A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

The Incredible Hulk, or rather, Bruce Banner and not the Hulk himself, is one of the greatest characters ever created. I can already hear the groans of undead snobs rolling over in their graves and preparing to claw their way up through the dirt and grass (and maybe concrete) just so they can sink their decaying teeth into me and eat my brains for daring to say something so sacrilegious, but bear with me. In his very conception, the Hulk has every bit as much to say about humanity as The Lord of the Flies or any other treasure of literature, because he’s a metaphor for the constant struggle we all face to reconcile our animal natures with the demands of civilization. Everyone has a raging beast of some sort within, whether it has humungous fists and a hard right jab or maybe just a really acid tongue, and everyone has to struggle to restrain that beast in order to get along with other people and fit into society. To borrow a term from Ursula K. Le Guin, the Hulk is just a literalization of the metaphor of that beast, and as such, you can do virtually anything with him. He’s a fantastic tool for writing stories that are not only exciting and larger than life, but also deep, emotional, philosophical, and universal.

The latest attempt at bringing the Hulk to a wide audience, though, The Incredible Hulk (starring the great Edward Norton as Bruce Banner and an unfortunate CGI creation as the Hulk) fails to realize most of that potential, because the creative team behind the film turned the struggle within Bruce Banner from a war between his two natures — and by extension, all our two natures — into a detached clinical problem involving pulse rates and some multicolored goop that can be viewed under a microscope. I’m not saying science fiction (or the trappings thereof) shouldn’t be involved in a Hulk story; that would be silly. But instead of Banner struggling with his own impulses towards anger, his own desire to smash, and his own very obvious need to civilize himself and maintain the restraint of civilization at all times, we just see him watching a heart rate monitor and trying to keep the number from getting too high when he runs. In other words, the writers turned the Hulk from a tragic flaw that arises from Banner’s very nature into an arbitrary problem that could have happened to anyone, and in so doing they stripped the universal, relatable metaphor out of the story and thus deprived the audience of an absolutely essential point of emotional identification — the very thing that makes a story work in the first place.

I imagine they did this to try to make Banner more “likeable”, since that’s one of the big watchwords in the studio system nowadays, and a guy with an anger management problem doesn’t necessarily seem “likeable” on the surface, but that’s what good writing is all about: making a flawed and very human person likeable anyway so that we all care about his struggle.

The movie is actually both more successful and somewhat more sadly flawed than I’ve let on, though, because in other areas, the writers did take some advantage of the metaphor. With the exception of true, dyed-in-the-wool, no-exceptions pacifists, most people probably agree that anger and even violence have their place and are sometimes appropriate. Killing someone in self-defense when he’s trying to cut your heart out with a chainsaw, for example, or defending a child from a marauding priest with a raging hard-on, would probably seem appropriate to most people. The key is deciding where and when violence and anger are appropriate, and using them only in those times and places — and then only in appropriate measures. With Emil Blonsky, the villain of the film (played wonderfully by Tim Roth) we get the perfect foil for the twin characters of Banner and Hulk: someone who wants to be all id all the time and has no use whatsoever for restraint. In fact, in turning himself into the Abomination, he completely and utterly repudiates civilization and thus creates the ultimate justification — indeed demand — for Banner to let the Hulk loose: to defend ordinary civilized people from monsters like Blonsky.

As far as it goes, this is absolutely terrific writing.  Banner and the audience both get to see the consequences of embracing anger (e.g. the Hulk) without any kind of limit, and Banner is also forced to learn that sometimes the Hulk (i.e. anger) is actually a necessary and good thing.  The problem is that Banner’s decision to willingly become the Hulk and fight the Abomination hasn’t been set up as the culmination of a struggle within himself between his desire to be peaceful and his very human urge to lash out. It’s not the resolution of a character arc in which he finally realizes he’s been trying to make a false choice and he suddenly has to look at everything he thinks he knows in a whole new light. It’s not even a particularly meaningful character arc point at all, because Banner has been so sanitized and stripped of depth that the choice doesn’t actually mean very much at all.

Instead, Banner just sits around sulking about how bad it sucks to be him and how he can’t be with the woman he loves and everyone’s chasing him and it’s just not fair, and then some shit happens, the end. There’s some good, fun stuff in the movie, but overall, it’s a big missed opportunity, and the money folks could’ve made a heckuva lot more money off their investment if they’d just paid more attention to the script.  It’s understandable that they didn’t, because they’re money people after all, not script people, and script people need money people just as much as money people need script people, but the problems in communication between the two are a subject for another day.

