Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
A charming fairy-land of playfulness, whimsy and possibility, and the interior of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a richly realized, imaginatively produced meditation on art, creativity and irrationality, and how those unpredictable, untameable, wild qualities can be used to make a lot of money. In this regard it is a summation not only of Tim Burton’s career but of the movie business in general.
Early on in the movie, a story is told about Willy Wonka building a chocolate palace for a vain Indian prince. Wonka warns the prince that the palace won’t last, but the prince disdains his advice; eat his beautiful palace? The idea is absurd. Sure enough, the palace melts and the prince is left with nothing. This anecdote sets the tone for the rest of the story — Wonka built the palace to be consumed and destroyed, but the prince wants it to stand as a tribute to his own extravagance. Wonka knows that the power of his art lies in the fact that it will not, cannot last; the prince demands that the art last forever.
Charlie wants to get one of the golden tickets that will admit him entrance to the mysterious, magical factory — that is, he wants access to the creative center, the act of creation. A budding artist himself (he’s built a model of the factory out of deformed toothpaste caps), he seeks the locus of inspiration. Since Charlie is a desperately poor child, how shall he obtain this ticket?
The other children get their tickets through a variety of methods: Augustus Gloop gets his because he naturally eats a great deal of chocolate, Veruca Salt forces her father to enslave his factory workers into unwrapping millions of chocolate bars, Violet Beauregard gets hers seemingly through blind determination to win, and Mike Teevee gets his through “cracking the code,” using a complicated formula to determine where the next golden ticket might appear. Of these approaches, Augustus’s seems to be the most innocent and related to the natural function of chocolate (that is, to be eaten); Augustus’s problem seems to be that he enjoys his natural state a little too much.
How shall Charlie get his ticket? His parents buy him a bar for his birthday, but there is no ticket there. So parental love, generosity, legacy, inheritance — those won’t get Charlie what he wants. His grandfather gives him money from a secret stash, his last money in the world, to go buy a bar, but that bar contains no ticket either. So faith and lack of caution won’t work either. No, Charlie gets his golden ticket through sheer dumb luck — he finds a ten-dollar bill in the street (in England, but let’s set that aside for now), and buys a bar from the first newsstand he comes to. He uses no system and has no determination — he’s not a “special child,” he is not blessed. As Willy Wonka says when he meets Charlie, “Well, you’re just lucky to be here, aren’t you?”
After getting his golden ticket, after achieving his entry into the heart of inspiration, Charlie is tempted to sell out. His family, he reasons, could get thousands of dollars for the ticket, he shouldn’t be so foolish as to trade a day of inspiration for months of sustanence. His grandpa George sets him straight, tells him that money is the most common thing there is, they’re always printing more of it, but the golden ticket is rare and precious, almost unique, and so Charlie narrowly avoids losing his inspiration for something as banal as comfort.
The first stop on the tour is Wonka’s own center of creation itself, a virtual Garden of Eden of candy (the Eden parallel made explicit by Violet greedily snatching a candy apple off a tree — and lest we forget, “inspiration” means to have God breathe into you). Wonka, like God, invites the children to eat anything they want with one exception. Set free in Eden, Mike Teevee destroys as his father (who bears an uncanny resemblance to renowned subway vigilante Bernard Goetz) looks on helplessly and Mrs. Gloop is seen stealing what is being given away for free. Augustus breaks the one rule set down and gets expelled from Eden.
This is the third time I’ve watched the movie, but only the first time Johnny Depp’s performance made any sense to me. This time around, I was struck by when his speech is fluid, when he has trouble expressing himself and when he actually must rely on pre-printed cheat-sheets to say something. Since Wonka makes and sells candy for a living, it is assumed that he is a wholesome, child-friendly man, but of course nothing could be further from the truth.
The imitation “Small World” robot puppet number, meant to herald the arrival of Wonka, backfires and melts down as it invites the guests into the factory. It’s an imitation “Small World” number because Wonka is trying to match his public image as a children’s entertainer, a la Walt Disney. It melts down because it cannot disguise the fact that he is not. It’s notable for being an introduction to a character who, of course, turns out to not be part of the introduction. Wonka is happy to put on the show, but it does not occur to him that he would actually be introduced by his own introduction. That would make too much sense, and Wonka is not capable of making sense.
Little Wonka says makes sense in any practical sense of the term, and that is of course the point, or rather the pointlessness. (“Why is everything in this factory completely pointless?” complains Mike Teevee. “Candy doesn’t have to have a point,” answers Charlie, “that’s why it’s candy.”) I am reminded of conversations I’ve had with artists where I’ve tried to get them to give up the secrets of their work. They can rarely explain why they chose one concept over another, get vague and visibly uncomfortable when pressed, and either completely shut down (as Wonka does several times in this movie) or else start reciting reams of incomprehensible theory they remember from art school (which is what Wonka has the cheat-sheets for). Wonka doesn’t have a scheme or a formula or a plan; he just is.
(The most controversial aspect of the movie is its attempt to “explain” Wonka, which Burton and Depp put over in the most ironic, eye-rolling terms possible. “Okay,” they seem to be saying, “we’ll give you ‘meaning,’ but we’re not going to mean it.”)
Several things in the movie stick out amid the elaborate production design and the sumptuous photography. First is the performance of Deep Roy as every Oompa-Loompa in the movie, which is both a triumph of special effects and a triumph of acting, insofar as one quickly accepts the idea of thousands of Oompa-Loompas living in the factory and quickly forgets the fact that they’re all being played by the same guy. Second is the makeup, which seemingly transforms several of the characters into something a little more than plastic and a little less than human. Third is the trained squirrels, another special-effects triumph and the result of thousands of hours of squirrel training.
