Marvel-ing about works of art in their times

What will our great grandchildren think about the films we love?

One of our local high schools is named for John Hersey, the famous World War II correspondent and author.  His book Hiroshima, an account of the detonation of the atomic bomb on that city during the war, was a staple of middle school and high school reading lists when I was in school during the 1970s.  According to a friend of mine who is a middle school teacher, it's still frequently assigned in middle school literature and history classes.  I somehow passed through my primary school years without being assigned to read it, but I picked it up and read it anyway one summer during my college years when I found it kicking around my parents' house.

After that single encounter with his work, I traversed the next couple of decades without giving much further thought to Hersey.  But having moved into this local area and hearing his name invoked whenever the school is mentioned, my curiosity was sufficiently piqued to Google him.  I learned that he won a Pulitzer Prize, not for Hiroshima but rather for a novel called A Bell for Adano.  I think I've mentioned that I frequently choose books to read from lists of nominees for (and/or winners of) prestigious prizes.  A Bell for Adano certainly meets that criterion, although it is not recent; it was published in 1944, and won the Pulitzer for fiction the following year.  A copy of the book is in our local public library, so I checked it out and read it.

The basis of my theory of letting nomination committees curate my reading lists is that the committee of experts presumably will weed out the misses and leave me with a list of hits to choose from.  But in fact, my experience is that the Pulitzer finalist lists from year to year contain both hits and misses (and some years are considerably better than others).  A Bell for Adano, I'm sorry to say, was a miss for me.  The story is about a US Army major who is appointed to be the administrator of a town in Italy called Adano during the Allied occupation.  He's a good man who personifies many American virtues.  One of Hersey's points in the novel, and presumably one of his real-life convictions, was that American values such as freedom and self-determination were superior to those of the Europeans who had lived under fascism.  Perhaps that view was tenable; but reading it now, it comes across as rather embarrassingly self-congratulatory.  In our era today, with the Pasha of Self Congratulation occupying the White House, my appetite for that sort of thing is not large.  The novel also rather patronizingly paints the Italians of the town as quaint, cute and mostly harmless, and certainly no match for the clever and able Americans.  I suppose those portrayals were intended to be colorful and comic, and perhaps they were received that way by the American reading public in 1944, but they do not translate well today.

So my overall take of A Bell for Adano is that it hasn't aged well.  It strikes me as a good example of a work that may have worked well initially, but in retrospect, its artistic success and commercial appeal were contingent on social or cultural factors that no longer apply.  Hersey's novel satisfied an appetite or filled an emotional need that no longer widely prevails.

The question, "Will this work age well?" has been on my mind as we embark upon film awards season.  Glancing through the various Top 10 lists, it interests me that a couple of movies from the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe have broken through to critical acclaim.  I'm thinking in particular of Black Panther (100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer for Top Critics) and Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse, (94% Top Critics Tomatometer).

I've seen both of them.  I liked Spiderman.  I didn't like it so much that I plan to watch it again, but I would do so if that means spending quality time with my wife and/or children.

I didn't love Black Panther.  As that puts me out of step with the critics, let me share a couple of thoughts.

The translation of the old Marvel comics, for which I think I paid 50 cents at the corner store when I was a kid (not that I bought very many of them; I wasn't very into comic books), into high-budget blockbuster films, surely is the most important commercial development in the industry in the last decade (six Marvel entries among the top 20 highest-grossing films of all time).  I've seen many of the Marvel offerings.  I suppose they are the current generation's version of the Western: civilization is preserved when good defeats evil.  There are a number of elements of the films that appeal to me: I like action, I like heroic banter, and I have no objection to watching Scarlett Johansson cavort about in form-fitting costumes. 

On the other hand, I'm not particularly a fan of high-priced special effects, and without special effects, a Marvel film is, well, just another Western with different costumes. Marvel films end spectacularly, with the theater sound system cranked all the way up and 2/3rds of the budget going into those final scenes.  I don't hate that sort of thing, but I don't get a cathartic buzz from it, either.

The importance of Black Panther can't be discussed without considering the casting.  The cast is one of the chief reasons that critics have loved Black Panther.  The cast of Black Panther is what we would expect in any Marvel film: they are young-ish, attractive, and sufficiently fit that not much additional padding is required to fill out their costumes.  From a certain point of view, the casting was not a roll of the dice: the lead roles were filled by Hollywood veterans who already had impressive credentials.

But to claim that the casting was risk-averse is to miss its defining feature.  In case you've spent the last year trapped in an underground bunker, or perhaps have been living inside an advanced African civilization isolated from the rest of the world, let me just mention that nearly the entire cast is black.  I don't describe it as "African American" because not many of the leads would fit that profile; the cast is more multicultural than that, with some originally from other points on the globe, or having parents who are natives of other points on the globe, or themselves having spent considerable time overseas.  But they are (nearly) all persons of color.  For a big-budget blockbuster to be made with this casting - it probably felt like a big risk in the fundraising meetings, and the producers are to be lauded for conceiving it and pursuing it.  To that extent - and it's an important consideration to many within the industry, as well as to many critics and audience members - we might call the film a Social Justice Statement project.

Because nearly all of the cast are Wakandans in the film, that means that they must speak with a sort of vaguely African-sounding accent, and use vaguely African-sounding locutions, like addressing one's sibling as "My brother".  Of course, phony accents are a long-standing mass entertainment convention; being able to speak English with a credible accent is a requirement for any serious actor, and there are dialect coaches to help them.  Still, I fear that the accents and the locutions are among the elements that, in 50 years, people are going to chuckle at.

Let me try to summarize my view of Black Panther: if one is able to bracket out the color of the cast, one is left with a rather conventional Marvel film - and in my personal estimation, a conventional Marvel film isn't a particularly great film.  They're basically hi-tech shoot-em-ups with preposterous premises (teen boy bit by radioactive spider), but less interesting than Westerns because unlike, say, High Noon, the good guys all have super powers.  I don't consider the writing or the characters or the story in Black Panther to be a cut above the usual Marvel fare.  As I've mentioned, the synthetic accents are a little questionable.  In short, the color of the cast aside, it's not a remarkable film.  I don't think it belongs on the Best Of lists.

And so the question on the table is: does the Social Justice Statement aspect of the film, which I'm endeavoring to fully acknowledge here: does that elevate the film as art?  Does it turn a conventional work into a remarkable work?  I'm afraid I don't think it does.  That is not to say it's not worth pursuing.  We could wish that, next time it's pursued, it's pursued in a better vehicle than a Marvel film.

My prediction is that when our grandchildren, for whom multiracial, multicultural casting will be commonplace, watch Black Panther, they'll smirk and say, "They thought this was a four-star film?  What were they thinking?  And they thought that these portrayals of Africans were positive?  We've come a long way."