Summer of Whedon

So. Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers. The last two movies I’ve seen (and I know I’m not alone in this), both of them bearing the Joss Whedon imprimatur (producer and co-writer of one, co-writer and director of the other). Even if there wasn’t anything else to look forward to this summer, even if there weren’t the looming shadows of Prometheus and The Dark Knight Rises, this would already be a pretty strong season. A few thoughts on them both below. These are not reviews. I’m assuming you’ve seen both movies, so there are spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen them, then stop reading this and hit the theatres.

No, I’m serious. Go away.

[Waits.]

Fine, while they’re off doing their homework, the rest of us can carry on. As I said, these aren’t reviews, but let me get this out of the way: Cabin in the Woods is the most fun I’ve had at a horror movie in quite some time, and The Avengers, too, is enormous, fist-pumping fun.

You’ll note that I used the word “fun” twice in the preceding sentence. I was not being lazy. It seems to me that this is exactly what the two films are about. Fun is what they are having, and they want their audiences to join in. They are exuberant, witty works, made by fans for fans, yet open to general viewers who would never even have heard of Hawkeye until just now.

A big part of that fun is the massive, extremely conscious use of intertextuality in both films, and that’s what I find myself returning to as I think about them and the nature of their viewing experience. All works of art, of course, are filled with echoes, conscious or not, to other works. Whedon’s scripts are very self-aware, and they demand an equally alert audience, one that will engage actively with the games being played. This is particularly true of Cabin in the Woods – if you have never seen a horror movie in your life, then this film is not the place to start. But even The Avengers makes some demands along these lines: if (however unlikely this may be) you have not seen the previous Marvel adaptations, or are otherwise unfamiliar with the characters, then you’re probably going to be a bit lost.

But the more the references are recognizable for a given member of the audience, the more likely that viewer will be to exult in the film. And that kind of endless referencing is, furthermore, a big part of the comic book reading experience. Any given issue of an ongoing series from Marvel or DC is not going to be a completely self-contained story. It will be part of a larger story arc, possibly a never-ending one, and it will intersect with story arcs from other series, which will do the same with still more. It’s a clever marketing tactic – one that, at the peak of my comic collecting back in the late-80s, resulted in my buying DC’s entire line every month – but it is also an exciting experience for the reader, given the size, depth and richness of the universe so created.

The Avengers, then, recreates that experience of being in the know, and tapping into multiple story-lines. It also religiously follows the other conventions that complete the Marvel comics experience – the snappy patter during combat, the fact that all super-heroes must fight each other when they first meet, and so on. The self-conscious intertextuality of the film mirrors the same in the comics, and so brings the movie even closer to its source material.

I am willing to bet, however, that if you saw Cabin in the Woods, no matter how much you loved it, it probably didn’t frighten you. Maybe it’s just me, but the greatest suspense I felt was the worry that the world wasn’t going to end, and I would be cheated out of something extremely cool. But the world did end, and I was not cheated. Yay! But what this also means is that I was responding to the movie on an intellectual, rather than visceral, plane, and horror movies, like romances, need to get us at the more atavistic level if we’re going to be frightened. Similarly, The Avengers is not likely to have the same emotional punch as The Dark Knight for many viewers, I’m guessing. Nor is it trying to, except insofar as it thrills by being the incarnation of the super-hero-team comic book experience.

But maybe that’s enough. Sometimes, sheer, giddy, smart fun is all we need.

Dances with Knives

The buzz has been building since that insane trailer hit the Internet, and The Raid: Redemption (why, oh why was that completely unnecessary subtitle added?) has finally landed on our local screens. So my wife and I sallied out to catch it this weekend, because nothing says “Easter” like excessive violence (just ask Mel Gibson).

Our premise, then, is a raid by the Indonesian equivalent of SWAT into a gang-controlled highrise so seedy and grim that even the zombies have clearly given it a pass, wanting nothing to do with a neighbourhood that bad, thank you very much. Within minutes, everything goes pear-shaped, and an orgy of killings by gun, blade, fist and foot ensues.

I am very much looking forward to the DVD release, in the hopes that one of the extras will be outtakes and behind-the-scenes looks at the stunts, because how anybody survived the making of this film is beyond me. I had been delighted, earlier this year, by the old-school brutality of the fight scenes in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, but ye godz, the work here defies description and beggars belief. The fight sequences, gentle reader, are to be witnessed, not described, so I won’t go into them much here. I shall simply state that, if there is any justice the world, the fighting style of silat will have the same rejuvenating impact on the action genre as did District 13’s revelation of parkour in 2004. And the UN General Assembly should forthwith issue a declaration that, from this day onward, all martial arts scenes in film must include the use of knives.