A couple of winters ago, the artist Christo finally got to install his “Gates” project in Central Park for two weeks in February. He had been trying to get it installed since 1979 and finally succeeded in 2005. There was a great deal of resistance to the project (over 25 years of resistance, in fact), both before it was put up and afterwards. I remember walking through Central Park amid the gorgeous, inspiring, completely pointless saffron banners, and being accosted by a total stranger, an older man who was furious, furious that this artwork had been put up. “Why couldn’t they use the money for something useful?” he demanded to know, from me, for some reason. To which I said “What does it matter? It was his money, he can do what he wants with it.” “Yes,” said the man, “But we have to pay for it!” To which I said “But we don’t have to pay for it. Christo used his own money to put it up, paid all the workers to maintain it, and will pay to have it taken down. In addition, he’ll pay to have the park restored to its previous condition and make a large donation to the Central Park Conservancy. In addtion, the tourists coming into the city to see the piece will bring more money in, so not only are we not paying for it, we’re in fact making money off it.” But the man would not be placated. He knew, he knew that Christo had to be making a fool out him somehow, that there had to be some kind of a scam to it, one doesn’t just spend millions of dollars on something as pointless as, as this.
I walked on through the park and came to the Sheep Meadow, where hundreds of New Yorkers and tourists roamed in a state of weird, elevated giddiness. The park had been transformed into a wild playground of irrationality; the Gates, finally, didn’t “mean” anything at all. If anything, they removed meaning from the park; they were a meaningless hoot, a shout of joy in the chill February air (I wonder if it’s symbolic that Charlie visits Wonka’s factory on February 1st, literally the middle of winter). Three years after 9/11, New Yorkers defied depression with an embrace of the exuberantly irrational. Like the palace Wonka made for the Indian prince, “The Gates” didn’t last long, by design. If it had stayed around forever, or had been brought back for an encore, it would defeat the purpose of the piece, which is to be transitory and as sensual as a bite of chocolate. To keep “The Gates” around would be to want to have one’s cake and eat it too.
Low-lifes and little girls: Paper Moon and Little Miss Marker
Two Depression-era comedies made seven years apart (Paper Moon 1973, Little Miss Marker 1980), with the same setup — a man living on the outskirts of the law has an orphaned little girl thrust into his life. Here is an object lesson about how to do a thing and how not to do a thing.
Peter Bogdanovich was a young man when he made Paper Moon, it was his third film (after the luminous Last Picture Show and the delightful What’s Up, Doc?). Walter Bernstein was not a young man when he made Little Miss Marker, and although he was a hugely accomplished, well-respected screenwriter at the time, this was his first (and only) theatrical feature.
Essentially, everything Paper Moon does right, Little Miss Marker does wrong. Paper Moon is acutely observed, stark and heartfelt while Little Miss Marker is shallow, limp and sentimental.
Little Miss Marker should have everything going for it — a classic, cast-iron story (by Damon Runyon) that had already been filmed twice before (in 1934 with Adolphe Menjou and Shirley Temple and in 1949 [as Sorrowful Jones] with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball), a heavyweight, almost Wilderesque cast (Walter Matthau, Tony Curtis, Julie Andrews), a budget big enough to create the streets of New York on the Universal lot. In contrast, Paper Moon is based on a relatively obscure novel, has a decidedly lightweight lead (Ryan O’Neal), and a series of bleak Kansas locations.
Plot: Paper Moon is a road picture. The little girl’s mother has died, and her probable father, a drifting grifter, is given the task of getting the little girl to a “respectable” home in the next state. He tries to get rid of her but she won’t be put off. They embark on a life of petty crime together on their journey across the Midwest. Little Miss Marker is an “urban” comedy, where a gambler leaves his little girl with his bookie, then goes off and kills himself, leaving the hard-bitten, cynical bookie to care for her. He gets involved in a B-story that has nothing to do with the little girl and a romance that has nothing to do with the B-story. All the plot lines come to an end but do not all come together.
Photography and sets: Paper Moon is shot in gritty, high-contrast black and white, which makes this 70s comedy look like a John Ford picture and also lends a great deal of gravitas to his genial, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Californian leads. Its location exteriors are all authentically weathered and withered, its interiors are spare and bleak. It’s a movie about a nation with no money and it shows in every aspect of the production design. Little Miss Marker, on the other hand, is shot in pretty, high-key general lighting, intended to make the movie a happy escape into a simpler time, but which now makes it look like 60s television or a filmed play, shot on backlot sets that look desperately back-lot; every street ends in a T, pavement is flat and even, grime is painted on in pretty, even coats.
Music: Paper Moon has no score; it uses occasional period songs to set its time and underscore the emotional terrain. Little Miss Marker has a cutesy-pie fake-“thirties” score by Henry Mancini, intended to evoke nostalgia but serving only to move the story into a kind of fairy-story Depression where colorful characters talked like wise guys and nothing bad really ever happened.
Casting: Paper Moon, as noted above, would seem to be the movie at a loss here. Who is going to play a better low-life, Walter Matthau or Ryan O’Neal? And yet, Matthau’s performance in Little Miss Marker is mannered, labored and fussy while O’Neal’s, although insubstantial, is breezy and blithe, it breathes and connects on a more human level. The cast of Paper Moon is filled with picture-perfect unknowns, while Little Miss Marker has a miscast Bob Newhart, an overplayed Brian Dennehy, a stiff Kenneth McMillan and a mugging Tony Curtis.
