Origins: Do we need to know? (And how)
I just saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which I’d heard from my good friend out in LA was a load of rubbish and not worth the price of admission. But I went anyways with a group of friends and quite enjoyed it. While not a great film, it was certainly entertaining. It got me to wondering about origins films. The next Star Trek movie is about the origins of Captain Kirk and takes place ‘back when the crew of the Enterprise was hot’. A recent article caught my eye about how J.J. Abrams is being put in charge of this Star Trek in order to revive the franchise despite the fact that he wasn’t really a fan in his youth.
“It always presumed you cared about this group of characters,” he said — “The Twilight Zone” was inviting, offering a self-contained origin story in each episode.
So J.J. Abrams of “Lost” and “Alias” fame (two shows, I might add, that are certainly not self-contained in each episode but require insane amounts of back-story to watch) will be doing some origin-ing for Star Trek. But is finding origins, uncovering them, and pinning them down in the obviousness of screened representation really a good idea?
I had a great discussion over lunch about this with a friend who argued that it was this sorting out of loose ends that made Wolverine so banal and, in the end, deflating for the whole X-Men series. He cited the joker in Batman: The Dark Knight who makes up a different reason for his psychosis on several occasions, which only serves to deepen our horror and fascination with him. It seems to me, however, that Wolverine is a different case entirely… he is always dark and brooding and sometimes, in X-3 at least which I’ve seen recently, it’s all too obvious why (Hale Berry/Storm: “You’re in love with her, Logan”.)
There’s some sort of obsession going on with writing back-stories, perhaps in part from a dearth of fresh ideas, but perhaps also because we’ve developed a sort of Freudian impulse to psychologize and to explain past actions with deep and traumatizing experiences in the past (SPOILER ALERT: such as losing a loved one, being privy to the enslavement of mutants, and getting shot in the head with an adamantium bullet and thus in a sort of Phineas Gage way multiplied by 100, losing all memories and becoming even more unstable and brooding).
So, does Wolverine’s past being portrayed in a movie deflate our enhance our understanding and enjoyment of later movies? Does his character become less compelling for having been ‘explained’ and thus having been exhausted of tantalizing possibilities? And does this aspect of the movie have anything to do with the general ennui with which its been received so far? There’s always the possibility that origins stories in and of themselves don’t need to tie up all the loose ends as this one did and can simply be done better. We’ll have to wait for the new Star Trek for a proper comparison, I suppose, and to see what Abrams does to the backstory of Captain Kirk, to Spock, and to the rest of the gang.
My lunch-time conversation also detoured into the modern-versus-postmodern heroes. But that will have to wait for another post.
UPDATE: There was a bit of a tech glitch when I published this post and some gibberish from a firefox application ended up attached to the end of the post. My apologies. It has been deleted.
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