An appreciation of THAT THING YOU DO on its 30th anniversary

This is a piece I originally wrote ten years ago for Film School Rejects on the occasion of THAT THING YOU DO's 20th Anniversary. Since Film School Rejects is no more, I've rescued that piece and am republishing it for the 30th anniversary of the film (which was actually yesterday, but who's counting). Man, time really flies. 

“I try and try to forget you girl, but it’s just so hard to doooo…”

It’s one of my favorite moments of pure joy in a film. A young rock band in 1964 Erie, Pennsylvania that has been slowly breaking in with a few gigs at talent shows and local restaurants, hears their song on the radio for the first time. The discovery is played first on Faye, the girlfriend of the lead singer, who is so stunned when she hears the song over her transistor radio that she runs screaming down the street, looking like a crazy person. She and another band member converge at the appliance store where their drummer works and before long, the broadcast is booming through the store as the four band members and the girlfriend dance rapturously to their own beat.

For my money, it’s one of the most endearing “Holy shit! We’ve made it!” scenes in film, and it’s one of the reasons that if I run across the film it belongs to on TV, I have to watch it.

That film is 1996’s That Thing You Do, the directorial and screenwriting debut of Tom Hanks. Today is the 30th anniversary of the film’s release. It’s the story of the Wonders (or “Oneders,” if you prefer), a one-hit wonder band that briefly becomes teen sensations during their quick assent and even faster fall from grace. The charming ensemble is led by Tom Everett Scott, playing Guy, the fill-in drummer drafted at the last minute before a talent show. Bored by the slow pace of the band’s ballad, Guy kicks up the tempo and a catchy pop hit is born.

Like many details in the film, this plot point is an allusion to the Beatles, whose early hit “Please Please Me” was also a sped-up ballad. For a movie that functions as a sort of tribute to sixties pop music, it’s notable that none of the the soundtrack is actually of the period. Often films set in that era mortgage emotion reactions on the backs of a licensed soundtrack, but every song heard was written specifically for the film. There are other acts that seem to be allusions to performers like Johnny Rivers and The Shirelles. Somewhat brilliantly, the soundtrack album composes its liner notes as if all acts appearing were actual bands of the era. It’s so straight-faced about this that years later, I met a girl in college who thought these were actual sixties legends.

But the real gem is the title track, which might even be more catchy than most of the hits it’s designed to pay tribute to. Considering the song is heard in full at three major points and in partial performances several more times, it’s a minor miracle we don’t get tired of it. In fact, it’s a rather catchy earworm, written by Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne and vocally performed by Mike Viola of the Candy Butchers. (Mike and Scott Rogness trade lead and background vocals on Little Wild One also, which was written by the Gigolo Aunts.) Hanks had held open submissions for the title track and another submission “I Need You (That Thing You Do)” can be heard over the closing credits. The other Wonders tracks we hear are almost as enjoyable. (I lobbied my wife unsuccessfully for the ballad “All My Only Dreams” to be the first dance at my wedding.)

Filling in the villain role is Johnathon Schaech as Jimmy, the bandleader. Most creative types probably like to think they’re “cool guy” Guy, but almost all of us have our “Jimmy moments.” From the start, he’s the serious one of the group, almost too serious, and the film plays that for a couple light laughs until it shifts gears to show “artistic integrity” can breed diva-ish attitudes. After several viewings over the years, I’ve come to wonder what an encounter between an older Guy and the band would be like. Would Jimmy own his mistakes or is he incapable of the growth that would lead him to admit fault?

And then there’s Faye. I’ll admit, as a teenage boy a lot of Faye’s appeal came from the fact she was played by Liv Tyler in the “post-Aerosmith girl” phase of her career. She was one of the It Girl crushes you were legally required to have in the mid-90s. Her character is another one you appreciate more after repeat viewings. She actually makes Jimmy’s arc more credible because we reason that if a girl this good can support Jimmy, there MUST be more to him than meets the eye. If you mention Liv’s part in this film, most people remember the “I’ve wasted thousands of kisses on you” speech, but where Tyler really shines is any scene that requires her to play off of Scott. Their chemistry is often smuggled within scenes, hidden in other business. It’s done just lightly enough to make the Guy/Faye pairing at the end credible without tipping the film’s hand.

I’d call it “good writing,” but it’s really “good editing,” and the evidence to support that is available. Bigger isn't always better, and that’s certainly true of the “extended cut” of That Thing You Do which tacks an extra 40 minutes onto a film that runs for an hour and forty-eight minutes in its theatrical form. If you’ve ever watched the Deleted Scenes feature on a bluray and had the reaction, “Yep, I totally get why that was cut,” you might find this longer cut instructive. It’s one thing to see the extra shavings in isolation. It’s quite another to experience them reintegrated into the film in a way that fundamentally upsets the entire organism.

The Extended Cut isn’t just longer, but it also has a slightly different feel and tone in places. This isn’t a case where major subplots were deleted entirely, or where reshoots created drastically alternate versions of scenes. It’s mostly the same film – there’s just more of it. What emerges is an interesting lesson in film pacing and the brevity you can find in strong feature writing.

Just to give you an example of where some of the extra minutes of fat are found, in the Extended Cut, it takes 44 minutes to get to that moment I embedded above, where the band hears their song on the radio. In the theatrical cut, that happens just past the 30-minute mark. That is almost perfect placement for the end of Act One if you were to follow some sort of Save The Cat paradigm. The next big turning point in the story is the introduction of Tom Hanks’s Mr. White. The Extended Cut makes us wait exactly an hour for this moment. In the Theatrical Cut, it happens at minute 38.

To put it another way, 22 minutes —over ONE THIRD – of the first hour of the extended cut is completely extraneous. The movie spends a lot of extra time in Erie, PA and early scenes give more focus to Guy and his girlfriend Tina. She’s played by Charlize Theron, and she appears MUCH more in this cut, mostly in scenes about her romance with the dentist she leaves Guy for. Scenes playing that beat keep popping up well after the point has been made.

It’s an interesting thing to note about the script Hanks shot – it’s overwritten in ways that I’ve seen in a lot of first-timer scripts. (And before anyone thinks I’m taking gratuitous shots at Mr. Hanks I will absolutely cop to being the King of Overwriting on my early scripts.) Sometimes it’s not until you’re in the editing room, or watching something with a restless audience that you realize, “Holy crap, I don’t need a LOT of this.”

The Extended Cut lingers so much on two drawn-out scenes with Guy and Tina that the rest of the band isn’t introduced until nearly the nine minute mark. That’s a lot of real estate taken up to introduce the points that Guy has a girlfriend and that he works in his father’s appliance store. The first meeting with the band is also extended by a little bit and it plays slightly more stilted. There’s a bit about Guy tapping Faye’s bumper with his car, and him feeling so bad about it that he buys the band breakfast before going to sit over by the counter alone. In retrospect, it feels like a moment meant to set-up the chemistry between Faye and Guy, but it’s a beat that doesn’t belong in the scene.

As the scene appears in the theatrical cut, by removing the awkward bits that underline how much Guy isn’t a part of the gang, their banter with him seems to play with more familiarity behind it. Faye thanking Guy for breakfast as she leaves, a non-sequitur in the theatrical cut, unintentionally reinforces this. It implies a prior agreement to treat everyone, and thus a friendlier dynamic.

Seven minutes into the theatrical cut, Jimmy and Lenny are already at the hardware store asking for Guy to fill in. By that point in the Extended Cut, Guy is still the only band member we’ve met and he’s busy making out with his girlfriend on the sofa. It takes that version of the film over 13 minutes to get to this point. Following Save the Cat rules, the 13-minute mark should coincide with a major turning point in the story. Guess what happens 13 minutes into the theatrical cut?

That’s the moment where the band plays the talent show and Guy kicks up the tempo.

(I’m no fan of the formulaic approach Save the Cat is guilty of peddling, but its stance on pacing is worth being aware of.)

If I was going to give young writers and filmmakers a lesson in pacing, I’d have them watch the theatrical cut followed by the extended cut. Once you’ve seen the shorter version, you’ll marvel at all the extra chaff. Scenes play out well after they’ve made their point, such as the moment when the original drummer is injured. A riot at the pizza place is shown in greater detail and referenced in an extended discussion in a later scene, which is a lot of time to burn on a scene that makes no impact later.

