This may come as a surprise to anybody who has been privy to my many embarrassing rants, but I am about to speak positively about a movie based upon a comic series. To compound the felony, I know next to nothing about the series upon which the movie is based. Gather ’round as I confute the laws of I Evolved Into This!? physics.

After seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, my girlfriend remarked that there wasn’t much to the characters. She was turned off in particular by what she viewed to be a lack of inroads into the character of Scott Pilgrim himself. Fair enough, I say. For much of the film, Scott and his screenmates are somewhat inscrutable. But as the film progresses, it does reveal a few unseen facets. It merely does so in broad strokes, encouraging the viewers–by association with their own experiences, personalities, and senses of humor–to contribute that which isn’t in the script. For this reason, Scott Pilgrim is not for everyone.

Perhaps we’re meant to take Scott for the cliche that he initially seems to be: a sad sack, unlucky in love and lacking in convictions. Gradually, events from his past are revealed that contradict the cliche, which can (and should) be viewed as character development. When Scott ***OBVIOUS BUT OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING (highlight text to reveal)*** triumphs over his last foe, be mindful of which sword he’s using–and which one he’s not. ***END OBVIOUS BUT OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING*** Sure, it’s not exactly subtle, but it’s an ingenious way of literally illustrating his growth.

That scene is just one of many smart uses of video game and comic iconography in the film. I’ve spoken out against amped-up, hyper-stylized filmmaking in the past, and that’s exactly what this might appear to be to a careless observer. In fact, Scott Pilgrim–while certainly amped-up and stylized–does what it does with clarity and a sense of purpose, which are the chief qualities that set it apart. Is it self-consciously clever? Sure as hell. But it’s not to the film’s detriment. Not only is the style relevant to the storytelling, but it’s a lot of fun. Where other action movies try to obfuscate their most preposterous moments, Scott Pilgrim revels in them.

I can’t vouch for its faithfulness to the comics, but the film does refine comic-inspired techniques that other, similar projects have clumsily implemented. For example, split-screen close-ups, which resemble bordered panels, are used to a similar purpose as the classic two-shot. Perhaps Scott Pilgrim learned the few positive lessons of Frank Miller’s The Spirit, which used modern special effects to “draw” on the screen. And perhaps (again, I don’t know) it mimics the comic’s approach of appropriating the iconography of another medium–video games–rather than simply ape the original experience. Whatever the case may be, anything lost in the translation is not apparent to me. I’m a sucker for a well-told story that plays to the strengths of its own medium, and the Scott Pilgrim movie passes the test.

Will Eisner’s best moments showcase genuine empathy for people. In A Contract With God, we meet Mr. Scuggs, a mysterious building superintendent whom nobody knows, yet everybody has an opinion of. People regard him with fear and mistrust. With a single facial expression, Eisner allows us to see Mr. Scuggs as his tenants either cannot or don’t care to see. We also meet Frimme Hersh, who finds success as a business shark. Though Hersh has hardened his heart, there is a pervasive sense of yearning for something that he once renounced. These characters typify the book, which catalogues flawed things done by ordinary people who cannot be dismissed.

A Contract With God is frequently described as the first graphic novel*, which is misleading. In actuality, it is a collection of four short graphic stories. The first one, the titular “A Contract With God,” consumes a full third of the book. The page length is fitting enough; the story bears the hefty burden of depicting the life of Frimme Hersh, from childhood to death. In doing so, it strains even the generous page count that Eisner allots to it.

The heavy reliance upon third-person narration in “A Contract With God” might indicate a couple of things. First, the story is being briskly summarized to fit into a predetermined page length. It comes across as more of a yarn with accompanying illustrations than a complete comic. Secondly, this simply may not be the format best-suited to telling a story of this scope. It is difficult to span a man’s entire life in any fashion, let alone in the sparse, scattershot fashion seen here.

That issue aside, “A Contract With God” does contain a strong moment in which the character of Frimme Hersh renounces his faith, which is conveyed through a two-page physical transformation. It’s a strong visual idea that will hang like a specter over the subsequent stories. Eisner’s original preface to this book reveals the private, long-held grief that inspired “A Contract With God.” Hersh’s transformative moment is strong enough to earn that inspiration, even if the rest of the tale falls short.

There is a recurring theme of life-changing events, punctuated by one last ritualistic run-through of daily routine. Frimme Hersh says his prayers for the last time. In the next story, “The Super,” Mr. Scuggs shovels one more load of coal into the fire. It’s a classic literary move, but there is something vital in these moments. The characters understand the passing of their way of life. They do what they do for the last time, perhaps out of attachment, out of obligation, or as a symbol of burial. It’s not easily put into words, which is probably why Eisner didn’t.

In “The Street Singer,” Eisner ingeniously switches among different points of view. First, we get an omniscient account of street singers and their activities. From there, the story switches to the P.O.V. of a washed-up opera queen looking to reignite her career. Finally, it switches to that of the street singer himself. While not as emotionally involving as the other stories in this collection, “The Street Singer” almost functions as dark comedy. The climactic moment of the story centers around a tragicomic misunderstanding, rich with irony. The punchline is that the street singer, fond of the drink, gets kicked out of his favorite tavern.

