Darker and Edgier, Ad Inifinitum
Hollywood’s new obsession is becoming tedious
Take a glance at these stories about upcoming blockbusters and you might notice a pattern: “Joss Whedon Reveals That ‘Avengers 2’ Will Be Much Darker Than The First Movie.” (Entertainment Wise) “Captain America Will Be ‘Darker, Edgier’, Co-Director Says.” (Spinoff Online) “Man of Steel To Be Edgy Like The Dark Knight Rises.” (Fandango) Hollywood has a new obsession: the “darker and edgier” movie. In an age of reboots, remakes and rehashes, American studios are scrambling for new ways to cash in on old ideas, and making a familiar property darker and grittier has become the most popular option.
It all began with Batman. In 1989, Tim Burton brought Batman to the big screen as a Gothic fantasy, with Michael Keaton’s tortured, melancholy anti-hero stalking the streets of a dystopian Gotham City. Bombastic action sequences and a peppy pop score by Prince did nothing to disguise the gloom. The film’s sequel, Batman Returns, was even darker and more twisted—Michelle Pfeiffer’s morally-compromised, PVC-clad Catwoman was its main attraction—and audiences adored it. Still, all the murky visuals and psychological torment alarmed Warner Bros. executives eager for family-friendly blockbusters and they jettisoned Burton in favor of Joel Schumacher. The series took an abrupt turn into camp that revived the cartoonish excesses of the 1960s Adam West television show. Fans balked at a Caped Crusader who had nipples on his suit and carried a customized bat credit card: Batman & Robin bombed at the box office. The franchise languished for nearly a decade before Christopher Nolan resurrected it in 2005 with Batman Begins, the first entry in his Dark Knight Saga. Nolan’s vision of Gotham was just as bleak as Burton’s, but with an added, disquieting, layer of realism. (In Batman, the Joker invents a toxin that leaves victims ghastly white, with fixed grins; in The Dark Knight, he simply carves a rictus into their faces and covers them in white paint.) Speaking to a crowd at the Film Society of Lincoln Center last year, Nolan acknowledged the grim realism of his movies and cited a surprising source: the James Bond films of the 1960s. “They introduced the threat of nuclear terrorism very specifically for the first time in movies,” he said. “If you look at Thunderball, it’s actually pretty edgy.” The darkness in the Dark Knight Saga signified authenticity:
I felt a responsibility as a filmmaker to create first and foremost an entertainment, something that people could feel a distance from and enjoy, but I also felt a responsibility, even as an entertainer, to be honest about my fears.
Audiences appreciated Nolan’s honesty: The Dark Knight Rises earned more than $1 billion worldwide.
In its wake, seemingly every superhero or science-fiction sequel and reboot arrives pre-steeped in shadows. The Amazing Spider-Man was marketed as an edgier take on New York’s favorite web-slinger. No matter that Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man is barely a decade old: it’s lighter and brighter and custom demands it must be out of date. Marvel has also announced that upcoming sequels Iron Man 3 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier will be grittier than their predecessors, while Thor’s next excursion will be to The Dark World. The new Star Trek film is simply subtitled Into Darkness. What, if anything, the darkness contributes to these storylines, seems beside the point.
The “darker and edgier” phenomenon has also surfaced in fairytale and fantasy films, where it is often paired with “girl power” and an insistence on giving girls more assertive heroines. Sporting severed heads and blasted heaths, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland replaced Lewis Carroll’s whimsical dream world with a bleak Underland. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton believed Alice required an edgy makeover to match and admitted in a New York Times interview to “thinking more in terms of an action-adventure film with a female protagonist” than of Carroll’s proper young lady:
I do feel it’s really important to depict strong-willed, empowered women, because women and girls need role models, which is what art and characters are. Girls who are empowered have an opportunity to make their own choices, difficult choices, and set out on their own road.
Well, quite. But Woolverton’s Alice, brandishing a sword with which to slay the Jabberwocky, has so little to do with Carroll’s Alice—a bored, but clever little girl—that she might as well not be Alice at all. The feminist reworking was merely a limp excuse for Disney to rehash a story it has already told once before. Snow White and the Huntsman tried a similar trick with Grimm’s fairy tales’ fairest damsel in distress: Kristen Stewart’s Snow White doesn’t cook or clean; she wears armor and leads an army to overthrow her wicked stepmother.
But just why are all these films “darker and edgier”? Because it’s reassuring. We are living in the age of the War on Terror: where euphemisms like “extraordinary rendition” have become common knowledge, people willingly subject themselves to full-body scans at airports and no one ever feels completely safe. When we need to escape, we do what we have always done—we go to the movies. In the 1940s, Americans made it through World War II by singing along to sunny MGM musicals. In the noughties and new teens, they cope by watching their worst fears being enacted on-screen. And any film that doesn’t acknowledge our troubling times automatically appears out-of-date. In The Dark Knight Rises, Gotham is cut off from the rest of the world and left at the mercy of a madman, but Batman saves the day. Terrorism is given a face (Bane), recognized as a threat and defeated—the basic desire for good to triumph over evil is what makes viewers crave darker-and-edgier movies.
Yet are endlessly recycled plots really what audiences want? Apparently, yes, if the comparative receptions of Oz the Great and Powerful and Jack the Giant Slayer are anything to go by. Despite being panned by critics, Alice in Wonderland was a great commercial success and Disney lost no time in reimagining another fantasy world—this time, Oz. The studio followed the formula with slavish precision, up to and including a respected director with a penchant for dark tales (Sam Raimi). Oz is officially a prequel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but really trades on viewers’ familiarity with the classic MGM film, The Wizard of Oz. According to Forbes, the new film’s approach was both predictable and bankable:
The most common unmade Oz is the Lord of the Rings interpretation that reimagines the story as a dark, gritty fantasy war saga. There can be no arguing that [Sam] Raimi did something right by mixing elements of homage to the 1939 MGM film with his own slightly darker and more mischievous sensibilities
James Franco’s Wizard is a cynical conman, inveterate womanizer, and naturally, our protagonist. Characters are manipulated and corrupted almost by rote, simply to confirm that this Oz is indeed darker than the numerous other versions that have gone before it. By contrast, the film’s main box-office rival, Jack the Giant Slayer, made full use of the inevitable magic beans and beanstalks, yet remained refreshingly original. It also flopped at the box office. Despite a good cast and special effects that were on a par with Oz, Jack just wasn’t as recognizable to the majority of audiences as Oz and it failed. Studio executives can be forgiven for surmising that the more derivative a film is, the more successful it will be, as long as it is darker-and-edgier.
Although reinvention is the key to sustaining many a long-running franchise—just ask James Bond—going “darker and edgier” has run its course. Once an imaginative means of resuscitating old ideas, the device is now threadbare from overuse. Hollywood ought to accept this and move on: some of its audience has begun to notice.
