Chained To The Keyboard

I was awake at the hellish hour of 6.00am today in order to make the long drive to Brisbane to attend the voice-recording session for my animated TV episode. Up until yesterday, I wasn’t even sure I’d attend. It was so very far away, after all, and I didn’t know how welcome the lowly writer would be at one of these things.

Turns out my fears were unfounded. As soon as I came in, the creator/showrunner got on the mic and informed all the voice actors that the writer had arrived, which I thought was nice. The recording session went very well, with a lot of the dialogue getting big laughs. It was obvious that most of the actors are pretty good. One guy in particular - the voice actor for the two most important characters in my episode - did an outstanding job, always adding a new spin here or a few extra words there to make the lines funnier.

After my ep had finished, everyone went out of their way to seek me out and tell me what a great script it was. The creator in particular was full of praise; he informed me that my ep was one of the best in the season, and that they’d try to nominate it for an award (whatever that means!). According to him, I was the first writer who had been able to nail the dialogue voice for one of the main characters. He also invited me back to write another episode for them, and also mentioned a few other projects that he has coming up next year.

All in all, not a bad way to start the day. So I guess my advice to working writers is this: If someone invites you to a recording of your episode, you say YES.

Everybody knows about Superman.

The man from Krypton. Red, blue and yellow. Look, up in the sky! Faster than a speeding bullet. Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor and Kryptonite.

Superman is the most popular comic book character of all time, and the most well-known. He singlehandedly created an entire genre of storytelling, and even gave it a name: Superhero.

It’s been a big week for Kal-El. Eight months and two hundred million (!) dollars later, Mr. Singer has graced us with a teaser trailer. The big surprise? It’s excellent. Maybe it’s because hearing the disembodied voice of the late Marlon Brando playing the role of the disembodied voice of Jor-El is eerily touching and appropriate. Perhaps it’s the uplifting John Williams score. It might even be the fact that Brandon ‘Who?’ Routh doesn’t actually look too bad in the main role.

And meanwhile, over at Superman’s birthplace of D.C. Comics (that’s ‘Detective Comics’ Comics, in case you were wondering), the biggest book launch of the year has just hit. It’s called All-Star Superman, and it’s by two of the biggest all-stars in comics today: Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, creators of We-3. It looks set to demolish the sales charts, and no wonder, because it’s one of the best single-issue comics of the year.

How can this still be happening after sixty-seven years? Like the Christ-figure that he is so often accused of representing, Kal-El of Krypton just keeps coming back to life. So why is this tights-clad impossibility one of the most important fictional characters of the 20th Century? Because more than a comic book, more than a movie series, more than a merchandising tie-in, Superman is a symbol.

Most obviously, he represents the Ultimate Immigrant. 1939 was a time when refugees and immigrants came to America to start a new life, and Superman came from very far away. Faced with the destruction of their home planet, his parents placed him in a rocket ship and sent him to Earth. He grew up among humans; experienced human pains, yearnings and loves. And like many refugees given a second chance, he grew to love his adopted country.

Superman, therefore, embodies the American Dream; that anyone can make it in the land of the free, anyone can rise to greatness by their own strength. The Kent family instilled in him good ole’ fashioned American values and, incredibly, they took hold. Born from a cruel, cynical, violent race which destroyed themselves through hubris, Superman defied his own genetics and embraced the highest human morals. Which is not to say that humans aren’t cruel and violent. If he had been raised by any other family, the Man of Steel could have turned out very differently. But he found the Kents, and thus Nurture won one over Nature.

Yet some would argue that Superman is entirely inhuman, an alien overlord enforcing his own code of morality upon humans; a god-like Nietzchean uber-mensch. But the point of Superman is that he’s not a god at all. He cannot be physically harmed, but he still feels pain, confusion, loss, anxiety, fear. Quentin Tarantino’s little speech at the climax of Kill Bill Volume 2 is about the alien-ness of Superman; about how his Clark Kent persona is his own personal commentary on humanity. I prefer to think of Clark Kent as Superman’s vital link to humanity. Without that Clark Kent ‘disguise’, he’d always be in costume, always be flying high above the people he’s supposed to protect. With it, he gets the daily opportunity to better understand the human world, looking at it from the inside, sharing mortal lives and collecting information on his adopted community. There’s a reason Clark Kent chose to become a reporter, after all.

