More Wolverine Debate
So now Matt Yglesias and Ta-Nehisi Coates have been going back and forth, though mostly agreeing, on the issue of origins in the new Wolverine movie. For Yglesias, we don’t need to know an origins story… the sketchy back-story already available was enough.
Wolverine isn’t a character whose origins we’re curious about. Wolverine is a character whose origin is that he has no memories and we don’t know where he’s from other than that at some point he was mixed up with a shady covert ops program that bonded adamantium to his skeleton. That’s the origin. That’s the character.
While for Ta-Nehisi Coates, we are curious about the back-story of Wolverine, but it ought to be left up to the imagination of the reader. The ‘negative space’ allows our imaginations to be exercised. This is Wolverine’s… allure, for lack of a better term. It’s then Hollywood’s inability to resist a sure blockbuster that causes them to make movies that pin down and restrict our imaginations.
This brings me back to the point about J.J. Abrams and Star Trek (see previous post). Do we need to have an origins story in order to care about character?
Now I’ll finally let on my own opinion in all this, and to pick up on some of the questions I asked in the last post, since I completely failed to do that last time. I disagree with Matt Yglesias. We are interested in Wolverine’s back-story. His seeming lack of a past is fascinating and makes us want to know about that past. On the other hand, I disagree with Ta-Nehisi as well. An origins story doesn’t necessarily delimit imagination and, I think, only does so if it tries to answer all our questions. This neat-and-tidiness is, I think, what caused the Wolverine movie to be such a flop. It unraveled its yarn to the point where we didn’t have any questions further questions. Nothing is left to tantalize us since our appetite has been completely satisfied.
But as J.J. Abrams (or his writers) ought to know, back-stories can be written that complicate rather than complete the plot, opening up new possibilities and new relationships.
Finally, I realized I should have prefaced the whole discussion last time with the fact that I wasn’t really a comic book nerd when I was a kid, so while I usually end up watching comic book-based movies, I don’t have the ‘original’ to compare it to. So there’s another origins story, when every critic is capable of mumbling, ‘The original was better…’
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