Zero Dark Literally

Sometimes a cipher is just a cipher

When it comes to movies these days, I'm usually pretty late to the party.  The joys of my 50-inch plasma screen mixed with my deep seated aversions to out of focus imagery, over cranked air-conditioning, and rude morons yakking in my ear have caused me to pretty much abandon theater going for any reason other than to make some sort political/financial statement.  If, say, Joss Whedon or Terry Gilliam have a new film out, then I'm going to make the trip just to put my money where my mouth is in the hopes that those under-appreciated (heretofore in Whedon's case) filmmakers get to make more movies.  And occasionally (very occasionally) there will be an action film that looks promising enough that I want to experience it via the big screen, although this latter case usually (very usually) ends with bitter disappointment and much oath swearing regarding my intentions to forgo the next big budget spectacular-spectacular that everyone says is great.

All of this is to say that I am woefully behind the curve when it comes to movies, so I don't usually write about them.  It's not to say that I don't love movies, and it's not to say that I don't consider myself fairly knowledgeable about movies (even more so now, as you are about to learn), but rather it's to say that I don't go to movies.  No, what I do is rent movies.  And the lag time that makes that possible tends to put me at least six months behind the conversation of the moment, which makes it pretty hard to write about movies.  Of course, one glance at this blog will tell you I don't usually write about much of anything, but I don't write about movies even more than I don't write about other things.

In a sense, however, this rant isn't really about a movie.  I come here neither to praise nor to bury Zero Dark Thirty, but rather to bitch a bit about the death of American film as a subtle experience, thanks to the apparent death of subtlety itself.  Because the reaction to Kathryn Bigelow's film---or perhaps I should say the overreaction---is just another depressing example of the literalism that has overtaken every aspect of the American experience.

In the months following Zero Dark Thirty's release, I did a fair job of avoiding any conversation about the particulars of the film (Did they get Osama Bin Ladin?  I had no idea!), but I would have had to cut off my ears and pluck out my eyes in order to avoid all the outrage pouring forth from the film's detractors regarding its alleged promotion of torture for fun and profit.  Many people, especially those who had not, I would later learn, actually seen the film, were besides themselves over what they believed to be the rah-rah nature of the film in general, and the we'd-never-get-anything-accomplished-without-torture stance that they had taken away in particular.  In fact, the early wave of that particular criticism was so pervasive that it was directly responsible for my having moved Zero Dark Thirty from the top of my list of must see movies of 2012 to the bottom.  I still wanted to see it, mind you, but I decided I was going to wait for the DVD to become available via Red Box rather than spending the cash for VOD or, god forbid, actually going to a movie theater.

And so that is how it came to pass that I didn't actually see Zero Dark Thirty until yesterday, several months too late to really take part in the debate that raged across the cable-net-o-sphere in the most hectoring and pedantic manner possible.

Of course, that's not such a bad thing, I now understand, because it turns out that most of the people who I would have been arguing with also never saw Zero Dark Thirty.  Glenn Greenwald, one of the commentators who led the attacks on the film from the pages of The Guardian admitted as much, and he was outraged that you were outraged that he was outraged at a film he hadn't even seen.

After all, not seeing a film you are condemning has a long and proud tradition.  I can remember being a young man in New York City and arguing vociferously with a picketer outside a screening of The Passion of the Christ, and that very angry fellow hadn't seen the film in question either.  So obviously Glenn Greenwald was in some illustrious company.

But even those detractors who had watched the film's images flicker before them in a darkened room apparently never actually saw Zero Dark Thirty either, because the seething anger being directed the film's way has been, so far as I can discern, wholly misplaced and the result of a blindingly inaccurate understanding of the film's message.  It also betrays a basic misunderstanding of what film itself is, or, for that matter, what a message is.

My biggest takeaway from the outrage I have perused these past 24 hours is that many people today, especially those who participate in or provide coverage of the political world, seem incapable of understanding any ideas that are more complex or less obvious than those that can be clearly expressed via a direct-mail flyer, a campaign poster, or a USA Today pie chart.

But what I personally took away from this whole experience was not anger over the film's non-existent pro-torture stance, but rather depression over the fact that people are just getting more fucking literal with each passing year.  Because the idea that Zero Dark Thirty is anything but anti-torture, anti-imperialism, and anti-pretty-much-every-fucking-thing that the Bush bastards did can only be explained by the fact that people today must believe that if you are not standing on a soap box, megaphone in hand, decrying that which you oppose in the most strident and explicit terms possible, then you are probably in favor of smothering puppies as a way to pass the time in between atrocities.

I really wish there was a word I could type here that would convey the feeling that comes from wanting to slam my head down on my keyboard at having to type that last sentence.  "Frustration" just doesn't do it justice. Probably the Germans have a word for it, but you will excuse me for forgoing any German when I'm about to wade hip deep into a pool of people calling Kathryn Bigelow a Nazi.

Yes, Zero Dark Thirty has a total absence of didactic monologues decrying the inhumanity of torture.  No one stands up and shouts, "What are we doing here?  What have we become? Are we now the terrorists?"  So if she is guilty of anything, Kathryn Bigelow is guilty of vastly overrating people's ability to take from a film anything that is not explicitly stated in dialogue.  She is guilty of making a movie rather than a polemic.  For that, I celebrate her.  But for that, literal minded simpletons like Glenn Greenwald castigate her.

For the Greenwalds of the world (and there are many of them), there is black and there is white, and then there is the guy standing on your chest explaining to you which is which.  For the Greenwalds, important issues of the day can only be discussed while standing on someone's chest, preferably with an amplifying device of some sort hooked into their larynx.  And if you do not agree, then you are probably just some sort of modern day Nazi who thinks the Iraq War ended too soon.  Sure, you can say you think torture is bad, but if you aren't saying it loudly enough based on an arbitrary decibel scale invented and individually calibrated by each and every Greenwald out there, then you might as well be Donald Rumsfeld's butt monkey.

For the Greenwalds, subtlety is not something political arguments are made with, and therefore films that are subtle might as well be an endorsement of tyranny.

The problem here is that films are---surprise, surprise, surprise----not supposed to be didactic political arguments.  In point of fact, films are films. That may sound stunningly obvious, but if it were really all that obvious, then a lefty like Kathryn Bigelow wouldn't have spent the last several months being labeled as Dick Cheney's answer to Leni Riefenstahl.

Of course, this assumes your idea of film is not limited the greater works of Michael Bay and Tom Shadyac.  This all assumes that your idea of film includes people like Welles and Hitchcock, and even, dare I say it, fucking commies like Tarkovskiy.  This assumes you understand that sometimes people say one thing when they actually mean another, and that it is exactly that juxtaposition of meaning that often provides the most devastating critique possible.

Films are not campaign speeches, nor are they Guardian articles, and so they are not always aiming for the lowest common denominator.  They are also not newspaper stories, so they are not written and produced and directed using only those tools which can be understood by an eighth grade audience.  Great works of art are meant to affect those who are open to them in the most subtle ways possible, and so they reward repeated viewing and, most of all, careful consideration.  They are meant to provoke an emotional reaction initially, with intellectual meaning only becoming truly clear later, and only then if you are willing to work up some skull sweat to get there.  If you are only capable of knee-jerk reaction in the moment, then you are likely going to miss the type of pointed commentary which usually only becomes wholly obvious once something is chewed over later.

All of which is to say that something like Zero Dark Thirty isn't going to be as easy a nut to crack as Bruce Almighty, even though at the same time Zero Dark can still be a hell of lot more entertaining and exciting than the almighty Bruce and his titty-growing, moon-pulling shenanigans.

Thus, when the CIA officer in Zero Dark says, mid-torture, "This is what defeat looks like," to a captured terror cell financier, there is a reason the camera is squarely on the officer himself at that moment.  When you hear the words "this is what defeat looks like" you are not looking at the pitiable Arab tied to the ceiling.  No, when you hear the words "this is what defeat looks like" you are looking squarely at the torturing agent of the U.S. of A.

This is the use of another near-dead tool called irony.  On the surface it appears that the defeated one in the scene is the man tied to the ceiling, but the point of the image shown to us at the exact moment that the line about defeat is uttered is that, in fact, we are the defeated ones.  The point is that defeat looks like this CIA officer, not the detainee.  The point is that a once great nation has been reduced to animal behavior that is in direct contravention with its foundational principles.  The point is that we are the defeated, and with every punch and kick and electro-shock to the nuts, we defeat ourselves a little more.