The Little Girl: Paper Moon, of course, cast 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal as the little girl and she won an Oscar for her work, which, although not as genuine as, say, anything from Dakota Fanning, is still winning and affecting. Little Miss Marker, on the other hand, seems to have picked a six-year-old from the “Adorable Moppet” bin and left it at that.
The Dame: there’s always a Dame, of course, and here’s perhaps where the real difference in the movies appears. In Little Miss Marker, the adorable moppet brings together Walter Matthau, the heartless curmudgeon, and Julie Andrews, a fallen society lady, to replace the family she has lost. The romance between Matthau and Andrews makes no sense and feels completely forced, and the movie ends with both of them giving up their wicked ways for the good of the child. In Paper Moon, on the other hand, Ryan O’Neal falls in lust with a giggling, insincere whore (Madeleine Kahn), and the little girl spends the second act of the movie trying to break up their romance because she’s cutting into their grifting time.
Script: Damon Runyon, one of the most instantly identifiable writers in American literature, has never been captured well on film. Like Mamet, he has a clear, definite dialogue style, one demanding committed actors capable of breathing life into his heavily stylized rhythms. Matthau tries to do so but can’t, Curtis and Newhart don’t even try, and Andrews’ dialogue has been written to completely ignore the issue. The affectionate view of gamblers and gangsters that Runyon wrote is made cartoonish, silly and harmless here; the result is a plastic, fake Runyon that doesn’t evoke Guys and Dolls, much less the New York of the 1930s. Meanwhile, Paper Moon, while slightly episodic and far from “realistic,” nevertheless teems with authenticity and well-observed details of daily life.
At the end of Paper Moon, the man makes good on his promise and delivers the little girl to her “respectable” home. The little girl takes one look around and high-tails it out of there; she realizes that a house is not a home and respectability is not fulfillment. And in a phiosophical sense, she sees that life is not a destination you arrive at, it is a journey you take. At the end of Little Miss Marker, the gambler and the fallen sophisticate get married for no reason at all and, although both are middle-aged and broke, decide to “go straight” for the sake of the little girl (whom no one asks, and who seems to be perfectly content to play cards, pick pockets and bet on horses for money). Paper Moon disdains conclusion and becomes evocative and moving, Little Miss Marker ties everything up in a neat bow and evaporates before the credits have run.
Todd’s Oscar picks
Note: although I am a member of the Writer’s Guild, I am not a member of the Academy. I’m just a guesser like anybody.
Further, note that I have never won an Oscar pool in my life. If you want to know who is going to win at the Oscars, ask Mrs. James urbaniak. She has won every Oscar pool I’ve ever entered.
Performance by an actor in a leading role
Leonardo DiCaprio – BLOOD DIAMOND
Ryan Gosling – HALF NELSON
Peter O’Toole – VENUS
Will Smith – THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS
Forest Whitaker – THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND
I actually haven’t seen any of these movies. I’m going to say Forest Whitaker, because the trailer for Venus set my teeth on edge.
Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Alan Arkin – LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Jackie Earle Haley – LITTLE CHILDREN
Djimon Hounsou – BLOOD DIAMOND
Eddie Murphy – DREAMGIRLS
Mark Wahlberg – THE DEPARTED
A strong field, but Eddie Murphy is due. He is one of our greatest actors and a national treasure. I am astonished he was not nominated for The Nutty Professor.
Performance by an actress in a leading role
Penélope Cruz – VOLVER
Judi Dench – NOTES ON A SCANDAL
Helen Mirren – THE QUEEN
Meryl Streep – THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA
Kate Winslet – LITTLE CHILDREN
These are all extraordinary performances. I wish Cate Blanchett was in this category so we could have three Queen Elizabeths fighting against each other.
Everyone is saying Helen Mirren is going to win it, but I preferred Meryl Streep’s performance. She was astonishing in that movie.
Performance by an actress in a supporting role
Adriana Barraza – BABEL
Cate Blanchett – NOTES ON A SCANDAL
Abigail Breslin – LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Jennifer Hudson – DREAMGIRLS
Rinko Kikuchi – BABEL
I’m baffled by Cate Blanchett in this category — she’s easily the co-lead in Notes, and extraordinary as always, easily the most gifted actress of her generation. Abigail Breslin gives one of several excellent kid performances of the year. But Jennifer Hudson is the walk-away favorite here.
Best animated feature film of the year
CARS
HAPPY FEET
MONSTER HOUSE
Happy Feet, although it gets weighted down with a “message” in Act III, is by far the best animated film of the year. Utterly original in a year of achingly similar talking-animal movies, character design that is authentic and subtle without sacrificing kid appeal, an organic, felt storyline instead of a forced, programmatic formula, and living, breathing characters.
Achievement in art direction
DREAMGIRLS
THE GOOD SHEPHERD
PAN’S LABYRINTH
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST
THE PRESTIGE
Dreamgirls.
Achievement in cinematography
THE BLACK DAHLIA
CHILDREN OF MEN
THE ILLUSIONIST
PAN’S LABYRINTH
THE PRESTIGE
All of these movies are really well shot. Children of Men has two sequences which count as two of the most jaw-dropping action sequences ever shot, but I’ll say Pan’s Labyrinth.
Achievement in costume design
CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA
DREAMGIRLS
MARIE ANTOINETTE
THE QUEEN
Dreamgirls.
