The Hobbit: The Battle of How Many Armies?

I went to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies yesterday, thereby wrapping up a cinematic adventure that began for me back in December 2001. The film, I think, is definitely a mixture of good and bad drawn from Peter Jackson’s urns of blessings and ills, but my main thought coming from it, as since I saw Return of the King back in 2003, is that Jackson doesn’t really understand Tolkien.

I have friends who get furious about this, and rant about all manner of little changes the films make from the books, but I see those kind of changes as – in the main – simply the price of adaptation. Books aren’t films. When we change media, we change stuff. That’s what happens. Characters change and get compressed, dialogue gets trimmed, episodes are cut or even invented, depending on what the story needs. Bill Goldman's very good on this, in both Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? What shouldn’t change, though, is the theme and tone. If you’re going to change those, why are you bothering at all?

As I said nearly eleven years ago, Jackson eviscerates the story by leaving out the Scouring of the Shire, that conclusion to the Lord of the Rings which sees the hobbits returning home and having to clean up their homeland, where petty greed and viciousness and power hunger have taken over, as hobbits willingly serve Saruman’s new dictatorship and rejoice in holding forth over their weaker neighbours. There’s a sense in which the episode is an anti-climax, and it’s probably for that reason that Jackson omits it from the films, but given he has about seventeen other endings to The Return of the King, I think he could have ran with it.

The omission of the episode shows up a profound difference between Tolkien and Jackson. Tolkien, it has to be remembered, was an articulate, informed, and orthodox Catholic, something that runs right through his books, such that you tend to miss half of what’s going on, not least the point of Tolkien's stories, if you can’t see with his eyes. Tolkien, indeed, called The Lord of the Rings "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision," explaining that what he called "the religious element" in his writing was not on the surface, but was "absorbed into the story and the symbolism."

Catholic that he was, Tolkien believed very strongly in Original Sin, in the notion that there’s a darkness in the heart of man, and that cracks run right through all of us; for Tolkien the Ring is something that deepens our darkness, that widens our cracks into chasms, that magnifies the faults that are already within us, and that amplifies our tendency towards sin. Crucially, though, while the Ring is a corrupting force, it is not an originating one: it doesn’t make people evil, rather it fosters and worsens the evil already within. As such, even when the Ring is destroyed, evil remains in the world. It’s a petty, cheap, brutish thing, and it doesn’t go away. The Hobbits save the world, and still have to save their homes.

Not so for Jackson. For Jackson, evil is an external phenomenon. The Ring is, of course, an externalisation of Sauron’s power, but that’s not to say that Tolkien thinks evil is external. On the contrary, he sees it as within, with the eternal frontline in the war between good and evil being in the depths of the human heart.  But for Jackson, once the Ring is destroyed, the shadow falls and evil is banished from Middle Earth. Prices still have to be paid – Frodo will carry his wounds as long as he remains in the world – but there is no wickedness in the world after the Ring is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom.

Jackson sees evil as something outside us, and something that’s embodied in a Ring or “other people,” especially ugly monstrous ones – orcs, goblins, trolls, dragons, giant spiders – or swarthy foreigners from the east and the south.  Yes, Tolkien makes these identifications first, but he does so in a context where we all have the capacity for evil. Not so for Jackson, as is shown by his removal of the “Scouring” without a substitionary episode or speech to make the same thematic point: no, get rid of the Ring, his story says, and everyone will live happily ever after.

And so to The Hobbit.

Leaving aside his failure to understand Tolkien, I think Jackson had two main problems with the first Hobbit film, An Unexpected Journey. One was that Tolkien could distinguish between his dwarves by just giving them different names, whereas Jackson had to make them all into recognisable individuals with distinct appearances, voices, mannerism, and personalities, all of which added time to the film, making it far longer than the tale it was telling merited. The more serious problem, though, is that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings sprang from The Hobbit, and grew far beyond it in a deeper, darker, richer way. Jackson can't do that: his Hobbit has to function as a prequel to his Lord Of The Rings, and has to maintain the already established tone and look of the original trilogy.

He's done impressive work on that front. The opening shots of Erebor as a Dwarf metropolis to surpass the Elvish magnificence of Rivendell set up the world of The Hobbit as a real part of the Middle Earth he’d already envisaged.  In some ways it shows what Balin must have dreamt of in the darkness of Moria. His dwarves became a race of armoured Gimlis in leather and mail, almost wholly supplanting the books’ jolly chaps with colourful hoods – Dwalin in dark green, Balin in red, Fili and Kili both in blue, and others in purple, grey, brown, white, yellow, pale green, and in Thorin’s case sky blue with a silver tassle. The significance of the story had to be brought out: this is not just the story of Bilbo’s adventure, but is rather the story of the return of Sauron, of how new relations were seeded between Elves, Dwarves, and Men, of how one of Sauron's greatest potential allies was preemptively taken off the board before the War of the Ring, and above all how the Ring was restored to the world, and Hobbits entered into the world.

 

When you get down to it, Jackson's telling a huge six-part story of how the most insignificant and unlikely of people find the greatest weapon in the world and then destroy it and he manages to do it in a way that makes sense and looks consistent. Credit, so, where it's due.

For all the glory of Erebor, the first Hobbit film annoyed me. It retained enough of the chirpiness of the book to be childish without retaining enough to be childlike. My Maths teacher used to say “between two stools you fall to the ground,” and, well, I think that's what happened. There was far too much dwarf humour, a failing in Jackson’s original trilogy but one taken to excess here. How much falling over did there have to be? And did the whole Goblin chase sequence need to go on for quite so long?

The Gollum scene, though, was good, and I'm left wondering if Jackson will follow George Lucas’s precedent by tweaking The Fellowship of the Ring to show Martin Freeman, rather than an artificially young Ian Holm, as Bilbo finding the ring. I was okay with the Azog stuff too, to be honest. Sure, he’s not in the book, but he is referred to in the book as having killed Thorin’s father. I think giving a bit of individuality to the orcs wasn’t a bad thing. He also looks straight out of Guillermo del Toro’s sketchbook, which isn’t a bad thing.

The second film, The Desolation of Smaug, I found vastly better, though I wonder how much of this was due to me not watching it in 3D-HFR. The images were ones into which I could get absorbed, rather than ones that distracted me. I thought the sequence where they're all floating downriver and Tauriel's doing her arrow stuff absurd and straight out of a game, but, er, I'm not going to criticise Tauriel too much, for predictable reasons. I also liked the Smaug sequences, and the spiders, and quite liked Jackson’s casting of Steven Fry as the smug, self-important, oleaginous Master of Laketown.  Beorn was largely wasted, I felt, though I consoled myself with the thought that that otherwise irrelevant section might bear fruit in the third film, as indeed it does in the book, when Beorn shows up at the battle, retrieves Thorin’s mortally wounded body, and kills the Goblin leader Bolg, son of Azog. I thought too that the dialogue between Tauriel and Kili really could have been better, but overall I found it a smoother and much less laboured film than the first one, and came out of it thinking that while it was further away from Tolkien than ever, perhaps this was necessary to set up Jackson's – not Tolkien's – Lord of the Rings.