Hanks’s longer version explains things that don’t need to be spelled out. There’s an extra scene added just to show Guy giving everyone transistor radios so they can listen for the song. Wisely, someone realized no one was going to ask, “Hey, where did the transistor radios come from?” and so we accept that Faye happens to own one.

It’s an educational exercise to spot these sorts of moments throughout, but they are the only flavor of restored scenes. The band’s show at the Pittsburgh concert hall is played as a significantly bigger deal here. They erroneously get the fancy dressing room belonging to the host, and there’s also a touching moment where they assemble on the stage well before the show and look out at all the empty seats. They have a slight celebratory dance there, and it’s played as much more of an “I can’t believe we’re here!” beat.

Why remove that? Pacing surely plays a part, but also by downplaying this gig, it makes their first show on the tour feel much more impactful as them hitting “the big time.” Delaying this gratification makes the release of that later scene more satisfying.

There’s another Faye/Guy interaction mixed in that sequence and it’s deletion is another smart moment. By cutting a lot of the overt chemistry between the two characters, we don’t watch the movie waiting for her to inevitably choose Guy over Jimmy. There’s enough left to make their coupling make sense, but not so much that we realize we’re seeing a love triangle.

Audiences today have a full century of film history to draw on. They’re savvy enough to fill in the blanks where they need to and are quite capable of getting ahead of a movie if it calls its shot too obviously.

When editing is done right, the audience never realizes anything was removed. If someone told you there was a cut of That Thing You Do that had 40 minutes of extra scenes, you’d probably assume there’s a lot of extra story and drama contained there. As we’ve discussed, this isn’t even near the case.

The most substantial change is the end. In the Theatrical Cut, Guy says that his idol, Del Paxton, thinks he has the chops to make it as a drummer and so he’s going to stay in L.A. In the Extended Cut, Guy records an interview with Del and leverages that to get a job with a radio DJ he met on their promotional tour. It’s that job he stays behind for, and Faye stays for him. The Theatrical Cut allows Guy a semblance of his dream, while the Extended version is a little more realistic and maybe a little less feel-good after seeing a two-hour demonstration of why Guy is a great drummer.

There’s something appropriate about Tom Hanks’s That Thing You Do becoming the film it was meant to be by picking up the tempo and being reshaped into something more “peppy” and “snappy” as Mr. White would say. The theatrical version is as infectious and joyful as the title track, and knowing the version that almost was makes me appreciate its simple brilliance even more.

Star Trek turns 60!

Today is the 60th anniversary of STAR TREK. 

Or as I might think of it, the 30th anniversary of the 30th anniversary of STAR TREK. That's a bit of a brain-breaker for me because it means the DEEP SPACE NINE episode that paid tribute to THE ORIGINAL SERIES, "Trials & Tribble-ations," is now older than the episode it honors ("The Trouble with Tribbles" aired on December 29, 1967) and give or take two months, is now as old as the series it honors.

I'm not ready for DEEP SPACE NINE to be as old to modern viewers as TOS was to me. And yet, here we are.

I bring up the 30th anniversary of STAR TREK in 1996 because it's probably the last great peak in STAR TREK history. UPN made a big deal of the milestone with a 30th anniversary TV special that assembled almost all of the entire casts of the then-existing four TV series. The 5th season of DS9 and the third season of VOYAGER were being broadcast even as STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT was on its way to theaters, where it would become the highest grossing film of the franchise up to that point. And if you were a Trekker around this time, it probably felt like STAR TREK could never be stopped.

Ron Moore, who wrote for TNG and DS9 and co-wrote the first two NEXT GENERATION movies, has often made the case for 1994 as the cultural peak of STAR TREK. That was the year TNG ended, DS9 was on the air, VOYAGER was entering production and GENERATIONS brought together some of the TOS cast with the TNG cast in their first film. To top it off, TIME Magazine put Kirk and Picard on their cover. Moore says he walked into the office with that issue and said, "This is the peak. It's all downhill from here."

And I get that, but 1996 was a peak almost as high. And I might make the case that the following seasons of DS9 and VOYAGER were their creative peaks. DS9 introduced the Dominion War storyline and really embraced serialization, while VOYAGER brought in the Borg and Seven of Nine which really reenergized the show.

If you were around my age, all of these shows and movies undeniably shaped your idea of what STAR TREK should be. I love the TOS gang. Some of their movies are among my favorites. TNG was one of the first instances I remember being aware of specific writers and what they brought to the show, and certainly the cast was excellent even when the show hit blander patches.

But for me, DEEP SPACE NINE will always be the pinnacle of TREK. Some of that definitely has to do with it coming along as my own tastes in entertainment were maturing. The franchise was taking a more complex, morally ambiguous turn right as I was hungry for something besides the black and white morality often found in the other two shows. It felt like TREK was rising to challenge me right at the time when my mind was opening up to that kind of storytelling.

Now DS9 is celebrated for its distinct voice, darker storytelling and moral complexity. It was fascinating that during the relatively peaceful Clinton Administration, we got a Trek series that dealt with wartime ethics and it was completely uncontroversial. No one accused it of being preachy or pandering just because it had a moral point of view. 

That became funny in five or six years time when the corrupt Bush Administration lied to the American people to justify a shameful quagmire of a war. It felt like every wartime moral issue raised by DS9 prepared me to have my own perspective on everything that was going on in the real world. Had DS9 been a few years later, conservatives would have called it "Bush bashing" and "propaganda." But it was prescient in a way that allowed me to define my moral lines before they were tested.

That's not to say DS9 didn't get a lot of bullshit attacks at the time - it did. From people who considered themselves "real" fans of Star Trek. And man, did those guys have a lot of opinions about why DS9 wasn't "real Star Trek" and why it wasn't a good show. 

A sampling:

- STAR TREK is about exploring the galaxy in a starship. This station doesn't go anywhere. It's not what STAR TREK is at all!

- It betrays Gene Roddenberry's vision by showing a darker side to the Federation. STAR TREK is a utopia! There is no dark side to the Federation and if these writers think it should have one, they don't understand STAR TREK!

- You can't tell war stories in STAR TREK! It's against Gene's vision!

- Gene Roddenberry was a secular storyteller! You can't have a show where the main character is a religious icon!

- Casting a black man as the lead is just them hitting us in the face with political correctness.

I want to dwell on that last one for an extra moment. There ABSOLUTELY was a racist backlash to casting Avery Brooks as Commander Sisko. I was there. I saw it. It was real. There are fans today who downplay this when it's brought up, saying that STAR TREK fans have never made racist arguments against shows they didn't like.

And Janeway dealt with the same bullshit over being the first female captain. There's always been an element of racism and misogyny within the fandom itself. I'm not saying it's even a large element, but it's present, and even back then it would launder those bigotries in behind the "This isn't Star Trek/Gene's vision" nonsense.

That's why I can't take anyone seriously when they claim to be the arbiter of what is and isn't Star Trek. Nope, sorry. You have zero authority there. You can feel - as I have about PLENTY of Star Trek - that "This isn't something I enjoy." But that's a subjective assessment. You not liking something doesn't obligate everyone to agree it's bad.

There's something weird in the psychology of people who feel like they OWN Star trek in that they must delegitimize the Trek they don't enjoy. They don't stop at "I didn't like it because it's not what I look for in Star Trek."  They have to go as far as "This isn't legitimate. Everyone who enjoys this isn't a real fan like I am, and the only real Star Trek comes from the exact same process that gave us THE ORIGINAL SERIES."

To that end, I've seen the argument made in more than one place that what's wrong with the current shows is that they're not written by people who read literary science fiction, like TOS was. It's an idea that seems to make sense until you realize that in the 1960s, most science fiction films and TV were mostly still dealing with bug-eyed aliens and those sorts of stories. A few exceptions aside, the majority of intelligent science fiction was literary.

Science Fiction television and movies have come a long way in sixty years. To argue that a Star Trek series is wrong to draw on more modern inspirations is to sound like film theorist Rudolf Arnheim did in his 1932 book FILM AS ART when he believed that synchronized sound would be the ruination of film.

As James T. Kirk once said, "People can be very frightened of change."

I went on my own journey to realizing that if I wasn't enjoying the Star Trek with which I was presented, I could always move on. I had a shaky relationship with VOYAGER... seeing the potential in the premise and the character dynamics and then often disappointed when it seemed content to stay within its box. And then came the 4th season, with the addition of Seven of Nine, who was like a jolt of energy to every scene she was one. It shook up some of the staid dynamics on the ship and we even got some loose serialization.