Everyone has a different reaction to Superman. There’s a brilliant moment in Steven T. Seagle’s graphic novel (and here the term is actually correct) It’s A Bird… in which the protagonist, struggling with writing the character of Superman, has a personal epiphany and exclaims: “He’s a fascist! That’s why I don’t relate to him!” For some people, the idea of an all-powerful hero policing the world according to his own rigid moral code is reprehensible. I would argue that Superman’s moral code is actually rather flexible. He evaluates every situation on its own merits. With super-hearing, super-sight and super-speed, he faces choices every single minute. Save those flood victims in Pakistan, or that child falling out of a window in Chicago? There’s only time for one. (This concept was brilliantly explored in the very first issue of Kurt Busiek’s seminal Astro City.) And time and again he’s had to question his own reasons for existing. Does the world really need a Superman, or is he actually holding back the progress of humanity? Unlike Wonder Woman with her warrior code, or Batman with his vengeance-fuelled crusade, Superman is never quite sure he’s making the correct decision.

And that, Dear Reader, is why Superman is interesting. Of course, that’s only my opinion. Superman means something different to everyone.

What does he mean to you?

To cut a long story short, I returned it to the store.

Judging from what I played, the game is pretty shallow. It has about as much relation to real-world filmmaking as Theme Hospital has to medical surgery. That’s not a slight on sim games; I was just expecting something a bit more robust.

The actual movie-making part of the game - the reason I bought it in the first place - was pretty much ruined for me due to some kind of incompatability with my graphics card. I spent hours trying to fix the problem, but to no avail. My girlfriend, however, seemed to enjoy the micro-management aspect of the game, so I gave it to her. It wouldn’t even install on her computer, so back to the shop it went.

And I’m not alone. I’m sure a lot of people out there are enjoying The Movies and having no problems, but there seems to be a vocal minority on the publisher’s forums for whom the game is buggy to the point of being unplayable. I think it might be time to stop giving Lionhead and Peter Molyneaux the benefit of the doubt. Judging by Black & White and its sequel, their games seem to possess an abundance of good ideas and not much else.

I really should have seen this coming, given that I recently returned the awful and sophomoric Fable. Sorry Pete. My goodwill towards your company just ran out.

This is where I should be telling you all about The Movies, which should have been released on Wednesday. I was there bright and early, eager to get my copy before they sold out… and of course it was nowhere to be found. The worker-drone at E.B. knew nothing (as usual), but the helpful guy at J.B. Hi-Fi explained that they had put the game on the shelves that morning, only to have it immediately recalled because of a faulty installation disk. He explained that it would be fixed and re-issued, “in about a month. Probably in time for Christmas.”

Goddammit. So I bought Civilization 4 instead.

Now, Civ 4 is an excellent game. Let’s get that fact out of the way right now. However, it has one little problem: me. When it comes to the topic of history, I can be an excessively curmudgeonly bastard. By way of example, the other day I spent half an hour yelling at the History Channel because the narrator of ‘I, Caesar - The Life of Justinian’ kept referring to the Byzantine Empire as the ‘Eastern Roman Empire’. Let me tell you, buddy, you can only get away with that before the 5th century A.D.!

See? I’m getting all worked up again. Which brings me to the bizarre historical oddities of Civ 4.

First up, I have some problems with the range of nations you can select from. The Incans are included but not the Mayans. The Mongolians are in there but not the Koreans. The freaking Empire of Mali (Where? Exactly) is included at the expense of the once-great medieval power of Ethiopia. Arabs and Persians are present (and it’s a pretty hazy distinction between those two) but no Turks. And, glaringly, we’re missing vital historical players like the Norse, Celts, Babylonians and Carthaginians.

More mind-boggling are the leaders chosen for each country. Representing the Arabian Empire we have the general Saladin but not the prophet-warlord Mohammed, who founded an entire religion and forged his empire at scimitar-point. For leader of India we get Gandhi, which has the rather anachronistic effect of making the Indian nation pacifistic and diplomatically pleasant throughout all of history.

No Ptolemy for Egypt. No Charlemagne for Germany. Greece gets Alexander the Great, who was actually Macedonian. Rome gets Julius Caesar, when it should have got Augustus or Trajan. But the poor Aztecs get the shortest straw of all: Their national leader is Montezuma, arguably the most incompetent ruler that nation ever had.

Then there’s the treatment of religion in the game. In the interests of not offending anyone, the designers decided to allow any civilization to adopt any religion, and for all religions to be functionally identical, gameplay-wise. This leads to some serious wackiness. You get Hindhus eating cows and Jews eating pigs. You get Jewish missionaries, which have never actually existed in history. Weirdest of all, there are no economic bonuses or negatives for converting to Islam, which in reality forbids usury and requires the payment of Zakat (one fortieth of your yearly earnings go to charity).