Now, of course, Kathryn Bigelow could have simply had a character say all of that aloud.  But that would have necessitated creating a new character named Boring McObvious, or at the very least changing the name of the movie from Zero Dark Thirty to Glenn Greenwald, Let Us Explain It All To You.  And then instead of a movie she would have been making a civics lesson.

And it would have been a civics lesson, by the way, with which huge swaths of the Western public would not agree.  While Glenn Greenwald and I may not be big fans of torture, it is worth mentioning here that torture polled exceedingly well during the period in question, and continues to do so to this day.  Kathryn Bigelow is indicting not just a transitional U.S. government in that shot of the CIA officer.  She is also pointing her camera vicariously at all of us who allowed atrocities to be committed in our name.  This is very tricky business she is engaging in, trying at once to document reality, while at the same time trying to take a position on that reality that is not didactic and boring, while at the same trying to engage an audience that is probably more than half filled with people who just may think the CIA guy is doing God's own work.

So how do you reach not just those people who are inclined to agree with you when you are making a film?  How do you make something that can stand the test of time and perhaps reach into and discomfit those with whom a political discussion would end as quickly as they are able to ascertain that you are stating something with which they do not agree?  And what is the point of a film in the first place?  Is it merely something that should be designed to make all those people who already agree with you feel good about themselves for the position they took?  Do we really want our movies to turn into the same sort of unchallenged echo chamber that our news media has now become?  Can a film really be great if it is merely designed to be glanced at, understood immediately at face value, and then passed around between like minded individuals like a Facebook meme?

The scene I mention above comes right away in Zero Dark Thirty.  And whether you get the point of the film grammar Bigelow is using or not, the scene is shot and staged in such a way as to make us uncomfortable from the get go.  Certainly our protagnist, the young CIA agent played by Jessica Chastain, is uncomfortable.  Chastain's Maya grimaces and looks away repeatedly, but, apparently to the Greenwalds' endless frustration, she never says a word.  Eventually she will be corrupted by the process in which she is engaged, and later you will see her witness and participate in such acts without batting an eye; indeed without even registering on her face that there is anything to bat an eye about.  But while this tale of innocence corrupted is as old as storytelling itself, these days you rarely see it played out wordlessly, or without any external comment at some point, and so the discomfort shown by Maya in this early scene was apparently not enough for the Greenwalds.  For the Greenwalds, force-fed a diet of 42-minute homilies on the supposedly simple nature of good vs. evil each week on NCSI & Order, how can someone truly be corrupted if she didn't begin from a place where she was verbally railing against the injustices she would later come to accept as a matter of course?  If she didn't verbally object, then how are we to understand that there was anything happening on screen that we were not supposed to applaud? After all, don't Mark Harmon and Sam Waterson make a big speech each and every time they see something morally questionable?

Of course, the fact that none of that happened is very much not to the point the fickle finger of fascism at Bigelow.  For those who believe everything must be a cut and dried political argument, and only a cut and dried political argument, trying to find meaning in the messiness of reality is much too difficult.  If you want to make a point in the political world, you state it outright, and then you say it again, and then again and again and again.  And then nine thousand more times for the stupid people in the cheap seats.

For the Greenwalds, if you want subtlety, make a movie about a zombies or something, otherwise you are on the wrong side of the moral divide.

Again, if you take everything literally, and if you are of the belief that anything shown without immediate verbal condemnation is then de facto consent, as apparently the Greenwalds believe, it is possible you will take away from Zero Dark Thirty that torture is, as Martha Stewart might say, a good thing.  It is possible you will see the image at the end of the film---the very one that leads this post---and it will simply wash over you with no meaning.  It is possible you will not see that the isolation in which Maya is bathed at the end of the film is meant to signify the isolation that we, America, have created for ourselves with our terribly wrong-headed approach to the war on terror.  It's possible that her being alone on an island in the middle of darkness for most of the last hour of the film will not resonate with you at all, and you will see no larger meaning in those carefully crafted images.  It's possible that when her decade long mission, the thing to which she has dedicated her heart and soul with so little thought of its consequences or aftermath, is finally at an end and she is asked where she wants to go next, you will think nothing of the fact that she has no answer and simply weeps in silence.  It's possible that you will see no broader meaning in any of that.

But just because you do not see it does not mean that it is not there.

Ecce Homo Solvo

"Rob Portman said what now?"

And The Great Gay Off of 2013 has begun.

Fresh on the heels of Hillary Clinton's having been fresh on the stilettos of Rob Portman, Sen. Claire McCaskill (Confused - Missouri) yesterday became the latest Democrat to remind us she had never previously uttered word one in favor of marriage equality, thus pointing up yet again just how many liberals progressives Democrats have managed to skate without taking an actual position on a civil rights question. Thanks to the GOP being slightly to the right of Ghengis Khan on this issue, Dems have previously been able to give lip service to gay rights without actually moving their lips.  But now, in the wake of Rob Portman's epiphany that his gay son was an actual human being deserving of civil rights, McCaskill, like Clinton before her, realized it was high time to get on record in regards to gay marriage before she ended up coming off as slightly less enlightened than Torquemada.

"I have come to the conclusion that our government should not limit the right to marry based on who you love," she wrote. "While churches should never be required to conduct marriages outside of their religious beliefs, neither should the government tell people who they have a right to marry."

McCaskill, who made her announcement via Tumblr, a forum of which no doubt she hoped the majority of her backwater constituents had never heard (or couldn't spell if they had), went on to say that her views on the subject, like those of many invertebrates politicians, have evolved over time, but that she is now unable to look her gay and lesbian friends, colleagues, and staff "in the eye without honestly confronting this uncomfortable inequality."

Left unsaid was that staying to the right of Rob Portman on this issue would have justified her gay and lesbian friends, colleagues, and staff punching her in the face repeatedly.

And The Great Gay Off of 2013 continues.  Can you predict which Democrat will stand up and state (or, like McCaskill, blog) the obvious next?  And which Democrats will drag their feet so long that they end up not only being behind Rob Portman on this particular curve, but perhaps also behind John Roberts?

It's never too late unless Rob Portman beats you to it.

Where's a fucking time machine when you need one?

After standing mutely by while her expedient husband signed the Defense Against Marriage Act back in '96, and then after coasting by on the fact that her party was the only one that even tacitly supported a homosexual's right to exist, let alone get married, Hillary Clinton watched Rob "Empathy" Portman (Hypocrite-Ohio) officially go on record as being in favor of gay marriage this past week; something the probable Democratic candidate in 2016 had never actually done herself.

And that's how we end up getting a slow Monday news story where Sec. Clinton officially declares herself to be out and proud, which is something most of her supporters assumed she had already done long ago.

Nope.

Expect Clinton to be just the first of many democrats in the coming weeks who will be having their oh-shit-come-to-jesus moments once they all digest the fact that Rob Fucking Portman was quicker to the gay marriage support bandwagon than they were.

Lost in all the ridicule of Portman for only changing his gay-bashing tune once his son made Portman realize that all that gay bashing actually affected him personally is the fact that a horde of Dems  have never actually said public word one in favor of gay marriage, as they have long been able to be seen as pro-gay simply by not having an "R" next to their names.  So why bother saying something that will piss people off if you can get credit for having done so without actually having to do it, right?

That changes now.

Because let's face it, appearing like you are behind the curve on a social issue in comparison to Rob Portman...

Do I even need to finish that tortuous sentence?

No democrat wants to face a GOP opponent who can claim to have been in favor of gay rights first, so get ready for The Great Gay Off of 2013 in the weeks to come.

And way to go, Rob Portman.  You may be a total slime who couldn't see the frying pan until your son hit you upside the head with it, but you may have actually done some inadvertent good here.  Maybe if Mr. Portman the Younger starts dating a melon picker who can't get healthcare, then Pa Portman might end up becoming an actual human being some day.

What Would Ryan Lochte Do?

Why do I get the feeling that the answer to this question is usually gonna be, "Well, dude, he would fuck it; that's what he would do."

Go fuck yourself, Megan McArdle

"I probably hate myself as much as you do."

Since, you know, written words can only go so far, and since Megan McArdle apparently cannot think and type at the same time, I'm going to cut and paste her droolings and then just post a short video clip in which the late sociopath Mr. Blue refutes that which I would never have thought needed refuting.