But once the fifth season rolled around, the show stagnated, as if it had expended its most ambitious ideas and was done challenging itself. I felt vindicated a year later when Ron Moore left after a few weeks on VOYAGER's staff and gave a long interview that dove into all the ways he felt that VOYAGER was in a rut, delving the same Trekian patterns that had been beaten into the ground by over a decade of modern shows.

(The sites that hosted that interview are LONG gone from the internet, but the Wayback Machine helped me recover all six parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6. A wild feature of this is with hindsight, you can almost see him formulating what would because his BATTLESTAR GALACTICA reboot in real time here.)

Of course, today I understand that VOYAGER probably had network pressures placed on it that hindered it from being as daring as DS9. And perhaps some of its audience wouldn't have followed it into more serialized storytelling. I think VOYAGER's familiarity was a virtue for much of the audience that found it. If DS9 upsetting the apple cart was too much for you, VOYAGER was probably comfort food.

I wasn't yet at the point of abandoning shows when I stopped enjoying them... which is so strange to consider in hindsight. I turned up every week out of... duty? Habit? The idea that I HAD to watch it because it was Star Trek? It's funny how the mind works sometimes. I had an even more pronounced version of this relationship with ENTERPRISE.

Actually, that's a funny sidebar. By the time ENTERPRISE premiered, I was very into the idea of breaking into TV writing. There were two Trek reviewers, Jammer and Tim Lynch, who had made a name for themselves so much that they'd both been invited to pitch to Star Trek. I decided that my big break would be to do the same for ENTERPRISE. And so with Season 2, I started by writing reviews of the first few episode and posting them to Usenet.

I lasted four episodes before I stopped. I realized I wasn't getting enough out of the shows as entertainment that I enjoyed the act of assessing them and living in the same creative frustrations week after week. I wasn't getting anything out of wallowing in that repeatedly. That's probably why I'm perplexed that nearly a decade into the newer era of Star Trek, the same voices who hated these shows when they premiered still show up EACH WEEK after a new episode to repeat the same vitriol. 

I never did fully give up on ENTERPRISE, though it was the first Trek series where if I missed an episode, I usually didn't go to any trouble to catch up. I continued to watch through it's ups and downs. Why?

Because it WAS Star Trek!

With the later shows, I've found it easier to engage and disengage depending on my level of enjoyment. A show that's not geared to my tastes no longer does much to upset me. The characters I liked are still there in TOS, TNG and DS9. They live on in not just the produced TV shows and movies but in hundreds of novels and comic books. 

Which is not to say there haven't been new shows or episodes I liked - there definitely have been. Because I know people who've worked on those shows, I understand that so many of the people involved in these shows grew up on the same Trek I did. There are probably more fans working in Star Trek now than there were in the 90s Trek era.

Is everything they're doing to my taste? No, but considering by the tail end of the Rick Berman era of Star Trek, my biggest complaint was that the shows had become staid and stuck in their own habits, I welcome the wild swings. The best Trek has come from pushing at the boundaries of what came before.

Spock once said that "Logic is the beginning of wisdom. Not the end." In that spirt, the adventures of Kirk, Spock and McCoy on the Enterprise were the beginning of Star Trek... but not its end.

May Star Trek always reach for strange new worlds.... and go there boldy.

Some of my Past Star Trek related posts:

Deep Space Nine's wartime morality plays show that good writing is timeless - Part 1, Part 2
16 Great TV Shows, Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Why all three seasons of PICARD were necessary to Jean-Luc Picard's journey after the end of TNG
Peter David and the art of the tie-in novel
Networking screw-ups and Ron Moore

SUPERMAN RETURNS turns 20 today

Twenty years ago this morning, I was at the Grauman's Chinese Theater for the first screening of the film I maintain is the best DC Comics film post-1981 that isn't directed by Christopher Nolan: SUPERMAN RETURNS.

It's a film whose reputation has waxed and waned over the years, but I've loved it from my first viewing and was very disappointed we didn't get a sequel or two. Brandon Routh was perfect casting as Superman and Clark Kent, and I was delighted when he got to reprise his role as Superman during the CW's Arrowverse CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS.

If you ask me, he could still play Superman today. During my time on SUPERMAN & LOIS, I even pitched a multiversal crossover that would have brought Brandon and Tom Welling's Supermans into an adventure with our Superman. It never got further than an idea I pushed for, and as things played out there probably was never really a good place in the series to tell that story. Still I live in hope that maybe someday I'll get the chance to write it as a miniseries for DC.

I actually met Brandon (and his then-wife Courtney Ford) a couple times during the WGA and SAG writers strikes back in 2023. They were just as friendly and gracious as you'd want them to be.

My comprehensive celebration of SUPERMAN RETURNS on Scott Weinberg's OVERHATED podcast can be found in a variety of places. There's a weird glitch with this episdode. If you go to the Apple Podcast page on the web, the episode is there in full. If you try to download it through your iPhone app, only six minutes are there. 

To address this, Scott has made the episode available for free on Patreon here. You can reach it through the link or by searching OVERHATED on the Patreon app.

OVERHATED is also available on Spotify and you can find this ep here.

I'm embedding both the Apple version and the Spotify version below.

Thirteen years ago, one of my first pieces for Film School Rejects was a piece titled, "Why The World Needs SUPERMAN RETURNS." There's a lot of overlap in that piece and what you'll hear me express on OVERHATED. 

Sadly, some time last year, FSR ceased to exist and with it went all of the archives. The only way to find my original article is with the Wayback Machine. Given the anniversary and in the interests of preserving my writing, I'm reposting it below.

Why the World Needs Superman Returns

If everything had gone to plan, this summer we’d probably be getting the concluding chapter of a Bryan Singer-helmed Superman trilogy.  Indeed, for a while, it appeared we might get it.  The film opened in Summer 2006 to a bigger 5-day opening than Batman Begins had a year earlier.  Its worldwide gross was also about $17 million more than the Nolan Batman prequel as well.  It even earned a decent amount of critical acclaim, coming in at 76% on Rotten Tomatoes.  So while the film might not have been a Spider-Man-sized hit, it was a promising debut by some of the more superficial standards the industry uses to measure success.  The film certainly was far from being an outright bomb.

Some time ago, Quentin Tarantino mentioned that he was writing a 20-page review of Superman Returns, explaining why he loved it so much.  We’re still waiting on that, and since I’m about one-fourth the filmmaker he is, it seems fitting that my own review is that much shorter.

I really enjoyed this movie the first time I saw it and the passage of seven years has done little to dampen that feeling.  This is why it’s been so hard to see the narrative shift to the point where it’s assumed this movie was a horrible bomb.  There are people I know who loved it in 2006 who have since taken up the anti-Superman talking points, just because it’s cool.  Here’s where I blame Warner Bros a little bit.  I think if they had pushed forward with a sequel and released another solid film three years later, Returns would be a lot better regarded today.  Instead, they dragged their feet for a few years, the momentum dissipated and by the time Christopher Nolan was announced as producer, the internet had decided that whatever its merits, Superman Returns must be a bad movie simply because it failed to spawn a sequel.

Superman Returns is sometimes knocked for being too reverent to the Reeve movies, but that assessment overlooks what Singer accomplished by tying this movie to the Richard Donner continuity.  For starters, it means he can side-step having to retell the origin.  Not only was the first Superman film pretty well embedded in the collective consciousness, but at the time Smallville was already five years into telling its own origin story. 

The approach Singer took was not unlike how the Bond movies used to handle their continuity.  We’ve seen earlier adventures and we assume that some version of them is considered the backstory of whatever Bond we happened to be watching. (At least until the hard reboot with Daniel Craig.)  It builds on the past, while maintaining ties to it.  After all, it doesn’t bother me when the Bond movies haul out the Aston Martin, or when the familiar, 50 year-old Bond theme kicks in on the soundtrack.  By and large, it’s an approach that served Bond well and I think it works here too.

The film’s conceit is that Superman has been away for five years on a wild goose chase to the ruins of Krypton.  I know that some take issue with this, wondering why he’d go there when he “knows” Krypton exploded.  Does he?  We saw it explode – all Superman has is a recording from his father, which was made before the explosion.  If you opened your email to YouTube link to a video of your father saying “Son, I’m about to die in a car crash,” would you take it as gospel that actually came to pass?