Bilbo’s discovery of the Arkenstone in the second film just hammers home, of course, how he clearly has the cheat codes for The Hobbit game, finding plot coupons everywhere he goes: elvish blades, the Ring, the Arkenstone. And game is right: if the Moria scene in The Fellowship of the Ring had felt like a game, the Hobbit sequence feels like a game time and time and time again.

And so to the third Hobbit film, The Battle of the Five Armies, whatever the five armies are meant to be: in the book it's clearly goblins, wargs, elves, dwarves, and men, but here it's definitely Azog's orc army, Thranduil's elves, Dain's dwarves, and Bard's men... but who else? Bolg's second orc army? Thorin's band of dwarves? The eagles?

 

Unfortunately, I watched it in 3D-HFR, having forgotten how much I’d disliked it in the first film, with everything seeming overlit, and the general feeling being as though we’re on set with people traipsing about in silly costumes and make up and fake ears. It couldn’t help but distances me from the action, as through it all I thought it all looked dreadfully fake, as did the longer shots of the CGI armies which looked like trailers for a game.

There is good stuff in the film, it has to be said. Thorin's madness is very well handled, echoing Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. While this seems yet another instance of someone being corrupted by an external force, in this case the treasure burnished for decades by Smaug’s greed, it nonetheless feels more normal, somehow, than the corrupting effect of the Ring, especially in combination with Steven Fry's common or garden greediness, and that of his henchman. The film, then, at least recognises that it doesn’t take a monstrous evil to turn people into monsters, but that most of the time evil is a petty, small thing, people bearing cracks of original sin that such as the Ring can turn into chasms. This goes some small way to remedying the deepest problem with the original films. Martin Freeman is great as Bilbo, and Bard is very well done. So yes, the film really does have good points.

Unfortunately, it’s not just got good points.

The appearance of Dain is written in a way to suit the actor far more than the character, I'm afraid. It is immensely enjoyable, but still, it's jarring, and shatters any sense of immersion you might have been lucky enough to get even with the blasted 3D-HFR. You’re not watching Dain Ironfoot, the eventual King Under The Mountain who will fall with Bard’s grandson decades later at the Battle of Dale while hundreds of miles to the southwest Aragorn and Legolas and the lads – and Eomer – are doing their thing at the Pelennor Films. You're watching Billy Connolly being, well, Billy Connolly.

The armies look dreadfully false in the battle scenes, row upon row of faceless automatons in identical armour moving as one as though telepathically commanded. If you know anything about ancient or medieval warfare this simply doesn’t hold up: warriors tended to own and supply their own equipment, and would have had distinct shields and helmets and variations in their armour. Having them all look uniform just feels dreadfully wrong.

The fighting too owes more to 300, or the games that inspired that, than to reality: elves and dwarves don’t get on, we’re told, and bear old grudges, and yet when the moment comes, with no planning – let alone training – they all know exactly what to do. The dwarves form an impressive shieldwall, with hints of the Roman testudo, and look set to withstand the orcish attack, establishing an unpassable barrier behind which the elves could use their long bows and winnow the orc forces. Instead, though, the elves cast aside their massive tactical superiority in terms of their lengthy killing zone, and vault over the dwarf wall, rendering it pointless, and start swirling among the orc forces, laying into them to cinematically impressive and militarily ludicrous effect.

This is a thing. Too many people rave about the battle scenes in Jackson’s films, oblivious or indifferent to just how ludicrous they are. The Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen.  If you want to see plausible cinematic renditions of pre-modern battles, you can’t do much better than The Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, and Ran. More recently, the one at the start of Gladiator is okay too, and obviously people love the ones in Spartacus and Braveheart, but really, it’s the Kurosawa ones that bear most rewatching.

There’s an astounding lack of tactical sense in the Battle of the Five Armies, with nobody attempting to take out the Orc signalling system until Thorin shows up and decides to target Azog who is directing commands from the signal tower.  Not that sense is really part of the sequence: if I’d thought the bit in The Two Towers when the horses run down a cliff one of the most absurd things I’d ever seen, it’s solidly trumped by Legolas leaping from falling block to falling block in a manner reminiscent of Mario, somehow resisting the urge to headbutt gold coins out of the air.

Beorn does appear in the battle, but rather than mysteriously appearing and saving the day, as in the book, he instead joins battle as an airborne bear, flown from the far side of Mirkwood, presumably, by the Eagles ex Machina, and isn’t shown doing anything especially impressive other than running into the fray. He doesn’t kill Azog’s son and lieutenant Bolg, that honour being left to the wonderful Tauriel, or any other prominent orcs, and the overall effect is to leave me wondering what the point of Beorn being in the story was. We don’t see him accompanying Bilbo home either. It’s all very odd.

“Farewell, good thief,” the dying Thorin says to Bilbo in the book, continuing, “I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed.” It’s an impressive line, pointing to the importance of an afterlife to the dwarves, but the line doesn’t make it to the film; indeed, to see Thranduil’s sorrow at elvish blood being shed, you’d never imagine that fallen elves have their souls cleansed and their bodies reborn in their own land, never to return to Middle Earth. For a film that’s about battle from beginning to end, it has precious little to say about death – and never touches on how Tolkien saw death in the context of Middle Earth. In these films, when you're dead, you're dead. That's it. Maybe modern audiences prefer things that way, but it's not how Tolkien thought, and it's not how things are meant to be on Middle Earth.

There seems something pointless about showing indistinguishable CGI automata trading blows for as film does without showing us what death really involves. All else aside, I’d like to have seen Thorin’s funeral. That would have been a suitable ending, or part of it,

“They buried Thorin deep beneath the Mountain, and Bard laid the Arkenstone upon his breast.
‘There let it lie till the Mountain falls!’ he said. ‘May it bring good fortune to all his folk that dwell here after.’
Upon his tomb the Elvenking then laid Orcrist, the elvish sword that had been taken from Thorin in captivity. It is said in songs that it gleamed ever in the dark if foes approached, and the fortress of the dwarves could not be taken by surprise. There now Dain son of Nain took up his abode, and he became King under the Mountain, and in time many other dwarves gathered to his throne in the ancient halls.”

The Iliad ended with the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses. It’d not have been a bad example for Jackson to have followed.

The Dark Knight Rises: Hope does not Disappoint

Superhero films offer us a “faithless, modern mythology”, according to Tom Hiddleston, who played the renegade Norse god Loki in this summer’s Avengers Assemble. Writing in the Guardian this April, he observed that “In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.”

