Can Style Be Substance?

So I’m supposed to be trying out that pared down style now. All those adjectives, superfluous nouns and weird exclamation marks flying all over the goddamn place were getting old. No more corpulence.


It’s a shame that the Blade franchise, stemming from the Marvel comic book incarnation of the same name, has died out for several reasons. First of all, the visceral style of the first two movies in the trilogy had a sensual edge to them which really seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the nineties, that icy, hard, cool exterior with not much underneath – firm to the touch yet brittle. And inside...inside...

 We won’t dwell on the third of the trilogy. Some things are best left dead and buried.

 The second reason seems to stem from a growing disdain towards films which produce an overt aesthetic which does not conform to that which is set down by the status quo of conventional Hollywood blockbusters. That grungy, eastern-European setting to Blade 2 was unpalatable for viewers who desired their Western brains uncontaminated by the Other and all its grotesque trappings. The idea of a bureaucratic race of bloodsuckers, by the same token, also seemed no doubt a little too close to the bone. There are enough people out there getting fucked by pale guys in suits at it is.

 The third reason has something to do with the short lived season of the Blade series. It was a fat candle with a big wick and in the very short period it took to burn bright and out most viewers were either drooling over the basketball or seriously pissed off by the fact that their brains had been stimulated by a rich mélange of neo-noir aesthetics and stylized ultra-violence.

 Those last two facets of the Blade franchise are what brought about its demise in the first place. There’s something bizarrely familiar about that alternate universe which viewers find unsettling; the shortcomings of the director to alienate the audience from the spectacle has had the opposite of the desired effect. The protagonist grabs a cop and dashes his brains out against the trunk of the patrol car. Broad daylight. New Yorkers everywhere. No one pays much attention. At first the sight seems intrinsically ridiculous. Maybe the director was lazy, the viewers think, and shift back into their seats. Either way, the complete apathy of human beings towards each is being illustrated in no uncertain terms on the big screen. The movie ends. No one pays much attention.

I suppose it’s ironic. The director sets out to make a film which art only in the most superficial sense – the surface is the canvas. So can style be substance? The end result is the complete opposite of what anyone had ever intended, and that, I guess, leads into why the films are associated with what one lazily refers to as postmodernism.