(From, appropriately enough, something called The Daily Beast)

"I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.  Would it work?  Would people do it?  I have no idea; all I can say is that both these things would be more effective than banning rifles with pistol grips."

Over to you, Mr. Blue

This shoe shouldn't be on any foot.

"I'm sure glad to see the left is coming around to my way of thinking."

There is not much to say about this shit, other than to point out that witch hunts are not okay just because they are being led by people on my side of the political isle.  Stupid is as stupid does has never applied so well as it does when talking about people attacking a man (who, it just so happens, shares all of their views and goals) simply because they don't think he's funny.  Oppression in response to oppression has never been an answer to anything other than the question of what is stupid and fucking counterproductive.

And while trying to get a man fired from his job (and working to make him permanently unemployable) is not quite on the level with beating a man to death because you do not happen to like what he does with his cock, defending a wrong by saying it's not as bad as another wrong that you experienced is not, I am pretty sure, a very effective argument for anything.  It's also the same argument that every bigot and despot who has ever walked the earth has used before you.

Worst of all is that even with so many real world problems still to be addressed, there are hysterical branches of the very necessary activist movements out there who just go around inventing things to attack and fix.

  

But there are some things, no matter how unfunny you may find them, that are simply not a threat to you.  Jokes about one man's balls slapping another's would be one of those things, as would be the idea of cumming on a comic book character's face.


Even were we to reach a point where women and gays had full equality on every level with the stupid fucking white men who have been oppressing them all these years, there would still not be a single reason to expend any energy on tasteless jokes about banging super heroes.  Tasteless jokes neither hurt you, nor do they create an environment that would cause people to want to hurt you.  At worst, tasteless jokes are the result of said poor environment, rather than the cause, but even that would be stretching it pretty fucking thin in this particular case.

If you have to go out of your way to find people to attack (especially when they are people who, it turns out, have been fighting on your side for years), then you are actually just as much a part of the problem as those who would deny you your equal rights.

It's a tricky thing to believe you have the right to ban that which offends you while at the same time opposing others who would ban you because you offend them.

That could be why the constitution does not contain anything about the right not to be offended. 

Put The Bunny Back In The Box

My thanks, per usual, to the fine Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight Blog for talking me off ledge today.  

The difference is that we, and HuffPost Pollster, are looking at the Electoral College and the popular vote in a holistic way. The evidence is ambiguous enough that it’s hard to know for sure, but the fact that Mr. Obama appears to hold a lead in the Electoral College is reason to be suspicious that Mr. Romney leads in the popular vote.

Two of the three hypothesis yield an Obama win. It’s something of a coincidence that our model now shows Mr. Obama with almost exactly a 2-in-3 chance of winning (as do Vegas betting lines), but it isn’t the worst way to think about the election.

Also, thank you Las Vegas!

Just wish I had read it yesterday when it was actually published.  Would have saved me 24 hours of tsuris. 

Crazy Like A Narcoleptic Fox?

"Even I could beat fucking Romney!"

If the President loses this election after all the hard work of the GOP to allow him an easy path to what would have been an unprecedented reelection, then I think that pretty much sums up the Obama presidency in a nutshell. 

It scares the hell out of me that the GOP might get their grubby, greedy, gleeful hands back on the rudder, but I guess I should not be surprised that President O. let me down yet again. From the moment he took office, at which time he totally underestimated the size of the problem with the economy and how staggeringly difficult it would be for him to fix (especially with the guys who broke it advising him), to the way he underestimated and tried to silk glove his way with an opposition party that wanted to roast him alive, to the startlingly moronic statement he made during those first 100 days about being able to fix all the problems of the world or else "we are looking at a one-term proposition," straight on to his completely underestimating the war in Afghanistan (or perhaps embracing it---God only knows), you can draw a direct line through all of that to his completely underestimating what was required of him last night.

You really gotta work at it to be the most disappointing politician of my lifetime when my lifetime includes a dude who nearly got booted out of office for sticking a cigar up some little girl's hoo-hah.

Maybe he just doesn't want to be President anymore. Or maybe all the hate has got to him; maybe he's developed PTSD or some other mental problem. Or maybe he's really just a Republican in Dem's clothing and that finally caught up to him. I just don't know.

Whatever it was, those of you out there who don't seem to think this is serious must think the whole world is Barack's choir to preach to. But that wasn't a show for the choir last night. That was a show for the morons from Rock Ridge; the ones who still cannot seem to make up their minds despite the fact that it's the most black and white choice since someone held up an empty ice cream cone and asked you, "Chocolate or Feces?"

If any of you are taking comfort in 5 point poll cushions, then you're still living in 1948, and you probably didn't hear, by the way, that Dewey lost. This is the most mercurial electorate in history, and those same polls I now read some people touting as predicting an easy path in Ohio and Fla and PA and where-the-fuck-ever-else have been bouncing back and forth like tennis balls for the whole cycle now. When a guy can go from tied to a ten point lead and then back down to a three point lead in two weeks, that tells you that the electorate is dumb enough or uninformed enough, or both, that they might end up reeling into the voting booth and being surprised that Donald Trump's name isn't there for them to pick from ("When did he drop out?" they will numbly think to themselves before voting for the guy who swayed them last).

Yeah, 90 to 95 percent of the country have made up their minds, but it's the 5 to 10 percent who are left (and the 50% of them that will actually vote) who are going to decide this election, and those numskulls are still looking for something to make up their minds for them. Assuming they aren't waiting on the results of a reading of chicken guts, last night was an enormous step towards pushing them one way or the other. And for every one of those sheep who thought Romney was a dick during the debate, I have to believe there are 9 others who think Obama was in catatonic shock.

Why? Because I wouldn't vote for Romney if my balls were on fire and his sole campaign promise was to pay a private fire department to hose them down for me, and yet even I thought Obama was in catatonic shock. I may be disappointed in Obama so far but I support him to the hilt against the fruity oaty nut bars of the current day GOP, and yet even I thought Obama came off as completely incompetent and, worst of all, wholly out of touch.

Jon Lovitz is going to have a whole new skit to do soon if Obama doesn't wake the fuck up. Can anyone out there get Sam Jackson to talk to him?

Community, Dan Harmon & Sony: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Phallic Symbol

See Chevy Chase Jump For Joy

This began as a comment over on Todd VanDerWerff's article about showrunners at the AVClub.  If you haven't read that, you should.  If you have read it and saw a really long and obnoxious comment about six pages in, then you might be experiencing Deja Vu. And if you read the article but didn't see the comment, then this may feel a bit like Vuja De.

(Although for you second timers, I have expanded the comment quite a bit, which is not necessarily a glowing endorsement for reading it, I suppose.)

For those uninterested in the original article, in it Todd discussed Dan Harmon's being fired from Community in terms of other famous showrunner/studio fights that went badly and/or public, such as those on Moonlighting and MASH, and also in terms of those that flew by under the radar, such as when the Cheers creators were forced out.  He also throws in some stuff about the fight AMC had with Matt Weiner over Mad Men, the fight AMC had with Frank Darabont over The Walking Dead, and basically all the fights AMC has with everyone, possibly including random strangers AMC executives accost on the street.  AMC's like the network version of Travis Bickle.

It's an interesting article, and it's notable especially for a section dealing with the difference between being a Creator and a Manager when it comes to running a television show.  What it's not notable for, to me, is having anything to do with the situation over Dan Harmon getting fired by Sony. There is a major difference here between Community and every other show Todd mentions, which is this: All of those shows were hits.  They were either just becoming hits, were established hits, or were hits that their studios were panicking over because they were fading fast.

And obviously, "hit" is a loosely defined term, as Mad Men draws few viewers, yet is a hit all the same for AMC.  People can quibble over how much money such a relatively low rated show can generate, but it's obviously quite a bit if AMC was willing to cave in and give Matt the Weiner the tens of millions of dollars he wanted.

Anyway, Community itself is much different because it was never a hit, and so this firing of Harmon has nothing to do with trying to maintain or reestablish a hit show by altering it's creative direction.  This was more about minimizing heartburn while nursing a dying animal to market before it croaks on you. In other words, I just find it very hard to believe this Harmon/Sony snit was about changing the direction of the show in order to keep it alive long term.  I think this is about having fewer headaches during what Sony believes will be the final push/season to get to them to syndication.