The final story in the bunch is called “Cookalein.” It seems to be the most overtly autobiographical, and it is also perhaps the most illustrative of Eisner’s strengths and weaknesses. Until this point, the stories have toed the fine line between drama and melodrama. “Cookalein” crosses that line. Events occur that demand greater attention to complexity and nuance than is allowed here by the remaining space of the book. There is the sense that the story condenses events from several boyhood vacations into one, resulting in a greatest hits collection of mishaps and milestones. This kind of story is best dealt with in fine touches, rather than the broad strokes used here.

But even if the scope of the story escapes the storytelling, the characters are as vividly drawn as one could hope–in both senses of the phrase. The events do offer a glimpse into a way of life that is distinctly Depression-era, urban, and Jewish, which most readers will be obviously unfamiliar with. Here, Eisner is letting the audience in on the secret rituals of his upbringing. It’s his human touch that shields these stories from sentimentality and cliche.

The environments throughout, inspired by old NYC tenements, are presented impressionistically. Often, a patch of bare floorboards, a set of steps, or an arch of bricks stand in for the complete picture. Eisner’s art is not sloppy or lazy. Every partially (or completely) omitted background is calculated to represent the environment in effect, rather than in totality. A few key details present all the necessary information to evoke a feeling of being there, even if all the mundanities of the room are not accounted for. Make no mistake: this a forceful way of placing focus upon the characters at the center of the action. That said, the sense of environment is strong enough that completing the backgrounds might have done more harm than good.

As with all of Eisner’s work, the drawings are slightly cartoonier than one might expect from stories ostensibly grounded in reality. This aesthetic is a clever deception on Eisner’s part. Rather than put the stories at a distance, the theatrical gestures and exaggerated facial expressions have an immersive quality that captures the quirks of humanity through amplification. Drawn more subtly (or not at all), the visual action in the story might never achieve those human qualities. There are far too many comics with nominally realistic artwork, but which don’t achieve Eisner’s truth to life. Eisner’s faith was in the visual as the most character-expressive element of his stories.

As it happens with items of historical importance, A Contract With God’s reputation does not rest entirely upon the merits of its content. It is a strong book, and it would be unfair to judge it based purely on its place in history. Now that its epoch has passed and the newness of its ideas has worn off, it can be appreciated for what it is–not Eisner’s best work, but an original achievement in comic art. It goes without saying that it is necessary reading for any informed and literate reader of comics.

—

(*A Contract With God is allegedly the first-ever “graphic novel.” Eisner would later admit to using the term to court publishers, many of whom weren’t interested in comics. The etymology is quite simple. A graphic novel is novelistic storytelling carried out through images rather than text. As a collection of short stories loosely connected by common themes and environments, A Contract With God does not fit the bill. That’s not to say that Eisner was wrong, but “graphic novel” in this case applies only as a marketing tool for skeptical publishers. For the rest of us, a more accurate descriptor could be “graphic anthology,” or simply “comics.”)

It bugs me that, with a few exceptions aside, the humble critic has yet to come to comics. I’d like to see a greater appreciation for comics as both a craft and an art form. But even more so, I think that storytellers in comics sometimes need a good kick in the ass. Perhaps if that ball is going to get rolling, I’d better step up and figure out what I personally think is good and bad in the realm of comics. A list of principles—rules, if you will.

Be warned! At 2,441 words, this is going to be an epic length excursion into the guts of the comics medium. It will explore things that can be done to good effect. It will explore mistakes that are made all too often, sometimes by comics’ brightest stars. I really hope it will explore ways for writers and artists to achieve an improvement in their own work.

Prepare to become a better storyteller!

1. Choose your format wisely.

Is the finished artwork going to be on 6×9 paper? Horizontal 14×11 paper? A computer screen? Make sure that the needs of your story are in tune with the format you’re working in.

There is most definitely a common format, but by no means is it automatically the best for what you’re doing.

Don’t be afraid to experiment!

2. Sound in comics has severe limitations. Or, off-panel voices don’t work.

A dialogue balloon comes in from an unknown source beyond the edge of the panel. Is it a man’s voice? A woman’s voice? Is it coming from an old person or a young person? If it’s off-panel, who knows? Remember, the readers are supposed to be hearing this in their heads!

Never keep your audience from knowing what a voice should sound like. It might be mysterious, but it’s also cheating. Dialogue balloons stand in for real sound. If you can see the dialogue on the page, you should be able to “hear” it.

3. Time in comics has severe limitations. Or, one panel cannot represent multiple lengths of time.

Comics can’t outright show the passage of time, so be as careful as possible when implying it. If you have both an action sequence and a bunch of expositional dialogue to get through, find a better solution than just cramming them together.

Say that one of your characters is punching another character in the jaw. If the panel is supposed to be showing the hit, then the hit is controlling how long the panel lasts. If the panel is supposed to be showing dialogue, then the dialogue is controlling how long the panel lasts.

Of course, you see the problem. Punching is fairly instantaneous. Dialogue is not. They can’t be included in the same panel without screwing up the panel’s sense of duration. This can be thought of as the “Jeph Loeb makes superheroes talk too much while they fight” rule.

4. Use color with deliberate purpose, or not at all.

Color for the sake of color is a marketing tool at best, and an intrusion upon the visual design of the story at worst. Know why you’re using it.

Avoid the shiny, airbrushed, gradiated, heavily filtered coloring often seen in today’s mainstream comics. It’s sterile and artificial-looking. Colorists ought to be proud when their work looks like it came primarily from the hand of a human being, rather than a computer.

Don’t be afraid of black and white.

5. Don’t rely too heavily on text.

Let the readers discover your world visually. Let it unfold for them. It will be much more “real” than if it’s explained through captions.

