2025-08-02 13:57:39
The whole marketing push for Together had me scared of that movie like nothing’s been able to since the trailers for Barbarian. Those trailers suggested that we’d see something so impossibly horrifying in the basement that I could very well faint from sheer terror; Together‘s trailers kept showing just enough body horror imagery that I was afraid seeing their extended forms would have me vomiting in the theater.
I’ve mentioned it before, but the only time I’ve fainted in a movie is when a teaching assistant dropped Un Chien Andalou with no warning onto a class full of first-year cinema studies students. Tunnel vision, walls closing in, the works. That’s stuck with me ever since. I still go into horror situations, and especially gross-out situations, concerned that I won’t be able to intellectualize my way around it, and my body will betray me.
I don’t want to throw a wet blanket on Neon’s marketing push, but: the body horror in Together does get increasingly graphic, but at least for me, it never really crossed the line from unsettlingly suggestive to outright viscerally upsetting.1 The most squirmy moments — like one really well-executed scene in a bathroom stall — are mostly kept to the level of suggesting a ton instead of showing too much. At least, until the very end, by which time I was ready for them.
So overall, the movie isn’t as bonkers over-the-top as I’d been expecting and, honestly, hoping for. But it’s better as a result. There is a sequence of scenes leading up to the final act that are all fantastic, and they only work because the movie puts so much time into letting you get attached to the characters. They’re a likable, believable couple who are having some very relatable problems.
Of course, they’re believable as a couple because they’re Alison Brie and her real-life boypartner Dave Franco. But the appeal isn’t just because they have believable chemistry, but because they have to be good at horror and rom-com comedy and physical comedy and relationship drama, and it turns out they are really good at it. And also sexy horror black comedy, which I hadn’t even known was a genre.
There’s a beat where Millie asks Tim why he happens to be carrying a lighter, and it works so well to show the depth of their relationship: that comfortable familiarity that runs deep even as you’re keeping secrets from each other.
Speaking of believability, it does a fantastic job of recreating what it actually feels like to have an anxiety attack or a full-on panic attack, at least in my experience. There are multiple scenes that play off the idea of anxiety dreams or horrific nightmares, and they work not because you’re suddenly surprised that it’s a dream, but because you know that it’s a dream, and you’re dreading what you’ll see just as much as the character is.
But my favorite thing about Together is how it plays off my favorite of one of the oldest moments in horror and suspense movies: the “don’t open that door” scene. There are multiple scenes where you know that there’s something horrific happening on the other side of the door, and you don’t want to open it, but you’re compelled to.
What makes these moments interesting again is that both the ambiguity and the motivations are changed. It’s still horrific, even though there’s little mystery about what’s happening on the other side of the door; by this point, you know exactly who’s behind it, and you have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. And you’re compelled to open the door not out of whatever it is that motivates horror movie characters to open doors that they shouldn’t. You’re compelled because you care about the person on the other side.
And the horror isn’t “something horrible might happen to me” but “something horrible might happen to them.” You can’t bear to look at it, because looking at it will make it real, and yet you have to.
I liked it not just because it made those feel fresh again. I wasn’t just processing the scene like a horror movie, but feeling it down to my core, the same sense of dread that the character would be feeling.
I also liked it because it was perversely romantic. Despite the unmistakable metaphor of body horror as codependency, despite the multiple friends telling these characters that their relationship is toxic because the other one is such a drag, despite their worry that they won’t be able to escape, there’s the realization that they were already trapped even before the supernatural stuff started happening. Because they’re too much in love, which isn’t something you can intellectualize your way out of. And maybe it’s just me, but I think that’s pretty sweet.
The rest of this post contains spoilers for Together, where I go into more detail about my favorite sequence.
The scenes start on the last night before the final act, when they both finally realize what’s happening to them is real.
First is Millie trying to force her way into Tim’s music room. The sound effects are so brutal and so evocative, there’s no mystery of what’s happening (because we’d already seen similar from Tim in the shower), but you just don’t want to see it. So we hear a smash and see a streak of blood against the glass, which for me was the single most upsetting image in the entire movie.
