Swamp Thing (2019), we hardly knew ye

The 'cancelled before it finished production' 2019 TV show SWAMP THING is a curious sort of warning on how not to adapt a comic book (or other long-running source material).

Note that I enjoy the show and that it's mostly well-made, well-written, and well-acted. However...

It shares a major problem with the 2011 GREEN LANTERN movie insofar as it tries to throw a huge amount of comic-book 'mythology' that the original comic accumulated over decades into a relatively small package. 

So much so that the 'Big Reveal' of episode 9 took 11 years to come about in the comics -- and was thus actually a Big Reveal when we learned that Everything We Knew Was Wrong. Nine episodes in, we barely know Alec Holland/Swamp Thing. The Big Reveal is just another plot point without much tragedy or shock behind it.

The show also invents new stories for many of the main characters which are not really an improvement on the original stories.

Then, for reasons I really don't understand, it throws two non-Swamp-Thing-related DC characters into prominent roles, Dan Cassidy (aka Blue Devil) and Madame Xanadu.

Though I do love Blue Devil

And an all-new ghost story plot. And at least three completely new, major supporting characters.

Did I say ten episodes? It actually does all this by the end of episode 5. There's still half a season to go and even more mythology to process. 

Then it throws in this very odd bit in which several episodes bear the titles of Bruce Springsteen songs. If the whole thing were set in New Jersey, I could maybe understand this. But it's set in Louisiana. Jarringly, the show switches from Springsteen titles back to titles from the comic-book series with episodes 9 and 10.

I do give the series a pass on its relative lack of Swamp Thing. It's a TV show, and the budget can't necessarily handle a partially and sometimes fully CGI Swamp Thing being the star of his own show, instead of a muck-encrusted cameo in many episodes. On the other hand, if you're going to make a show about Swamp Thing, maybe only do so if the budget is there.

One last thing that interests me is that the original Swamp Thing comic series, from the early 1970's, basically followed the rubric of The Fugitive. To wit: 

• Mysterious criminals kill Alec Holland's wife and accidentally turn him into Swamp Thing when they blow up his lab and saturate him with the 'Bio-restorative Formula' Linda and Alec Holland had been working on to increase plot yields. 
• Swamp Thing (a name given to him by the media -- he actually goes by 'Alec') sets off on a cross-country journey to find the people behind the murder and avenge his wife's death. 
• The government agent who failed to protect the Hollands pursues Swamp Thing across the country, initially because he believes that Swamp Thing may have played a role in the murders. 
• Each issue pits Swampy against a new supernatural menace.

Like I said, I enjoy the show but spend a lot of time agog. Even if we assume that the producers wanted to make a mythology-heavy, arc-intensive show out of Swamp Thing, they've simply overloaded the concept with too much information and way, way too many characters. I hope that its rapid cancellation means that a different version is on the way, or possibly a more faithful movie version.

But boy oh boy. Even in original works, watch that mythology. And watch out for too many characters introduced too quickly.

Also... how did Blue Devil get into the mix? Was the writers' room drunk that day?

The Dark Half (1989) by Stephen King

The Dark Half (1989) by Stephen King: The Dark Half falls into the transition zone between drug and alcohol abuse and sobriety for Stephen King, whose loved ones staged an intervention some time during the novel's initial composition. And among other things, the novel features a novelist who has struggled with alcohol addiction. 

Protagonist Thad Beaumont also struggles with his best-selling pseudonym having been 'outed' -- or forced into an outing, really, in order to deprive the discoverer of a writer's 'dark half' of any financial windfall after that discoverer tried to blackmail Beaumont. King's own pen-name, Richard Bachman, died of "cancer of the pseudonym" in 1986 under less blackmaily circumstances.

Beaumont himself writes (or, writer's blocked, wrote) mainstream literary fiction, with his first novel almost winning a major prize. His 'own' novels have never sold that well. Writer's block caused him to start writing violent, hard-boiled crime fiction as 'George Stark.' 'Stark' nods to the prolific Donald Westlake's 'Richard Stark' pen-name, if you're interested. 

The protagonist of two of these best-selling novels, Alexis Machine, also nods to a character in a novel by crime writer Shane Stevens, as King notes in his afterword.

Man, that's a lot of nods! One last one would be that Beaumont's name seems to be a gesture towards the prolific fantasy and horror writer Charles Beaumont, with 'Beaumont' itself having been a career-long pen-name for Charles Nutt.

So Beaumont retires George Stark -- in a feature article in People magazine no less! Thad's wife feels relief at this. She never liked the way Thad acted when he was writing as Stark, almost as if he were another person.

Well, yes -- George Stark does indeed turn out to be a different person. Or a different something, anyway. And he's really pissed at having been 'retired.' And he looks and acts a lot like Alexis Machine, the violent and amoral criminal protagonist of two of the Stark novels.

