Archive by Author

My new short film SHARE

Excited to share that my short film SHARE is live on Kickstarter! Really proud of the script and excited to make it happen!

Here’s how you can help:

  1. Donate! – No amount is too small and I will be forever grateful to you for helping to jumpstart my career to the next level
  2. Share the campaign on your social networks and anyone offline you think might find the project interesting
  3. I’m looking for any kind of PRESS I can get – so if you know anyone that blogs, podcasts, or writes please send them my way. No interview is too small and I’ll talk about the film, technology, crowdfunding, whatever!
  4. Stay tuned, every day or so throughout the campaign I’ll be posting a short interview I’ve done with various luminaries from my life asking them, Would You Share? at the film’s website: WouldYouShare.com.

Love Sex God: Awakening World & Spirit of Evolution

One of the projects I’ve been focusing a lot on the last 3 years has been Sebastian Siegel’s Love Sex God documentary series. I co-produced, edited, and shot the first installment, Awakening World. It’s lighthearted and thought provoking short documentary about some of life’s deepest questions: Love, intimacy, heaven, hell, and purpose. It’s been playing the festival circuit recently and been received quite well where it has shown, so much so we’re now crowdfunding the resources to make the 2nd film in the series, Spirit of Evolution.  Spirit of Evolution will cover religion, god, spirituality, and how our beliefs can often change and evolve over time.  Get a DVD copy of the first film by supporting the 2nd one below!

Continue Reading →

The Hobbit: 24FPS vs 48FPS & Other Problems…

I saw The Hobbit this morning in 3D HFR in order to give Peter Jackson the benefit of the doubt and see it as he most intended it to be seen. Do I regret seeing it like that? No. Would I recommend it? No.

There’s a lot of problems with this film, only one of which is the HFR. Narratively, it’s a bit of a mess. I was wary when Peter Jackson announced his two films were becoming three. For LOTR, it made sense, three books, three movies! But to take the single book of the Hobbit and make it into three films? Absurd, I thought. And I was right. While Jackson is drawing on appendices and other writings of Tolkien to flesh out the three film arc, the simple problem remains that the material just isn’t really there, and not just lengthwise. The Hobbit is far more of a children’s book, and narratively the stakes just aren’t as high. Now, my biggest problem is how Jackson looks to be dealing with that. Instead of making a lighter hearted movie, he quickly attempts to start bringing in some of the stakes from the LOTR trilogy into this trilogy. It sort of works, but mostly doesn’t. The Hobbit just isn’t the same beast. Bilbo goes on his journey mostly by choice, and so he can have an adventure! Frodo, on the other hand, goes on his because there’s basically no one else that can do it! It’s against his will in fact, which is much more dramatic.  Trying to elevate the narrative of The Hobbit to the epic status of LOTR was a mistake.

Now, excessive problems aside, here’s the problem with the 3d and HFR in my mind. Off the bat, I’m neither a particularly against nor for 3d. Seeing AVATAR in 3D was one of my favorite cinematic experiences of all time, and I thoroughly enjoyed the 3D in Life of PI this year. But would I have been crushed if I hadn’t seen either movie like that? No, and the why of that has much to do with my feelings towards HFR.

In my mind the process of going to the movies is forgetting yourself, and identifying with the characters on screen. It’s a process of entering that world, not tjat world entering ours. The HFR 48 FPS of The Hobbit did not make it easier for me to go into middle earth. It felt more like middle earth coming into my life. The same applies to the 3d. If it’s failing to suck me “into” the world, it has become a barrier to me entering into the screen world. I felt that both the 3D and HFR in this case ended up being the latter: barriers to entry, never letting me forget that I was watching a movie. And without the forgetting, it’s much harder to be identifying.

That being said, I know my perspective is HEAVILY culturally influenced. EVERYONE that has grown up in the US since the advent of television has been culturally conditioned to associate 24FPS 35mm film with high quality, and 60i video to be television (more real in some senses). There’s nothing particularly special about 24 FPS other than it’s roughly the rate at which Persistence of Vision in the human eye works “well enough”.

