The Crow, Batman & Michael Myers Face the Remake
New Model, Old Franchise
This is the second drawing of Eric, from The Crow, ever. As much as the first movie adaptation of the James O’Barr comic may mean to us, The Crow as a concept, and as a brand, as a story and story launchpad, comes from O’Barr, not anyone else.
The Dark Knight Returns was written, penciled, inked, colored, and published before Batman: Year One. We need to start thinking of revisitations of a character, fictional world, or a property not as erasure, but as commentary.
The Crow, the comic, predates The Crow, the motion picture, while the motion picture has a nostalgic, aesthetic, or emotional hold on an audience distinct and separate from a similar or comparable hold the comic has on different audiences.
Commercially, a publisher, a producer or distributor are always going to claim a current version. “This is the official continuity.” “This is the new continuity.” “This counts; that doesn’t.” They have to, for commercial purposes.
We are not commercial entities. We are people. So, while we might have a tendency to toe this line, we do not have to. Nor, to tow a line if the weight it is attached to has for us no value.
The Halloween of 2007 does not have to overtake 1978’s Halloween as more real or true. Or, vice versa.
The purist urge to declare earliest versions the truest or to prize director’s cuts, producer’s cuts, to declare script more true than finished movie, is itself a trap if you take it too far and get stuck.
We can look on all these things as commentary, as conversations and critique, not only of similar external matters, but of each other. The re-establishing of Halloween (1978) that Halloween (2007) and (2018) do are commentary and critique, they are conversant with the 1978 movie, and 2018, also, with 2007 and with all the other Halloween movies which it either erases or manipulates.
When a new Batman tv show or comic is released, with a clean new continuity establishing, rather than look on it as superseding or eradicating the previous versions, look on it as commenting on them or considering them. A Catwoman who is just a thief or suffering a brain injury as commentary on a Catwoman who is a protector or socioeconomic revenge mechanism, who is wearing black and hardly any cat-motif or who is wearing purple and green and big round cat ears. This is dialectic.
The Michael Myers of the Halloween movies of 1980, 1998, 2009, and 2018 are all, ostensibly, direct followups to the basic story and tone of the 1978 movie, with 2009 a sequel to the 2007 reboot/retelling, 1980 a sequel to 1978, 1998 and 2018 skipping over or repurposing much of the intermediate sequels to create a strong tether specifically to the 1978 original. The Myers are all, then, overlaps of an identity, of a constructed person, but that person is the bogeyman, and the bogeyman has no set form or specificity. The 1978 and 2009 films specifically reckon with Myers as a form of something that might be unhealthy wish fulfillment, Michael appearing in ‘78 after Laurie Strode’s virginal sexual anxiety and the song, Mr. Sandman, invokes a call for a perfect dream man.
The Batman in The Dark Knight is killed and resurrected, at the end, only for the same writer to bring him back in Year One, with a different body, different face, and different history. The Alfred/Bruce dynamic in Year One is not present in The Dark Knight, unless we put it in there. It had not yet been created.
Prior to Batman: Year One, Alfred came to Bruce Wayne as an adult, both of them adults, called upon by his dying father to sacrifice his entire life and go serve this American and his ward and dust their mantle. This is the Alfred who keels over dead, in The Dark Knight, when Wayne Manor is blown up and Bruce, too, has a mirroring heart failure.
The Alfred Pennyworth of Year One, who was always with Bruce and who helped raise him after his parents were murdered, is a new Alfred, a new kind of Alfred. This Alfred Pennyworth is a commentary on the old, a reflection on the socioeconomic standards of differing times and cultures and an expression of the maturation of politics and, yes, expression, itself, in superhero comics.
The Laurie of Halloween 2018 and Halloween H20: 20 Years Later are two looks at how a Laurie might have grown past the 1978 movie’s experiences. Steve Miner (whose career was somehow not ruined by Soul Man) and David Gordon Green craft, with their team, their collaborators, two different takes, and Jamie Lee Curtis is afforded a chance, in 2018’s, to critique her critique (of a critique, if we want to also consider the 1980 sequel).
Just as we would consider Curtis and Carpenter or Curtis and Miner to be in conversation about Halloween and Michael or Laurie, we have to think of Frank Miller and Klaus Janson or Janson and Miller and Lynn Varley as a conversation, a heterodyning, and for one work to be intermixing and clarifying with another.
To pull it over to another franchise, to take the casting of a taller actor for Jason Voorhees to mean than that Jason as always been taller makes an internal sense, but it is silly to insist that the casting director or the director or whoever truly believed Jason has always been taller. Especially in media, like comics or movies, in which the color of the sky or the air is dictated by conscious artistic choice and modifiable by the same.
Batman debuted on the cover of Detective Comics #27 with a yellow sky. Halloween (1978) used anamorphic barrel distortion. Almost all the blood and injury you believe you are seeing in any Halloween movie or Batman comic is by implication; much of the violence we experience most viscerally in film is sound. Foley violence allows us to look away even when we think we did not.
The makeup has been around the eyes of every movie Batman for over thirty years, but Matt Reeves’ version is the first one on which the makeup did not magically evaporate when the mask was pulled off. The eye makeup on Batman in a movie is the same as the yellow foreign sky or the CGI stars where America is too bright to have them in the sky at night anymore. The CGI stars are the height of Jason Voorhees, the condition of Michael Myers’ mask, the width of Batman’s shoulders, the style of Jason’s mask, the reason Michael Myers kills or cannot be killed.
You can love your Eric, your Michael, your Batman. You can love your Laurie Strode. But, there are more than even three protagonists who are resurrected and accompanied by a crow. There are more than three kinds of Michael Myers. More than three kinds of Batman. Even Jamie Lee Curtis reinvented Laurie at least three times, whether or not you consider her originating or creating the role.
Everything is an adjustment.
Learn to adjust.