Then there’s their conversation at the dinner table, where she’s still in denial and trying to come up with a rational explanation. And again, the single image that makes it exceptional: the drop of blood that has forced itself in a straight line towards Tim, abruptly switching direction after he’s stood up and moved around the table to follow her.
Then the highlight, which is the bonkers scene in the hallway. By this point, we’ve gotten kind of used to seeing his body taking abuse, so we can only imagine what’s happening to Millie on the other side of the door. We get a close-up of Tim’s bones cracking and popping, An American Werewolf in London-style, as he’s pulled down the hall, before the reveal of Millie’s body unnaturally bent and twisted.
And amidst all of that intensity, they respond both like characters in a horror movie and like a bickering couple who’ve been together for years. She’s screaming “why is this happening?” while it’s also clear that she’s finally no longer in denial, and is implicitly admitting that he was right all along. They’re fairly smart characters, so they think to reach for the valium, and Tim points out “they call it diazepam now.” And while all the bone-cracking and skin-melding is going on, they’re furiously swallowing pills and licking or snorting them off the floor. The level of over-the-top insanity I’d been hoping for the entire movie (although the bathroom stall sex scene was a pretty good contender).
Finally, the scene in the trailers, where she’s physically separating them with the not-at-all-subtly foreshadowed mechanical saw. What I loved about this scene was that it was different in tone from what I’d expected from the trailers. We’d seen Millie with a steely resolve, fully prepared to cut herself free, no matter how drastic and painful it seemed. But the actual scene actually plays out like a couple who still deeply care about each other and still have a sense of casual familiarity, even when they’re doing something horrific. (And especially welcome: the scene was played for tension, as the actual act wasn’t particularly graphic. At least, the part that I could see through my fingers over my eyes).
Followed by a short, dialogue-less scene of them in the aftermath, sitting on the floor and eating. He offers her what he has, she silently shows him that she’s already got a sandwich.
That whole sequence is the heart of the movie, and it’s what makes the whole thing work. The final act is pretty standard horror movie stuff, relatively: it explains stuff that probably didn’t need to be explained, and it takes the codependency metaphor to its only logical conclusion.
But because of what came before it, it ends up being more than just a darkly comic satire. There’s a sense of romanticism to it that makes the friends’ warnings seem irrelevant. It was never possible for either of them to just walk away, because they were too much in love. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s not a downer, either.
Or at least, it leaves it up to your own interpretation. I thought the final shot was a goofy Twilight Zone-style stinger, instead of a genuinely cynical condemnation of sacrificing your own identity to a relationship. But then, I’m also somebody who frequently finds himself talking about what “we” are doing more often than what “I’m” doing, so maybe you get out of Together what you bring to it.
I think the key is playing “Two Become One” during the end, which yeah, is a fairly obvious needle drop for a scene that’s supposed to be comically horrific, but it has more significance in the moment. It’s the record that Millie mentions while her friend is calling Tim a loser, because it was a special thing that he’d done for her early in their relationship. You can tell that the friend thinks that that’s “basic,” because she dismisses it as early-relationship sentimentality and asks what Tim has done for her recently. Which is a question Millie can’t answer.
But the other scenes make it feel like the friend is missing the point. In an earlier scene, Millie had already happily acknowledged that the two of them were “basic.” And so is the whole idea of “love languages,” and keeping a running tab of what your partner’s done for you lately. There’s a romantic notion underneath that true love is about years of shared experiences. Casual familiarity that comes from understanding the other person, not just living with them. Special moments that make you feel special, even though they might seem mundane to anyone else.
We see tension in their relationship in an earlier conversation with their neighbor, where they suspect that their relationship has just become a case of accounting for each other’s deficiencies. The difference between “you complete me” and “you perfectly complement me.”