So there’s a few things going on that make The Hobbit troublesome. First off, high frames rates immediately make us think of Soap Operas. The first hour of the Hobbit will be JARRING to you if you see it in HFR. The second hour and a half are much better, as Jackson has noted in interviews. Your brain will adjust to a great extent. But still, everything is BUTTERY smooth, which is just very different from the more dreamy motion of 24.

Now, on top of the 3D and HFR, there’s also the fact that these films were all shot 100% digital on RED Epic Cinema cameras. The LOTR, while in the end a digitally effects laden film, was still shot on traditional 35mm. The Hobbit has NONE of the subtle film grain of 35, and as good as RED Epics are, the highlights just look like terrible blown out video at 48 FPS.  Then on top of that all, to get 48 FPS the shutter angle of the camera has to be different, and shorter.  So there’s no blur on motion, the whole thing is like Saving Private Ryan which doesn’t benefit a FANTASY movie in my mind.  Fantasy isn’t supposed to be real, that’s why it’s fantasy.

So in the Hobbit we have CRYSTAL clear images moving with twice the smoothness of traditional film. There’s literally TWICE as much information coming into your eyeball every second, and the clarity of that information is sharp beyond 35mm, which in the end is the biggest problem.

While I have no facts to back it up, I’d be willing to bet that if you analyzed a human brain while it watches 24fps that it would be very different from one watching 48fps.  I think it’s because of the “just enough” nature of 24fps. Since there’s more blanks to be filled, I have a hunch that the brain actually has to do more “work” than when watching higher frame rates.  It’s more actively engaged even though film going is a passive process. During the action sequences, 48 FPS is actually too much information in my opinion. It’s a LOT of data to sort, so instead of my brain having to work harder, it just gets overwhelmed. Then, on top of that, there’s the 3d which is completely unnatural for the human eye (focusing on a single plane while tricking it into thinking there’s depth).  End result is that I never felt like I was in middle earth.

In summary, for me  the Hobbit in 3D HFR 48 attempts to bring the shire into my world, not me into the world of middle earth.  Go see it in 24fps non 3D.

 

Link

The Perfect Camera is Finally Coming! Things will NEVER be the same

Forget DSLRs. Forget RED. Forget Alexa. Forget IMAX. The perfect camera is finally coming: under $10k, 16 bit, 4:4:4, RAW, 18 stops of latitude, a larger than full frame sensor, light-field technology for perfect focus, and up to 1200 FPS of over-cranking. More perfect than film, in fact, it’s more perfect than the human EYE, the ultimate image capture and acquisition tool.

It’s revolutionary. It’s cinematic. It’s the great democratizer of an industry. And of course, it’s not yet real.

But it will be.

Link bait aside, it seems like everyday a new camera is announced and a bunch of people begin arguing online about how it is or isn’t perfect. That is all fine and great, I’m addicted to the whole process myself. I love seeing technology evolve. I love seeing film evolve. So what’s up with this bullshit post?

There’s no doubt that the day is coming when we will have image acquisition tools that really do capture everything perfectly.  True “raw” in the sense that focus, resolution, color, and fidelity will be so finely captured, and with such complete flexibility that never again will we miss another scene because focus was off, never again will we have to use generators and miles of rigging to light a scene, never again will we make sacrifices in acquisition at the cost of the story.

Like it or not, it’s coming.  Crews will get smaller and the technical barriers to capturing stunning imagery will disappear.  And even well before that we’ll be at the point of good enough: the mp3 of filming will emerge and serve 99% of our needs (hell, you could even argue we’re already there in some respects).

And it’s not just in film that’s it’s going to happen, but in many many industries and sectors.  The perfect photo realistic game engine.  The home television or VR glasses that render at resolutions greater than the human eye can see, the car that drives itself and never needs maintenance.  The industrial age is passing, and will continue to slowly taper off and ultimately change everything.