For those who don't know, syndication is the golden calf of television. No matter the show, being able to sell it to television stations so that they can "strip" it all week (playing it  at the same time Mondays through Fridays) makes more money for a production studio than anything else. A show like Community isn't going to reap a Seinfeld type billion dollar bonanza, but the difference between syndication and no syndication is many millions of dollars. And for giant corporations like Sony, even tens of dollars matter.  Companies that big watch their bottom lines very carefully, and they are looking to maximize revenue every way possible.  If the call is between not getting syndication money or getting it, then it's no call at all.  Once that finish line is in sight, that becomes a studio's primary goal to the exclusion of all else.

In the old days, it took 100 episodes to reach that magic "stripping" level of syndication.  More recently, the number everyone has been looking to reach is 88 episodes, which just so happens to be four seasons worth of episodes for a normal show order of 22 episodes per season. But in the past year or two, studios have begun to think anything in the 80 range is likely enough for them to work out some sort of syndication deal.  More is always better, but anything is better than nothing.

As it stands today, with a mere 71 episodes in the can, Community is much more likely to eek out a less lucrative deal with a Comedy Central than the bigger dollar payday a deal with a TBS would provide them, so at least getting through one last 13 episode season is crucial to Sony. I think that is much more their thinking here than is the idea that they can replace Harmon now and suddenly revitalize the show into something that will reach another season or two on NBC. 

Sure, maybe Sony is hoping a creative change for this incredibly low rated show will maintain or achieve a ratings level long enough to get NBC to give them 4 more (or even 9 more) episodes past that initial order of 13, thus getting them to the magic number of 88 or above, but that would have to be the maximum upside anyone at Sony is realistically considering.  And even if this particular studio pulling this sort of palace coup were looked at in the light of past moves of this nature, Community is a different beast entirely from the Moonlightings and MASHes of the world.  It's ratings are so low (perhaps the lowest rated show to ever be renewed by a major broadcast network), and it's new time slot on Friday is so bereft of potential new viewers, that Sony must understand that whatever miniscule number of new fans they might entice by broadening the humor on the show will very likely be offset by Harmon loving fans defecting away (as I plan to do unless someone like Todd V. tells me this fall that the show is just as brilliant sans Harmon, which I seriously doubt he will end up telling me).

So, unlike all the examples in the AVClub article, this was not a move made for long term reasons. I cannot seriously entertain the idea that anyone at Sony thinks Community will suddenly become broad based, or that there will ever be a season five, let alone anything beyond that. Oh, maybe secretly the Sony execs hope (in that small part of their heart that doesn't bleed black oil) that Community can tick up enough that it draws a ratings number that makes it decent Friday fare that is worth bringing back for yet another season, but there is no way that's a primary motivation here.

No, this isn't really about the long term prospects of this show. This is all about not having to deal with Dan Harmon during this very short time where this failed show (in terms of ratings, people, not creativity) reaches that promised land of stripped syndication, reaping Sony at least a small pot o' money that they probably never in their wildest imagination expected to see back during S2, which would have originally been the final season of Community had not NBC's entire lineup been in the toilet, and had not Sony already agreed to slash their asking price once they realized that a third season would put them in sniffing distance of reaching syndication.

So this isn't about changing the show for any serious reason other than for not allowing anything to fuck up Sony's reaching a goal they probably never seriously believed they could reach until just a few months ago, when it suddenly became apparent that NBC was still so fucked that they might just be willing to keep Community around for one more pathetically rated season, allowing NBC to have one less half hour to think about while they went about fixing all the black holes in their lineup that they still had yet to fix during the past two years.

The sad thing here is that back when Community first returned from it's very long winter hiatus, it actually appeared that Harmon himself was going to be able to stabilize Community's ratings at level that would get Sony that fourth season and all its future syndication gold.  For one brief week, Community's ratings spiked upwards and made it seem that the show might be one of the least of NBC problems. But then the ratings came crashing back down, and as the show closed out its season with some of the most expensive episodes they produced this year, Community went out with three shows in a row that matched the lowest ratings it had ever received.

With the hopes that a magical ratings miracle would get them to 80-something episodes dashed, Sony likely moved to cover their bets with NBC by offering them an even cheaper deal for a fourth season than they did for the third, and NBC still only responded with a 13 episode renewal and a move to Friday nights.


So now Sony found itself in a position were they were slashing the budget for the show yet again, which is something they had reportedly been butting heads with Harmon about all year long, and now they had to seriously worry that perhaps they might not actually end up reaching any number worthy of syndication.  Maybe the show gets all 13 episodes next year on Fridays, but maybe not. Friday is a lower bar to clear in terms of ratings, but it's also a night where ratings can crater quickly.  In my last post I wrote that Sony probably doesn't care what the ratings are next season so long as they get their 13 episodes, and that NBC probably doesn't care either so long as Sony isn't charging them more than the most minimal amount for Community's fourth season. But anything can happen.  Maybe the ratings go so low that even NBC has to cancel it after three episodes. Or maybe NBC has a miracle resurgence (HA-HA-HA-HA-HA) and can thus afford to just dump Community before it finishes it's shortened fourth season run.

Or maybe Dan Harmon has another very public episode even worse than playing private Chevy Chase voicemails in public.  Maybe Dan Harmon does something so crazy that it ends up causing NBC to say, "You know what, fuck it! We don't want a season four of Community. We are tired of the nonsense, and even changing showrunners at this point is pointless."

Likely? Probably not. Possible? Absolutely. And even if it's only a 1% chance, that's a chance on missing out on millions of dollars that Sony just does not have any reason to take. They don't need a good season of Community next year; they just need a completed season of Community next year. If it's in focus and in English, then it's going to be good enough for Sony.

And then, of course, there is that beyond the pale hope against hope that Community does at least well enough to get another handful of episodes ordered, allowing them to reach 88 or more episodes and not having to worry about setting a new bar of stripped syndication at 84 or fewer. It's not really likely, but it's not impossible on NBC. It could be a back nine order, getting Community up to 22. Or it could be back four order, which would put them right at 88. And I must even admit the extremely unlikely possibility that it could even be another 13 episode order for another season, either on NBC or, as with Cougar Town, another low rated cult hit, on TBS or some other basic cable network.

Again I say, is it likely? Probably not. But possible? Absolutely.

But none of that happens if Dan Harmon fucks it up, either through some sort of bizarre behavior that results in a negative publicity wave that makes it all untenable, or through continuing to drive away any mainstream viewers that are still watching while folding their laundry or shaving their cat (which has to be fewer than 12 people at this point, but I guess you never know for certain, as I honestly believed Community had reached its ratings low point last season, which turned out to be wishful thinking).

In any case, the idea of reaching that syndication deal has got to be serious for Sony.  That has to be like found money for a studio that had to sweat out even the Season Two renewal, which wasn't a sure thing by any means despite Community pulling ratings back then that today would guarantee Community a renewal on NBC.  But back then NBC was still under the mass delusion that they were a major broadcast network, and so back then everyone was on pins and needles waiting to see if Community could even get that second season. Back then this idea of syndication wasn't even a glimmer in anyone's eye, and so right now there is no way that isn't priority #1 for Sony.

How close was Community to getting cancelled after it's first year?  Close enough for Dan Harmon to record the video at the top of this page, which shows him informing a clearly nervous cast about their renewal by telling them, "Sorry, you all have to work with Chevy Chase for another year."

Ahh, the halcyon days of the Chase-Harmon relationship, eh?

This firing wasn't a battle over the soul of the show, or even over what the network wanted creatively.  Dan Harmon already won that battle for us, putting on the show he wanted to write and that we few (we happy few) wanted to see, apparently burning a few bridges at Sony in order to do so. So this firing wasn't like any of the previous famous showrunner ousters. It wasn't about Sony taking creative control of a once successful show in order to try and get more seasons out of it. No, this was about not having to deal with any more pain in the ass bullshit during what will likely be the last few months this show is ever in production.  This was about making a near certain death decidedly more painless, rather than continuing on with what it sounds like was, for Sony anyway, an excruciating life.

And just in case you read this far without quitting early so you could start replying about what an asshole I am for saying mean, pragmatic things about Dan Harmon and his tenure as a showrunner, let me boldface this for you:

I FUCKING LOVE COMMUNITY!  I AM DEVASTATED THAT HARMON GOT FIRED.  I'D LIKE TO FREEZE HIM WHEN HE"S NOT WORKING IN ORDER TO EXTEND HIS LIFESPAN SO HE CAN PRODUCE GREAT SHOWS UNTIL THE YEAR 2223!