Achievement in directing
BABEL
THE DEPARTED
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
THE QUEEN
UNITED 93
Has to be Scorsese. Has to be. Babel and Iwo Jima feel like homework, The Queen feels too performance driven, United 93, while amazingly directed, far too painful to sit through. Has to be Scorsese.
Best documentary feature
DELIVER US FROM EVIL
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS
JESUS CAMP
MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY
Inconvenient Truth. They can’t pass it up. Plus I don’t think any of the others are about the Holocaust.
Best documentary short subject
THE BLOOD OF YINGZHOU DISTRICT
RECYCLED LIFE
REHEARSING A DREAM
TWO HANDS
No idea.
Achievement in film editing
BABEL
BLOOD DIAMOND
CHILDREN OF MEN
THE DEPARTED
UNITED 93
I’m going to say United 93.
Best foreign language film of the year
AFTER THE WEDDING
DAYS OF GLORY (INDIGÈNES)
THE LIVES OF OTHERS
PAN’S LABYRINTH
WATER
Oh, Pan’s Labyrinth. Definitely.
Achievement in makeup
APOCALYPTO
CLICK
PAN’S LABYRINTH
The makeup in Apocalypto is quite an achievement, but I don’t think the Academy can give it an award. And if they can’t give it to Apocalypto, they can’t give it to an Adam Sandler movie. A lot of the makeup effects in Pan’s Labyrinth are computer generated, but I still say it will win.
Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)
BABEL
THE GOOD GERMAN
NOTES ON A SCANDAL
PAN’S LABYRINTH
THE QUEEN
I’m going to say Notes on a Scandal, only because it’s by my favorite living composer, Philip Glass, and I want to see him win.
Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song)
“I Need to Wake Up” – AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
“Listen” – DREAMGIRLS
“Love You I Do” – DREAMGIRLS
“Our Town” – CARS
“Patience” – DREAMGIRLS
I’m going to say one of the songs from Dreamgirls. But I could be wrong.
Best motion picture of the year
BABEL
THE DEPARTED
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
THE QUEEN
Has to be The Departed. The other ones on this list don’t even come close.
Best animated short film
THE DANISH POET
LIFTED
THE LITTLE MATCHGIRL
MAESTRO
NO TIME FOR NUTS
Not a clue.
Best live action short film
BINTA AND THE GREAT IDEA (BINTA Y LA GRAN IDEA)
ÉRAMOS POCOS (ONE TOO MANY)
HELMER & SON
THE SAVIOUR
WEST BANK STORY
West Bank Story. (It’s about Israel, right?)
Achievement in sound editing
APOCALYPTO
BLOOD DIAMOND
FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST
Hmmm — a toss up. I’m going to say Flags, just because that’s the only one where I remember being impressed by the sound effects editing. (Last time I used this logic was for Dances With Wolves, and I was right then too.)
Achievement in sound mixing
APOCALYPTO
BLOOD DIAMOND
DREAMGIRLS
FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST
Dreamgirls.
Achievement in visual effects
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST
POSEIDON
SUPERMAN RETURNS
Pirates. Bill Nighy with an octopus on his face is, hands down, the greatest, most sophisticated, most successful, most daring visual effect of the year.
Adapted screenplay
BORAT CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN
CHILDREN OF MEN
THE DEPARTED
LITTLE CHILDREN
NOTES ON A SCANDAL
Not sure what makes Borat an “adapted screenplay,” but whatever. Little Children is the best screenplay of the year.
Original screenplay
BABEL
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
PAN’S LABYRINTH
THE QUEEN
Gosh. I’m actually going to say Little Miss Sunshine, only because I don’t think they’ll give it to Pan’s Labyrinth. Plus, Little Miss Sunshine was, you know, this year’s “little movie that could,” and otherwise won’t win anything.
There you go. And remember, I’m always wrong about these things.
Kit’s corner
It’s not my intention to turn this journal into a “kids art” blog, but I would be remiss if I didn’t include some drawings by my daughter Kit (4). Kit does not have her older brother Sam’s single-minded, monomaniacal drive regarding superheroes, but she does have a healthy interest in them, leavened by interests in other things, like, say, Maisy, Speed Racer, Tom and Jerry, Polly Pocket and so forth.
Above are two of her drawings, of Wonder Woman (with her tiara) and Cinderella (with her beehive and bow). The thick black line sticking out of WW’s head is her hair — Kit doesn’t quite get the whole gravity thing yet. And Cinderella’s hands are not on fire; those are her fingers.
Avengers Defeat Galactus!
This was the scene early yesterday morning in Sam’s bedroom, where one of the most fearsome titans in the universe was soundly defeated by the Avengers, aided by members of the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. Ben Grimm stood proudly upon the stomach of the fallen giant and surveyed the scene with a calm wisdom while Iceman, Spider-Man, Logan and Bishop covered the lower half of this seemingly unbeatable foe.
The Hulk stomped out the eyes of the intergalatic plunderer and gave a triumphant roar of “Hulk smash!” while Professor Reed Richards plunged his elastic arm deep within Galactus’s ear to scramble his brains.
Among the fallen was a collection of villains formidable in their own rights, but puny mortals compared to the immense, god-like Galactus. Left to right: Sabretooth, Magneto, Dr. Doom (his gun still clutched in his cold, dead hand), Dr. Octopus and Juggernaut.
Iron Man was unable to participate in the attack on the supervillains, as he was out of scale. He had to be content with providing moral support from the headboard.
