If you ease into it, it’s done
I gave up on Netflix’s The Sandman. Two episodes. They were both pretty good. They both convinced me fairly quickly that I didn’t need any part of this in my life, and made me regret that I’d watched even those.
Roxana Hadadi covered it pretty well in her review for Vulture — even the premise that the rest of the season softens Dream’s “imperious asshole” nature, to make him more like a contemporary comic book hero, was enough to convince me that my gut reaction of “I’m not sure about continuing with this” should be rapidly flipped to a “nope, stopping here.”
But moreover, I think my initial response was the one I should have heeded. In episode 1 of The Sandman, Dream begins narrating in voiceover, right at the start of the episode, laying backstory and worldbuilding track for everything that follows. And as soon as he began speaking, I realized that this whole enterprise doesn’t actually work if the voice you hear in your head when you read those glorious white-on-black blobby speech bubbles in the comics, is not your own voice, or a voice echoing inside your own head. Nothing against Tom Sturridge, but his voice proves to be one of the many things made specific by adapting The Sandman, that should never actually be specific, because it is meant, by design, to be personal.
Here’s another thought: comparisons are often made between the capabilities of modern visual effects technology and the creative freedom afforded by comic book imagery. Well, yes, that’s reasonable. But the VFX in The Sandman are all audio-visual VFX presented in narrative television mode, i.e. moving pictures in a 2.35 aspect ratio at 24 frames per second; and that’s not actually a 1:1 transliteration of 75 issues of comic book panels. Why? Because the artists changed. The styles changed. The panel sizes, for fuck’s sake, change. The narrative sped and slowed based on what beats needed to be emphasized, what frames needed to break your heart, what double-page spreads needed to make you gasp, and stop right where you were, and stare at them, afraid to turn the page.
And while all of this is true for most comic books ever, The Sandman made it much more of a virtue. Do our dreams always look the same? Do the people we meet in them always have the same faces, the same colour hair? Do they act a certain way; behave naturally or unnaturally? The variation is the point. The variation is the dream.
Now, it’s not fair of me to assume (2 episodes in) that no moving picture equivalent of some of those core aspects of The Sandman‘s visual art haven’t found their way into the show. But just because you can do a CGI, utterly photorealistic, rendering of The Dreaming, does not in any way mean you can make me feel like I’ve been there. It isn’t just the limitless visual opportunity of a drawn page. It’s the way it’s drawn, too.
I get it. Translating anything from one medium to another means transforming the nature of the thing, and I have gone in for that transformation, across popular culture, more times than I can count. But The Sandman is much too personal to me; and, again, I think that being-personal-ness is both part of its original design, and key to its original success. I don’t want that fucked with, and I think fucking with it actually works against the nature of the experience. I don’t ever even want to imagine a cast and crew of strangers’ version of one of my most cherished dreams.
The person who introduced me to The Sandman back when I started writing comics was Matty “Gormenghast” Price, who is also the main guy that I TIFFed with back in the days when I’d attempt seeing fifty films at any given festival. Neither of us do that anymore, but he evolved an ethos back then that he shared with me, and that we both apply broadly to moviegoing: “If it’s not working for you, walk the fuck out.”
Okay, the “the fuck” was probably youthfully over-exuberant. The entire point of the thing (for me, anyway) actually goes the other way: it’s meant to take the heightened emotionality of deciding to leave a movie that isn’t meeting your needs as a viewer — for whatever reason — out of the equation, and to recognize that the only contract you have to meet on this earth is with yourself and your own time.
A lot of pre-film-Twitter friends and frenemies were aghast at the notion that you’d ever pop out of a film before seeing all of it (and, worse, render an opinion on it), because to many people who love film as an art form, the contract between viewer and viewed is sacred. “They” make the thing, and “we” agree to watch that thing, and watch all of it, and then respond to it on its total merits or deficits.
That is definitely a way of looking at it, yeah.
On my end, and for many years now, I’ve balanced that against some other, equally obvious precepts — life’s too short; and the more films you see, the more likely you are to detect craft errors early; sunk cost fallacy applies to something as trivial as a movie ticket — and other precepts that, I think, people think about less often. One, for example: that you’re a whole-ass person with a whole-ass life and interiority and subjective view of things that changes and flows as you move through time.
Sometimes, that puts you in the exact right place to encounter a thing. (Seeing Enter the Void in a morning screening of TIFF ’09, where half the audience bailed out before it was over, was one such time.) Equally sometimes, though, you just have other shit going on, and it takes a particular kind of mindfulness to pay attention to that, too.
And then there’s the even bigger thing that nobody likes to address: that something can be great and still be unworthy of your time. Sense8 is great, and yet I (still, five years later) find myself mired between episodes 2 and 3 of the second season, with no momentum to continue. The Sandman might be great — it certainly looks, sounds, and behaves like “prestige TV” — but I have strong personal reasons to not want to engage with it. House of the Dragon might be great — or it might be more tits-n’-dragons Ren Faire trash that we use to hide from our coming Mondays, per Helena Fitzgerald’s definitive take on Game of Thrones — but, good lord, after the last three years of all of our lives, do we really need to watch childbirth-n’-death scenes like that?
(But while I’m here, and to extend Fitzgerald’s read on GoT to the HotD era: how much of the sneering contempt that has greeted the new show among the Film Twitters is misplaced acknowledgment that the original series was sensationalist trash, lauded by the bajillion writers on the “prestige television” critical circuit? And now, with the new show showing up as more of the same, is the opportunity to belatedly virtue-signal how far above the whole enterprise they wish they’d always been?)
In any event. TIFF ’22 is upon us, and from my slightly different vantage point from the one I had all those years ago, I can say pretty definitively that if something isn’t working for you, walk the fuck out. That isn’t to say that the experience of the festival, or of seeing a movie at all, isn’t as precious — arguably even more so — as it’s ever been. It really is; it’s a fucking wild-assed miracle that the appreciation of film, as film, is still a thing that exists in the world, in any shape, in any size, let alone at a shape and size the size of TIFF. And it’s been all-the-more-so weird, these last two years. The contract between audience and film has changed shape faster and more drastically than even the most bearish on moviegoing’s long term chances [cough there’s me and Price again, cough] were caught by surprise. It is downright heroic — on the way to becoming archaic — to actually get out to a movie theatre in a crowd full of people and watch a thing en masse with no pause button, no skip button, no “watch next episode.” It’s a harder thing to do than it was three years ago, for all the same reasons the pandemic has made everything harder, for everyone with the mind to be aware of it. Our brains have turned to overripe cheddar, our attention spans all suck, our anxieties run rampant in the world outside the movie theatre, and even the best of us have somewhat lost the muscle memory of not reaching for your phone the moment your attention wanders off whatever’s on the screen.
So, it matters. It really, truly, still matters, and if you can get past the garden fence into that treasured mental and emotional space where — in that darkened room amongst all of those strangers — you can find the state of grace called being with, and simply exist within the realm of the story that is being told to you via moving shadows and light on a wall in front of you, cherish it.
But if you can’t, or you won’t, or you’ll try again tomorrow, or if that whole way of engaging with films is just passing away behind you like the Elves to the sea… well, so be it. Life is too short, all the more so today than it was the last time we rolled out those red carpets. Even the best of us knew how small and frail the whole thing really is, and that there are other things, on the other side of that garden wall. WTFO.
For Jennifer