Back from the Grave, Ready to Party

It was a good vacation.

One of the things we got was the DVD of Hancock. I spoke about Hancock at length before but now that I've seen it again I have two additional things to say about it.

The first is that I was wrong. It is not the best superhero movie of all time. That's because it's not a superhero move. Instead, it is a movie with a superhero. Now, it is the best movie with a superhero of all time but that's sort of problematic as it is the only (to my knowledge) movie with a superhero that's been made.

Why the distinction?

I twigged to this sort of idea listening to the Julie Schwartz Memorial Lecture, featuring Neil Gaiman, the other day. Cowboy works, science fiction works, mystery works, etc., have stations of the cross in them. This is, of course, vastly oversimplified. A cowboy book, for instance, has a clear hero and villain. The hero is usually flawed in some way and often mysterious or has a troubled past. He comes into town. That's pretty much universal. See A Fistfull of Dollars, for example. The alternative plot is something comes to town to meet the hero. See High Noon. Confrontation ensues. The hero (usually) wins.

There are also cowboy movies that play against type where each station of the cross is marked by its opposite rather than the normal fare. Unforgiven is a good example.

A book with cowboys in it is significantly different. In such a work, the stations of the cross are essentially absent or reduced in scope to coincidences. A good example is E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times. This book happens to have cowboys in it but the book is in now way a cowboy book.

This is not to say that the genre work is worse or better than the work that uses some of the trappings of the genre. It's just to say they must be judged differently.

Hancock, then, is a movie with a superhero in it. Batman: Dark Night is a superhero movie.

The second additional thing I have to say about Hancock (remember? There were two.) is perhaps one of the reasons it is not a superhero movie. To recap: Hancock is an amnesiac man with superpowers. He tries to help out but he's drunk most of the time so he's often worse than the problem. He's drunk because 1) he's miserable, 2) he doesn't know who he is and he's alone and 3) because of 1 and 2 he's an asshole. Ray, a PR guy who's trying to use his PR powers for good rather than evil, is saved by Hancock. In return, he tries to straighten Hancock. Oh, by the way, Ray is married to the other superbeing in the story but doesn't know it. Fun ensues.

The neat bit that is so important in the story is that Ray, fully normal human being, is on equal footing with the two superbeings. At no point does he act subservient. At no point does he act as if he is less important than they are-- the movis clearly stating that importance does not derive from naked power but instead comes from within. It comes home later when Hancock and Mary have a fight and express some emotions that have been bottled up between them for hundreds of years. What she is protecting is not earth. It is not some abstract concept of evil or the predations of a concrete supervillain. It is trying to preserve a bit of happiness that she has with Ray. She prefers Ray. She chooses Ray. Ray makes her happy.

Contrast this with the overblown melodrama in Dark Night. Batman can't have a relationship with a normal person because his high flung morality prevents it: it would interfere with his life's work. He's taken on that life's work because he has a grief problem anybody with a grain of counseling could help him with. But he clings to it. The world of the Batman requires the grim world of Metropolis and the psychopathic Joker. Hancock lives in the real world. That's the difference.

Well, as real a world as can have a Hancock, anyway.

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