| Saturday, July 19, 2008 |
16:37 - What makes a supervillain?
http://www.drhorrible.com/
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Okay, this is freakin' awesome:
Neil Patrick Harris in his own Joss Whedon-helmed musical.
Stick it out past the first few minutes where it seems like it's not going anywhere. Trust me, it does. Damn, I'm glad to see that the art of musical theatre still finds expression in this day and age.
I do, however, wonder about the by-now well-worn "ironic superheroes" genre. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, it's not even really possible to play a superhero story "straight" anymore; the blockbuster movies do their best, but it's all they can do to avoid homages and injokes that render the whole thing tongue-in-cheek. The fertile ground these days is in this Venture Bros.-ish table-turning, where we empathize with supervillains and watch their political triangulations as they try to get in good with the Guild of Calamitous Intent/Evil League of Evil/Council of Doom/whatever guise the concept takes. It's all a much more "human" style of storytelling, and thus lends itself all the better to humor, acclimatized as we are to the kind of comedy that derives from people on the screen acting according to impulses that we all can relate to to an absurd degree of detail, right down to the mumbled turn of phrase and the passive-agressive apartment argument and the petty rummage for cash at the food court. Nothing's epic anymore; everything's personal. The world of fantasy has shrunk to human scale.
This may be hyperbole, but really—how many new productions do we see these days that aren't parodies or tweaked retellings of well-loved memories from childhood? We've been doing it for decades, what with The Wiz and Wicked and the like, but nowadays it's almost all we do.
Not that this is inherently a bad thing, or anything. I just wonder how the trend might reverse itself. We've exposed all the stories we know as a culture to several peanut-butter-thick layers of ironic reimagining by now, parodying and re-parodying them until there's nothing left to appreciate with any sincerity, but rather with a smirk and a knowing grin. So how, I wonder, does this culture manufacture more sincerity? How do we create something new that isn't a parody of something we saw as kids? How does Superman come about again?
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Brian Tiemann
