Much of what makes Hellboy so much fun as a motion picture relates, I think, precisely to this question of influence I was mulling over yesterday. Hellboy is not only *not* original, but is very nearly slavish in its overt sampling of its sources. Just a few of these include Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, X-Men, Frankenstein, Mimic — director Guillermo del Toro is quoting himself there — Spiderman, Men in Black, Lord of the Rings (notably the Balrog & troll sequences), Harry Potter, Shrek, Edward Scissorhands, The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Girl Interrupted, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft & the songs of Robert Johnson. I know that I'm missing more references than I got, especially since I don't follow either the American slasher or Hong Kong kung fu genres.

 

What holds this anthology of low rent devices together is editing. The film virtually never slows down — the few scenes that give the audience a chance to catch their breath & build the nominal depth of character for the narrative's four main characters — Hellboy, his girl Sparky, their FBI keeper John Myers, and HB's "father," good ole absent-minded professor Broom (John Hurt made up as Albert Einstein) — are short & filled with both edits & flashbacks so as not to let go of the film's underlying, relentless pace.

 

As you might anticipate from this circus of allusions, the film's focus isn't on hanging together narratively — indeed, there are large gaps, most notably in the lumbering way that the film takes Hellboy's primary partner, "Blue," a creature from the Black Lagoon type who appears to have cribbed his sensitive soul from 3CPO, the Star Wars bot, out of the story line for the film's last third so that it can concentrate on the love triangle between Sparky (Princess Lea) and Hellboy (Hans Solo) & Myers (Luke Skywalker) as they  try to keep Rasputin from opening the portal to the Other Side. For all of the energy that has gone into creating Hellboy, a sort of red Shrek, Blue & Sparky or Liz, a gal with a pyrokinesis problem, the film's bad guys are remarkably lacking in charisma.

 

That this gumbo hangs together at all is a considerable achievement, yet, as should be obvious, this is a film that eschews greatness, depth, insight or real affection. The film is so firmly focused on its roster of homages that it never looks up to consider what it might add to this pantheon of Saturday afternoon thrillers. The result, I suspect, may be that the film will rake in the requisite hundreds of millions of dollars, but have no impact whatsoever even on the genres it holds most dear.

 

Hellboy, in short, is a filmic equivalent of new formalism. If, that is, new formalism took its marching orders from the livelier venues of poetry. Which, in turn, new formalism emphatically does not.

 

Which brings me back to the question of influence & originality vs. derivation. Robert Duncan, the most thoughtful of those arguing for a derivationist perspective, for the idea that no poem is born disconnected from the whole of literary history, nowhere argues that poetry itself does not thereby evolve. Indeed, I think it is clear from his work that poets necessarily write the poems they themselves need & that this need can be seen (or, perhaps better, felt) as a lack or absence in the poetic constellation. Hellboy, like new formalism, works from the presumption that the map of the heavens for its genre is largely, if not entirely, complete. The most one might strive for is to add one's own name to an already crowded roster.

 

I used to think — and still do, mostly — that what so animated the Poetry Wars of the late 1970s & early '80s was that language poetry, simply by existing, demonstrated that the constellation of possibilities articulated by the New American poetries of the 1950s where themselves not complete. Langpo's most animated opponents where those, like Tom Clark, who had signed up for a particular flavor of the New American mapping, and who were passionately committed to the idea that their universe not change. It was, to say the least, a teleological reading of literary history. What was most objectionable about langpo therefore was simply that it existed. Had langpo presented itself as, say, third-generation projectivism, nobody would have complained. Perhaps, precisely, because no one would have noticed.

 

To date, newer tendencies, such as the New Brutalism, have yet to articulate exactly how the map of the constellations itself must change. As certainly it must. Langpo's origins in the Vietnam conflict may position it with regards to the issues of today, but they hardly render it adequate to a post-Soviet universe in which the issue of anti-modernism, whether in failed states — where anti-modernism comes out as a mode  of theocratic fascism — or in post-industrial centers (where one form of anti-modernism shows up as the School of Quietude), is inescapable. The langpo position, I would suggest, is that the tasks of modernism itself were never completed, that the bulb of the Enlightenment has mostly flickered without giving full lumination, & that much remains yet to be done.

 

So I look at Hellboy as a guilty pleasure for a world in which guilt itself is no longer palpable, and it would be easy to despair. What happens when there are no more films to make, no more poems to write? Hellboy's solution, that we should make the old ones over & over, feels to me woefully inadequate. What is excluded from this motion picture is precisely what cinema needs.