He’s almost right. Superhero films offer a modern mythology, but there’s nothing faithless about them. Modern morality plays, they’re expressions of a world built by Judaeo-Christian tradition, and embody not merely explicitly Christian ideas but also those universal images that J.R.R. Tolkien described in 1931 as having prefigured Christian truth: “The Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there,” he said, “while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”

The Norse myths Tolkien so loved, for instance, pointed to Christianity through such images as Odin hanging on the World Ash, or Baldr, the dying god, but it remained for Christianity to fulfil the truths to which they pointed.

Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow makes a very modern mistake in Avengers Assemble when she says of Thor and Loki, “These guys come from legend. They’re basically gods.”
“There’s only one God, ma’am,” replies Chris Evans’s Captain America, a recently revived relic of the 1940s, “and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.”

This isn’t simple religious chauvinism; rather, having some idea of what the word ‘God’ means, Captain America recognises Thor and Loki as mere men writ large.  The ancient Vikings would have understood what he meant; they knew that their gods and the God of the Christians were different not merely in degree but in kind.

Avengers Assemble develops this idea when Loki attacks a crowd of people in Germany and demands they kneel before him, embracing what he sees as their natural state. “In the end,” he says, “you will always kneel”.
“Not to men like you,” says an old man, willing to kneel before the right person but recognising that Loki is as mortal as he is.
“There are no men like me,” replies Loki.
“There are always men like you,” answers the old man, clearly recalling his youth, when so many of his countrymen showed themselves willing to prostrate themselves before the false gods of Hitler, the German state, and the earthly paradise the Nazi regime promised.

It might seem odd for an avowed atheist like Joss Whedon, writer-director of Avengers Assemble, to make such meaningful theological points, but Judaeo-Christian tradition has so formed our world that modern secularism and even atheism stand on Christian foundations. The light of Christian truth, if there is any truth at all in our art, must inevitably shine through.

Interesting though Whedon’s theological asides are, Avengers Assemble is ultimately a light – albeit immensely entertaining – piece of work. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, on the other hand, is far weightier fare, and one which repays repeated viewings.

2005’s Batman Begins shows the young Bruce Wayne falling down a covered well, crashing to the bottom and being terrified by the bats that launch themselves at him. “Why do we fall, Bruce?” his father asks after rescuing him, before answering his own question with the words that define the trilogy: “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

The motif of fall and rise pervades Nolan’s trilogy, reflecting its themes of sacrifice and resurrection and embodying an idea that has been central to the western mind for millennia. The Apostles, in the earliest sermons recorded in Acts, cast the Crucifixion as a prelude to the Resurrection, while Paul, in Romans 5, explained that the price we pay for the Fall is nothing compared to the grace we receive through the Incarnation, a mystery distilled by the Easter Exsultet into the seemingly paradoxical cry, “O truly necessary sin of Adam... O happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer.”

Few mythic figures are more iconic than the scapegoat who bears the price of others’ sins, and as Michael Caine’s Alfred says in Nolan’s second Batman film, 2008’s The Dark Knight, it’s a role for which the Batman is supremely well-suited. “Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point of Batman. He can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make – the right choice.”

The Dark Knight concluded with the Batman apparently guaranteeing Gotham City’s future by becoming a scapegoat for murders committed by the city’s deranged district attorney, Harvey Dent. The Batman’s sacrifice enabled others to build a new era of law and order upon Dent’s supposedly pristine reputation, but as this year’s The Dark Knight Rises makes clear, a victory built on a lie – no matter how noble – is a false victory.

Eight years after The Dark Knight, Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon is haunted by the lie which empowered him to clean up Gotham’s streets, and Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is a broken recluse, haunted by the death of his childhood love. The Batman is but a memory while the dead district attorney is idolised by a city unaware of his dreadful crimes. Gotham may be peaceful but the city's prosperity rests on rotten foundations, and it seems discontent is ready to boil over among the city’s poorest.

When the city’s underclass erupts from its sewers, it becomes clear that the Batman will have to face his greatest challenge, one that drives him to the darkest pit of despair and forces him to face the question of whether his city is worth saving.

The Dark Knight had answered that positively, but The Dark Knight Rises is more ambivalent; Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman points out that ‘innocent’ is a strong word to use for Gotham’s citizens, who seem to have revelled – or at best cowered – in the anarchy unleashed by Tom Hardy’s Bane. “You don’t owe these people any more!,” she says, “You’ve given them everything!”

“Not everything,” replies Batman, determined to save Gotham regardless of whether its people deserve it or not. A more convincing Christ-figure than at the end of The Dark Knight, the Batman is willing to go to his death for the guilty as much as for the innocent.

“Suffering produces endurance,” writes Paul in Romans 5, “and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” Batman has always been an adolescent revenge fantasy, but Nolan’s Batman suffers and endures until he learns to hope, transcending his self-imposed mask as an angel of vengeance, and is redeemed. The Dark Knight rises.

– from The Irish Catholic, 2 August 2012

The Superhero With A Thousand Faces

Few books have ever had as big an impact on me as The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell's massively influential study of the archetypal hero's journey in the world's myths, legends, and folklore; since reading that just and a book-length interview with Campbell after I turned twenty-one, I've ploughed through several of Campbell's other books, including his monumental study of comparative mythology in general, The Masks of God. 

Why so many of our stories are similar is an interesting question, and one open to all sorts of answers, whether psychological, sociological, or theological. I'm inclined to favour a theological explanation, following the likes of Chesterton and Tolkien in seeing the legends of the world as prefiguring the Incarnation in which they were fulfilled; it makes sense to think of the story of Jesus as a true myth, where God expresses himself in reality rather than through dreams and poetic images. 

Still, attempted explanations aside, I don't think there's any getting away from the fact of how structurally similar our myths tend to be. Campbell's work has had a huge impact on Hollywood, as is well known -- George Lucas is surely his best known acolyte, but one thinks of George Miller too, and more recently Christopher Vogler, author of a staggeringly influential memo, and whose book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, has proved a potent conduit for Campbell's thinking. David Eddings has said that using mythic archetypes in storytelling is the literary equivalent of peddling dope, and in that sense there's a fair case for calling Vogler a narrative drug-lord.

His book, it's worth saying, is well worth reading, no matter what one thinks of it: his influence on the craft of storytelling has been such such that it needs to be understood. One thing I'm left wondering, though, is whether he had any influence on Disney's 1997  film Hercules, because that follows a very clearly beaten path and it's most definitely not the path beaten by the Heracles of ancient myth -- in any variant.

I'm not saying it doesn't owe a lot to Greek mythology -- it does, in that its loaded with characters and references from ancient Greece, but these ingredients are used in a recipe which is far from Classical. In fact, the story of Hercules seems to be not so much ancient Greek as modern American, in that as far as I can tell it draws from the template most firmly laid-out in 1978's Superman: The Movie.

