Racoons with Guns

So there’s been a bit of talk about this, and how it heralds the End of Grimdark (rumble), a Return to Core Values (drumroll), some sort of genre re-set maybe, at least within the context of superhero movies.  I don’t see it myself – but then I haven’t seen it and I don’t suppose I will for quite some time (my son’s only 3, so a little young yet for that avalanche of self-righteous gun violence and fisticuffs that passes for PG entertainment in Hollywood these days).  So I’m not about to start passing judgement on either the film itself or the contention that it represents some kind of paradigm shift within genre.

But.

I can’t help noticing that the much vaunted opening take of 94 million dollars ranks quite a long way down this list, and that the last Dark Knight movie, floating right there in the top five, took close to twice that amount.  Presumably all the people who paid to see that one haven’t undergone a sudden revulsion against the Gotham Gloom they were so eager to partake of two years back, and though many of them probably went quite cheerfully to see the Racoon with a Machine Gun this month, they would presumably also hurry just as cheerfully back for another instalment of the Grim Dark Knight if anyone’s prepared to serve one up.  And I don’t see anybody crying out for a return to the Adam West days on that particular  franchise.  So there’s that.

But beyond that, I have to ask – what is all this desperate longing for an End to the mythical Grimdark?  What’s with the whinging about collateral damage in Man of Steel?   I mean, who are these people?  What parameters are they using?  Have they really been going to cinemas to sit through superhero movie after superhero movie over the last ten years with gritted teeth because those movies are just not Shiny Happy enough, just not Black and White enough in moral tone?  Seriously?  Did they just……fall asleep or something, and miss sixty years’ worth of cultural growth and diversification?  Have they also been sitting at home with the TV, stomaching HBO and Nordic Noir with a bitter grimace, dreaming wistfully of a return to the glory days of TJ Hooker and The A Team?  Is this a constituency so totally bombproof resistant to cultural shift that they want to go back to a fictionscape dreamed up in the middle of the last century, back when women and coloured folks still knew their place, the cop on the beat was a lovely cuddly (white) guy, war was a glorious endeavour undertaken against dastardly foreign foes, and real men walked like John Wayne?  Do they really feel so threatened?

Look, this mythical Grimdark overlordship just doesn’t exist, it never has.  Want Shiny Happy Superhero movies?  You got ‘em.  Sam Raimi’s Spiderman trilogy straddles the previous decade, box-office triumphant, and the grimdarkest thing that happens in those movies is Tobey McGuire going briefly rogue, which in the end added up to what?  Wearing a bit of black, not showing up to work on time and leching at women in the street.  Oooh, shudder.  What else?  Well, the much reviled moral landscape of 2007′s KickAss actually features the squeakiest clean gang of heroes you could imagine going up against cackling evil Mafia bad guys (oh, but Hit Girl swears a lot and she’s a girl – Hey. Deal with it.)  Even Chris Nolan’s Batman never really lacks for clear moral justification, his antagonists are all chips off the old Supervillain block, and he gets a straight up Happy Ending to round the trilogy out.  And is someone really going to try to tell me that the Iron Man movies are dark?

Even in the arena of fantasy literature, where Grimdark has perhaps kindled to life as an actual thing, a conscious sub-genre, it’s still never been the dominant form.  Anyone recall the name Paolini?  The Inheritance Cycle?  That sucker’s sold over 33 million copies since 2002.  And it’s not exactly grimdark in its thematic assumptions.  Lord of the Rings hasn’t gone anywhere either, it still shifts copies by the tonne, and so do books that are its direct thematic heirs.  Sure, George R R Martin and Joe Abercrombie sell, but so too do Terry Brooks and Trudi Canavan. The only thing that’s really happened in fantasy is a diversification of form – something for everybody, a spectrum of story-telling reflecting a spectrum of demand.  And in the shifting matrix of that marketplace, what still sells more than anything else – just go back to that opening weekend list – is straight up Good guys vs Bad Guys with the Good triumphant and a Happy Ending every time.

So where’s the beef?  Why do people get so bent out of shape about this minor thing called – for want of a better, more nuanced, more fucking grown up descriptor – Grimdark.  Why so desperate for its limited influence to be over?

It seems to me that for a certain sub-section of genre consumers, it’s not enough that Grimdark exists as a limited aspect of the genre landscape and that there’s plenty of other, brighter and cheerier stuff to consume elsewhere.  Grimdark is like the latte-sipping elites so railed against by Republican Right pundits in the US a few years back – it’s a construct that offends by its very existence.  Never mind that childlike story-telling completely dominates genre cinema.  Never mind that such grimdarkness as has actually managed to creep into superhero movies is at most a veneer on a largely unchanged black and white moral base.  No, the mere intimation that there might be more to a heroic narrative than the heroes are the Good Guys, the villains are Bad Guys and the heroes should Win a rousing Victory appears to be in itself such an offensive contention that it arouses a kind of defensive knee-jerk hysteria just by surfacing.  Get that Grimdark out of my sight!  How dare you imply a moral relativity in my fictionscape!  There’s no place for that shit in this town.  I want capital E escapism, dammit, and so should every other decent person on the planet!

Guess some of us just aren’t decent.

In fact, some of us wish SF movie-making could manage to import a sensibility that looks a bit more like this.

Now there’s a movie I’ll be queuing to see.

Grimdark ain’t over, it’s just hanging out elsewhere under its real name.  Look for the mailbox labelled Nuanced Adult Thriller.