Supergirl (1984)

This one I'd never even heard of.  Evidently it never got a US release.  But of the five films in the

original Superman series, it's not the worst.  It's not even the second-worst.  On the other hand, it is the third-worst...

What it does badly is pretty easy to identify.  It's borderline incoherent a lot of the time - like, on a basic narrative level, it's just hard to figure out who's doing what or why.  Or maybe it's just so poorly thought out that you don't want to figure out what's going on.  Why does it take us until near the end of the movie to realize that the villain's strangely decorated lair is actually a carnival haunted house?  What's the purpose of delaying that information?  It's not much of a payoff when it arrives;  more of a "huh." 

But plot holes aren't, in and of themselves, a real problem for me in superhero movies.  The bigger problem in this film is that the midwestern town it's mostly set in is undoubtedly the ugliest slice of America ever committed to celluloid.  Dirty, drab suburban sprawl, full of random power lines and no trees,  fast-food joints and strip malls, all crammed together in a shallow frame so we can make out all the corporate logos (product placement is always everywhere in this series), just before they get squashed by a not-terribly-fast-moving tractor.  Watching it I half wondered if the whole thing was a clever and hard-edged satire on American consumerism.  I almost wish it was.

The tone of this movie, at every turn, is just off.  Weird.  Sometimes it's weird in a good way, like Supergirl's first flight.  It's so wide-eyed and airbrushed that you expect unicorns to pop up, or Shaun Cassidy, but it works in a strange way.  A Girl's First Flight.  Similarly, the opening Argo City stuff with Peter O'Toole is bad, bad, bad, but strangely enjoyable - vaguely reminiscent, for sheer vervaciousness, of such Gallic s-f masterpieces as Barbarella or Fifth Element. 

The best part of it, the one really good thing, is the villains.  Faye Dunaway, Brenda Vaccaro, and Peter Cook as a trio of backbiting, not-too-imaginative witches.  The parts are underwritten - like I say, they're given a great lair but the filmmakers forget to explain it until it's too late to care - but all three of the actors camp it up marvelously. There's an opportunity for some kind of mythic resonance here - contrasting types of Girl Power - and it gets lost in the mess of the script.  But Dunaway and Vaccaro's chemistry almost delivers it anyway.

Superman III (1983)

My take on this movie is pretty much the same as everybody's, I think.  It's not great - in fact it's really
awful in parts - but then again it's not as bad as the fourth film.

The awful parts - where to begin?  Richard Lester is still directing it as if he's embarrassed by the whole thing.  Not too embarrassed to cash the checks, I guess, but certainly not willing to invest the thing with any dignity.   And while my particular subject-position on all the superhero movies is that I'm not a superhero-comic reader, still I can tell that the villain here is not an integral part of the myth.  It doesn't surprise me to learn that he was written precisely as a not-Lex Luthor when Gene Hackman's services couldn't be procured.

Then there's Richard Pryor.  Now, I don't have a problem with the idea of putting Richard Pryor in a Superman movie.  I mean, I could probably accept him if the part was written right.  But the racial attitudes that underlie the writing of this part are just odious.  It's wrong on so many levels.  But that was the Reagan era for you.

But then there's the extended sequence with Clark Kent vs. Superman, or good Supe vs. bad Supe.  This is the scenic part of the Uncanny Valley. We're seeing things that just shouldn't be, and they're wonderful.  It works on all the levels that the rest of the movie fails on.  Visually, thematically, narratively.  The film is worth seeing for that.

Lou Reed R.I.P.

Yes, even a Deadhead, prog-sympathizer, soft-spot-for-folk-having, no-New-York putz like me likes him some Brother Reed.

And now there ain't no comin' back.

Superman II (1980)

Writing seems to be the only area where my morbid persistence fails me.  I'll watch all the superhero movies, even the ones everybody knows stink - I can't stop myself - but as soon as I set myself the task of writing about them all, it's all over.  I can't get started.  If I totaled up all the pages I've written

on unfinished novels since high school I'd have...well, a lot.

I start with the Superman movies because they're the first superhero movies I can personally remember, but also because they're usually accepted as starting a new era in superhero movies.  Once Hollywood could make you believe a man can fly, it could do anything, and any superhero story was possible. 