I’m not suggesting that the final shot is coming out in favor of losing your identity to your partner. But it does frame the last scene as a final grand romantic gesture, where they’re not falling into codependence because they’re not complete enough to make it on their own, but because they both choose to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the other.
2025-08-02 03:45:28
I just watched a video from Dead Meat, giving an explainer on “The Wyatt Sicks” and how they fit into the history of horror in professional wrestling. The video’s a year old, but it’s become relevant recently after Universal Horror Nights announced that they’d have a house themed to The Wyatt Sicks. I’m sure there’s a not-insignificant portion of the audience who, like me, had never heard of them before.
I doubt I’m ever going to be a WWE fan, but every time I get a peek into that whole universe, I get the impression that they’re operating on an entirely separate level from anything that I’m familiar with.
It’s not just the typical case of something that’s not my thing, but I can understand how the hardcore fans can get super into the lore and the aesthetics, like anime for instance. And it’s not like drag, where it does absolutely nothing for me, but I can at least see how people can appreciate as an oversized expression of community. And it’s not like reality TV, where I can at least get how fans appreciate it as a kind of improv soap opera performed by non-actors.
Modern professional wrestling feels like they’ve taken everything I get about both fandom and about creating popular entertainment, allowed it to grow and evolve over decades in an environment that allows it to thrive (Florida), to the point that it’s now not just alien to me, but several generations beyond the level that I engage with things.
For instance: I love going on about metatext and “multi-channel communication,” where even art that seems low-brow on the surface is actively engaging with the audience on multiple levels simultaneously. Anticipating and subverting expectations. Using the form of the media to make a moment or an idea land harder. Playing around with what’s fiction and reality and blurring the lines between them.
Modern wrestling treats all this kind of over-thinking as completely irrelevant. Unlike it was when I was growing up, where the media tried to treat “is professional wrestling fake?” as if it were a legitimate question, today’s version has moved so far beyond that, even raising the question would make you seem like the biggest simpleton. It’s not just that the audience knows that it’s all about showmanship, but that they can understand and appreciate how much of it is showmanship vs how much still requires physically demanding athleticism.
And on top of all that, the kind of always-twisting lore and continuity and complicated back-stories that would make even the nerdiest Star Wars or comic book fans give up.
While I get sidetracked on questions of authenticity and public personas — where’s this person coming from? How much is what they actually believe? How much is purely fiction, or knowing satire, or unknowingly revealing their faults and limitations? — the wrestling crowd seems perfectly capable of understanding that the characters they see aren’t real people and also they very much are.
This story in particular is about a wrestler who had various personas, had built a cast of weird characters around some of his simultaneous personas, and now has a group of other wrestlers — including his real-life brother — paying homage to him by embodying some of those characters to carry on his lore. As the video asks: is it exploitative, or is it a sincere homage? And it mentions the ARG-style videos teasing the group, and interviews where the wrestlers address the question directly.
It seems like attention-grabbing showmanship and a genuinely sweet homage at the same time. There’s such a level of artificiality and exploitation in the modern WWE that’s so in-your-face that there’s little remaining that’s sinister about it. It drills everything down to the basics, which more “high-brow” media tries to cover up with viral marketing campaigns, talk show interviews and web series struggling to find new ways to make celebrities seem relatable, and the repeated insistence that they’re concentrated on making art. Professional wrestling makes the transaction plain: we’re taking your money, and we’re entertaining you in return.
And it’s only possible in an environment where everybody understands that none of this “real,” and at the same time, all of it is “real.”
2025-08-01 14:30:51
It’s tough to explain the exact difference between a Naked Gun gag and a Police Squad! gag, but there’s an example of each in the same scene of the original The Naked Gun:
Leslie Nielsen is looking up Priscilla Presley’s dress, and he says “nice beaver!” after which she says “thanks, I just had it stuffed,” and hands him the taxidermied beaver she’d been holding.1 That’s a Naked Gun gag.
When he compliments her ankle bracelet, she says, “Oh, did that slip down there again?” and puts it back on her wrist. That’s a Police Squad! gag.