Sam’s cosmology
The pantheon. Click for much larger view.
As we see, the Justice League takes up the top shelf, as befitting their status as supreme beings. The order of the seven is taken from Justice League publicity materials, which always order them in this way.
But then, curiously, the Justice Lords (the evil Justice League from an alternate time-stream) are placed on the same shelf, and in the same order (minus Justice Lord Flash [or Reverse Flash], who is not featured as a member of the Justice Lords proper [except for the false Justice Lords generated by the Luthor/Brainiac monster]).
Below the Justice League are the second-tier Leaguers: Plastic Man (a custom job bought on eBay), Vixen (posed below her current boyfriend, Green Lantern) Shining Knight (who should be posed beside Vigilante, who has not yet been acquired), Black Lightning and Isis (two more eBay custom jobs), Robin (Robin? The hell is he doing here?), Atom Smasher (the lone Justice Leaguer who claims Jewishness as part of his identity in this otherwise areligious team), Green Arrow (mysteriously, not posed next to Black Canary), Aquaman (note that the Aquaman posed here is the one without the cape; this is the real Aquaman), Batgirl (partially obscured) (Batgirl?!), Huntress, Atom, Red Tornado, Hawk, Dove, Metamorpho and Zatanna.
(Sam is loath to place one character in front of the other — they are all equal [on their shelves] to each other. It pained him to place Aquaman in front of Batgirl but he was forced to due to space considerations.)
Then, we have the third-stringers, or supporting characters: Supergirl (whom I would have placed in the second tier), Orion, Black Canary (another second-level hero, imho), Starman, Booster Gold (a third-shelfer, even though he has his own episode of JLU, Elongated Man (yes, the official Elongated Man is trumped by a custom Plastic Man, as he should be), Nightwing (Nightwing?) Steel, Wildcat, Waverider, Dr. Light (that’s Dr. Light II, not the rapist of Elongated Man’s wife), Aztek, Dr. Fate, Rocket Red, The Creeper.
I do not know what system Sam uses to rank these figures. Black Lightning is a second-shelfer, even though Sam knows very little about him and has not seen him featured on the show, and while he’s never seen a Plastic Man comic and he is not featured on any of the Justice League shows, Sam somehow understands thathe outranks Elongated Man (comics fans, of course, know that Plastic Man did not begin his life as a DC hero, he was purchased from another publisher; Elongated Man was the pale imitation DC cooked up so they could have their own stretchy guy). Isis has never been featured on the show or even in the tie-in comics; Red Tornado he finds compelling enough to put on the second shelf, even though the character only has the most passing moments on the show. Robin, Nightwing and Batgirl get included, even though they are not part of the League (and are presumably either off with the Teen Titans or guarding Gotham City, dating Bruce Wayne (Batgirl only) (I think) and growing old while waiting for Terry McGuiness to take up the Batman mantle). (And before anyone starts complaining about Robin and Nightwing being featured at the same time, the Robin featured here is Tim Drake, not Dick Grayson.) The Green Lantern Corps (Katma Tui, Kyle Raynor, Arkkis Chummuck, Tomar Re, Kilowog), although they dominate several key episodes, currently reside in a bench on the other side of the room (presumably the bench is the same relative distance from the shelf as Oa is to Earth). Vixen is posed beneath Green Lantern, but Zatanna is not posed beneath Batman, although they have been romantically linked.
The underworld. Click for much larger view.
On the bottom shelf, crammed together, we have the villains, with the most powerful in the center, growing less powerful (or relevant) as we move to the edges. Thus, Lex Luthor, Joker and Brainiac take center stage (with the Very Tall Darkseid, Doomsday and Bane behind), flanked by Poison Ivy, Amazo, Mr. Freeze and the ultra-lame Copperhead to the left, and Catwoman (seated), Sinestro, Two-Face, Bizarro, Harley Quinn (obscured by Bizarro), and the ultra-lame Mirror Master to the right.
Even casual Justice League viewers will note the preponderance of Batman villains here. Strictly speaking, Joker, Bane, Mr. Freeze, Catwoman, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn shouldn’t be here at all (although some of them put in a brief appearance in a couple of episodes). It is, I’m guessing, their overwhelming importance to the Batman/Gotham City mythos that warrant their inclusion in the Legion of Doom.
I cannot explain Poison Ivy’s outranking of Amazo. The Amazo character in Justice League is one of the key stories of the whole series, second only to the Justice Lords scenario. We even have two other Amazo figures (one gold and one clear, symbolizing different levels of Amazo’s evolution), which have been banished along with the Green Lantern Corps (perhaps for similar thematic reasons — Amazo does, after all, leave Earth when it has nothing more to offer him). Similarly, I cannot explain why Catwoman is seated; Sam is adamant about this point however and has corrected her posture on more than one occasion. The Joker’s distance from Harley can be explained for character reasons (Joker seems to spend half his time distancing himself from Harley) (He’s even gotten Bizarro to hold her off).
Reverse Flash, who until recently lived between Harley Quinn and Mirror Master, now mysteriously resides in a box under the desk.
Justice League vs. God
The Magazine Editor was visiting the other day and conversation turned, as it often does in my house, to the Justice League.
My son Sam (5) is, to say the least, obsessed with the Justice League, an obsession I’ve done little to discourage. He sleeps under a shelf full of Justice League dolls action figures (he has 80 or so, not including the inevitable copies, and also not including the various members of the Green Lantern corps, who, although appearing on Justice League, are not actually members of the Justice League), as well as banks, comic books, encyclopedias, posters, and a wall covered with his own drawings of various members.