And just think about it: Would Buddhism really be the same religion if Siddhartha Gautama had been born in feudal England? What would Egyptian Christianity look like? These are the questions that keep me up at night. In my last game Moses was born in the Aztec Empire, which led me to imagine a Mesoamerican Ten Commandments like this:

1. Thou shalt worship no other gods but Quetzalcoatl. Oh, except for Huitzilopochtli. And Tezcatlipoca, Tlaloc, Xipe Totec, Coatlicue, Xochiquetzal…
2. Thou shalt not kill. Unless it’s to sacrifice a burning heart to me. Because if you don’t, I’ll pull down the sun and end your pathetic mortal existences.

And so on.

UPDATE: Good news, everyone! Turns out the rumours of The Movies’ demise were greatly exaggerated. The problem seems to have been fixed, because I now have myself a copy. Hooray!

Somewhere between the time I made this post and the present day, a miracle occurred: An excellent Australian movie was released. Not only is it excellent, but lots of human beings are actually going to see it. And, even better than that, it has people talking.

The name of this anomaly is Wolf Creek. Written and directed by Greg McLean, it’s a confronting, mean, nasty, scary slasher film. I loved it.

The film has all the right moves. Accessible genre for 20-something audience on a Friday night? Check. Controversial subject matter to drum up word of mouth? Check. (There’s been lots of nice free fluff articles about white-faced people walking out of cinemas, British backpackers swearing off going to Australia, etc.) No painful feeling of Australianness? Check. In fact, Wolf Creek is the first truly universal Australian film since Shine, 9 years ago. The Weinstein brothers certainly thought so; they bought it for $7.5 million, the most ever paid for distribution rights to an Australian film.

Some critics seem to have difficulty classifying it, but it’s really very simple: it’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the Outback. From the setup (teenagers in a car travel far from civilisation and meet some mentally-unbalanced people), to the resourceful heroine, to the mad-but-ingenious killer with meathooks and murky motivations, TCM was all I could think of while viewing it.

But despite the obvious heritage, Wolf Creek has enough of an individual style to set itself apart. The lengthy first act (something like 30-40 minutes) is enough to make it stand out. Maybe it’s the sense of underlying dread; or maybe it’s the improbably gripping verite style of quick-and-dirty character development contrasted with lingering shots of harsh desert landscape; but that first act just rocks.

What’s more, as in all great slasher flicks, there are Iconic Moments. You know what I mean. Grandpa with the killing mallet, Michael Myers pinning that guy to the wall with a knife. Moments that enchant with their very wrongness, that stick in your head for days after. Unfortunately, Wolf Creek’s ending really lets it down. Instead of Leatherface swinging a chainsaw in the middle of the road, or the camera frantically searching for The Shape’s body, we get instead… well, I won’t spoil it for you. Suffice it to say: It’s a bit lame.

But let’s put the ending aside and celebrate instead the first great film to come out of our country in donkey’s years. Regular, non-artsy people watching Australian films is surely a sign of the End Times. I just hope Wolf Creek inspires in the correct way. Which is to say, I hope it doesn’t just spawn a clone army of second-rate Australian slashers. On the contrary, I pray that it demonstrates to filmmakers that they really can do anything, if they try; that they can make films set in Australia that aren’t necessarily about Australia; and that there is an audience out there just waiting for them to get it right.

On a completely unrelated note: It’s a good week to be me. This week I get paid for not one, but two writing jobs; I will meet with a Mysterious Hollywood Acquaintance to discuss my feature spec script (no, really); and I will commence watching my just-arrived-from-Amazon copy of Veronica Mars Season One. Oh, and The Movies comes out on Wednesday.

Let the Week of Awesomeness begin!

I apologise for the complete lack of content over the last week. During that time I’ve been:

A. Busy.

B. Sick.

C. Lazy.

And not necessarily in that order.

On the plus side, I’ve recently partaken of two excellent pieces of pop culture: Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys and Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek. I’ll be posting tomorrow about one or both of them. In the meantime, go read a blog that actually updates.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about superheroes.

Maybe it’s because I’m writing a superhero screenplay. Or maybe it’s because I’m a huge freaking nerd - who can say? In any case, I’ve been thinking about the old idea that superheroes are modern updates of folktales and myths, and I’ve realised something.

They’re more than that. They are, I think, the defining story of our age.

Pretty big call, huh? Well, think about it. Every great period in history had a story that shaped it, a story reflective of the hopes and aspirations of its people. Alexander the Great forged an empire on the story of the Iliad. So important was that story that he saw himself as a Homeric hero - he even detoured from his path of conquest just to visit all the sites mentioned by Homer. And after Alexander conquered the world, he in turn became a new story for a new generation of shining Greek democracies.