I want him to be the fucking Winter Soldier of television comedy.

But this was not a Cheers/MASH/Moonlighting situation.  This was: "We just need to make it through another six months before we don't give a shit about this show anymore, so do we really need this pain in our balls around for that?"

Sadly, the business answer was no.

Why Sony Had To Fire Dan Harmon

"The Madness Could Not Continue"

I hate to make assumptions about stuff when I have no direct knowledge, but let's do that. Let's read between the lines here, because then I think the removal of Dan Harmon from Community makes all the sense in the world despite the fact that it removes me as a viewer from the show’s miniscule audience.

Let’s start with the last part first, so I can establish my bona fides before going on to tell you why Dan Harmon deserved no better than what he got.

I have no intention of watching a non-Dan Harmon helmed Community for a few reasons, not the least being that Harmon obviously saw this coming and crafted a fine series finale. He saw that it was quite possible Community wasn’t going to be renewed, and so he took it out on a grace note.  And he had to know that even if Community were to be renewed, it was getting renewed without him.  Community has been finished filming for months now, and they start filming the next season in July.  Whoever is going to run it has to start breaking episodes in the next few weeks. Showrunner contracts are not left to be worked out mere months prior to a new season debuting. The handwriting was on the wall, on the floor, and probably stenciled in crayon on Dan Harmon's balls: He was finished at Sony.

So Harmon combined those factors together, did some basic Asperger's arithmetic, and the answer to whether or not he’d ever work again on Community probably struck him as close to 0%.  When Pierce Hawthorne spun around and said, “Hey, don’t use the word “gay” as a negative,” I pretty much knew Community (or at least Dan Harmon’s Community) was over.  You don’t swing a character that far around in anything less than the series finale.

So he ended the show well, and I know that no one can make the same show without him (since no one has ever made this show before with or without him), so I am out.  

I am lucky that way.  I have very little trouble cutting the cord with a television show, be it because I don't like it creatively, or because I want to make some sort of pointless stand, or because the chicken bones I threw on the ground that day told me that the next time I watched it my soul would be cast into the pits of Hell. When I want to quit, I just quit.  And the idea of Community continuing without Dan Harmon's distinct voice interests me not at all. Maybe if Todd VanDerWerff tells me that it's just as brilliant without him, then I might check it out.  But I won't be tuning in to see for myself.  For now, I'm just going to be content to remember the show as it was, ending at a point that seemed perfectly appropriate creatively.

So I'm not someone who wanted to see Dan Harmon go, because I am someone who wanted to keep watching a show I thought was wonderful.  This is a very sad day for me, as it is for dozens of people across the land.

Now let’s get back to the first part, which is why I would have fired Dan Harmon myself were I running Sony, even though, as I said, I would no longer wish to watch the show without his participation.

It’s because this isn’t about whether or not anyone watches this show next season.  It's because this about the fact that nobody does watch this show now!

Obviously Sony worked some deficit spending magic to cage a renewal out of NBC in order to get them to syndication, which is that magical land where TV production companies finally get to recoup all the money they invested in a television show, and then possibly make some fine cash-money profit on top of it all.  Studios often produce shows at a deficit; sometimes at a massive deficit.  It's rare when a network pays a studio enough for the broadcast rights to cover all the studio's production costs, but studios do this because reaching syndication (meaning airing on TBS or WGN or wherever, five nights a week, in perpetuity) means more than enough money to paper over any deficits incurred in getting there.

With Community's ratings in cancel-even-if-you're-NBC territory, making it to the magic land of syndication is all that matters.  And it should be noted that, as a business matter, and with Community's ratings being what they are (or are not), just getting to syndication is all that should matter to Sony, which made a massive investment in something and is thisclose to seeing it pay off.  Not getting the next 13-18 episodes completed wouldn’t be quite like winning the lottery and ripping up the ticket, but it would be like winning the lottery and losing the ticket.  All that matters is finding that ticket, and all that should matter to Sony is getting one more season in the can.  Not one more good season, mind you, but simply one more season.  TV is a business always, but it’s a business only at this point for Community.

With that in mind, you have to fire Dan Harmon. This was an easy decision.

Look, as I said, I have no intention of watching a non-Harmon Community, but that doesn't mean I do not recognize that the man had to go.  For a manager, the voicemail incident alone was a firing offense.  Period.  You can be abrasive and whatnot; you can run over budget; you can even take your show in a direction your employers do not like; but unless you are laying golden eggs for them, then you have to still be a manager.   

And managers do not humiliate their employees in public for no reason.

(Scratch that: Managers do not humiliate their employees in public ever.)

If you are Sony, you cannot allow Dan Harmon to come back as a manager, no way, no how. Nothing he can do will make you an extra dime at this point, but allowing him to continue in his position after his very public bad behavior sends a terrible message to everyone in your very large company.  It says, “We have no control over anything, even a minor department which produces zero return on investment.”

That’s not a statement any company can ever make. 

Dan Harmon is a great writer.  Dan Harmon was a shit manager.  When your goal is now solely one of numbers (reach a certain number of episodes), and you are deficit spending in order to reach that goal, then you don’t need your man in charge running around and taking a dump on everybody’s front lawn. 

If Sony wanted to ensure the creative genius of the show, then maybe (maybe!) Dan Harmon could have stayed, but creative genius is not needed at this point.  They don’t care that I am not going to watch anymore.  They don’t care if anyone watches anymore.  They only care that NBC was willing to pony up a small amount of money towards the production of the show, and that they were willing to give them a slot in which they would air it.  And after three years of investment and (it sounds like) agita in getting to this point, that is absolutely all they should care about, because it doesn’t matter if Community draws the same number of viewers next year or half that number.  They are going to make the same amount of money in syndication either way.

It doesn't matter anymore how they get to syndication.  All that matters is that they do get there.

So there is no financial incentive for them to bring back Dan Harmon, and there is an enormous downside in damage to their reputation that would come from letting a manager of theirs behave abominably without repercussion.

Dan Harmon returning next season would be a win for a small number of people watching TV, but it’s a lose-lose proposition for Sony.  He brings positives to the show, no doubt, but he brings zero positives to the company that produces the show.  And if he did anything at all to fuck up their getting to their syndication number, then it would be a complete and utter disaster for them. It would be the kind of disaster that would rightfully get people above Dan Harmon also fired for not preventing such an easily foreseeable, however unlikely, event.

If I were running Sony, I'd have fired Dan Harmon in a minute.

(EDIT: I've been getting a lot of flack for this post, but I cannot stress enough how much I fucking love Community.  I think Dan Harmon is a fucking genius. If I could make it happen, we'd get a hundred seasons and a dozen movies. I'd keep Dan Harmon in suspended animation when he wasn't working in order to lengthen his life span as long as possible.  He'd be the fucking Winter Soldier of television comedy.

All I am saying here is that you don't run a serious business based on how much someone makes you laugh. Sony is a billion dollar business, and they are not going to fuck around with a guy like Harmon, or anyone else for that matter, when he starts burning bridges loudly and in public.  Airing dirty laundry in public in Hollywood is #1 on the Do Not Ever Fucking Do List.

The moment Dan Harmon pressed play on his IPhone, he ended his tenure at Sony. Basically, he fired himself. He put his bosses in a totally untenable position.  Even if they wanted to keep him, they couldn't.  Even if the president of Sony is the #1 Community fan in the world, he has to think of the billion dollar company that he is running. 

You cannot have some dinky little show that is making you no money in the headlines repeatedly because its showrunner enjoys publicly humiliating the talent. That can never happen no matter how big of an asshole Chevy Chase is. There are a lot of assholes out there that Sony wants to work with, and Sony cannot take any chance that they will lose one of those assholes because that asshole is worried his personal shit is going to end up on the internet because Sony can't keep their people in line. 

Just because you and I love Community, why does that make it okay for Dan Harmon to take a shit on the people who employ him? It really is no different than you walking into your boss's office and screaming, "FUCK YOU!" at the top of your lungs. You are going to get canned 10 times out of 10.)

The Avengers: Assembling An Empire

The Real Super Hero?