I was such a huge fan of Police Squad!, I think that even at only six episodes, it’s the funniest TV series ever made, and there’s been nothing that’s ever matched its brilliance. So the original movies were funny, but kind of a disappointment. I don’t know whether it’s the longer run time, the fact that being free of network censors meant they didn’t have to be as subtle, or if they just ran out of their best material in the TV series. But most of the humor in the movies just felt kind of obvious in comparison to the series.
Based on the trailers for the new version of The Naked Gun, I expected it to be more of the same: funny, but hella corny and kind of obvious. Movie tough guy Liam Neeson dressed as a little girl, showing his little girl underwear? Can you even believe it?!
So I was pleasantly surprised that the full version of that scene is stuffed with some genuinely funny, goofy gags. It was really starting to feel like they’d left the Naked Gun stuff in the trailers but saved the Police Squad! level gags for the full movie.
And my favorite was when a bad guy opens a safe deposit box and pulls out an ominous piece of electronics, which is labeled “P.L.O.T. DEVICE.” That’s the stuff.
The first 25 minutes or so is packed full of rapid-fire gags, hitting the right balance and somehow managing to be both goofy and understated. I was starting to wonder if they’d finally managed to make a real Police Squad! movie.
But gradually the jokes get cornier and more obvious instead of drily, understated wittiness. And then there are segments that are weird for their own sake, in a way that I don’t remember in any of the movies, so it ends up feeling like an amalgamation of Police Squad!, The Naked Gun, and a Lonely Island digital short, unsurprisingly.
Most of it worked, and I was surprised by how much it had me laughing out loud. The only part that had me sitting there stone-faced was the whole night-vision binoculars bit.
My main criticism isn’t that the jokes weren’t funny, just that there weren’t nearly enough of them. There are entire scenes where the movie actually seemed to be trying to move the plot forward, which seems to be missing the point entirely2, and I started counting all the opportunities for jokes in the background that they missed.
For instance: Frank finds a box of matches with a logo on it, and the logo ties a murder victim to a nightclub owned by the villain. But there’s no joke there, which is a big disappointment to anybody who remembers the logo for the Club Flamingo from Police Squad!, and then the animated sign that’s over the Club Flamingo.
(There’s one gag like this in the new Naked Gun: a scene takes place in an Ultimate Fighting Championship ring, and on the mat, quietly hidden among the logos for energy drinks and muscle slime, there’s the logo for sponsor NPR).
But overall, it’s pretty funny, and I got a strong sense that this was made by people who loved Police Squad! as much as they loved The Naked Gun. I appreciated all the moments that felt like homages to the original series, and I only wish that there were a lot more of them.
2025-07-31 08:30:12
I saw an article from The Advocate quoting Pete Buttigieg responding to questions about transgender athletes, taken from a longer interview with NPR’s Morning Edition.
The question was part of a larger conversation about Democratic party messaging, asking if/how Buttigieg’s approach would differ from the party’s. His response:
I think the approach starts with compassion. compassion for transgender people, compassion for families, especially young people who are going through this, and also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them, like wondering, wait a minute, I got a daughter in a sports league. Is she going to be competing with boys right now? Right?
And just taking everybody seriously. And I think when you do that, that does call into question some of the past orthodoxies in my party, for example, around sports, where I think most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as as as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women’s sports.
When interviewer Steve Innskeep asks: “Meaning the parent who’s complained about this has a case in your opinion?”
Sure. And that’s why I think these decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians, least of all politicians in Washington, trying to use this as a political pawn. When President Trump says something like “no boys in girls sports,” which is a phrase that they use. […] I think that chess is different from weightlifting and weightlifting is different from volleyball and uh you know, middle school is different from the Olympics. So that’s exactly why I think that we shouldn’t be grandstanding on this as politicians. We should be empowering communities and organizations and schools to make the right decisions.
I included the entire quote here both to be as fair as possible to Buttigieg, and to make a larger point about the way he answers questions.