Art. The Economy.  The Environment.  No aspect of reality will be left untouched.  The disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the last decades was only the beginning and it’s going to get much worse, and frankly, that’s scary.  30 years ago if you invented the ultimate toy and everyone wanted it, you had to DO more work to make more of that thing.  No more.  Next weekend I could crank out the next great game on the iphone and that 30 hours of work can be instantly and forever replicated without me putting in another second of my time, energy, or anything physical. I don’t have to build more factories, ship more stuff, or hire more people.  1′s and 0′s are easy to replicate.  (an exaggeration but you get the point)

Yet, as with anything, it’ll be at a tradeoff.  For decades cinema’s barrier to entry has been huge: massive crews, expensive gear, time consuming post production.

Boom.  That’s all going away.  It’s going to be easier than ever, in the technical sense, to make movies.  And the second that external “things” cease to be the barrier to entry, INTERIOR “things” suddenly skyrocket in value. Creativity, Integrity, and more than ever the ability to tell compelling stories that reflect a diversity of values that folks connect with.

Seth Godin put all this a bit more succinctly in a post earlier today:

When everyone has access to the same tools

…then having a tool isn’t much of an advantage.

The industrial age, the age of scarcity, depended in part on the advantages that came with owning tools others didn’t own.

Time for a new advantage. It might be your network, the connections that trust you. And it might be your expertise. But most of all, I’m betting it’s your attitude.

This is obviously spot on for the film industry, and for any industry that involves technology or a scarcity of knowledge. Jobs that once existed because only a few people had access to certain physical means of production are going to just keep vanishing. Staples will begin printing 3d objects next year. Need a follow focus? Print it. It breaks? Go make another. There’s already a whole world of torrenting going on for 3d printing designs and plans.

The point is, gear, and the means of production for most art are going to be “good enough” and “cheap enough” that almost anyone will be able to create world class content VERY soon outside of the traditional structures and systems that have already been built up. Now obviously there will always be amateurs and pros, huge companies and underdogs, and billion dollar marketing budgets vs single youtube channels, but things are changing.

The Attention oriented network economy is upon us. In the perfect (and yes still unlikely in many ways) world outlined above, INTERIORS become infinitely more valuable than EXTERIORS. If me and every person with a bit of spare cash can suddenly have the means to create stunning audio or visual content, it ENTIRELY shifts the premium from the EXTERNAL STUFF, the gear and production tools, to the INTERNAL stuff: the values, creativity, and ability of a group to work together to make something beautiful.

The days of being an asshole that no one wants to work with just because you know how to use some super exclusive piece of gear, or own some ridiculously expensive piece of equipment are ending. Learning is getting easier. No matter what you know how to do, there’s going to be someone else out there that can probably do it better than you and for less money to boot. Being the type of healthy, integrated, and creative person that people WANT to work with: because you communicate well, work hard, and have values that people respond to and want more of is only going to become more and more important.

STORY becomes the complete and utter king again. And what is story other that the ability to share a meaningful expression of what it means to be human. How can your next action movie mesmerize me in a way that I’ve never been before? So far we’ve been relying visuals to show us things we’ve never seen before. But soon that won’t even be enough. It’s going to take more. A new perspective on the world, a completely authentic emotion, a layer of reality never before witnessed. Frankly, I’m excited. We’re getting really close to having figured out how to do the “form” part of my favorite arts (cinema and video games), and when that’s off the table the pivot to “content” is one I’m hoping I’m in the right time and place for.

I’ve personally struggled since moving to LA and trying to “break into” the film industry. Many times I’ve questioned my wisdom in not heading out here straight out of college and working my way up a production ladder. There’s a LOT of technical “stuff” I just don’t know how to do, and certainly not as well as others.