Fast forward past the Roman Empire (which also venerated the stories of the Iliad and Alexander) and we get to arguably the most influential story in history: the life of Jesus Christ. On the strength of that story, Charlemagne of the Franks forged an empire and lifted Europe out of the Dark Ages. And in turn, he and his circle of paladins would be remembered in the defining stories of the French nation, the chanson de geste of the Medieval bards.

Which brings us to the last - and probably our most culturally-important - story, the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. These stories shaped the lives our British ancestors and they still affect us today - when we unconsciously talk of ‘finding the Holy Grail’, or ‘Camelot’, or ‘knights in shining armour’.

These are all examples of stories that changed history. And they share many common elements: They’re nebulous, changing and evolving with the times. Everyone knows the basic tropes of them, if not the specifics. They penetrate the culture, inspiring imitations and endless retellings. They show us the best of ourselves, reflecting what humanity could be. And finally, they come in many different forms and variations; often they’re contradictory and confusing; yet every different version is somehow still correct, a separate facet of an overall truth.

Sounds like Superman. Or Batman. Or Spiderman.

Is that going over-the-top? Do I really have the right to compare some trashy comic books to the greatest stories in history? I don’t know, but it’s what I believe. And that’s why I’ll keep reading and writing about superheroes.

My prediction: We’re going to see even more of a public acceptance of superheroes in the coming years. More films, more games, more mainstream acceptance of comics. I think the ceiling on this thing is pretty damn high. And if they do end up being the most important stories of our age… Well, with the state the world’s in, that could only be a good thing.

An Unrelated Addendum: This post should have been up two day ago, but my internet connection has unfortunately been misbehaving.

And speaking of unfortunate things, some asshole just got hired to make the Castlevania movie. This is bad because I have, for some years now, harboured a secret desire to one day write this film. Seriously, I had it all plotted out in my head. Now along comes the guy who nailed shut the coffin on the Alien franchise and steals my fucking Castlevania. And you know what, Paul W. S. Anderson? Nobody needs that many middle initials, you untalented bastard.

In London, just across the street from Hyde Park, there is a memorial. It is dedicated to ‘Animals In Warfare’, and it consists of several life-size bronze statues of dogs, birds and other animals. The centrepiece is a Clydesdale pulling an artillery piece. Above the statues, a sign reads: ‘THEY HAD NO CHOICE’.

The memory of that memorial is how I feel reading Grant Morrison’s WE-3 (illustrated by Frank Quitely, published by DC/Vertigo). Originally a three-issue miniseries, WE-3 is now collected in a trade paperback. If you only buy one comic this year, this should be it.

The premise is pretty simple: A secret military research program kidnaps three ordinary household pets, grafts high-tech equipment and weaponry onto them and trains them to kill. They escape from the lab and try to find their way home. It’s Homeward Bound meets robo-death armour.

Interestingly, the writing represents Morrison at his most readable and lucid; it stands in stark contrast to his usual brand of psychedelic, genre-defying, cosmic chaos.

(And here I must digress. I recently learned that some people dislike Morrison’s tendency to include ‘throw-away’ setting details that jar the reader and cause them to reinterpret the entire story part-way through. These critics call it ‘hyper-compression’.

An example: In Doom Patrol Morrison has a character explain that a fallen angel created an alien world. But then she changes her mind and admits that, “Well, it’s either that or the psychic projection of a woman called Ilse Krauss, who’s lying on a hospital bed in Bremen, dying of brain cancer. It’s hard to be sure”.

How fucking brilliant is that? That’s not ‘hyper-compression’. That’s virtuosity. Here endeth the digression.)

If you liken Morrison’s trademark ultra-detailed stories to intricate mosaics, then WE-3 is by comparison a simple, flawless diamond. The book is astonishingly visual – there is no dialogue at all for the first thirteen pages, and not a single panel description in the entire book – and consequently the act of reading it is almost Zen-like. Quitely’s art lays out the story so broadly and effectively that just about anyone can enjoy it, no matter their comics reading experience.

And here’s the brilliant part. This story could only have been told as a comic book. As prose it would have lost all the immediate savagery, sweat and fear. On film it would have been laughable, or worse, far too confrontingly violent.

Because this book bears an angry, confronting message: animals are not like us. It’s as if Morrison started with the concept of anthropomorphic animals and then took a goddamn sledgehammer to it. I’m serious; he demolishes it. After reading this book, the very idea of talking animals will fill you with an odd feeling of revulsion and shame. In the end, the triumph of WE-3 lies in its lack of humanity. Human speech may be surgically implanted, but human hate, fear and greed are inherent.

The verdict? Genius. You should probably go buy it as soon as possible. And if you’re an animal lover, prepare to cry a lot.

That’s all for today. Tune in tomorrow to hear me ramble on about superheroes!