Every now and then the success of a movie surprises me a little, and May 2008 is one of those times.  Why is Iron Man doing so well?

The villain’s plan is the most important part of an action movie or a thriller, but the plan in Iron Man isn’t just generic, it’s not even sketched out very clearly in the first place.  And to make matters worse, whatever exactly it is, it has something to do with selling arms to bad guys in other parts of the world who want to use them on their own people, or maybe on their own immediate neighbors, meaning it has no direct effect on any of the characters in the film, on any of the people they care about, or even on most people in the audience in most parts of the globe.  So the stakes suck.

(Oh, and note to manufacturers illegally selling arms: don’t leave your company’s name prominently stenciled on the boxes.  I mean, duh!)

Just as importantly, the resolution of the protagonist’s character arc (his growth, or the lesson he learns) has to be intimately bound up with the defeat of the villain’s plan — it’s literally the way the protagonist changes and improves as a person that enables him to finally defeat the villain — but in Iron Man, the creative team actually made Tony Stark’s character development part of the problem!  He starts out as a stereotypical weapons dealer who’s unmoved by the harm wreaked by his work, but when he’s kidnapped by terrorists and he sees the toll his weapons take up close and personal, he vows he won’t sell any more weapons until he figures out some way to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands and being used against innocent people.  Sounds like a neat idea, both in terms of weapons and character design, right?  But while his solution is the Iron Man suit, something that can’t be used against innocent people because he’s the one piloting it, the suit immediately complicates matters enormously when the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic, I mean, Obadiah Skid-Marks, or whatever the heck the villain’s name is, copies the suit and not only makes a much bigger, stronger version of it but plans to sell boatloads of them to bad guys all over the world!  Kind of makes the whole Iron Man suit concept look like a really bad idea, huh?  Sort of makes you wish Tony Stark had just stuck to being a heartless weapons dealer and left well enough alone, right?

Well, imagine instead if the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic actually had a really cool villain’s plan: sell (or even give!) a whole bunch of weapons to terrorists so they can stage a huge attack on the United States… which would force the US to buy lots and lots and lots of weapons from the Dread and Terrifying Mr. Generic in order to fight back, making him super-rich and mega-powerful!  Then maybe he wouldn’t be so generic, and people in the audience would really care about (and understand) his plan and the efforts of the hero to stop him.  Even people in other countries would care a lot, because nobody without a vested interest in the proceedings wants the US to go to war.  Let’s face it, war pretty much sucks infected corpses for everyone.

If this were Stane’s plan, then Tony Stark’s character growth would be perfectly and completely bound up with the conflict of the story: his earlier uncaring self would have enabled his co-executive Mr. Generic’s devious villainy, and his new, better self (and the Iron Man suit his new, better self created) would be required to defeat Generic and his terrorist army — and better yet, he could defeat them without even starting a war at all.  That would be awesome.  That would be an incredibly satisfying ending.  And since we’re at war now in the real world, and because it often seems like there are no good solutions, just more problems, it would give the audience a huge cathartic release of all the tension and fear they’re carrying around because of real-world events — tension and fear which can’t, at the moment, be released in the real world.  That’s called taking advantage of the zeitgeist.

Some of you may be figuring I’m completely full of ass because Iron Man is making tons and tons of bank and looks to be a monster success, but after some thought, I came to the conclusion that there are two basic reasons for that.  One, the economy sucks and the war sucks and everything sucks and there seems to be no way out, so just like a really full balloon can wind up being popped by a lot of things, even a brush with a sticker magnet on the fridge, not just by a really well-sharpened needle, people were primed for release and Iron Man provided it.  And two, which is kind of a variation on one, it was the first movie of the summer, and whatever its flaws, it provided some definite summer pleasures, including Robert Downey Jr.’s awesome lead performance, nice acting all around, some really fun effects, a few good suit sequences, and the first appearance of a popular superhero character in his own movie.  But I’ll make you a bet that unfortunately nobody will ever be able to collect on either way: if the script had been structured and written better, the movie would’ve made even more money.  A lot more money.  And it would’ve built even more interest in the inevitable sequel.  Unless someone has a time machine or a scope that can look into alternate universes, there’s no way to prove I’m right, but I’m sure I am.

