• About
  • Cats Dig Hemingway
  • Guest Bookings
  • John King’s Publications
  • Literary Memes
  • Podcast Episode Guide
  • Store!
  • The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film
  • Videos
  • Writing Craft Discussions

The Drunken Odyssey

~ A Podcast About the Writing Life

The Drunken Odyssey

Tag Archives: origin stories

Like a Geek God #19: Beside the Point of Origin

16 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Like a Geek God

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, origin stories, X-Men

Like a Geek God #19 by Mark Pursell

Beside the Point of Origin

 Origin stories need to die a slow, painful, fiery death.

But first, a history lesson.

xmen

The modern era of superhero cinema began in 2000 with a long-awaited celluloid re-imagining of the X-Men franchise.  This should have been a portent of great things to come: Bryan Singer’s foray into comic book action brimmed with mood, tension, and a fair approximation of the franchise’s psychological complexity (Halle Berry’s tone-deaf turn as Storm notwithstanding).

Xmen 1

It took years and millions to finally get an X-Men movie project off the ground.  No, really.  Imagine that for a hot second.  Imagine an executive/financial landscape in good ol’ Hollywood that viewed a superhero movie not as the nominally-expensive cash grab it currently represents but instead as a black hole investment, unlikely to reap much from its sowing.  That was the landscape all through the ‘80s and ‘90s, a time when not only X-Men but Spider-Man and multiple other Marvel and DC properties languished in the most fiery of development hells.   The story might have been different if Tim Burton’s unparalleled 1989 Batman had launched a film franchise that was both critically and commercially viable, but Burton’s own 1992 follow-up, Batman Returns, was largely misunderstood by viewers, and the subsequent movies (1995’s Batman Forever and 1997’s Batman and Robin, both barely more than odious) did little to instill hope among Hollywood suits that comic-book adaptations would result in desired profit margins.

Untitled

However, against all odds, X-Men did eventually achieve liftoff, and did so with enough panache and box office returns that it not only set the stage for sequels of its own, but also a reinvigorated cinematic landscape where suddenly, superhero projects gathering dust in the slush pile turned into diamonds-in-the-rough, potential moneymakers desperately in need of a greenlight and a quick turnaround.  In rapid succession, we got X-Men 2, Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the Blade franchise, all within a period of roughly three years.  By the mid-Aughties, however, this sputtering pilot light of life among superhero cinema looked in danger of going out just as quickly as it had been lit.  For every Hellboy, there was a Catwoman; for every Unbreakable, a Daredevil.  Then, Christopher Nolan singlehandedly reoriented the genre with his dark, archetypal take on Batman’s origination, Batman Begins.

And with it, cast the immediate future of the superhero movie into a paradoxical pit of both financial viability and critical darkness.

Untitled

Batman Begins isn’t responsible for superhero cinema’s fixation on the origin story.  Every noteworthy hero film that came before it in the early Aughties was also an origin story of sorts, even X-Men.  And standing alone, there was nothing particularly egregious about Nolan’s decision to tackle Bruce Wayne’s complicated past.  It’s only when you consider the decade of superhero movies that has passed in the interim that you see how unforgivingly Begins’s success molded the movies that came after it.  The contemporary cultural juggernaut known by the innocuous-sounding title of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is thoroughly and utterly marred by this.  2008’s Iron Man also chose a “hero begins” route, recasting Tony Stark as a modern, motormouthed, military-industrial apologist.  Iron Man is notable as the opening salvo in Hollywood’s MCU onslaught, beginning a decade-long project to release individual hero movies for all of the classic Avengers teammates and then, finally, a climactic film where they would all work together in a team (perhaps you’ve seen it? It was written and directed by a little-known auteur named Joss Whedon). It’s also notable because it’s one of the few movies in the MCU that is actually good, but that’s an argument for another time.  Iron Man’s runaway success—again, very merited, given its high quality—gave birth to Thor, Incredible Hulk, and Captain America: origin stories, one and all.  Soon even non-franchise superhero tales, like Chronicle, went the “origin story” route.  The origin story became such a fixture in the forefront of pop culture preoccupation that it bled into our TV shows (Bates Motel, Hannibal, Sherlock).  Somewhere along the way, the idea of the origin story became entangled with the idea of the franchise reboot; less than a decade apart, we have two very different Spider-Man movies, both origin stories.

