In My humble Opinion - The World Of DC; It's Always Darkest Before The Dawn
This article first appeared at NotThePopularOpinion.Wordpress.Com
Answering a question about the value of darkness By M.Schinke
Get out your flashlights, Opinionnerds!
This won’t be a strictly analytical piece, but there will be an element of analysis in it. My list of Twitter followers is a small but potent group of individuals who are always challenging me with interesting ideas. On this particular night, one of my mutuals, @AlexSchepers2, hit me with an interesting poderence:
Firstly, I want to thank Alex for the question; even my own family doesn’t show this level of interest in what passes for, “thinking” in my world. Now I’m not some kind of expert on the subject so I’m not going to pretend that my thoughts on the matter should be taken to mean anything more than, “Hey; I have an opinion too”, but this is something I’ve put some thought into in the past, and it’s an approach to storytelling that I think has an amount of merit to it.
What Is Darkness
Before we can get into this conversation, we have to come to an important determination; what is it that makes a story or film, “dark”? Is it a specific approach to tone and material or is it simply a lack of abject, for lack of a better term, lightness? It is dark by intent or is it merely dark by contrast?
Please bear in mind that I am no writer. Though I have read as much as I can on the subject, this hardly qualifies me as an expert. This is as educated an opinion as I can assemble; it is up to you to determine the merit in what I have to share.
I believe much of what people deride as, “dark” lately is simply storytelling that doesn’t include any self aware winking at the audience; no light elbows to the ribs that say, “do you see what we did there?” or specific overtures at being Ha-Ha funny, while including aspects that lean towards the heavily dramatic. However, I believe crafting a dark film or story has to be more than just the absence of some other element. Taking a story, or a movie, into a dark place is about purposefully leading the characters, and the audience, into areas that are more than just difficult or tense; they can be torturous, dangerous and downright frightening. Ren’s detox scene in Trainspotting comes to mind as an example of darkness without being violent or gruesome. But despite a couple of dark scenes, Trainspotting isn’t considered a, “dark movie”. The balance of the material has to be considered while we ask, “what is the honest approach to the story being told”? Old Boy is a film that is inherently dark given it’s plot about involuntary incarceration, mental anguish, incest and violent revenge – it has more than just a couple of dark scenes. Another example would be Jacob’s Ladder, a movie about a dying man’s mind torturously blinking out of existence. By contrast a film like The Accountant, while being primarily an action film, is played dramatically straight but is not considered dark, even with its lack of overt levity. Darkness in storytelling is a specific approach to crafting the atmosphere and story delivery, it is not simply the absence of levity or bathos. In storytelling, from what I have been able to observe and learn, darkness is an additive effect; you have to craft darkness specifically in order to make sure it translates to the audience in the manner you intend. It’s like building a wall with mounds of clay; you have to add darkness to have darkness. It boils down to this; something isn’t dark simply because it isn’t overtly light.
Darkness by comparison is, obviously, how one piece of storytelling appears when compared to another. Power Rangers may seem dark when placed against its precursors on FOX Kids, but hold it up against films like Flowers In The Attic, Schindler’s List or Chinatown and it seems pretty tame. If you’re looking at Man of Steel as being a, “dark” film in total, the question is, “to what are you making the comparison”? If you are comparing it to the 1978 Superman film then yes, by comparison Man of Steel is much darker overall. But being darker by comparison does not make Man of Steel a dark film, especially since the intent of both movies is so very different. Superman: The Movie is, for lack of a better term, a kids movie. It isn’t meant to be complex or challenging to either the character or the audience. This isn’t a knock or a drag on the film, merely an observation. It’s purposefully light, breezy and wondrous as it’s meant to capture the attentions of children while still delivering something to keep adults entertained. By comparison, Man of Steel was not designed to entreat children with the power fantasy of being the ultimate good guy. The initial mission statement for this film was to create a grounded Superman specifically for an older audience; an audience that should be better equipped intellectually and emotionally to process more complex information. Since the film was intended to be a straight drama (think more Lincoln, less Ninja Turtles) it’s going to appear darker because drama is inherently dark. Now you can question whether or not that’s an appropriate approach to take with a character like Superman, but that conversation is completely separate from whether or not Man of Steel, “is” a dark film. Batman v Superman is a much darker film than Man of Steel because it was always meant to be as part as a larger, meta-textual story. However, again, I must stress that dark by comparison does not equal dark.
Is It Dark In Here Or Is It Just You
While the first handful of Marvel films made overtures towards being dramatic works, The Incredible Hulk being the strongest example (as well as the most derided, interestingly enough) those that followed have all been constructed with different ratios of action to comedy following the successful approach of The Avengers, as if Marvel is more engaged with the idea of keeping the audience titillated then it is with rounded storytelling. Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Black Panther specifically lean towards a more overtly dramatic approach (which is likely why I find BP’s attempts at humor to be so shockingly out of place) but by and large the films seem to employ their light touch on drama as sparingly as they can. This, by contrast, makes the DC hero films look much darker up to this point as their goal, as stated, was to be free to produce films with varying degrees of approaches, including the deeply dramatic, for an older audience. Man of Steel my not be as visually bright and shiny as the Superman of past days but, again, not pushing imagery over the top to sell the idea of a comic book come to life is not the same as making something dark. So if the DC films can only really be looked at as dark by comparing them to films that are, by design and decree, avoiding a certain level of dramatic storytelling and, thus, darkness; what then is my stance on the subject at hand? What do I think is the value of the DCEU starting out dark?
