Blockbuster films don’t have to be watered-down hero fare to succeed at the box office. The compelling design and archetypal simplicity of our comic-book heroes are gold mines for stories that blend pop culture symbolism with moral force and aesthetic vision. By treating our pop culture icons as myths, much like the Greek poets treated their gods, we open the door for mega-blockbusters that speak to the most vital questions of our time.
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Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Marvel’s most recent $200M operation, falls into the same trap as so many blockbuster comic-book movies burdened with the need to appeal to as many demographics as possible. It’s fun and flashy, but it squanders its symbols. And that’s a shame: The multiverse conceit is fertile ground for a story that speaks to modern anxiety – the dizzying freedom of being able to lead any one of thousands of possible lives, combined with the tragic realization that none of these lives holds any cosmic significance. But Dr. Strange missed this thematic opportunity, instead using the multiverse for the same dimension-hopping superhero romp we’ve seen countless times.
Blockbuster films don’t have to be watered-down hero fare to succeed at the box office. The compelling design and archetypal simplicity of our comic-book heroes are gold mines for stories that blend pop culture symbolism with moral force and aesthetic vision. By treating our pop culture icons as myths, much like the Greek poets treated their gods, we open the door for mega-blockbusters that speak to the most vital questions of our time.
Take Batman. He’s a rich man who dresses like a bat and runs around a grimy Art Deco cityscape fighting crime. Sometimes he’s joined by his adopted son, an orphaned gymnast in green underwear. His worst enemy is a clown.
While this doesn’t sound like something that audiences would keep coming back to, much less a strong draw for ambitious filmmakers, the symbolic world of the caped crusader provides filmmakers a striking set of visual shortcuts to themes such as political corruption, childhood trauma, and self-mastery. The most successful of these adaptations have proven that there is something of substance behind the bat-shaped boomerangs and evil clowns – or at least that there can be, if these symbols are put to good use.
This year’s The Batman uses the Dark Knight’s symbols to tell a story of abandonment, corruption, revenge, and the razor-thin line that separates a man who asserts his morals from the degenerates he puts behind bars. Could director Matt Reeves tell such a story without Batman? Sure, but that movie would forfeit the opportunity to employ a set of symbols that audiences respond to on an archetypal level – and that movie certainly wouldn’t have taken in $771M worldwide.
Batman’s symbols are better understood than most comic book icons, and the character has benefited from retellings that adjust his symbols to speak to different moral concerns: Christopher Nolan explores the limits of law and vigilantism and gives us a Christlike Batman who sacrifices himself for the sins of his city; Matt Reeves presents an obsessed, depressive Batman who struggles to draw a line between good and evil in a corrupted world; and so on.
Meanwhile, there have been three iterations of Spider-Man in the last two decades, all of which have told the same story and left many of its motifs in the dark.
One example of a pop culture reiteration done well can be found at the Japanese box office, whose highest-grossing film of 2021 was the final installment of Hideaki Anno’s Evangelion series, Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time. This series, along with its preceding seasons, proves that pop culture success need not water down a franchise. On the contrary, it can provide new frontiers for stories that take advantage of their symbols and benefit from successive retellings.
New Age Gospel
When it debuted in 1995, Neon Genesis Evangelion was an immediate hit. With a unique visual style, compelling character design, and a storyline more complex and intimate than what the genre previously had to offer, Evangelion just about single-handedly changed the popular perception of anime.
One of the most powerful elements of the anime is creator Hideaki Anno’s masterful use of symbolism. He brings a pastiche of genre symbols and conventions to the visual language of Evangelion, banking on the audience’s familiarity of the genre to play with – and sometimes subvert – its tropes.
Evangelion quickly sheds its genre mold, however. What initially presents itself as a sci-fi fighting anime turns increasingly toward the interior lives of its characters as it mixes in a swath of religious symbols: Deaths are marked by cross-shaped explosions; cryptic references are made to Adam, Lilith, and the Dead Sea Scrolls; characters use machines called “Evangelions” to prevent the invading “Angels” from triggering the apocalypse, and so on.
This mix of Christian, Jewish, Kabbalah, Shinto, and genre symbols might sound like a chaotic mess, but it manages to cohere into something that is more than the sum of its parts: a visual language unique to Evangelion. The religious symbols have some connection to their original referents, yes, but Evangelion’s crosses, angels, and the like take on new meanings that have less to do with religious transcendence and more to do with a postmodern story of loneliness, anxiety, and the search for identity.
Twenty years after its presumed ending, Anno returned to the franchise with the Rebuild series, a four-film retelling of Evangelion. While the first film recapitulates Evangelion’s television run with updated animation and minor changes, the rug is quickly pulled out from under our feet as these minor changes snowball into a radically different storyline. It is a curious procedure: Anno treats what he has created as an outsider, using his own creation as a mythos and putting old symbols to new use.
Here is an example. In the original series’ infamous elevator scene, the passive, anhedonic character Ayanami allows herself to be slapped by the indignant, prideful Asuka. In the Rebuild version of this scene, however, Ayanami is inspired by a blossoming relationship with Shinji, the films’ protagonist, that was absent in the original. When Asuka attacks this time, Ayanami has the will to defend herself.
It’s a quiet moment, and its full effect is only possible because audiences are familiar with the original scene. It’s also a fresh take on Evangelion’s broader meditation on human freedom and the assertion of one’s self, as such a small change creates a world of difference in a beloved character.
Moments like these are case studies in a form of storytelling that is only possible for franchises that have attained the almost mythical status of Evangelion in Japan or Star Wars in the US. Such franchises have room to play with their symbols because they can count on a certain level of familiarity on the part of the audience. While it is certainly possible that new symbolic worlds could be created and reach such heights of pop culture significance, moments like this show the artistic potential inherent in pre-established symbols.
When Camille Paglia wrote that the greatest artwork of the last 30 years is Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, she wasn’t (entirely) joking. Much like mythology gave the ancient Greek poets a wealth of symbols with which to exercise their artistry, pop art has given us laser swords, men in capes, and giant robots. Movies like Star Wars don’t conjure their success out of thin air – they contain in their visual languages something with which audiences deeply resonate. I suspect that the great pieces of pop art to come will embrace such symbols and work through them.
The watering-down of pop culture productions is not inevitable. As Anno did with his own artwork, American filmmakers should ask themselves what the symbolic worlds of their pop culture icons can mean, and put their symbols to good use. The best Batman adaptations, at the very least, show that the American market has an appetite for such projects.
The unfortunate fact may be that studios have little to no financial incentive to make anything other than unchallenging crowd-pleasers. But they have no disincentive to do so – challenging pop art is eminently possible, and audiences deserve better.
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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.