So what’s the problem?  This panoply of origin stories has been financially viable for Marvel Studios, and critics have been suspiciously kind to the entries in the MCU, even the ones that are insignificant fluff at best (here’s looking at you, Thor).

Untitled

Why should we be concerned? What’s got my little geek heart all aflame?

I think, somewhere along the line—because X-Men, Batman Begins, and Iron Man told origin stories that succeeded both critically and commercially—that the origin story came to be thought of as something that has an intrinsic cinematic value to moviegoers, that the archetype itself is some sort of lodestone that, if only picked up, yields magic.  The truth, as should be obvious to anyone who bothers to look beyond the immediate surface of things, is that those movies, particularly X-Men and Iron Man, are extremely well-constructed.  They succeed as movies first, origin stories second.  The script and the direction don’t rely on the basic components of an origin story to do their work for them.  The writers and actors and directors have fleshed out the characters, spent time creating opportunities for viewer investment at all possible moments, and made sure that their story works not just as a lackadaisical illumination of how X character got from Point A to Badass, but as a narrative experience in and of itself.  Take, for example, the first Mad Max movie, which wasn’t even necessarily conceived as the beginning of a franchise but whose tale of a vengeance-seeking policeman was executed with such muscular vision and cinematic poise that it unintentionally birthed a franchise.

With each passing year and each new superhero origin story, however, it’s become clear that subsequent writers and directors can ape the general look and feel of an origin story but not the substance of its best examples.  There’s also the matter of not really having to do much work when writing an origin story (theoretically) because they all follow a distinct pattern: hero has problem, hero gets power, hero has to figure power out.  You can knock out an origin story screenplay without moving much beyond first-thought, and, as Hollywood has discovered, people will go in droves to see the resulting movie.  From a financial standpoint, origin stories have become a no-brainer investment: minimum effort resulting in maxiumum profit.   What this has created is an atmosphere of origin-obsessed superhero movies that have long ago abandoned complex, fresh storytelling in favor of the rote.  This problem reached its apotheosis with 2013’s Man of Steel.  We’ve actually seen a LOT of Superman in the last few decades (Lois and Clark, Smallville, Superman Returns), so it’s not exactly like we needed a brand-new reboot, but reboot it they did, and with as little narrative acumen as a direct-to-video knock-off.

Archetypal stories and figures move in glacier-like cycles through the attention span of pop culture.  Slasher flicks gave way to torture porn gave way to found footage, to use horror as an example.  Vampires gave way to zombies gave way to whatever monster will capture the zeitgeist of the popular imagination next. The obsession with the origin story is weirdly appropriate for the Information Age and the social media generation, where everyone is the star of their own Facebook reality show and builds their own “super” origin story out of their life narrative.  We powerless mortals no longer identify with the hapless humans who help the superheroes: we see ourselves as the superheroes, misunderstood and put upon but ascending to a great destiny, while pop music assures us that we were “Born This Way”, that we’re a “Firework”, that we’re never less than “Fucking Perfect.”  It’s the delusional opposite of Generation X disaffection, which at least had the virtue of cynicism.  Who can say whether the Men with Suits have articulated this connection, but they perceive enough about the way social psychology works to know that the contemporary moviegoing audience spits out $$$ when certain buttons are pressed, and they press them with gusto.  The good news is that the origin story is quickly turning into a fallow field, in need of crop rotation.  There are only so many heroes to make movies about, only so many ways to depict a brave-but-reluctant soul’s rise to power.  Now that everyone from Tony Stark to Peter Parker has had the murky origins of their heroism fracked and stripped of every possible vein of crude, superhero movies will eventually be forced to turn to other types of stories, new chapters, new problems.  To be honest, this will probably be the death of the superhero boom; Millennials will care little for Captain America’s middle-aged struggle with morality because it doesn’t say anything to them about the movie of their lives, and the dollars will stop flowing in a Mississippi-like torrent to the glass eyries of Los Angeles.  That’s good; it’s necessary.  We need to let the superhero lie dormant for a while.  It’s only out of a period of dormancy that a given archetype returns to cinema with vim and vigor.  Think Batman 1989.  Think X-Men 2000.  I’m personally looking forward to ten years without capes and noble martyrdom.  Maybe by 2020, I’ll be ready for some more.

