The Marvelous World of Disney?

Nearly fifty years ago, Stan Lee was running a marginal comic book company on the brink of extinction, with one major asset: the rampant creativity of artist Jack Kirby. In the ultimate confirmation, by some standards, of Marvel Comics's elevation into the pop-culture canon, the company is going to be sold to Disney for four billion dollars. So the rich get richer and pop culture grows more homogenized. On the creative end, I suppose some Kingdom Hearts-style crossovers between the "universes" are inevitable if not compulsory. I doubt whether you'll see much difference in Marvel content, either in comics or movies, though you may end up seeing superheroes on ABC more often. Still, something distresses me about Disney's ongoing colonization of our shared culture. In my more dystopian (or maybe just dyspeptic) moods I can see a day coming when the Disney stamp will be a seal of cultural legitimacy and nothing will matter to most pop consumers unless it bears the mark of the Mouse. As long as Time Warner exists (and owns DC Comics) that day won't arrive, but between them the two rival colossi could form a kind of cultural "bipolarchy" of the sort I see functioning in American politics, in which the war of the gargantuas leaves nothing else standing, or drives the rest underground. Not everyone will be as pessimistic as I am sometimes, but I doubt whether anyone but a stockholder can say that this is a good thing.

More (and Better?) Academy Award Nominees!

Ten pictures released in 2009 will vie for the coveted Academy Award for Best Picture of the year according to a ukaze from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. The decision consciously hearkens back to the Golden Age, when ten finalists was the rule for a while. In a year like 1939, of course, you could have ten nominees and still complain that some deserving films were left out. In some recent years, however, whether you could field ten credible nominees was subject to debate.

There are two reasons to make this change. One is to allow studios to promote more films as Academy Award Nominees, whether while still in release or for DVD purposes. The more likely reason, I think, is to boost the ratings of the Oscar telecast by giving more people a rooting interest in the result. The most likely result, I imagine, is the inclusion of more pop films of the kind that get excluded by the annual December rush for prestige. That's more likely than more independent films making the cut. This could be good or bad. A year ago, it might have meant The Dark Knight getting the nomination I thought it deserved. This year, ...what? If the list becomes less "elitist" than it supposedly is already, I tremble at the prospect.

Literal Mindedness Around the World

Here's an anecdote from Lawrence Rosen's Varieties of Muslim Experience: Encounters With Arab Political and Cultural Life from the University of Chicago Press.

Some years ago a group of young men in the Moroccan city where I was working asked me if I would join them at the showing of an American film so that I could explain anything they did not understand. When I asked the name of the film, they told me that it was West Side Story. I decided to go along. At first the young men were captivated by the film. Two gangs approached each other. Then one man pulled a knife. Then someone from the other group pulled a knife. And then they both began singing. The Moroccans turned to me in astonishment: What kind of men do you have in America, they asked, who start singing when they should be fighting? My attempt to explain musicals was a complete failure. Films, they insisted, are lifelike, and therefore they must be "true" -- they must show things as they are; otherwise they are just "lies."

Musicals don't often come up for discussion in the blogs I follow, but the attitude Rosen encountered in Morocco reminded me of the resistance often offered to genre cinema in general, or to any movie that opposes a sense of spectacle for its own sake to the prevailing linear, literary or simply literal-minded standards of popular taste. The Moroccans' American counterparts might not denounce certain movies as "lies," but they will call a lot of stuff "stupid" for basically the same reasons. It might be a musical, it might be science fiction, or it might be an Italian giallo, but the response will most likely be the same. To the extent that it deviates from conventional narrative expectations or a complacent sense of the "real," it's stupid, or worse. I'm not trying to say that there's no such thing as a stupid movie or even a stupid concept -- only that many people's standard of stupidity is, well, pretty stupid.