17. (October 2021, ahead of announcement of a new Director’s cut for Suicide Squad)
What are we?
There is an importance to making art and art is important; making quiet, personal art, making large mass-market art. It’s the nature of the movie-making system that to paint on the largest canvas you have to compromise to commercial interests, commercial brands, ‘intellectual property’ — and the corrosive influence of that term has burned away more culture than any ‘modern mythology’ could hope to restore. But what comes out is still art, sometimes pop art, sometimes crass art, sometimes art we appreciate and sometimes art we don’t.
Making art — making meaning — and showing it, or not showing it, saving it or destroying it. These are universal experiences. Showing art to each other is how we come to understand ourselves in relation to another human being. We cannot communicate directly, brain-to-brain. We only have words and images, and we use them to tell each other things we don’t even know we know.
This goes some way to explaining the sense of natural justice to hearing that someone has prevailed against the machine and had their authentic vision made available, however much the nature of a collaborative artform means that the idea of any one ‘vision’ is illusory. It was right that the world got to see Blade Runner without narration, it was right that Ken Russell’s The Devils was liberated from the censors, and it was right that Zack Snyder got to release his Justice League. If this list is of films by directors with a fairly homogenous demographic, it is only because relief for this injustice, like so many others, is distributed unfairly. But that does not make any individual case less unjust.
Which is all to say that it is as important that David Ayer gets to have his cut of Suicide Squad as it is when an indie musician releases a treasured album or a writer submits their first essay. It may not even be ‘good’, whatever ‘good’ should mean. It has probably come about as the result of some tedious bean-counting exercise; such is the world we live in. But we should celebrate that on the largest scale there is an affirmation that it is good for people to be able to create and release art for its own sake, and for the sake of creative integrity.
I closed out my last essay by saying that “Suicide Squad is over, for now.” Somehow, against all odds, Suicide Squad has another attempt to explain itself.
Editorial note: Contrary to rumour at the time, there was no announcement and Suicide Squad did not get another attempt to explain itself.
Some works remain evocative of a time and place for you, even when the time and place they are set aren’t really all that similar to the circumstances you remember. Such it was for me and Scott Pilgrim, which I read on the cusp of the age it concerns, living nowhere with even the slightest similarity to Toronto. I was in fact somewhere between the ages of Scott, a 23-year-old serial moocher, and Knives, his inappropriately young 17-year-old partner with whom he’s kidding himself at the start of the books. It’s a terrible age to be.
When I bought the first three books I was stuck in a rut, studying a terrible Maths degree at a university in a field outside of Coventry. When I bought the final three, I had (possibly for the first time) made a significant life choice that would ultimately change almost everything about me — not uncommon, I’m sure, for a 20-year old. I moved, I changed what I was doing, and I started to change how I thought. I bought a guitar, of course.
The story of Scott Pilgrim is the story of a young man who crafts grand stories about his achievements and successes, set in a world which makes many of these things cheekily literal. When talking about their school-years romance, band drummer Kim Pine describes how Scott fought his way through a River City Ransom scenario, defeating hordes of fellow students in hand-to-hand combat to rescue her. When Scott fells each of Ramona Flowers’ evil ex-boyfriends, they explode into a handful of change commensurate with their social standing. And when Ramona vanishes towards the end of volume 5 and his friends are either too busy or too far away to participate in his heroic pursuit of her, Scott enters something like a period of depression, drifting from place to place and struggling to put his self-image back together. When he does, it’s by recognising that his actions have always depended on and had an impact on others. Rescuing Kim was a great triumph for him, but their relationship always sucked for her.
Much of the subtlety of Scott Pilgrim is lost or muddied in the collective memory because it was omitted from the 2010 Edgar Wright film, Scott Pilgrim vs The World. The film was a necessarily condensed retelling that was scripted before the final book was even written, packing six books-worth of plot into a 1h52 runtime. And there is lots of subtlety to be found in the books, despite the bombast and the action and the video game theming — it may be hard to imagine now, but at the time the concept of a story being embellished with elements of video gaming was novel and exciting. The film sticks with this world of heightened metaphor, having the climax being Scott approaching the same scene twice, once as the embodiment of heroic love and once as the embodiment of a more mature self-respect. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s less emotionally complex than the long, drawn-out ennui Scott experiences over the final two books.