On the surface, this seems like the most Buttigiegian response ever, and it follows his typical strategy:
For all I know, Buttigieg finished this answer thinking he’d nailed it. This is typically the kind of thing he gets exactly right, and is a large part of why I’ve been so vocally (and occasionally, financially) supportive of him in the past.
Which is why it’s such a colossal disappointment that he got this one so spectacularly wrong.
He’s correct that right-wing politicians are using this as a political pawn for grandstanding. He’s also correct that this was an issue for communities and organizations, before it got turned into a political pawn. But it has been turned into that, and he flat-out failed to respond correctly.
There is only one correct response: full-voiced and unequivocal support of transgender people of all ages.
Again, this is typically the kind of thing he gets right, a combination of political savvy with thoughtful integrity. So it’s disappointing that here, he failed on both counts.
It would’ve been politically savvy to recognize that this is a controversy that has been created entirely by right-wing bigots to get political favor from bigoted voters, and to simply say as much. Say “compassion for families, for transgender people, especially young people” and leave it at that. Full stop.
The entire rest of Buttigieg’s response is like watching him willingly run full-speed into a lawn full of rakes. Just like Obama will never be forgiven by some people (read: me) for his “pre-evolution” comments about marriage equality, Buttigieg’s extended comments about the concerns of “fairness” should have been kept to himself, and he gained absolutely nothing by voicing them. It will not win him points with anyone, and will only piss off the people that might have supported him (read: me).
Even worse than that, though, it’s a failure of integrity, because it’s astoundingly hypocritical. I don’t think his impulse to “both sides” everything is insincere or purely political; he’s made it the thesis driving his entire political career, stressing that we can only solve our problems by communicating with and trusting each other.
Assuming he actually believes what he’s saying here, and he’s willing to treat LGBTQ civil rights as issues that need to be addressed one letter at a time, then that calls into question his insight on any political issue. Because this is clearly, obviously, blatantly just a direct repackaging of the exact same bullshit that was used against gay men and lesbians for decades, to turn us into a similar wedge issue to win votes.
Normally, I wouldn’t consider it valid to mention a person’s sexual orientation in an argument. But Buttigieg has brought it up multiple times in multiple TV appearances, and I still have yet to see a single interview or television segment where he doesn’t mention his husband and their kids.
So you’d assume he’s extremely familiar with hearing questions of basic civil rights treated as if they were a controversy, demanding that we show the most compassion for the people who are the least affected.
If a gay person wants to serve in the military, is it “fairness” to deny that, insisting that it will make their colleagues uncomfortable?
Is it “fairness” to allow gay people to serve in the military as long as they’re sure to never, ever acknowledge their orientation to anyone, and they’re always wondering whether it will ruin their career if anyone finds out?
Is it “fairness” to refuse to recognize and protect marriages between gay couples, because some straight people who are completely unaffected might oppose it?
Is it “fairness” to refuse to allow gay men and women (like Buttigieg’s husband) to be teachers, because some parents allege that children aren’t safe around queer people?
Is it “fairness” to refuse to allow gay couples to adopt, because some people believe that children need a mother and a father figure to grow up well-adjusted, despite any legitimate evidence backing up this nonsense claim?
Buttigieg and his husband also like to mention their home in TV and social media appearances. Would it be “fairness” to say that they’re limited in which states they could’ve moved to, because of the “compromise” that some states were allowed to refuse to recognize their marriage as legitimate? Would it be “fairness” for some states to deny them health coverage under their “roommate’s” policy? Would it be “fairness” for some states to call their right to parentage into question?
Transgender people of all ages are being subjected to the exact same bullshit that other marginalized groups have been subjected to for decades. Reframing it with nonsensical “concerns” about fairness in athletics is a wholly fictional invention designed solely to allow bigots to deny that they’re bigots.
If a parent is concerned about their daughter competing in a sports league against trans students, then the correct response is not to show them compassion or pretend that their concerns are in any way legitimate. The correct response is to tell them flat out to stop being such shitty parents.
