May 29, 2008
The Spirit of a Mythic Metropolis
A lone figure, dressed in trenchcoat and fedora, sprints recklessly across the rooftops of a crumbling yet timeless city.
After just a one-minute teaser trailer, I’m already looking forward to the film adaptation of The Spirit. Not only because I’m a huge fan of Will Eisner’s seminal comic series about a detective who ostensibly returns from the grave to fight crime as a masked vigilante, but also because I’m anxious to see the film’s depiction of Central City — The Spirit’s apocryphal metropolis. In just that one minute of footage, we get an understanding of both the posthumous private eye and his relationship to the urban environment in his somewhat clumsy average-joe-meets-parkour sprint across the grim and gritty water tanked rooftops of the almost sublime Central City. And our main character, The Spirit himself, implies an intimate connection with his home, as only a mysterious, noir-ish, comic book hero can. “My City,” he says, “I cannot deny her. My City screams. She is my mother. She is my lover…and I am her Spirit.” Chills. Chills, I tell ya!
In a recent interview with Comic-Con Magazine, wirter-director Frank Miller (he of Sin City, 300, and Dark Knight Returns fame) had this to say about Eisner, The Spirit, and New York City.
CCM: Both you and Eisner have reputations for gritty, urban settings, and Eisner’s stories were definite productions of their time…Is The Spirit move set in a specific time?
FM: It is not, and neither by the way is The Spirit comic. It looks like the 1940s because that’s what was around him, but Eisner never considered it to be a period piece. and one of the many connections between Eisner and me is our deep love of New York City, and New York City is impossible to trap in time. It’s so much of a Pompeii. It’s constantly rebuilding itself, but keeping its old personality at the same time…
The movie, Milller claims, is really a love letter to New York City. Clearly, the man has a love for the timeless urban mystique and a subtle understanding of the history of america’s “central city.”
Miller’s minimal, stylized aesthetic isn’t for everyone, but I think it successfully blurs the boundaries between comics and reality — creating a sort of hyper-reality that works at both the scale of a cityscape and a single room stuck somewhere in that labyrinth of life and industry. He’s able to create an implied space, an emotive architecture, that describes not only the space of a room, but also the personality its occupant. All this with only a few strokes of light and shadow. And finally, I couldn’t finish the post without including the trailer that’s so captured my imagination.