Lately, however, as I shift more into creation mode, I’m starting to appreciate the fact that I took my 20′s to go “figure myself out” and do work to grow up a bit as a human being. The more I step into writing and directing, the more I’m finding having even a modicum of understanding about how we as humans behave is a tremendously useful.

My podcast, blogging here, writing screenplays, shooting short scenes, building a self owned sustainable business: everything I’ve been doing this year has hopefully been helping to the lay the foundations for not having to worry about the forms or systems of creation, but simply getting to focus on creating content that audiences find compelling.  Which is great because once I get that perfect camera I’ll finally have all the tools I need to tell an awesome story!

Continue Reading →
Link

“The Death of Normal” / The Power of Perspectives

Those wishing to hold national office in these United States will find it increasingly useless to argue for normal, to attempt to play one minority against the next, to turn pluralities against the feared “other” of gays, or blacks, or immigrants, or, incredibly in this election cycle, our very wives and lovers and daughters, fellow citizens who demand to control their own bodies.

Regardless of what happens with his second term, Barack Obama’s great victory has already been won: We are all the other now, in some sense.

A brilliant post by David Simon about what he feels was truly groundbreaking about last week’s election: the disintegration of “normal” as more and more voices begin to come into play in the US political process. Go read it, then come back.

The idea of “the other” has always fascinated me, and it comes as no surprise to me that breakdowns of last week’s voting show that on the whole, the denser the population of an area the more liberal that area tends to vote.

Why? Simple in my mind, the more people you’re around, the less you fear the other. Being exposed to a variety of perspectives different from your own, and realizing each and every person behind them is a human being is about as big a catalyst for growth as I can think of. As “the other” becomes known, they become human, they become relatable to, and they become real. It’s easy to be a dick when you’re anonymous, Youtube is proof of that. But when you actually see others, and are actually seen by them, understanding emerges. It may not be agreement, there’s plenty of people whom I know and deeply disagree with, but I can at the very least begin to understand where they’re coming from, and once I have an idea of where someone is coming from, it’s much easier to see them as human beings.

So what’s all this have to do with film? Easy.  PERSPECTIVES.  I believe in perspectives, more perspectives = better informed decisions.  That’s what being liberal means to me.

It’s also why I *love* cinema– because of its amazing ability to give viewers NEW perspectives: on themselves, on others, on the world around, and on those feats of imagination that only exist in celluloid. Not only that, but it’s able to package and deliver those new perspectives in an EMOTIONAL context.

The corner stone of modern hollywood cinema, the CLOSE UP is one of the best delivery mechanisms for emotional perspectives that I think we’ve found yet. We’re literally wired to feel in ourselves what we see in others.  In most day to day life we have to buffer than resonance, and dampen it to survive.  We walk by the homeless person on the street, ignore the shouting match between our neighbors, and don’t blink an eye when a parent scolds their child.  Some of that is our biological wiring – strangers can be danger!  But in the movie theater, we’re safe.  We can drop all that.  We can fully merge with the other up there on the screen.  Our self is forgotten, even if temporarily, and we become our Self and experience things we never would otherwise.  That’s profound to me.  And literally millions of us are already doing it, everyday.  It works best with a really big screen, in a specially dedicated space that’s nice and dark and gets a bunch of selves together in the same place in the same moment (the theatrical experiences still matters!).   It makes “the other” into US, one scene at a time.

  • Create a character the audience can identify with.
  • Put that character through the full range of human experience, the good, the bad, the godly, the seedy, whatever.
  • The audience, if even only in a way that is a sliver as powerful as the “real” thing,  gets to experience that perspective without ever having done it, been there, or suffered through it.  Wisdom can be transmitted without the harm.

Movies let us practice being human.

ACTION!

Continue Reading →
Video

Demo Reel Scenes

Here’s some fun short demo reel style scenes I’ve been shooting for some actors out here in LA, written by some of the same people that star in them.  A crew of me and sometimes 1 or 2 others and generally blocked and shot on the fly.  Great practice for me as a director: blocking really does take some brain power, even for simple scenes.