I've long realized this, but as I think I hinted before, Superman is such a problematic myth for me (how do you make perfection interesting?) that I never revisited the movies until now.  So I'm only now coming to the realization that, for all their historical importance, they're really a botched job.  Even the first one - and in many ways, I love it - is less than what it could have been.  The story of why is well told here, so I'll just summarize.  Richard Donner was hired to make two Superman movies at once:  he was doing the Peter Jackson thing of filming it all at more or less the same time, but finishing the first one first to make the money to finish the second one.  But Donner's bosses lost their nerve and wouldn't guarantee the second one until they saw that the first one was a hit.  So to hedge bets Donner put the second movie's ending at the end of the first one.  It was a hit, but the bosses sacked Donner anyway and brought in Richard Lester to finish up the second film. 

Decades later Donner went back and put together his own version of Superman II, and really, if you're at all interested in the character, you have to see both of them.  Which is kind of sad, because the Lester version really is bad.

It's bad because it doesn't take the character, the story, the mythos seriously.  His Superman does what so many of the Bonds around this period did, treat the whole thing as an excuse for a romp.  It's a fun movie, and very much in tune with the times, but it mostly fails to make anything of its materials.  It's as if Lester was embarrassed to be making a movie about a guy in tights.

Donner wasn't embarrassed:  his first Superman movie succeeded because he (and his team) believed.  Respected the material, and brought it to the screen with a conviction that poetry out of it.  So one might expect his Superman II to be better than Lester's and it is - there's hardly any comparison.  I only have one objection:  it's incomplete.  I understand the desire to minimize the amount of Lester-shot footage in the final Donner product, but so much is cut out that unless you've seen the Lester version you don't really understand what the villains are up to.  The Donner version depends on the viewer having seen the Lester version. 

I guess I have one other objection, although there's not much that could be done about this.  The Donner version of SII ends the way Donner had originally meant the film to end - meant it, that is, way back at the beginning of the project.  The problem is, Donner used that ending for the first movie;  it really wasn't available for the second movie.  In other words, both Superman: The Movie and Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut end with Superman turning back time.  What needs to happen is for somebody to go back and cut a version of the first movie that ends the way the original project meant for it to end, so that the two films match up as the big two-part epic they were meant to be...

Unless/until that happens, what we're left with in these first two movies, and two versions of the second, is kind of a mess.  A noble, promising, at times glorious mess, but still a mess of loose ends, inconsistencies, and half-realized ideas.  Which, in an odd way, fits:  since Superman is about perfection, it's kind of right that it was unrealizable, at least in this first go-round.  I think one perfect Superman movie did get made, and maybe I'll get around to explaining why I think it's perfect someday, but for the moment I'll just observe that it embraces incompleteness - it starts as if in the middle of a story, rejecting the idea that it can achieve perfection in itself.  Maybe the best way to glimpse completeness is through incompleteness?  Not a new idea, certainly, but a nifty innovation for a superhero movie.

So what does Donner do in his version of the second movie that's worth doing?  Present The Last Temptation of Christ - in tights.  I.e., he argues that if Superman is perfect, then part of his perfection is to recognize that he belongs to everybody, and therefore to nobody in particular - and to accept that, he has to deny himself happiness, or at least whatever happiness he thinks a normal human relationship would bring him.  Superman must be self-denying.  And that's the only way we mere mortals can even begin to identify with him as a hero.  Without that he's just a child's fantasy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Taps at Reveille (1935)

So I'm still occasionally pressing on with my Fitzgerald obsession.  I am obsessive with things like this, and sometimes, when it's driven by past experience and future promise of joy, I consider it a good thing.  But sometimes it's just a neurotic inability to cut my losses and get out.  I was starting to feel that way about Fitzgerald:  after reading Gatsby I decided to read All of Fitzgerald, something I'd long been curious about.  Then I realized that of his novels only Tender is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon come close, and not too close at that;  and that his short stories, while sometimes striking and sometimes amusing, don't come any closer.  So I got burned out.  But here I am, reading Taps at Reveille.

It was the last collection he published during his lifetime, the last he oversaw.  The first half of it consists of all of the Basil and Josephine stories he saw fit to reprint, but those are best read in the posthumous collection by that name.   That leaves ten stories, a book-length volume in itself.

The best, by far, is "Babylon Revisited," and since that's frequently anthologized the casual Fitzgerald reader may be better off reading it elsewhere.  It's a masterpiece, maybe the only one of his short stories that I've read that touches Gatsby's power and grace.  It's got his familiar faults - the villain, the obstacle, is a woman, and she's depicted with scant empathy.  But the elegiac tone leaves a deep impression, and the protagonist's guilty self-control leaves a mark. 

