Wider Reading | Thirteen Thoughts - The Green Lantern Trailer

I’d heard that the Green Lantern trailer had bad CGI. So when I Youtubed ‘Green Lantern Trailer’ and clicked on the first entry that came up, my first thought was,


“Wow, they’re right – this does look bad.”

My second thought was,

“Hey, Nathan Fillon’s in this? Awesome! Maybe now he can stop doing that jobbing work on Castle that presumably is his way of directly accessing his almost-entirely-female fanbase via Living TV or wherever the hell it airs.”

Are those Captain Hammer's gloves?

It wasn’t until Hugo Weaving as Elrond popped up in voice-over that I realised I was, in fact, watching a fan-made trailer (and from that point of view it actually had quite splendid special effects.)


Clicked back and watched the real trailer.


My first thought was,

“Ugh, Ryan Reynolds.”

My second thought was,

“No, hang on – didn’t he do that film Buried about being trapped in a coffin, and all the critics praised his acting in it to the skies? Maybe he’s matured as an artist, gained the respect he deserves from his directors, and he no longer has to play that same smug, sarcastic-yet-somehow-not-at-all-intelligent, slimy arsehole you just want to punch in the kidneys.”

My third thought was,

“Ugh, Ryan Reynolds.”


I should probably admit about here that I know next to nothing about what the Green Lantern is, and that this trailer only explained so much. Apparently Ryan Reynolds’ character happens to stumble upon a crashed alien spaceship, and the dying being inside is so impressed by his ability to correctly pronounce his own name that he gives him a magical ring that can do anything.


At this point, I was thinking,

“Ri-ight. Is this one of those ideas which seemed cool forty or fifty years ago but is now just a bargain-barrel attempt to keep the superhero trainwreck moving by wheeling out even the most absurd ideas “All-American Comics” could possibly come up with?”

And then, in a burst of serendipity, I watched Ryan Reynolds being transported to a magical planet where he met a heroic purple man with a moustache and battled Peter Sarsgaard, whose brain had apparently expanded to the same proportions of those of The Brain in Pinky & The Brain. Oh, and he had a moustache as well.

My fifth thought was,

“You know, Peter Sarsgaard, I’ve never been overwhelmed by your charisma (looking as you do like a slightly pudgy young Kiefer Sutherland), but for your dad’s sake – and he’s been in some tosh – I am slightly disappointed in you.”


My sixth thought was,

“Hang on...Peter Sarsgaard isn’t Stellan Skarsgard’s son? Well, that does explain the different spelling. Okay, I don’t much mind what you do, then.”

Seventh thought.

“You know which Swedish actor needs to do more movies? Peter Stormare. Pretending to be Italian in Prison Break doesn’t count. He did make a great Satan in Constantine, though.”


One Wikipedia search later, I had my eighth thought.

“My God...Peter Stormare’s original name was ‘Peter Storm’. And he’s a musician now! He should be a superhero. Either that or team up with Christopher Lee to make a supergroup of undistilled badass. All right, all right, focus. It shouldn’t matter that nothing in this trailer or this film will ever be cooler than Peter Stormare and Christopher Lee as band members who are also a superhero crime-fighting team-”

Ladies, I present, for your delectation: Sex.

Back to the trailer. And I’m struck by how, in the midst of a section in which Ryan Reynolds’ best friend/exposition dump laughs at how irresponsible he is, suggesting we’ll be treated to at least forty minutes of him using his powers, Bruce Almighty-style, to look up ladies’ dresses before he BECOMES SERIOUS ABOUT GREAT POWER REQUIRING GREAT RESPONSIBILITY, we hear him explaining,

“Anything in my mind...I can create.”

Ninth thought;

“If he can create anything he imagines, he’s even more omnipotent and utterly pointless than Superman. Presumably there’ll have to be a bit an hour in where he tries to imagine Peter Sarsgaard falling into a pit-full of brain-leeches, only for Peter to reply, ‘Hahahahaha! I’m afraid your powers of imagination will not work on me, for I have invented a spray-on Imagination-Repellent!”


Tenth thought, delivered while weeping.

“Hollywood seems to have decided that if the mainstream, non-comic-book-reading audience will lap up Iron Man, they’ll watch any superhero, no matter how outdated and strange they are. Oh, Christ, the Green Hornet’s coming out as well, isn’t it? And The Avengers. And Thor. I just don’t care any more. Why does nobody understand that Iron Man wasn’t a particularly good film, enlivened only by extended wealth-porn and Robert Downey Jr.? Don’t believe me? Try imagining it with Orlando Bloom as the lead.”