Continue Reading →
Link

Netflix, Big Data, and what hollywood is missing out on.

Sarandos says Netflix makes more “data-centric decisions” than most networks. He was able to analyze how many subscribers like the series’ star, Kevin Spacey, as well as how many rented the BBC series on which the new production is based. “You get a very addressable audience. Better than that, I know exactly who they are.”

That’s Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos talking to his investors about one of the KEY advantages tech companies have over traditional media studios in the evolving film and television markets.

For a few years now I’ve been thinking that the real value of Netflix isn’t the content library per say, but the exhausting amount of specific data Netflix has on what its actual customers like and watch.  With one of the most famous recommendation algorithms around, Netflix has always encouraged users to rate movies since they first began shipping DVDs in the late 90s.  Since re-shifting their focus to streaming, they’ve also been able to collect even more default data – ie what shows and movies you started and whether or not you finished them, regardless of ratings.

As they shift into content production and with such vast knowledge of their users, Netflix can make FAR more intelligent and informed decisions about what to make than just about any company (save for Amazon) out there.  Compared to the traditional studios that have absolutely no feedback loops with their customers other than tickets sold and DVDs rented, Netflix is years ahead of the curve.  When Netflix now chooses to make a show or movie, they don’t have to GUESS what their customers want and don’t have to base their decisions off the hunch of programming executives.  Instead, they can see, DOWN TO THE ZIPCODE, what genre of shows and starring what actors their customers are already watching.  If they see that 10% of their customers devour Arrested Development’s 2 seasons in their entirety, it’s a no brainer for them to make season 3 – and at a budget that takes into account the actual numbers they can expect to see.

When I compare this to Warner Bros, Disney, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and the rest, it seems to me they’re in big trouble.  The single biggest cost for most “big hollywood” movies these days is marketing, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars for movies, and there’s little to NO actual data for how much a difference all those ads make.  They can pour all the money they want into Dark Shadows, Battleship, or John Carter – and if audiences aren’t interested they FLOP.

The traditional studios are at a MAJOR disadvantage on this technological side, mostly because they’ve resisted the transition to digital delivery for so long, meaning outside companies like Apple, Netflix, and Amazon have been able to gain a significant foothold in the emerging market.  They’ve built an infrastructure that can connect the data of what people are watching with the teams that are deciding what is being made.  While Ultraviolet was a bold attempt to reclaim some of this lost ground, it’s frankly just too little, too late.  As Amazon and Netflix continue their march towards original content creation, I’d suggest the studios find a way to partner up – and fast.

And if I was Netflix right now?  Embrace your opposite – I’d open a series of small cinema cafes in all the major cities to act as communal centers for cinema lovers.  I’d constantly be programming a diverse selection of screenings of classics, second runs, and indie movies that draw SPECIFICALLY from what the customers in that zip code like.  Got an abundance of people that LOVE Firefly living in Chicago…screen the whole series over the course of a month!  Have a coffee shop / bar attached so people stay and chat afterwards, and hang out to talk cinema there even when they aren’t see a movie.  Cinemaphiles LOVE going to the movies.  A home theater system still cannot replace the value of an audience sitting in a dark room together, seeing a picture projected larger then life.  Fill up all those empty Borders and Circuit City stores and bring some culture and art back to communities.  You’ve got the DATA to pretty much guarantee a healthy crowd at ANY screening in any major city, USE IT!  I’d go!

Continue Reading →

New Podcast! The 7th Kingdom

Very excited to announce the launch of a new podcast I’m co-hosting my with my brilliant friend Stan James: The 7th Kingdom – A deeper look at technology and life.

I first met Stan back in my Integral Institute days when he presented to our office on an exciting new technology platform he was developing at the time (which later morphed into Lijit).  I was immediately drawn to Stan in that first meeting as he was already exploring the intersection of technology and human behavior.  We quickly became good friends during the few years we spent living in Boulder together, and had many conversations about technology, human behavior, social and cultural evolution, and all the trends and patterns we saw emerging.

