movie is undermined by ATTACK. In that conclusion, main character Shinichi (Sho Aikawa) taps the power of childhood belief so as to transform into the super-powered Zebraman, who then foils an invasion of insidious aliens. Unfortunately, once humankind has learned who the hero is, Shinichi's civilian life goes to hell thanks to the media. Even his small family, with whom he seemed to be reconnecting thanks to his altruistic actions, is simply out of the picture, and his "imaginary family"-- Mrs. Asano and her grade-school-aged son-- is the same. Then a mad scientist captures Shinichi for an experiment that leaves the former teacher depowered and amnesiac for the next fifteen years.

By 2025, Tokyo has got so nutty over Zebraman that the city has been renamed "Zebra City," and in the hero's absence, an idol singer named Yui (Riisa Naka) has taken on the persona of Zebra Queen, keeping the populace happy with bread and circuses. Aihara, the aforementioned mad scientist, has used the public's fascination with Zebraman to institute a bizarre social practice, "Zebra Time," in which anyone can commit a crime, though the local stripe-uniformed cops are also free to shoot down anyone they please. Aihara and Yui plan to extend this improbable method of seizing power to other lands, and supposedly parts of America have already been converted.

The amnesiac Shinichi ends up in a hospital run by a dissident group that opposes the power of Aihara's political reign. Among the group is a twenty-something doctor, who turns out to be none other than Shinpei, the young student who helped Zebraman in the first film. A more important contact, however, is that Shinichi encounters Sumire, a girl who looks like a grade-schooler but claims to be twenty-five years old. It's eventually revealed that one of the aliens from the first movie still occupied her body, not only retarding her age but also giving her special powers, with which Sumire jump-starts Shinichi's buried powers.

Bits and pieces of the big explanation are foregrounded. For instance, Yui/ Zebra Queen forsakes her black-and-white attire for all-black outfits, and when Sumire triggers Shinichi's transformation, he becomes an all-white version of Zebraman. The Reveal: Aihara used a psychic centrifuge to separate all the black-hearted evil of Shinichi into the independent existence of Yui, who possessed many of the same powers as Zebraman (including the signature "zebra kick"). But Zebra Queen isn't as easy to control as her "father" assumes. Not only does she murder Aihara with the help of her costumed female backup singers-- a very fetish-y death, BTW-- she also uses the centrifuge on Sumire in an attempt to gain control over the alien powers she possesses. The process unleashes an alien monster to attack Zebra City-- and all of the villainess' plans to eradicate the undesirables in humankind have to be sacrificed for expediency.

Can the hero's good and evil sides reach a rapprochement? If you've watched the right STAR TREK episodes, you know the answer. But the real novelty of ATTACK is the way the script gives the film an ending that mixes heroism with one of the goofiest visuals I've seen in a Japanese film of any kind, to say nothing of the tokusatsu TV shows that ZEBRAMAN homages. 

ZEBRAMAN (2004)

 

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

Though I've seen a lot of comments calling Takashi Miike's ZEBRAMAN a comedy, I think it conforms more to the literary mythos called "irony." Comedies are generally very straightforward about exploiting human discomforts to engender laughs. But Miike, who directed from a script by one Kankuro Kudo, seems to be constantly stressing situations that undermine the viewer's certainties of what to take seriously-- or even, what not to take seriously.

(EDIT: Kankuro Kudo is the scriptwriter of record for the movie, but apparently both he and one Yamada Reiji co-created an earlier ZEBRAMAN manga, which the movie partly adapts, and which I have not read.)

Although some costumed crusaders like Zorro and Superman fake weakness to conceal their true strengths, there's no shortage of heroes, especially from the Golden Age of Comics, who start off as meek and mild, and only toughen up after being suffering humiliation or adversities. Miike clearly wants the viewer of ZEBRAMAN to see the movie's protagonist as a "real Clark Kent." Teacher Shinichi Ishikawa (Sho Aikawa) not only gets zero respect from the grade-school students he deals with, he also rates zero with his family. His son Kazuki, who attends said school, is tormented by other kids who think Shinichi is totally uncool, while the teacher's wife appears to be carrying on an affair and his teenaged daughter Midori is dating older men, possibly to express her contempt for her real father. (I say "possibly" because none of Shinichi's unlikable family members get a lot of screen time.) The teacher's only escape from dire reality is being a fan of a short-lived tokusatsu TV show from his childhood. This show concerns a fantastic, alien-fighting costumed hero, Zebraman. Shinichi even creates his own Zebraman costume as an escape from reality.

But is reality all that certain? It's the year 2010-- just six years from the time of the film's actual release-- and 2010 is also the future-year in which the TV show was set. Current news broadcasts carry stories about the strange behavior of animals and maniacs on the loose in Yokohama. Covertly, Japan's defense agency studies the mysterious appearances of mutated creatures, apparently the result of extraterrestrial tampering. 

At school Shinichi meets a transfer student, Shinpei, and Shinpei's mother Mrs. Asano. Shinpei has his own debilitating backstory, having lost the ability to walk after finding the corpse of his suicidal father. By chance Shinichi learns that Shinpei also has an enthusiasm for the Zebraman show, even though the boy only saw the program through the Internet. Shinichi develops an affection for this family, so much more appealing than his own. He decides to show off his costume to the wheelchair-bound boy-- but while skulking through the streets in costume, he comes across a crime: a woman just slain by a maniac in a crab-mask. Shinichi contends with the crazy man, and to his surprise learns that he suddenly possesses fantastic athletic prowess. Further, when slain the crab-man proves to be an alien mutation, as well as (perhaps not coincidentally) one of those older men that Shinichi's daughter is shown having dallied with.

There's an explanation of sorts, though Miike isn't interested in all the fine points. Some decades ago, a UFO crashed near Yokohama, and unbeknownst to humans, one alien survived and masqueraded as a human. The same school where Shinichi works is constructed on the site of the UFO crash-site, and the alien somehow becomes the school's principal. Further, the principal, knowing that his people plan to invade Earth in 2010, manages to launch the TV show ZEBRAMAN as a surreptitious warning of the coming invasion. I guess the show, which was canceled after seven episodes, had the desired effect, because it reached just one ardent fan, who was capable of taking on the powers of a superhero. How Shinichi gets transformed is one of those vague points; he merely talks about the power of belief, symbolized by the phrase "anything goes." So when, late in the movie, Zebraman needs to manifest the ability to fly, he's able to do so by a major effort of the imagination, much like Peter Pan asking children to believe in fairies.

Shinichi eventually triumphs over the alien invaders and wins approval from both his real kids and his substitute family (though the script stops short of letting the protagonist hook up with Mrs. Asano). Yet Miike and Kudo throw in a lot of weird scenes to keep ZEBRAMAN from seeming like a straightforward adventure-story. After learning that Mrs. Asano is a nurse by profession, he has a vivid dream in which he (as Zebraman) loses an arm in combat but grows it back when given medical attention by a costumed doppelganger of the widow, "Zebranurse" (complete with a gigantic syringe). And it certainly has a comical effect when the hero does the "zebra back kick" of the TV program and leaves a hoof print in a mutant's forehead. So even though Miike champions the power of belief, he clearly also favors the power of absurdity as well.

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 (2019-20)

 

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. Yet 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 story-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 things fall 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, after which she 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.