Does it gain from being read in context?  Maybe.  The title of this collection asks us to think in terms of elegies, of laments for something that ended before it really even got started.  And a couple of the other stories suggest that theme:  "Crazy Sunday," with its delicious adulterous flirtation turned to ashes in the mouth by the death of the Other Man;  "The Last of the Belles" and "Majesty," two more, but still effective, foxtrots to Fitzgerald's familiar theme of the shockingly precocious young woman whose freshness is belied by her cynicism.  So:  maybe.

The volume also contains some more experiments, along the lines of "Benjamin Button" or "Tarquin of Cheapside."  There's the Civil War story "The Night of Chancellorsville" and the ghost story "A Short Trip Home."  Most interesting of these is "Family in the Wind," because it seems to show Fitzgerald trying to be Faulkner.  It's a failure, even embarrassing - it's not possible to believe Fitzgerald's sudden attempt at empathy with poor rural people - but it's revealing that he'd try this.  And that he'd elect to reprint it in his lifetime, when so many of his other short stories didn't make his cut.

Hippie Chic at the MFA

We also went to the Boston MFA last week, first time in four years.  Not just to see the current special exhibit on Hippie Chic.  But we did see that.

As a fashion exhibit it was great.  That is, as an exhibit of clothes that even at the time would have been more expensive than I could have afforded and more fashionable than I could have pulled off (or put on), and that anyway I've only seen in photos, and that are thus are worth paying money to ogle in a museum, it was fine.  You know, if you listen to the music of the period, you've seen photos of Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Nicks, Grace Slick, Lulu all wearing stuff like this, so it's nice to see it in person, in a kind of starfucking sort of way.

I did take issue a little bit with the characterization of it all as hippie.  Predictably, given my own obsessions.  The exhibit did gesture toward the fact that this was, after all, for the most part haute couture trying to co-opt street fashion:  big business stealing kids' ideas and trying to sell them back to them.  And in the case of the hippies, who like the punks a generation later were pretty much a DYI kind of movement, into found and made objects above all, the ideological contradictions get pretty heightened.  Some of these dresses and suits were in-the-scene and of-the-scene, but some were the Man, pure and simple.  I can understand why, coming from an institutional context that's more or less dependent on charitable contributions from the Man, why that tension wasn't interrogated more.  But still. 

Yale Center for British Art

We were in New Haven for a couple of days this week, and I went to the Yale Center for British Art. 

I'm not an Anglophile.  At least, I don't consider myself one.  In fact when I was younger I had arguments with Americans who I thought were too Anglophilic - childish arguments, to be sure, but the point is that although I don't consider myself a cultural nationalist neither do I have a thing for British culture for its own sake.  That said, I do like my share of UK bands, writers, films, etc.  And over the last decade or so I've developed a real love for 18th and 19th century British painters. 

I don't think I realized quite what a love it was until I spent the afternoon at this gallery, though.  I'm not sure I can quite explain it, either.  I can explain my love for old portraiture in general - a good portrait that really captures the personality of the sitter is the best way I know to connect across the centuries, to feel common humanity from a remote age.  But why British portraits of that period, more than American?  More than French?  More than Dutch?  (Well, maybe not more than Dutch.)  I
have to think about this more.

So since I haven't thought about it enough I'll just link to a couple of masterpieces I saw and tell you why I loved them.

One is a painting that I think most viewers would agree is a masterpiece:  Reynolds's "Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue."  Reynolds makes her look utterly dreamy, yet completely conscious of her charm - you expect her to say something bawdy, or just to wink, at any moment.  She's so young, and so alive. 

The other is one that perhaps a lot of viewers would pass by:  George Beare's "Portrait of an Elderly Lady and a Girl."  Certainly it lacks the perfection of the Reynolds.  Mrs. Sgt. T once taught me that most portraitists used generic bodies and only had the subjects pose for the face, and you can really see it in the old woman's body and arms, which so utterly fail to match her face.  But that face - so unabashedly aged, so unglamorous, so real.  And the granddaughter, fresh-faced but a little awkward, a little bored.  Again:  real.

*

Is it connection that I feel?  Is it the conviction that, unlike the subjects of French or Dutch portraits, if I somehow met these people I could speak with them and understand what they said?  An illusion, of course, but a powerful one.  And yet they're British, and I'm not, right?  Does this mean that I don't feel American?  That I don't think there's a distinction between British and American culture, either in the 18th century or now?  Would I have been a Tory in '76?  Do I agree with the Booker Prize being thrown open to Americans?