 ___________

Mark Pursell in Orange

 

Mark Pursell (Episode 75) is a lifelong geek and lover of words.  His publishing credits include Nimrod International Journal, The New Orleans Review, and The Florida Review, where he also served as poetry editor.  His work can most recently be seen in the first volume of the 15 Views of Orlando anthology from Burrow Press.  He currently teaches storytelling and narrative design for video games at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida.

Scribophile, the online writing group for serious writers

Online, shop here:

If you must, shop Amazon and help the show.

Audible.com

Blogs

Not forgotten

Categories

  • 21st Century Bronte
  • A Word from the King
  • Aesthetic Drift
  • animation
  • Anime
  • Art
  • Autobiography
  • AWP
  • Biography
  • Blog Post
  • Bloomsday
  • Buddhism
  • Buzzed Books
  • Cheryl Strayed
  • Children's Literature
  • Christmas
  • Christmas literature
  • Comedy
  • Comic Books
  • Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart
  • Craft of Fiction Writing
  • Creative Nonfiction
  • David Foster Wallace
  • David James Poissant
  • David Lynch
  • David Sedaris
  • Disney
  • Dispatches from the Funkstown Clarion
  • Doctor Who
  • Drinking
  • Dungeons and Dragons
  • Editing
  • Education
  • Episode
  • Erotic Literature
  • Essay
  • Fan Fiction
  • Fantasy
  • Feminism
  • Film
  • Film Commentary
  • Flash Fiction
  • Florida Literature
  • Francesca Lia Block
  • Functionally Literate
  • Ghost writing
  • Graphic Novels
  • Gutter Space
  • Help me!
  • Heroes Never Rust
  • History
  • Horror
  • Humor
  • Hunter S. Thompson
  • In Boozo Veritas
  • Irish Literature
  • Jack Kerouac
  • James Bond
  • James Joyce
  • Jazz
  • Journalism
  • Kerouac House
  • Kung Fu
  • Like a Geek God
  • Literary Criticism
  • Literary Magazines
  • Literary Prizes
  • Literary rizes
  • Literature of Florida
  • Litlando
  • Live Show
  • Loading the Canon
  • Loose Lips Reading Series
  • Lost Chords & Serenades Divine
  • Magic Realism
  • Mailbag
  • manga
  • McMillan's Codex
  • Memoir
  • Miami Book Fair
  • Michael Caine
  • Military Literature
  • Mixtape
  • Music
  • New York City
  • O, Miami
  • Old Poem Revue
  • On Top of It
  • Pensive Prowler
  • Philosophy
  • Photography
  • Poetry
  • politics
  • Postmodernism
  • Publishing
  • Recommendation
  • Repeal Day
  • science
  • Science Fiction
  • Screenwriting
  • Sexuality
  • Shakespeare
  • Shakespearing
  • Sozzled Scribbler
  • Sports
  • Star Wars
  • Television
  • The Bible
  • The Curator of Schlock
  • The Global Barfly's Companion
  • The Lists
  • The Perfect Life
  • The Pink Fire Revue
  • The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film
  • Theater
  • There Will Be Words
  • translation
  • Travel Writing
  • Vanessa Blakeslee
  • Versify
  • Video Games
  • Violence
  • Virginia Woolf
  • War
  • Westerns
  • Word From the King
  • Young Adult
  • Your Next Beach Read
  • Zombies

Recent Posts

  • Episode 524: Yeoh Jo-Ann!
  • The Curator of Schlock #382: Dark Crimes
  • Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #175
  • Episode 523: Aaron Angello!
  • The Curator of Schlock #381: The Driver

Archives

  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • The Drunken Odyssey
    • Join 3,107 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • The Drunken Odyssey
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...