Good Humor

The reviews are in and Wolverine (or, as it is more clunkingly, officially called: X-Men Origins: Wolverine) is judged to be a failure. But by what rubric? Here we might consider last summer's two supremely silly yet (or therefore?) roundly praised comic flicks, Iron Man and Batman: Something or other, as well as this past winter's overlong turd, Watchmen.

Batman fares worse on second viewing. What seemed at the midnight show to be an overedited, cryptofascist male gadget fantasy, a Hammacher-Schlemerer catalogue through which the late Heath Ledger occasionally sashayed like a minor inmate from a college production of Marat/Sade, cast only because the queer director liked his . . . diction, transforms upon review into one of the most supremely turgid eighteen hours in the history of cinema, as if Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler had been reimagined by an adolescent A/V club of Rand enthusiasts and revenge fantasists, two sets that admittedly overlap to a greater, not lesser, degree. It is relentlessly loud and even more relentlessly preposterous for the apparent seriousness of its ambitions. Am I the only one who believes that literary ambition killed the comics? The substitution of pop Freudology for character destroys what makes, or made, comics fun. It is actually possible to construct what are now universally known as "dark" characters without drowning them in a Mariana Trench of Oedipal fuckwhat and shitnot. A real "re-imagining"--another ridiculous neologism--of the character, who after all originated as a detective, would properly look to noir, Hammett, Spillane, Bogart.

If Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight managed anything approaching genuine interest, it was that it maintained an atmosphere of dour portentousness for thirty-nine straight hours without actually portending anything. What was the Gee-Dubyan expression? All sizzle, no steak? It was a fajita pan full of crackling oil but no meat or peppers. Presumably there was some philosophical tension between Control and Chaos, but you can watch the marvelous Stockard Channing expostulate unconvincingly on the same subject in the film version of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation, in which Will Smith plays a genius transformed into a play-actor far more convincingly than baleful Christian in either of Nolan's pulp oeuvres.

The action sequences in The Dark Knight are darker than a bad Italian restaurant, and so I spent the entire movie feeling as if I were trying to read a menu. In any case the fighting was edited by a humming bird. The nec plus ultra of night fighting in films may still be Lee's Crouching Tiger, which made balletic virtue of bodies even at their most absurdly antigravitational and also made a quality of silence, which is more than you can say for the crash-banging of the Dark Knight himself, who is as balletic as a charging hippo . . . and as loud. Poor Morgan Freeman occasionally wandered through the movie, looking slightly befuddled. I assume he was hired to lend gravitas, as he is black, old, and therefore wise. When finally it all ended, after twenty false endings and ninety straight hours at 400 dB, I felt as if I had been beaten, and not in a good way.

And yet . . . this movie was held up as the New Seriousness in comix, while its kinetic and brightly colored summer counterpart, Iron Man, in which Robert Downey Jr. dons a gaudy metallic costume and does battle with Hollywood's two favorite types of evildoers, Muslims and bald guys, was supposedly only the skillfully executed counterpart, the delicious meringue and ice cream to follow Batman's bloody steak. But this movie was the far more enjoyable, and certainly the better, of the two, if only because someone remembered to pay the electric bill. The praise lavished on Downey's performance was thoroughly overdone--playing insouciance isn't exactly a stretch for him. Jeff Bridges was bald . . . and he smoked! Ruh-roh! Gwentyth Paltrow's cheekbones made several interesting cameos. I wished it had eschewed entirely its hopelessly confused attitude about Military Good/Military Bad, Muslims Bad/Muslims Good. Oh for chrissake, who cares? Blow something up! Do it again!

Then Watchmen, based on Alan Moore's dour tales of fetishism, was adapted for the screen. It took one look at The Dark Knight's five-day festival and raised it a whole summer stock season. It dealt with precisely the same, uh, themes, but even more incoherently and with even worse lighting, if such is possible. It was meant to explode the superhero genre, but instead merely exploded. Even more than Batman, it slavered all over the inherent fascism of herodom, and concluded that look over there, a flying thing, cool! Which would have been fine at mile marker 5 or 10, but at 1500? No thanks.

Wolverine, a pastiche of all these things, is even more thoroughly birdbrained which makes you wonder: why do they hate it so much? I suspect residual embarrassment over enjoying something so completely adolescent. Personally, I enjoyed it. It quickly dispatches its psychology, rolls uninterruptedly from genre cliche through fireball, and, at a mere 107 minutes, clocked in at 20 less than even Iron Man. It seemed to me to be exactly what a Marvel comic ought to be, a skein of unintelligible nonsense with amazing pecs. Oh, Hugh!