No Substance #174: The B World
I love B films.
I love B art, in fact.
It’s not right to say that B films are the only kind of B art out there. Lots of work fits the definition of B films, which is often genre, often part of a series, and often given over to sensationalised scenes and plots. You don’t have to think very hard about books, or comics, or paintings, or poetry, that will fit the mould made famous by films such as Plan 9 From Outer Space, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and Hell Comes to Frogtown. Joe Lansdale’s Drive-In duology are a good place to start for a comparison in books, but there’s also Judge Dredd comics, Stephen King, and a bunch of others. Some you may like, some you mightn’t (I’m not a big fan of Plan 9, for example). Some you might even say aren’t B-grade. That’s fine. I have a big broad definition of it, myself. Trying to stake out the borders of something like B-grade is just silly. If you want something to be it, cool. If you don’t, no stress.
I grew up on the later versions of B films. Things like Star Wars, The Exorcist, Highlander, A Fistful of Dollars, Escape From New York, The Prophecy, and The Crow are all part of my DNA, much like a whole bunch of books, comics, and artists who worked in those areas and who I won’t even begin to describe because there’s just too many. It’s mostly why I am the writer I am today. I write B things. Of course, I also like art that is technically interesting, or ‘high art’, as well, and I try to marry the two together, perhaps mistakenly, and that’s the other half of what I do. There’s a lot of class involved in art, and genre often acts as a signal of your class when you present your work to the outside world, and yourself with it. I mean this mostly when it comes to applying for grants, or jobs, or when you’re in various environments where you meet people. Most artists are safely middle class, and the institutes around writing run upward, class wise. It’s easy to signal wrong in such an environment. But that’s not for discussion today. It’s probably not for discussion, really. It is what it is. But regardless, I think of myself as a writer classy trash, or trashy literature, however you want to cut it. My fortune is yours if you want it.
I’ve been thinking about this partly because they’re remaking The Crow. You might have heard about it, or might not have. You probably aren’t surprised to hear that they are remaking it regardless of if you have or haven’t. After all, they’ve tried three sequels and a TV show, as well as some comics and franchise novels. Poppy Z Brite wrote one, way back when. It’s called The Lazarus Heart, I believe (I have it, but I’ve never read it). They’ve been trying to make The Crow into a success franchise since after Alex Proyas’ film turned in the dollars, somewhere in 1994. None of it as been terribly successful, at least in my experience. It’s odd, when you think about it. The Crow is a simple enough concept, a dark revenge fantasy that you can twist and turn in a lot of directions, but which frequently isn’t, and becomes instead a dull repetition of its first instalment. I suspect that’s the cause of its failure. You can’t recreate the moment of success by repeating the same the same things in various versions of the original. One of the reasons that Prey worked so well for the Predator series was that it stepped outside the original film, and gave itself a unique setting and time and didn’t try to link it to anything else.
My theory, and it’s a working theory, one I neither hold to, or passionately believe in, is that sequels and reboots are the grounds of diminishing returns, especially in B Land. Maybe it’s true of all art that is subjected to seconds and thirds, and that all art, in and of itself, is lightning caught in a bottle when it works. You can try and recapture it, but mostly you won’t. I could believe in that, myself. Maybe I do. You just need to find out what are the rules of making it work. Some remakes and reboots do, after all. Personally, I think it’s when you step outside what was done before, and take the base but make it new. You can’t repeat yourself. You’ve always got to be new.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to No Substance to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.