When I first started thinking about launching a podcast earlier this year Stan was top of my list as I figured “we’re already having these conversations, and they’re FUN!”.  When I proposed the idea to him he quickly got as excited as I did, and hence The 7th Kingdom was born.  In our new podcast we’ll be taking a deeper look at technology and life: how is technology evolving?  how are we evolving?  does it change relationships? health? productivity?  is the breakneck pace of innovation good, bad, or both?  We’ll be exploring all of this and more as we talk with each other, interview friends and experts, and explore the ways in which technology is affecting us as individuals,  our societies, and our planet.  We’ll be talking about new technologies, old technologies, and media of all types.  With Stan up in Silicon Valley, and me in Hollywood, we feel like we’re at a unique crossroads between two of the most powerful industries in the US.

Please subscribe to us in iTunes and share with your friends.  In our pilot episode Stan and I talk mostly about how the idea for the podcast came about, who we are and some of our personal technological histories, and introduce some of the topics we’ll be discussing in future episodes.

Welcome to the 7th Kingdom!

Aside

Premiere Pro CS6 is Killing Me

Every single time I open it to edit, I find stuff missing that just worked in FCP7. I’d hoped that they’d use the year between FCPX/CS5.5 and CS6 to just port over a bunch of FCP’s most useful tools Maybe CS6.5 will be the droid I’ve been looking for, but so far I find it mostly aggravating to work in.  Sadly even all these years later I still find it worth the time to transcode footage and use ancient FCP7.  If I was Adobe, I’d put out one single poll to my customers: What did FCP7 do that you miss in Premiere Pro?  Then I’d add ALL of that to CS6.5 and drive the stake in the heart of FCPX for good.

Just in today’s edit session I hit the following stumbling blocks:

  • No Command-F to find and select clips on the timeline for easy pasting of attributes.
  • No ability to jump back and forth on the timeline between CLIP markers.  Clip markers are pointless in CS6.
  • Marker functionality overall is brutal. I miss double hitting M!
  • No using the numeric keypad for multi clip editing.
  • No single key to cut to a new angle in the timeline when multi clip editing.
  • Can’t rejoin a clip if you razor it and then decide the edit isn’t needed. Final cut not only let you delete the cut, but would visually signify that this cut was continuous. Super useful.
  • No real multi clip collapsing when finishing.

Attention Engine

Happy new announce I’ve finally launched company and site, Attention Engine. The umbrella organization for all the business websites and video productions I do to pay the bills, Attention Engine is focused on media production for the digital age. WordPress Websites, Video Production, Custom Demo Reel Scenes, and Technology Coaching. Start Getting Noticed!

Interiors and Exteriors in Super Hero Films & Why The Hulk Now Rocks

We’re now 12 years into the Super Hero resurgence in cinema. Roughly starting back with Bryan Singer’s 2000 Xmen and continuing strong this summer with The Avengers, The Amazing Spiderman, and The Dark Knight Rises, it’s clear the super hero saturation many predicted isn’t really going anywhere. Having crushed just about every box office record so far, it’s clear people love The Avengers. I myself did, and found it to be one of the most entertaining “summer” movies I’ve seen in years.

What is it about these films that fascinates so many? Obviously there’s the economics of the films, adapting properties based on long standing comic series means there’s already a prebuilt audience the material, so no matter how poorly the films are made someone will show up to see them.

What’s fascinating for me, however, is what the genre allows for narratively so much more explicitly than other films. It’s often said that comic books have in some ways become the “myths” of our times, and in many ways I believe they are. Telling stories full of moral lessons, challenge, and teeming with metaphors about personality, society, psychology, and so on, which is very fertile territory for telling action packed dramatic stories that are perfect for the cinematic big screen.

