Tag Archives: threshold

Swamp Thing 3.6: The Endless Anger of Harry Ritter

Swamp Thing, ,

“Where the hell’s my man?” Harry Ritter hollers. “I thought he was back!” He’s right over there.

That’s how we’re introduced to project field supervisor Harry Ritter, who’s coming in hot. I don’t know if you know what a project field supervisor does, but whatever it is, it’s terrifying.

“What’s going on here?” He’s still freaking out. “Get those crates into the church! You men in the boat, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Get that damn thing outta sight! Lamebrains!” I thought this project was supposed to be hush-hush.

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Superman II 2.14: How Suite It Is

Superman II, , , ,

So here’s something that Superman II isn’t about: a honeymoon racket in Niagara Falls.

“I think this kind of thing should be exposed,” says the big blue boy scout in the big pink boudoir. “See, they get kids here just starting out in life, and then they take them for every cent they can get! That’s what Mr. White says.”

That may be true, for all I know. Maybe honeymoon hotels were the NFTs of the early 80s, just a big honeypot trap waiting for gullible marks to come along and get digitally swindled. I don’t recall reading any spicy exposés of the honeymoon hotel industry in the news back then, but maybe every reporter who was assigned to the story got distracted when they discovered that a close acquaintance had superpowers, so nobody ever wrote the story.

The only thing I know is that the plight of those swindleable kids has nothing to do with the story of Superman II. We don’t meet any young couples starting out in life except for Lois and Clark, and the only hotel employee that we see is the bellboy, who sneers his way through 75 seconds of screen time and then passes from our lives forever. In fact, twenty minutes from now, when Lois collects enough plot coupons to achieve enlightenment, she and Clark are going to fly off to their own private ice palace, and the Niagara honeymoon racket will continue, unimpeded.

So, the question is: what are we doing here?

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Superman 1.23: The Myth of the Monomyth

Superman: The Movie, , , ,

Around dawn, Clark wakes from a restless slumber and there’s a hum somewhere — some high, electric, pulsing hum coming from the general barn area, and it gets louder, the longer he thinks about it. Something’s out there, something that was buried a long time ago.

People should always dig up mystery boxes, it’s just good protocol. If somebody went to all the trouble to bury their secrets deep in the earth, then obviously it’s supposed to be dug up and exposed to the open air again. Nine times out of ten, something terrible happens, but you never know, you might be the lucky one.

It’s December 15th — just before Christmas, 1978 — and Clark is unwrapping his gift ten days early. Inside, he finds a little green lightsaber, which is literally the thing that every kid in America is hoping for this year.

This is the Call to Adventure, and if you’ve got your Joseph Campbell Hero with a Thousand Faces bingo card handy, you can cross that one off the list. This is the hero venturing forth from the world of common day, aka this wheat field, into a region of supernatural wonder, aka the North Pole, where he’ll get Supernatural Aid and/or Cross the First Threshold, and then go into the Belly of the Whale and set out on the Road of Trials, which I think is the Daily Planet typing test. Unless the Belly of the Whale was the space capsule, of course, in which case the Road of Trials was probably running faster than the train, and now it’s time to meet Woman as the Temptress. Which is probably Lois, but at the moment she’s only nine years old, so it might be somebody else.

Well, today’s the day that we get all this figured out. It’s time for us to ask whether Superman: The Movie follows Joseph Campbell’s model of the Hero’s Journey, as an example of the universal monomyth. The answer, obviously, is of course it fucking doesn’t.

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