Yahoo News: 'Exorcist' director slams trend for comic book stories
Perhaps Friedkin wants more intellectual movies made, and more people to appreciate them. But seriously, I fail to see how his movie Killer Joe, the story of "a drug dealer who hires a cop moonlighting as an assassin to murder his mother to collect on an insurance policy that will pay off his debts, and sells his sister as a sexual retainer" as "adult." Okay, I'll grant that it is "adult" in the same sense that pornographic films are
euphemistically called "adult" yet at their core are nothing more than adolescent fantasies. Friedkin then justifies himself by saying that he is drawn to the story because "it is about 'innocence, victimhood, vengeance and tenderness.'" I see this theme treated well in Spider-Man's origin and in the early Punisher stories.
The article further says, "The violence in the film is purposeful. 'There's violence throughout society,' [Friedkin] noted, adding: 'There's a thin line between good and evil and there is the possibility of evil in all of us.'" This is a mature concept? A three-year-old being his selfish, aggressive and violent self can aptly demonstrate this.
Friedkin's movie may be "adult" but it is far from "mature."
But I'll grant Friedkin this, he is consistent with what he says. The article relates,
Hirsch recalled, during filming "the makeup girl would be dabbing me with blood with a paintbrush. Friedkin would come up and go, 'No! No! No!' and grab her bucket of blood and douse me in the face with it and then go get another bucket of blood.
"I was just soaking with blood."
"There's an intensity (in his directing). He can be very volcanic. He's a live wire. He enjoys extremes," Hirsch said of Friedkin, recalling a gun being shot on set once "to shake up an actor."
"They don't call it shooting (scenes) for nothing," he quipped.
Personally, what makes comic-book-themed movies appealing is that their iconic characters "at their core, represent selfless sacrifice for the greater good," as comic-book writer Greg Rucka puts it. In this age where -- on the streets and in the boardrooms -- good and evil are blurred, people need something to believe in if only to keep themselves from committing suicide in despair. I honestly believe that this recent appeal of comic-book-themed movies are a manifestation not of the audiences being infantilized as Friedkin asserts, but of rising to maturity, rising to see beyond the depressing state of what we are to what we can be -- perhaps even to what we were meant to be by Almighty God. We are beginning to see that, while we do live in an evil world filled with evil people, this is not how it should be. We are beginning to see a transcendent good from amidst the decay of our dreary lives. Indeed, as humans made in the image of God, we have a sense of what is right and what is wrong, no matter how much we try to assert and explain that it's all relative. The fact that some things offend us show we have this sense. And the fact that we fight against what offends us show we long for an absolute state of good.
I echo Greg Rucka's sentiments on this issue:
for the contingent out there who sneer at heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman and Captain America, those icons who still, at their core, represent selfless sacrifice for the greater good, and who justify their contempt by saying, oh, it’s so unrealistic, no one would ever be so noble … grow up. Seriously. Cynicism is not maturity, do not mistake the one for the other. If you truly cannot accept a story where someone does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, that says far more about who you are than these characters.
Amen. William Friedkin needs to do some growing up. Maybe reading a few comic-books would help.
Note: Greg Rucka quotes are from: http://www.ineffableaether.com/2011/08/24/light-in-the-dark/
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