It’s fashionable in some circles to beat up on Spider-Man 3, but while there’s no question that it fails to live up to the standard set by its two predecessors, it’s actually a moderately entertaining and partially satisfying movie. The problem is that its authors tried to cram too many characters, too many narrative threads and too many different themes into the story. There’s not enough time to adequately dramatize and satisfactorily resolve them all — but simply making the movie longer wouldn’t have helped, because some of its themes have nothing whatsoever to do with the others.

Part of the movie concerns Peter Parker’s internal struggle with the arrogance that can easily come with power. This dilemma is magnified by his infection by the Venom parasite, which makes him a stronger Spider-Man but also strips away his inhibitions and heightens his negative emotions, making him more selfish, more arrogant and more likely to act on his anger.

The foundation of his character arc also could have meshed extremely well with his ongoing external conflict with Harry Osborn over Peter’s role in Harry’s father’s death. Harry is rich and has some of the selfishness and arrogance that often come with wealth, particularly inherited wealth, and his emotions drive him to take bloody revenge on Peter. The two characters, therefore, had the potential to dramatize one of the basic themes of the Spider-Man mythos — namely that with great power comes great responsibility — and to organically explore the internal tension between selfish arrogance and selfless nobility. When Harry imbues himself with super-strength and sets out for revenge without care for the consequences to anyone else (to the city in general, which would lose its protector if Harry succeeded in killing Peter, but also to any innocent bystanders caught up in the whirlwind of their combat and to Mary Jane and Aunt May, two people he ostensibly cares about) Peter could have been given a rude awakening, seeing his own Venom-exacerbated but nonetheless real selfishness and arrogance reflected in Harry, and deciding to renounce both his unhealthy emotions and the extra power offered by the parasite.

Unfortunately, neither this theme nor the effect of the Venom parasite are adequately dramatized. Yes, Peter Parker does cavalierly injure and defeat Harry while wearing his black suit, and yes, there are some extremely funny scenes involving his stuck up behavior towards women, but we never really see the appeal of the parasite — its upside, the reason Peter wouldn’t just throw it away immediately — because we never actually see the extra power the black suit grants him, and instead of serving as a dark mirror for Peter’s newly dark self, Harry suffers from amnesia and meanders out of the story for awhile.

Much of the problem stems from the fact that the movie throws an additional villain into the mix: Sandman, whose thematic nature is utterly at odds with the rest of the story. The Sandman material is about feeling the need to do bad things for good reasons (Flint Marko, who becomes the Sandman, attempts to steal money to save his daughter’s life) and learning to see the shades of gray in life when people want everything to be either black or white. In the end, Marko renounces his criminal ways, and rather than obeying the letter of the law, Peter lets him go. This is fertile ground for a story and could have made a fantastic Spider-Man movie by itself, even potentially tying into the Harry Osborn storyline, as Harry too has done things that require forgiveness, and forgiving Marko could have enabled Peter to forgive Harry — and Harry to forgive Peter. But that would have been a very different movie, one that didn’t involve Venom or Peter’s struggle with his personality and with unhealthy emotions.

The schism between the two disparate themes and narrative threads is most evident in the scene when Sandman and Venom form an alliance to take down Spider-Man. This is entirely in character for Venom, who is driven by the petty emotions of rage, jealousy and vengeance, but utterly out of character for Sandman, who just wants to be left alone so he can try to help his daughter. The Flint Marko whom we’ve gotten to know simply wouldn’t actively seek to kill Spider-Man, let alone deliberately endanger the life of an innocent woman in order to accomplish that goal. The authors of the film try to use this development to merge two fundamentally incompatible story lines, but that simply cannot work.

So that’s the lesson of Spider-Man 3. Both stories it tries to tell are intriguing and partially dramatized, but the movie as a whole is thematically scattered all over the place instead of being tightly focused. Every movie, whether it’s a blockbuster or an aesthetically challenging micro-budget indie, needs one fundamental theme underlying the entire story. Every scene, every character and indeed every subsidiary theme is just an aspect of that single foundational master theme, and a movie requires that all the relevant aspects of that theme be dramatized if it’s going to be complete, just as all the colors of light are required to combine to form true white.