Many years ago, in my youth, I read comic books about superheroes. I also watched Star Wars movies. I did not ever read Star Wars comics. I tried a few, but I didn’t find them very interesting in comparison to the overwhelming visual and auditory experience of the movies. I say that, but in my teens I did read the Star Wars original novelization by George Lucas, or so I thought at the time. Now Wikipedia says Alan Dean Foster ghost wrote it. I enjoyed the book, but at the time I read any science fiction I could get from the local library, which meant whatever water warped paperbacks were on the spinning metal rack by the front door and sometimes I’d have to keep spinning and spinning it and all I could see were the same books that I’d already read, actually the exact same copies of the books, with the tears and creases that I recognized from when I’d checked them out before, and so i got desperate and read the Star Wars novelization and as I say I kind of liked it but I liked anything with spaceships by that time and I didn’t find it as imaginative as a lot of other books that I was interested in, which brings me to the theme of this post, the Hagenart 1st and 2nd Rules of Writing for Media
Rule 1: The higher the complexity of the performance medium, the lower the level of creativity and complexity required for it to be interesting to most people. Basically, you don’t need to be as creative to write for a movie with moving visual and sound elements, as you do to write for say a novel. At an intermediate level, writing the lyrics for a song with music accompaniment requires less creativity and excellence than writing a poem to be performed by spoken word only. Basically, a bird must work harder to fly than a fish must work to float.
Rule 2: The higher the complexity of the medium, the less freedom you have when writing for it. A person writing a prose novel can write with less constraints than a person writing for a movie. The movie script has to be portrayable on a screen in a certain time. Basically, a bird may fly faster than a fish can swim.
Rule 3: The rule of Transfers. When you make a movie out of a book, you lose freedom but gain the added dimensions of the new medium. When you make a book out of a movie, you lose the power of the medium and gain freedom.
3a: The new freedom doesn’t usually help the movie made into a book, because the story is already set. That’s why novelizations fail to be interesting, because something written for a film will suffer from the transfer to a less powerful medium, without gaining enough from the freedom. It may swim with the fishes but it will not fly with the birds. And it must compete with books written with the freedom enjoyed by Rule 2.
And that’s why the Star Wars comics weren’t that interesting.
But what about the movies made from books? They actually work pretty well, in general, because they bring the high caliber imagination and storytelling of a successful novel to the power of the sound and visuals of the cinema. But to move to a new medium, they lose some of the freedom of their original medium, so those annoyingly picky readers like myself may resent or dislike the film version. But we still watch it. Well, I don’t, not any more. They’ve hurt me too many times. Lord of the Rings cut too deep.
Now I bring in the super hero movies, the supposed point of this post, yes!
The MCU people have managed to take the creativity and storytelling freedom of the comic books to film, while making the most of the cinema’s visual and auditory power. They’ve also had some good fortune, in that the new special effects technology has enabled them to bring the comic books to the screen with far less constraints in their storytelling freedom - Lessening the impact of Rule 3.
But there’s a secret advantage to making movies out of comic books as compared to regular novels, that makes all the difference: The comic books are serials, with lots and lots of storylines to choose from. The comic books sometimes retell the same story with minor changes many times. The readers can’t possibly even remember all the plots and alternate versions of each character, so they don’t care if the movies stick with the exact plot of whatever original comic storyline it was based on. So the MCU creators didn’t have to stick to some exact plot like the Harry Potter movies did - ugh, how they did. So the fans didn’t care.
Except for Origin Stories. Which the MCU people have wisely avoided, except for Iron Man - but I think that worked because they had Robert Downey Junior, and fun visuals. But that usually doesn’t work - I have come to believe that Origin Stories generally do not work in movies, because they take too long and pretty much depend on the actor - so if you don’t get someone really good, it’s unbearable and uninteresting.
Actually that’s rule 4: Origin Stories should be left to the Comic Book, unless you have RDJ to do it for you. MCU seems to know this. The DCCU people haven’t quite learned it. But they’ve still made a lot of money, because of Rule number 5: Anything about superheroes makes money now because we humans love to fantasize about being superheroes because we want to be unique and we have learned from the internet that we are not unique. We are living in gigantic high tech anthills and we are not biologically designed to be ants, we are chest beating monkeys who live in small tribes where everyone knows us and we are important to the group. We dream about joining a special tribe, rising above the ants somehow, having a secret quality, a superiority that transcends our everyday ant struggles and failures.
So those are some of the Hagenart Rules. There are more of course. I like making these rules. It feels like being an alpha gorilla with big hairy arms, telling the other monkeys about my favorite comics and hogging all the oranges.
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