TA. I don’t know — I think I might have gone too far with the whole Justice League thing.
TME. Could be worse. You could send him to Sunday school.
(laughter)
TA. I mean, I don’t mind, you know, the intensity of it — and it’s not violent like Batman is violent — but I just worry that he’s watching something that he isn’t really getting. I mean, there are all these moral and ethical concepts in the show that are just too sophisticated for him —
TME. That’s what I mean. It could be worse, you could be sending him to Sunday School.
So be it. Sam likes Justice League because it’s more interesting to him than Superfriends or Magic School Bus (both of which delight his four-year-old sister) and he’s too old for Maisy or Thomas the Tank Engine. Its moral lessons are couched in high drama, well-drawn characters (in every sense of the word) and fluid, exciting, colorful action, more so than any Sunday school class I remember (although the Bible is certainly not lacking in colorful, absorbing, morally complex action stories).
Sam confessed to me the other night:
SAM. Dad?
DAD. Yeah?
SAM. I believe in superheroes.
DAD. Sure.
SAM. No, I mean I really believe in them. I think they’re here, I think they’re hiding, so they can be there if we need them.
Well, okay, he’s five, so I’m not too concerned about him having actual paranoid delusions. If he believes there really is a Superman who is good and strong and (mostly) invulnerable, a vastly powerful being with an unerring sense of right and wrong (or at least a team who will correct him if he’s wrong), if he believes in a collection of smart, quick-witted, eloquent heroes who will help him out when he really needs it and never let him down, well, that’s the message of Justice League, but it’s also the message of Sunday school. And as far as I’m concerned, as far as belief systems go, I would rather have him believe in the brightly-colored pop-culture fantasy of Justice League than in the blood-encrusted gothic tales of organized religion any day.
Batman: The Movie
Seeking some undemanding entertainment the other night, I put on my DVD of 1966’s Batman.
As bad as it is, it seems silly to attack this movie too strongly. It is, after all, a comedy. More than that, it’s not even a movie. It was not meant to compete with, say, Torn Curtain. It’s merely product, a brand extension, designed to increase the value of a television show.
The plot, such as it is, makes no sense and wanders all over the place. This shouldn’t be a problem for a comedy (Horsefeathers has no plot whatsoever but is still pretty damn funny) but still it tests the patience of an intelligent viewer. The characterizations are loud, silly, grating, contradictory and unfaithful to the source material.
For those unaware of this unique cultural artifact, the plot goes like this: Catwoman, The Joker, The Penguin and The Riddler have conspired to kidnap Commodore Schmidlapp, who, in addition to running a distillery, is the the inventor of a gizmo that can instantly dehydrate people. The bad guys use the device to turn the UN United World Security Council into piles of colored dust. Before they do that, they spend an entire act screwing around with an attempt to kill Batman by kidnapping Bruce Wayne. Catwoman, who is normally a cat-burglar (hence her name), is here turned into a master of disguise, pretending to be a Russian journalist. The Penguin, normally concerned with bird-related crimes, here pilots a penguin-painted submarine and also briefly becomes a master of disguise. The Riddler, being The Riddler, is compelled to give away all their plans with his clues. The Joker is given nothing to do; in retaliation, Cesar Romero has refused to shave his mustache, clearly visible under his clown-white makeup.
The tone veers from genial camp to bizarre, psychedelic comedy. Adam West, looking like the young Harrison Ford (or maybe Dennis Quaid) plays Batman with a keen edge of ironic seriousness. The villains suffer from the same problem as the heroes in Superfriends; they have no characters to play, only a clutch of symptoms. The Batman of Batman: The Movie is not one to brood in a cave between illegal bursts of vigilante activities; this Batman takes place entirely in broad daylight. Batman holds press conferences at police headquarters, trots down the street in crowded lunch-hour traffic and punches a shark while dangling from a ladder. Far from being the world’s greatest detective, this Batman is an easily-fooled dolt who blunders from clue to clue, solving crimes almost by accident.
The climax of the movie, which involves Batman intoning a solemn prayer for peace and the future while holding a garden hose, is almost worth sitting through the rest of the movie.
This evening, my son Sam (5) found the DVD sitting out and asked to watch it. I warned him that it was not the Batman he’s used to, that there would be no swell animation, that this Batman would not be grumpy and sullen, that he walks around in public in broad daylight, that the whole movie was kind of silly, but he was still game.
Enthralled.
I remember when I was a kid taking Batman seriously, but that was a long time ago (I was exactly the same age as Sam is when it first came on TV). Sam has never shown interest in live-action versions of his favorite cartoon stars; the George Reeves Superman got a thumbs-down, and while he’s curious about Superman Returns, he hasn’t pushed to see it.
Tonight he was so caught up in Batman: The Movie that he needed company while watching it. Not to make sense of the plot (which is impossible anyway) but to verify the fact that it was actually happening. He was transported, stunned, horrified, confused (unsurprisingly), intrigued, and held in the grip of suffocating suspense.
While the tone of blithe camp escaped him (the dehydrated pirates were a source of genuine anxiety), he got the broader jokes, such as when Batman can’t get rid of a large, round bomb on a crowded pier and pines "Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!" or the Bat-copter crashing, fortuitously, atop a mountain of foam rubber. He asked if there were more Batman movies like this one. I said "Sam, there are, literally, dozens of Batman movies like this one," which delivered to his cerebral cortex a vision of heaven. (Why are those episodes not available on DVD? I assume a rights issue, as the characters are owned by WB and the series was produced by Fox.)