More specifically, the super hero genre does one thing in specific I find particularly fascinating, which involves the relationship between interiors and exteriors, or in Ken Wilber’s integral speak, the left hand quadrants and the right hand quadrants. In brief, I’d argue that basically all the most critically (and audience) acclaimed super hero movies manage to do one thing, and that’s to use the “super” hero power to eliminate “exteriors” from being main challenge/sticking point for the hero.

What on earth do I mean? Basically than in a world of normal people, the super hero emerges with a trait, skill, or ability and makes him nearly untouchable by the ordinary. Superman, the green lantern, ironman, the xmen, the hulk, spiderman….all down the line the super hero is basically no longer in danger from common threats and life and death situations. That’s what makes them super! Nearly every origin story across the line delves into this at some point, as our super hero is mastering/learning his or her powers, we get to seem them basically completely owning any threat that come their way.

This mastery is invetibly folowed by the emergence and presencing of the super villain. The hero, having gained this extraordinary power, needs to struggle in some way or another to make the movie interesting. What’s the best way to make a hero struggle? Make them face off against someone that is as powerful, or particularly more powerful than them, the “bigger suit” as my friend likes to call it. Bigger Suit also sometimes manifests as Multiple Suits as well, so instead of one bady, we can to see the protangonist facing off against tons of them.

As soon as the bigger suit has emerged, the brillance (and conservatism) of most super hero movies immediately emerges. The story is no longer one about exteriors, and instead shifts to being a story of interiors. Our protagonist is no longer SUPER because of his or her power, as the villain either matches/exceeds that power or has found a way to nullify it. What now makes our hero super is their INTERIORS: character, will, and ability to endure suffering. The best super hero movies, (and arguably many of the best action movies), invetibly hit that “interior will” shot, our protagonist is using every power she or he has, and it’s not enough. Whether locked in a physical confrontation, mental/psychic one, or magical/energetic one, our character’s external powers have met their match and all hope seems to be lost. Then bam, the magical happens. It turns out that what our hero has that the villain doesn’t is an internal trait, not and external one. Something worth fighting for, love for another, care for their country, whatever it is our hero has nearly been destroyed but then battered and beated, and often screaming in the process, our hero gets in touch with that interior trait and turns the tide. Batman, it turns out, is particularly fascinating because he is solely a hero of will, he has zero super powers and is driven entirely off the sheer power of his will and discipline to be exceptional.

This “interior power” or will, comes from what’s called the Upper Left quadrant in integral speak, and is deeply tied with what tends to dominate conservatism in the US: the belief that a persons achievements in life comes from their internal discpline and will, not their external circumstances. In fact, it’s also a very core strain of americanism itself, the belief that anyone can go from “rags to riches” with another perservance and hard work. Narrative struggles that deal with interior states, IE, self doubt, worry, or any thoughts or beliefs that occur within someone that can’t be seen on the outside, are often tough to both off cinematically. Interiors are traditionally the territory dominated by novels and traditional stories, as in that medium we’re able to dive into our characters heads and read and know their thoughts first hand. Movies, however, are an artform of exteriors. Outside of flashbacks, dream sequences, and usually cheesy voice over, we never really have access to a characters inner thoughts, thus often making it harder to tell tales where interior shifts are the main plot points. The super hero genre someone cuts around this problem, by using the “super power” as an external signifying for the internal states. Superman punches harder, Cyclops lasers stronger, and the hulk smashes more as their interior state changes. Their outsides are powered by their insides quite simply. Captain America may have been injected with a super serum, but that’s not what makes him super. His determinism, optimism, and sheer refusal to give up are what make him extraodinary and what really give his powers their power. (sadly a concept that wasn’t really explored enough in the feature film, one of the main reason I thought it failed cinematically). In spiderman speak, the entire heroes philosphy is boiled down to “with great power comes great responsiblity”, a responsiblity that only those with strong willed and virtous interiors can harness. One of my few gripes with The Avengers in fact mainly revolves around the lack of a satisfying “all hope is lost” moment for the team. They’re never really in threat of losing except for a very short sequence in which iron man is overwhelmed, the hulk is pummeled by aircraft artillery, hawkeye runs out of arrows, and thor/captain america just stop fighting for a moment. The interior shift moment gets almost entirely transplanting onto Iron Man, as he finally embodies Captain America’s finest interior quality and decides to stop the nuke knowing very well it’ll likely end his life.