If your daughter is a whiny loser, you don’t fix that by showing her how to be a bigoted whiny loser. You fix it by explaining that being in a sports league is all about learning cooperation, healthy competition, personal achievement, and losing gracefully. There have been whiny losers in sports for far longer than right-wing assholes have been losing their shit over personal pronouns.
There have been “unfair” matchups in kids’ athletics for far longer, and kids who can absolutely trounce everyone else, regardless of whether their gender is the one assigned to them at birth. That is why kids go into sports in the first place, to learn how to be part of a team and how to healthily interact with other people. The point isn’t to win, you whiny, immature, chodes. It’s insulting to expect anyone to show “compassion” for the kinds of assholes who are the villains in 90% of teen summer movies.
Which is what makes Buttigieg’s response cross the line from “extremely disappointing” to “infuriating:” not only does it take the right-wing bait, but it shows a failure of integrity by giving compassion to the people who least deserve it, and denying it with a meaningless hand-wave to the people who actually deserve it.
Where’s the compassion for parents having to consider uprooting their family and moving to a different state, because of increasingly tyrannical and despicable limitations on health care, or even simple acknowledgement of their children’s true gender?
Where’s the compassion for the kids who are being subjected to all of this completely unnecessary bullshit during the most tumultuous period in their lives? Why should they have to give a solid damn about the people actively working to make their lives worse for no reason?
I have no doubt that Buttigieg and his defenders (and I used to be one, remember) will insist that this was just part of a much larger conversation, that it’s unfair to focus on this while ignoring the sentiment behind the rest of the interview, and that it’s focusing on a relatively small issue at the expense of the much larger and more complex issues going on while the nation is in crisis.
Both NPR and Buttigieg put the focus on Democratic messaging and the inadequate response to the current administration. The transcript hosted on NPR doesn’t even include or mention the question about transgender people in athletics.
But if you can’t handle the most basic questions of right and wrong, then you’re unequipped and unqualified to answer more complex questions of right and wrong.
That’s why this one conversation has dashed all of my hopes for being personally progressive but advocating for a centrist government. In the past, even as my own views have shifted gradually leftwards, I’ve maintained the opinion that being centrist is crucial to federal government. We’re equipped to change administrations every four years, but we shouldn’t be expected to tear down and rewrite the core values of our country every four years. We shouldn’t have to be spending our lives riding the pendulum back and forth between left and right, where years of stress, misery, and uncertainty depend on a fraction of a percentage of the popular vote.
But as we’ve seen so many times that you’d think I’d know better by now, basic questions of right and wrong are kryptonite to centrist politicians. This could and should have been a slam-dunk for Buttigieg, but he refused to forcefully speak out in defense of the people who need it the most.
One of the ideas that Tim Walz campaigned on was being able to compromise in politics without compromising your integrity. It’s so simple that it just feels like a sound bite, but as it turns out, it’s the most important thing.
2025-07-30 01:30:00
If you came of age in the early 1980s like I did, you certainly went through that cherished rite of passage, when a friend explained to you a piece of the secret knowledge that you’d carry into adulthood (or if you were especially mature, you figured it out yourself through experimentation): the fact that most John Williams scores1 can be sung to the title of the movie2.
Michael Giacchino doesn’t waste time with ambiguity, though. In his theme for Fantastic Four: First Steps, he has a chorus tell you exactly when to sing “Fan-tas-tic Fooooouuurrr!”
And honestly, I think that theme is just great. It does exactly what it needs to do, placing it into the franchise with the sweeping majesty of MCU super hero movie music — even though I’ve spent too much time in Avengers Campus at Disneyland, and I can no longer stand to hear the Avengers theme, that overture they play during the Marvel Studios intro with the comics panels and excerpts from movie scripts gets me every damn time.
But then it really takes off at around 2:20 (of the Apple Music track, about 8:40 in the YouTube video), when it blends into the vibe of retro-futuristic space-age music, having the chorus emphasize those repeated four notes “bom… bom bom bom” that make you want to take your flying car out to go shopping in an ultra-modern supermarket.
