Thu, January 29, 2004

I've been watching a lot of Smallville lately, and it's such a bizarre show. It's enjoyable to watch, but at the same time it's terrible. Just awful. But excellent. Fantastically abysmal. Unforgivably engaging. In large part, this is because of the show's own split personality. It oscillates between horribly cheesy episodes with freak-of-the-week villains and awkward romance between Clark Kent and Lana Lang, and intricately engineered progressions of the well known Superman mythology. It's a great show, because it's just watchable enough to stay tuned and that means I can enjoy the recaps on Television Without Pity, which deliciously skewer the show's many faults from a perspective of grudging appreciation (which is the absolute best way to go – it's what I try for with the Survivor columns).

The show has been a lot of fun, especially the recaps. It also interested me in the Superman story, because Smallville mines some details from the comic books, some from the Christopher Reeve movies, and makes up some elements on its own. So, I rented Superman from 1978 on DVD, and the experience was not unlike Alien. Both are movies that I had only seen many years ago, and both are known as iconic films in American cinema. And, in both cases, my memory of their excellence has clearly been affected more by their general appreciation than by their particular worthiness. I'm wondering if I'm the only one who sees these films as falling short of their reputation for greatness, or if everyone else is also underwhelmed, but just sort of goes along with it.

To begin with, I should say that Superman isn't quite as unwatchable as Alien. Gene Hackman is truly enjoyable, and Christopher Reeve really shows why this was a well deserved breakthrough role for him. He manages to underplay the Superman role to an extreme degree – he says he wanted to let the costume play the role, a wise and risky choice for a young unknown – while at the same time delivering a broad but nuanced performance as Clark Kent. (And it's strikingly obvious that Crispin Glover modeled his George McFly at least in part off of this portrayal.) Reeve makes some subtle but brilliant choices with his performance, and it adds a lot to the character that is easy to take for granted because, at least for my generation, they've always been part of what Superman is. It's easy to forget that this is because of Christopher Reeve.

However, from a structural standpoint, the film is weak and bizarre. The scenes with Jor-El (Superman's dad) are heavy and drag on well beyond being useful, especially those scenes after he's long dead. And, for some reason, Clark suppresses the urge to use his powers to save people until the one night his new crush gets in a helicopter accident, and then suddenly he's Mr. Lost-Kitty-Finder? I don't get it. And if he's never been involved in life-saving before that night, why is he already wearing the Superman outfit under his street clothes? I have a lot of respect for Richard Donner, and the things he's done in the fantasy/action genres. (The Lethal Weapon movies I could take or leave, increasingly, but they're very popular.) As kids, we loved Ladyhawke like nobody's business, and Conspiracy Theory remains one of my recent favorites. However, Superman exemplifies the struggle that the industry had in finding its footing in the post-Star Wars blockbuster event-movie market. The script was re-written and re-re-written, and the result – as it still is in many movies today – is a mishmash of scenes and ideas that seemed appealing along the way, but no longer fit together in any context. The most compelling part of the whole thing is the set design for Lex Luthor's underground lair, patterned after the look of Grand Central Station a few floors above it.

Besides (and it’s inconsistencies like these that bug me about Smallville), the way it works is that Clark can fly. As a flying object, Clark can support other objects, because of his strength, and therefore hold them aloft while he flies. For example, when he saves Lois after her helicopter crash. He catches her, and he has to hold onto her. She holds onto him, too. He grabs the helicopter, and lifts it up. This makes good sense, and – regardless – the film establishes it as the way the flying works. But, a few scenes later, when Superman shows up for his interview/date with Lois, they go flying around and suddenly his power of flight is transferable? He holds her up by just a fingertip. He isn't Tinkerbell, people. This is just wrong. This should only be possible if she has very strong arms and fingers, and is just balancing herself like that – which is to say, it's impossible.

