My December review of the comedy-western LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING caused me to knock down some of my old mental dominoes and set them up in new in configurations.
The key factor to my conception of the "superhero idiom" is that the character must be a high-dynamicity icon (which can include all of the four personas, not just heroes) who has some "super" attributes or affiliations. As I hadn't watched FRENCHIE in its entirety for over fifty years-- though I'd frequently enjoyed discrete parts of the movie--I was surprised to find that it did include a minor metaphenomenon: that of a peculiar, non-realistic form of acupuncture. The metaphenomenon is not directly associated with either of the film's two "likeable villains," Frenchie (Brigitte Bardot) and her friendly enemy Maria (Claudia Cardinale), and neither of them even witnesses said phenomenon. The audience alone bears witness while the movie's "unlikable villain," murderous Doc Miller, is given the acupuncture treatment by a Chinese doctor, a treatment which both heals Miller of his wounds but also delays him long enough to keep him from impeding the Frenchie-Maria dust-up. After that, Miller shows up but gets killed, almost as an afterthought. But even the small metaphenomenon of pseudo-acupuncture shifts FRENCHIE's world away from the domain of the standard isophenomenal western.
I decided to include FRENCHIE as one of the "superhero idiom" films on my GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA blog, but this got me thinking about some of the narratives that I tended to disallow in earlier posts here. For instance, in the 2016 essay THIRD PRESENCE, PERIPHERAL, I then favored the concept that if the metaphenomenon was peripheral to the narrative action of the eminent icon, the icon, no matter how megadynamic, was not metaphenomenal in nature. Of the handful of works I examined, the best known was the 1998 MULAN. The only metaphenomena I recall from the Disney film were two Sub icons who are theoretically on Mulan's side-- an intelligent cricket and a dinky ancestral dragon -- but they contribute nothing to Mulan's climactic battle with the Mongol chieftain, which seemed to me then to be isophenomenal in nature. Now, however, I would tend to say that just the presence of two metaphenomenal entities in the story makes the entire narrative metaphenomenal. So now I would include Disney's Mulan as a member of the superhero idiom as well.
It's possible that to some extent I remained slightly influenced by the conceptions of the "rational Gothic" writers of the late 18th century and of their spiritual kindred, Tzvetan Todorov. Both Todorov and the rationale Gothicists viewed all types of fantasy as reactions against the "reality" experienced by real-world readers and thus viewed both uncanny and marvelous phenomena as escapes from reality. I've never agreed with that simplistic view, but I can look at some of my older essays, like THIRD PERSON PERIPHERAL, and see a small tendency on my own part to privilege the world of the isophenomenal. My 2025 essay QUICK NUM NOTES marks a shift in this viewpoint, in that now I see both uncanny and marvelous phenomena as equal departures from consensual reality. This doesn't invalidate anything I've written on Prime icons who lack high dynamicity, though. Hubert Hawkins of THE COURT JESTER exists in a fictional world where hypnosis can transform an ordinary fellow (albeit with some terpsichorean skills) into a master swordsman. But he himself remains low-dynamicity. Because Hawkins is never able to consciously tap the sword-skills the hypnotist brings out in him, his world is dominantly uncanny, but Hawkins doesn't possess any metaphenomenal attributes or affiliations that play into his combative status.
This part of the essay ran so long that I didn't get to the "anomaly" part, so that'll be for Part 2.
No comments:
Post a Comment