I’ve also heard complaints that Superman would “never” abandon Earth.  I think it’s always dicey territory to lock oneself into a belief of what a character would “never” do.  People make mistakes, people act out of character – all it takes is the proper motivation.  In Superman II (which may not be in this film’s continuity, not that it matters), Superman forsakes his powers for a relationship with Lois.  He shirks his duty for something that matters more to him – true love and human connection.  It’s that quest for connection – to find what might be other survivors – that drives him out into space.  He’s searching for family, but only finds (in his own words) “That place was a graveyard.”

The tragedy of that loss is compounded further. By the time he returns to Earth, the world has moved on without him.  This cruel injustice is most keenly felt when he learns that Lois Lane is not only engaged, but has a five year-old son and is about to win a Pulitzer for an article entitled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.”  It’s a great dilemma to drop Superman in the middle of, as it forces him to question his place in the world, and his relevancy in the modern day.

One flaw I will concede is that the film doesn’t go far enough in showing us Lois’s side of the argument.  I would have liked to have a stronger sense of how the world realized it didn’t need Superman once he’d left.  Some of the most powerful Superman stories deal with him having to accept that his role as a perpetual guardian angel might actually be stunting the world’s progress.  That’s not a question the film pursues, though, and it’s unfortunate because Lois’s argument of “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman” never really gets a hearing.  Indeed, once Superman is pulling off all manner of super-feats to save the day, it feels like Lois really is reaching to make a case.

Instead, the film ends up exploring how Clark is even more of an outsider than he was before.  Here’s where I think Brandon Routh doesn’t get enough credit.  He might not draw such extreme distinctions between his Clark and his Superman that Christopher Reeve did, but by dialing down his Clark’s nerdiness, he makes him a more believable person.  In the Reeve films, the conceit usually was that any time we saw Clark, Superman was hamming his performance up. 

What Routh does is he largely makes Clark the “real” guy and turns Superman into the mask that can hide those insecurities.  Examine moments such as when Clark probes Jimmy about Lois in the bar, or when he later is talking to Lois and trips over trying to explain Superman’s motivations.  Little flourishes like that give Clark a reliability that Reeve’s version wasn’t often allowed.

It’s become fashionable to dismiss this film with the scoff that “Superman didn’t punch anything!”  Do me a favor – the next time you hear someone offer this opinion as if it means anything, please punch them!  I’m pretty sure if you go back into the lore that the George Reeves Superman didn’t punch anyone either, and even Reeve’s Superman rarely threw a punch.  Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I prefer that the movies I watch be about something.  Was Batman Begins a great film because of it’s deep exploration of Bruce Wayne’s character, or was it awesome solely by virtue of the fact that Batman uses some thugs for boxing practice?

And so what’s Superman Returns about?  In a great many ways, it’s the story of a father and son.

Richard Donner’s vision was very much in the same spirit.  Jor-El has a crucial line in early in the Donner film, one which is called back to not only in Superman Returns, but in a pivotal scene in the Donner Cut version of Superman II: “The son becomes the father, and the father becomes the son.”  Not insignificantly, this is in the voiceover that opens Superman Returns, and Marlon Brando’s visage reappears in the Fortress of Solitude, reminding us of Superman’s last link to his homeworld.

Partway through the film, Superman finds himself at an emotional crossroads and he heads to the Fortress.  Presumably he’s seeking guidance from the Jor-El program – but he finds… nothing.  The crystals that gave him access to that program have been taken by Lex Luthor.  Lex perverts them into the instruments of his scheme and by the end of the movie, the surviving crystals are lost forever.  The first film featured Jor-El’s physical death and now, and here he undergoes a sort of spiritual death.  In myth, the death of the father is often necessary to motivate the hero’s ultimate maturation and the loss of the crystals seems to symbolize this in part.

But as Superman loses a father, he gains a son.  This is understandably one of the more controversial aspects of the film.  I think some people reject the plot on its face simply because it had never been done before in the Superman mythos.  I have to admit, even though I’m a massive Superman fan, this is one of the reasons I dig it.  Another oft-heard ignorant dismissal of this film is that Superman is a “deadbeat dad.”  That’s a pretty unfair characterization considering he’s not even aware of his son until the final moments of the film.

The moment that pulls all of this together for me is when Superman pays a visit to his sleeping son, aware for the first time of his connection to the boy.  He echoes his own father’s words and he tells the boy that he will be different from everyone else, but that he will take his father’s strength as his own, gaining the benefit of Superman’s experience while Superman will watch over him, perhaps also learning something in the bargain. “The son becomes the father, and the father…” he trails off.

It’s the perfect way to close the circle, as Superman leaving his son to be raised by Richard White and Lois Lane directly parallels Jor-El sending Kal-El away to be raised by the Kents.  It’s for the boy’s benefit.  The Whites already are a family and it would be wrong for Superman to disrupt that, but it’s clear he’s going to be a part of the boy’s life.  As he tells Lois, “I’m always around.”

Superman explores Krypton in search of more of his kind, and much like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, returns home find that it has what he’s been looking for all along.  He is not the last of his kind.  Not anymore.

Let’s not overlook some of the other virtues of Superman Returns. I would be remiss if I didn’t single out James Marsden for special praise.  Through and through, Richard White proves himself to be every bit the hero that Superman is.  Marsden also imbues the guy with an abundance of charisma and integrity.  He’s absolutely worthy of Lois, which is a pretty bold writing choice when it would have a lot easier to make him a cad whom Superman overshadows.  The script didn’t need to make Richard an antagonist, not when Superman already has his hands full with Lex.

I’ve heard some critics deride Kevin Spacey’s performance as “campy,” and often while tarring Hackman’s performance with the same brush.  I dispute both charges.  You want to see camp? Watch the Batman TV series.  That massive overacting that King Tut does? That’s camp.  The ridiculously serious speeches given by Batman and Commissioner Gordon? That’s camp.

I put the question to the court – is Entourage’s Ari Gold campy?  Because both Hackman and Spacey’s interpretations of Lex are far closer in temperament to Ari than they are to anything on the Adam West Batman show.  Here’s an exercise to try: take any scene where Hackman’s Lex berates Ned Beatty’s Otis and mentally replace them with Ari and his assistant Lloyd.  You’ll find it’s pretty damn easy to cast those characters in those roles.  Hackman’s Lex might be larger than life, but that’s just because he’s a conceited, egotistical megalomaniac.  It’s still a far cry from “camp,” and I’d argue that Spacey’s Lex is even more restrained.

I’ll cop to the fact that Lex’s scheme isn’t perfect.  I wish that the emphasis was less on how he was pulling a land swindle and more about him using the crystals to cultivate more Kryptonian technology.  Imagine what “the greatest criminal mind of our time” could do with all of that at his fingertips.  I think it would have been more unique than making Lex obsessed with land and it barely requires any restructuring and rewriting of the script.

There seems to be some misunderstanding of exactly what Superman does to get rid of the island.  Some viewers apparently walked out confused that he was able to pick up an entire island of kryptonite without feeling any ill effects for several minutes.  It’s seen as a “plot hole” that the radiation doesn’t kill Superman immediately.  It’s no plot hole at all – the viewers just need to be paying attention to notice:

1)     Superman has just recharged in the sun.

2)     The island is only laced with kryptonite – not made of solid kryptonite.  This is actually underscored by the fact that he stands directly on it for several minutes before feeling too many ill effects.

3)     When he picks up the island, he’s actually burrowed below the construction, putting a fair amount of earth between him and the worst of it.  The higher he flies, the more these extraneous chunks of earth break away, exposing him to more and more radiation.

4)     The kryptonite has a visible effect on him, but like a boxer going the distance, Superman fights through the pain.  It’s not as if he defeats the fatal radiation through sheer force of will.  He merely puts all of his strength into lasting just a few moments longer – long enough to complete his task.  It’s nothing short of heroic that he keeps going. Tony Stark’s suicide run in The Avengers reminds me a lot of this, actually.

The effects and production design are top notch and the film has a number of great set-pieces.  I feel bad for those who don’t get at least a little thrill from the plane sequence, the massive disaster sequence in Metropolis or the yacht sequence.  The script reaches for real emotional resonance too.  Early on, Lois wonders why Superman couldn’t even say goodbye before he left, scoffing that “It’s just one word, goodbye.”  Later, Lois pleads with Superman not to go on what surely will be a suicide run.  Taking a beat, Superman looks at her and Routh manages to make his reading of just one word – “Goodbye” - convey everything that needs to be said about how he feels and that he doesn’t expect to survive what he’s about to do.  Superman Returns succeeds because it never forgets that it’s about these people and their relationships with each other.

