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790 hits since 30 Apr 2019
©1994-2024 Bill Armintrout
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Patrick R30 Apr 2019 4:16 a.m. PST

Raise your hand if you have a fair knowledge of superhero comics.

If so you probably know that around the 1980's and into the 1990's comics underwent a few changes. Having major characters die was suddenly pretty big, starting with the Death of Superman. Of course they couldn't kill off a character who had been around since WWII and still makes up a significant portion of the sales total so they brought him back.

Since then it's been fairly common for major superheroes to die, stay in limbo for said amount of time(or not) and return. The conceit being so prevalent that even Professor X made an in universe reference to death being a revolving door.

To people who are familiar with comics it's considered common knowledge. It's one of those cultural shibboleths fans can endlessly share among themselves.

What may surprise comic fans is that outside of their peer group this knowledge hardly exists. It sounds almost impossible to those steeped in pop culture, but the average person on the street has little or no knowledge of the tropes and conventions of most genres.

Most people have only a vague awareness and understanding of the films they go watch, they are not familiar with most of what constitutes the common knowledge base of pop culture. This is not in itself a bad thing, there is no inherent hurdle to appreciate a thing without having any pertinent knowledge on the subject.

To quote Jaylah "I like the beats and shouting."

The joke here is a good example : Jaylah is an alien character in the movie Star Trek Beyond who lives in a crashed Federation starship and listens to music by the Beastie Boys. She has zero understanding of what the music is about, but enjoys it on a very basic level.

To understand the point, you have to know who Jaylah is and know the quote, if not you can still infer the point of the joke, but if you know the film you should appreciate the reference.

So somebody may like a piece of Jazz music, but it takes quite a bit of knowledge to appreciate it to the fullest.

Why is understanding something so relevant ?

This can be seen in the pre-Avengers Endgame discussions. A surprising amount of people seemed to hold the character deaths in Infinity War to be absolute and permanent. To somebody with a background in superhero comics this sounds weirdly naive since they assume that they will find a way to restore most of the characters.

To put it another way, the average person on the street has very different expectations than somebody with knowledge and understanding of the subject.

Even if they have seen all 22 films they may not have internalized all the conventions and features of comic book (or film) superheroes. Their understanding is different.

"That Jazz music sounds like they are just making noise."

If know and understand Jazz you'll want to explain that it's all about music theory etc.

But if the other person doesn't want to understand this, it's going to remain noise.

If you fail to understand something, you're likely to make wrong conclusions on a given topic. If you think Jazz music is just random noise then the people who pretend to understand it must either completely wrong, be really weird or may just be plain lying and making it up as a kind of stupid joke on the rest of the world.

These days it's fairly common to hear people accuse movies of being "full of plot holes" although their point may not even come close to the general definition of a plot hole. People may mistake a certain film convention for a mistake and call it a plot hole.

What may surprise people even more is that many viewers have no real idea of what's going on in a given film. They consume it, they enjoy it, but they couldn't tell you the plot of the last film they saw even if you put a gun to their heads.

This is not an attack on these people, and it's not the tired old joke of the old person who doesn't understand modern movies with their fast-cutting. It's just that many people watch films in the same way you watch fireworks, there is no real narrative to a fireworks display, just a bunch of "ooohs and aahs" delivered at a steady pace.

People consume these major moments not because they follow the plot and appreciate the finer points of the story, their reaction is Pavlovian. Over time they have acquired an instinctive grasp of story beats and punctuation and as long as they come at a steady pace they remain entertained, but once you start to jostle these conventions around the movie becomes confusing to them and we get "plot holes"

Of course this is the most basic type of ill-trained pop-culture consumer, most people have some vague understanding that gives them something to hold onto, but to anyone who is well-versed in things like storytelling or cinematic language there is a strange rift because there is no common ground to discuss things and leads to the common perception that the audience seems to enjoy the first dumb movie that comes along and that critics only like "stupid complex movies where nothing ever happens."

If Jaylah's yardstick for music is "beats and shouting" she will not be inclined to understand Jazz or Mozart.

If your yardstick is something like character emotion and moments of action you'll not notice that character interaction may be completely wrong or that the emotions you're trying to look for to carry you through to the next scene is merely evoked and not organic to the story. If you have no reference points with the story you will not notice it's well or badly written.