Eleventh thought, as I examined the Green Lantern (movie) Wikipedia page.

“Sure, you could have Robert Downey Jr. play every superhero role. But surely even that would get tiresome after five or six films...hang on, the director Martin Campbell has acknowledged the trailer’s ‘colourful’ look, claiming they were going for a sort of Flash Gordon vibe. Yes. Because post-ironic camp worked so well for Scooby-Doo.”

Twelfth thought.

“Ah...the purple moustachioed man is played by Mark Strong. Now I understand everything. Because, much as I do enjoy his work, nobody can deny that Mark Strong has an obvious fetish for playing supporting roles in awful films. In fact, knowing how he’s usually typecast, I’m surprised he isn’t the villain-”

Thirteenth thought, after reading further on down the Wikipedia article;

“Ah, so he’s being set up to play the villain in the sequel. How awfully optimistic of them.”

Swamp | Fiction | Swamp Thing. You Make My Heart Sing. You Make Everything...Oozy.

To Seamus Heaney, bogs and marshes are a touchstone symbol (his enemies would probably claim, an overused symbol) of the unconscious mind. He’s forever peering into them, digging them up, unearthing horrid monsters of the collective mind’s past. To him, though the swamp appears to be a wasteland quagmire, there are ancient treasures to be found within – but also dangers, strange and troubling truths that the conscious mind fears to face. These artifacts, however – Tollund Men, and the poet’s own reflection, disturbed by a rat - always serve a greater purpose; that of reminding us who we really are.

“As if he had been poured

in tar, he lies

on a pillow of turf

and seems to weep

the black river of himself.

Apollonian.

For Samuel Beckett, the unconscious is also a swamp, but he feels less ambiguous about its potential merits. (It should be noted that both Heaney and Beckett have shown in their work that they have, at the very least, a working understanding of Jung). In Happy Days, the ‘swamp’ – the quicksand into which Winnie gradually disappears over the course of the play – is literally oblivion. The unconscious is unquestionably a place of de-individuation, and the ambiguity comes from Beckett’s own feelings towards that loss of the self; is it to be feared, or embraced as an end to the constant atrophy of his characters?

The fascinating thing is that this complete opposition of views comes from the action of the swamp rather than the nature of it. Heaney sees the swamp as an opportunity for enlightenment; his, appropriately, is the rising action, a shift from the Dionysian towards the Apollonian – or, to put it in the more accurately Jungian fashion, a shift towards the Apollonian using the Dionysian – a “night journey”. Beckett views the swamp as something to sink into, and, in consequence, something to lose oneself in. It’s the end that Hamm longs for – and that only finally comes to Winnie after a play’s worth of total bodily and mental decay.

Dionysian.

Obviously, it’s the Beckettian viewpoint that makes me a little troubled about the surprisingly widespread quicksand fetish. Wikipedia suggests, not unreasonably, that a great deal of the phenomenon’s influence is due to the widespread exposure of quicksand, and the thrilling peril that came with it, in the old vintage adventure serials that permeated their way into a young generation’s consciousness. A cheerfully open-minded Slate article eloquently points out that the niche is split between “sinkers”, who enjoy the actual sensation of being submerged themselves, and the voyeurs who have the desire to see others being immersed. It goes on to note, using the data collected by enthusiastic fetishists who are attempting to every scene involving quicksand, swamps, bogs, marshes, that the peak era for the swamp in Hollywood cinema was not, in fact, during the age of the adventure serial, but in the 1960s – where, apparently, jaw-droppingly, 3% of all films contained a scene in which someone fell into a viscous liquid and couldn’t get out. (Don’t look at me like that, it’s their statistic.)

I’m very strongly resisting the urge to point out that cinema has never before or since shown anywhere near such an impulse towards swamps as in the decade most famous of any decade for its embracing of the Dionysian ideal.

...No, I can’t do it. I can’t hold it in any longer. What I just said. In the Sixties, the era which perceived itself to be about collectivism, orgies, and drugs (even if the overall reality was quite different), the symbol of someone being immersed in a quagmire shot up dramatically in the public consciousness. Additionally, as an aside, one of my favourite movies from the Seventies, Don’t Look Now, which is very much about psychological illumination, features prominently the repeated symbol of a body being raised out of muddy water. And, if I really wanted to push my luck, I might argue that one of the most famous Dionysian characters in the mainstream is called Quagmire.


Giggity.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor