The Spirit

Oy. In retrospect this was probably the wrong movie to be the sixth one I'd sat through during a thirty-two hour stretch. My mind grows numb just trying to write about ut. That probably would have happened anyway, no matter when I saw this movie, but it makes it extra hard.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way: the animation of the The Spirit is superb. If you like this type of eye candy, or are a fan of animation in general, then seeing this movie may well be worth your while. Go for it.

But twenty minutes into it, I felt a glaze over my eyes that made it hard to digest it all. Why the hell don't I care about these characters?

Here are some possibilities: it's the same retread story about the (phony) problem of "crime run wild on the streets" and a shadowy hero who fights it because the cops can't, and in which the hero and the villain are "twin" manifestations of each other (The Dark Knight, Max Payne, Punisher: War Zone). This particular storyline is like the Spirit himself: you just can't kill the son-of-a-bitch. The best we can hope for is to cut up the pieces and mail them far away from each other.

The movie wasn't so much a story, as the story of a story. To wit: "one upon a time there a movie plot. The movie plot had a superhero and supervillain. You get the idea, because you've seen this before, so I don't need to explain much further. The hero of the story was very, very noble and good. The villain of the story was angry and bad. They fought each other fiercely and eventually, at the end of the movie plot, the hero triumphed. The end (of the story of the story)."

But I tried, dammit, giving it my all to dig up a bit of salvation from this movie that didn't depend on visual effects. I guess I was just too tapped out. Moreover, I just couldn't help cracking up every time the Spirit launched into a soliloquy about "his city," each one of which seemed like a parody of the lyrics of "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The hollow fragmentation of the story and the characters is perhaps the real message of this movie. Maybe that's what it was really about---how degraded we are in 2008, not in a real street-level crime sense, but in a paucity-of-narrative sense. The hero was created by the villain just for amusement. Even the archvillain's henchmen are literally just clones, comic and moronic carbon copies who blithely follow robotic killing instructions, and who differ from each other only by the name on their t-shirts.

We have no real stories left, and thus we are dead in our souls like the hero, forcibly resurrected over and over against our will to watch the same meaningless plots over and over again. The only color in our world comes from our atrocious villains who have no motivation other the naked psychopathy, which itself is the last remaining thing we can understand as cultural coin.

In that sense, the best line of the movie comes from the archvillain, Samuel L. Jackson's Octopus (isn't that name ripped off from Spiderman?). Clad in an outrageous Nazi SS uniform, he tortures the unkillable hero. As he does so, he blurts out his motivation-of-the-moment: "I'm going to take over the world...and then everything WILL FINALLY MAKE SENSE!"

Indeed. I finally got it. And with that, I stumbled out of the theater, as if dug up from a grave, and drove my trusty black car into the night. My Christmas gift card was finally used up, and in doing so I'd seen all but one of the new releases that week. Three for three, two days in a row. My completely arbitrary victory was complete.