No Evil Shall Escape My Sight ...
How to do mythology
Elliot S! Maggin
June 19 2011
I love Green Lantern. Always have. He was the reason I convinced my dad to give me a dramatic boost in allowance in the early Sixties.
I was getting a quarter a week, which was actually in line with the purchasing power of most of my friends – at least the ones who didn’t live on the upward-mobile South Merrick landfill. Around 1960 Julie Schwartz, a senior editor at DC Comics whom I wouldn’t actually come to know for another ten years, started trying out new superhero characters every six months in a magazine called Showcase and then launching most of them off in their own comics. So when I was about eleven comics went from a dime to twelve cents an issue and new titles I just had to follow were coming out with predictable – but nonetheless alarming – reliability. The Green Lantern book by John Broome and Gil Kane was just so damned good I had to do something drastic, so I put together a spreadsheet to illustrate my predicament for Dad. I needed a nickel more a week just to account for the new cover price, and a regular boost every six months (retroactive to the previous half-year) to cover the new stuff from Julie. I needed a bump to forty cents right away, I showed, and my advancing years justified the inflationary spiral to ensue. Dad was not visibly impressed, but he and Mom conferred and a few days later he announced that I would now have to be responsible for several expenses for which they had heretofore paid. To accommodate for this my weekly allowance would now be three dollars. No matter that I now had to cover my own lunches; I had my Green Lantern.
There were many other reasons I loved Green Lantern, most of which are on display in the just-released Warner Bros film of that name. The critics uniformly seem to hate it. They have their heads up their asses. Especially Peter Travers in Rolling Stone who ought to know better. Here’s why:
Green Lantern the film launches a visual and figurative vocabulary – a set of assumptions about the viability of the popular consciousness – that we haven’t seen updated in this medium since Star Wars. The intelligence of the film is on display mostly in what the filmmakers choose to leave out. There have been wormholes, for example, in earlier movies, but they’ve always been accompanied by lengthy digressions where some learned Sagan clone explains in excruciating detail what they are and how they work. Sometimes there are even lame visual aids: toilet paper tubes and fiber optic reading lights and such. By contrast, somewhere toward the top of the second act, Ryan Reynolds in a holographic Green Lantern body suit launches into the maw of one somewhere off the northern edge of the solar system and pops out in the neighborhood of the ancient planet Oa at the geographic midpoint of the Universe. No problem; no further explanation necessary; visually obvious.
The film is full of such shorthanded leaps, all the better to fit a corker of a story. “Too much information,” one movie reviewer cries, drooling with the assumption that what he’s too intellectually lazy to integrate is beyond the grasp of an audience better acquainted with the shared experiences of twenty-first century collective memory than he.
There’s an astonishing absence of cultural sophistication among our supposed cultural gatekeepers these days. This lapse is so prevalent that reportedly the marketing suits at Warner Bros are already casting around for someone to take the fall for their huge but timorous investment in this superb product of American heroic fantasy. Someone somewhere in the arcane process that goes into making a big Hollywood movie understands the protocols of traditional mythology and, what’s more, whoever among the Warner geeks knows this stuff got to make some major creative decisions that kept this presentation consistent not only with its source material but with the classical coding that made it great.
Only one of the creatives who built and grew the Green Lantern character managed to get himself credited for anything in the film titles. Good going, pal, but here are some names that belong up there too: Mart Nodell, my buddy Gil Kane, John Broome, Julius Schwartz, Alfred Bester (who in a fit of chemical-enhanced invention wrote that oath in 1941), Dennis O’Neil, Neal Adams (happy birthday) and an Oscar-style list of people without whom we would never have had this common treasure.
To the suits at WB: As I write this the thing hasn’t even finished its opening weekend and already you’re circling the wagons like a bunch of wanna-be cowboys scared of a few coyote howls. You should know better but, really, we don’t expect you to.
http://www.caveatcorner.com/
wasn't necessary at all.
