Problem Heroes: Who's Afraid of The Fantastic Four?
I was late to the Fantastic Four fan club. So late, in fact, that about two years after I "got" them Marvel cancelled the comic book. They retired their first family with no plans to renew for the foreseeable future.
Of course, the internet tubes lit up with speculation following this news. Most claim that this was all down to a spat between Fox and Misney (or is it Darvel?) regarding the rights to handle those particular characters in movie form. Many more point out it is stupid to cancel a title of a niche taste art form (comic book) in an attempt to hurt a mass-market art form (movies). The truth is still at large, missing, presumed lost eternally. None of these business shenanigans are interesting. If they were we'd be here talking about Darvel's (or is it Misney's?) recent success in retrieving their spider toy from Sony. What's interesting, particularly in the case of the FF is the reasons why they have had such a rough time. No hero, or set of heroes, has found the transition from their origin in paper and ink to their realisation on the silver screen so hard. The tragedy of the FF is that they were so popular in comics for so long only to be mishandled and abused in the hands of the studios. The metric of popularity, however, is imperfect. It is true that the Fantastic Four are a cornerstone of Marvel's comic universe. Does that mean that Marvel always knew what they were doing with the property they created? No. Not really. Many of the problems writ large in the FF's movie exploits were existent in the comics too. The history of the Fantastic Four is one of misunderstandings and failures. More so than it is of the glory and stability that nostalgia might invoke. The genius stroke of the FF as characters is that they are a family, Marvel's First Family, no less. Family and superhero fantasy have never been easy bedfellows. The FF's greatest strength, as Doctor Doom might say, is also their greatest weakness. Not that this is actually true. Mass media audiences love family drama, they love it on television particularly. In comics the audience is seen as young and troubled. The comic audience, accepted wisdom would have us believe, reject the institution of family. At the outset, the FF's members were all pretty one-note, which is not a surprise, given the time and cultural context of their origin. We had Reed, the absent minded professor. Sue, the woman in the background keeping it all together. Johnny, the impulsive young hothead. And Ben, the stoic best friend providing a foundation for the other members. A clue to how hard it was for any of the early writers to layer this are the power set of the team. The four had powers that exactly mirrored their cookie cutter personalities. Are you beginning to glaze? Are you starting to think that maybe it's a good thing that the comic is over and no surprise that the films suck? Good. Then you're thinking like a film executive with no imagination. Have a dozen fresh-baked internet smug points on me. The writing trick to overcome flat personalities is pretty simple. You add more layers to the personality - this makes characters more rounded and everyone happier. Good characters are the foundation of family drama, and any television writer will happily tell you that. In the world of comic books, however, we have wandered far from the point. One dimensional characters are fine. You can get away with it as long as they're facing interesting challenges and fascinating foes. Ask Batman! (Waits for Bat-rage from all corners of the internet to die down. Continues.) The comics cheated the whole "flat characters" problem. It did this by having the intrepid foursome face some of the weirdest villains ever created. From Doom to Galactus, the FF faced off against everything the weird science playbook had to offer. Therein lies a false problem that only the films have ever encountered. Film execs appear to believe that the First Family's arch-nemesis, Doctor Doom, is too silly. Okay, so here's a megalomaniac scientist magician who is the ruler of his own country. He dresses in the most ridiculous armour and green hooded cloak and speaks only in villain talk. I can see how that might be a tough thing to picture audiences taking seriously. I don't think film audiences, or comic audiences, were ever supposed to take Doom seriously on face value. Doctor Doom is a weird assault upon normative values at every level. When you stand before his Latverian throne and are commanded to kneel before your new overlord you are supposed to kick back. You are supposed to want to punch him in his stupid, armoured face and mock him for his pretention. Then you realise, holy crap, he has a country, he has an army and he's a twisted genius. So you kneel, resenting every minute your knee touches the floor. That's how Doom works. He would be a demi-god, but he keeps undermining his own power by posturing and showing off. In order to pull that off you need to be daring as a storyteller. The minute you try to tone that down you shoot yourself in the foot. For this reason, it is the Corman flick's Doctor Doom that is the most compelling iteration of the villain in any movie so far produced. In Corman's vision Doctor Doom must be every bit as awe-inspiringly ridiculous as he was in the comics. There's only so much you can do with $1 Million budget but still... the heart is there. Doom just typifies the heart of how Marvel dealt with the "one-dimensional family" problem. Their response to having limited character resources was to come up with crazy ideas. Like a villain who turns people into two dimensional beings and stores them on sheets of paper*. The spirit of the Fantastic Four became a spirit of science-adventure. This represents the key problem shared by both film and comics when it comes to the FF. Superhero comics are "supposed" to be about steroid-y buff dudes punching one another. What fate then, for a group of people having wacked out adventures solving problems in fringe science? What fate indeed? If they're supposed to be punching people, then I guess it's clobberin' time. The clue to the problem here is that Ben Grimm's catchphrase would be redundant in a Captain America story. I'm sorry Cap, but whenever you have a problem, it's always clobberin' time. If the Fantastic Four got a better deal in the comics it was because the comics were unafraid of having a few crazy tableaux. Outlandish cosmic beings (with or without purple buckets on their heads) are grist to the comic artist's mill. The films always flinched at going too far, being too ludicrous, going too far over the top. The other advantage the comics had was the number of writers able to bring their own vision to the characters. In all cases writers were never permitted to stray too far from the characters' "roots". This meant that character arcs often ended in chaos rather than development. Even so, in the in-between stages they had moments to be glorious. What needs to happen is that the culture itself needs to re-appraise the Fantastic Four as a superhero team. What needs to be recognized is their potential for universal appeal. As soon as you stop thinking of them as a power fantasy for teenage boys, they have a chance to be something remarkable. The other thing that needs to happen is that people need to run with the weird science angle of the concept. The fear that things are "too out there" needs to go. All signs point to the proposition that the Fantastic Four would be best served as a television concept. It is obvious this was something that occurred to Greg Berlanti and John Feldman working for ABC in 2010. The basis of their show No Ordinary Family is a clear rip off of the Fantastic Four. That show failed in two vital aspects, the characters were flat and the weird science aspect didn't go far enough. Way to fumble the ball guys. Meanwhile, in the world of cinema, Fantastic Four once again finds itself re-tooled. No surprise it is a "dark re-imagining" aimed with precision at exactly the wrong audience again. So with a heavy sigh I return to the comic back catalogue. A place where science-fantasy dreams come alive in glorious coloured ink. A place where I can dream my little dream of Susan Storm actually being allowed to have some kind of authentic personality. * I don't know if this is true, but it should be. What do you think of the "problems" movies have with FF? How do you feel about the Fantastic Four's place in modern media? |
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