Let me show you what I'm talking about. I've reeled this comparison off enough times over the years that it shouldn't take long here...

A Heavenly Child raised in Obscurity...

Both films start with a little baby boy being cherished by his parents in a place far from our own, a place where mere lesser mortals like ourselves don't belong. All, however, is not blissful in these paradises; Krypton is doomed, while Hades makes it known that his exclusion from Olympus does not please him...

Like Moses in his basket, the infant Kal-El is sent away from Krypton by his parents in a small spaceship destined for Earth, while Hades' henchmen kidnap young Hercules and take him away from Olympus where they attempt to turn him mortal. Each infant is found by a childless couple who resolve to adopt him as their own...

And all the adults are astonished by the little boy's prodigious strength. By this point, in case you're wondering, the Hercules story has already strayed some way from the myth; in the legends, he is indeed the son of Zeus and the strangling of serpents is an important tale of his infancy, but it's not quite like this. Rather, Heracles is the child of Zeus and Alcmene -- a mortal, and not Zeus's sister-wife Hera; consumed by anger and jealousy it was Hera who sent serpents to kill the baby in his cradle. I'll not point out any further differences, unless it's seems really obvious. You can look them up for yourself.

Anyway, the boys grow up and never quite fit in. Young Kal-El goes by the name of Clark Kent, and doesn't play football with the other teenagers in Smallville, while Hercules isn't allowed to play discus with other Greek lads of his age. Neither boy had any idea of his real identity, until he comes unto the possession of a mysterious amulet found with him as a child.

Taking the amulets with them, the boys leave home and set out on foot on a long journey, crossing the most barren of wildernesses...

Until they eventually reach great white temples...

Where they can finally speak to their real fathers, who tell them everything about who they really are and how it is their destiny to become heroes.

Clark's eighteen when he arrives at the Fortress of Solitude and begins his training, whereas Hercules isn't so young -- he'll fly off on Pegasus, who features in the Belleraphon myth, to meet and be trained by Philoctetes, who in Classical myth is someone who only shows up as Heracles dies, but will be eighteen by the time the crucial events in the story play out.

From Obscurity to the Big City

Anyway, once they're ready, they set out for the big city. Clark Kent, who we'll henceforth know as Superman, arrives in Metropolis, while Hercules goes to Thebes, 'the Big Olive' as it's known. The two heroes meet a sharp-nosed, sharp-tongued brunettes who comment on his innocent farmboy routine. Lois Lane will bestow the name Superman on Clark, while Megara refers to Hercules as Wonderboy.

Lois and Megara both fly with the heroes, much to the girls' consternation...

You've got me? Who's got you?

And both girls press the heroes for information about themselves, including potential weaknesses.

Do you like... pink?

Time goes by, and the heroes make great names for themselves, doing all manner of wonderful deeds and saving countless lives, but all is not well, because while they can soar through the skies, great dangers lies beneath their feet.

Deep under the ground live people who are determined to destroy our heroes, supervillains, for want of a better word, who have huge plans for real estate deals -- yes, both Lex Luthor and Hades both refer to their apocalyptic plans as real estate ventures -- that they realise Superman and Hercules could thwart.

Each of these villains is notionally aided by two none-too-bright henchmen...

And each does most of his scheming in a large round room, built around a large round map.

Triumph, Death, and Resurrection

Well, the villains eventually put their plans in motion and capture the heroes, removing their powers.

But though the heroes lie impotent, eventually they are enabled to get back on their feet so they can thwart the villain's plans and save the world.

Unfortunately, even then victory comes at a cost, as in both cases the price of the world being saved was the life of the girl. 

'There's some things,' says Phil to Hercules, 'you just can't change,' but Hercules refuses to accept that and instead sets out to change things by defying the law of death itself, bringing Meg back from the dead by going to the underworld and diving into the swirling waters of the Styx to save her. Likewise, Superman resolves to restore Lois to life by breaking the laws of time, despite the admonitions of his father; he will turn back time if that will restore the one he loves to life. 

Both men drive onwards, circling as fast as they can to save the ones they love. It takes all their effort -- just look at Hercules who's clearly dying or Clark who is bearing the strain of someone who loves absolutely and who would do anything to save someone who has no idea how much he loves her, someone who will never be able to understand how much he has done for her.

And how do the two stories end? Well, Lois and Megara are both restored to life....

While as for the villains, let's just say that they both meet their just desserts, with Lex Luthor being locked away and Hades being himself dragged into the Styx. Both villains, curiously, end up bald as coots.

I've been banging on about this for years, and whenever I say to people that the plot of Hercules is obviously based on the plot of Superman they invariably laugh and say that surely I've got it the wrong way round. If anything, isn't it more likely that the plot of Superman is based on the ancient legends of Hercules. And then I sigh, and point out that the plot of Hercules owes very little to the Greek myths. Sure, the ingredients are ancient, but the recipe is rather more modern.

Though of course, there are those who'd point out that it's anything but modern, as the Superman story in the broadest sense is the story of a profoundly Jewish hero, and that the film owes more than a little to the story of Christ. Jor-El's words to his son, saying 'The Son becomes the Father... and the Father the Son.' The name, Kal-El, supposedly meaning 'Star Child', but clearly a theophoric Hebrew name like Emmanuel. The childhood rescue from certain death -- itself an echo of the Moses story -- followed by a life in obscurity. The emergence after thirty years in obscurity to perform all manner of wondrous deeds and save life after life. The transformation of death so that it becomes a path to resurrection, triumph over evil, and the salvation of the world...

I've come to disagree with Joseph Campbell pretty profoundly in some respects, but he's taught me an immense amount, not least how to look at stories, and to think about where they came from. If you've not read anything by him, you should give it a shot. The Way of Myth, his book-length interview with Fraser Boa, was my introduction to him, but I think Bill Moyer's The Power of Myth might make an even better starter.

Stick your toe into the water. You might end up walking on it.

Watchmen: A Very Belated Analysis

With the Zack Snyder film on Channel 4 last night, it was interesting to see Watchmen trending on Twitter. There were legions of derisive tweets scorning the film for being complex, ponderous, nasty, stupid, and dull; equally there were no shortage of people leaping to its defence by sneering at the people who didn't like it and calling them pretentious.

My favourite comments of the evening were one by a friend wondering whether the film's makers made a decision early on that as the film was to be long it should be dull too, one remarking that he'd gone to see it in the cinema when he was sixteen and had been forty-four by the time the film ended, one saying how it was weird to recognise every image from the comic but being retold by an idiot, and one pointing out that the film is not without merit, but is seriously flawed.

I think I'd go along with at least the last two of those two observations. The main problem with the film, as Pádraig Ó Méalóid concluded in reviewing it when it first came out, is that:

'It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing. Watchmen is the most perfect graphic novel there is, and a huge amount of work went into making it that way, and attempting to streamline that for the big screen was never going to work.'

