EPISODE 122 -- LESS ENTERTAINING FORMS OF POSSESSION

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

Today my face collided with a street sign pole. And I mean COLLIDED – as in, I did not even know there was a pole anywhere within half a mile of me until I ran into it hard enough that I thought I might have broken my nose. (Which, can I be honest, actually seemed like kind of a cool option.)

Bizarrely, this was not the first time that my face has come under assault in the city in which I currently find myself. (I’m away from LA right now.) A couple years ago, I was sitting on a park bench here, relishing the leafy plane trees all around me. (After you’ve lived in Los Angeles for a while, walking amongst trees is a semi-hallucinogenic experience. You can literally feel their presence feeding your dry, would-be-screaming-except-we’re-exhausted-by-it-all pores.)

Suddenly, out of nowhere, something crashed into my face. A pigeon. No joke, a living rat sac of germs for some reason that I cannot explain crashed into my head, and then flew away. I screamed. People walking by laughed.

On this particular occasion, however, the contusions were not random and without fault, but a result of a particular, predictible-if-you-know-me distraction. On the other side of the street, I had noticed that one of the houses was number 666.

I do not like this number. Don’t like to say it. Don’t like to read it. Don’t like to think about it. The newest version of the prayer book that priests use to say Mass has a page with that number, and on it is a prayer we say every time, and now that I've noticed it I have to force myself to ignore that because otherwise it would really distract me. I don’t like that I’m writing about it right now. I really do not like it.

I am not by nature a superstitious person. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. I’m not even sure I totally believe in “The Devil”, in the cloven hoofs and tail way that people talk about him. The very idea that a loving God who created us and wants nothing but good for us would allow a semi-divine eternal being to wander around leading people to ruin does not make a lot of sense when you stop to think about it. It’s like your dad agreeing to pay the rent on your apartment for the first year, but oh, by the way, he picked a place that’s infested with rabid mice. So, you know, careful.

But I also believe there’s a lot more to this whole “world” thing than we can see. I actually think at this point that’s just common sense. I mean, who would have ever guessed that you and I are each made of tiny particles that are made of even tinier particles that act in ways that are just so weird scientists actually refer to their interactions as “spooky”. Or that what we call gravity is actually the effect of a thing’s mass actually warping space, and not only that but time. Or that there could come a time when four different super hero shows do a week long cross over that is not only fun to watch but action packed and filled with great character beats for almost twenty characters (some of whom are long since dead).

And now, suddenly and without warning, the author loses his way.

For those wondering what the heck I’m talking about: when it comes to comic books translated into other media, Marvel pretty much has the gold star locked up in the film world. DC, so far anyway, simply cannot hold a candle to the success Marvel keeps having, film after film.

But on TV, so far, it’s DC that keeps building success on success, first with the gritty Batman-esque “Arrow”, then the more hopeful and funny “The Flash”, and now “Supergirl” and “Legends of Tomorrow”. And this week for the first time all of those shows crossed over with each other. My own comic book geek love aside, it was exciting to watch just as a writing challenge. So many characters, so many stories to serve, plus how much scifi super hero action can you really pull off on television?

It turns out, A LOT. And with a pretty high level of success, too.

Having made his point, you might think the writer would get back to what he actually intended to talk about today, which was not this.

You would be wrong.

And I’ll tell you something else—as much as Marvel has made its signature the playful, human camaraderie its characters share (all hail the Joss and Robert Downey Jr.), the relationships among the core DC TV characters is almost stronger. The characters are almost all much younger, and there’s a sense of sibling struggle and love that is just out of this world.

Stepping back, the Marvel heroes so far are like office coworkers, competing, fighting, lusting and enjoying one another’s company like (mostly male and largely adolescent) office workers do. There’s the smart guys always trying to top each other, the dude from another country that no one totally gets, the guy with the anger management issues, the family man and the gorgeous woman they’re all attracted to.

The DC TV characters on the other hand are very much like siblings in a family. Oliver Queen is literally everyone’s older brother (and some characters near-dad); Barry Allen is the earnest little brother who wants to make Oliver proud; Kara is almost his twin, equally hopeful and sweet; and Sara from Legends has become pretty much everyone’s older sister.

Those familial bonds gives the DC characters a pathos and heart that as much as I love the Marvel movies I have rarely seen them crack, other than in the relationship between Cap and Bucky and, I suspect, in the relationship we’re going to see between Peter Parker and Tony Stark. Robert Downey Jr. pretty much created that franchise into the wonder that it is, but he’s also become the touchstone for its quippy, semi-smirky tone. Which we all love, but which is slightly more distant from us, more protected.

It really seems like there’s not much more to say, so why don't we--

And that does not always serve the brand--

*Sigh*

– “Ant Man” really is meant to be a guy like us, that’s the genius of casting Paul Rudd. But his movie never quite got there; it was never quite ready to be as funny and human as Rudd is. Until, that is, we got to see him in “Captain America”. Then he’s everything we could have hoped for, I think because the Cap movies are built to be far more emotionally accessible. Even “Civil War”, for all its struggles, was built around these enormously powerful fraternal relationships – Tony and Steve; Cap and Bucky (and to some extent Cap and the Black Panther) – and its high water marks, the Tony/Steve/Bucky fight and the massive superhero showdown, lived and died on how they went to emotional, familial places. In the abstract I couldn’t believe they were trying to introduce Spider-Man in the midst of all this craziness, but in practice it made so much sense. Simply by virtue of being a boy, the first real “kid” superhero in this universe, his presence created a sense of family.

