August 26, 2007
stardust
It is surely an act of unfairness to judge graphic novel culture on the basis of a movie, one made from a story that meant to be a novel and was only a graphic novel incidentally.
Still.
One gets the sense that Neil Gaiman's rep as a genius must somehow be a reflection on the subculture that has so elected him. Like the water-cooler boor who becomes the office analyst because he read a Jung book in college, Gaiman seems to have raised himself into the empyrean on the narrow shoulders of Joseph Campbell. Campbell is not a very persuasive starting position in the first place: a sloppy structuralism denuded of whatever force it might have had by spiritualization. Stardust, in film version at least, for all its stylized whimsies, seems like the most mechanical Campbelliana imaginable. There are no characters, only positions, in which squat a rather unfortunate set of actors. The little matrix of the hero narrative has been filled with requisitely "original" figures; it's a movie written entirely in a single page Excel spreadsheet.
To be fair, this may be true of almost every Hollywood movie: that the roles, relations and actions are fixed more remorselessly than in any Russian folktale, and that the pleasures and communications happen in the variations possible within such tight contours (one notes that this account is a mirrorworld of the caricature of Marxian description, wherein the lives of individuals unfold according to the merciless logic of dialectical history, allowed the most limited latitude of action which has an experiential relevance but no determining force on the outcome. Hollywood genre films, one might suggest, are the structure by which this non-determining and intensely limited activity is seen to be nonetheless the entirety of the film's substance, both despite and because of its irrelevance to outcomes).
What grows weary, if not downright aggravating, is when a movie (or graphic novel) wants credit simply for knowing about the structures, varying them scarcely at all — and this, we have been suggesting, is Stardust's calling card. Let's be plain: Joesph Campbell and the like are exactly incisive enough to make dumb people seem more intelligent; it's equally true that they make reasonably intelligent folk seem dumber if they take to parroting them. That Neil Gaiman appears as smarter his cohort...well, this is a verdict of considerable clarity.
This is not to say that the film is entirely without interest. There is something of interest in watching Robert DeNiro go about the grim task of obliterating his own legend, a task that dates at least to Analyze This and has, in contemporary culture, no comparison except perhaps Eddie Vedder (the strikingly unambitious boredom of the last dozen years must be on purpose, right?) By now, DeNiro is merely a poor substitute for other famous and famously stylized character actors in on their own joke (Walken, Hopper, Keitel, etc); at what point will he have effaced his own history enough to return to work?
Posted by jane at August 26, 2007 12:26 PM | TrackBack