If we aren't talking about police officers, surgeons, teachers, fire fighters, soldiers or parents, then often in the real and boring world perhaps the closest thing to real super heroes that we have are the people who bring our fictional super heroes to life.  Usually beset on all sides by the inequities of life (along with countless bean counters attempting to test market all originality out of existence), these writers and directors and artists are the ones who create and nurture the comic books and movies that fire our imaginations, giving us all a much needed respite from the banality of workaday life. And it would seem to me that we have reached a tipping point where the best of these men and women are now the only hope we have of avoiding a world where we cannot see any discernible difference in depth and character between the characters in spandex & leather on the screen and the little plastic dolls that represent them in the store.

Perhaps nothing pointed this up for me more, or made me realize just how close we had been coming to that tipping point of banality, than the out-of-the-box style, wit, complexity and character brought to the newest super hero movie, The Avengers, by it's writer and director, Joss Whedon.  Starring a bunch of characters most people had never even heard of five years ago, The Avengers exploded onto the scene this past week, starting with an out-of-nowhere record breaking opening weekend that cemented and locked down, forever and always, the now undeniable fact that what was once thought to be cult is now decidedly mainstream and eminently marketable.

If the Marvel Machine, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Disney Demesne, can infuse such unknown quantities into our culture so completely and thoroughly in just half a decade, then comic book super heroes are now truly commodities to be reckoned with.  If you no longer need Spider Man or Batman or Superman, characters ingrained deeply into the public consciousness for many decades now, in order to break the bank, then it is clear that today super heroes are right there with Mom, football, and apple pie flavored moonshine.

But if super heroes are now concrete commodities, then only the most delicate care and feeding going forward will prevent the commodities brokers of the world from taking total control and leading us down a path to the land where super heroes are no more interesting or exciting than anything else they buy and sell and marekt, from pork bellies to frozen concentrated orange juice. Rather than a knock on the boys and girls who work at Duke & Duke and all the other brokerage and marketing firms out there, this is merely a pragmatic assessment of the practical effects of them doing their jobs correctly. The attempt to maximize profit and broaden accessibility usually means sanding down all the edges and ensuring that nothing that could alienate a potential customer is ever allowed to slip through the cracks.

This, of course, completely ignores the fact that daring originality is generally the entire reason why the very thing they are trying to neuter in order to increase popularity actually got so popular in the first place. But, hey, when was the last time the things human beings did in the pursuit of more dollars made a whole hell of a lot sense anyway?  Once the good old $$$ signs reach a certain level, people wig out and lose their shit. Common sense is the first to go, and good judgement is usually right on its heels, with objectivity left dying on a vine.

That's why the most important thing to trumpet about the unbridled acceptance of the The Avengers is not its phenomenal creative and financial success, but rather the possibility that said success is now of such an awesome nature that it will finally bring about the ascendency of one Joss H. Whedon, and that it will perhaps even ensure future employment for all the other potential Whedons of the world. Perhaps these staggering box office receipts will finally prove to even the densest of studio execs that an unfettered Joss Whedon can make you far more money than a tightly controlled Martin Campbell or Joe Johnson ever could.

In other words: the big question to ask now is, will the Powers That Be realize who the real super hero is?

Regardless of your level of geek love, or your total absence thereof, you will have to admit that it is pretty cool that Joss Whedon, a guy who has been under the mainstream radar for so many years, could break out in such a big, bad way.  As the surprise writer/director of the surprise movie of the year, it's nothing short of amazing that Whedon is now the one making the strongest argument yet that something can be engaging, multi-layered and original, while still being cool and fun and hugely profitable.

(Long after, it must be said, guys named Nolan, Jackson, Raimi and Singer loudly made much the same argument yet were seemingly not heard at all.)

The reasons for this amazement have nothing to do with talent and everything to do with Hollywood's tendency to worship at the altar of the status quo. Joss Whedon had spent 20 years as the guy who could only bring in a devoted but miniscule audience. In the strange wood they call Holly, the chances of anyone giving him the opportunity to try and break out of that mold were so small that it would have taken serious effort just to bring them up to slim. Forget slim to none; the odds of it happening were more like somewhere between none and negative none to the tenth power.

And yet ten years after his television show Firefly became the poster child for the long held Hollywood belief that complex ideas, intricate story-lines, balloon popping humor, and intensely character oriented storytelling produces nothing more than a small and deeply disturbed subset of fans who will be devoted but won't make you any money, Marvel hired him to write and direct one of the biggest gambles in movie history. In between the crushing disappointment of Firefly's mishandling and cancellation by Fox (seemingly dooming Whedon to forever making low rated television series for minor networks) and his hiring to write and direct The Avengers in 2010, three things happened:

1. Whedon formed a relationship with Marvel the old fashioned way: he wrote one of the most successful runs, both critically and financially, of one of Marvel's most successful titles, The X-Men. Starting in 2004, Whedon penned 24 landmark issues of The Astonishing X-Men, forging a relationship with the Powers That Be at Marvel unlike that of any other writer/director. It gave him an in on the comic book side of the company that should not be underestimated.

2. In 2005, Whedon took 35 million dollars and made it look like 100 when he directed Serenity, the big screen spinoff of Firefly and Whedon's first major motion picture. The movie didn't make much money, but what was so impressive to many was Whedon's sure hand in his first feature, and the way he made each dollar look like ten up on the screen.

3. Jon Favreau and Robert Downey, Jr. hit one out of the park.

It's impossible to overstate the shock waves Iron Man sent through the industry.  Relatively untested directors had helmed successful comic book adaptations before---Raimi with Spider-Man and Singer with The X-Men---but Iron Man was something else entirely.  To begin with, Marvel was involved with Iron Man up to their eyeballs, unlike with the Sony produced Spidey pics or the Fox produced X-Men, and so they saw first hand that you could have giant hit with a relatively untested director who valued character over action and special effects.  More importantly, Iron Man was more unconventional than any of the super hero films that preceded it.  As the first massive hit film to be based on an obscure title, Iron Man played with tone and style in a way not yet seen in the risk averse world of mammoth budget film making.  The playful script for Iron Man, along with the unconventional choice of Robert Downey, Jr. as the lead, no doubt convinced Marvel that it could be successful making movies in a manner similar to the style Whedon had been demonstrating he was adept at for almost 20 years.

So Marvel now had a giant success that came from hiring an obscure director to helm their first big solo effort.  Like Whedon, Favreau made his mark as a low budget, cult writer/director who managed to make his movies look much bigger than their budget.  The main difference between the two was that Favreau did have one giant hit to his credit, 2003's Elf, but it was the look of the 2005 comedy/sci-fi bomb Zathura which likely had a lot more influence on Marvel's decision to hire him for Iron Man.  As with Serenity, Zathura was well received critically and in the community, and it looked a lot bigger than its budget of 60 million.

And so a perfect storm came together, emboldening Marvel to hire the man they knew every comic book junkie on the planet wanted to see them hire.  And now Joss Whedon has become the director of the moment by being the guiding force behind one of the biggest mainstream hit movies of all time.

The funny thing is that Whedon didn't do it by selling out and making some generic piece of comic book claptrap that hit every movie beat according to Hollywood Hoyle, as so many post-Iron Man comic book movies seemed to do; he did it by taking something familiar and making it unique. Yep   he did it by making a movie filled to the brim with complex ideas, intricate story-lines, balloon popping humor and detailed character oriented storytelling, which in turn engendered an enormous number of deeply disturbed fans and tons of fucking money.

You just can't make that stuff up.

No, you cannot make any of this up, which is why we should not take lightly just how unusual Whedon's success here is. Nor should any of us ignore the lessons to be learned from the impressive and creative manner in which he did it.  The what is certainly amazing, but it's the how that is truly illustrative.  Somehow this master of what was thought to be limited appeal, geek friendly pop culture took the most unwieldy super hero story ever attempted and managed to make it geek friendly and yet still broadly accessible, and he did it by using the same techniques and creative choices he's been using every step of the way for his entire career.  Joss Whedon didn't change; comic books just came along and changed Hollywood.