Well, I don’t believe it did.
I don’t find Man of Steel to be a dark film as much as it is a naturalistic piece of drama. It isn’t as exaggerated as most fantasy films are even with it’s depiction of a man who can fly and shoot lasers from his eyes. Batman v Superman is a dark-er film but it needs to be to tell it’s specific story and to function as the middle chapter of this three part Superman drama that includes Man of Steel and Justice League. Suicide Squad has very little in the way of darkness as it was released and Wonder Woman, while touching on some drama, largely avoids engaging the darkness of it while pushing more of the exaggerated, “lightness”, as the Marvel films do in order to boost the contrast and make it’s relatively tame dramatic dalliances seem darker by contrast. Even at its highest dramatic point, BvS isn’t really a dark movie, it’s just darker by comparison given that it’s dramatic delivery is almost never interrupted and its atmosphere is so heavy throughout.
None of the films are really dark, but they aren’t made for children. And therein lay the conversation about what is an, “appropriate” way to showcase these characters. Should they always be rendered as, “kid friendly” or is it ever okay to allow them to be in stories that cater to older audiences, at least on film? And make no mistake; if you are crafting the content and delivery of a film or story so it can be acceptable to audiences of a certain young age; you are making a kids movie, no matter how many double entendres your script includes. The only factor that determines how far you go with that is the target age of the audience you’re seeking. Man of Steel ran afoul of this issue as it attempted to construct a straight dramatic piece that functioned on a specific internal emotional and physical logic, as opposed to the, “cartoon logic” that dominates many of these types of movies. They attempted to create characters that act and react like, “people” do with complex emotions, as opposed to being lawn sprinklers or morality spitting out lessons on how to be a, “good person” – a more mature audience shouldn’t need the simplified ruminations. There are some, including yours truly, that greatly enjoyed seeing the character and it’s world portrayed this way with the understanding that all the other versions of the character still exist to be enjoyed as well. Others were not so pleased, citing any deviation from the general accepted norm for the character to be anathema and, thus, illegitimate. This is a conversation worth having, but one much larger than the scope of this article. Plus; it’s sure to piss me off, so I’m not going there at this point.
Bring It Back To Me
An article I wrote a while back (Of Drama and Darkness) talked about this issue of drama and my feelings on the subject have not changed. Drama is darkness by degrees. The more dramatic you make a piece of storytelling the darker the tone of it becomes. However the addition of a few dark notes does not a dark film make. Struggle, tumult, hardship, strife, grief – these are the things that challenge a character internally and cause them to grow and change. At the very least you can examine how a character reacts and works internally when you have them face these difficulties, if wholesale change is not available to you. Drama without darkness is just tension, and audiences know tension can only exist for so long before something snaps and we’re off and running again. Drama forces characters to slow down, contemplate, process – and that makes audiences looking for an easy thrill ride of a film uncomfortable.
This idea that Man of Steel was a, “dark” movie has been a source of terrible frustration and horrible hilarity for me as people attempt to justify their position. I’ve pushed this point a number times already but I don’t think it can be stated enough; something being dark by comparison does not mean the product is dark by either intent or by production. I’ll add to that; a piece you feel should be more overtly light and humorous not engaging in your preferred interpretation does not mean it is, in absence of that, engaged in the opposite. I find it personally difficult to believe that anyone with a moderately healthy film habit and a fairly broad library of viewing behind them could have looked at this man of Steel film and thought, “Well it was either this or Eraserhead, and frankly; Lynch is for pussies”.
Yes; hyperbole is the enemy but please grant me this one indulgence in light of the abject idiocy of the insinuation.
The DC film universe didn’t start out dark; it embraced a level of dramatic storytelling that a segment of the audience was not prepared for. It replaced cartoon logic with a semi-rigid set of rules to govern its characters that allowed them to retain their fantasy silhouettes while acknowledging the possibility inherent in dramatic limitation. More than that, the films embraced a sense of reality to govern the psychologies and emotions of it’s characters. Gone were the morally superior and nigh classically altruistic figures of the funny books, replaced with characters built to embrace the moral, ethical and emotional complexities that we all have to deal with in our world, heightened almost to absurdity by the fact that they are still portraying characters regarded as superheroes. The films were allowed to be dramatic the way any film not meant for kids would be, and this will always be a sticking point for me in conversation on this subject. If I believe there is any value in the films, “starting in a dark place” it’s that they allowed for drama so they could create more complex works that have pushed me to become a better audience member, and because they acknowledge a storytelling that resonates with me. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s valuable enough.
Clever endings aren’t my bag.
Laterz