The song that I think of as the platonic ideal for this style of music is “Nation on Wheels” by George Bruns, which immediately conjures up images of monorails and molecules and Magic Highways. It’s so perfect, in fact, that First Steps uses it outright.3
But I suspect that the music that might have more directly inspired Giacchino is the theme(s) for “Lost in Space,” by John Williams. There are two, and they’re both absolute bangers. The original from 1965 feels like an Irwin Allen sci-fi series, which is good because that’s what it was:
The later one from 1967 is probably better known, and it has more of the feel of what the series primarily became known for, a sci-fi adventure primarily intended for kids:
What really impresses me about Giacchino’s work is his versatility and adaptability. He’s in high demand because of his ability to work perfectly within existing styles, like with Star Trek and Rogue One, but also manages to come up with memorable, instantly classic themes, like in his scores for Up, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles. His score for Fantastic Four: First Steps is a showcase for both: combining Marvel music and Space Age music into something intensely hummable, and maybe even more importantly, demonstrating that he understands what this movie is about down to the atomic level.
Plus, I love seeing someone having so much success working with material he so clearly loves. There’s a sense of fun and enthusiasm throughout all of it4 and an enviable kid-in-a-candy-store energy he brings to projects where you just know he’s nerding out over the chance to do it.
One of those is his music for Space Mountain at Disneyland, which had a tough legacy to live up to after Dick Dale’s space surf guitar take on Carnival of the Animals, but which I’ve grown to love. Largely because I hear so much of the influence of the “Lost in Space” themes, not to mention a genuine love of Tomorrowland.
2025-07-28 05:54:22
Releasing Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps in the same month seems like it’s just shamelessly baiting comic book nerds into rekindling the old1 rivalry between DC Comics and Marvel, offering their take on “who won?”
And since I’m a nerd, and I’ve already got a short-lived series on here that was supposed to be about pitting two similar movies against each other, and it’s Sunday, I’m going to take the bait. (Kind of).
I went into First Steps not really knowing what to expect, since I was never a Marvel guy outside of the movies, I didn’t grow up with these characters, and I’ve bounced off of every attempt I’ve made in the past to read Fantastic Four comics.
But I had a lot of preconceived ideas about DC Comics and Marvel, as well as the tone of the existing movie franchises and what each was trying to accomplish. I had a strong expectation that while Superman made me feel like a little kid again, First Steps was almost certainly going to be a solid MCU installment designed to kick off a new phase or whatever, with a thick veneer of mid-century visuals slapped on top.
So I was pleasantly surprised that First Steps broke through my defenses pretty early on, and it won me over in ways that Marvel movies (as much as I like them) usually don’t. It’s possibly the first entry in the MCU, and possibly even the first movie based on a Marvel property, that has absolutely zero trace of being ashamed it’s a genre movie based on comic book super heroes.
That upends my entire notion of what the MCU is all about! I’ve always taken it for granted that one of the core goals of the entire 20+ year project was to translate comic book stories into a format suitable for movie-watching grown-ups. There’s always got to be a sense of “this shit’s crazy, yo!” to make it palatable for the normies.
It’s baked into the core branding of the two brands, at least throughout the time I was still reading comics: DC Comics are all about fantasy, and Marvel is all about heightened reality. It’s setting stories in Metropolis or Gotham vs New York City, basic Pop Culture Media Literacy 101 stuff.
One of the (many) things I loved about Superman was how it was so thoroughly and unashamedly a celebration of comic book super heroes, and how well it captured the feeling of a certain era of comics while still feeling contemporary.
So it was a big surprise to me to see First Steps pulling off that impossible feat as well, but for a different era of comics, which had a different tone. It’s actually a better-than-perfect adaptation of the comics from the 1960s that I’ve read, because it retains the overall feeling while updating all of the stuff that deserves to be left in the 60s: the characterization of women, ethnic minorities, and countries outside of the US2.