This is an action movie that remembers that the most exciting special effect is not necessarily the biggest explosion (and believe me, I have ab-so-lute-ly nothing against Very Large Explosions), but rather the human body accomplishing the seemingly impossible (and doing so in the service of the most take-no-prisoners, wince-inducing ass-kickery imaginable). There was a very small audience at the screening we attended, and in a large theatre, that usually makes for a pretty quiet viewership. But every last one of us was hooting, shouting, and laughing with giddy exhilaration. If you’re lucky enough to catch this with a packed hall, you’ll probably be a week coming down from the adrenaline high.

But outstanding fight choreography aside, there something else the film does very, very right, and this is at the level of the script. The economy of the storytelling is superb. Mercifully absent are: long build-ups, digressions into “witty” banter, attempts to flesh out the characters with family picnics, Beatles record collections or collapsing swimming pools, and so on. The raid is underway within the first five minutes. Any character development takes place during brief interludes or is integral to the action scenes themselves. The Raid know we have come for the meat – raw, brutal excitement – and so the meat is what we get, with every gram of fat removed.

I’m not saying that the lesson I’m drawing from this is that all writing should be similarly devoid of anything but set-pieces. Film is a visual medium, this is an action film, and so the movie very appropriately emphasizes the kinetic. But this is (for me, I hope) a salutary reminder to ask myself, when plotting, writing, or revising, does this need to be here? I know I won’t always ask that question, or answer it correctly (or honestly, if it comes to that). But if someone else does ask (and then deploys some completely appropriate editorial silat), I’ll have only myself to blame.

Inaugural Trumpet Blast

Well, that sounds grand, doesn’t it?

My hunch is that this Interweb thingie is going to hang around. I’m prescient that way, always anticipating the next whim of the zeitgeist. In keeping with this unerring ability to keep two steps ahead of the wind (yes, I paid actual money to see The Happening), I hereby launch this here blog whatchamawhosit. Your life is now complete.

But snark aside, this is a bit of a day for Your Humble Correspondent. Over the course of the last year, I’ve begun writing Warhammer 40,000 fiction for the Black Library. My first story — “The Carrion Anthem” — has shown up in a couple of places, most recently, to my enormous gratification, here: http://www.blacklibrary.com/warhammer-40000/25-for-25-ebook.html (and, while I’m busy plugging, will first have a physical appearance here: http://www.blacklibrary.com/all-products/best-of-hammer-and-bolter-volume-one.html). But today, I get to be part of another anniversary, the Black Library’s 15th: http://www.blacklibrary.com/all-products/celebrate-15-years.html. Fifteen years, fifteen 1000-word e-shorts. Huge fun reading them, and as for writing one…

… I was invited to write about Commissar Sebastian Yarrick. In the same way that writing a 1000-word short is both a pleasure (a thousand words? awesome! I’ll get that done by yesterday!) and a challenge (a thousand words? how do I tell a full story in so short a space?), writing Yarrick was a privilege, and joy, and a responsibility. On the one hand, I get to write  a story about freakin’ Yarrick! On the other… If readers don’t like how I portray certain characters in my novels where everything is of my own creation, that’s too bad, but they’re my characters. So what I choose to do with Jen Blaylock (and have her do) in that series is, in the final analysis, my call. But readers will have had an investment in Yarrick long before I showed up. So I do hope that my little piece here rings true to that incredibly rich character.

My thinking went something like this. Firstly, in a story of this size, I obviously should stay away from the epic events of the Second and Third Wars of Armageddon. His imprisonment by Ghazghkull Thraka after the defeat on Golgotha is a smaller episode in his life, but still too big a tale for 1000 words. But then I thought there might be something worthwhile to say about what his life during his captivity.

I also like Yarrick’s deep awareness of his own image. The orks think he has the evil eye? Fine, he replaces the eye he lost with a laser-firing implant.  That is such a delicious conceit, one of which I am very much in awe, and the mechanics of it — Yarrick conforms to the distorting gaze of the Other by creating a lethal gaze in return, a lethal gaze very much feared/desired by the Other — are a Lacanian wonderland. Great stuff, and I’m still sorting out all the implications in my head. So my thought then, was to zero in on Yarrick’s gaze, and the power it has even without the implant, and try to touch, just a very little, on where that power comes from, and on the interlocking web of gazes (humans’, orks’, Yarrick’s, Ghazghkull’s).

And I wanted a decapitation.

So there we are. A few of the musings behind my small part in the Black Library’s anniversary event. If you check out the story, here’s hoping you enjoy it.