If your cue in a film is a character emotion then how this emotion is achieved may not be perceived, you merely wait for its expression to guide you to the next point. If a character is angry you'll expect an action scene or something filled with negative emotions, if a character is happy there might be a quiet moment filled with happy emotions. If the movie tries to nuance this or play with the conventions it leads to confusion and accusations that it is a bad film, despite there nothing being inherently wrong in the first place.

And this explains why Michael Bay or the Speed Films get so much traction with audiences, the makers understand that most people don't get beyond character emotion and action. A Michael Bay film ticks all the boxes even if you have zero understanding of film. It's entertaining and exciting they are "near perfect entertainment"

But why do critics hate Bay films if they are perfect ?

When I say people expect emotions and action this is valid only for today's audiences, go back to the 1930's and 40's and people's expectations may be emotions and spectacle. That's why musicals were so popular, they dripped with emotions and spectacle. Blockbusters took over after Star Wars and now audiences expect action.

So as long as you hit the right expectations the rest of the films don't matter. Most movies today will skip traditional story and plot in favour of shortcuts to create faster pacing and keep people entertained.

By skipping all the boring stuff and streamlining the story into near non-existence Bay creates very efficient movies, but they retain almost nothing of the traditional conventions of storytelling.

So the critics will note the lack of story and only see a string of ticked boxes without any narrative structure, while the average moviegoer sees only those elements they enjoy and fail to notice a complete lack of narrative.

And this is where Marvel comes in. They make interesting films in that they come from a medium where playing fast and loose with the rules is an art. Superhero Comics today are akin to the most successful streamlined beat generating genre in fiction across all platforms today, the Soap-Opera.

Soap opera is a perpetual waterfall of viewer reinforcement though a constant frustration and reward system. Every storyline is designed with strong emotions going towards a resolution you cannot wait to discover and while you are halfway through the ongoing first line a secondary and a tertiary line is being seeded so that by the time you have been rewarded with the end of a major plot, you're already invested in another.

Superhero comics function in much the same way.

And they translated this language to film, not only by getting all the viewer expectations right, but also because they don't skip on the actual storyline, even if it's a very thin one.

To have 22 films support each other, you need a narrative tissue to maintain a cohesion and it's all fairly well done which explains why both audiences and critics like the films.

By contrast DC tried to do the same, but they made two major changes. First they thought they could substitute all emotion with dark drama, uniformly miserable characters and skip heavily on the narrative tissue. So the general audience doesn't notice much different other than that it's a darker tone, but emotion is emotion, who cares that Superman is now a selfish dick who only saves the world because the light of his life Lois Lane would otherwise perish. The emotional cues are right where they need to be and the action is also right on time. Everyone else notices the inconsistent tone of the characters, especially compared to their comic book counterparts, the lack of narrative tissue and the fact that many elements in the film are just shortcuts.

There is a scene in Batman v Superman : Dawn of Justice where Superman saves a family trapped on the roof by a flood. It's a really impressive moment in the film.

YouTube link

Note that I expressly said "Superman saves a family."

Look at the scene again, you see people on a roof, water around them, Superman is up in the air, the woman reaches out to him and …

Notice there is no interaction. Superman doesn't save them, he just hangs in the air looking dramatic. The desperate woman sells the shortcut by crying and reaching towards him.

Superman doesn't save people in this scene, it's only heavily implied. You're being tricked into believing this is an awesome Superman without even showing him doing anything other than look epic.

It's a trick, it's a shortcut. Nothing really happens, but the scene sells you a story without telling it. Narrative is excised from the film in favour of dramatic vignettes.

I think you can easily see how this is a very powerful narrative tool in the right hands, if you are lazy or don't want actual human interaction ruining your edgy filmmaking style.

Here's another example :

YouTube link

Snow White and the Huntsman. Remember how I talked about a "chosen one, the fair princess" ? How you can hire somebody to really act it all out or simply use a quick shortcut ?

Kristen Stewart is an OK actress, given the right script she could probably pull it off, but why bother if you can just put in a scene full of CGI magical creatures and have people simply state she is "the one" ?

The problem is that in the same film they spent all their energy on trying to highlight Charlize Theron's evil queen so much that Stewart's Snow White needs a shortcut to establish she's the awesome one.