I know, we should judge films on their own merits, and not in comparison with the books they're based on -- even if that weren't common sense, Bill Goldman has proven the point with style in both Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell?  --  but that's not to say that we can't analyse a film's strengths and weaknesses in comparison with the source material.

Watchmen is very much a comic about comics, a comic that tries to show just what comics can do, and that aspect of the book is obviously impossible to reproduce on the screen. Take, for example, the book's fourth chapter, where Doctor Manhattan is on Mars. This is an unparalleled instance of what comics can do, as it puts us exactly in the position of Doctor Manhattan himself: just as he exists in the present but simultaneously perceives all manner of points in his past and his future, so too we read the chapter, focusing on one panel at a time but always aware of and even able to see a host of other panels. In reading comics we are almost godlike ourselves, existing outside the universe of the characters in an eternal present but able to perceive all points in the characters' pasts and futures. They exist in a space-time continuum of their own, whereas we, beyond their pages, can see all points in their universe.

There's no way this can be reproduced on the screen. Snyder tries, but I think he fails. His Mars sequence is beautiful, but it doesn't even come close to achieving what the comic does in this chapter, and in some ways actually hurts his story. If the comics' reader is metaphorically divine, the cinema viewer is essentially voyeuristic, and in many ways it's hard to see the film's Doctor Manhattan as other than a standoffish voyeur.

Still, there's not much Snyder could do about that. What of the rest of the film?

Missing the Point

I think a huge part of the problem with the film is that Zack Snyder really doesn't seem to have understood the book. 300's glaring inconsistencies demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that Synder's not an intelligent film-maker, and while I don't dispute his visual gifts, a book as relentlessly intelligent as Watchmen deserved to be brought to the screen -- if that had to happen at all -- at the hands of a smarter director.

The first time I saw the film -- on an Imax screen on the morning of the day the film opened, with me not having slept the previous night -- I was almost immediately thrown by how Snyder directed the opening scene where Eddie Blake is assaulted by his mysterious attacker. In the comic this episode is understated -- we see it as a series of flashback panels, interspersed into a dialogue between detectives inspecting the wreckage of Blake's apartment. There are only seven such panels -- we see an eighth later on, revealing the assailant's face -- and as far as we can tell if we assemble them into a sequence, what they show is that Blake was punched once, hurled to the floor where he is kicked once, and then thrown out a window.The episode is retold three times, and we only see these few actions, so I think that's probably all there was to the event.

Anyone who's seen the film won't remember the film's fight as having been quite so straightforward. A glass is thrown, a gun is  fired, knives are hurled, and there are punches, kicks, and blocks aplenty with bodies being smashed into and through things before Blake is dashed through his window. Oh and along the way, Blake punches a colossal lump out of what appears to be a concrete wall...

... and is himself smashed through what must surely be a fairly sturdy counter-top.

When I saw the film in the cinema I assumed the counter-top was marble, and stared in horror, thinking that Snyder seemed to have given genuine superpowers to both the Comedian and his assailant. Even allowing that it's probably meant to be a glass counter, I'm still far from convinced that Snyder doesn't want us to think of these combatants as being preternaturally powerful.

Just as importantly, perhaps, the tone of this was radically different from the tone of the comic. The comic keeps us at a distance, watching the action in a detached way, far enough off to observe and understand what's really going on. We see more of the game that way -- but this fight sought to suck us in, just as all the film's subsequent ones would do. The film tries to involve us in the action, pulling us in so we can't really see what's going on. I'm not saying that's not a reasonable thing to do, but if you want to do that, go and come up with your own story. Watchmen isn't about involvement. It's an autopsy of the whole costumed-hero genre, and like any autopsy needs to be carried out dispassionately.

Or, putting it another way, if you want visceral thrills and excitement, there are plenty of other superhero stories out there. Watchmen's not about that, and the film insults the book by trying to make it into something so radically opposed to what it's meant to be about.

Still, my concerns were almost allayed by the film's superb credit sequence. Indeed, I'd comfortably say that the credits are the best thing about the film. Loaded with jokes, and playing with the iconography of the last half century, its superheroic tableaux offer a potent and sometimes hilarious commentary on how superheroes have developed on the screen -- silver or small -- over the decades. There's only one thing I was troubled by in the sequence, but that aside, the first time I saw the film the credit sequence almost banished my concerns.

What if Superman were Real?

Unfortunately, as the film progressed, and especially thinking about it afterwards, I realised just how massively Snyder has misunderstood the comic. Take, for example, the scene at the end of the film where Ozymandias, Adrian Veidt, explains his apocalyptic scheme to Rorschach and Nite Owl. Rorschach says that they won't let him do that, and Adrian looks at them as though they're idiots.

'Do that, Rorschach?' he says, 'I'm not a comic book villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my masterstroke to you if there were even the slightest possibility you could affect the outcome? I triggered it thirty-five minutes ago.'

Clever, you might think. If only Bond baddies could resist their urges to tell 007 what they're up to, maybe they might just get away with their schemes. But here's the thing. In the comic, Adrian doesn't say that. Rather, he says something which is subtly -- yet crucially -- different.

A Republic Serial villain? Well, of course, nobody nowadays remembers the 1940s and 1950s movie serials, where the likes of the Phantom or Zorro would confront all manner of nefarious characters and thwart their diabolic schemes, so it makes sense for Snyder to change things. Everyone nowadays knows how the Penguin, Lex Luthor, Magneto, Loki, and so forth have a tendency to give the game away to their heroic antagonists, so why not mention comics villains?

Except that this misses the point of Moore and Gibbons' Watchmen to an astonishing degree. Just as Watchmen is, in terms of its form, a comic about comics, so in terms of its content it is a superhero comic about superhero comics. One of the things it considers and tries to answer in a sincere and intelligent way is what a world would be like if there were costumed heroes in it, especially if any of them had actual superpowers. An important parallel to the story in the original book is a comic-within-a-comic, this being a horrific pirate story. It seems there are no shortage of comics in the world of Watchmen, but they're not about superheroes. Superheroes exist in the real world, and so escapist fiction has to look elsewhere for its source material, rooting its stories instead on the high seas of the eighteenth century.

'I'm not a comic book villain?' Of course he's not. He's not a pirate.

Indeed, Snyder doesn't seemed to have perceived in any meaningful way the extent to which Moore and Gibbons grappled with how the existence of a godlike superhero like Doctor Manhattan would change the world. The Watchmen of the film is, like the book, set in an alternative 1985, but the texture of that world doesn't seem all that different from ours. It should be, however. The book has a scene in early 1962, where Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, learns just how world-changing Doctor Manhattan really is.