Use subtext and physical action to hint at what your characters are thinking! Many comic book characters express themselves just by grimacing and balling up their fists. Real people have a much broader range of expression than that.

Don’t overload the page with text. It makes for an ugly page. Once upon a time, former DC Comics editor Mort Weisinger decided that 210 is the maximum number of words that one page can support. How he came up with that figure is a mystery to me, but it seems pretty spot-on.

6. Choose wisely, when to break from the panel you’re in and advance to the next one!

Tell your story in as few well-chosen, well-composed images as you can. Fragmented visuals are a sign that the author and artist are imposing too much of their own voice upon the material. Let the readers form their own experience, rather than forming it for them.

Give your readers enough detail to visualize the complete environment. A strong grasp of the geography (this word will pop up again in a little while) is essential for the reader to make visual sense of what’s going on.

More lines in your drawings do not mean more detail. This means you, Jim Lee!

7. Avoid talking heads.

If two characters are talking to each other, let them be seen together! Draw them in “two-shots,” and use as few panels as possible. If you find yourself needing a long chain of close-ups to get the whole conversation in, trim your dialogue first.

In fact, don’t use close-ups at all unless you need to reveal something in the character’s face. That’s what close-ups are for.

8. Work from the human level.

Don’t go for flashy visual angles unless they somehow make sense within the story. If your two characters are calmly dining in a restaurant, keep us in the room and keep us at eye level. Leave the fancy angles out of it.

9. Be mindful of the axis of action.

As I’ve said, your drawings should be creating a sense of geography—in other words, the physical space of the story—in the reader’s mind.

If the geography is going to make sense, the placement of characters and objects needs to be consistent. This is best accomplished by keeping them in the same left-to-right visual arrangement from panel to panel. Their positioning will feel much more consistent this way.

This visual arrangement is sacred! Stray from it only in two circumstances: one, the scene ends, or two, a new viewing angle has been clearly established.

10. When it comes to the era, keep it real.

Either tell the story here and now, or do good research to create the time and place that it does happen. Don’t use stereotypes or clichés to create the illusion of an exotic setting. That’s cheating.

11. When it comes to environments, continue to keep it real.

If a scene takes place in a bedroom, the bedroom should have the things that a real bedroom would have. The same goes for a kitchen, a living room, a dining hall, a snowy field, a desert, or a verdant forest.

If your environment has a foreign item in it—that is, anything that wouldn’t commonly be there—your story must include a plausible explanation for how it got there and why. A gun taped to the bottom of a table, a chest buried in the yard, or whatever.

This could even extend to special knowledge possessed by a character. Unless your characters are all-knowing and all-powerful, they should never miraculously be able pull the right item or right bit of information out of thin air in the nick of time.

12. If it looks like it violates the laws of physics, don’t use it.

If your character clearly kicks a ball forward in one panel and it is seen rocketing straight up into the sky in the next, something is wrong. If your character punches a boulder and the boulder reacts as though it’s made of rubber rather than stone, something is really wrong.

Get rid of this stuff. If your story depends on it in order to work, go back as many steps as it takes to fix it.

Of course, this assumes that your story’s universe is consistent with real world physics. If not, then any differences from reality must be carefully established early on. And, once established, your story must never stray from its own version of physics.

13. Come up with something better than a villain who exists solely to oppose the hero.

Unless you’re going to explore the hero’s grief when he realizes that his actions led directly to the existence of a violent monster—and trust me, it’s been done—you’re only going to make him look stupid, impotent, and irresponsible.

14. Avoid telling stories with “quote marks” around them.

The comics medium is so choked with parodies, alternative takes, ironic takes, and other post-modern dickery that the original stories are starting to lose out.

Learn to tell sincere, original stories first, because you need to know what something is before you can even attempt to subvert it. There’s a fine line between clever and obnoxious—and when the authors know and even enjoy what they’re playing with, it makes all the difference.

Note: “sincere” and “original” do not necessarily mean serious! There is such a thing as sincere comedy, just as there is such a thing as ironic tragedy.

15. Ambiguity is good. Deliberately confusing your audience is not.

Ambiguity means that there are a variety of valid, interesting ways that your story can be looked at. A muddled, nonsensical story doesn’t count as ambiguous. Not that meaning can’t be found in muddled nonsense, but in that case, the audience deserves the credit—not you.

16. Female wardrobe is not an opportunity to pander to young male readers.

I realize that mainstream comics are primarily read by teenage boys and adult men, and that most of those comics involve superheroes—and superheroines. If you insist on perpetuating the dominance that this genre unfairly has over all others, this rule is especially for you.

Please, please—at least pretend that your female characters are proud and emotionally secure when you’re designing their costumes. Also try to remember that while your female characters might be able to defy gravity, the costumes probably can’t.

While you’re at it, you might also pretend that your superheroine would probably opt for clothes that protect her skin, rather than expose as much of it as possible.

17. Don’t sanitize violence.

If you’re going to let your characters fight, then show what would happen if they fought. Blood. Broken bones. Severe wounds, perhaps. If the nature of your story doesn’t allow this, then it doesn’t allow the violence.

However, don’t amp up the violence to exaggerated levels, either. This isolates the reader with a layer of fantasy, which is its own sort of sanitation.

