Imaginary Worlds - Saving The Girl

Episode Date: November 19, 2014

What exactly is the role of the love interest in a superhero story? Is she just the emotional stakes for the hero? Can she ever be anything more? I talk with screenwriting guru Pilar Alessandra, and screenwriters Craig Fernandez and Carr D'Angelo. It turns out even male fans get frustrated when their favorite heroes can tackle villains head on but flee romantic relationships. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. I'm Eric Malinsky. It was December of 1988. I went to see Mississippi Burning, which is really not a good movie. But anyway, this trailer comes on beforehand. And, you know, this was unusual for the time because usually all those trailers started with, In a world where, you know, justice is a game or whatever. And it just had these images just

popping on screen with no explanation. It was a militarized Batmobile with like flames coming out of the back and shooting missiles from the side. I'm Batman. And Batman is wearing a black rubber suit. Wait till they get a load of me. And the Joker looks like really twisted and grotesque. me. And the Joker looks like really twisted and grotesque. And you know, by high school, I mean, I'd stopped reading comic books. So this very unsuper friends looking Batman was a total shock to me. I thought it was something that Tim Burton had come up with. Soon I learned that I'd missed this whole renaissance of comic books where the characters had gotten darker and more complex. So I went to Newbury Comics in Harvard Square, and I devoured every bit of information I could

until the movie came out, June 1989. But that wasn't just another night for either of us, was it? And so as I was sitting there watching the movie, this one thing seemed kind of off to me, this one character that just was taking up so much screen time, Vicki Vale. And she was on the comics, which is fine, but, I mean, Kim Basinger felt like she had wandered in

from a completely different movie. I just got to know, are we going to try to love each other? I didn't realize what I was seeing was the beginning of a formula. In superhero movies, there had to be a love interest. And the love interest, at some point, had to fall off a building or a bridge or something and scream before the hero swooped in and saved her. Or doesn't save her, and then that's his cross to bear.

Are you alright? Let's not do that again. And after 25 years of superhero movies, this pattern started to become kind of fascinating to me. Because the writers and directors didn't really seem to care about the love interests. I mean, they were always really badly underwritten. But why were they there? Why did they take up so much time? I put these questions to Carr D'Angelo, who used to be a development executive, and now he runs a comic book store in LA. I developed a lot of superhero and comic book

projects for Universal. And a writer named Bob Gale, who was a writer of Back to the Future among other things one of the things that he said about comic book movies and superhero movies is that the third act always has to have the choice where the hero who normally chooses other people's interests he normally puts other people's interests ahead of himself that's what makes him a hero in the first place where he's going to decide, am I going to help myself or am I going to help everyone else? Let die the woman you love. Do I save my girlfriend?

Suffer, my little children. Or do I save the populace at large? Now, shoot! I mean, this is an ancient formula. You know, think about the first movies ever. A girl is tied to the railroad tracks. The bad guy is twirling his mustache. And then the hero rides it on horseback and saves her in the nick of time. It all came from the same place. And it's, you know, the cowboy doesn't really kiss her until the end just to say, hey, I saved the town. But the love interest is supposed to kind of represent what the hero is allegedly fighting for. That's interesting. I thought about that. That's true.

And even in detective stories in film noirs, the girl sort of to some extent represents what's good about this town. And the detective is fighting what's bad about the town. Right. And one of the women may be a femme fatale who Right, right. Who lures the hero in, you know, which is more a Catwoman or Selina Kyle. You're the second man who killed me this week. I tried to save you from gravity. It seems like every woman you try to save ends up dead. Or deeply resentful.

Maybe you should retire. Women, traditionally, whether it's in literature or in film, if you let them get a little kooky, suddenly they were interesting. And Catwoman is slightly crazy, albeit in a really sexy way. But why does she have to go Looney Tunes to finally be free? That is Pilar Alessandra.

She also used to be a development executive in Hollywood. Now she teaches screenwriting, and she has clients all over the world. You know, in the screenwriting world, when you're dealing with something from scratch, what people like me are trying to talk to writers about is what's her story? She doesn't exist to support anybody she exists within her own

movie with her own agenda and her own strategy of achieving that agenda my 13 year old daughter was sort of railing about this today her big thing is these women know what they're in for if they're dating a superhero why don't they have some skills? Now, at this point, I actually asked Pilar if we could get her daughter to come in and join us on Skype. Eric, I'm so sorry. She won't come out of her trailer. That's Hollywood speak for she won't come out of her room. She's doing the, no, I can't talk. No, no, no. She's pretending she's shy. We tried.

Now, Pilar thinks that the love interests are actually getting more interesting because we are swamped with a glut of superhero movies. You know, like take Iron Man. First movie, Pepper Potts is basically the girl. But three movies later, she's running the company and she saves him in the end. I got you. I got you first. I mean, like, not just emotionally saves him, and she saves him in the end i got you i got you first i mean like

not just emotionally saves him like physically saves him the origin story they exist to be the emotional stakes for the main character but when you're coming up with a two or three or a four you can't ignore somebody on screen and just have her be the damsel in distress over and over again. It forces the writer and the producer to use this character in a more active way. But settling down and getting married is just not what superheroes do. And I'm not talking about the reasons the superheroes give, you know, my enemies would go after the people I love, or you can't count on me. I may be called away at a moment's notice to save the world.

It's the writers who always want to kill these relationships, especially in the comics where the characters don't age, or age backwards. Craig Fernandez is a screenwriter in L.A. Peter Parker will chase Mary Jane for ten years, and then when they eventually marry the characters, because the writers got old enough so that they understood that that's what came next, they felt that the character was destroyed. And then how do you get rid of her?