It essentially says that it’s pointless to be constantly calling out this stuff as silly, or naive, or juvenile, since that introduces this artificial layer between the material and audience, so that you’re at best appreciating it instead of feeling it.
For instance, a minute into the climax of Fantastic Four: First Steps, I could predict exactly what all of the story beats leading up to the end credits would be, and my predictions turned out to be entirely accurate. But it never felt predictable to me so much as inevitable: this stuff had to happen because it’s the only satisfying way this story could’ve played out3. Even if you’re already completely familiar with a piece of music, it still doesn’t feel satisfying hearing it again, without all of those final notes played in exactly the right order.
I read a great observation from Josh Labelle on Bluesky about David Corenswet and James Gunn’s interpretation of Superman in the latest movie: “I’m starting to think what I enjoyed about that interpretation of the character is that it’s the closest he’s ever been to Spider-Man.”
Which is core to how that whole movie works, once again the difference between Superman being aspirational vs being inspirational. The character is almost never presented as someone the audience can relate to, while that’s Spider-Man’s whole deal. And it’s the reason the introduction of the character was such a strong counterpoint to what DC was doing at the time. I already mentioned that one of Superman’s first lines in the movie was “Golly!” But the part that completely charmed me is soon afterwards, when he gets exasperated with Krypto and says “What the hey, dude?!”
Meanwhile, Fantastic Four: First Steps goes hard on the idea that its characters are paragons. They are all good at just about everything4; even the hot-headed, perpetually horny one usually intended to be comic relief proves himself to be an expert in alien linguistics. They’re celebrated with cartoons and comic books and variety shows, and they’re set apart from the rest of the city in the Baxter Building, working on their experiments that no normal human could possibly understand.
But even with that, they’re treated not so much as gods or even super heroes, but as celebrities. The public is fascinated with their private lives. They’re not reclusive; they make a point of making media appearances, or talking to the public directly to keep them informed of what’s going on. And Ben Grimm makes a point of staying true to his roots and walking the streets of New York, putting on shows for adoring kids.
They’re not really like any of the existing MCU characters5, because there’s a sense that their super powers aren’t some kind of curse that they overcame, but just something that made them even better able to do the kinds of things they’d probably be doing even without super powers. They’re both a human family that we can relate to, and also the best of us, the kind of people we should aspire to be.
I think the two depictions are interesting because they ask what does a 21st century audience want from its heroes? For a long time, I was wondering if we even want to see heroes anymore, as opposed to tortured characters with tragic back stories who happen to have super-human abilities. We either need them to be so far removed from our own experience that they exist purely as fantasy, or we need them to have some fatal flaw that keeps them from being too much better than us.
I love just having hundreds of millions of dollars poured into movies that say, “It’s good to have characters who represent the best of us and the kind of people we should try to be, actually.”
One of the most common story formats in comics from the Silver Age is to have characters who don’t know each other suddenly be thrown together, they have a big brawl based on a misunderstanding (or just a desire to fight so that the audience can see their favorite “who would win?” match-ups), and then they eventually come to an understanding and end up working together to defeat the real enemy.
So it feels like both Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps are both so good at capturing the feeling of super-hero comics, that they’ve kind of managed to do that. They seem to invite fans to slug it out, prove their loyalty to their favorite brand, and choose a winner. But the reality is that they’re both great, and they’re great because the source material has spent decades being cross-pollinated between creators finding out what works and what doesn’t, what are the best aspects of “the rivals” that they can adapt into their own characters.
Turns out my favorite incarnation of Superman feels a lot like early Spider-Man. And one of my favorite MCU installments ever works because it allows itself to be fantastic and makes no effort to be grounded in the contemporary real world. What the–?!
Winner: Life-long comic book and movie nerds getting to see the biggest studios pouring tons of money into adaptations of their favorite source material, which finally embraces the true appeal of super hero comics.
(But also: Superman. Because I loved that movie so much, you guys).