It may not be a perfect film, but how often does one find such a film?  Superman Returns doesn’t get enough credit for everything it does right, and for its ambitions to tell a different kind of Superman story.  You can’t judge the value of a film by how many sequels it spawned or how many careers it launched.  Does the fact that Henry Thomas  had few notable roles after E.T. diminish the power of his performance there? Or the legacy of the film?  Is Batman Begins a great film only because it beget The Dark Knight, or can we assess its creative success on its own merits?  I won’t dispute that there are metrics to measure the business success of a film but it would wrong to consider only those figures while giving the film a superficial reading.  

For years, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, staring one-time Bond George Lazenby, was the black sheep of the James Bond series.  Its tone was different from the others, and the “new” Bond was jarring for many. The fact the next film did its best to return to more familiar ground offered fuel for the claim that OHMSS was a film best forgotten.  But times eventually changed and this Bond was eventually re-evaluated with a more objective eye.  I have hope that Superman Returns will eventually achieve a similar renaissance.  Bryan Singer and his team made a film that they should be proud of, and it deserves to have those merits recognized.

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This article provoked a follow-up post, which you can find here.

OBSESSION is disturbing and brilliant... and might thankfully kill the "everyone gets drunk and horny" eps of genre TV

I saw OBSESSION this weekend and it immediately made me think of a Superman TV show, but not the one you'd expect.

If you haven't heard the premise of OBSESSION, it's a violent and disturbing film about a young man named Bear who makes a wish with a Wishing Willow that his platonic friend Nikki would love him more than anything else in the world. Almost immediately, the spell turns Nikki amorous, then clingy, then dangerously obsessed with Bear. She becomes very physically forward with him, aggressively coming onto him. All she wants to do is be with him and she won't take no for an answer. It only makes her more insistent.

OBSESSION plays this for disturbing horror, amplified by the fact there are moments where Nikki becomes briefly lucid and see a brief moment of shock and horror about what she's been doing. It's impossible to watch this as wish fulfilment of having the girl you crush on like you back. It's impossible not to see this as a violation of Nikki's mind and body. 

Impressively, the movie doesn't go for any gratuitously male-gazey moments. A weaker film would have objectified Nikki, certainly during the first encounter where Bear gets everything he thought he wanted. But writer/director Curry Barker isn't interested in letting the audience off the hook for even a moment.

A genre TV staple is the "A love spell (or virus if you're less supernatural and more sci-fi) goes wrong, making everyone horny and wacky! Isn't that fun?" episode. Probably the earliest version of this is Star Trek's "The Naked Time," which stripped away the characters' inhibitions so that we could see the parts of themselves they most wanted hidden. It's a pretty compelling episode. Unfortunately, it also gave us Star Trek: The Next Generation's "The Naked Now," where the effect of the virus is mostly "everyone gets drunk and horny."

In the last decade, maybe you'll find this occurring less often in genre TV, but there was a period where it was obligatory. Hell, you're probably thinking of several examples right now as you're reading this.

The specific example that came to mind for me was a first-season episode of Lois & Clark called "Pheromone, My Lovely." The cast gets exposed to a perfume with a pheromone that removes their inhibitions. Clark turns out to be immune, which ensures plenty of hijinks from the fact Lois isn't and her repressed attraction to Clark comes to the surface. There are three separate sequences of her throwing herself at Clark aggressively, in a succession of skimpier outfits. 

Most of those moments lived on in the opening credits for a while after that, so if you ever wondered where the scene of Lois showing a lot of leg while climbing on Clark's desk came from, or the scene of her in a revealing white lace dress, or the scene of her belly dancing in a harem outfit came from, it's from this fan service-y episode. Her lowest point has her showing up to Clark's apartment in that outfit, performing the Dance of the Seven Veils and then waking up the next morning still in the costume, very confused and humiliated.

I have a complicated relationship with this episode. Next to on-screen vomiting, the only thing I find more painful to endure from a TV show is second-hand embarrassment and this episode is FULL of it. I'd say Lois's humiliating antics are spread across half the episode's running time. Perry and Jimmy are affected, but to a less embarrassing degree and their antics are more fleeting compared to Lois's. So seeing Lois Lane turned into a giggling airhead and flaunting herself in a way you know she NEVER would in her right mind is... a lot. I've been a Superman fan all my life. I really, really hate seeing Lois humiliated.

BUT... this episode also aired the week I turned 14. And one cannot deny the appeal of some Teri Hatcher fan service, particularly in the time just before she became the most downloaded woman on the internet. For me, this becomes like that episode of SEINFELD where Jerry's conflict over dating a super-hot woman with now other interesting qualities manifests as his brain and penis being locked into a chess game with each other.

But to return to my original point, this whole episode is undeniably humiliating for Lois. She says so more than once. But the tone of the episode is all "ha ha! Isn't this silly she's completely taken leave of her intelligence and dignity and just wants Clark to fuck her? Also, check out Teri!"

Another detail that I hadn't really taken note of until recently is that pre-mind whammy, there are at least two scenes centered on the idea that Lois is too uptight and too much of a stick in the mud. You don't have to look hard to read the subtext as, "Man, this chick really needs to loosen up. Amiright?" The purpose of those scenes is to make unleashing her wild seem karmic. Maybe she's supposed to deserve it for the crime of caring about getting her work done seriously, or maybe it's to be taken as a lesson she needed in loosening up.

Either way, it's framed as a way of mitigating us from feeling TOO bad about Lois's humiliation and debasement. The show is saying, "We're letting you off the hook. Please enjoy the T&A guilt free."

Knowing this is a beloved episode I can anticipate there'll be a few counter-arguments to my takeaway, so let me deal with them in brief:

- The episode was WRITTEN by a woman, dummy! True, and an interesting detail to note, but not one I find compelling as a mitigating factor.

- The perfume only makes you act on existing attractions, so Lois stalking Clark isn't that bad. Sure, but all that means is that she's throwing herself at someone she really likes as opposed to any rando. But we have a treasure trove of evidence from later scenes where Lois can openly lust after Clark and NONE of it looks like what we see here. She doesn't get moon-eyed and giggly. She's not trotting out the Dance of the Seven Veils. This Lois only exists in this episode.

- You're being too serious and this episode is all meant in good fun. You suck. I'm not accusing them of having set out to send these messages. I'm just pointing out how easy it is for problematic elements to seep into a story if you're not considering the bigger picture.

Anyway, I'm not saying I was always enlightened enough to articulate the issues in this way. If I was aware of most of this, it was something I could only articulate as "Second-hand embarrassment makes this kind of humiliation unbearable to watch." I have an equally hard time with SMALLVILLE's mind-whammy eps. I don't think all of them fall in the same traps as this one, but their very first, "Nicodemus," definitely is a cousin to this episode.

And as I said, this is a genre TV staple, so I'll even spot most of those shows the fact that it became such an accepted trope that for a while, everyone completely just stopped thinking about the implications. It became a question you never ask, like "How does a guy like George Costanza seem to have a very attractive new girlfriend every other week?"

Great storytelling can often come from looking at something that's been done a thousand times, taking a step back and forcing people to see it just slightly different. It's the kind of genius that comes from taking something super familiar and telling it in a way that makes an audience realize, "I never saw it like that before."

In this case, OBSESSION starts with unrequited love. Everyone at some point in their lives has fallen for someone who didn't fell the same for them, and doubtless they wished they could will a mutual attraction into existence. When we meet Bear (Michael Johnson, who perfectly depicts a guy in denial about how horrible his actions are), he's love sick for Nikki, his platonic best friend and co-worker. Early on there's a scene where Nikki tells him one thing they love about their friendship is "I feel like I can talk about anything with you." We all know what that means.

In movie short-hand, that line is usually deployed as a way of twisting the knife on the crushing male. OR it's seen as the green light for them to tell her how they feel, only to learn they misread the situation. MY read on it is that it's the clearest sign the girl does not see the guy as a romantic option. She's affirming their relationship has total disclosure - meaning if she was into you, she'd have SAID it already and conversely, if he was into her, surely HE would have told her already too.

So when Nikki says that, she's assuming an honesty to their relationship that isn't actually there. Indeed, Bear's wavering about his feelings in the conversation DOES seem to get picked up on her radar because she asks him straight out if he's into her. And again he balks at telling the truth. This is smart writing because it's apparent even in the moment that everything that follows is the result of cowardice. Bear had other options. He actively chose the one that robbed Nikki of her autonomy.