The Dark Half entertainingly wrestles with a surprising number of meta-fictional issues amidst its mostly propulsive plot. King structures the novel in an interesting way. It's what I guess I'll call the 'Two Steps Forward, One Step Back' Structure. 

Stanley Kubrick famously used this structure in The Killing because that's the structure the novel that was the basis for The Killing used. The plot follows one character for awhile until some sort of crisis is reached. Then it jumps back in time to a different character and proceeds forward until the crisis has been reached and passed for another crisis. Then, rinse and repeat. The studio found this structure confusing and forced an infamous voice-over onto The Killing. Here, it mostly works.

Recurring King character Sheriff Alan Pangborn appears here because some of The Dark Half occurs in Pangborn's Castle Rock. Pangborn would soon be the protagonist of Needful Things (1991) and, in an alternate-universe version, a character played by Scott Glenn in the first season of Castle Rock. Here, he's introduced to the weirdness of Castle Rock for the first time (Pangborn hails from New Jersey) but certainly not the last.

In all, The Dark Half is enjoyable, occasionally piercing, and only sometimes a bit padded, especially with lengthy, narrative-halting  biographies of peripheral characters, a recurring problem in King. King would re-use some elements of The Dark Half decades later in The Outsider. 

Somewhat bizarrely, King also gives an academic friend of Beaumont's some traits previously given to a character in "The Crate" (adapted in Creepshow). I have no idea if this was intentional or if King forgot that he'd used elements such as a wife/significant other who annoyingly tells people "Just call me Billie!" 

King does manage the feat of making the common sparrow into a magical figure of hope and dread. You wouldn't think sparrows could conjure up the Sublime, but The Dark Half somehow pulls that trick off. 

Recommended.

Joker (2019)

Joker (2019): based on characters and situations created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, and others; written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver; directed by Todd Phillips; starring Joaquin Phoenix (Arthur Fleck/ Joker), Robert De Niro (Murray Franklin), Zazie Beetz (Sophie), Frances Conroy (Penny Fleck), and Brett Cullen (Thomas Wayne):

Downbeat, revisionist take on Batman villain The Joker's origin story from the guy who directed The Hangover. Somehow, it mostly works. Director/co-writer Todd Phillips lifts much of the movie's written and visual aesthetic from 1970's and early 1980's Martin Scorsese. Hey, if you're going to steal, you can do a whole lot worse.

The result is a super-villain origin story that plays like the offspring of Scorsese's Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, with just a little After Hours mixed in. It's 1981, and Arthur Fleck, who will become The Joker, is a sad-sack, deeply mentally ill man caught in a family and bureaucratic nightmare of an existence. What larks, Pip!

Films derived from superhero properties don't usually deal with the truly down-trodden and desperate. Why should they? That's not the stuff of CGI! That Joker can be read as a small-scale power fantasy seems to have freaked out all the people who let the truly pernicious large-scale power fantasies slide right by without comment. There's certainly nothing attractive about Arthur Fleck's plight or his apotheosis. It seems to me that Iron Man, aka America's Giant Metal Penis, is a far more dangerous movie than this.

And Joaquin Phoenix is indeed a revelation. There's nothing 'funny' about this Joker, nothing crowd-pleasing or attemptedly crowd-pleasing about him in the manner of all previous big-screen Jokers. He's a man who becomes a monster in part because of forces beyond his control. This Joker is, among other things, physically brain-damaged. Yikes. Highly recommended.

The Institute (2019) by Stephen King

The Institute (2019) by Stephen King: Novel: Stephen King returns to the world of psychic children in his new novel with mostly positive results. 

The eponymous Institute kidnaps children and puts them to work doing... what? Well, if I told you, I'd spoil the novel. Suffice to say that the people behind the Institute believe that the ends justify the means and that they're the good guys.

They really must think they're the good guys because they've been killing a whole lot of children for decades. And their families. King remains fairly ruthless throughout the novel, making things seem more plausible. There's a heck of a death toll, both depicted and implied, and the vast majority of those deaths are children between the ages of about 8 and 14.

But soon after the novel begins, the Institute makes one mistake -- they kidnap a boy genius. They didn't kidnap him because he's a boy genius. Human intelligence is irrelevant to their aims. Well, until it interferes with them.

King plays a bit with structure in the novel, beginning with a secondary protagonist -- a former police officer who goes walkabout and ends up as the Night Knocker in a small Southern town. After about 50 pages, we jump to our primary protagonist. A beginning writer would probably be told not to do this shift. But King can do what he wants -- and the structure does cause suspense insofar as we wonder how events in demon-haunted Maine (where the Institute is located) and the Southern whistle-stop will dovetail.

In all, it's enjoyable and fairly tight. The characterization of the children is typically astute. And the characterization of the assorted antagonists, while occasionally one-note, makes sense when one considers that they're people doing terrible things for what they believe is a noble cause. That's going to disconnect one from empathy -- or require people with low empathy from the get-go. It's also the only King novel I can think of in which probability calculations play a major role. Recommended.