Poster Posting: The Spirit

On a lengthy walk through Chelsea and Tribeca to get to the second part of a strong double feature (Son of Rambow=good, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg=even better) a strange triple poster array plastered to the side of a construction site caught my eye. I didn't have my camera on me at the time, but here's a digital file:



If it looks like something straight out of Sin City that's because it's designed to look that way; it's an ad for longtime cartoonist (and nascent film director) Frank Miller's cinematic adapatation of Will Eisner's The Spirit. I'm quite sure the rather obvious similarities — the black, white & red color palette, the inky blacks flecked with incandescent white to create the illusion of space and the street poetry turned taglines ("My city screams...she is my lover...and I am her Spirit") were all done intentionally to try to drive Sin City fans (and, hey, I'm one of them) to the theater.

A little background on The Spirit for people who aren't familiar with it. Rather than being an actual comic book sold on a spinner rack, it was a 16-page pamphlet that was distributed inside Sunday newspapers across the country from 1940 through 1952. It was effectively about a cop named Denny Colt who gets splashed by a mysterious chemical during a raid on a criminal's hideout, passes out, and is mistakenly declared dead. When he comes to in his own coffin, he doesn't even bother freaking out about the fact that he just got buried alive; instead, he decides to let the world believe he's kicked the bucket in order to fight crime outside the confines of the law as The Spirit. Eventually, though, The Spirit started to become a supporting character in his own magazine, and Eisner used his world to tell stories well outside the confines of the super-hero genre.

Eisner created the strip and wrote and drew it (with uncredited assistance from his studio) until he left to serve in World War II. When Eisner returned to the strip in 1946, he grew more experimental and The Spirit flourished under his stewardship. Today the series is remembered largely for this period: when Eisner helped push the boundaries of what people thought comics were. He had a great eye for panel layout and a knack for creative design (famously, The Spirit's logo never appeared in the strip the same way twice, and it was always cleverly integrated into the first page of artwork, a technique that both saved space and helped establish mood). (For a very affordable taste of the series, I strongly recommend DC Comics' The Best of the Spirit trade paperback)

Miller is an on-the-record fan of Eisner; the two even collaborated on a very readable booklength conversation about their careers. And as Eisner showed time and time again in the series, The Spirit is a malleable property that can accommodate almost any kind of narrative. But this poster makes me a little uneasy.

The Spirit is not going to be easy to adapt to movies because it's basically pure comics. Eisner had very strong ideas about what comics were and what they could do, and he basically used The Spirit as his own mad scientist's laboratory in which he proved it. Because it's style and technique are so rooted in comics, the only thing you could translate to movies to get a truly faithful adaptation would be to make something just as inventive but very movie-specific — a Spirit movie that could never flow back into comics. What we don't need is a Sin City rehash. This poster suggest that might be what we're going to get. I hope not!

Poster Posting: The Hills Have Eyes

Hopping into the subway over the weekend, this image caught my eye:


The Hills Have Eyes is a remake of the 1977 Wes Craven horror film of the same name. I have not seen it, but according to all descriptions, the film is about a family stranded in the deserted, pitted "against a clan of inbred cannibals." The remake's trailer makes it clear that, inbred and cannibalistic as they may be, they are also horrifically mutated by nuclear fallout.

Great, now that we've got that squared away, let's take a look at that poster. In it, the pasty paw of an unseen assailant — presumably a fallout-laden inbred cannibal — is holding down his victim. Presumably, the mutant cannibal (or "mutannibal," if you prefer) has something weighty and blunt in his unseen hand, and he's planning to use it to beat the ever-loving crap out of her.

It's a tad misogynistic but, whatever, it's a horror movie and that's par for the course. What caught my eye wasn't the pose, it was the girl. Look at her face again: smooth and surprisingly docile for someone whose death is seemingly seconds away. This woman is way too calm for someone face-to-face with a horribly-mutated killer. For purposes of comparison, look at the expression on the face of this woman in a still from the film:


See, now that's proper terror. That's what it looks like to be assailed by mutannibals! And I should know.

So why the placid face in the poster? Call me crazy, but I have to see it as a classic case of having your horror cake and eating your sex too. Horror movies have to be scary, but they have to be sexy too. I would have to guess that this is a marketer's attempt to kill both birds with one poorly-aimed stone. Since you can't very well give a come hither scare to a violent albino psychopath (well, I suppose, certain unseemly people could, but not the types in a major motion picture), the best you can do is to look like you don't care one way or the other; like being held down and made to beg for your life is just another day in the office.

Then again, I'm sure this poster was selected out of dozens of prototypes, and vetted through focus groups in malls around the country, whose opinions are much more important than mine. I'd love to be a fly on the wall of those discussions — "Well we like the man holding the woman down to bludgeon her to death, but does the woman have to look so scared about it?"