Once Bear casts his wish, the effect is immediate. Nikki comes back out to his car and strikes up a flirty conversation with him, during which she momentarily snaps out of the love spell and is like, "What am I doing. I'm acting so weird." The spell reasserts itself quickly, and before long Nikki has asked to spend the night at Bear's house. Though confused by the sudden change in her behavior, he's certainly not going to turn that down. While he first sets her up in the guest room, he also doesn't put up much resistance when she insists he join her in bed and then she takes the lead in seducing him.

Bear's due diligence amounts to repeated questions of "Are you sure? Are you feeling okay?" before he allows himself to indulge. In the real world, we'd say he'd done his part in seeking enthusiastic consent, but there's never any doubt he feels like she's not in her right mind AND that he's the cause of it.

All of this is done in a way that makes the audience squirm uncomfortably rather than being titillated. Lois's mind whammy is played for exploitation and is very indulgent of the male gaze. OBSESSION never does that with Nikki. If you want to an example of the camera making the audience complict in objectifying a female character, under the guise of being the POV of the male lead, go watch Megan Fox fixing a car engine in TRANSFORMERS. The film justifies that as her character being the perfect fantasy girl for its lead, and so that cinematography is merely dramatizing it.

The cheap exploitation version of this idea would have objectified Nikki early on so we see how she's Bear's fantasy. It would have leered at her in the bedroom scene and shot it like a fantasy fulfilled, and then it probably also would have even cloaked her more manic and violent moments as some kind of empowerment. 

I'm not even saying you couldn't make an entertaining movie with that approach, but it would be a far baser angle from which to explore the idea. It would be a story with the more simplistic message of "be careful what you wish for" rather than a disturbing exploration of male entitlement and themes of consent.

It also probably would have been a story where Bear is the victim of The Girlfriend From Hell and our empathy would be with him. (Indeed, note in the L&C episode, our empathy is with Clark's exasperation with Lois's sexual come-ons and not Lois herself being unable to even resist her humiliation in her own workplace.) But in OBSESSION, our empathy is always with Nikki.

Nikki is played by the probably-should-be-top-billed Inde Navarrette in one of the most fearless performances I've seen in horror. Inde's most notable credit before this was as Sarah Cortez on SUPERMAN & LOIS (yes, I managed to hold back this detail deep enough for it to be the THIRD Superman show referenced in this review), which I happened to write on throughout its entire run. In fact, I co-wrote one of Inde's two biggest episodes, season two's "Girl... You'll Be a Woman, Soon." If you want to assume bias on my part, go right ahead, but keep in mind that if I didn't genuinely like this film, I just as easily could have said nothing about it.

Inde's performance is unhinged and uninhibited. One relatively early moment really stuck with me. Nikki is in bed with Bear, half-naked and ready to go further when the "real" Nikki asserts herself for a moment. The transition from devotion to the kind of shock you'd feel if you found yourself mostly undressed with your best friend is perfectly played. She actually falls off the bed in shock. Though Bear allows himself a moment of distress, it does absolutely nothing to throw cold water on his desire to consummate the relationship.

Because of how Inde plays that moment, it's impossible to see what happens next as anything but a violation of her. The more unhinged Inde makes Nikki, the greater our empathy for the "real" Nikki who we realize must be some kind of unwilling passenger and spectator to what the demon who's hijacked her body is making her do. Inde finds just the right modulation for her performance where even the most lovey-dovey and romantic declarations feel wrong. Every time Bear looks past it or tries to rationalize it, we hate him just a little big more.

At one point we're given access to the real Nikki, personified by the most agonizing scream I've heard in a horror movie for a long time. Nikki becomes more and more demanding of Bear, and her jealousy of anyone else gets amplified. Most disturbing are the moments where she escalates to self-harm. My interpretation of those instances is it's a dramatization of real Nikki at war with demon Nikki.

In any event, there is nothing vain about Inde's acting in this film. I saw first-hand how hard she could go on a scene when I worked with her, so I wasn't surprised to see she had something like this in her. That doesn't make what she accomplishes here any less impressive. I've seen more than a few of these Girlfriend from Hell kind of movies, and when I was script reader I read even more. It's very apparent to me a movie with these elements could easily tip over into camp. 

Nikki is a role that invites going over the top and chewing the scenery. Inde has to go big and manic, but modulate that on just the right frequency so that what she's doing remains disturbing and not just absurdly comic. This performance is on a razor's edge all while being so RIGHT that you're not even thinking about that fact as it's going on. It's the acting equivalent of juggling chainsaws while surfing. Doing either one is impressive enough on its own, but how many people are brave enough to try doing both and risk failing spectacularly.

Is it an Oscar worthy performance, as some of the hype is now saying? Looking at the last five years of the Oscars, I don't think it's any less worthy than any of the performances that were nominated. In terms of the politics, the fact it's a horror film, and a very violent one probably work against it, as does the fact it's Inde's first feature leading role.

If Inde Navarrette gets nominated, I think her Oscar clip needs to be the scene late in Act Two where a seemingly sleeping Nikki is at last able to speak for herself for a few minutes... and she begs Bear to kill her because she can't bear to live in this torment any longer. Her performance is gut wrenching... and you don't even see her face. It's carried entirely by her voice.

Obviously Barker deserves a lot of credit in knowing exactly how to modulate the tone throughout the film. His job is that nothing in the movie gives us permission to laugh AT Nikki as though she's Jim Carrey playing The Mask. This film is confident about how much it wants to upset you and make you look at the ugly truth of a somewhat shopworn premise.

Every laugh in this movie is uncomfortable. Most of the time in horror, the laugh is a release of tension, giving everyone a moment to take a breath and relax. The vast majority of the laughs in OBSESSION only heighten the tension, that sort of nervous, involuntary laugh that is provoked in response to seeing something so insane, the only appropriate reaction is giggles to push back the "What the FUCK?!" energy rattling in your skull.

(Okay, there's one glorious, beautiful broad laugh early in the third act, maybe the only laugh that doesn't directly involve Nikki's behavior in some way.)

The denial of catharsis extends even further. If Crazy Nikki always lashed out by hurting Bear, we'd be cheering her on. If he deserves punishment, then every horror visited on him feels like, "Karma, BITCH!" That's why as unsettling as they are, the self-harm scenes are absolutely necessary. They drive home that this entire story is violence being committed upon Nikki. And for what? The crime of not intuiting that her friend had feelings for her.

The premise never lets itself off the hook. I was very relieved when I saw the film never tried to imply that Nikki's experience was somehow poetic justice for her, that on some level she deserved it. She's not some vixen leading Bear on and taking advantage of his feelings. Even though we later learn she's been hooking up with their mutual friend for two years, it doesn't recontextualize anything done to her as deserved.

I have a hard time turning off the part of my brain that predicts how a film will resolve. This one confounded me because I kept looking for the bread crumbs that would make a non-bleak ending possible, and there were none to be found. That seemingly left only two options - an unearned happy ending, or an unrelentingly dark proper one. It took the right path for the movie and executed it in a way so impactful, the final shot lingers with you for quite some time after.

OBSESSION has been hyped since its debut last September in Toronto. That's eight months of fairly regular conversation - at least in film circles - about how incredible this movie is. The praise was so persistent that even as I anticipated finally seeing the movie, I was dreading the inevitable result of that full court press. 

Nine times out of ten (hell, almost TEN times out of ten) when the internet film community goes ga-ga for a festival film, I walk out of it feeling like, "I don't know what you all saw in that, but I'm guessing it helped to see it at 1am after being film drunk from 7 other screenings in two days." With OBSESSION, my expectations were not only met, but surpassed.

After seeing her used to her full potential here, I'm really sad I no longer get to write for Inde Navarrette. Maybe we even could have taken LOIS & CLARK's pheromone premise and rendered it almost as darkly (and a lot less violently) as OBSESSION does. I know she and Alex Garfin would have had a lot of fun with something like that.

In any event, this movie should be the final nail in the "Love Spell makes everyone wacky and lovesick" premise as escapist fluff. This movie is an indictment of that male fantasy as a violation. And it goes to show you, it's possible to find disturbing horror even in the lightest of premises if you come at it from an unfamiliar angle.

