Disbelief (and the suspension thereof)

[andrewducker]

Stories are funny things. For a start they aren't real. They're about as unreal a thing as you can get, existing solely in your imagination, different in each one as we each envisage a different world in which similar events unfold. There's a variety of different things that attract us to stories, that keep out attention focussed on them. Whether we feel any affinity for the characters, whether the story has emotional resonance with us, whether we appreciate the emotions it engenders within us and many other factors can all have a large effect on our enjoyment of a story.

One of the trickiest things to manage is suspension of disbelief - whether we are able to take the story onboard, or if our reality detectors immediately reject it as nonsense. This can be a sense of belief in relation to reality or it can relate to the inward consistency of the film. Some things can be happily accepted in the context of one story but not in another and some people will happily accept the most outrageous things at one time, but spurn other very similar things in another story. A friend of mine once disparaged Evita, saying the people didn't have even vaguely Argentinian accents. The same friend owns the complete set of Disney films and not once have I heard him complain about the lack of greek accents in Hercules.

When dealing with stories that have jumped from one medium to another, sometimes you are left with the tropes of the original medium which are suddenly more offensive to our disbelief than they were before. Spandex costumes , for instance, look almost normal to people flicking through a comic, but have a tendency towards extreme ridiculousness on the screen. However, to watch Superman and complain that he wears red and blue lycra would seem completely ridiculous - by purchasing a ticket to see Superman you've given up all rights to complain about watching a film which uses the Superman standards. Similarly, to complain that Spiderman getting his powers through being bitten by a spider is patently unscientific and ridiculous would seem churlish - Peter Parker is bitten by a spider and gains the ability to walk up walls, that's an established part of the mythos and telling that story in another mythos isn't going to change anything.

It was thereore with a certain amusement and amazement that I saw people's complaints about The Hulk - that he withstood damage that was impossible, that he leapt miles in a single leap, that his trousers never tore off when he swelled in size. Now, were this to be an original film I can understand that these complaints might have some substance, that the laws of physics might need to be taken into account (or not, depending on what kind of film was being made). But he does all of these things in the comic. The comic book character leaps miles into the air, withstands tank shells and never, ever loses his shorts. To complain that the film character based on him does all of these things seems baffling in the extreme - akin to watching a Star Wars film and complaining that there were light-sabers in it.

Comments

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

But we've been through this before, Andrew. You belong to the school of people who believe that if it's fantasy, that means it doesn't have to have rules. I belong to the school of people who believe that if it's fantasy, the rules have to be worked out with the same precision as scientists work out the rules of this universe: otherwise it's shoddy fantasy.

[andrewducker]

I've never seen anything with rules that good. Nothing whatsoever. The rules tend to, at best, be cohesive on a thematic or plot level, they pretty much never hold together if you question the reasons for them.

And the main thrust of my point was that questioning the iconography of something when it's very nature includes that iconography is an odd thing to do. Like going to see a pirate movie and complaining about the obsession with boats.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

But your closing sentence: But I understand that some people are jarred somewhat more by the fantastical than I am... implies that it is people who are "jarred by the fantastical" who object to the Ang Lee Hulk - whereas, as far as I can see, people without experience of the fantastical do not object to it; it is people who prefer fantasy to operate with coherent and systematic rules who object to it. So the conclusion of your argument is wrong. Which tends to make the rest of it look wackier than it deserves.

[andrewducker]

You're right. In retrospect it's quite obvious that I had no idea how to finish the post, so I tacked on something that didn't flow at all.

So I've chopped off that last paragraph.

Cheers.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Yes - it makes more sense as an argument now. :-)

[andrewducker]

I have this ridiculous urge to put pithy endings on posts. To, as it were, wrap them up and give them a cute final paragraph.

I really must learn to control that.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

endings are a talent. work on it. many authors are so bad at them - maybe if you practice, you won't be one :-)

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Comic mythos, to use your phrase, is different from film.

A character doing something in a comic, or being a certain way in a comic has no bearing on the film character.

Films are a different world.

Sometimes, just sometimes, they can be pushed into the mythos, but generally, they exist as a separate, or at least "partitioned off" section.

The hulk can do X, Y and Z in the comics? For reasons A, B and C?

Great.

In the film, there is no reason to suppose it will be the same. A film is different to a comic, is for a different audience, who know different things.

When the newspapers ran stories about Robin getting killed, people who read them (and often the news writers) commonly assumed that the Robin meant was Dick Grayson, as seen in the TV series.

Films of comics aren't usually for the fans. They're for -all- the people who watch films. And the comic mythos, at that point, is a brand name. The film mythos is a different world.

[andrewducker]

Oh, certainly, they're different. And, unlike Erin, I don't complain because the mythos is different in the X-Men film than it is in the comic book. Sometimes, to make it work you have to change it.

But in going to see (for instance) a film based on the Hulk comic book, surely one is tacitly indicating that one is at least willing to see a film that contains the same things that the comic book does?

If I paid my £5.60 to see Superman the movie and then complained that he went around flying, in clear violation of the laws of physics, that'd be ridiculous - it's a movie about Superman, for goodness sake, that's what he does.