There's not a hint of an electric car in the film until pretty much the final shot, and neither are there any electric hydrants to power them with. This makes sense in some ways, of course, as the modified plot of the film in fact involves the eventual replacement of oil, other fossil fuels, and nuclear power with a form of energy based on Doctor Manhattan's own powers. That's fair enough, you might think, so what's this sign doing outside Hollis Mason's garage?

'Obsolete Models A Speciality,' it says. In the comic this is a reference to the whole automobile industry having been transformed, as well as being a metaphor for both Nite Owls being past their sell-by dates, but I'm not sure what it's doing here in the film. Sure, you might argue that I'm quibbling here, and that this might just mean that Mason fixes old-fashioned cars, but I don't buy that. Moore and Gibbons put an enormous amount of effort into building a real and consistent world, with its own distinct yet coherent texture, and that sign was a very deliberate part of that, a specific foreshadowing of just how thoroughly Doctor Manhattan's existence had changed the world; it seems to have little relevance here. It's just here, as far as I can see, because Snyder saw it in the comic and thought it should be there. I don't believe he considered why it was in the comic.

And yes, this is a small point, but it's these kind of details that reveal the depth of Snyder's incomprehension.

Missing the Magic between Panels

One thing Scott McCloud talks about at some length in his stunning Understanding Comics is that much of what makes comics work is what goes on between the panels -- the gaps in time that we fill with our own imagination. Cinema's brilliantly capable of doing this too, of course -- we need only think of the shower scene in Psycho, in which we see the knife being raised but never actually see Janet Leigh being stabbed to death.

Unfortunately, Zack Snyder's anything but a subtle director. He doesn't like to leave things to our imagination. I suppose the film's opening fight scene pretty much made that clear, but still, take, for a more gruesome example, the episode where a gang of 'Top-Knots' attack Dan and Laurie in  an alleyway. It happens in the third chapter of the book and fills just a few panels over five pages -- indeed, there are only five panels showing any fighting at all, and it can hardly be said that these panels shirk the violent reality of what's happening. Here are the first two panels, juxtaposed to make a point.

In the first panel Laurie breaks one mugger's arm with her knee and elbow; if you've any doubt of that, note the commentary from the TV interview with which this sequence is crosscut -- 'make it snappy,' says the interviewer, talking about something else entirely, but as part of this panel serving as a counterpoint to the image. The agony on the mugger's face is obvious. You can see him wailing on the ground in the second panel, as Laurie turns to a second assailant -- a third panel shows him clutching his broken arm. Dan, meanwhile, has grabbed another mugger's jacket with his right hand in the first panel, and in the second slams his left hand upwards, breaking the mugger's nose in a manner that is, as the interviewer's commentary tells us, 'quite sudden and quite painful'.

But how does Snyder render this? Well, he has Dan breaking an arm too. Like this.

Gory, eh? I'd say unnecessarily so. That's the mugger's forearm being graphically snapped, such that his radius -- and quite possibly his ulna too -- rips through his flesh, with blood spurting everywhere. This same sequence will also feature a neck being broken with a horrendous crunch, and Laurie driving a knife into the neck of another mugger. For all that the fight in the comic is violent, it's nothing like this. Gibbons' art was matter-of-fact, realistic without being showy, whereas Snyder, as in 300, glorifies in violence. Frankly, I think this is -- at least by James Joyce's definition -- pornographic.

And that, of course, brings us to perhaps the film's most gratuitous episode, a cringeworthy minute-and-a-half long sex scene, moodily lit and acrobatically performed such as to put the puppets in Team America to shame, and all conducted to the exultant strains of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, with the volume turned up to eleven. Perhaps you'd like to see how it appeared in the comic?

And then, following that little Hitchcockian gag, reminiscent of North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief, we had to turn the page to see...

Well, not a whole lot, actually. And doesn't that work better? Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying I've got issues with Malin Akerman's pretty face, comely form, or shiny black boots. I'm just saying that there's no need for this scene in the film. The comic merely implies it, and allows us to fill in the gaps in as tasteful or tasteless a way as we see fit. The film, on the understand, reduces us to the status of voyeurs, watching an absurd sequence as devoid of necessity as it is of art.

Issues with Women

I've heard it argued that Moore has issues with women, and that this really comes out in his work, but having been weaned on Roxy in Skizz and especially The Ballad of Halo Jones, I just don't accept this. Horrible things sometimes happen to women in Moore's work, certainly, but horrible things happen to men too, and I think it's telling that he dedicated From Hell to Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Marie Jeanette Kelly, all five of them victims of Jack the Ripper, saying, 'You and your demise: of these things alone are we certain. Goodnight, ladies.'

There's an attempted rape in Watchmen, and this has enormous consequences to the story of both the book and the film, but the way it's handled in the film differs from that in the book, in such as way as to somehow be both trite and offensive. Snyder at times charts a course that differs from Moore's, in such a way as to hurt the work. And in the credits sequence, he does this:

Is that in the book? No. No, not really. The book details the death of the Silhouette in a text section -- an extract from Hollis Mason's autobiography -- as follows:

'After that, things deteriorated. In 1946, the papers revealed that the Silhouette was living with another woman in a lesbian relationship. Schnexnayder persuaded us to expel her from the group, and six weeks later she was murdered, along with her lover, by one of her former enemies. Dollar Bill was shot dead, and in 1947 the group was dealt its most serious blow when Sally quit crimefighting to marry her agent.'

Dollar Bill's death is also shown in the credit sequence, with him sitting dead with his cloak caught in a bank's revolving door, as mentioned elsewhere in the story. That tallies with the story. But this image? Sure, the book says nothing of how the Silhouette and her lover were murdered, so some imagination is needed here, but was it necessary for them to have been killed in bed, in underwear and suspender belts, with the words 'lesbian whores' scrawled across the wall in their blood? This seems an image designed to titillate and horrify in equal measure, and seems a classic example of how profoundly different Snyder's vision of Watchmen is from that shared by Moore and Gibbons.

And then there's Rorschach...
I really think Snyder gets the characters wrong in this. There's no way that Snyder's Dan Dreiberg could be deemed a 'flabby failure who sits whimpering in his basement,' as the book's Rorschach dismisses him, and his Doctor Manhattan is more an softly-spoken voyeur than an aloof god who's almost paralysed by his near-omniscience. The film's Ozymandias, as played by Matthew Goode, looks so effete that the phenomenal strength he displays in the movie is wholly inexplicable unless we assume he has superpowers. And as for Rorschach himself? Well, I think Snyder almost gets him right, but in cutting the most self-revelatory lines the comic Rorschach utters, he deprives Rorschach of the paradox that makes him breathe.

In the book there's a horrific sequence where Rorschach executes a child murderer after having realised the child's fate; it's a flashback scene, with Rorschach telling a psychiatrist how he became who he is. The film features the same episode, but even more graphically, and with some liberties taken in the action, and then has Rorschach say:

'Whatever was left of Walter Kovacs died that night with that little girl. From then on there was only Rorschach. You see Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her. Destiny didn't feed her to those dogs. If God saw what any of us did that night he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew. God doesn't make the world this way. We do.'

