Gimme Those Funky Horns

FILM:


Horns - 2014
Written by Keith Bunin
from the Book by Joe Hill
Directed by Alexandre Aja

Horns is bound to anger the internet rage-nerds (but then what isn't?) with its resistance to simple classification and expectation-defying insistence on being completely itself.  The core structure is that of a murder mystery, but in its greater context it's also a love story and a dark parable that steps outside naturalistic conventions.  While I had some doubts about whether its primary conceit was strictly "horror," the final scene convinced me that, while it was certainly horror, why should it need to be strict about it?

The rage-nerds love to throw out the debate between Siskel & Ebert over Full Metal Jacket and Benji the Hunted as an attempt to discredit Roger Ebert, but it really only demonstrates that the rage-nerds don't understand art.  Ebert gave thumbs down to FMJ and up to Benji in the same episode, and Siskel tried to shame him with the specious suggestion that he was saying Benji was better than FMJ.  What's often omitted from this example, however, is that Roger called Gene out for his false equivalency, explaining (as Siskel damned well should have known) that the rating of a single movie is not inherently a comparison to all other movies, but an indication of how successfully that movie achieves its own purpose.  Art is not a sport, and the pathetic need to score it for so many emotionally and intellectually undeveloped males per their demands and expectations is deeply unhealthy for the art form.  In Ebert's opinion, FMJ was not entirely successful as a war movie, or an anti-war war movie, or a Kubrick movie, and I can see his point without necessarily having strong feelings about it one way or another.  Separately, he saw Benji the Hunted as a very successfully executed Benji movie.  While having no personal interest IN a Benji movie, I can see how one might be well made per its own intentions.  While you and/or I may feel that he misjudged FMJ, Benji had absolutely nothing to do with it.  In other words, they're not in competition with each other -- not one human soul went to the theater in 1987 and said, "Hm, do I feel like seeing a bleak vision of the Vietnam War, or a cute children's story about a fluffy dog?!" -- they're in competition with themselves.  I bring this up because A) I consider Ebert to have been pretty much as good as it gets when it comes to film review, and 2) the absolute failure of the majority of internet loudmouths to grasp this concept has become toxic to the media arts.

Approaching Horns as a film that is what it means to be, it's a complete success.  Approaching it as a film with tho obligation of meeting the expectations of angry young boy-men, it's a magnet for scorn.  And the moral of this story (like so many stories) is "Don't read Comments on the Internet."

But I digress...

Horns stars Daniel Radcliffe in what I believe is his best performance to date.  Radcliffe plays Ig Perrish, a young radio DJ from near Seattle who is accused of murder.  The murder of which he is accused is of the love of his life, Merrin (the ethereal Juno Temple), his girlfriend since childhood.  The whole town hates Ig and wants him to burn.  Even his parents' phrasings betray their own doubts about his innocence.  Universally despised, but legally bound not to leave, Ig is in a living Hell.

So maybe it shouldn't be entirely surprising when he starts to sprout horns from his forehead.  Devil's horns.  People react very differently to Ig's new appearance.  Some see it as representative of what they already think he is.  Others don't see them as anything terribly unusual, and some don't see them at all.  This becomes part of the mystery.  Along with the new fashion statement, Ig's other statements take on a new gravity as well.  People immediately start sharing their shameful secrets, asking him whether they should go ahead and act on them.  We all have our hidden impulses, but we like having the Devil around to blame.

Initially horrified, Ig comes to embrace these changes almost like super powers, enabling him to uncover layers of the mysteries surrounding him.

Well, I just enjoyed the hell out of this film.  What was more-or-less a mystery gained all kinds of richness through its characters and their secrets, and through the utterly surreal story device of Ig's horns and abilities.  It's filled with genuine humor, never resorting to cheap jokes, and darkness that never resorts to bleakness.  The way the story reveals personal histories creates characters worth caring about and hoping for  Even when a plot point came up that hinted pretty strongly at the mystery's solution, I was still fascinated to find out how it all fit together.  This is just plain good storytelling, in the true spirit of fable craft.


OPENS TOMORROW

TELEVISION:


Constantine: Pilot Episode - 2014
based on the Hellblazer comics by first written by Jamie Delano,
based on the John Constantine character originally created by Alan Moore

I don't know if John Constantine has actually become "wildly popular" over the years since I walked away from comics, or if that's merely the hyperbole of the lazy and triflin' entertainment press.  The movie with Keanu Reeves was... okay ...but felt wrong, primarily because the character known to readers is a smart-mouthed demon fighter from the north of England and Keanu Reeves is, well, Keanu Reeves.  It was with extreme skepticism that I approached the new NBC series.  It just didn't (and I'm still skeptical about this) seem possible that a network TV show could have the brutal darkness and grit of the comic books I knew.  It was announced that Constantine wouldn't be shown smoking, which is not only a defining character affectation but a MAJOR plot point.  And the actor, Matt Ryan, still doesn't look quite right -- his clothes look too fresh and his dye job or wig still strikes me as costumey.

So it came as a significant surprise to me that I was intrigued and entertained for the entire pilot episode.

The story was instantly familiar to a reader of the original series like me, even if it's been transposed from England to the United States.  At least Constantine is English, as he always should have been.  The character was created by Alan Moore during his run on the Swamp Thing, and always had the quality of bringing that gloomy, rainy, Jack-the-Rippery steak-and-kidney flavor of the macabre to DC Comics' supernatural world.  Alan would probably get his ire up for me saying this (then again Alan hardly needs an excuse anymore), but I always took John Constantine to be the character most like Alan himself (prior to Promethea anyway), albeit wrapped in Sting's body.  Constantine is something of a paranormal investigator, magician (the real stuff) and "Master of the Dark Arts" towing doom in his wake.

