I like comics. If you’ve been reading this site for any length of time, you know that based on how I cover superhero movies. But I also like comic strips.
From the time I learned to read until I left for college, my dad would leave the “funny pages” on the kitchen table for me to read before school. I’ve always liked comic strips for their compact storytelling—entire plots in six frames or less—and how illustrators solve problems in two-dimensional, usually black-and-white images. I sincerely believe reading Far Side will teach you everything you need to know about joke writing, and reading Calvin & Hobbes is as important as watching Great Films and reading Great Novels to make you a better storyteller.
All that said, Here is unlike any other comic. It was an experiment by Richard McGuire that started in the alt comics movement of the 1980s and was finally anthologized in the 2010s in a graphic novel. In Here, McGuire drew the same part of the same room of a house, but every frame was a different a point in time. In some frames, McGuire would inset fractional images to show multiple points on the timeline at once. Given the limits of the medium, the result is mind-bending. Here’s an example:
It’s almost like looking at art from prior to the invention of perspective. Everything is happening on the same “line”, your eyes have to adjust to the layers of information and learn to pick apart the individual elements within the whole. But the cumulative effect is the story of not a person or a family, but a place. Here tells the story of a single point in space and how it evolves over millions of years.
Robert Zemeckis turned Here into a movie, though, and I have some concerns. One, you simply cannot capture what makes Here special on film. Film offers its own unique advantages, but some things exist in the right medium the first time, and I believe this to be the case with Here. What is special about Here is the experience of looking at it, and learning to decipher the frames and what they detail about the corner of that living room at any given time. There’s no real narrative to Here, except the passage of time. There is one woman who recurs over decades, the matriarch who calls that living room hers, but she’s not a character with a real arc beyond “aging”.
Immediately by turning Here into a movie, Zemeckis has to start inventing a narrative, because Robert Zemeckis isn’t the type of filmmaker to explore outside the traditional bounds of cinema. Just look at the trailer—Here is now a family drama. Tom Hanks and Robin Wright play the most recurrent occupants of the house. As far as this trailer shows, frame layering to show different times simultaneously is only used in the title sequence, but there is a lot of time lapse outside the window, and a LOT of de-aging technology on display.
As is ALWAYS the case, the longer we have to look at digitally de-aged faces, the worse they look. In quick glances, de-aged Hanks and Wright don’t look bad. At first, I thought about how far this technology has come and how quickly. But then that sequence of young Hanks and Wright embracing keeps going, and by the end, they look plastic. This tech is, still, simply not as good as filmmakers want it to be.
More concerningly, though, Zemeckis co-wrote the script. I haven’t liked a script he penned since Back to the Future in 1985, and his best films, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Death Becomes Her, he did not write. Especially with his last decade of films Zemeckis’s writing has been mawkish and cliché (probably trying to recapture that Forrest Gump magic). Part of what makes Here so interesting is how spare McGuire’s writing is, just a word or occasionally a sentence, usually juxtaposed with different times to create a sort of echo, where the words in one moment sort of apply to other times, too.
But again, the film version of Here isn’t about narrative experimentation, and the visual experimentation seems limited to bringing back Tom Hanks’ look from The Burbs. The more true-to-form version of Here as a cinematic experience is probably something like David Lowery’s exceptional A Ghost Story, which ponders time from one fixed position in space. A Ghost Story is more lyrical than narrative, though, and not the kind of broadly appealing schmaltz Zemeckis is fond of. It’s sort of disheartening to think someone could look at Here and so badly misunderstand it, and I really hope this is just a case of a bad trailer, of some editor somewhere tasked with making an unusual film understandable in less than two minutes.
If Here really is a time-lapse movie with a lot of de-aging, I will be so sad, and also ever more determined that no one should ever adapt House of Leaves, a deeply weird and unique book. Some things exist just how they should. Not everything needs to be a movie.