Stretching the metaphor as far as I possibly can:
"Excuse me, I bought this tin of peas and the peas in side were green."
"Yes sir, that's the colour that peas are."
"Well, I know that peas in freezer bags are green, but I'm not used to green things in tins. Surely things in tins are brown or red."
"I'm afraid that peas are green no matter what kind of container they come in."
"But surely cans are different from freezer bags?"
"Of course they are, but peas are peas, no matter what they come in."

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

peas are peas, indeed.

but you miss my point.

I wasn't saying some peas are different from other peas.

I was saying that peas and carrots are different.

Comic Hulk and Film Hulk are not two of the same type of thing. They are different. There is no inherent thing which says "If Comic Hulk is X, film hulk must be Y"

y'all seen the first Punisher movie? It's about a guy who kills people, and that is where the inspiration ends. Oh, and he's called Frank. But other than it, it's generic (but fun) action all the way.

I guess you're not getting my point here. I'll stop.

[andrewducker]

I _think_ I get your point, but I think I disagree with it. There's certainly no reason why movie Hulk has to be the same as comic Hulk, but to complain they are the same seems to indicate that you were hoping that despite the word Hulk on the tin, it wouldn't actually contain Hulk at all.

I haven't seen the first Punisher movie tho, it had Dolph Lundgren in it, it looked terrible. Despite living with Neil for a year I avoided many, many terrible films :->

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

"but to complain they are the same seems to indicate that you were hoping that despite the word Hulk on the tin, it wouldn't actually "

nope. you did miss it.

no matter.

[andrewducker]

I prefer to think of it as having seen it and disagreed.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

If you'd seen my point you presumably would have replied to it, rather than replying to points I wasn't making, surely?

[andrewducker]

You were saying that Hulk in comics and Hulk in movies wasn't the same thing. They should be taken as two distinct things and were not directly comparable.

I was saying that the medium was equivalent to a container for the story and that one shouldn't be too surprised if the story remained consistent across mediums.

This seemed like a fairly straightforward disagreement to me.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

*shakes head and sighs*

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

:-) (you should be glad you never let Marcus [or indeed Emma] pick the films from the Alva video shop)

[andrewducker]

I let Emma picks films once or Twice. Which is how I ended up watching the live action Generation X movie.

Really, really bad.

[kpollock.livejournal.com]

The one that I recall was "Warrior Princess" (or somesuch. It was as bad as it sounds.

[blackmanxy.livejournal.com]

Well, if we're talking about most comics, which are largely unknown to viewing audience, I might be inclined to agree. Even X-Men isn't something most people are really familiar with. But when it's one of the few well-known comics (Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Hulk, Spider-Man, and maybe one or two others), then I think it's pretty safe to assume that anyone in touch with pop culture is familiar with the most basic elements of those character's stories. People know that Superman's weakness is Kryptonite, Wonder Woman has a magic lasso, and Spider-Man and Hulk got their powers from radiation accidents that simply aren't feasible in the real world. Those characters all have a mythos that extends beyond the comic book origins now. Of course, the fact that every character I mentioned has been featured in a TV series helps.

That said, if comic movies are meant to be for all the people who watch films, then there has to be some nod to the people who are familiar with the comic, otherwise the movie is only for non-comic-reading fans. Honestly, I'd never want to attempt a film adaptation of a comic where I had to strike such a delicate balance in pleasing some pretty disparate groups of people.

Of course, all this just bleeds into another one of my rants about anal-retentive science types, but I won't go into that here.

[allorin.livejournal.com]

Wonder-woman has a magic lasso?!?!

[andrewducker]

I was going to make the point that lots of people have no idea about even the larger "mainstream" superheroes.

And yes, she does.

An invisible plane too...

[blackmanxy.livejournal.com]

The accent thing just doesn't make sense to me. The act of translating a movie lies wholly outside the context of the movie. To use a hackneyed phrase, the translation occurs on the viewer's side of the "fourth wall," not on the characters' side. The people in Evita aren't actually speaking English - they're speaking Argentinian and it's being translated to English somewhere between the movie's internal reality and our external reality. Now, presumably the characters are speaking unaccented Argentinian, at least for the region, so why would they have accents at all? I could see someone from a different region or country having an appropriate accent, but for the people speaking the default dialect, that just seems pointless.

Of course, if the characters are going to interact regularly with people from the viewers' region, then it makes more sense. It helps differentiate the speakers of the native (internal) dialect from the speakers of the viewer's language or dialect, but that's only occasionally the case. Other than that, it just seems like a condescending and somewhat nonsensical audial cue for the viewer to remember "oh right, they aren't actually speaking English!"

[andrewducker]

I liked the way this was done in Hunt for Red October. Start off with them speaking Russian, pan around and fade into them speaking English. Worked perfectly.

Oh, and I agree with you entirely.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

In contrast, one of my biggest complaints about The Hulk (other than that it was a jumbled mess) was that the hulk looked like a refugee from a mid-90s video-game, he was ugly, inelegantly done and generally foolish-looking. I was definitely expecting better animation.

[allorin.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

Speaking of Hulk, is that your inspiration for the vomit-inspiring colouring in here? My head hurts....

[andrewducker]

Naah, I just went through all the colour schemes trying to find one that was high-enough contrast...

[allorin.livejournal.com]

Well, it's high enough to make my nose bleed...