18. Storytelling is a moral activity.

Remember the thing about imposing your voice upon the readers’ experience? Your readers have a right to explore the images without you dragging them around with selective, constrictive page layouts. When in doubt, always err on the side of giving the readers more freedom.

How much you control the reader’s experience is a matter of story as well. Don’t be too restrictive in how the story can be judged, and do not, DO NOT impose your overarching interpretation upon the reader! Never be too on-the-nose with what you think it all means.

The amount of freedom you give to your readers, in any aspect of your comic, is an important moral decision.

19. Everything in your comic matters.

Every panel composition, every page layout, every character design, and every line of dialogue has its own little bit of influence upon how your story will come across. Be careful of your decisions!

The reader can and probably will notice careless decisions and overlooked mistakes. And even if they don’t, their experience of the work will still be negatively impacted. Assuming you’re good enough to weave a spell over your audience, it’s all too easy for that spell to be broken.

And finally, the big Kahuna…

20. Never use what is overused.

The following are signs that your story is on autopilot:
• Romantic complications that occur because one character cuts off the other’s explanation and nobody ever bothers to clear things up.
• Horror stories that only move forward because somebody does something unreasonably stupid.
• Superficial, unlikely action of any kind—weapons, murders, drugs, whatever. Most of us will never kill anybody, be murdered, or be involved in a shootout in a warehouse full of heroin. And yet, our lives certainly don’t lack stories that are worth telling.
• Directionless stories about quirky outsiders and their unlikely friendships.
• Revenge plots.
• Wealthy criminal masterminds who issue orders while sitting in the shadow of a really tall chair.
• Impossible-to-kill characters that fall down, apparently dead, but rise back to their feet after a moment. Or—for the Dragon Ball fans—characters that apparently die, but emerge unscathed from a cloud of dust and dirt.
• Common turns of phrase, especially in dialogue. (“I’m not a terrorist—I’m a patriot!” “She died of a broken heart.” “We’ll meet again, Spider-Man!”)
• Characters that are capable of coming up with a perfect Seinfeldian one-liner for any situation.
• Out-of-the-box slice-of-life woe-is-me self-indulgent masturbatory sub-cultural award-baiting psychosexual pseudo-intellectual coming-of-age generic pre-fab shopping-list anything.
• Stories in which the main problem is that the hero and the villain haven’t fought yet, and the solution is that they do.
• Gunfire scenes in which nobody hits anything or anyone unless it’s convenient to the plot. Also known as the Imperial Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship.
• Exotic, elaborate forms of assassination that could just as easily be accomplished with a single gunshot. Also known as the Dr. Evil School of Supervillainy.
• Final showdowns that occur in a factory with showers of sparks everywhere, or in a completely deserted area with lots of smashable scenery.
• Final showdowns that occur in densely populated areas, completely glossing over the high number of casualties that would necessarily occur.
• Really, any story in which the conflict is resolved through prolonged physical combat of any kind—fire arms, kung fu, whatever. If you’re such a great writer, is that the best you can do?

This is usually the part where you’d expect me to say that rules are meant to be broken, or something equally trite. But that’s not going to happen here. You may think you have an awesome reason to violate these principles. I assure you, though, that you do not. You need these limitations. They will give your stories a fighting chance at some kind of ingenuity.

Seriously, no excuses. Don’t phone it in. Don’t slack off. Don’t put your story on autopilot. Be a good storyteller.

Ever heard of Beowulf? The recent movie, not the story. How about Avatar? You probably saw that one. Most moviegoers did.

There are two big movie trends right now that seem impossible to escape. One is so-called “realistic CGI,” in which the animators try to achieve a photorealistic look with purely synthetic images. (Photorealistic images have already been achieved in movies by pointing real cameras at real things, but let’s not digress too far into that.) The other big trend is 3D, which requires the viewers to wear large plastic goggles. Hollywood asked you if you wanted these things in your movies by making them, and you responded by opening your wallet.

The royal “you,” of course. I’m not pointing fingers.

There have been some oddly specific objections to these movies, more than just the backlash you’d expect from a burgeoning trend. The complaints range from mild annoyance to actual physical pain. People think that the CGI characters look weird, waxy, and lifeless. Some have complained about getting headaches while watching the 3D presentations.

The Uncanny Valley

It turns out that human biology itself might be resisting the CGI graphics. The recent buzz term for the unshakeable “offness” of realistic computer images is “uncanny valley.” Our brains are fully prepared to accept images of real actors, photographed in the flesh. We’re also prepared to accept animation, so long as it’s on the cartoonier side. It’s when realism and animation start to encroach on each other’s territory that the trouble begins. That point of convergence—too realistic to accept as a cartoonified representation, never realistic enough to accept as the genuine article—is called the uncanny valley.

Psychologists have done some recent research on macaques, which might shed some light as to why this happens.

Princeton University researchers presented images of real monkey faces, unrealistic animated faces and realistic animated faces to five monkey subjects and recorded how long they gazed at each. Similar to the human response to objects in the uncanny valley, the monkeys avoided looking at the most realistic animated faces. The scientists, who published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, speculate that realistic animations might resemble sickly or diseased animals because they lack subtle cues of health such as normal skin texture and hue—and that an aversion to such sights may have evolved to keep us healthy. [Scientific American]

While this is a compelling explanation for why CGI characters never quite seem to look right, I doubt it will deter further attempts by movie animators.

H3daches

Then there’s the issue of 3D, which presents yet another psychological puzzle.

