Originally published July 27, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1445
“Review stuff” was the mandate given us by She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (i.e., Maggie). But nothing was specified.
So I’m going to review the past week’s worth of my entertainment activities.
A couple of weeks ago, Neil Gaiman was in town doing a book signing promoting American Gods. Kathleen and I went, and opted not to be “fabulous” and just walk up to Neil (who was busy signing away and taking lots of time with each and every fan, of which about two to three hundred turned out.) Instead we just waited in line with everyone else. It was especially entertaining listening to fans, who had been following the entire McFarlane-“Angela”-“Miracle Man” imbroglio, angrily excoriating Todd and talking about all the people he’d been mean to, unaware I was standing two feet away.
Nevertheless, we wound up waiting two flippin’ hours, (by which point I’d been made by some eagle-eyed fans and they stopped talking about fan stuff because they knew I was standing there, so a lot of the charm dissipated for me) so when I cracked open the book, I thought, Ðámņ, this sucker better be worth it.
Well, it definitely was.
Nominally American Gods is the story of Shadow, a recently released convict who finds himself in the employ of… well… a god, who goes by the name of Mr. Wednesday (and anyone who knows the derivation of the day’s name can pretty much figure out pretty quickly who he is.) Shadow is informed by his new employer that a major war is heating up between the old, recognizable gods, such as the Egyptian pantheon, and the newer gods whom Americans have come to worship: Gods of media, computers, cell phones, etc. And as Wednesday’s aide-de-camp, Shadow will have a significant, if infuriatingly undefined, role in the impending struggle.
But that is really only a backdrop for Gaiman’s leisurely examination of the ever-changing landscape of American faith. We live in a country where we question, more and more, the relevance of gods in our existence. There is virtually no mention of standard churches, religious organizations, Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism et al in American Gods. Jesus doesn’t show up and offer to roll up his sleeves and battle side by side with Buddha (which is fortunate, considering they just did that over in South Park.) They don’t factor in at all, almost as if organized religion itself is a side issue, churches such a big business that genuine faith—and the sacrifices, both spiritual and physical, that such faith entails—have gone by the wayside. Instead American Gods explores what, if anything, is truly important to Americans. What do we really care about? What sacrifices are we genuinely willing to make in order to show we believe? What is it, out there, that we believe in anymore? And what, out there, believes in us?
Shadow’s odyssey is an odd conglomeration: Part “Road” movie if Hope and Crosby were on acid; part Deathbird Stories as Gaiman examines the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes parasitic relationship between gods and their worshippers; and part Shirley Jackson, as a small and seemingly idealized town becomes a microcosm for American society: What evil sacrifices are we willing to accept in order to protect our concept of the common good, and are those sacrifices justified, or do they taint the end product? And yet with all these literary forebears, American Gods is nevertheless a unique and thought-provoking piece of literature, Sandman taken to the next level of examination. I wasn’t one hundred percent blown away by the resolution of the God War itself, but by that point I was so involved with all the other aspects of the book that it almost seemed secondary, and it didn’t diminish the impact of what Gaiman was trying to say with the rest of the work. Highly recommended.
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I finished American Gods yesterday and immediately started the trade paperback collection of Warren Ellis’ thought provoking Come in Alone column which ran weekly for a year on the Comic Book Resources website. I read it from time to time in its run, but it’s nice to have it all in one place, and see the cumulative impact of Ellis’ genuine love for the medium and frustration at its shortcomings.
Being self-obsessed, of course, I can’t let Warren’s following observation slip past without comment: “I mean, I’m sure Peter David has a fine old time on Supergirl, but I have to be honest; watching him piss away his gift for dialogue and the inventiveness I’ve seen from him in person on thin little books that will never be seen again past the week of their release is a bloody waste.”
My first response is, as one would expect, “Gee, thanks… I guess…” But then I figured, hey… it’s not like I’m in a field where anything is guaranteed. I spend a few days writing an issue of Supergirl, it’s out there for a week, and people enjoy it. This is as opposed to a writer who’s not Neil Gaiman, spending months crafting a novel so that it can go out to bookstores with no promotion or advertising, be buried among other books, sit there for a few weeks unnoticed, get the covers ripped off and pulped, unseen by anybody. Or spending a year on a film that’s supposed to be a theatrical release except studio politics sends it straight to video and only one out of every twenty video stores even carries it. Or spending two years on a play, in staged readings, workshops, rehearsals, so that it can be trashed by critics who didn’t get it and close in New Haven.
It doesn’t mean that I’m not always striving to get my work out there in new and more challenging venues… but in the meantime, there are worse fates than those thin little books.
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Major, major spoiler warning: I am now going to ruin the ending of A.I. I do this with a clear conscience, because Steven Spielberg already ruined it. In fact, anyone who asks me if they should see it, I tell the same thing with all seriousness: Go see it, but when the words “2000 Years Later” appears on the screen, motor out of there. If you absolutely insist on staying, then pretend you’re at home watching a DVD version, and you’re now screening an alternate ending that’s part of the bonus materials. You know, like that dippy ending to Terminator II set in Washington, D.C. The kind of thing that makes you wonder what an otherwise capable filmmaker could possibly have been thinking.
A.I. isn’t Spielberg’s first endeavor to take a classic fantasy story and cast it in science fiction terms. That would be his other lettered film, E.T., which was essentially Peter Pan, complete with lost boys, dazzling flying sequences, and a Tinkerbell-like glowing resurrection. But A.I. is even more blatant. Spielberg, working off a treatment begun by Stanley Kubrick, endeavors to craft a tale that recasts Pinocchio with a robot boy named David, who decides to seek out the Blue Fairy so that he can become a real boy and earn his mother’s love (don’t ask). Gepetto is William Hurt’s scientist, who crafts the closest thing to a son he can produce; the cricket is incarnated as a talking Teddy Bear; the crafty fox shows up as Jude Law’s “Gigolo Joe,” a character who starts strong but eventually devolves into exposition man; Stromboli the sadistic puppeteer shows up as the ruthless overseer of a “Flesh Fair” in which robots are trashed for sport; Pleasure Island becomes Philadelphia by way of Blade Runner; we even have David searching for his mother underwater. I kept waiting for Monstro to show up.