That's not bad, but the book has him saying something far more bleak, far more nihilistic, and far more determined than that:

Look at that. The Rorschach of the book doesn't merely say that if God's up there he obviously doesn't care; he says that there is no God, and indeed that there's no purpose to life, and no objective meaning to anything other than that we choose to impose on it. Rorschach sees this the world as a world of brute facts, without meaning or purpose or pattern save what we imagine. In a universe consisting purely of 'is', it's impossible to construe an imperative 'ought', and yet Rorschach does it anyway. What meaning does he chose to impose on his universe, and does he ultimately chose to die for? In both book and film, he answers that question in his diary:

'Millions will perish in sickness and misery. Why does one death matter against so many? Because there is good and evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of armageddon...I will not compromise in this.'

Why must evil be punished? There's no meaning or purpose to life, after all, so why bother? The answer, ultimately, is simply that Rorschach is certain that this is true: this is the design he is determined to scrawl on this morally blank world.

In the film, if you want to, you can read Rorschach's disagreement with Veidt as a Kantian refusing to accept the views of an utilitarian, scorning the idea that evil can be done for the sake of a later and greater good, and then ultimately sacrificing himself, hoping that good will prevail but unable to countenance having not tried with every fibre of his broken being to overcome evil. But in the book, Rorschach's morality is his own.

Evil must be punished, he says, and in this he will not compromise, not even in the face of Armageddon. But what is evil and what is good? Rorschach believes the world is, in itself, morally blank. Strictly speaking, he doesn't believe in good or evil, save as what he chooses to call good and what he chooses to call evil. And yet at the end, he realises that one man cannot have a personal morality, as distinct from and as superior to everyone else's. Either all moralities are equally valid -- Veidt's and Dreiberg's and Laurie's and Manhattan's as much as his -- or else there's a higher one, that transcends our own.

Either way, Rorschach, who has lived his life without nuance, having battled so hard and so long with monsters that he has become a monster, gazes so deeply into the abyss that he sees the abyss gazing into him, and realising  his own inadequacy removes his mask, so that at the end, facing death, he stands again as a battered and broken Walter Kovacs.


You'll notice I've not taken issue with the film's climax, which is significantly different from that of the book. To be frank, I didn't mind it. I thought that was an imaginative rethinking, and I'm not hung up on the film being a carbon-copy of the book. What I have issues with is films adapting books or comics or whatever and not even attempting to recreate the feel of the source material. If you just throw out the tone and theme of whatever it is you're trying to adapt, why bother at all? Surely the essence of the source should be the one thing that's sacrosanct?

Dredd: Once Bitten, Twice Hopeful...

I don't know how many of you remember 1995's Sylvester Stallone take on perhaps the most famous character in modern British comics? Judge Dredd, in most people's memories, was an absolute disaster: the plot was a overloaded hodge-podge of stories, the comic relief was risible -- and not in a good way, the film lacked any of the depth and satirical wit of the strip, and it got the hero fundamentally wrong. And yet, oddly enough, it was still better than Batman Forever, which the critics of that year somehow neglected to pan, leading to them being surprised when the absurdity that was Batman and Robin came along.

I am the Luuuuuuhhhhh!!!!!

Truth be told, the 1995 Dredd wasn't all bad. Diane Lane was very watchable, and even at his hammiest Max von Sydow brightened the screen, and in terms of design I really liked it: Mega-City 1 looked good, and both Mean Machine and the misplaced Hammerstein were spot-on, and things like the bikes and the prison ship were great. But then there were the judge's uniforms.

I've seen a hell of a lot of people sneering online at them, dismissing them as leotards with gleaming pads, and drawing special attention to Stallone's mighty codpiece, but the thing is, stuff that can look great in comics just looks implausible on the screen. Why do you think the cinematic versions of the Batman and the X-Men shun spandex for body armour and leather? That's why, at least in terms of design, I'm looking forward to next year's sally at Mega-City One's finest, with Karl Urban in the title role.

Until this week we'd not had much to go on in terms of what the new judge's uniform would look like -- a distant blurry shot of a judge on a none-too-promising bike, a very murky headshot of Dredd, and the above picture of the film's eponymous hero pointing his Lawgiver at -- well, who knows?

But then, this week, Empire featured a host of shots from the film and some enterprising soul decided to scan them and post them online for the whole world to see. They're encouraging, I think. For starters, we can see that Urban's Dredd isn't a pumped up ogre. This is as it should be. I'll always remember David Bishop explaining to an aspiring artist at the UK Comic Art Convention back in the day that Dredd isn't meant to be a musclebound giant -- he's more of a lean, mean, fighting machine. And indeed, early Ezquerra and Bolland drawings of Dredd were anything but overmuscled, while such artists as Mike McMahon and Brendan McCarthy did wonderfully skinny Dredds.

Perhaps more encouraging still is the fact that the uniform's been changed to look more practical, more gritty. The shoulder, elbow, and knee pads, which have grown to proportions as impractical as they are impressive in the comics, have been reduced to a far more plausible size, not unlike those from the strip's earliest days. The tight leather-esque suits have been ditched too, in favour of something that looks like a natural development from modern riot gear. It looks genuinely futuristic, but rooted in the present; it suggests a future with a past.

The one concern, I feel, lies with the helmet. I've already seen people grumbling, saying that it looks silly, as though it's too big for the judges' heads. I don't blame them, really, but I think they should hold their fire. The simple fact of the matter is that the judges' helmets are very difficult to get right. For all that some people didn't like the helmet Stallone wore -- though they liked things less when he removed it -- it represented a decent stab at handling some serious design problems with the helmet of the comics. 

There are at least two big problems with Dredd's helmet, as we see it in 2000AD. 

In the first place, it only looks good if we presume Dredd's head -- and indeed the judges' heads in general -- is very small. And I mean very small. Even the most realistic takes on Dredd's helmet presuppose that he has an astonishingly tiny head. Dredd wasn't the only character so afflicted in 2000AD. After all, one look at Torquemada's helmet in 'Nemesis the Warlock' should have got you wondering what kind of abnormal had a head that could fit into that thing. For all that Bryan Talbot is a comic genius, I never really bought his Torquemada, because he was clearly a normal man wearing an impossible hat; Kev O'Neill, on the other hand, just drew freaks, and so could get away with it. 

Linked with this is the whole issue of the back of the helmet; if the helmet protects the nape of the neck adequately,  it bars the wearer from looking up or from shooting when lying down, such that the only helmets that could really be plausible in this respect are ones that are flared out at the back.