Superman writer/artist Dan Jurgens looks back on ARMAGEDDON 2001, 35 years later - Part 2

My talk with Dan Jurgens about SUPERMAN ANNUAL #3 and ARMAGEDDON 2001 continues. For Part 1, go here.

The inciting incident of the story is that Superman has taken American lives for the first time when he sinks an American nuclear sub and eight of the crew don't get out in time. We're shown that's an inadvertent act on his part, almost an accident. 

Later when he is responsible for Martian Manhunter's death, that's also unintentional. But at the same time, you have Lana Lang clearly feeling like Clark is not well and Batman's arc is also about getting him to the point where he's ready to take lethal action against Superman.

I feel like it would have been easy to write a version of the story where Superman just writes off any collateral damage as unavoidable and feels justified in taking out any powerful heroes determined to stop him. So, to ask the question in a way where I don't feel like I'm putting some of the answer in your mouth, why take the path where he's culpable for, but perhaps not intentional in committing his worst acts?

If Clark was still an aspect of Superman, he couldn’t possibly be involved with intentionally taking a life. Not in any way. Any loss of life had to be incidental and impossible to foresee. That’s what makes Superman so different from most other heroes.

To spoil a 35 year-old comic for those who haven't read it, this future timeline ends with Batman killing Superman. Typically Batman has had a no-kill rule. You make sure we see how conflicted he is over this, even as he does it. The exchange where Robin says "You did the right thing, Bruce" and Batman responds, "No. This can never be called 'right'" has stuck with me so much I wouldn't have even had to reread the book to remember it. 

But at the end of the day, it's always controversial to depict Batman taking a life. How did you navigate for yourself keeping Bruce in character as he did what had to be done?

So, in a hypothetical future story, the guard rails aren’t as restrictive. A writer can go down unlikely corridors of story that they couldn’t otherwise use. That issue’s conclusion is a prime example of that.

But, at the same time, in order to make it work you have to keep the characters consistent with any understanding we have of them. So, yes, Batman needs to have that rule and live by it, at which point he has to acknowledge that he stepped over that line. Batman may not be outwardly emotional, but he still has to show remorse and regret.

You're not the first person to kill off Lois Lane in an alternate future. You're not even the only one who did it in an ARMAGEDDON 2001 annual, and there are multiple prominent examples in the years that follow, so this isn't aimed at any specific instance. I've only seen an issue made of this in recent years, but there are fans who feel that it's somehow disrespectful to Lois Lane as a character to kill her off even in an alternate future. Sometimes this rises to the assumption that Lois was killed because the creator hates Lois.

Do you have any reaction to that point of view? Speaking as a creator, what goes into a decision like killing Lois, or giving any character a "bad end" in an alternate future?

I’d like to think that the bulk of my writing work with Lois Lane would make it quite clear that I don’t hate her as a character.

As much as anything, doing a story where she dies in a speculative future goes back to a couple of comics I had as a kid. 

Both are Imaginary Stories, which were the Silver Age’s version of alternative future or “What If?” stories. Lois’ death was the subject of both of these and for that time conveyed great emotional impact for Superman. If you’re dealing with the matter of Lois’ importance to Superman, her death shouldn’t suggest the writer hates her anymore than doing the “Death of Superman” would imply that the writer hates Superman himself. 

I’ve also gotten criticized for reducing Lois to nothing more than Superman’s “vessel” because she bore his child. 

In short, no matter what you do, someone will find a reason to dislike it.

As for the issues in question, notice how these are basically the exact same cover idea. “Superman, with a child, mourning Lois.” One might see any number of ways they foreshadowed my work, years later.

Shifting to the conclusion of the ARMAGEDDON 2001 event, how last minute was the decision to change Monarch's identity from Captain Atom to Hawk? Had you drawn the complete issue of the "Cap is Monarch" version by the time this happened?

I recall it as being very last minute, for those times. (These days, we can make changes to a book when it’s at the printers. Back then, before email, scanners and digital lettering, it was very different.)

My memory could be a bit spotty here but I know that I had broken down the entire issue with Monarch being Captain Atom. Those are rough sketch thumbnails that I always do printed size, before blowing up into final pencils.

I had drawn most, if not all, of the issue as well. 

At the time, there was a 1-900 telephone service that fans could call into and get, “Insider Comic Scoops,” for a fee. Maybe a buck? I’m not sure as I never made the call.

In any case, that phone service revealed that Monarch would be revealed as Captain Atom. If you look a the basic plots of the annuals, they were to set up the notion that Monarch could be most any DC hero and the revelation would be a surprise.

Once that secret as revealed on the insider hotline, DC decided to shift gears as the idea of a surprise was still something worth shooting for. With that in mind, they made the change from Captain Atom to Hawk.

I recall discussing this on a conference call with Archie and Denny. I don’t believe either of them were 100% convinced it was the right way to go. Nor do I remember either of them were totally against it. It was more of a, “This is probably for the best,” type of feeling we shared, though i was probably more inclined to keep it as Captain Atom. 

But we went through the script and identified the necessary changes that would have to be made. Denny wrote it up, I drew it and we went from there.

A couple years back, DC decided to print the "Robin lives" version of BATMAN 428, the issue where a fan vote ultimately decided that Robin would die. In that case, the difference between the two amounted to about five pages fully or partially altered. In the case of ARMAGEDDON 2001 #2, it would be significantly more unseen pages. At least in terms of the art that exists, would it be possible for DC to complete an alternate version of the issue - either as its own thing or as part of a long-overdue collection?

In this age of Omnibus Editions, Absolute Editions, Facsimile Editions and just plain cool collections, it certainly seems to me that there should be some type of collection for ARMAGEDDON 2001, books 1 and 2 as well as the connected annuals. 

Since I still get a lot of questions about this at Cons, I also think there’d be enough interest in the original ending, which means we should do something to present it as it was meant to be.

The reality, however, is that there is almost no one left on staff at DC who was there when we did the book. Denny [O'Neil] and Archie [Goodwin] passed away and [DC Publisher and Chief Creative Officer] Jim [Lee] and [Editor-in-Chief] Marie [Javins] have greater familiarity with Marvel’s efforts during those years. With that being the case, I doubt anything will ever be done with A:2001, but we can always hope.

Finally, I don't know how many people remember this, but the crossover was followed almost immediately by a miniseries called ARMAGEDDON: THE ALIEN AGENDA, centered on Monarch and Captain Atom battling through time. You drew the first issue and so I wanted to ask, was there some alternate version of this project that was supposed to focus on the Captain Atom Monarch before the change? Or was the entire existence of this mini a result of the change to Hawk?

As I recall, that miniseries came up very late in the game. Since I wasn’t involved in the earliest conversations, I can’t say for sure, but I think it was planned as something that could capitalize on the popularity of the series and was always planned to feature Captain Atom. I really don’t think it was a reaction to having Hawk as Monarch, though that certainly influenced where the series was going to go. 

The fact that the four issues were drawn by four different artists shows how sudden it was. The idea was to get the scripts done as soon as possible and get all four pencillers working at the same time. The first issue’s pencil deadline was a real rush— that much I definitely remember!

Thanks to Dan Jurgens for his time and a great interview!

Superman writer/artist Dan Jurgens looks back on ARMAGEDDON 2001, 35 years later

In comic book circles, Dan Jurgens needs no introduction. It's inevitable the first line of his obituary will be "the man who killed Superman," as he was the writer/artist of the famous SUPERMAN #75. His association with Superman as a regular writer/artist began in 1989, and as it stands, he's almost certainly written more Superman stories than any other creator. While the Superman artist with the most stories to their name is Curt Swan, Dan's body of work pretty handily should put him in 2nd or 3rd place there.

This week is the 35th anniversary of a DC crossover event called ARMAGEDDON 2001. Dan provided the art for the two bookend issues, the first of which established the premise: Ten years in the future - in 2001 - one hero would betray and kill all the others. The identity of that hero was never known, as they then assumed the name Monarch and became an authoritarian leader. By the year 2030, Matthew Ryder has had enough of raising his family in Monarch's joyless dystopia and manages to become a test subject in a time travel experiment that transforms him into the time traveling Waverider.

Determined to stop Monarch before he comes to power, Waverider travels back to 1991 and uses his powers to read the possible futures of the major DC heroes, each encounter being depicted in one of that summer's Annuals. Of course, this is ultimately a device for the creators to explore a bunch of "What If" stories with their characters.

