The Talking Picture, Ep. 23: Whatever Happened to DC Movies?

On Planting and Paying Off in The Avengers

A lot of making your story structure feel complete and crystalline is the successful implementation of plant-and-payoff. There are some writers like James Cameron, Joss Whedon, and Christopher Nolan who are very good at this plant-and-payoff pattern. Then there are the other writers and stories - and let's just use the example of the Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland, which is just riddled with instances where it tries to manufacture plant and pay off by just repeating more or less random bits of dialogue from earlier and hoping that it will have acquired some sort of significance in the interim. 

But as far as this goes, one of the things about this that people often get wrong is you have to set it up properly. There was a Cinema Sins video on The Avengers that didn't get this. 

Cinema Sins is a video series that consistently manages to list every problem that doesn't matter, every little niggle that does not actually affect the dramatic impact of the movie. In this case, for some reason, it pointed out that Captain America had made good on a bet that he had never explicitly agreed to, and when it said that I wanted to rend my hair from my head, because that's the f***ing point you moron. Of course they didn't agree on it because that would be telegraphing the plant, that would have told the audience that this is going to get paid off at some point, leaving us counting the seconds until the payoff finally arrives. 

That was actually one of the best examples of plant-and-payoff in the movie, because it establishes the plant in such a way that when it does get paid off, everyone remembers the setup but at the time no one would have known if and how that first line might come up again.That is more or less an ideal execution of plant-and-payoff. The setup is a good and quippy enough line that it stands on its own, but at the same time memorable enough that when we see the callback some half hour later, we all get it.

The other extreme, as I mentioned, is Alice in Wonderland - the Tim Burton version - which tries to turn Why is a Raven Like a Writing Desk into a plant-and-payoff, which doesn't work because the phrase has no relevance to story, theme, or character. Lewis Carroll originally included it precisely because it was a non sequitur. The movie does this a lot, and it just doesn't work because they are basically just picking out random lines of dialogue and hoping that the audience will find something of staggering brilliance in the phrase that was not immediately apparent the first time. But whatever.

I admit you have to walk a bit of a tightrope to make this work, not being so overt that the audience makes you immediately, but not using just any old line either. The latter is important not only because getting it wrong devalues any future use of the technique elsewhere in the film, but more significantly because at its best, plant-and-payoff speaks to some larger theme or arc in the film. 

The Captain America plant-and-payoff reinforces Cap's character as scrupulously honorable, but also serves to underline the grandeur of the spectacle by showing us that Captain America is as amazed by the reveal of the helicarrier as we are. In James Cameron's Avatar, we are very clumsily invited to marvel at the scenery. Michelle Rodriguez says "You should see your faces" as the cast stare dumbly at a green screen. The Cap example is all the more resonant for its silence. All the talking was done in the plant, so the payoff doesn't need dialogue. Gold star.

On Superheroes

I have heard a variety of arguments to the effect that this new crop of superhero movies are all the same. Obviously there are similarities in tone between, say, Spider-man and the X-men, or between Spider-man and Iron man, or between X-men and the Avengers, or between Thor and Green Lantern. There is undeniably some truth to this, and your toleration for those common elements is going to vary depending on how much you just like the genre. But it’s also dangerous to generalize - after all, there’s very little connecting “The Dark Knight” and “The Avengers” aside from some superficial similarities between Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark.

But a closer examination of even those two characters reveal that sure, they’re both billionaires, but their relationship with their respective moonlight roles reveals that equating the two is like saying the lead characters of Lincoln and There Will Be Blood are the same because they both have prominent facial hair and are played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Iron Man doesn’t have a dual identity - he is just Tony Stark, all the suit does is make him harder to punch when he annoys you.

Batman, on the other hand, is more complicated. I’ve already written a bit about this, but Bruce Wayne really no longer exists - he is an act designed to draw attention away from his vigilante activities by night. All that’s left of him is the specter called the Batman.

As for the tone of the Marvel movies, yeah...they do get a little samey after a while, but while the combination of spectacle, snark, and strong characterization isn’t exactly original anymore, it’s a formula that works and that produces pretty entertaining movies. Certainly I prefer it to, say, the MIchael Bay formula of massive spectacle with bugger all else going for it, or the Fantastic Four movie’s approach of awkwardly trying to be a more whimsical X-men without really understanding what makes the characters special in their own right. So yes, you have Iron Man 2 desperately trying to be Iron Man 1 and failing, but then you have Iron Man 3 trying to be Lethal Weapon and mostly succeeding.

That segues awkwardly but not illogically into something else I wanted to organize my thoughts on: super-hero methods. I think the preferences in any given time period in superhero storytelling as regards this feature will tend to reflect the dominant fears of the time. During periods of high street crime, I imagine you’ll be more likely to see heroes like Spider-Man and Batman taking down muggers and convenience store robbers. In times of war, you’ll be more likely to see heroes like Iron Man and Captain America taking on conflicts that threaten the globe. In times where we fear things like terrorism, like now, we’ll be more likely to see stories about heroes taking on large, cosmic, and largely unknowable evils, favoring heroes like Green Lantern and Thor. The Avengers movie managed to combine the second two.

However, there is one somewhat encouraging trend in these stories - increasingly, it’s less about a war on crime than it is about the hero taking on his or her own demons in the form of a specific enemy. That is, it’s more about examining the character than it is about about an uncomfortably fascistic power fantasy for paranoid shut-ins.