Those are simple issues of ergonomics, but I think there's another issue too, and that's vision. Dredd's helmet is almost always drawn such that he must be squinting at the world through a narrow slit; certainly, he'd have had no peripheral vision, and you'd rather think that's something he'd want. Stallone's helmet didn't skimp in that respect, ensuring the visor was very wide, and effectively removing the nose-guard. 

Having loved comics and gotten my school magazine banned through my strips when a schoolboy, I used to go to comics conventions back in my late teens, speaking to artists and editors in the hope of getting advice and maybe -- eventually -- becoming a comics artist myself. I got encouragement, too, especially from Bryan Talbot and Steve Pugh, with both of them saying I'd definitely make it if I just practised more -- and my finals soon put paid to that, with life taking a different course soon afterwards. Looking through my portfolio, Steve Pugh was very impressed by my take on Dredd, commending my design work on the helmet in particular. I think it was obvious that I'd spent a lot of time trying to resolve the issues of vision and mobility.

As it happens, I think the vision issue's not a big deal; we can just assume there's kind of an lcd display running across the inside of the helmet, effectively giving the judges a far greater field of view that the visor itself would allow. But that still leaves the fact that the helmet needs to fit on the head, needs to allow the head to move, and needs some padding inside it to cushion any impacts.

Unless you've lots of hair for padding anyway. In which case you'll probably ditch the helmet.

All round, I think the new uniform looks great. I just hope the script, directing, and acting are as good -- and given that Alex Garland penned 28 Days Later, there must, at least, be some slight grounds for hope.

'Rules get a bad rap, but the rules are what define the Muppets'

I am, as far too many friends of mine are painfully aware, a huge fan of the Muppets. I've blogged about them here a couple of times, whether listing and linking to some of their finest ever sketches, or else linking to a screenshot of Cyndi  Crawford dressed as a Frogeteer and singing alongside a Muppet shamelessly based on that old fraud L. Ron Hubbard.

There's a fascinating article by Elizabeth Stephens over at The Awl, entitled 'Weekend at Kermie's: The Muppets' Strange Life After Death'. I don't by any means agree with everything she says but she certainly raises some good points, starting from her springboard that is the new Muppets film, which she certainly admits is an exciting prospect. To be fair, how could it be otherwise, combining as it does the Muppets, Jason Segel, and the ever-watchable Amy Adams?

Stephens thinks the film, no matter how good it is, has some massive hurdles to overcome, not the least of which is that the Muppets aren't who they once were, or, at any rate, they don't sound or move like they once did. I started to wonder this recently, when someone queried my Kermit the Frog impression and seriously tried to argue that Kermit sounds more like Bert than Ernie. 

'No, he doesn't,' I insisted. 'Kermit and Ernie were both voiced by the same person, both by Jim Henson; Bert was voiced by Frank Oz, he of Miss Piggy and Yoda fame. Kermit basically is Jim Henson's voice; Ernie is Jim just making his voice sound rounder.'

The problem, of course, is that I was almost as wrong as I was right. Jim Henson, to our enduring loss, died twenty-one years ago. He didn't voice Kermit in Muppet Christmas Carol, or Muppet Treasure Island, or Muppets from Space, and if Kermit ever appeared in Muppets Tonight -- I can't remember -- Jim didn't voice him there either. Steve Whitmire, who's also the voice of Ernie nowadays, did duty back then, so I suspect my friend heard my Henson-esque take on Kermit and felt it just didn't rhyme with Whitmire's Kermit, which he surely knows better.Stephens' feeling is that it's just not the same:

'From 1955 to 1990, Kermit the Frog was voiced and performed by Jim Henson. After that, Steve Whitmire, known for his smart-mouthed Rizzo the Rat, took over. Whitmire’s Kermit sounded a lot like Henson's, but his voice was a little thinner, and his singing more rhythmic and less melodic.

Let me preface my next statement by saying that I know it will seem ridiculous to the casual reader, inflammatory to a good many fans, and downright specious to the expert of rhetoric, but for me watching Steve Whitmire’s Kermit is akin to watching someone imitate a mythic and longed-for mother—my mother—wearing a my-mother costume in a my-mother dance routine. This person’s heart is in the right place, which only makes it worse. “You should be happy,” the person pleads with me, “Look, Biddy! Your mother is not gone! She is still here.” Now, no one would ever do that. No one in her right mind would think it would work. A child knows his mother’s voice like he knows whether it's water or air he's breathing. One chokes you and one gives you life. Strangely, I feel the same about Kermit. Whitmire is an amazing performer—especially as the lovable dog Sprocket on “Fraggle Rock”—but, when he's on screen as Kermit, I can feel my body reject it on a cellular level.'

Crazy? Maybe, but she has a point. Indeed, she has a lot of points, and most of them are good. Her overall thesis, though, is one I'm not sure of. She's basically saying that the Muppets were the work above all of one man, that they were of their time, and that they should be allowed die rather than becoming an anonymous product, like any other Disney property.

Well, maybe. If that were happening -- and there's an element of it -- I'd agree. Certainly I felt watching Muppets Tonight that while it was often very funny, it lacked the poignancy -- the heart, even -- of The Muppet Show. Rizzo the Rat, Seymour and Pepe, Johnny Fiama, all those guys -- they're funny, but they're not flawed. Henson once described his job as being akin to Kermit's, saying 'Kermit finds himself trying to hold together all these crazy people, and there’s something not unlike what I do.' That was really at the heart of the old show -- that Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo and others were all, basically, frail and damaged individuals, desperate for people to care about them. The show was hilarious, but somewhere in that levity was a sense of tragedy too, a sense that there are cracks in all of us.

Still, it was in the post-Henson era that I rediscovered my love for the show, and did so through a post-Henson show. I was babysitting my nephews once upon a time, and agreed to watch with them their video of Muppet Fairy Tales. Made in 1994, four years after Jim Henson's death, the Muppets' take on 'The Elves and the Shoemaker' is priceless. Kermit plays the shoemaker, with Robin as his grandson, and the elves all look and sound like Elvis, and make them loads of blue suede shoes; at the end, the shoemaker and his grandson provide them with new clothes, like in the story, save these clothes are white satin jumpsuits, and the lads don their new clobber and head off the Vegas. That was clever enough to intrigue me, but what really stuck in my head, and which I'll often quote to an admixture of horror and delight, was Miss Piggy's stunning performance as the clever pig with the house of bricks in 'The Three Little Pigs.' Watch it. Seriously.

And Muppet Christmas Carol is very very good, and Muppets from Space seemed to be exactly what the old show and films were about. It may have been a bit of a false dawn, but I think it showed that all wasn't lost.

And then, of course, there was that whole business with Sesame Street's Big Bird sitting side by side with television's most attractive woman on The West Wing.

Quite possibly the greatest moment in the history of television.

That was in 2004. There's life in the old frog yet. Roll on November. Like Jason Segel, I can't wait.