GETTING THE MIX RIGHT
November 23rd, 2010 by Adrian ReynoldsHow many ways are there to tell a story? And in choosing different means, do we arrive at the same place, or are we in fact creating other stories altogether? I ask because I come across and can utilise different approaches according to my intentions, and sometimes encounter stories where the combination of narrative and means to express it makes for an unusual effect.
Case in point: the first volume of Son of the Gun, written by Jodorowsky with art by Bess, a handsome Humanoids hardback I picked up for just £5 in a Forbidden Planet sale. I’ve got some limited experience of Jodorowsky through seeing his film Santa Sangre, a kaleidoscopic yarn involving circus folk, psychedelia, incest, and — somewhere in there I swear — a dead elephant.
No surprise then that lurking between the covers of what seems to be a crime yarn, is something rather more twisted. The writer’s mystic and mythic preoccupations have been fused with an otherwise conventional story, and the effect is fascinating. The tailed protagonist Orlando is raised by a midget whore and whelped by a dog, growing up to be the fiercest and brightest of a gang of street thugs, before ultimately being crucified in the desert. Even Scorsese at his most florid hasn’t taken his fascination with Catholicism so far — here we’ve got the fusion of Last Temptation and Goodfellas that he shied away from.
The thing is, it works. The mixture of mythic and street material is highly effective this way round. What doesn’t work for me is when inherently mythic material is presented in the manner of street level storytelling. No surprise that I’m thinking Brian Michael Bendis at this point.
I loved his work on Daredevil, where the mix of guilt, obsession and street crime works just fine, and suits his dialogue tics. A word about those actually: much is made of Bendis’s love of David Mamet, and there’s some overlap. But where Mamet’s dialogue is always moving the story forward, Bendis all too often circles round and round without momentum. Which is exactly what you don’t want when you’re writing characters like Captain America and Thor. Those guys are heroes, icons, living myths, and work best when treated as such. Having them stumble over their words and circumlocute to no good end is bad writing, plain and simple.
That’s not just my take on matters, it stems from research. A seminal bodyworker called Moshe Feldenkrais spent his life examining the way we use our bodies and neurology, and created exercises to minimise what he called ‘parasitic’ thoughts and movements. Leg twitches, hums and hahs, all the stuff that characterise ‘normal’ interaction — but which we can learn to reduce. And if that’s possible for you and me, you can bet true heroes operate at that level and beyond.
This is something that Grant Morrison gets — and Kevin Smith doesn’t. Morrison’s Batman is the ultimate a human being can aspire to, a billionaire who has reached the pinnacle of physical and mental perfection. Smith’s contribution to the Batman mythos? He had him piss himself. Which works fine at the level of teenage sniggering…but that’s pretty much the level Smith’s work is stuck at, for all his attempts to include some moral fibre in Dogma.
Someone else who gets it is Walt Simonson. His run on Thor embraced the epic in every sense, from the larger-than-life dynamism of the artwork to the galactic scale of the adventures his hero engaged in. And even when he worked on a smaller scale, with Thor turned into a frog, there was still a sense of true fantasy about it. No stumbling over words and Woody Allen style self-consciousness: Thor represents the divine.
I’m all for mixing things up, learning from different styles and genres. But that includes recognising when a particular approach is going nowhere, and hasn’t been pursued before for good reason. But what do I know? Bendis comics sell by the truckload. All very well. But that’s the point when we can look at the distinction between popular appeal and mass appeal. The Beatles were the first, creating art that elevated themselves and touched peoples’ lives. Oasis are examples of the latter, aping the surface aspects of what the Fab Four did without ever expanding that template or creating work with real resonance.
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