Once you marry her off, how do you get rid of her? Because now she's in the way. They wrote a story in which the devil, Peter Parker has to make a deal in which to save his aunt, his marriage with Mary Jane gets erased from history. DC Comics did the same thing. The writers were sitting around talking about how Lois Lane's marriage to Superman was boring. And so they decided to reboot the entire DC universe. And now they have Superman dating Wonder Woman,

which actually I think is turning out to be pretty interesting. But Craig says any writer who was bored with Lois Lane was lacking imagination. Lois Lane is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. She takes her life into her hands every day. And if you made her, you know, just covering the city beat, she would go up against corrupt politicians, mob bosses, but their inability to make that an interesting character. She's dating an alien, keeping it a secret within a newsroom.

What that would do to her brain, not being able to tell the greatest secret in the world. Do you think that she wouldn't sit down with every superhero, know everyone's story? Even Grant Morrison, when he was writing the comic book Animal Man, wrote a storyline that commented on how hard it is to have a love interest. They even play with the trope of his family being murdered.

And it has the character hunt down the writer of the comic book and say, why would you do that? Really? Yeah. There's a story where Animal Man goes to God, where essentially he goes and finds Grant Morrison, and Grant Morrison brings his family back at the end of the story and says, yeah.

Does God look like Grant Morrison? Yes. Ha! It's interesting. There's another interesting theory out there as to why superheroes can't commit. And the first time I ever came across this idea, I was watching the movie Batman Mask of Phantasm, which I know if you don't know the movie, that sounds like a really silly title, but it's actually a really good animated film.

So Bruce Wayne has fallen in love with a woman named Andrea. She can hold her own. She has skills, as Pilar's daughter would say. Got a few moves of my own. Miss Hovey's self-defense class for girls. And she really understands him. She has a dark past. And at one point, he's standing in front of his parents' grave. And he admits that being in a happy relationship is killing his need to be Batman. It just doesn't hurt so bad anymore. I know I made a promise. But I didn't see this coming. I didn't count on being happy.

Please, tell me that it's okay. Maybe they already have. Maybe they sent me. If Bruce is always fighting on behalf of his parents, his dead parents, then he's always their child. Getting married would be a way of growing up, psychologically replacing them. But running around in a costume and punching bad guys, that's just not what grown-ups do. But that's what these characters are designed to do. Comic books are written for little boys. So, you know, all the characters were created with the premise that they're going to read them from 8 to 12.

And then at 12, they're going to get interested in girls and sports and stop reading comics. You know, you're looking up to Clark Kent, and then you are Jimmy Olsen, and then you're Clark Kent, and then one day you're Perry White, and you go, oh, fuck. What happened? Because when you're Jimmy Olsen, you should stop reading comics and get a job. But no, now you're Perry White, and you're still reading the same stories. I mean, that's the strange thing, too, is that we are this first generation that for

some reason never outgrew comics. I mean, it's kind of weird. Every generation did and then we just didn't. Well, there are a couple things that are kind of weird about it. If you're reading in the 70s, it's the first time you get second generation comic book readers that are now writing them. So the story started bumping up. And then you got people like Frank Miller and Alan Moore that started deconstructing like 79, 80, 81. And then you started getting all the alternative stuff. So now we're a generation that saw literature. We saw what the medium could do. You know, at a very early age, we kept looking for the comic books

to achieve that. And you get these great moments, these great runs of characters where they get it. And then a new writer comes on, kills off characters, goes in a completely different direction. Yeah, you just get perfect moments.

That's all you can hope for with any comic book character. You want to hear my perfect moment? It was the 1978 Superman film. And it's a moment I don't think I really appreciated until I watched the film again as an adult. So Margot Kidder as Lois Lane has just met Superman by falling off a building, of course, and screaming until he catches her. But then he agrees to be interviewed for the Daily Planet. planet. I never lie. Um, uh... Oh, just how fast you fly, by the way. Oh, no, not really. No, never actually, uh...

The ad campaign for that film was, You'll Believe a Man Can Fly. And the funny thing is, at this point in the movie, Lois has accepted that a man can fly. What she can't is, at this point in the movie, Lois has accepted that a man can fly. What she can't believe is that a man in 1978 still has faith in Congress. And what I love about that moment is it has nothing to do with superheroes, but it has everything to do with her character. And of course, as a kid, I didn't believe that Christopher Reeve was flying. But in that moment, I believed these characters were feeling something,

something that was real and scary and exciting, which made me care about them. And that's the only special effect that really matters. So that was going to be it for this week's episode, but there's actually been some late-breaking news in the comic book world. Both DC and Marvel are planning these big crossover comic book events for the summer, and they've been releasing images sort of as a teaser. One of the first images that Marvel released has Peter Parker,

and he's in his Spider-Man uniform, and he's got the mask off, and he's next to Mary Jane. And there's this little redhead girl climbing on his shoulders, and it's their daughter. And then a week later, DC released images for their big crossover event, and one of them has Superman kissing a pregnant Lois Lane. And so there's been all this debate among the fans. Is this going to be the new normal? I mean, is this going to be in canon? Or is it just a glimpse into an alternate universe that will very quickly disappear? Either way, I'm pretty happy.

So that actually is it for this week's show. Thank you so much for listening. Special thanks to Jonathan Mitchell, AIR, the Association of Independence and Radio, Pilar Alessandra, Craig Fernandez, and Cara D'Angelo. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweeted E. Malinsky. Leave a comment in iTunes, which would be great.

And I haven't mentioned this so far, but on my website, for each episode, I do a different iPhone drawing, because I sketch people on the subways with my iPhone. And this week, I drew Margot Kidder. So you can check that out at imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply.