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Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods
Jan. 28th, 2011 11:10 pmJust back from seeing the documentary Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods at ACMI.
Morrison is a Scottish comic book writer. Along with Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, he was part of the British Invasion in the '90s, when DC Comics went to the UK to hire strange new talent to reinvent their old superheroes.
Morrison's most famous work is probably The Invisibles, a sprawling psychedelic epic about occult terrorists fighting an insurgency against the soul-crushing powers that rule this world. It's full of sex, it's full of drugs, and it's full of magic.
Magic is a big deal with Morrison. He's been a practicing magician since the age of 19. He talks about it a lot in the documentary, and he talks about it in a very pragmatic, down to earth way. He does it, he says, because it works. Try it. See if it works for you.
Inspired by The Invisibles, lot of my friends did. I dabbled a bit too. My experiments were not failures. Failure would be "nothing happened". My results were hideous anti-successes: I'd work a tiny little ritual, and afterwards I'd be plunged into suffocatingly bleak moods, I'd get sick, and my life would go to shit.
Coincidence? Probably. But needless to say, I stopped.
I never really believed in magic, anyway. I could justify it to myself as a sort of Applied Jungian Psychology, concrete poetry, motivational therapy for the weird. But in my core of cores, I'm a scientific rationalist. I tried it. It didn't work. Move on.
So it was strange to find myself in the cinema, listening to Morrison explain his approach to the occult, and thinking Maybe... He's charismatic, is Grant Morrison. Not in a showy, salesman fashion. He's just honest, and enthusiastic, and a bit self-deprecating.
The other theme running through the documentary was Morrison's ideas on superheroes. Morrison rose to fame while comics were going through their "dark and gritty" phase, where angst and violence were emphasised as being more realistic. But why would you want to drag superheroes down to the real world? Morrison would rather take the opposite approach: raising the real world up to the ideals of comics. He talked about a "shamanic experience" he had writing Superman, where he interviewed a fan dressed as the Man of Steel, who answered all of his questions completely in character.
That perhaps is the essence of Morrison's magic: merging fiction and reality, using each to create the other.
I came out of the cinema just as the sun was setting beside the Flinders St Station clock tower. The sun was vast, blinding. I couldn't look at it. I couldn't look away. The whole city was engulfed in fire.
I was feeling... weird. Upset. Fragile. Something about the documentary had touched a nerve inside me, and it was stinging. I'd been elated in the cinema. But outside, all my self-doubts as a writer hit me hard.
I caught the tram past my usual stop, and got off at Burnley Oval. I needed to be outside, to walk on the earth to ground myself again. Children were running over the freshly cut grass. At the far end of the park, a Citipower technician was working on an electricity pole. He was taking down the old and damaged power line, and installing one that was new.
Symbolic?
Who knows.
If you're interested in comics, or creativity, or eccentric Scotsmen, Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods is well worth watching. Tonight's screening was the only scheduled cinema screening in Australia, organised by the crew of the NonCanonical comics podcast. You can buy the DVD at comic-book stores, though, or from Amazon.
Morrison is a Scottish comic book writer. Along with Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, he was part of the British Invasion in the '90s, when DC Comics went to the UK to hire strange new talent to reinvent their old superheroes.
Morrison's most famous work is probably The Invisibles, a sprawling psychedelic epic about occult terrorists fighting an insurgency against the soul-crushing powers that rule this world. It's full of sex, it's full of drugs, and it's full of magic.
Magic is a big deal with Morrison. He's been a practicing magician since the age of 19. He talks about it a lot in the documentary, and he talks about it in a very pragmatic, down to earth way. He does it, he says, because it works. Try it. See if it works for you.
Inspired by The Invisibles, lot of my friends did. I dabbled a bit too. My experiments were not failures. Failure would be "nothing happened". My results were hideous anti-successes: I'd work a tiny little ritual, and afterwards I'd be plunged into suffocatingly bleak moods, I'd get sick, and my life would go to shit.
Coincidence? Probably. But needless to say, I stopped.
I never really believed in magic, anyway. I could justify it to myself as a sort of Applied Jungian Psychology, concrete poetry, motivational therapy for the weird. But in my core of cores, I'm a scientific rationalist. I tried it. It didn't work. Move on.
So it was strange to find myself in the cinema, listening to Morrison explain his approach to the occult, and thinking Maybe... He's charismatic, is Grant Morrison. Not in a showy, salesman fashion. He's just honest, and enthusiastic, and a bit self-deprecating.
The other theme running through the documentary was Morrison's ideas on superheroes. Morrison rose to fame while comics were going through their "dark and gritty" phase, where angst and violence were emphasised as being more realistic. But why would you want to drag superheroes down to the real world? Morrison would rather take the opposite approach: raising the real world up to the ideals of comics. He talked about a "shamanic experience" he had writing Superman, where he interviewed a fan dressed as the Man of Steel, who answered all of his questions completely in character.
That perhaps is the essence of Morrison's magic: merging fiction and reality, using each to create the other.
I came out of the cinema just as the sun was setting beside the Flinders St Station clock tower. The sun was vast, blinding. I couldn't look at it. I couldn't look away. The whole city was engulfed in fire.
I was feeling... weird. Upset. Fragile. Something about the documentary had touched a nerve inside me, and it was stinging. I'd been elated in the cinema. But outside, all my self-doubts as a writer hit me hard.
I caught the tram past my usual stop, and got off at Burnley Oval. I needed to be outside, to walk on the earth to ground myself again. Children were running over the freshly cut grass. At the far end of the park, a Citipower technician was working on an electricity pole. He was taking down the old and damaged power line, and installing one that was new.
Symbolic?
Who knows.
If you're interested in comics, or creativity, or eccentric Scotsmen, Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods is well worth watching. Tonight's screening was the only scheduled cinema screening in Australia, organised by the crew of the NonCanonical comics podcast. You can buy the DVD at comic-book stores, though, or from Amazon.