Sam disagrees with my assertion that the Joker does nothing ("No! He zaps those guys with the dehydrating gun!") but he does not approve of Cesar Romero at all. He totally bought the obviously-rubber exploding shark, and its cousin the non-exploding exploding octopus. He liked the penguin submarine and all the bat-machines. When asked what his favorite things in the movie were, he correctly answered "Catwoman and the Batmobile."
Mouths of babes.
Superfriends vs. Justice League
When a child first sees a cool new superhero, the first question is usually “What does he do?”
This is a fitting query regarding characters of action, but it is no way to structure a TV show. And yet, it is seemingly how the producers approached the structure of Superfriends. In contrast, the producers of Justice League took the “What does he do?” question for granted and instead asked the far more important question “Who is he?” The characters in Justice League are individuals with points of view, motivations and personalities, the characters in Superfriends are merely agglomerations of abilities.
The cape is not the man, and this, I opine, is the basis of why Justice League will be treasured for generations to come while Superfriends will always be regarded as a camp classic fit only for the simple.
In Superfriends, Batman has a computer and a cave full of gadgets, Wonder Woman has a magic rope and an invisible plane, Green Lantern has a magic ring, Flash is fast, Superman has his multitudinous powers, Aquaman talks to fish. Those are all fine attributes, but they do not, in and of themselves, constitute character. If all that mattered was the number of powers, Martian Manhunter would be a more popular superhero than Superman. What the producers of Superfriends chose to do is give all their heroes the exact same personality, whether they are the Last Son of Krypton, the Dark Knight, the Amazon Princess or The Guy Who Talks to Fish. The heroes of Superfriends are uniformly game, brave, chipper, chatty, easily startled and, paradoxically, unflappable. No sooner do they exclaim “Great Krypton/Hera/Gotham/Neptune!” than they pull some improbable solution out of the air and calmly implement it (as Seanbaby mentions, this solution often involves “spinning around” the bad guy/explosion/missile/lava/monster/lava-monster until the spinning affects it somehow). This conceptual blunder, not the dumb plots or the cheap animation, is why Superfriends is so reviled. Television can soar on dumb plots and cheap animation, it cannot survive without characters. This is why episodes of Superfriends feel so shallow, repetitive and lame; there are seven main characters and they all think and act exactly the same way. Think about it: Hanna-Barbera actually gave the members of the Justice League less personality than they gave to the members of the Mystery Gang.
Because their protagonists have no personalities (or, if you like, they all have roughly the same personalities as Batman and Robin do on the Adam West Batman show, the source of Superfriends‘ most likely inspiration) there is no dramatic tension in the scripts. That means that the writers must come up with ever-more-improbable, ever-more-lame, ever-more-fantastic, ever-more-bizarre plots of exhausting, spiraling action to put their heroes and their various abilities through their paces. These plots can be wonderful diversions, but they do not constitute drama.
The producers of Justice League, coming from the success of their Batman and Superman animated series’, understood from the beginning that it actually doesn’t matter what a superhero’s abilities are; what matters is who the superhero is.
Take Green Lantern. The beauty of Green Lantern is not that his ring can make anything happen, it’s that his ring can make anything happen within the bounds of his imagination and that that magic is limited to the force of his will-power. Green Lantern is not about a magic ring, it is about Imagination and Will. If the wearer is a dullard, he makes a very poor Green Lantern indeed, and his ring is useless if one can wear down his will. (The creator of Green Lantern borrowed the magic-ring idea from Arabian Nights; the first Green Lantern’s name was originally to be Alan Ladd, off of Aladdin.) Green Lantern’s appeal lies not in his ring, the ring is a tool, like a badge or a gun; Green Lantern’s appeal lies in the personality of the man/woman/space-creature wearing the ring. Like a western or police drama, it’s doesn’t matter that one carries a badge, what matters is who carries the badge. One can be a great policeman, a corrupt policeman, a shy policeman, an incompetent policeman, a sly policeman, a duplicitous policeman. The same principle applies to doctors, lawyers, detectives and space explorers, to name only the most prevalent of TV professions. And yet, in the minds of the producers of Superfriends, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, Jim Rockford and Barnaby Jones are all the exact same person.
In Justice League, what was important to the producers about Wonder Woman is not that she’s super-strong or has a magic rope, but that she’s a princess who has led a coddled, innocent, priviledged life apart from man’s world. The strength and the rope are tools that happen to be sitting around, useful in fighting alien menaces, but the point is that her naive personality and optimistic attitude give rise to drama as she clashes not with bad guys but with Batman’s scowling cynicism or Hawkgirl’s brazen forthrightness (favorite Hawkgirl line: “Less talking, more hitting!”). The producers of Justice League didn’t get around to mentioning that WW’s lasso is a lie-detector until the third season, and even then it was total surprise to WW. What makes Flash work in Justice League is not that he’s fast but that he’s a careless goofball. What makes Batman work is not that he’s a brilliant detective but that he’s bitter, remote and scornful. And, as I’ve mentioned before, what makes Martian Manhunter a different character from Superman is not his powers but his soul. The characters in Justice League aren’t a bunch of superheroes, they are a bunch of people who happen to have super-powers. This seems like an obvious distinction to make, and has been in the comics since their inception, but it never occurred to the producers of Superfriends.
