THE NATURE OF STORYTELLING PT. 3

Literature is a luxury, fiction is a necessity.-- G.K. Chesterton, IN DEFENSE OF PENNY DREADFULS, 1901.

In Part 2 I responded to Martin Scorsese's praise of Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST by noting that Hitchcock used much the same "innocent accused" trope for THE 39 STEPS, which lacked any of the "painful emotions" Scorsese extolled in NORTHWEST. In that essay, I said I didn't know what if anything Scorsese had written about STEPS, but I was informed that the movie did make at least one of the director's best-films lists.

Another famous film on the list, at #942, is 1971's DIRTY HARRY-- and it just so happens that in Pauline Kael's contemporary review of that film, she touched on some of the same issues mentioned by Scorsese in his 2019 remarks. Kael wrote:

There's an aesthetic pleasure one gets from highly developed technique; certain action sequences make you feel exhilarated just because they're so cleverly done-- even if, as in the case of Siegel's DIRTY HARRY, you're disgusted by the picture.

I don't know what aspects of the Siegel film Scorsese liked well enough to elevate it into his personal pantheon, but those favorable aspects must have weighed more in his personal scales than any elements he might've found problematic. 

The Kael excerpt, even though it doesn't specify the reasons why HARRY is disgusting, is a flawed analysis. I don't believe for a moment that Kael was "exhilarated" by this or that action sequence because she thought they were cleverly done. I think she had a visceral response FIRST to a thrilling scene, because it conveyed the illusion that she was experiencing the events. Then, after the fact, she rationalized that she'd been captivated by the technique behind it.

This general idea of "good technique in the service of a bad story" bears a strong resemblance to the way Scorsese dismisses superhero movies in his remarks to EMPIRE magazine re: theme parks.

The only time his ardour dims is when the subject of Marvel comes up. “I don’t see them,” he says of the MCU. “I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well-made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

In his follow-up remarks Scorsese admits filmgoers also went to Hitchcock movies to experience "thrills and shocks" like those offered by amusement parks. (I assume he's associating such parks primarily with things like carousels and roller coasters, though he doesn't explicitly say that.) But after admitting that the Hitchcock films offer thrills and shocks, he stated that they offer other elements that keep viewers coming back to them.

I don't disagree that a lot of Hitchcock films offer other interesting elements, just as I believe that Siegel's DIRTY HARRY offers more than, say, an appeal to fascist sentiment (which was one of Kael's condemnations of the movie). But I also would say that some superhero films offer these other elements as well, and that they're not all homogenized thrill-rides as Scorsese contended.

Ir's at this point I finally work my way back to my Chesterton quote. In his defense of the despised medium of penny dreadfuls-- which defense is an almost precognitive rebuttal of Frederic Wertham  -- Chesterton admits that what he calls "fiction," as opposed to "literature," is a "dehumanized and naked narrative." Yet he calls it a necessity because these naked stories are akin to the ones people tell themselves as they live their daily lives in society.

Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilisation is built; for it is clear that unless civilisation is built on truisms, it is not built at all. Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram.

The "ordinary" men and women who watch the films of both Siegel and Hitchcock may be responding equally to the movies' "heroic truisms," to the convention of watching the good guy overthrow the bad guy. Some may also respond, as Scorsese says, to other elements of  the famed directors' stories, but others in the audience may not get anything out of PSYCHO or DIRTY HARRY but the visceral thrills. If the best superhero movies could compete with Siegel and Hitchcock in terms of both the visceral and what I call the mythopoeic, then that accomplishment would be a little more impressive in my book than the comparatively simple excitements of a roller coaster ride.

And as it happens, I do think at least some superhero films have more to offer than "technique" alone. 

The 2008 IRON MAN is a case in point. There's little doubt that the filmmakers capture much of the appeal of the comic-book character, depicting the wonder of a man's rebirth: of compensating for a near-fatal wound by building himself into a super-knight-in-armor. The flawless way in which the filmmakers explore every step of Tony Stark's evolution into Iron Man-- including the humorous ones-- provides enough "thrills and shocks" to satisfy even the most undemanding of Chesterton's "gutter boys." But of course there are other elements that made the Marvel Universe seem credible, ranging from Tony Stark's silver-spoon political naivete to his "daddy issues," which didn't exist in the early IRON MAN comics and only developed, very erratically, over the course of two decades. I noted in my review that in the comics the Obadiah Stane arc is clumsy and superficial, but the movie takes all of those weak "father's evil colleague" motifs and works them into a more cohesive myth of the superhero as partly damaged in spirit as well as in body.

Is the 2008 IRON MAN as great a film as PSYCHO or DIRTY HARRY? I wouldn't go that far. But IMO it does show a mastery of elements that go beyond "thrills and shocks," and other costumed-crusader films have done much the same, though there's perhaps not enough of them yet to form a "canon." I don't question that the very same filmmakers turned around and made a lot of mediocre superhero films-- not least the two IRON MAN sequels. But those sequels no more downgrade the accomplishment of the 2008 film than PSYCHO is compromised by the vastly inferior FRENZY.