Recent web-discussions on the issue of ‘Avatar h3dache’ seem to agree that the problem lies in presenting the viewer with a fairly rich 3D environment, but no opportunity to choose to focus on a part of the scene that was filmed (or rendered) ‘blurred’, i.e. out-of-focus foreground elements such as leaves. Some of us seem to be fighting Avatars determination to make these choices for us, and getting our cognitive perception in a twist in the process.

In his determination to avoid criticisms of traditional ‘jack-in-the-box’ leveraging of 3D (wherein a director will engineer a shot so that things deliberately swing out at the viewer) Cameron seems to have compromised by shooting as much of the movie as possible with a very limited depth-of-field, in order to accentuate the 3D illusion.

…

Examining unfocused areas of the frame in Avatar is literally quite a headache, and counterintuitive to our enjoyment of the ‘baked and locked’ 3D planes that we are being presented with. Knowing that depth-of-field is all he has to play with if he’s not going to shoot rocks directly at us, Cameron doesn’t hold back - he relentlessly racks focus in scene after scene.

So the trick to avoiding a headache when watching this movie is to be obedient, and concentrate on the parts of the shot that the focus tells you are ‘important’. Once I understood this at the preview screenings last week, my headache began to clear up, but I was conscious too of the effort of having to ‘zip over’ to the next point of rapid-focus in order to keep up and preserve the 3D illusion. [Shadowlocked]

To simplify, your eyeballs are focusing on an unmoving 2D surface—the movie screen—which is lying to them, telling them to focus and refocus on distances that aren’t there. The actual surface isn’t going anywhere. Like realistic CGI, nothing in nature has prepared our eyes to accept this.

I humbly submit that the audience shouldn’t have to “be obedient”—in other words, politely ignore the movie’s problems. After all, if 3D has any possible benefit to the art of moviemaking, you’d think it would be giving the audience multiple planes of action to look at. While Cameron’s 3D renderings have a deep, rounded appearance, the movie itself—the images on the screen—stick to just one plane of action at a time. It moves no differently than a 2D movie. When Avatar goes from one plane of action to another, it doesn’t do so by composing in multiple planes and letting the viewer decide. It drags the viewer, through rack focusing.*

Texture aside, Avatar isn’t terribly 3D at all. In classic movies, there is a longstanding tradition of “deep focus” shots that show everything clearly, far away and all the way up to the foreground. This style of camerawork gave filmmakers many planes of action to play with. In The Rules of the Game, characters bicker like children in the foreground while other characters sneak around them in the background. It’s played for laughs, and it works. In Citizen Kane, the boy plays outside the window while his parents debate his future inside the house. These movies might not “pop” at you with the special glasses, but they are composed in 3D. Multiple planes of action, playing upon one another. That’s real 3D cinema—movies that use depth in the action.

The irony is that Avatar might cause even more headaches if it were photographed in this way. With eyes skating all over the place and constantly refocusing on depths that aren’t there, the presence of actual stuff to look at might just drive them haywire. Just give them one surface to look at. Be confident that the viewer’s brain is smart enough to bring the movie into the third dimension on its own, without the aid of big plastic glasses. So long as the movie is good enough, of course.

(*Rack focusing is when there are at least two things happening on the screen: one near the camera, and one further away from it. The camera focuses on one, and then quickly refocuses onto the other. You see it happen every other second in Paul Greengrass movies.)

(Note: If the title of this page isn’t enough of a clue, this article will discuss various plot details of Shutter Island. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you might not want to read this. There’s your spoiler warning.)

This film is an exercise in doubt. If I were to break it into three parts, I would say that the first third sows the seeds of doubt over whether or not the authorities of Shutter Island can be trusted. Our U.S. Marshal characters go in to solve the mystery of a missing patient. They are met by a number of important people who make a big show of being helpful, without ever doing anything to help. We get the pervasive sense that nobody is being honest. This sense is communicated through every frame of every shot.

The middle third sows the seeds of doubt in our perception of the events. In a chance encounter, one particular character makes a compelling point: if our hero’s sanity comes into question, then his credibility is forever undermined, even to himself. And because our hero is our guide through this narrative, that means that everything we’ve witnessed so far and everything we’ll eventually witness can only be taken in those uncertain terms. His mission is no longer just to unravel the mystery, but to cling to the faith that he’s in the right. In his view, the authorities of Shutter Island might question his sanity, but his sanity allows him to see their ulterior motives for doing so. It’s all part of their devious plan.

So what does the final third do? The majority of movies don’t require the audience to think very hard. Most viewers have been trained to expect that the mystery will be solved, that the questions will be answered, that everything will be tied up nicely. The cleverness of this portion of the movie is that these people will find what they’re looking for. Shutter Island provides the necessary evidence to support this interpretation. All has been revealed. We’ve reached the cheese at the end of the maze.

That is, if we stop looking once we’ve found the cheese. We must be careful to guard ourselves against confirmation bias, which is what happens when we see the evidence we’re looking for and disregard the evidence we’re not interested in. In truth, Shutter Island is littered with too much evidence to conclusively point to any one answer. By my count, there are three major possibilities left open at the end of the movie, and they all deserve consideration. They are broken down as follows:

1. Our hero is insane. In the course of the final act, the authorities reveal that our hero is a mental patient, living in an elaborate delusion. It appears that they’ve gotten through to him, that he’s accepted their attempts to convince him. However, in the final scene, he speaks confidentially to his doctor—the man who, in his fantasy, is his U.S. Marshal partner. He reveals that he still intends to escape and bust this Shutter Island conspiracy wide open.