I will admit that I was not convinced by Sixth Sense that Haley Joel Osment could act. He spent that whole film looking terrified and speaking in a low whisper. That’s no challenge. Any adorable kid actor who contemplates what his career is going to be like when he’s not cute anymore (ex: Macaulay Culkin) should be able to carry off gut-wrenching fear. But his work in A.I. has me convinced. His impressive performance provides the emotional soul that’s missing from the script.
Even with its shortcomings and by-the-numbers pacing, the first hour and forty minutes of the film works powerfully enough. And then we get the ending: The real ending (i.e., the one Kubrick would have gone for) and the Spielberg ending, which wrecks the good ship A.I. on the shores of overreaching sentimentality.
The real ending has David in a submersible vessel in a Coney Island flooded because the polar ice caps melted (although you can’t pin the cinematic mess on Kevin Costner this time around.) The sub’s headlights pick up a statue of the Blue Fairy, part of an exhibit in the submerged remains of a storybook amusement park. Having finally found his goal (he thinks) David then proceeds to beg the Blue Fairy to transform him, over and over, like a broken record. And the camera slowly pulls away as an omniscient narrator tells us that David continued doing so, without let-up, until he ran down and the world froze over.
It’s powerful, moving, heartwrenching. Because what David has learned, in striving to be a “real boy” by pursuing a fairy tale, is that fairy tales don’t exist. They’re fantasies, contrivances. They’re not real. David goes as far as he can in his personal quest, but he is forever destined to fail in it because one can only fail in such a quixotic endeavor. Finding Blue Fairies is what happens to fantasy constructs, while failure in impossible tasks is what happens to real people. He gets his wish to be real, but in a backhanded manner: In his failure, he finds some measure of reality. Considering the oceans freeze, it’s literally cold comfort.
Not good enough for Spielberg. We then go two thousand years later, where David is thawed out by… well, frankly, I’m not sure what the hëll they are. Aliens? Maybe. An advanced form of machine life? Perhaps. Either way, they come out of nowhere. After lifting from fairy tales and literature, Spielberg then blows it by resorting to one of the hoariest dramatic contrivances of all: Deus ex machina. (Or, perhaps Machina ex Deus, if you subscribe to the notion that these are machines.)
Let us put aside for the moment that if you’re doing CGI creatures, why the hëll give them two arms and two legs as if they’re going to be played by human actors? The problem is that once these creatures show up, everything goes out the window. David asks if they can make him real. They say they can’t. Why not? We’ve never seen them before, and their capabilities are purely at the writer’s whim. Why can’t they say, “Sure, no problem, we’ll grow you a body from human cells?” or “Sure, we’ve got a frozen artifact right here, we’ll just transplant your consciousness into it.” David, upon presenting them with a hank of his mother’s hair (again, don’t ask), requests that they recreate her for him so they can be together forever. “You can only spend one day together,” they explain, giving a bullcrap cosmological double-talk reason why this is so. But there’s no excuse for it, really, except to provide an ending in which you see more incredible manipulation and string-pulling than you would at a puppeteer’s convention.
A.I. was obviously a labor of love (as opposed to, say Jurassic Park II, which was just labored). But as anyone can tell you, if you truly love something, you have to be willing to let it go. Spielberg didn’t do that. Instead he held on to it, like a dog worrying a bone, until the only thing left was a feeling of annoyance and the firm belief that Kubrick—had he been there—would have wielded a pair of scissors to end the film properly. Instead A.I. winds up becoming A.OY.
So how was your week?
(Peter David, writer of stuff, will be spending most of his time at the San Diego Comic Con signing autographs at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Booth and the Claypool Press booth. In addition, he will be doing readings from his work Saturday afternoon.)
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While I believe Spielberg has since come out to say Kubrick had planned the “2000 years later” ending before he died, it just forsnt work as done by Spielberg. And, while I haven’t seen it for over a decade, I can’t help escape the feeling that a good part of that is the poor design choice with the future robots. One of the most discussed elements of the ending—aside, perhaps from whether Spielberg had tacked it on to an otherwise strong Kubrick treatment—was what exactly those things at the end were, with most people settling on aliens (since, frankly, they had the bodies of conventional aliens). But, as the producers later made clear, hey are supposed to be the future evolved robots that inherit the earth. So, for them, finding David is like finding the first person recognizably human—Adam, if you will. It’s this huge discovery for them, and hey want to give him everything that he wants, but they also want to keep him the same and not tinker with his machinery, because he’s a genuine historical artifact.
Now,mall of his does nothing to improve the nonsense with his mother at the end, but it goes pretty far to explain why they care so much about him, want to make him happy, but aren’t willing to change much about him. Unfortunately, because the evolved machines look like aliens and no one bonkers to say “we’re you after 2000 years!”, most of the audience walked away wondering why Speilberg had to bring aliens into it yet again (and this was before Indy 4!).
Peter David: Or spending a year on a film that’s supposed to be a theatrical release except studio politics sends it straight to video and only one out of every twenty video stores even carries it.
Luigi Novi: Oh my god. I don’t know what’s odder: The fact that this column was written in the age of video stores or that the mere fact that there such an “age” that is now over has left us with artifacts like this that are dated in that way.