Scott has always assumed that he will be the hero in whatever story he’s living. If he’s dating a high schooler it’s okay because it’s him, even if he’s dating a high schooler. If breaking up with Envy Adams made him feel bad then she must have been at fault, because it’s him and he’s feeling bad. What changes him is the realisation that he was prioritising fighting the evil exes — prioritising the story — over his actual relationship with Ramona. Ramona’s affection is not determined in a fight between Scott and a bunch of third parties. To reach that place though, he has to go through the breakdown of this assumption of default heroism.
When I think of the Scott Pilgrim books, I think of those passages between volumes 5 and 6 where Scott is at a low ebb, feeling useless, propped up by his parents and failing on his own standards as well as anyone else’s. That’s much how I felt when I was reading them, having notably at one time scored a straight zero on an exam paper. It wasn’t even that I didn’t show up — I showed up, sat with the paper in front of me for the mandatory minimum thirty minutes, then left. What was happening, which I didn’t recognise at the time, was that despite whatever aptitude I had for the subject, I didn’t have any affection for it. I didn’t want to learn Maths. I’d just assumed for my whole life that I would. Questions like “Who do I want to like me?” are unanswerable if you’ve always assumed that anyone who knows you will like you.
I don’t know if I always viewed myself as the hero in any story, but like most people I viewed myself to some extent as the protagonist, or someone whose job was to fill the role of the protagonist. What changed for me was the realisation that I could choose to do things in my life that I enjoyed. It’s an obvious realisation — but everyone has to make it once. With the help of my friends, much like Scott, I did just that. Brian Lee O’Malley has an earlier book, ‘Lost at Sea’, about a young twenty-something who goes on a road trip with some friends she belatedly realises have invited her along by accident, but has a great time with anyway. O’Malley has a real talent for capturing the young adult mix of absolute confidence and unbearable self-doubt.
All of this is prologue to discussing how Scott Pilgrim is back. O’Malley, along with BenDavid Grabinski, has penned an eight-episode follow up series for Netflix, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, that apes the best elements of other legacy sequels like Matrix: Resurrection and Rebuild of Evangelion. The show starts as a direct adaptation of the books before veering off into an alternate sequence of events where Scott is out of the picture for much of the period of the original plot and Ramona instead is forced to reckon with her wants and responsibilities. Ramona of course was never so much of a fantasist as Scott, and so her story — while goofy, adorable and action-packed — is more easily resolved. She apologises to the exes who were unfairly hurt and the others simply find other relationships to obsess over. It’s a breath of fresh air with much in common with Matrix: Resurrections’ handling of Trinity, another female character who while she wasn’t underserved in her original appearances was still forced into a particular kind of role by the story having one set hero who wasn’t her.
Scott has to return of course, and when he does it’s with the gimmick of time travel. Future Scott, a thirty-something with an impressive beard (and a coat he really should have thrown away by now) has hit a rough patch in his relationship with lifelong-love Ramona and decided that the only way to heal his broken heart is to reach into the past and have the relationship never happen at all. It all gets a bit silly from here, with the desire to give Ramona the agency in resolving this plot at odds with the fact that weird, buff, forty-plus Scott is the climactic villain. But the basic idea is sound: what would a character as flawed as Scott be doing in his thirties, if things had gone badly for him? Searching for the fault in his stars is as sound a choice as any. Catastrophising any blip into a grand narrative of failure. The positive side of always seeing yourself as the hero in any story is never seeing yourself as the victim. Future Scott realises — or is forced to realise, really — that his mistakes are his own doing and not some cosmic contrivance that could have been avoided with the benefit of hindsight.
It’s an interesting approach to the question of what these characters went on to do which avoids — to some extent — the trap of writing a new dramatic arc with characters who already completed their story the first time round. It’s necessarily unsatisfying if Scott and Ramona actually lived happily ever after. It’s necessarily bleak if it all went wrong for them. The need for conflict in a new story means sequels and revisitations tend towards the latter — I’ve heard many complaints about the unkind future Dial of Destiny proposed for the character of Indiana Jones, left sad and alone after his many adventures. But neither route obviously leads to a compelling narrative. What’s needed is a new story, which is something that could always really be better tackled with new characters rather than the baggage of old ones. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off splits the difference: the future characters are speculations, what-ifs. The present characters have the interiority. Even if all the people who read it have grown up, Scott will always be 23.