This seems to be the most commonly accepted interpretation of the ending. He’s insane, and has been the whole time. There have been some negative reactions to the film that appear to be based on this version. The viewers feel as though everything they’ve slogged through to get to this point has been invalidated, as if a film this well-crafted could ever be described as a slog. But never mind that.

2. Our hero is sane. In this version of the ending, our hero is still playacting—not as an insane man pretending to be sane to placate his doctors, but as a sane man pretending to be insane in order to guarantee a release from his pain. His last words to his “partner” strongly imply that he is sane, but is willing to be lobotomized so that he won’t have to live with the terrible things that his fantasy was safeguarding him against.

While this interpretation doesn’t frame the earlier portion of the movie in a drastically different way from the first interpretation, it does cast some interesting doubts upon earlier scenes that seem to imply insanity. It becomes that much harder to tell when he’s been wrong and when he’s been right.

3. The conspiracy is real. According to the laws of reality, this is the least plausible of the three endings. But for one thing, “least plausible” is not the same as “implausible.” Shutter Island is an utterly self-contained environment where any attempt to question the authorities can easily be dismissed as the ravings of a delusional paranoiac. One of the main reasons for disbelieving in conspiracy theories is that they’re untenable in an open marketplace of ideas. Shutter Island is anything but.

For another, to dismiss this interpretation out of hand is to ignore the seductive ideas that the film has been playing with all along. Our hero’s certainty is all he has to tell him that he’s sane, and the most obvious way for his enemies to protect themselves would be to declare him insane. In his most vulnerable moment, it may be that they’re not freeing him from the delusion, so much as crafting it for their convenience. In a place like Shutter Island, reality is fragile and mutable. Which version of reality is the “real” one might depend solely on how many people are willing to agree upon it. In the final scenes, our hero simply gets voted down.

There is not enough evidence to settle upon any one ending, and that’s just as it should be. As Scorsese’s on-and-off collaborator Paul Schrader is fond of saying, the final scene of a movie should continue to play out in the lobby of the theater. Movies with open-and-shut endings are rarely as interesting as movies that encourage the viewers to puzzle over the pieces. Unfortunately, it often seems as though a clean-cut ending is all that the average moviegoer cares about, as though two thirds of the story are just a means to arrive at that point. It’s a shame.

I will submit an informal theory, which I will dub the Beavis and Butthead effect. Imagine, for a moment, an average anti-intellectual moron. We’ll call him (arbitrarily male, of course) “Jack.”

Jack goes to the movies. He sees, oh, say, Avatar. He comes away from it thinking it was crap. “Who are these people trying to fool?” he bellows. “This is the same plot as a bunch of other movies I’ve seen! Why, the acting wasn’t even that great!” Jack goes home, logs onto IMDB, and gives Avatar a 1 out of 10 rating. Somebody needs to put these Hollywood hacks in their place, after all.

Meanwhile, Jill (arbitrarily female), for all her differences of opinion, is very similar to Jack. Jill goes to see Avatar and she loves it. She finds the special effects dazzling; Pandora is so real to her that she felt she could reach out and touch it. She thinks to herself excitedly: “This is the best movie I’ve seen in a long time! Just look at all the stuff on the screen! Check out all the hidden messages!” Jill goes home, logs onto IMDB, and gives Avatar a 10 out of 10 rating. Surely this marvel, this wonder of a film, deserves to unseat stodgy old bores like The Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption. Why, those movies aren’t even relevant to today’s world.

You rarely see a Jack or a Jill go for the “5 out of 10″ rating, or its close neighbors. If you’re lucky, they’ll shave off a star or two at the top because it wasn’t the second coming of Christ. Don’t expect anybody voting at the other end of the scale to shave off anything.

I’m not sure what drives this phenomenon, but it is observable. Whether you go online and look at the numbers or just listen to the scuttlebutt around the water cooler, there seems to be a reverse bell curve governing people’s opinions about entertainment. In the parlance of Beavis and Butthead, either “it rules” or “it sucks.”

Why is there such an absence of more varied opinions? Why isn’t there a more complex gradation between the two poles? Here’s my theory. Outside of natural selection, there aren’t many ways for something complex to arise from something simple. You’re probably not going to get a thoughtful, well-rounded opinion from a simplistic viewing process. If all you’re doing is passively absorbing what the screen pumps at you, then you’ll likely respond just one way or the other. It becomes a reflex. It rules or it sucks, and damn the very notion that anybody should discuss it more deeply.

Movies are for thinking about. Art is for thinking about. If you go into it thinking that it’s okay to turn your brain off–or worse, that you should turn your brain off–then you’re depriving yourself. You’re disabling yourself from knowing real crap when you see it, and you’re closing yourself off to the sheer richness of a truly good movie.

Most of all, you’re shutting off the critical faculties that are necessary for knowing when a movie isn’t great, and isn’t crap, but just… is. What doesn’t deserve your best appraisal doesn’t necessarily deserve your worst. Some movies are just lightweight entertainments.

Setting the record straight, I believe Avatar is worth seeing. To say that it’s the best film of the year, or even a great film at all, is worrying. It’s certainly an imaginative, pretty film, with many evocative moments and much else to write home about. No, it isn’t especially well-acted, and the plot is low on both subtlety and originality, but plot and acting are highly overrated phenomena. Perhaps its worse crime is that its visuals are so splendid that the rest of the production just isn’t audacious enough to keep up. This is by no means a bad film, and certainly not a “1″ on the IMDB scale. But neither is it a “10.”

