Is Storytelling Failing

I watched two movies yesterday. First, I watched Treasure Planet, an animated retelling of Treasure Island, set in a future with sailed starships. Next, Lana and I watched the recent remake of The Incredible Hulk. I really liked Treasure Planet and didn’t care for the “Hulk.”

Later, Lana and I talked about the movies we’ve watched lately that were “less” than compelling, The Strangers, Mongol, and whatever other ones we’d seen that we couldn’t even remember the titles of. We both decided that Hollywood made better movies in the 1970s and 1980s than today, and I was trying to decide why. A reason occurred to me that I’m throwing out to see what folks think.

I suspect that the people making movies in the 70s and 80s were largely influenced by books, while many of the folks making movies now are influenced by other movies and TV, or by comic books, which are closer to TV/Movies than to regular books. Movies influenced from books seem, to me, to have a better sense of storytelling, of combining all elements such as characters, action, and setting into a complete experience. Movies made by folks who basically only watch other movies or movie-like experiences lack that completeness.

How else to explain my yesterday’s experience? I much enjoyed Treasure Planet, based on a wonderfully fine novel, while with the Hulk I was constantly thrown out of the story by problems with continuity, things that just seemed simple storytelling "don’ts." For example, a chase scene early in the movie, which probably lasts a total of 15 minutes of “real life” time, begins clearly in daylight, and suddenly it is night! Say what? Or another fight scene takes place under a completely blue sky, until suddenly at the end it begins to pour down rain.

Now, Lana looked the Hulk up online and found that they did a lot of neat things to reflect back on the history of the character and on the TV show, and they were the “greenest” production ever in being environmentally friendly, but how could they take such care with these details and let the scene continuity vary randomly? It really hurt the movie for me, and all I can think is that they weren’t quite coming from a storytelling perspective. Rain is dramatic. Throw it in! Night is dramatic. Stuff it here! So it doesn’t make sense? The audience trained on TV and Video Games and comics won’t care. Well, uhm, there are still some of us out here who remember what good storytelling was like.

Nuff said!
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Comic Books Part Deux

Once more I ventured into a comic book store. This makes the third time in a month and I’m amazed at myself. I bought Planet Hulk, which collects a dozen or so Hulk issues under one cover. I bought it because of a sword & planet connection. All these issues take place on a planet called Sakaar, where the Hulk is exiled, and it has quite a bit of the old sword & planet feel. Sakaar is ruled largely by a group of red-skinned humanoids who remind one of the red-skinned people of ERB’s Barsoom, but there are also many other races that have been brought there by what is essentially a wormhole.

The Hulk is weakened by passing through the wormhole and is captured, through the use of an “obedience disk,” and sent to a gladiator training school. He makes friends there and ends up fighting first in the arena, and then at the head of a rag-tag army to overthrow an evil emperor known as the Red King. From there the story takes the usual sword & planet route.

There are some good and bad things about the book. First, since it collects a bunch of issues it is a satisfying chunk of reading material. I hate sitting down for a read and finishing in three minutes, and this actually took me a while to get through. Second, the writer(s) also have a pretty good handle on the basic sword & planet concept and created some interesting background characters and an interesting world. Unfortunately, the weakest part of the story was pretty much the Hulk himself. I really liked the first part of the book where a weakened Hulk is, while still formidable, actually challenged by some of the characters he meets and fights. Later, as the Hulk grows stronger and stronger and stronger I just lost interest. When the continental plates are ruptured, the Hulk leaps down into the boiling magma and…restores them. Later, he goes into the vacuum of space without a spacesuit, and then returns to the planet by meteoring into the ground. There’s no challenge to the Hulk left. That means no conflict, only some pretty images. But pretty images do not a story make. As a result, while I enjoyed Planet Hulk at one level, it didn’t scratch my itch for some good old fashioned swashbuckling.

There is one thing I’ve noticed, however, in my few recent trips to the comic stores. And that is the absolute excitement of many comic book fans for these characters and stories. Each time I’ve gone there have been several other folks in the store, all young men (mostly in their twenties), who are talking excitedly and animatedly about this comic story or that. And by “excitedly” I mean with voices raised in passion. There has been no mean-spiritedness to it, only joyous and wild discussion. I thought to myself, it’s not true that men aren’t reading, only that men aren’t reading regular books. And then I thought, what is it that attracts them to comics instead?

The standard views on males and females are that males are more excited by visual stimuli than women, and I have to suspect that this is part of the attraction for young males to the comics. However, I’m wondering why they need to have these visuals ‘given’ to them? When I read a regular novel I’m seeing all kinds of things visually. They’re just in my head.

I also wish I could find a better way, or some way, to connect to these readers. It seems to me that the Taleran books have much in them that a reader of something like Planet Hulk could enjoy. But why aren’t they discovering this? Where is the disconnect? What can I do to bridge the gap? I don’t know.
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