Why can’t our movie studios mature? Why can’t we?
Read the reply to this article titled: “The Mature Franchise” (Sept 2024).
§ A Childhood of Heroes
My childhood was suffused with some of the greatest entertainment a growing boy could ask for. All children need heroes, and it seems my generation got most of them.
With the rerelease of the original Star Wars trilogy and the release of the first prequel, The Phantom Menace, I began to see myself in a universe full of unlikely heroes, intriguing creatures, and climactic battles. My early sketchbooks were full of diagrams and details copied from encyclopedias of droids and ships found in this world. These stories taught me no matter how wide or dangerous the galaxy might seem, you can always step up to do something significant.
Along with sci-fi came fantasy. While I was still had a child’s sense of the wonder and imagination, the first installments of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter were released. My drawings then turned to the various textures of wizard robes and mythical trees, the glint of a hero’s sword or a dragon’s scales. Instead of relying on impressive or complicated technology, these more magical stories emphasized spiritual discipline and the cultivation of character.
At the same time, the modern superhero blockbuster was born. In Spider Man, Peter Parker grew into both his powers and his responsibilities, swinging between skyscrapers and fighting goblins. In Iron Man, Tony Stark marshaled his technical genius to fight against those who profit off wars. In Nolan’s Batman, Bruce Wayne integrated his shadow and fought against fear, chaos, and power—personified in Scarecrow, Joker, and Bane.
These superheroes had to navigate between their everyday and heroic personalities, in order to bring something otherworldly into our mundane world and save the day. The benefit this brings to a teenager finding his own way into the powers and persona he will bear in adulthood is so obvious and essential it hardly needs to be mentioned.
§ The Squandering Empire
But it seems the franchises of my youth have failed to find their own way into maturity. Whether through their rapacious greed or a dearth of creativity, most of these franchises have devolved into a string of shameful cash grabs, devoid of plot or character, all dressed up in gaudy computer-generated imagery.
Whereas Tolkien’s Hobbit was a simple story that emphasized its hero’s small and unassuming nature, Peter Jackson’s Hobbit was a bloated trilogy that drowned out any simplicity with complicated side-plots and artificial graphics. Watching Amazon’s absolutely vapid Rings of Power is like scrolling through countless frames of stock photography taken at some generic Renaissance fair. In so many ways, it was an insult not only fans, but the very concept of viewership.
However, the most egregious offender of heroic storytelling is, of course, Disney. Naturally, Disney has a long history of removing grim elements from classic fairy tales to make them more palatable (and profitable). But recent expansions of their entertainment empire have become too much to handle.
Bringing Marvel Studios and Lucas Films into their portfolio was an unimaginably expensive set of acquisitions. Along with their wealth of characters, these legacy franchises also brought the urgency to recoup costs through incessant releases, abortive reboots, and aimless spinoffs. But ROI is not Disney’s only problem.
The subscription model built into the Disney+ streaming service locks both Disney and their viewers into a consumptive cycle that dilutes stories even as it expands the platform. Being limited creatures as we are, people have a finite capacity to consume a finite number of stories in the finite time we have allotted to us. Therefore, we don’t have a need for the seemingly infinite releases that come out on a seemingly infinite platform for a seemingly infinite amount of time.
Since the number of stories that are worth consuming and the number of stories we can actually consume are both very small numbers, increasing the amount of worthless stories only increases the odds that both we and the studio will waste time and money on stories that don’t matter.
This problem most acutely afflicts the Marvel superheroes, who have suffered the most from the repetition of their own formulas. After a certain point, Marvel creators thought that one unified, concrete “cinematic universe” was not large enough to hold the number of iterations they hoped to produce.
Thus, their vain repetitions spilled over into the disorienting, hypothetical realm of multiverses. No matter how intricately computer animators style these surreal worlds, audiences don’t care. We’re lost in our own world already: we don’t need to get lost in another one as well. We come to stories to ground us in the real world.
That being said, there’s a difference between “real” and “realistic.” Even when Disney tries to present something as “realistic” it only succeeds in warping reality in the most uncanny ways. Here, we can also see how the ever-expanding catalog hurts Disney by the amount of comparison it invites. With each new release of a classic story in a “realistic,” “live-action” form, the hand-drawn animations of the originals shines out with an evermore glorious contrast.
