I was reading a blurb online the other day about a new Batman movie currently being filmed in Chicago. (Yes, yes. “Comic book movie spoilers? However did you find those on the internet?” Get it out of your system.) There was a sneak preview of some early footage at a big comic book convention in the Windy City last month, and “spy reports” (and by “spy,” I mean “pot-bellied Boba Fett”) were overwhelmingly positive. The Memento guy is directing it; he’s staying away from the CGI and Bat Nipples and so on; the actors involved have been spotted in the proximity of integrity in the past and are either taking the material seriously or are crazy mad hos for cash. All the Batfans who were at the sneak preview came out saying, “That’s so cool! I can’t wait to see that!”
Why is that? Is something wrong with us?
Whether it’s Harry Potter or Seabiscuit or whatever maudlin s*** Oprah’s peddling this month or (especially) Lord of the Rings, we get really jazzed about our legacy movies. “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood? If anybody needs me, I’ll be in a sleeping bag in the lobby. I loved that book, especially the vivid characters fully made flesh in my imagination and the ending which, having read it, I totally know.”
I imagine you see what I’m driving at.
When I flew to Moscow as an exchange student in 1992, a surprise 8-hour layover in JFK International prompted me to buy a copy of Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. (While my copy of Rolling Stone with Wayne and Garth on the cover was brawny reading, it seemed increasingly unlikely to get me all the way to Finland.) In addition to being a ripping yarn for the fertile 16-year-old mind, Jurassic Park quickly became one of my last precious non-McDonald’s lifelines to the English language in a land where, for all I knew, my hosts could have been saying “good morning” or divulging launch codes. (My host mom was convinced that immersion was the way to go for me and ended each day with a lengthy dissertation on politics or human nature, neither of which had been covered in our chapter on Russian Names For Fruits and Vegetables. I wanted to tell her I lacked the Russian vocabulary to keep up with all of her monologues, except I didn’t know how to say that.) It was the first thing I had read, possibly ever, that took at least half a stab at being science fiction as opposed to pseudoscience fiction, a book that didn’t cause me to imagine the author sitting at the typewriter muttering, “‘His DNA was… resequined?…’ Resequenced! ‘His DNA was resequenced by the… photon… spectrum. Also quasars.’” I had never encountered pulp with a bibliography and appendix before.
A year later, when I heard they were making a movie out of my beloved linguistic oasis, I was unnaturally excited. Jurassic Park, in fact, marked the first time I ever bought movie tickets in advance. And without any of your debit cards and interweb either, I might add. (Cost a nickel, it did, and you got cartoons and a newsreel!) Since it was summer, my friend Mike and I went to the Esquire theater’s noon showing, laughing long and loud as we breezed past those suckers who were waiting in line for their tickets like chumps. “Good luck getting a seat, chaps! Ah, waiting in line. Were we ever so young?”
The movie itself was chock full of all the fun that severed Sam Jackson arms and disemboweled lawyers can provide, but the longer it lingered in my memory afterward the more disillusioned I became. While it was a good run-and-chase action spectacular, it really wasn’t the book I read. Dr. Grant hates kids now? Oh, so he can be stuck with the kids during the ordeal and learn and grow as a person. How necessary. Wait, were Grant and Ellie dating in the book? And Ian Malcolm lives now? Is it because he’s Jeff Goldblum? And wait! Wait! Who replaced crusty, nail-spitting, kitten-burning John Hammond with Uncle Grandpa the Leprechaun? Sir Richard Attenborough? Are you kidding me?
So like everyone else, I learned the poignant lesson that The Movie Will Not Be As Good As The Book. Sorry, son. The rites of adolescence are painful. You are doomed to spend your life shouting at screens, “If you liked the book so much, why didn’t you use it to make the movie?”
Many years later, another movie was made of a book I quite enjoyed, Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone. Again we bought our advance tickets; again we went to the Esquire, though this time we waited for “good seats” in a line full of people wearing glitter and bathrobes, waving cardboard wands at one another. When the movie got underway, I had an epiphany about Jurassic Park. As I watched Harry and his friends fight Voldemort and product placement, I thought, “Now you see? That’s more like it! This is very well done. They’re staying incredibly faithful to the source material. Everything is exactly the way I pictured it, and in almost no way does it diverge even slightly from the book… that I… already… wait a minute, what the f*** am I doing in here?”
So you can’t win. Either you ruined everything or you’re wasting my time.
But as a nation, we love it. Why do we love it? Why, once we’ve experienced something fully and made it our own, are we so eager to experience the exact same thing again in a slightly different (but not too different) way? Why do people have reason to believe that a Mod Squad movie is a good idea? Lost in Space starring Matt LeBlanc gets a green light; what’s going on there?
Why could people like me not wait for X-men? And why would hundreds of people then go online to complain about how the costumes were all wrong and Wolverine wasn’t short enough? There have been probably 700 X-men comics printed in my lifetime; I’ve read roughly 200 of them personally. That’s about 4,600 pages of X-Men, my friends. How much more of those mutants could you possibly need, and how hard would it be to find it? If you think Hugh Jackman has the power to single-handedly ruin your favorite book series, go reread some of the 15,000 pages of the original. Float away on the mighty Mississipp of marketing.
I have concocted a theory that it all boils down to this: movies are the last vestige of the democratic spirit in America.
Our political system has become ugly, crass, and divisive. Though it was generally considered impolite, it was once possible to discuss your political positions without getting booed or pissed on. That way of openly defining ourselves without anger or defiance or confrontation is, at least for now, gone. This does not stop us from needing a banner to gather under.
More and more, people use fandom to identify themselves. More and more, people carry their movies over their heads high. The kind of bumper stickery and opening night rubber forehead escapade that used to mark unabashed Klingon speakers is creeping into the ticket lines for more and more flicks. More and more, people I do not know are calling me a “muggle.” More and more, people become franchise partisans and swear oaths of loyalty before the first frame of film ever goes through the projector. And every weekend, those people vote with box office receipts. People don’t see movies anymore; they vote for them with money.
If you ever read one of the bigger fan sites for a Star Wars or Hobbit or Kevin Smith or Scooby Doo movie, you have seen this phenomenon. People will have online pep rallies to encourage the faithful to give a movie a huge opening weekend. People who have never cast a city ballot in their lives will log on and write, “We have to make Alien vs. Predator the number one movie in the country! Come on, people! It’s up to us!” The first time I saw this, theforce.net was encouraging its readers to mark (I think) the three-month anniversary of the release of The Phantom Menace by going in droves to see it again and make it the #1 movie in the country again. This, as I recall, was being organized “to send a powerful message.”
To whom? About what? Watto for President? Did they want to make sure Hollywood knew Star Wars had fans? Were they worried George Lucas might get discouraged and stop trying to sell them ceramic Podracer coffee mugs? What am I supposed to be getting out of this?
The same thing happened when Titanic was poised to overtake Star Wars as the top grosser of all time. “Come on! Take your mom and dad! We can do this!” Do what? Make a movie studio $7? I already did that last week. Are they sending me a cut?
“No, but I am a Titanic person. I choose Titanic as my movie, and when it does well this validates my likes, my worldview, and by extension me as a person.”
Do you ever miss the days when you didn’t know on Monday how much money a movie made the previous week?