Breaking the rules

The Spirit just came out on DVD so I had to rent it. The badness of it was so etched in my mind from my first viewing that seeing it a second time was a disappointment. The Spirit is just not good enough to be bad enough to be good. It's incompetent. And the problem with incompetence, apparently, is that in the long run it's dull. The first time I saw it I thought The Spirit might be saved with a better edit. Seeing it again I suspect that there's nothing that can help it. Its weaknesses are structural and more deeply embedded than I thought—

>Talk about the difference between 'showing' and 'telling.' The Spirit is all telling which makes it difficult to tell what's happening. It's as if Miller created his characters by labelling them "good guy," "bad guy." The Octopus, for example, is talked about in hushed tones. But we only see him doing the most paltry of evils and that's only at the end of the film.

>The scenes have no direction in the "they don't go anywhere" meaning of the word (well, in the "directing" sense also). Therefore, they don't make sense. The much maligned opening fight sequence between the Octopus and The Spirit, for example, has no reason for being. There is no objective to the fight. Worse, the Octopus himself KNOWS that there's no point to the fight. Characters wander through the film aimlessly puppeteered by a meandering plot.

>Despite its non-stop exposition, the film doesn't convey enough information for the drama to make sense. It's like sitting there trying to listen to something you should be reading.

In The Spirit Frank Miller tried to break the rules. But he made a fatal beginner's mistake. He didn't realize that "breaking the rules" really means "transcending the rules." This is what the old saying "you have to know the rules to break them" means. Breaking the rules doesn't mean creating without rules. It means that one is incorporating "the rules" into one's work but in indirect, invisible ways, sometimes even working around the rules. The error of the beginner is to not see structures, either acknowledge or negated, which remain invisible.