Take, for example, The Little Mermaid. In the original, the wise animators filled their brightly-colored underwater world with cheerfully-rendered, aquatic characters. But if I were to plunge you into a “realistic” ocean, the lack of sunlight in those deep, dark waters would become a nightmare. Now, if I were to add “realistic” slimy fish and “realistic” scuttling crabs to your experience, that might bad enough. But making these creatures talk would only bring an unsettling sense of eeriness to an already terrifying situation.
§ The Unwriting of Heroes
Tragically, Disney appears determined to dismantle the very franchises it once acquired at such great cost. When one assumes responsibility for telling some of the most important stories in recent memory, we soon find not everyone is up to the task.
Overshadowed by the stories they have inherited, many of Disney’s writers must have been confronted by their own futility. Instead of meeting the challenge offered by the past, most of these embittered creators have tried to enlarge their protagonists by eviscerating the heroes that came before them. Nowhere is this cowardly offense more flagrant than in Star Wars.
Originally, Luke Skywalker was a nobody living on the edge of nowhere who became the greatest master of the Force and saved the universe from evil. Now, we find Luke living as a nobody on the edge of nowhere who lost control of the Force and couldn’t even save his training temple from evil.
Originally, Han Solo was a lawless smuggler, bumming around with his shaggy buddy, but he eventually grows in virtue, becomes a hero who helps defeat the tyranny ruling the galaxy, and marries a princess. Now, we find Han as a lawless smuggler bumming around the universe with his shaggy buddy—after his marriage with the princess failed—and then he is killed by their son who mercilessly rules the galaxy as its new tyrant.
In both cases, the writers employ a sadistic parallelism to precisely undo the story of our heroes. What we get is worse than tragedy: our heroes are stripped of the virtues they gained in their stories; we find them in a place even worse than where their stories began; and they have no hope of redemption or improving their situation. But worst of all—we’re fools for having invested so much in them.
When all they do is unwrite the stories of our heroes, it hardly makes sense to call the individuals behind these films “writers.” It seems the sole aim of these “Unwriters” was to flatten the character arcs of these towering figures. Perhaps, in so doing, they could level the playing field low enough that we might take notice of their utterly nondescript characters, such as Rey, Finn, or Kylo Ren. How flat must you make the world for characters as flat as these to stand out?
Finally, so all-consuming was the infernal jealousy of these Unwriters, that they even tried to supplant the original story at the level of droids. They had the nerve to leave the indispensable and decorated R2-D2 idling in standby mode—just so he could be roused and knocked around by the sporadic and ditsy BB-8. On the one hand, we see savvy and battle-worn veteran of intergalactic battles standing strong and upright, if a bit boxy and outdated. On the other, we see a shiny and playful ball which spends its time rolling around delightfully, if a bit aimlessly.
In comparing the two, I wonder if BB-8 was more designed to be a toy than a character. Perhaps all of his appearances were actually commercials, put in front of children and parents, to demonstrate how fun he is to play with. Since both the parents and the children are subjected to movies with no heroes, it’s less likely that either will find ways to mature. In that case, toys might be the most we can hope for.
§ An Age of Adolescence
Growing up with so many heroes was an embarrassment of riches. In some cases, these riches might be too heavy to carry from the past into the present. Instead of finding ways to integrate the past into our present stories, it seems like many modern franchises either squandering their inheritance or actively rebel against it.
In the former case, the present dissipates its creative energy through superficially pursuing too many options without commitment, decision, or direction. In the latter case, the present ends up destroying itself through its attempts to destroy the past, for the past’s sin of simply being better the present.
While differing in temperament or motivation, both amount to essentially the same thing. Both are the typical responses of someone stuck in an adolescent stage of development. At a time when there is so much debate in American politics about “puberty blockers,” maybe it helps to see that our entire culture is dealing the problem of adolescence. We don’t know how to grow up. We don’t know what that looks like.
Whatever the cause and whatever the odds, I do believe in the transformative power of stories. Our ability to mature is based largely on the stories we hear and the heroes we model. Thus, I think we should also look at some franchises that have found ways to successfully mature.
That’s what I’ll be writing about next.
Read the reply to this article titled: “The Mature Franchise” (Sept 2024).