“Guardians of the Galaxy” is the one other possible exception to all this. They’re built as the cosmic version of the Avengers, a bunch of adults in a work-like setting. But somehow that first movie completely surpassed that mold, I think because instead of being a hero each of them was essentially broken on some level and an outsider if not an out and out loser. It’s crazy to say this, but really the transformative, Robert Downey Jr. level character of “Guardians” is not Chris Pratt, but Rocket the Raccoon. When we get his backstory of being experimented on, being the only one of his kind, the movie suddenly vaults to a whole different level.

I’m doing everything I can to stop him from moving on to Doctor Strange. I...GRR...REALLLY....ARGGH...AMMMMMMMMM....

“Doctor Strange” is basically Magic Tony Stark, equally smart, equally emotionally inaccessible but substituting some of the quippy for grimmer.

I knew – KNEW – we should not have watched the finale of that DC comics crossover thing tonight.

I enjoyed it, in fact I’d like to see it again, and it’s done really really well, way beyond expectations, but I don’t know. I didn’t walk away feeling very much for him – other than, and this is crazy but true, when he was interacting with his cape. Seriously, more than the ex-girlfriend or his co-magic ninjas, for me it was that magic cape, which was part protector, part friend, part pet, that was Stephen Strange’s one real relationship of the piece. Other than the Ancient One, who was sort of his magic momma.)

I could go on.

I seriously think this election broke him.

I mean, thinking of other Marvel superhero stories in these terms, what is the X-Men? It’s got that adult office coworker banter in some incarnations, and yet at the same time most of the characters are also present or former students of either Xavier or Magneto. Which becomes at times sort of annoying; it’s one thing for a 15 year old to have adults guiding them, but when you’re dealing with people in their 20s and 30s (and in leather suits to boot), I’m sorry Charles, but it’s time to move on.

Maybe that’s why that franchise has been so uneven; internally it hasn’t quite figured itself out. And maybe that’s also why the Wolverine movies have gotten better and better. The first film felt very X-Men-y, with students to save. But then “The Wolverine” turns out to be a sort of intergenerational love story, with a bad dad, a funny sister and a woman he would make his wife.

And “Logan” is even more clearly a movie about family. Xavier is the fragile aging dad – a much better role for him than professor; Logan is his son; and the little girl stands in as Logan’s daughter.

Then there’s “The Fantastic Four”.

Oh. My. God.

Just kidding. I’m done.

. . .

No really. I am.

​Prove it.

Where was I? Oh yeah, when it comes to reality, if we’re being totally honest with ourselves, we know that so much remains a mystery. So why would we be confident in saying that there are no such things as evil spirits or unseen forces or gypsy hexes caused from tossing around/thinking about/loitering in the vicinity of certain numbers that are actually so outrageously large there’s really no reason to ever use them anyway?

Now, given how uncomfortable this one very small thing makes me, so distracted in fact that its appearance on a house door would be enough to cause me to barrel into a metal pole in the middle of the day and cause my nose to swell up to the point that even though it is not broken I still feel pretty comfortable telling people “I was in a fight, what of it?” – given that, you might be surprised to hear that my first job in Hollywood was researching and writing a story about an exorcist. And that I did that and that alone for over a year.

But that’s a story for next week.

Ugh. This guy.

The only thing I can think of to say:

++ LINKS ++

Bana Alabed, @AlabedBana on Twitter, is a seven year old Syrian girl living in Aleppo. Her mother Fatemah tweets for her as she asks J.K. Rowling to send her Harry Potter books so she can forget the war or, more recently, as they struggle to survive. We should all be following it and trying to figure out how we can help.

I’m not much for old timey radio shows, but there’s a new podcast sort of in this style called “Homecoming” that I’m really loving. It stars Catherine Keener, aka that woman in all the indy movies who is just always so fantastic, and Oscar Isaac, aka that X-Wing pilot that the Force Awakens desperately wanted me to love. And it’s about a treatment program for soldiers just back from the Middle East. Keener runs the program (with David Schwimmer doing hilarious work as her awful boss who is always yelling at her from all over the world), Isaac is one of the patients. And something is not quite on the up and up.

Here’s the link to the first episode. Again, I don’t really “do” fiction podcasts, but this one is starting to get to me.

Last year at this time I was posting on Facebook little bits of thought and trivia on Star Wars every day, counting down to “The Force Awakens”. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out a way of continuing that for “Rogue One”, with no success.

But then today a friend (hat tip, Mick!) suggested an article by Chuck Klosterman about Star Wars and Generation X. And I found this fantastic slice from it. I’m hoping maybe I can find other interesting think-y piece on Star Wars to post. If you have ideas, I’m all ears!

Lots of cool “Rogue One” posters coming out now as we hit the final days of waiting. And is it me or do they all seem to be talking about our strange new world?

Look after yourself. There's absolutely nothing wrong with feeling afraid. But you're also not alone.

Next Week: What A Year Thinking About Exorcisms Does to Your Sleep