When any seven people are thrown into a high-stakes, high-pressure situation, drama inevitably occurs. While the plot contrivances of Justice League are more carefully, logically and elegantly presented than those of Superfriends, they are not more interesting or believable. A talking gorilla, an evil computer or an alien overlord are of the same narrative value whether they are designed by Alex Toth or Bruce Timm. What keeps Justice League alive is the drama that arises from the clash of personalities responding to the crisis.
Clayface vs. Grey Ghost
Clayface vs. Grey Ghost. Clayface is pictured on the right.
After many months of watching Justice League, Sam (5) abruptly asked to watch “some Batman” today. I got out our old DVD sets of Batman: The Animated Series and asked him which episode he’d like to see. Sam decided the way he usually does, by looking at the pictures on the DVD box, and chose “the one with Clayface.” That would be “Feat of Clay,” the two-part episode introducing the new villain.
I think what he was expecting after a not having seen the show since he was 3 years old was a plot where Clayface wants to do something bad and Batman has to stop him. Instead, this is what he got:
Lucius Fox, an employee of Wayne Enterprises, goes to meet Bruce Wayne in the middle of the night in an abandoned tramway station. Lucius, it seems, has some information on a crooked industrialist named Daggett that he’s turning over to Bruce so that Bruce can give it to the district attorney (which would be Harvey Dent, but that’s another story). Bruce Wayne, however, turns out not to be Bruce Wayne but rather an actor impersonating Bruce Wayne, on the behalf of some gangsters working for this Daggett fellow, who want Lucius dead. This actor turns out to be a Lon-Chaney-style “Man of 1000 Faces” named Matt Hagen. Hagen was in an accident years earlier and sold his soul to this Daggett creep in exchange for a miraculous makeup compound that gives Hagen the ability to fix his scarred face enough to keep working in movies. Trouble is, the makeup is addictive and makes your skin fall apart if you stop using it (a plot that WB would use again, to little effect, in their movie Catwoman, which might as well not have been based on a comic book at all for all it resembled the DC character). Meanwhile, Daggett has gotten tired of Hagen’s unpredictability and puts a hit on him. Daggett’s hit men could easily shoot Hagen, but they decide at the last minute to, instead, dump a beaker full of this magic makeup gunk on his face. The gunk soaks into his skin and affects him on a cellular level, turning Hagen into the hideous Clayface, a monster with the ability to mold his features into any form.
And that’s just Part One.
Setting aside thedarkness of tone and the ugly, brutal quality of the violence, Sam was utterly baffled as to what was going on. As well he might be. He kept turning to me and saying “What’s going on? Where’s Clayface?” (Clayface, indeed, does not even put in an appearance until well into Part Two.) Once Clayface appeared and Batman started pursuing him, he was still confused. “Wait, why is Batman after Clayface? What did Clayface do to Batman?” (Imagine: he’s five years old, yet he already grasps the notion of “probable cause.” A costumed vigilante can’t just pursue a shape-shifting monster merely on a hunch, there are rules!) I tried to explain as simply as I could what was going on, how Batman (that is, Bruce Wayne) isn’t after Clayface per se, he’s after whoever tried to kill Lucius Fox, and that leads him to Hagen (but not before a couple of dead-ends and having to spend the night in jail), and Hagen, after a great deal of angst, embraces his new-found powers as Clayface and uses them, not to commit crimes, but to get even with Daggett, the corrupt industrialist who made him this way. So Batman, by the end of the show, isn’t even fighting Clayface, but trying to help him reintegrate his fractured personality, an issue close to the heart of the 1992 Batman.
It’s impressive how much these early episodes of Batman TAS were real detective shows; there are gangsters and murderers and briefcases full of incriminating evidence and surprising amount of innuendo, references to things unsaid and shady, mysterious moral zones. Characters sometimes have complex, perverse or contridictory motives; you have to really pay attention to follow the plot, even as an adult. Also impressive, after watching so much Justice League, is how dark and painterly the animation is (that is to say, it looks like the Fleischer Superman shorts). Justice League looks like a kids’ show in comparison.
But the darkness and complexity of the plot was a little too much for my little guy to soak in and he needed a pallette-cleanser. He chose “Beware the Grey Ghost,” an episode where Batman teams up with the actor who used to play Bruce Wayne’s favorite costumed crime-fighter, the Grey Ghost, to solve a series of mysterious Grey-Ghost-inspired bombings taking place in Gotham.
This, especially after the scary, sophisticated Clayface two-parter, was right up Sam’s alley. Bruce Wayne watched superhero shows with his dad when he was a kid! Sam was right there. He completely understood who the Grey Ghost was and what he meant to Batman, and it was revealed that Batman has a secret cache of Grey Ghost toys and action figures, you could see the Batman universe snap into sharp focus for him. And when Batman teams up with his childhood hero in order to solve a crime, it was wish-fulfillment on a meta-level.
For Sam’s 45-year-old dad, there was great humor in the episode as well, since Adam West voiced the part of the Grey Ghost and the mad bomber turned out to be a demented toy-collecting manchild played, both in looks and voice, by series producer Bruce W. Timm.
For a bedtime story, it was the new issue of Justice League Unlimited, where B’wana Beast saves the day by punching a giant bee. That was one he could easily wrap his mind around.
For my readers who wonder if I’m ever going to write about a movie made for grownups again, go see the hugely entertaining, compulsively watchable Notes on a Scandal. It features a deft, accomplished script by Patrick Marber, a thunderous, tumultuous score by Philip Glass and a couple of stunning, detailed, utterly lived-in performances from Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.