For myself, I don’t regret the path my life took to reach the point it’s at now. I hope that’s true in ten years time and I hope that’s true in twenty years time. And selfishly, I’d like to find myself able to revisit Scott Pilgrim and the gang again, if it’s as thoughtful (and funny) as Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. But if I don’t it won’t be a big deal. There was a time and a place where Scott Pilgrim meant a great deal to me, and while it’s nice to visit it I don’t want to get stuck there. I don’t want to go to war with my younger self, like Scott does. It’s a good lesson, but as with all the lessons Scott Pilgrim has to offer it’s sure to feel straightforward in retrospect.
If you appreciate my writing, watch my new video essay The Fanatic, available now with a short companion essay kindly published by Blood Knife. If you’re after more text, please follow me on Medium or subscribe to my Letterboxd reviews.
This is the eighth and final in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.
Last time the show was tidying things up in anticipation of the big… beginning?
And so the clock ticks back round to the midnight position. Here we are in the first episode, and handily (for the purpose of writing a series of reviews backwards) it is itself a mix of beginnings and endings. I was more surprised than anything by how little the scene of ultra-violence at the end of the episode can be called a ‘twist’. The comparisons to Watchmen have ultimately been thematic rather than direct as I’ve gone through the series, but I think there’s something here in how the episode plays out deterministically — from the moment we’re introduced to the Guardians of the Globe there’s a palpable sense of sand moving through the hour-glass. These are not our characters, they receive precisely enough characterisation so that we know their skill set and we vaguely empathise with them, and not a moment more. The fight scene itself is almost perfunctory, the result a foregone conclusion, happening as it does post-credits. This was all done 35 minutes ago.
There are the parts I didn’t anticipate, like the vague unease with which the Guardians treat Omni-man as their unofficial extra member. There’s some very effective cinematography making sure that Omni-man’s appearance on the White House lawn is a little bit off, a little bit tense. The Immortal, last seen dug out of a grave and howling Omni-man’s name, seems like a complete asshole in the minor interactions with him we see. At least in terms of Omni-man, however, he is correct — his naked distrust as he pauses to check that Omni-man is bothering to catch the airborne people he’s hurling is impossible to read any other way, even if we didn’t know the twist.
Omni-man enters this group shot last, legs together where everyone else’s are apart. His cape continues to flutter in a breeze that doesn’t touch the others.
What is interesting is the sense, through the whole episode, that it’s Mark gaining his powers that has set this whole affair in motion. That Omni-man had plans long laid that have been brought into action as a result of needing to teach his son the Saiyan ways. It’s almost a shame this isn’t vocalised in the finale, unsubtle as the show is in most other ways. Puberty is a traumatic experience that can feel like it is completely destabilising the world around you — imagine if it really was. Omni-man, for his part, is not being very smart at all. His long-term plan for the child was clearly thought up around the time we see him give the puberty talk and little revised since; when he does speak the whole truth in episode 8, it’s an earlier Omni-man speaking. He can’t hold true to those principles himself any more, and ultimately doesn’t, flying off.
I wish there were more scenes with Debbie and Mark in the show, although to some extent what we get here sets the entire tone — there’s more of her in him than his father, and that’s going to make him completely unreceptive to the fascist rhetoric his father will pitch him with.
The Immortal’s distasteful persona is perhaps foreshadowing Rex’s participation in the New Guardians — and the general disfunction that that team will have in both their professional and personal lives. I don’t think it’s ever mentioned after this episode that Guardians HQ is in the side of a mountain; I’d been imagining a Justice League-esque Watchtower satellite this entire time. There’s some thematic purpose here — Cecil is notably fond of being able to place awkward people in subterranean pits to get rid of them, between the Guardian HQ, the prison where the cloners were being kept, and his sending the Rorschach demon back to ‘Hell’.