And another thing that bothers me is the whole spinning-the-earth-in-reverse business. When Lois dies, Superman spins the earth backwards on its axis in order to reverse time, which is just absurd. (I acknowledge the argument that accepting the super-strength and flying, but balking at the time reversal, is splitting fine hairs. I disagree; I'll accept the rules of the film, but when the film breaks its own rules, it's irritating.) This represents a fundamental flaw in thinking about the way time works, which always irritates me. If time travel were possible (and, sadly, we must admit that it is not, based on conclusions drawn from such thought-experiments as Back to the Future, Part III), it would consist of skipping from one point in time to another. It would not involve running events in reverse. Time moves forward; the time traveler moves backward (or further forward). So, nothing Superman can do will "rewind" time and pull Lois's car out of the ground, as depicted in Superman. It simply can't happen that way. However, there's even more wrong with this. The way to achieve any change in time is not to simply reverse the rotation of the earth. That's just picking an arbitrary action (albeit large on the human scale) which moves forward through time and trying to reverse time by reversing that action. It would be like saying "In forward time, the eight ball rolls into the pocket, so if I push the eight ball up out of the pocket and across the table, time will roll backwards." Wrong. Bringing the earth to a stop would simply cause everything on it to fly off in a generally easterly direction. Because of Newton's first law of motion. It's inertia. It's the reason you slide forward in the car if you slam on the brakes – you're still moving forward until your seat belt slows you down. Pushing the earth in the other direction would simply continue to discombobulate items on the ground. Plus, unless Superman's spinning were precisely orchestrated to follow the planet on its orbit around the sun, the earth would get knocked off of its orbit and most likely spiral out of the galaxy. Try surviving that, Lois! Besides, time moves forward everywhere in the universe. If you spin the earth backwards, Venus is still spinning forwards, right? This is sloppy screenwriting at its worst, and I know it is, because the writer remains confused. On the DVD commentary, screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz manages to convince Richard Donner that there is an error with the scene because among the backwards-playing images, we see Lois's car rise out of the trench. He says, "Oh, that's wrong, because Superman already pulled that car out of the trench – it doesn't need to come out again." Which is ridiculous; if Superman is supposedly playing time in reverse, the car absolutely has to come back out of the trench. That's the reverse of it going in. Earlier, unshown, was Superman putting the car in the trench, which was the reverse of him pulling it out, which happened right before he found out that Lois was dead and got all mad and flew off to reverse the rotation of the planet. So, the screenwriter had no idea what he was doing and is still clueless 25 years later. It's a shame because as Kal-El flies to Earth, he learns all about the history of humanity (and all the planets in dozens of known solar systems), including Einstein's relativity, which is specifically mentioned in the Marlon Brando voiceover. Einstein's relativity is one of the key things that contradicts the idea of spinning the planet backwards, so Clark should know better. So should Tom Mankiewicz. You can't reverse time just by spinning the planet backwards. This is not the sort of thing we should be telling our children. And children watch movies – you show me one who doesn't!

As a friend said, "Man, you're really tearing that 25-year-old film a new one!" Well, perhaps. But, just because it took me a while to get to it, doesn't mean my conclusions are invalid. And that spinning-backwards thing has bothered me for years.

My theory is that the film was a hit because it was the first relatively straight big-budget adaptation of a comic book (after the glorious but campy Batman film), and because most of the visual effects techniques were invented for this movie. People were awed by the spectacle, and rightly so. But, since then, I think it's only been a "good" movie because people remember the reaction it got back then. On its own, it has not aged well. A few of the visual effects still look pretty good – all look excellent considering the technology available – and Reeve's performance is truly amazing, but the rest of it is hollow and unsatisfying. It's like a papier-mâché cupcake. At first, it's enticing, but when you get close you realize that nobody put much thought into its construction and it ultimately fails to serve its only intended purpose.

One interesting DVD feature is the screen tests of multiple women who tried out for the role of Lois Lane. (Any of whom would've been a marked improvement, in my opinion. Especially Anne Archer.) It's an interesting commentary on the star-centered era of movies today. Virtually nobody does screen tests, especially for major roles. Almost nobody even reads or auditions in any capacity. Back then, they could get several impressive actresses to screen test in multiple scenes. I think, in general, it probably made for better movies. It doesn't mean that the actors had less power; it means the agents did.

***

The penultimate episode of NBC's Ed airs tomorrow night. This is a sorrowful injustice. You'll notice that NBC – those cowards – waited until the last minute to admit that they had decided to cancel the show months earlier than anybody needs to announce their next fall schedule. "That's it," they said last week. "One more episode, then a wedding. See ya!" I'm inconsolable. I can't think of a TV show currently airing that I like more. Maybe Arrested Development.

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