That's not something you're going to see every day, and it would be a shame if we (and, more importantly, the Marvel Machine) did not learn from this experience.  Because even for a comic book nerd such as myself, there was a moment there in the middle act of The Avengers when it appeared to want to crawl up its own ass and devolve into the typical third act boom-fest nightmare that turns so many people off of super hero movies, and which had limited both of the previous Marvel movies, Thor and Captain America, keeping them from reaching anything like the financial success of Iron Man.  But just as that feared specter reared its ugly head, you could practically feel Mr. Whedon reaching into the abyss and pulling his movie back from the brink with sheer determination and wit, crafting what may be a first in comic book movie history: a finale that was better and more engaging than all the fun and games and drama and bombast that had preceded it. And he was so successful in doing this that more people ended up loving The Avengers  than perhaps any previous comic book movie ever made

(CinemaScore, an imperfect measure if ever their were one, found that audiences gave The Avengers an aggregated rating of A+, one of only 20 or so movies to ever receive that rating, while The Dark Knight, the current    but perhaps soon to be felled    comic book box office champ, was rated as an A-).

Whedon took perhaps the least accessible comic book story ever told and managed to make it accessible and entertaining for all without sacrificing even a dollop of the artistic integrity that people had long believed was the one thing standing in the way of his ever achieving mainstream success. Through sheer grit, determination and talent, he Whedoned audiences all over the world into submission.  And if you've never heard of Joss Whedon, then perhaps you don't know just how unpredictable of an accomplishment this was.  Perhaps you don't know just how long and strange this trip has been, or why his overnight success actually took nearly 20 years, or why a success of this size for Joss Whedon might just turn out to be a triumph for movie lovers everywhere.

Literate and wry, with a massive pop sensibility, Joss Whedon has long been the most difficult man in Hollywood to market.  He refuses to bend to convention, yet he knows conventions so well that he can play them and subvert them at the same time. Often hamstrung by  his choice of projects that came with little, if any, ready made appeal or audience awareness, Whedon has long been one of the best kept secrets in Hollywood. I know of no other writer/director who has been so adept at turning off the public with his choice of projects(*), while at the same time being so able to turn people around 180 degrees if someone would just chain them down and actually make them watch what the man produced.


* (I spent several years laughing at the idea of something called Buffy The Vampire Slayer without ever checking it out.  Then I spent several months playfully ridiculing Mrs. Schmoker once she started watching and raving about it.  One night I was lying on the bed and reading while she was watching an episode, and it took less than an hour for me to put my book aside and start in with the "Who is that?" and the "What's his or her story?" questions.  Three weeks later I was hooked like a hungry fish, and then Whedon simply reeled me in, easily and efficiently turning me into one of those annoying converts you love to hate in less than a year.  Soon I owned every DVD I could get my hands on, catching up entirely on the man's back catalog.  Shortly thereafter I was proselytizing like John the Baptist on a sugar rush.)

And now the man whom people seemingly couldn't be blackmailed into checking out has become THE MAN of the moment, the creator and purveyor of the latest Biggest Movie of All Time.

Now, if you adjust for inflation, The Avengers isn't really going to be the biggest movie of all time (and neither was Avatar (14th) nor The Dark Night (28th), by the way, but rather Gone With The Wind).  In fact, it's entirely possible that this largest opening of all time doesn't even land The Avengers in the Top 30 movies of all time, at least when it comes to tickets sold.  But while it's fairly certain that The Avengers won't really end up as the biggest movie of all time, it is also certain that The Avengers will end up being one of the biggest movies of our time. 26 million tickets were sold this past weekend, and that had never happened before.  Never had so many people gone to see a movie in so short a period of time, and that translated into 207 million dollars, which, in case you were unaware, is a shit ton of money in any era.  Even adjusting for inflation, no film has ever made that type of money its first weekend. 

Of course, films have only been opening wide enough to make that type of coin in their first few days since the late 1990's, so it's impossible to make a true apples to apples comparison between The Avengers and many of top grossing films of all time.  The Exorcist, for example, sits at #9 on the all time list, which is likely going to be far out of The Avengers reach, but no one really thinks of The Exorcist as one of the biggest movies of all time because, for one thing, it only opened in a handful of theaters, as did most films in those days, and then it proceeded to rake its money in over the long, long, long haul.

Prior to Jaws and Star Wars, which stunned Hollywood with their success via a wide release pattern that had never been used before, movies never opened so big as to allow you to guesstimate how much money they might make overall.  Whether a movie was a success of failure generally could only be understood after a very long time, rather than after the first 72 hours. Movies primarily opened in big cities and, if successful over a number of weeks, spread out across the rest of the country from there, often in a painfully slow fashion, as word of mouth spread and moviegoers agonized over the wait. Sometimes movies, even those that were phenomenally successful, were allowed to play themselves out in one part of the country before ever even opening in other parts of the country.  Studios only made so many prints of a film back then, and they had to physically schlep them from one region to the next (a practice that was dealt a mortal wound by Spielberg and Lucas, and then finished off completely thanks to the advent of digital movie files).

The Exorcist finished its first year of release with 66 million in rentals, and then it just kept playing and playing and playing.  Ultimately, over a longer period than any film plays today, The Exorcist wound up with 230 million dollars in total gross. On the surface that is less than the Avengers made by the end of its first Tuesday. When adjusted for inflation, however, that comes out to nearly 900 million dollars domestically, a number which The Avengers is surely not going to reach.  Even Avatar (770 million adjusted) didn't reach those heights, and The Dark Knight (588 million adjusted) didn't get within a country mile of that.  Heck, The Dark Knight didn't even come close to taking down The Sting (706 million adjusted) or The Graduate (677 million adjusted), so take all those big box office records you hear about these days with an entire lick of salt.

And let's just pause a moment to remember a time when the biggest box office hits in the country were movies such as The Sting, The Godfather, The Graduate, and The Exorcist.

Okay, end of pause.

But back to Joss Whedon. What I most appreciated about The Avengers wasn't how much money it made, or even how much of a great popcorn flick that it was, but rather how Whedon managed to merge the sensibilities of a Christopher Nolan film with the raucous crowd pleasing nature of a Michael Bay turd.  The Avengers was neither fish nor fowl, but somehow a rather pleasing mixture of both (and what wine would you serve with that dish, by the way?).

Neither as pretentious as The Dark Knight during its most dour moments, nor ever as mindless as Transformers during its... well, its every moment, The Avengers was a movie that was as strong on character and humor as it was on action.  I wouldn't give it the A+ that CinemaScore gave it, but for the first time since Sam Raimi and Bryan Singer were making their sequels, or perhaps even since Richard Donner kicked all this off back in 1978, I finally found something that wanted to be both a movie and a film.

The Avengers wasn't perfectly successful at either, mind you, but I found any flaws to be simply a result of the inherent problems that came with trying to make movie with a story almost unlike any other ever made, rather than a result of any failing on the part of the writer/director.  If every first movie in a super hero franchise suffers from having to tell two stories in one movie (The Origin & The Adventure), then The Avengers had that problem times seven. And Whedon had to tackle that problem while bringing together disparate elements from a slew of films of varying degrees of quality, or lack thereof, which, it cannot be stressed enough, had never even been tried before.

That the movie wasn't an incoherent mess was itself an accomplishment of note.  That the movie ended up worthy of being part of the discussion about the apex of comic book film making is nothing short of a modern day miracle.

Previously the apex of modern comic book films have almost always been the sequels. Spider Man 2, X-Men 2, and The Dark Knight, freed from their introductory restraints, all put their predecessors to shame.  The Avengers, to my mind, also put those franchises first movies to shame, and it did so while dealing with more introductory restraints than any six movies combined. Given Whedon's success at accomplishing this near unprecedented feat, one has to be giddy with the anticipation of what he can do now that he will likely be free to pretty much make The Avengers 2 any way he sees fit.

If Marvel can get out it's own way, that is.

And that brings us back, finally and mercifully, to where this discussion began (sorry about that whole pointless digression into historical box office receipts, but a blog just brings the worst in tangential writing out of me), and where we began is with me wondering whether or not the people in the big offices in Hollywood, those mythical Powers That Be, will finally begin to understand just how much they need the Joss Whedon's of the world.  I am wondering whether all the money that is raining down on their heads will teach those people any sort of a lesson, or if someday we will instead look back on The Avengers as a blip on the radar, much the same way we do now with the second X-Men, Spider-Man and Batman movies.  For it all seemed so clear when those earlier movie were made and started popping out golden eggs left and right.  The message was simple and writ large: All you need do is combine comic books and art, and then you were golden.

