Fantasy for fantasy's sake, please
I was utterly disapppointed by Catwoman.
A blasphemous homage to the original comicbook (‘Patience who?’), whose sacrilege was made all the more horrifying by the movie’s curious philosophies (slashed leather is ok but if you wear too much makeup your face becomes as hard as marble and you will feel no pain – not even when you fall a hundred metres through panes of glass – altho you will die), absurd two-dimensional villian and heroine personalities and a plotline so thin it’ll be the latest clotheshorse of European design houses.
I actually love comic book adaptations – all the spandex-wrapped bodies of impossible sculpture, the supercool superpowers, the eternal struggle of good and evil in bold recognisable tropes with none of the complicated moralities. I love the voyeuristic visions it offers of familiar yet unfamiliar universes and the empathy it draws from the characters’ familiar yet unfamiliar struggles – yet never asking anything from the audience like thought or lessons: just that you enjoy the good ol’ romp.
Therein lies the problem with Catwoman. I went in expecting a hour or two of pure enjoyable escapism in a vacuum of suspended logics and I get a tale of capitalist hunger and of madness conceived in a superficial world whose goddess is beauty and money.
What’s wrong with that, you ask?
Well, its not fantasy anymore, is it?
Fantasy needs overblown villains with maddening desires to rule the world. Fantasy needs colourful heroes and heroines who possess extraordinary, unbelievable superpowers. Sure, make them human; ground the story in issues that are relevant to the average movie goer. But there are boundaries between fantasy and reality that should not be crossed - to overstep the thin line is to render the fantasy absurd.
To comprehend fantasy, one draws from a knowledge pool that would be vastly different if one were watching Bowling for Columbine. In Catwoman, we are expected to draw from both – with disastrous results.
The first hour is fine, when the viewer, as expected, suspends the voice of reason at the notion of a woman imbued with the supernatural powers of an ancient cat-goddess. All seems to be going the way of the average tho enjoyable adaptation effort when it all gets blurry with the introduction of the villian – a cold malcontent of an ex-model who’s put on the shelf in favour of a younger, tauter female and who now wants everyone to ‘pay’ for their obsession over physical beauty, the exact obsession that drives her very schemes.
To consider this character as evil in the context of comicbook logic requires quite a leap of fantastic imagination. There is no real menace in a fantasy sense of the word (think the fiery eye of Sauron); she doesn’t really want to take over the world and make everyone her eternal slaves, she’s just an over-the-hill hussy in the impudent throes of a mid-life crisis.
Against this kind of threat, Catwoman, with all her superstrength and lightning reflexes, is suddenly misplaced and ridiculous.
While there are bits of goodness in the movie – Benjamin Bratt’s delicious Latin physique, Sharon Stone’s suitably divaesque portrayal of the marble maiden, Lambert Wilson’s French accents. Yet these were insufficient to save what was essentially a flaw in its concept.
Laurel Hedare’s body-obsessiveness was too worldly to be villianous, her motivations too mundane. The evil capitalist firm was too bourgeouis. Halle Berry’s feline alter-ego thus sticks out like a sore thumb.
Why bother ‘grounding’ something that is supposed to be wide and sweeping? Why the ‘everyday’ take on a genre that’s supposed to be extra-ordinary? After all, who are we, mere mortals, to mess with a genre beloved by so many because it is – simply – fantastic?
A blasphemous homage to the original comicbook (‘Patience who?’), whose sacrilege was made all the more horrifying by the movie’s curious philosophies (slashed leather is ok but if you wear too much makeup your face becomes as hard as marble and you will feel no pain – not even when you fall a hundred metres through panes of glass – altho you will die), absurd two-dimensional villian and heroine personalities and a plotline so thin it’ll be the latest clotheshorse of European design houses.
I actually love comic book adaptations – all the spandex-wrapped bodies of impossible sculpture, the supercool superpowers, the eternal struggle of good and evil in bold recognisable tropes with none of the complicated moralities. I love the voyeuristic visions it offers of familiar yet unfamiliar universes and the empathy it draws from the characters’ familiar yet unfamiliar struggles – yet never asking anything from the audience like thought or lessons: just that you enjoy the good ol’ romp.
Therein lies the problem with Catwoman. I went in expecting a hour or two of pure enjoyable escapism in a vacuum of suspended logics and I get a tale of capitalist hunger and of madness conceived in a superficial world whose goddess is beauty and money.
What’s wrong with that, you ask?
Well, its not fantasy anymore, is it?
Fantasy needs overblown villains with maddening desires to rule the world. Fantasy needs colourful heroes and heroines who possess extraordinary, unbelievable superpowers. Sure, make them human; ground the story in issues that are relevant to the average movie goer. But there are boundaries between fantasy and reality that should not be crossed - to overstep the thin line is to render the fantasy absurd.
To comprehend fantasy, one draws from a knowledge pool that would be vastly different if one were watching Bowling for Columbine. In Catwoman, we are expected to draw from both – with disastrous results.
The first hour is fine, when the viewer, as expected, suspends the voice of reason at the notion of a woman imbued with the supernatural powers of an ancient cat-goddess. All seems to be going the way of the average tho enjoyable adaptation effort when it all gets blurry with the introduction of the villian – a cold malcontent of an ex-model who’s put on the shelf in favour of a younger, tauter female and who now wants everyone to ‘pay’ for their obsession over physical beauty, the exact obsession that drives her very schemes.
To consider this character as evil in the context of comicbook logic requires quite a leap of fantastic imagination. There is no real menace in a fantasy sense of the word (think the fiery eye of Sauron); she doesn’t really want to take over the world and make everyone her eternal slaves, she’s just an over-the-hill hussy in the impudent throes of a mid-life crisis.
Against this kind of threat, Catwoman, with all her superstrength and lightning reflexes, is suddenly misplaced and ridiculous.
While there are bits of goodness in the movie – Benjamin Bratt’s delicious Latin physique, Sharon Stone’s suitably divaesque portrayal of the marble maiden, Lambert Wilson’s French accents. Yet these were insufficient to save what was essentially a flaw in its concept.
Laurel Hedare’s body-obsessiveness was too worldly to be villianous, her motivations too mundane. The evil capitalist firm was too bourgeouis. Halle Berry’s feline alter-ego thus sticks out like a sore thumb.
Why bother ‘grounding’ something that is supposed to be wide and sweeping? Why the ‘everyday’ take on a genre that’s supposed to be extra-ordinary? After all, who are we, mere mortals, to mess with a genre beloved by so many because it is – simply – fantastic?
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