On another note, another fascinating example of interiors and exteriors as explored by super heros also came out of The Avengers. I’ve always been a Hulk fan, and gew up watching the show and often obsessing over the character. Consequently I was thrilled to see how damn right they finally got him in his third movie appearance in 9 years. What I found particularly fascinating was the way in which I think Joss Whedon interpreted the character. Traditionally, the hulk has manifested whenever Bruce Banner loses his temper, or control. He gets angry and destroys everything around him, and was pretty much the case in the previous films. The Avengers, however, started playing with this trope early on, as we see Bruce taunting the Black Widow with his faux anger when she comes to recruit him, and he has a general sense of humour about his entire situation when he’s on the SHIELD Aircraft.

*SPOILERS*
Now, while it didn’t translate perfectly to the screen, it’s clear that as soon as we meet Bruce he’s more or less learned to control his outbreaks to a certain degree. Loki charms him on the ship using the staffs powers, which apparently explains his uncontrollable rage outbreak on the carrier.

What I find fascinating about Whedon’s interpretation of the character is his move away from Banner “controlling” his anger. We here plenty of jokes from other heroes guessing how Bruce is keeping a “level” head, be it pilates, bags of weed, meditation, etc etc…all things in pop culture that are generally seen as ways to avoid anger. Whedon, however, explores entirely original hulk material in my opinion by going the OTHER way…instead of making it so Bruce is avoiding his anger, we later learn he’s able to control the hulk because he’s “always angry”. Now, off that bat that doesn’t make too much sense, but when read next to the scene betwen Tony Stark and Bruce Banner and Tony’s admission that his defective heart is actually the source of his armor, and interesting take on the hulk begins to emerge. The Hulk itself is Bruce Banners ARMOR, it’s what protects him. In which case, the entire idea of the hulk is shifted from being something to avoid, but to something that Banner can embrace. As many great teachers of spirtual wisdom can attest, (Robert August Masters being my favorite), there’s actually a stark difference between ANGER and AGRESSION. Anger itself is nothing but emotional energy, almost always released when one feels threatened or in danger, be in physically, emotionally, or even spirtually. In many senses, anger is simply a BOUNDRY, a construct around our ego to keep us safe. When we feel threated, we feel the energy of “anger”, alarming us to wake up to the moment and be conscious of what’s happening.

Aggression, on the other hand, is the destructive external manifestation of anger, most often involving lashing out on others. Anger, simply is, it’s not a choice, agression, on the other hand, is reactive choice to anger. We can’t choose not to be angry, but we can choose not to be agressive, which is exactly what I think Whedon NAILS in this version of the hulk. Whedon’s already on the record saying they had to cut Bruce Banner’s “aha” moment that he has after crashing into the building and before going to New York. Now, I can only guess as to what it was, but I would like to think based on the above clues that Bruce realized the more he EMBRACED the Hulk, and appreciated the fact this creature was in fact his armor than shows up when he’s in danger, the more he could control it. Instead of fighting against the Hulk (an act of agression), he could simply realize the Hulk is just a boundary, and manifests when Banner is threatened. By embracing his anger / Hulk, Banner can remain conscious enough to not be aggressive.

Now I don’t know about you, but for me it was simply AMAZING to see a mainstream popcorn movie based on 60 year old comics tackle as deep a concept as the difference between ANGER and AGRESSION using the metaphor of the hulk is pretty damned amazing. For me this is where real conscious filmmaking is at. For those that want to see it, the deeper layers are there. For those that don’t, they get to see HULK SMASH, and that’s a win for everyone.