Yet those three films are still very much the exception and not the rule.  Even though they combined to make more money than anyone could have ever dreamed possible, the Powers That Be apparently watched those movies and saw the capes and the super powers and nothing else.  How else to explain the piles upon piles of steaming comic book crap that's been produced in between? 

(By the way, I know I am screwing over Iron Man here by not mentioning it along with the other great super hero flicks, and I know that Jon Favreau's film certainly doesn't fit into my neat little "The Sequels Are The Best" box, but let's just agree to call that the exception that proves the rule, shall we?  Iron Man was obviously pretty golden also, and it's nearly right up there with any of the other great super hero movies, but, at the very least, Iron Man 2 quickly proved without a doubt that Marvel is just as capable of ignoring the lessons of success as well as anyone else in Hollywood. They may have the balls to pick unconventional directors, but Iron Man 2 certainly showed they do not always have the courage of their convictions when it comes to leaving them alone to do their job.)

One the one hand, I do have to hand it to Marvel.  Their movies may be up and down, but they have somehow managed to be a marketing machine while never quite putting out a Green Lantern-type piece of shit when it comes to their core character universe.  And it's even more amazing to me that they somehow managed not to use their six thumbed hand of marketing and development to screw up this particular film, which had a higher degree of difficulty than any comic book movie so far made.  I certainly don't like all their movies, and there are a few that I thought were just plain bad, but at least they have never screwed the pooch badly enough that they lost their shirt or their way.  Even the two atrocious Hulk movies had some interesting moments.  They sucked, but they didn't suck in an aggressively bad Green Lantern/Ghost Rider style, nor were they the type of financial bloodbaths that could have stopped their entire master plan dead in its tracks. And the only real problem with Iron Man 2 wasn't that it was a bad movie; it was that it was at least three great movies folded, spindled and mutilated into one exceedingly mediocre one.

So while I may be getting a bit tired of comic book adaptions on the whole    and while I certainly believe that most, if not all, of the problems with any particular Marvel produced adaptation are primarily self inflicted    I do feel the need to take a moment to acknowledge Marvel's audacious and unprecedented accomplishment to date.  They may actively fuck up their own films from time to time by occasionally masquerading marketing as film making, and they may take some sort of bizarre pride in their ability to drive away talented directors who do well by them, but they still have managed a pretty unique accomplishment in film history.  Certainly this whole run of films could have been quite a bit better, but they sure as shit could have been one whole hell of a lot worse.

I just hope they learn to step back now, because I think The Avengers marks a turning point in their filmed universe. Prior to The Avengers release, I was certainly burning out on super heroes, and the diminishing returns of the past year seemed to indicate that the public was as well.  While their last three films all made money and received generally good notices, none of those releases last year reached anything like the dizzying heights of The Avengers or Iron Man when it came to audience acceptance, be it creatively or financially. And there were many, myself included, who were wondering if perhaps the super hero gravy train was running out of steam.

So while none of the post-Iron Man movies were stinkeroos, all them of leveled off into the good-not-great range, and not a few people felt that a big problem was that the six-thumbed hand could be felt all over many of the creative choices that were being made.  If there was a common complaint, it was that Marvel seemed to start making films that were 3/4 movie and 1/4 commercial for another, yet to be made movie.

Yet now The Avengers has come along and managed to relight the flame within me (and apparently within at least 26 million other people), all thanks to Marvel's bold and supremely risky decision to hand over their most important and expensive movie to date to a TV writer with one of the worst commercial track records in the business, and then to pretty much get the fuck out of his way.

But this greatest of their achievements is now also a sword of Damocles hanging over all their future endeavors. Like the handful of great comic book films before it, The Avengers will ingrain within people the desire for a level of greatness that cannot be produced by a committee.  And beyond that, it's possible that Joss Whedon managed to push the "big, dumb fun" movie to a level of quality and depth that is as unsustainable as it was unprecedented.  The Avengers is a great movie, but simple replication again and again will not make for something greater.  Whether Marvel learned that lesson from Iron Man 2 or not cannot be evaluated until we see the next round of films they produce, but if they do not start to differentiate these films from one another now, then I believe they are going to grind down their cash cow until they'll be hard pressed to exchange it for even a thimbleful of magic beans.

So while it's been exceedingly cool to see Marvel pay such fine attention to detail throughout their filmed universe, and while their willingness to make unconventional directorial choices must be applauded, it should  also be understood that those two admirable and fairly unique strengths have been barely able to keep at bay the outrageous excess of marketing and development that keeps reaching into their stories, threatening to turn each one into an abject failure.  The delicate push pull going on between the creative and the financial sides of the company these past five years has been fascinating to watch, but its continuation is going to cause the whole shebang to collapse in on itself like a Shield Dark Energy Laboratory if they don't learn to keep the guys who are wearing ties and holding flowcharts away from the guys who are wearing capes and holding hammers.

So it's time to start letting their freak flag fly a bit more. Whatever instinct led them to pick guys like Favreau and Branagh and Whedon in the first place needs to come to the fore, and the instinct that leads them to check off boxes while cutting and pasting their scripts needs to shrink to the size of a very small hemorrhoid.  I'm a pretty big comic nerd, but I need another movie exactly like Thor or Captain America like I need a Hulk sized fistula.  And while I'd be happy to see Joss Whedon continue to crank out all the big, dumb fun that 250 million dollars can buy, I'm sure that ultimately I'd find it to be a gigantic waste of his talent, my time, and all the good will Marvel has now managed to accumulate.

I've had about enough big, dumb fun now to last me a few cosmic cube enhanced lifetimes, and the ties and the flowcharts should hit their knees every night and give thanks that Joss Whedon was able to navigate their minefield and craft what was the perfect capstone to a series of films that I will now always think of as The Marvel Movies 1.0. But it's adapt or die in this world, whether you are talking movies or mankind.  You cannot hope to replicate and evolve at the same time, and without evolution these movies will begin to produce diminishing returns both creatively and financially.  That may be tough to accept when standing at the summit of your greatest achievement, but it's exactly when you are on that summit that the smallest misstep can result in the greatest fall.

I believe now that the only way comic book movies will stay relevant and prosperous, whether you are talking about dollars or sense, is if they begin to transcend their genre. Otherwise super hero movies could easily go the way of the western genre, which was once even more ubiquitous than the men in tights genre is today.  These days westerns can only break through when they are reinventions of a revelatory nature. Whether you are talking about Unforgiven or True Grit, the financially and critically successful westerns are few and far between, and they are nearly always the result of film making of the highest order.

And so it shall some day be with super hero movies should they stand still, content to reap short term dollars via long form condescension.  Because like addicts, we need more or better to keep reaching the same high. So you should think long and hard about giving us better, because there is only so much more you can give us before we O.D. 

Somewhere between The Dark Knight and The Avengers is a truly great film just dying to be made.  Joss Whedon just proved that he is the perfect guy to try and make it, and that the public will reward whomever lets him do so with billions of dollars. I only hope that the Marvel Machine can get the fuck out of their own way and let it happen..

Ahoy, Matey (Or Why Television Cannot Be Pirated)

 I pirated this picture!

Quick: when I say piracy, what is the first thing to come to mind?

Is it...

...a.) Johnny Depp and a scurvy ridden band of miscreants fighting magical creatures while cracking wise?

...b.) Somalian thugs attacking Mitt Romney's yacht during a pleasure cruise to the Seychelles?

...c.) A 42-year old mother of three sitting at her laptop watching Grey's Anatomy?

I'll admit up front that I am taking somewhat of a Devil's Advocate position here.  I am not hard and fast on piracy as it is defined today (which would be as "c" in case you were wondering), and I understand that simply applying 30 to 250 year old legal standards to today is not always apples to apples.  It is, however, still fruit to fruit. And while I do not believe this to be a settled issue or think that my argument is anything like the last word, I do, however, strongly believe there are instances where downloading content is legal and moral.  It is not only of no harm to rights holders in many cases, it's actually beneficial to them in the long run.  It's not all instances, nor maybe is it even most.  But it is also nothing like as cut and dried as when I hear someone say it's never okay.

While some courts have held people to be in violation of the law for downloading, very few, if any, of these rulings have been over the downloading of television content as I am about to describe it.  And these types of rulings have been varied and inconsistent in any case, with none of these recent attempts at solving this legal issue going so far as to contradict and/or outweigh the long established Supreme Court legal precedent regarding television.