Your homework is to look up a bunch of movies on IMDB and check out their user ratings. Look for how many people voted at the extreme ends of the scale, versus how many voted for the middle ratings. Test my theory.

(And yes, I realize it’s been a long time since the last update. For the few people who may have noticed, I apologize. Hopefully normalcy will resume soon.)

Today’s entry is special: the first ever I Evolved Into This!? audio entry. This means two things. One, there will be numerous musical examples, which are much easier to deal with in a podcast-style format than in a text article. Two, those of you who haven’t been already will soon be blessed with the sound of my splendid voice.

(In case you’re unfamiliar with newfangled technology, clicking the little “play” button will make the sound begin. You can adjust where you are in the presentation with the little arrow keys to the right, or you can grab onto the little slider and move it around. This assumes that you have located your computer’s “on” button and have somehow made your way to this page without these crucial bits of common knowledge.)

I recently saw this question posted in (don’t judge me) the Internet Movie Database forums: Is it possible for a TV show to last without overturning its premise? The question was asked in reference to sci-fi and fantasy shows, but it applies to just about any kind of indefinitely long-running story. I will broaden the question: Is it possible for any long-running story to last without overturning its premise?

What’s a premise, in this context? The short answer is “what the story is about.” The premise of Smallville is that it’s about Clark Kent and Lex Luthor in their teen years, before they become superhero and supervillain, respectively. The premise of The Simpsons is that it’s a less fantastical, more dysfunctional look at the typical sitcom family. The premise of House, MD is that it’s a group of doctors who specialize in bizarre cases that nobody else can handle.

Let’s go for a more accurate definition. The premise is nothing more than the set of conditions, or limitations, that determines what a story is going to be about. And what it’s not going to be about, for that matter.

Example: Alec Holland is an experimental plant researcher in the bayous of Louisiana. One day, he becomes the victim of an act of sabotage. He mutates into the Swamp Thing, a man/plant hybrid monster, which must take revenge on the perpetrators and find a way to become human again.

Now, maybe there’s some other interesting stuff happening in Louisiana at the same time–political scandals, achievements in the arts, and so on–but that’s not in the story, because it falls outside of the conditions of the premise.

One condition of the premise is that Swamp Thing is trying to become human again. If he does, then his goal–the thing he wants, which drives him to do what he does–is met. There’s no more story. The main character is done. His character problem, the problem that falls within the conditions of the premise, has been solved.

Maybe he has other problems. Maybe Alec Holland has severe credit card debt, or a little cousin with autism. But that’s not in the story because it falls outside of the premise.

If Swamp Thing were a one-off story, like a novel or a movie, this would be no big deal. Assuming an optimistic ending, Swamp Thing would beat the bad guys, figure out how to become human again, and live happily ever after with the friends he meets along the way.

But Swamp Thing was an ongoing comic book series–to be continued forever, no end in sight.

Swamp Thing needs to become human again, or there’s no reason for the story to move. But if Swamp Thing solves this problem, the story ends and DC Comics is out of a monthly title. The premise, the set of conditions that determines what the story is about, has put the writers in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t position.

There are a couple solutions. One of them, typically employed on TV shows, is to gradually lessen the importance of the conditions and hope the audience doesn’t notice. The premise becomes broader, more inclusive, less distinct. The story becomes less specific, more directionless, more bloated, more meandering. Everything but the kitchen sink can be included, with hit-or-miss results. This happened in Swamp Thing for a while, causing a decline in the quality of the series. On the Simpsons, this approach produced the finest TV comedy of the ‘90s.

A riskier solution is to, in one swift motion of authorial godhood, abruptly destroy the premise and implement a new one. If it works, the story has a new lease on life. If not, the story is reduced to utter ridiculousness. This solution was successfully implemented in Swamp Thing, courtesy of a daring-but-then-unknown British gentleman by the name of Alan Moore. In just a couple of key issues, he introduced plot points that completely redefined (let’s all say it together this time) the conditions that determine what the story is about.

This not only freed the books of the limitations that had come to shackle them, but introduced new ones that kept a strong sense of direction and did not pose the same Catch-22 as the previous ones.

In answer to the original question, I would say it’s necessary to do SOMETHING to the premise. Once you’ve explored every cubic inch of the box you’re in, there’s nothing else you can do. You either find a new box, or look for ways to expand the box you’re already in. Or you do something that, Seinfeld aside, is unthinkable in American television: you end the story before it becomes necessary to ask questions like this one.

This entry discusses the plot of the film The Usual Suspects frankly. As this film includes one of the most controversial surprise endings in recent memory, I advise those who haven’t seen it to avoid this entry until they have. In the meantime, feel free to peruse my many other fine articles!

On the one hand, the ending of The Usual Suspects could be a clever twist that forces you to reconsider everything. On the other, it could just be a crass dramatic con job. It all depends on how you look at it. There is little good to be said about the “It was all just a dream!” plot device in its various permutations. It’s usually the writers’ way of forcing their way out of a corner. It’s a literary blunt instrument. The Usual Suspects may or may not be an exception.

Is Verbal Kint really Keyser Soze? “Probably,” says director Bryan Singer. The case is never quite closed, as sure as it seems when Verbal strides out of the police station without his characteristic limp. (Watch the film very carefully. There is much evidence to implicate Verbal, but there is also some evidence that muddies the waters.) Though it’s not a certainty, this entry assumes that Verbal is most likely Soze.

