"I cannot deny her. She is my mother. She is my lover. And I am her Spirit."
When I first heard that Frank Miller was attached to adapt Will Eisner's, The Spirit to film I was left with a vague sense of uneasiness, after all, this is the same Frank Miller of whores, whores, whores fame. He's neither known for his subtlety nor his ability to treat female characters as if they were anything but highly advanced Real Dolls. So when the trailer turns up in my RSS reader this morning it was with those same vague forebodings that I watched it at all.
And now that my retinas have detached I can say that I both rue and lament my decision: crappy ass CGI, Miller's tired emphasis on the color red [fangirl aside: if you're going to go for the same overplayed "make everything black and white except for a color or two here and there because ooh aren't we AVANT-GARDE" trope and you're going to do this with a Spirit movie, get it freaking right, okay -- it's not the Spirit's tie that's the psychologically important aspect of his costume, it's the blue fedora and the blue suit because they were his father's and I suspect the tie was more as a complementary color point and...ugh, forget it.], and then the completely offensive, generic, and badly melodramatic tag line:
My city screams. I cannot deny her. She is my mother. She is my lover. And I am her Spirit.
Are. you. effing kidding me? Leaving aside the city = woman + violent imagery inherent in the basic premise of the tagline, the only thing that's missing in the completely worn out virgin/mother/whore trifecta of accepted feminine roles is the "virgin" bit, but then this is a Frank Miller film so that's all explained. [INSERT LAME JOKE ABOUT THE ONLY VIRGINS IN A FRANK MILLER FILM BEING IN THE AUDIENCE.] Does he actually live in the Victorian period? Is he a strange visitor from 1882 come to learn about our plasma screen tee vees and BluRay DVDs and this series of tubes we call the internets? Will he, in exchange, bring us back something we've lost: the ability to define women based entirely on three roles and three roles alone?
The website for what will no doubt be a piece of cinematic gold is also mycityscreams.com but I will not link it because, clearly, it should not be viewed by ANYONE.
This:
Or this:
Should not result in this:
Because The Spirit is absolutely not straight noir. It's this dude sitting there with a bemused smile on his face that mitigates the noir and humanizes it:
But Frank Miller would not know funny if it came up and kicked him in the shins.
And now that my retinas have detached I can say that I both rue and lament my decision: crappy ass CGI, Miller's tired emphasis on the color red [fangirl aside: if you're going to go for the same overplayed "make everything black and white except for a color or two here and there because ooh aren't we AVANT-GARDE" trope and you're going to do this with a Spirit movie, get it freaking right, okay -- it's not the Spirit's tie that's the psychologically important aspect of his costume, it's the blue fedora and the blue suit because they were his father's and I suspect the tie was more as a complementary color point and...ugh, forget it.], and then the completely offensive, generic, and badly melodramatic tag line:
My city screams. I cannot deny her. She is my mother. She is my lover. And I am her Spirit.
Are. you. effing kidding me? Leaving aside the city = woman + violent imagery inherent in the basic premise of the tagline, the only thing that's missing in the completely worn out virgin/mother/whore trifecta of accepted feminine roles is the "virgin" bit, but then this is a Frank Miller film so that's all explained. [INSERT LAME JOKE ABOUT THE ONLY VIRGINS IN A FRANK MILLER FILM BEING IN THE AUDIENCE.] Does he actually live in the Victorian period? Is he a strange visitor from 1882 come to learn about our plasma screen tee vees and BluRay DVDs and this series of tubes we call the internets? Will he, in exchange, bring us back something we've lost: the ability to define women based entirely on three roles and three roles alone?
The website for what will no doubt be a piece of cinematic gold is also mycityscreams.com but I will not link it because, clearly, it should not be viewed by ANYONE.
This:
Or this:
Should not result in this:
Because The Spirit is absolutely not straight noir. It's this dude sitting there with a bemused smile on his face that mitigates the noir and humanizes it:
But Frank Miller would not know funny if it came up and kicked him in the shins.