In the other direction, Mark pauses briefly to look over the city, enamoured with his newfound flight, and sits on the end of a crane in what is probably not a refence to Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, but that’s certainly what it brought forward for me. Tom Cruise’s character, a crane operator, is spatially mirrored with the invading Martian tripods in his position up high above the city, and through the film learns to care for his family rather than his oblique idea of ‘protecting’ them. Mark’s arc through Invincible is not dissimilar, though obviously the perspective is shifted. His father, Omni-man, actively tries to see the world from the perspective of the crane. Every time Mark tries to intervene from on high however, he comprehensively fucks it up.
Some final notes on the episode itself, I did have a little laugh realising the extremely hammy visuals of the Saiyan planet from episode 8 were a direct parody of the harmonious visions in this first one. Getting the blood out of those pure white bodysuits must be hell. And as metaphors go, Mark leaving a crator every time he lands is extremely on-the-nose — he will continue to do that, metaphorically or literally, all the way to the final episode of the season.
A small thing, but the connected cold opens in this episode and the next were extremely charming, another dead-on throwback to the style of serialised superhero cartoons like Batman: The Animated Series, the episode-local supporting cast who get painted in the broadest strokes — “I can’t connect with my son!”/”Thank God I’ve finally connected with my son!”. For a series which ultimately hinges on an argument about whether the lives of the ‘little people’ matter, those non-superhero types are phased out as the series goes on. As well, a welcome early appearance for Titan, the man with stone for skin from episode 5, who I liked so much that just seeing him here improved my impression of this one.
The act of watching the episodes backwards, arbitrary as it was, ended up highlighting the Watchmen comparisons more than anything. We started in episode 8 with Dr Manhattan leaving the earth, then wound back to episode 7 to see that the world’s most intelligent man poses no more threat than the world’s most intelligent ant. Then back to episode 4 where we see Rorschach leave his journal, and all the way back here in the first episode we have what is effectively the Comedian being murdered. As I mentioned in the write-up of episode 4, I think one of the modern developments in comic superheros is that all of the heroes, in their complicity with the state, are akin to the Comedian. And so here we are with them all dying like the Comedian. The only act of heroism we see the Guardians do is defending the White House lawn, casting them as stronger, more mobile versions of the mounted guns that here line the White House roof. We want Omni-man to be brought to justice for their murder, of course, but my prevailing thought as the credits rolled was ‘good riddence’.
I wasn’t expecting to like Invincible, but obviously in the end I did. This is maybe not that surprising — it’s pulling from DC’s animated series, which I was always fond of, and from Buffy which was also a strong influence on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. Watchmen, as well, obviously. The gravity of Watchmen in this area is best captured by the decision to include a Rorschach character in the show, a role so unsuited to the modern-day setting that he had to be gratuitously shoved through a door halfway through the season. Overall, what struck me most was the way in which the show seamlessly integrates the kind of totalising military presence which has been made default by the Marvel movies, with shadowy state actors directing and influencing a crowd of superheros who are somewhere between private military contractors and celebrity influencers. In a world of near-universal surveillance, everyone is always watching the Watchmen.
I’m a little wary, rewatching the episode 8 ending montage, of where all this galactic nonsense is going to go. Seth Rogan’s character seems to me like a harbinger of some kind of eternal space liberalism, where we fly away from Earth to find out while we might be under threat from the space facists, there’s a well-meaning group of participants in space republic who, while they may be inefficient, mean well and want to help out. I’m worried that it will turn out that for all its mooted cynicism, this will be another world where there’s always a bigger parent to cry to.
But accordingly, and in final conclusion, I award the show the highest honour I am capable of bestowing: I’d probably watch a second season.
Evidently I preferred the second half of the season, though that might just be a necessary outcome of having a bunch of tedious world-building to get out of the way. That said, I certainly managed without it. Ultimately #6 was the only episode I’d consider bad outright, with #5 and #8 the obvious standouts.
This is the seventh in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.
We arrive at the precipice, the penultimate instalment of Invincible viewed backwards. Game of Thrones, among other “prestige” TV shows, gave the penultimate episode a sense of importance: these are the episodes where Ned Stark dies, the narrative climax of our season-long train of events. This is a role that a second episode viewed in reverse order can’t really hope to fill — there are no grand revelations here, no sudden departures. Instead we get as close to a stock episode of the show as is possible, an artefact from a dimension where Invincible is a Saturday-morning cartoon, with every week a new villainous threat.