The series opens with him in a mental hospital (per his choosing) trying to leave behind the idea that demons and ghosts and whatnot are real.  This is a man with a past of which he wishes to be unburdened, and it's not going to be as simple as disbelieving it away.

The first episode was actually a lot more fun than I remembered the comics to be, but it's hard to complain about that when you're having fun.  The episode did a fantastic job of establishing the series as well as completing a single-episode story.  It was overflowing with tone and texture, hinting at things to come without being overburdened by them, and sneaking in one hell of a tease without dwelling on all the "Guess who THIS is! Guess who THAT is!" that we got from Gotham.

You can seldom know for sure what you're going to get in the long run based on a pilot episode, but in terms of promise, Constantine's got it in spades.  Let's just hope he doesn't let us down like all those dead people he used to know.

Sequential Smarts

COMIC: Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud
Kitchen Sink Press (later editions; DC Comics and HarperPerennial) 1993


It's no exaggeration to declare that Scott McCloud's groundbreaking book, Understanding Comics is very probably the most important book ever written about comics, whether comic or prose. It's certainly debatable, but it's no exaggeration. During the 3 years that I taught comics classes at an art college in Portland, Understanding Comics was the required text for my classes, and although I never lectured from it, I frequently referenced it, and felt no guilt about about making it a compulsory purchase for a class that most students took just for fun. If they didn't "get it" then, at least they'd have it and be able to come back to it, because it's the kind of book that reveals new insight with every re-read; not just about comics specifically, but ways of looking at the world and human thought in general. It belongs in the collection of every person who has moved on to the question of "Why are comics cool?" whether they're coming from the direction of fanboy or skeptic.

I want to choose the right words here, to explain what Understanding Comics is to the uninitiated. I'm tempted to use words like "documentary" and "lecture series" but I'm afraid that the eyes of more skeptical or anti-intellectual readers will instantly glaze over and they'll fail to grasp how entertaining the material is in McCloud's hands. Firstly, Understanding Comics is a comic. It's a 215 page meditation on what comics are and what they can be. McCloud attempts to define what "comics" is, or are -- well, both really. He explores the language, time-bending nature, psychology, mechanics and approaches to comics, art in general, what comics mean, how they work, and the vast potential to which they can be used. He deftly sidesteps the question of whether comics can be "Art" with little more than a "Duh!" and goes on to treat them seriously as such, without bothering to validate such an ignorant question.

[Note to video game fans who are still surly with Roger Ebert for claiming that games can't be art: Rather than worrying about arguing with Ebert about whether or not they CAN be, the onus is upon us to demand more from our creators so the question becomes a moot one due to overwhelming evidence that they simply ARE. But this is a discussion for another day.]

McCloud walks us through the process of arriving at his definition of "comics." What he comes up with is a pretty broadly embracing definition, "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence." I'm still personally a little iffy on his definition. It excluded things like single panel cartoons, which, as I have argued directly with McCloud, create their own sequence owing to the placement of words relative to the image (example: a Family Circus panel with the text placed on the left of the panel by newspaper editors trying to cram more comics onto a page will not "work" the way it was intended when Bill Keane wrote it with the text appearing beneath the image).



McCloud's definition may also includes things like magazine articles which arrange photos throughout. The images may not tell a story, but they're definitely in deliberate sequence to "convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer" [from McCloud's expanded definition]. Now maybe he intends the definition to be that embracing, although part of me starts to believe that it's so broad that it doesn't really define ("to fix or mark the limits of") anything. His functional definition, however, is "Sequential Art," and that's as useful a handle as anything. With this definition, he's able to explore the impact that the form has had on culture throughout human history, far beyond the commonly accepted late 19th century origins of comics.



It becomes difficult to describe much of what McCloud talks about without turning into a second-rate parroting of all the material he manages so well. It's clear that he spent a lot of time thinking about these subjects, and clarifying his thoughts before he decided to tackle it all in a book. Much like describing the book in total, trying to explain the individual chapters would betray the ease and expertise with which McCloud handles (at first) seemingly esoteric and academic topics. He never speaks down to readers who would ordinarily never touch such a theoretical work as this. He explains things clearly, and makes understand why you suddenly care about things you probably never gave that much thought to in the first place.

By presenting this information in comics form, McCloud not only makes the theoretical more palatable, but he validates many of his points by demonstrating the largely untapped potential of the medium to communicate and enrich. When I taught my comics classes, and in conversations with fanboys online, every once in a while I'll come across someone who'll tell me "I already understand comics." Of course, what they really mean is that they understand what they want comics to be -- specifically, masturbatory nostalgia and/or juvenile reinforcement of male identity imagery -- and they don't want someone coming along and telling them that there's more to the medium that they love (and want to keep trapped in a frozen infancy, like a child who wants their dog to always remain a dependent and controllable puppy) than what they've believed it was since they first huddled under the covers with a flashlight and a stack of hand-me-down issues of Spider-Man. Understanding Comics doesn't make value judgments on content. In fact, it barely discusses content at all. What it does is deepen and broaden the reader's concept of what comics are, and what they can be. That expands the view of the reader (or the non-reader, for that matter) and opens them up to greater experiences, and in so doing, fills them with a hunger for a more refined and adventurous menu of a wider world -- and isn't that what art is supposed to do, after all?

Crosspost Classic!  08.21.2007