By Kent M. Beeson
This week debuts The Watchman, a new column by Kent M. Beeson. Every other Wednesday, Kent will put his combined cinephile/comic-book-geek background to good use by taking a look at a film or TV series that crosses into the comic book market.
Let me confess my sin up-front and get it out of the way: I pretty much left comics in 1990. I was starting college, so the money wasn't there, and the nearest place to get them was a bookstore one town over, and me without a driver's license. It hurt at first -- I'd been reading and collecting for almost ten years previous -- but soon the pangs of missing the weekly ritual were replaced by the ritual of the midnight movie. I traded my comic geekdom for the life of a cinephile, exchanging
The Uncanny X-Men,
Suicide Squad and
The Badger for Orson Welles, film noir and talky French flicks.
But I never lost my love for comics, nor their ubiquitous and occasionally reviled spokespersons, the superheroes. So it's been heartening to see a slow-building movement within the film industry -- powered, no doubt, by the rise of geek-affiliated writers, directors and producers -- to treat comics with respect. Bryan Singer's
X-Men appears to be the turning point for Hollywood adaptations -- reverent without being afraid of taking liberties, character-focused, and surprisingly low-key. While we've put up with such abominations as
Fantastic Four, generally, the track record the last ten years or so has been pretty good. When Zack Snyder sets his
Watchmen film in 1985 and wants to film the "Black Freighter" segment, you know there's been a sea change.
And with that sea change comes the opportunity to bring something different to the screen. Marjane Satrapi's
Persepolis 1 and
2, at first glance, seems like an unlikely choice to make the jump from comics to film. In the memoir about growing up in post-revolution 1980s Iran, Satrapi uses a deceptively crude style -- imagine Art Spielgelman drawing
Fineous Fingers from the old
Dragon magazine -- to trace the path of "Marji", her comic self, from little kid to alienated teen to liberated adult. The book's greatest achievement is detailing her country's huge cultural changes in a way that's both clear to the reader and true to her child-self's eyes. However, to be honest,
Persepolis the book is a fairly middlebrow work; it's that most blandly universal of genres, the coming-of-age story. And even though it is a memoir during an incredibly turbulent time, there's still something myopic about it. (Reading it, I couldn't help but wonder if, had I met Satrapi during that time, I'd find her absolutely insufferable.) Nonetheless, it's still effective -- the stark black-and-white art feels, at times, like the obsessive scrawls of someone who's telling her story like her life depended on it.
Satrapi co-wrote and co-directed the Oscar-nominated film version with Vincent Paronnaud, and this kind of hands-on creative control would suggest a faithful rendering of the source material. And it is, to a point. The herky-jerkiness and digressiveness of the book's narrative has been whittled down to a more traditional Hollywood-style "arc" -- Marji's lifelong search for her true self in the face of an oppressive religious regime that demands its women hew to a monolithic identity -- making for a more comfortably polished story. The characters are recognizably Satrapian, but they've been smoothed-out and prettified, while the flat (or non-existent) backgrounds of the novel have been replaced with more detailed, somewhat Gerhard-esque buildings and trees. And of course, the very fact that Satrapi's creations are now
moving is a huge change, but there's an unexpected touch of Miyazaki to the animation, the way a bicycle takes a corner or the menacing, nun-like Guardians of the Revolution who swoop and slither around Marji like No Face from
Spirited Away. It's an absolutely gorgeous film.
But here's the thing: for all the flaws of the comic, and for all of the virtues of the film, I can't help but feel like the film betrays something of the original source. It's in the second half, when Marji arrives in Vienna to escape from the war with Iraq. It's a potentially dangerous move for a story that, up until this point, has relied on the heroine's homeland to provide context to the rather rote coming-of-age drama. Yet, while the book anchors all the requisite points of this kind of tale (Crippling solitude! Bad boyfriends! Stifling marriage!) to Marji's outsider status, the film lets these blandly universal events become the story. "It was like a bad American movie," she writes in the book, all too aware of how cliché her relationship with her first boyfriend has ended. In the film, it's
exactly like a bad American movie, and sadly, it feels like Satrapi is happy with that. The entire second half is like this, forgoing the sociological detail for shopworn melodrama, culminating with the hokey "you go girl!" uplift of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger". It's probably enough for most audiences -- the rapturous reviews indicate as much -- but to me, it's a sad reminder that you can put comics on the screen, even critically-acclaimed ones, but it sometimes comes at a price.
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Slouching Towards Metropolis (The New Frontier)Kent M. Beeson is a former contributor to ScreenGrab and is a long-time cinephile and comic book lover. He maintains a film-related blog called This Can't End Well.
The Watchman is © Kent M. Beeson, 2008