It’s an episode heaving at the seams with what you might call “world-building”, endless detailing of who knows who from where, why, and when— and if you were invested in the worthiness of the itemised lists of facts about fictional worlds, this would be a fine first episode to watch. I may have given an involuntary groan upon realising I was being shown an establishing shot of an American High School, straight out of Family Guy. The sketch we’re given here for the structure of the show, interestingly enough however, is more in line with Rick and Morty than it would appear — from both subsequent episodes and from promotional materials . Space travel and inter-dimensional visits are firmly within bounds.
Reginald Vel Johnson High School, InvincibleAdam West High School, Family Guy
What’s interesting are the lengths the creators go to present a best-foot-forwards view of what the show is able to do, despite being bound up in all this housekeeping. This could easily have been another episode #3, a sloppy plate of here’s-what-you-get where the inadequacy of individual elements is (hopefully) excused by the variety of them. In an appropriately backwards manner, the episode ends with a gorgeously rendered high-contrast sweep of action, as Omni-man destroys the art deco dimension. Reminiscent of nothing more than the original plan for the Superman: The Animated Series introduction, it’s a striking end to the episode, even if it does highlight that nothing of such indulgent ambition in the animation turns up again, save perhaps some of the scenes of detailed viscera.
Superman: The Animated Series originally had a full stylised introduction in the style above, but it was revised to be a selection of clips from the show before release with only a small portion of the animation remaining.
The genius of Rick and Morty is in the recognition that the average viewer of a show like Rick and Morty is immersed in this kind of thing, and so is both likely to be very familiar with the tropes of sci-fi and fantasy — and be willing to explain them and/or read explanation of them at length on the internet. In this way, the show is free to engage in it’s iconic rapid-fire movement through different high-concept settings, pastiches and references. (This means the show is completely antithetical to ‘world-building’, by the by, and the writers are not afraid of nakedly poking fun at the legion of fans determined to fit the show into one unifying rational world.) The time-travelling aliens in this episode would fit easily into any given episode of Rick and Morty — we efficiently find out how they work (they move through time fast relative to us), the implications of that (they’ll be coming back) and then they come back. The basics fixed, we get some details that are going to cause us trouble: they advance very quickly technologically, but not so quickly that they cannot hold a grudge. And finally we get the twist: Omni-man can destroy their civilisation in the relative time it takes him to grow a small beard.
The trouble is that Rick and Morty isn’t just brutally efficient in the high-concept sci-fi settings; it’s also brutally efficient in the more prosaic stuff. Which is to say that most of this episode felt unnecessary to me, devoted to disseminating facts that are easily apparent from any given episode of the show — we get to find out that Eve goes to the same school as Mark, and she’s in a second-string hero gang led by an intolerable robot with tedious teammates. We get introduced to the space-CIA, exercising global authority under a constantly visible US flag. We’re introduced to Rex, who threads the needle between irritating and pathological a lot better here than he will in subsequent appearances (I can confidently state now that the scene where the “New Guardians” wash the blood off in episode 8 is, in full context of his season arc, still laughable).
As discussed in the previous episode (#3), every subsequent appearance from the detective demon has made him look less threatening and more incompetent. This episode does not break the pattern. He really does only feature for his five minutes of being-Rorschach.
Alien Seth Rogan is a pleasant diversion and nothing more — it was a little unclear to me whether or not he’d ultimately been to Earth before and what had happened? With the benefit of foresight I know he’s only coming back for some denouement at the end of the season anyway.
Because I don’t think I’ve mentioned it under any other episode heading, Sandra Oh (Debbie) really is top tier, along with JK Simmons (Omni-man) and Walton Goggins (Cecil). Between the three of them, the work-life balance scenes are consistently the most engaging scenes in the show.
I’ll take a moment to note the gorgeous design of the family house itself, a well-realised, well utilised set, despite being animated. It’s a house that at first appears open and welcoming, but the more time you spend with it the more it becomes clear that it’s a winding nest of secrets and cubby holes and invisible observers where the only constant is that wherever you are, someone could be watching. This episode may only be setting up the fundamentals, and to me that seems unnecessary, but it’s important to reflect on how much of those fundamentals — setting, casting, design— the show gets right.
Next time: we finally meet and then unmeet the Guardians of the Globe.
