Morning Coffee is a collection of top-fold news, oddities, observations and wisecracks, peppered with financial advice, movie reviews and more gathered by TheSequitur.com contributors and editors.
A.O. Scott, the tenured film critic for The New York Times, declared the superhero movie genre officially closed. Apparently, an art form that has been around since the 1930s and has generated billions in revenue – inspiring kids and adults together with imaginative storytelling that has given rise to some of this world’s greatest and deepest characters – only just outstayed its welcome.
A.O. Scott...thinks that there is a limit to how many good superhero stories there are to tell.“I have a hunch, and perhaps a hope, that ‘Iron Man,’ ‘Hancock’ and ‘Dark Knight’ together represent a peak, by which I mean not only a previously unattained level of quality and interest, but also the beginning of a decline,” he writes through a popcorn-butter-stained smile.
Scott, who is somehow not enough of a nerd to have heard of comic books, thinks that there is a limit to how many good superhero stories there are to tell. This is the same person who said, “I have long been of the opinion that the entire history of American popular culture – maybe even of Western civilization – amounts to little more than a long prelude to ‘The Simpsons,’” referring to the 2007 movie.
Now, I enjoyed "The Simpsons Movie" as much as the next fan, but clearly, this is a man conquered by the human predisposition towards exaggeration.
He blames the comic-book-movie’s impending doom on the “commercial imperatives” that govern each installment. He adds that the genre (and “The Dark Knight,” in particular) “spells out … serious themes” rather than “exploring them.” Much like Scott’s articles, in fact.
What is it called, again, where someone dismisses an entire class of something due to an already arrived-upon conclusion?Implicit in his argument is the rank notion that mass appeal demands the sacrifice of true artistic integrity. Scott simply assumes this fallacy to be true of the superhero genre, selectively pointing to past superhero movies, while neglecting the possibility of it ever changing. This is the same fallacy committed when one says that because something has not happened in the past, it will not happen in the future.
Talk about spelling out an idea rather than exploring it – Scott quite pompously dismisses an entire genre’s future before it is made.
(Meanwhile, I dispute the notion that the recent Batman movie, and other notable superhero movies, lacked artistic integrity – but that is not necessary for me to prove to anyone who saw this newest installment with an open mind.)
Scott continues, “To paraphrase something the Joker says to Batman, ‘The Dark Knight’ has rules, and they are the conventions that no movie of this kind can escape.” He goes on to list these conventions with such startling generalization (such as “the climax must be a fight with the villain”) as to make one think he’s rambling about action films, generally.
If he’s already dismissed the entire superhero genre, then of course it is doomed in his eyes. His are the sweeping generalizations of a man trying to come to terms with his inability to love what the entire nation is enthralled in.
What is it called, again, where someone dismisses an entire class of something due to an already arrived-upon conclusion? Oh, right – prejudice.
Oh, right—prejudice.Wait for The Watchmen, coming in the spring of 2009, to see the superhero genre flipped upside-down, turned inside-out and inverted molecule by molecule – a process that actually happens gruesomely to one of its characters (before he even becomes a hero). According to the film’s director, Zack Snyder, “In my movie, Superman doesn't care about humanity, Batman can't get it up, and the bad guy wants world peace.”
In other words, if superhero movies have gotten us this far by following the rules, just wait until they start breaking them. [New York Times, IMDB, Entertainment Weekly]
Jeff Dubbinis a contributing editor for TheSequitur.com.
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