Dan's contribution as a writer was with the very first issue after the bookend - SUPERMAN ANNUAL #3. With pencils by Dusty Abel and inks by Terry Austin, John Beatty, Dick Giordano, and Dennis Janke, Dan brings us a story about a 2001 where Superman has lost almost everyone who mattered to him - including Lois Lane and his coworkers at the Daily Planet - when Intergang nuked Metropolis. He's been on an obsessive anti-nuke crusade ever since, and he crosses a line that results in the loss of innocent lives. Thus, the President drafts the one man who might be able to take Superman down - Batman.

To mark this memorable story's 35th anniversary, I reached out to Dan Jurgens for a chat about crafting alternate futures, killing characters, Evil Superman stories, and writing one of the most memorable Superman vs Batman fights.

Armageddon 2001 was the first - but not the last - time you did the pencils for a major DC event. Did it feel like a big deal joining a relatively small club that counted George Perez and John Byrne as two of its very few members? How did you end up landing the assignment?

By that point, I had, of course, been working on ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN as writer/artist and drawing GREEN ARROW. 

I left GA in mid-1990 and was fielding offers. Right around that time Dick Giordano called me up and said they were planning an event that they were hoping I’d be able to draw. He said, “Don’t book anything else!” Before long, I was on the phone with Mike Carlin, Archie Goodwin and Denny O’Neil talking about the story. I was a bit hesitant to take something on that I wasn’t going to write, as well as draw, but when it became clear that Archie would write Book One and Denny would write Book Two, I simply had to do it. One of the great things about working in comics is getting the chance to work with people whose work you enjoy and respect. Archie and Denny were at the top of the list for that.

So, yes, I was definitely on board from the start. And, once Archie’s script came in, I was really thrilled. It was a great story and from a technical standpoint, no one wrote an easier to interpret and clean, visual script than Archie.

I love Monarch's armor. Did you get to design him and Waverider? If so what kind of parameters were you given to work with?

Yes, I designed Monarch’s armor as well.

Archie had asked for something dour in terms of color as well as making sure that it would cover his entire body. That, of course, was to keep his identity secret.

As for Waverider, Archie, Mike, Denny and I had a conversation where we came to the general idea of him being a time traveling Silver Surfer type. Since the Monarch was going to have a larger, heavier appearance, we wanted someone lithe. The timestream trailing color effect was my own idea, kind of based on Star Trek’s Enterprise when it would go to warp. At the time, I thought, “People will realize this signifier will indicate time travel.” I like to think that it worked.

Did you have any involvement in the plotting or the scripting of the ARMAGEDDON bookend issues?

Not with Book One and only a bit with Book Two. By the time that rolled around we had enough conversations that there was a small bit of input. As much as anything, it also came up when it was decided to change the ending. By then we were into the question of how to do it and do it easily, since I was already well into drawing the story.

At the time, what did you think of the plan to turn "a major DC hero" into a major villain?

I totally supported the idea. We have to be able to surprise readers from time to time and something like that works. Frankly, I think it would have worked better with Captain Atom because he had the power level to fit the idea of it all. On top of that, it would have been easier to keep him as a villain over the long haul because he didn’t have the connections to other characters, like Hawk did with Dove, for example.

And that always falls into the category of whether or not later writers will stick with it. Too often, someone else will come along with the sole desire of changing the last thing in print because Hawk, Captain Atom, Popsicle Man or whomever, has been their favorite since age seven and, “How DARE those creators mess with that?!” 

I love that this was a crossover that justified a lot of "What if"  stories. Once you knew what the crossover premise was, were you determined to write one of the Superman Annuals?

If you go back to the first question where I talked about wanting to write most of what I drew at that point, I was told right from the start that I’d be able to write one of the Annuals. So that made it a bit more enticing to get on board.

And I had hoped to draw it as well, but there was only so much time in the day. And as it was, that’s when I was working crazy hours anyway!

One thing that puts ARMAGEDDON 2001 near the top of my list of crossover events is that its structure doesn't force the tie-ins to be held hostage by certain plot points. Like ZERO HOUR, the event mostly acts as a cool writing prompt for the participating teams to run with. So with the marching orders being "show us where your character is 10 years from now," where did your brainstorming process start?

So, stepping back on this a bit, the first big decision was to set this up in such a way that it didn’t follow the pattern of a monthly book with a lot of different monthlies crossing into it. There was a very deliberate move to step outside all of that on behalf of both retailers and readers, who were a bit tapped out by that process. 

It also made the project more enticing to writers of the connected books and stories because it didn’t interrupt the flow of where they were in their own arcs.

In terms of the creative process, it was really the thought of saying, “Show us the future with something fun.” In other words, it as part of the exercise to step outside of where the character might logically go. So, a story idea or whacky new costume might be more likely to get approved than if it were part of the, “This WILL be THE FUTURE!” type of approach.

Did you give any consideration to telling the most plausible version of Superman's future, since at that point in comics, the character's existed in a perpetual present, where it seemed unlikely the storytelling would ever advance to their middle aged years? Or was your interest always in telling a future that you'd never want to experience with Superman? Were there any alternate pitches you toyed with before arriving where you did?

The ideas I had really swept into the one that saw print quite fast. I didn’t pitch anything radically different. It was more along the lines of a dialogue with Mike Carlin where we bounced various aspects of the overall concept back and forth. 

And we did want to step outside the continuity of the ongoing books at the time— to give it a bit of a different flavor.

Initially I wanted to talk to you about this because I remembered this as one of the first "Evil Superman" stories before that trope started being beaten to death over the last 10-15 years. And the unexpected thing to me when I reread it was that... I saw a lot more of "real Clark" in this authoritarian-leaning Superman than we've seen in stories like INJUSTICE. 

Can you talk about how you approached keeping some familiar aspects of the character even as he's taking actions that make the federal government and even Batman feel like he's stepped over the line? Were there any ideas you considered and then discarded because it would have made him TOO evil?

The balance was to keep Superman “in character” will also putting him on edge. 

Evil Superman for the sake of being evil doesn’t interest me because it’s too much of a detour. But keeping Clark more grounded and real makes it more of a logical— and not so distant— jump. 

At what point in the development process did you realize that Batman had to be the one to take on Superman in this story?

Batman was involved with the story idea right from the start. Some of the elements and ideas actually came to me while doing the DARK KNIGHT OVER METROPOLIS story a few years earlier. 

That often happens to me while drawing a story. Basic ideas can perk around in my head while I’m drawing a story, well after I’ve written it. I’ll be drawing page 10 (or whatever) and cooking on the next chapter, which I would have had no idea of beforehand.

The best example of this is Hank Henshaw/Cyborg Superman,  who I always so as a one-shot character. That changed once I started drawing that exact same story. 

Of course, with DARK KNIGHT OVER METROPOLIS, you're referencing Superman giving Batman the kryptonite ring and telling him that if he ever goes bad, he wants the means to stop him in the hands of a man he'd trust with his life. I can see how once that Chekov's Gun exists, you'd find it an irresistible hook to play out somehow.

Was the idea to homage the Batman/Superman battle from THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS simultaneous with that? It certainly was the most famous fight between those two.

Yes, definitely. I’d also add that a lot of creators within the Superman team had conflicting feelings about that fight because Superman was made to look like a government stooge of Ronald Reagan’s. 

We didn’t see him that way at all. He and Batman could disagree and be in conflict… and we recognized that Batman was supposed to be the coolest character in that particular story… but Superman coming off as a stooge might have been the wrong way to go.

But… that having been said… once the Kryptonite ring of Luthor’s fell into Batman’s possession, it was too cool NOT to use.

I remember reading this issue at 11 years old and noting the contrast with SUPERMAN IV. In that movie, Superman addresses the United Nations, tells the world he's taking away their nukes, and everyone cheers. Here, you've got a Superman on an extreme anti-nuke crusade and while it seems he still has a lot of public support, we see that the President considers him a threat to national security, which is something we didn't see happen in SUPERMAN IV. Was that movie on your mind at all as you wrote the issue?

Yes, it was. 

While I admired aspects of the movie and didn’t care for others, I don’t think we should be naive about what would happen if anyone ever showed up and said, “I’m taking away the world’s weapons. Especially those of the most powerful.”

I don’t believe the current president would react well to such a move, do you?

Certainly not him or ANY other prior U.S President, that’s for sure!

For the conclusion of my chat with Dan Jurgens, go here. 

If you want an overview of Dan Jurgens's Superman career, take a look at the tribute I wrote for the publication of ACTION COMICS 1000.