Here's another shortcut :

YouTube link

Why did they use a shortcut ? The director realized that no matter what they put in the crib, no matter how creative a creepy effect you could achieve at the time, it would never match the imagination of the viewer. This is a smart shortcut, so effective that many viewers to this day remain convinced they saw the baby.

It can be used smartly, it can be used lazily, but if you are not aware of how stories and cinema works you'll still understand the beat and the shouts without noticing how it works.

Is it any wonder that audiences will walk away from the Superman scene thinking they saw a real hero at work or that Kirsten Stewart played an awesome magical Snow White and that the baby in the crib looked utterly disturbing …

But two of them are lies and fibs.

This is why audiences will enjoy a film and why the critics will disagree. One sees a flawless film that gets all the beats and shouts according to expectations, the other notices it's just smoke and mirrors to hide a bad job. Or why people don't notice the art that goes into the music because it's only noise and doesn't have a the beat and shouting they like so much and only the critics, who are just stupid contrarians can enjoy …

So we have to agree to disagree.

Ed Mohrmann Supporting Member of TMP30 Apr 2019 9:19 a.m. PST

Thanks for your effort in posting such a lengthy
analysis. Perhaps many will benefit by it.

Personal logo Parzival Supporting Member of TMP30 Apr 2019 12:03 p.m. PST

Not sure of your point here? That films use techniques to create emotional responses and convey action or imagery that really isn't there? Well, yes. All drama does. When Macbeth says "Is this a dagger which I see before me?" there is almost never an actual dagger floating above the stage, in large part because it would wind up looking as hokey as heck. Whether the audience decides that Macbeth actually sees a dagger (and whether they then imagine the dagger themselves), or is just being metaphorically dramatic is to some extent beside the point, though a performance might tip the scale one way or the other. Camera angles and cuts are simply methods film can use to achieve similar results. I don't think audiences are really that ignorant of the techniques, though they may not know the terms. They just may not care. I can know that the "beat and the shouting" is why I like (or dislike) a type of music, and be quite aware that that is a question of technique, without having any awareness of the music theory behind it. Indeed, if you have to understand music theory to like jazz, jazz would never have become even remotely popular. Nor, for that matter, would Mozart. Music doesn't become popular or even reach "classic" status because people appreciate music theory. It becomes these things because large numbers of people simply like the way it sounds. Was Shakespeare considered great in his lifetime because scholars who studied the elements of drama had a deep philosophical understanding of his plays? No! Shakespeare was great because people in London liked the stories he told and the memorable way in which he and his actors told them! He was doing the Marvel blockbusters of his day, for audiences that included many people who were barely literate, if they were literate at all. That he did them at a high level of competence was just a part of that— but the people didn't have to be scholars to like his work. They were enjoying a really great show. But Shakespeare knew how to push their buttons, too.

Now, I'm not trying to say that the Marvel films reach anywhere close to Shakespeare in quality or achievement. But I don't think they're "just pushing buttons" either. They're largely fluff entertainment, really, but occasionally they hit a strong note— and in any case they're certainly superior to any Michael Bay effort, and I think even the casual blockbuster movie fan would agree, and better than most of the recent DC films, Wonder Woman being an exception.

As for specific films, I've not yet seen Endgame, but I'm a rarity in thinking that Infinity War was grossly overrated, largely because of character departures from earlier films (Thor becomes a dolt, Hulk a wuss, Banner an annoying, whiny nerd, etc.), really stupid moments of action and dialog ("restarting" a "neutron star"!?!?!?), and the glaring plot hole that the only thing they really have to do to defeat Thanos IS CUT OFF HIS FRICKIN' HAND— which they had already demonstrated either Thor or Doctor Strange could do. No hand, no glove, no snap, end of war. And that *is* a plot hole. And a bad one.

15mm and 28mm Fanatik30 Apr 2019 3:06 p.m. PST

I agree with Patrick on his thesis that a professional movie critic and the "average Joe moviegoer" approach a movie with different sets of expectations. The movie critic judges a movie by standards and merits that the average moviegoer finds much easier to forgive or overlook because the latter only cares about the "visceral experience" and having a good time. If Marvel or Star Wars movies delivered the requisite thrills and popcorn experience that he/she paid $15 USD for, then it's money well spent as far as they're concerned. This is why I gave the new 'Hellboy' reboot a decent grade even though its Rotten Tomatoes score is 15 percent:

link

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