Another day, another franchise sold to audiences on the promise of dark, edgy grit. A couple weeks ago, it was Little Women’s turn, which the CW network is going to translate from 19th century New England to a “gritty, dystopic” Philadelphia. The same week an edgy, dystopian Little Women was announced, Ben Affleck told moviegoers that his Batman in the upcoming Batman v. Superman movie will be “more broken & fucked-up” than previous depictions of the caped crusader. Given this trend, the next Bruce Wayne is going to be played by one of those slabs of carbon nano-fibers developed by scientists which absorb nearly all light.
I care next-to-nothing about superhero movies, but I’ve been fascinated by the public fallout over the new Fantastic 4 movie. The film, which is one of the worst-reviewed movies of the year, is shaping up to be one of those epic cinematic catastrophes that people talk about for years. Not only does this film have an obvious fake wig that shows up in some scenes and not others, it’s a gift that keeps on giving for terrifically awful headlines. F4 has already given us lots of train-wreck stories about possible drug problems, cast fights, high-profile media proxy wars, and a director who creepily isolated himself like Howard Hughes, or Wesley Snipes on the set of Blade: Trinity. One downside of the spectacular post-release flameout around Fantastic 4, though, is that it’s overshadowing how bad the film’s dour edginess was. I was really hoping that Fantastic 4 would be bad enough to start at least a little backlash against this trend.
When it was first announced, the reboot of Marvel’s first family was sold as another dark, edgy project. Though the plotline was dropped during some reshoot, Dr. Doom was initially going to be an Occupy-inspired hacker named Domashev, playing off both Anonymous and scary Russians like the Tsarnaevs for extra gritty realism. From what I’ve read, though, most of the darkness made the final cut. The Thing’s trademark catchphrase, “it’s clobberin’ time,” is evidently delivered to the young Ben Grimm by his abusive older brother before a beating. To put it in Superman terms, this is like Kal-El being sent to Earth because Kryptonian CPS took him from his violent, mentally ill parents.
The problem with this is that not everything needs to be gritty. Certain things, like a superhero family whose powers tend towards the ridiculous, probably shouldn’t be dark. If not pulled off right, the end result will be something grim, unpleasant, and “shockingly humorless,” as many reviews have said about Josh Trank’s film. At least Batman & Robin, despite the fact that it’s also a huge piece of shit, has some ridiculous jokes and cool art nouveau-stylings.
Making something that’s genuinely dark and gritty is relatively difficult to pull off. Gravitas and “realism” (whatever that means) are a lot easier just to affect, with a lot of faux moral anguish and predictable story beats. The fact that most gritty signifiers are so similar, so plug-and-play, is why almost every movie has an imbecilic fan theory that the whole movie is imagined in a dying character’s last moments. A lot of darkness is ginned up by giving a character X tragedy in their past, subjecting them to Y plot twist, etc.
This is why even the best dark & gritty blockbusters hit the same plot points. 2012’s Skyfall is the highest-grossing Bond film ever, and its dark & gritty sensibility is a welcome change from the absurdities of the late Pierce Brosnan era. But, like dark & gritty blockbusters The Dark Knight and Star Trek Into Darkness, Skyfall follows a well-worn template, which includes a hero at odds with his superiors in the first act, a villain who’d caught intentionally in the second, a “dark night of the soul” in the third, and so on. This now-familiar narrative arc is a popular way to wring pathos out of a story, but there won’t be any humor or wit to liven things up, since such frivolities are neither dark nor gritty.
Bond in particular is a character for whom wit is a defining trait. Though there was a bit of barbed banter in Casino Royale, by Skyfall the humor had been drained away. Specter, due November 2015, is being touted as epic in scale but more “realistic” than classic Bond, which will probably mean humorless. The Daniel Craig Bond cycle and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy have done a lot of the work popularizing dark & gritty subject matter. Hollywood takes as few chances as possible, so the success of these franchises has caused edgy seriousness to crowd out other sensibilities. Though dour realism isn’t the worst of Fantastic 4‘s problems, it’s another reminder that not all material benefits from that treatment.
An upcoming Star Wars spinoff, Rogue One, is promising to bring the darkness and grit of Zero Dark Thirty to the galaxy far, far away. The first official cast photo just dropped, and sure enough, it looks dark & gritty. Rogue One might be great, but this is still a space opera involving dogfights and wizards. A little seriousness will be better than the Jar Jar-stepping-in-poodoo jokes from Episode I, but how many people watching Star Wars wished it was more like that CIA PsyOp where that redhead tortures dudes. None of the million times I’ve watched Return of the Jedi ever made me think “this is good, but it needs more bathos and misery. Also, this is too bright, they’ve got klieg lights everywhere!”
As I’ve said before, the dark-&-gritty cycle should be seen for what it is: a set of historically contingent aesthetic concerns that are popular at the current moment. As with all other dominant popular sensibilities, there’s no reason all these films need to be like this. Ultimately, tastes are cyclical. There’s no reason to think that the dark brooding of Nolan’s Batman films is going to prove more evergreen than the candy-colored silliness of the Adam West show. At least out-of-date fun has something to laugh at, all the dark & gritty movies offer no humor at all.
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