Reflections from a Young Movie-Goer
The follow up part of
Supernatural International will be up shortly. It's become
quite a research project now, demanding much more scrutiny than I'd
originally planned. The next part will be looking at 60s British
ghost films, Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968) and The
Innocents (1961), but I also have plans to look at J-horror, haunted
houses, a couple of really interesting Asian films from this year
called The Wailing (2016) and Under the Shadow (2016), a few short
stories, and maybe even a comparison of the two different versions
of The Woman in Black. Once I started looking around, I found
out there was a lot more out there than I had first anticipated. The
subject matter is hugely interesting though as it seems to transcend
the horror genre altogether. To merely associate ghosts with fear is
to neglect how broad their cultural influence is and, furthermore,
how they feed into our other emotions. Their very existence in our
imaginations (both individual and collective) highlights the sheer
poetry of our ability to interpret reality; how we interact as
emotional, irrational beings with our surroundings, with others and
with time.
In the meantime though, before I get carried away, I've been
intending to write a post about the state of Science Fiction. I'd
drafted a couple of posts about it but never finished them and, up
until today, had since forgotten about it. However, after watching
the trailer for Luc Besson's new film Valerian and the City of a
Thousand Planets (2017), I thought now would be the perfect time
to revive the topic, seeing as what I'd written then aligned
perfectly with my reasons for getting excited about the film. For
those that haven't already, you can watch the trailer here.
Valerian looks like it will closely echo the stylings of
Besson's previous film, The Fifth Element (1997), presenting a
lush, distant future filled with colourful aliens, robots, spaceships
and all the other staples of a space opera. It's based on the French
comic, Valérian
and Laureline,
written
by
Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières, first
published in 1967. The trailer shows us little plot-wise, hopping
from one richly detailed panorama to the next as The Beatle's Because plays in the background. The song is a brilliant choice, telling us
that this won't be the gritty, self-righteous Sci-Fi we've become
accustomed to, but rather be closer in spirit to the French comics
scene on which the film draws from.
I
think that a lot of US Sci-Fi must labour under the impression that
it is impossible to be intelligent and have fun at the same time.
Either that, or they just don't know how to. This could perhaps be
because of their national obsession with good and evil narratives,
and their taking stories way too seriously. The most obvious example
of this is the work of Zack Snyder and, more specifically, the way he
crudely shoehorns subtext into his version of Superman. All the
humour in his work, rather than being neatly woven into the story, is
a separate thing altogether, as if it were carelessly sprinkled on
top of the plot. Although you can't blame him entirely for exploring
the serious side of Superman, as morality forms the basis of the Man
of Steel myth. Yet Snyder went completely wrong in trying to make
Superman dark and gritty, pulling crass Jesus poses here and there,
and frowning in the rain. My own favourite renditions of Superman
have been ones which have room for humour and real ideas, like Grant
Morrison and Frank Quitely's All
Star Superman.
Stylistically, All
Star Superman
is a lot closer to the French Sci-Fi comics of the 60s, because
Morrison and Quitely know how to wield creativity to effective,
meaningful ends. I think this difference between comic and film can
be observed throughout many recent Super-outings, with films turning
down comic-book outrageousness (weirdness, silliness, campness) in an
attempt to be taken seriously. Another case in point; the X-Men. In
truth, no amount of black leather and chrome will make these
characters more serious and grown up, they're crime fighting mutants,
one of them shoots lasers out of his eyes.
The
overwhelming popularity of the Marvel films has to some extent
infected the comics too, which are now simply spandex-clad soap
operas. Ultimately, they pale in comparison to something like Métal
hurlant,
an “adult-oriented” French comic magazine that began in 1974.
French comics can openly admit when they're smut, and they don't try
and dress it up in sensible clothes or infuse lessons into their
readers. They let the imagination roam free, providing an
intoxicating, morally apathetic sense of escapism, and as a result
feel a lot closer to Art than Entertainment. This is apparent in
Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius' The
Incal,
whose fruitful panels are filled with copious amounts of colour,
character and interest. For Moebius, the meaning of the comic is in
the art itself, it echoes the Decadent movement providing us with art
for art's sake. Like the Obelisk and Olympia press who between them
published Ulysses,
The
Tropic of Cancer
and Naked
Lunch,
art and pornography become to some extent indistinguishable. The
eroticism of Moebius' work, abundant with naked bodies and sexual
imagery, coupled with its chemically-suggestive psychedelia, is not
just a railing against authority and good taste, but an affirmation
of human sensuality. With this comes a sort of humour in the very
absurdity of his fantastical creations, it is in the sheer conception
of these things that the reader feels as if they are in communion
with another mind, exploring the limits of the imagination.
Whilst
a lot of French comics aren't overtly erotic or psychedelic, they
carry this tradition with them, with a light humour that resembles
the intangibility of imagination. A lot of US Sci-Fi attempts to
limit the amount of imaginative
stuff
in a narrative in order to create a vaster sense of realism in
accordance with their subtextual aims. As such, humour is a foreign
element which needs to be worked in carefully, balanced correctly so
as to not disturb the serious bits. Watching something like Luc
Besson's The
Fifth Element,
one realises how much the humour is woven into its very foundations.
It's a film that knows how to have fun, is unconcerned with providing
a realistic, moral basis for its plot. A similar sort of approach is
apparent in other French directors like Leos Carax, Jean-Pierre
Jeunet or Sylvain Chomet, who understand that sincerity doesn't have
to get in the way of entertainment, that in fact they can be
interdependent. I think that a lot of recent American Sci-Fi films
that have attempted to emulate the aestheticism of the French comics,
stuff like the Riddick
series or Jupiter
Ascending (2015),
have only failed because they don't understand the depth of their
humour. Valerian,
with its portly, spear-wielding aliens who don't so much as charge as
waddle into battle, seems to be a good sign for Sci-Fi cinema. All
the signs seem to be pointing in the right direction that it will be
able to recapture the spirit of French comics, which American Sci-Fi
sorely lacks at the moment.
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