If this is so, then the rug is pulled out from under the audience. Everything they’ve been led to believe over the course of the film, everything that has entranced them, has been an elaborate lie. Negative reactions are understandable. The audience members placed their trust in the story, only to have it wholly and cruelly undermined. It’s as though the whole movie up to the point of the revelation is rendered inert.

I will be so bold as to ask, “Why?” In a sense, every movie is invalidated sooner or later, usually the moment the end credits roll. The wool is inevitably pulled from the eyes of the audience. They’re forced to acknowledge that everything they’ve just seen was just a figment of somebody’s imagination. “It was all just a dream.”

What does The Usual Suspects do differently? Maybe it recognizes itself for what it is, whereas most fictions do not. It takes the audience out of the fiction just a little bit sooner than usual, so that they must understand it too. It’s like bringing up the lights in a theatrical performance while the set is still being changed. It confronts you, admits it’s manipulating you, and revels in the fact that it does not care.

That’s all well and good, but there’s a difference between accepting something and liking it. To that, all that can be said is this: as far as you were involved, prior to the Big Moment, were you enjoying yourself? The characters are all amusing in their own ways, but the plot is not the easiest to follow. Roger Ebert’s memorably succinct comment was, “To the extent that I understand, I don’t care.” The validity of the ending is irrelevant if the movie hasn’t already won the audience over.

But if it won you over, were you not intrigued by the ominous specter of Keyser Soze? Was there not sufficient suspense in the possibility that this demonic figure might win in the end? And were you not presented with a character that, supported by evidence, might reasonably be behind it all? Does it matter that much or all of Verbal’s story was a deception? Aren’t all stories deception? What else matters if the story can affect us in the moment, as a good story should?

Verbal Kint may just be another storyteller, and he may also be Keyser Soze. Whatever the case, he’ll flip you for real.

The Halloween season is over. Hopefully everybody has decompressed from their annual binge, whether it be on candy, booze, horror movies, or whatever else.

There is a distinct division within the horror genre. There’s the old-fashioned kind of horror, which aims to put you on the edge of your seat and prickle your anxieties. Then there’s the junk food: the stuff that serves up gore and violence as a means to an amusement, like monster trucks flattening rows of demolished cars.

There’s no use evaluating one version of horror against the other. Each has its audience. But the differences are worth discussion, which is why I thought I’d share this interview clip from comic book writer Alan Moore.

There was a British comic called Action, which received a great deal of negative attention from Mary Whitehouse and various campaigners for decency at the time because of the violence of its content…

One of the strips in it was called Hookjaw, and it was a blatant Jaws ripoff about a giant white shark. And I think it was originally drawn by a Spanish artist. I’m not sure of the artist’s name, but he was heavily into the gore on the strip. He would do it in a chops-smacking EC Comics fashion, where you saw every dangling eyeball, you saw every uprooted set of entrails… There is something about that kind of horror that is kind of reassuring, because it is so preposterous… it gives you an insulation against the material you’re reading. You can look at it and think, “Right, this is happening in some kind of horror universe, where everything that is possible… is going to happen, and happen spectacularly.”

When the artist finished on the strip, they replaced him with an artist from the girls’ comics, the British girls’ comics that were around at the time. And this was an artist who was mostly used to drawing the very demanding but largely conversational strips, which have got a completely different set of requirements [from] a horror strip. They show most people half-figure in the middle distance, having conversations in a completely mundane and lackluster environment, that is nevertheless drawn in perfect mundane detail.

So when the previous artist was on the strip… if he was called upon to show the discovery of a severed arm on the beach, then he would know how to do the shot. It would be right down there in the sand, next to the bloody end of the arm, looking up past all the exposed veins and dripping tendons and splintered bone, at the horrified people staring down at it in an upshot. Whereas the new artist on the strip, if he was asked to show the discovery of a severed arm on the beach, he would draw it as a middle-distance full-figure shot, where you’ve got a number of bland-looking people–therefore, realistic-looking people–standing around without contorted expressions, staring down at the awful fact of a severed human arm lying at their feet.

It wasn’t drawn to exaggerate the gore quotient. It was drawn in this completely quiet and unassuming way, the same that he would draw in a girls’ comic. But the horror was 10 times greater. It was because you were suddenly looking at a severed arm in an apparently real world, that was the same world that you could conceivably inhabit.

And this… I’m convinced, was the reason why his artwork worked so beautifully.

- Alan Moore, on Eddie Campbell’s contribution to From Hell
(Resonance FM, 10/23/2008)

The example of the two artists and their different approach to the same strip is an excellent illustration of the two varieties of horror. One kind savors every detail and lets it all hang out in a sort of hyper-realistic fantasy. The villain is the hero, the one with the personality; the victims are a blank canvas. They’re cannon fodder, and the object of the horror is to have fun at their expense.

The other kind relies on the commonality of everyday experiences to put the audience into the thick of it all. When the horrific element shows up, it’s all the more jarring, because it happens in a universe that isn’t deliberately “horror-ized.” The object could still be viewed as “fun,” but the fun comes at our own expense. We’re the victims, in a vicarious sense. The film Paranormal Activity is a relevant, if somewhat flawed, recent example, in that it takes the idea of horrific elements in a real(istic) world to an almost absurd degree.