Earthquake damage — exclusive photos!
As reported earlier, the individual hardest hit by the 5.4 quake‘s ferocity was this 12″ Hawkgirl figurine. The plastic figurine plunged over 15″ off the top of my computer monitor to land in this supine position on some papers. Top-heavy due to her large, unposable wings, she has always been a special risk in times of earthquakes. She is expected to be put back on top of the monitor later today.
Hawkgirl’s longtime companions atop the monitor, 7″ Wonder Woman and 6″ Trinity, were unharmed.
In Sam’s room, the body of a Sandtrooper lies face down on the floor, while a Darth Sidious Pez dispenser collapses nearby. Only the providence of springy, wall-to-wall carpeting saved these 4.5″ toys from possible scuff marks.
The mantises were unharmed.
Earthquake!
Well, boy howdy! Now I can say that I’ve actually lived through a genuine Southern California earthquake.
I was, of course, asleep, but was awoken by a strange shaking sensation. It felt as though one of my children was shaking the bed, trying to get me to wake up. Then, as I came awake, I thought what it felt like was one of the cats perched on the head of the bed, steadying himself before making a big jump to somewhere — if our cats weighed about 100 pounds more than they do.
Then I became aware of a rattling sound, which, were I in a different bed, I would have attributed to the bed frame rattling against the wall. Then I woke up enough to see that it wasn’t the bed frame, it was the framed paintings at the foot of the bed, and they were all swaying back and forth. By the time I was awake enough to register it, it was all over. Dogs in the street barked a little, passers-by laughed and related their tales of minor peril.
I sat up in bed, said “Hey. That was an earthquake,” and called my wife to make sure she and the kids were okay (they were — and at swim class, so, perfect).
I went downstairs to see if anything was broken. Not only was everything not broken, nothing seems to have even fallen down. Bookcases, dishes, tiny little porcelain figurines, everything was intact. Oops, no, wait, there is a casualty — my 12″ Hawkgirl figure fell off her perch on top of my computer monitor — maybe I should start up a funding campaign to stand her back up again.
Venture Bros: Now Museum, Now You Don’t!
What does Jonas Venture, Jr. want? He has founded a museum in his father’s honor, a father he never knew. If I’m not mistaken, he has turned his own home, Spider-Skull Island, into that museum.
Why does Jonas Jr. turn his home into a museum dedicated to his father? I don’t think it’s merely that he worships Jonas Sr (although it’s certainly easier to worship a father who isn’t around — cf Christianity), and I don’t think it’s merely that he wants to stick a knife in Rusty’s side (how appropriate that Jonas Jr lives in the ex-headquarters of the — yikes! — Fraternity of Torment).
I think Jonas, like many of the characters of the Venture universe, yearns for family. Up to this point, he’s kind of been tossed on the scrap-heap of “old Venture characters”, making do on Spider-Skull Island with Sally Impossible and Ned and the Ghost-Pirates and so forth. Having no love toward his brother (whom he tried to kill even before he was born), Jonas reaches out to his missing father to assemble a family from the members of the old Team Venture. This is the point of the museum, is it not? To bring together Colonel Gentleman, the Action Man and the rest, to assemble them for that “impromptu” photo-op, with himself at the center? To, essentially, take his father’s place as the head of the Venture family.
Jonas Jr’s gesture brings up questions the purpose of organizations like Team Venture, organizations like the Fraternity of Torment, and the real-life counterparts of those organizations (the CIA, the Marines, the Navy SEALS, the Mafia — any organization that presents itself, first and foremost, as a “fraternity”). Jonas Sr has no wife that we’ve seen so far, and is enormously absent with regards to his young son Rusty (his glib, facetious confession to Dick Cavett notwithstanding). Jonas Sr, no doubt, founded Team Venture precisely to have the family he felt he didn’t have in “real life.” If he felt Rusty was part of Team Venture, Rusty’s role in the team seems to have been primarily that of “hostage,” the family member who is always in trouble and therefore must always be “rescued.” Men, it seems to me, leave their “blood” families specifically in order to join an artificial family. The artificial family a man chooses may be the army, or academia, a street gang or a film crew — or it may be a globe-trotting gang of misfits and psychopaths adventurers. Jonas Jr, finding his tossed-together set of Venture “remainders” wanting, decides to shoot for the big prize — patriarch.
(Action Man’s murderous rampage in the intro, shouting “Action! Action! Action!” as he shoots a helpless man repeatedly in the head, reminds me that shows like Jonny Quest, Scooby Doo and the others cited in this episode were used, in their initial runs anyway, as babysitters for children whose parents wanted to sleep in on Saturday mornings. They became, in essence, surrogate parents and family members, teaching their lessons of violence, imperialism and incredibly bad parenting to a generation of wide-eyed moppets. This is, of course, where Billy Quizboy’s fan worship comes in. No doubt, Team Venture were Billy’s family growing up — as far as I can remember he’s never spoken about having parents or siblings — and his quivering desire to possess the team reflects that.)
(Oh, and how cruel is it that “Now Museum” features Team Venture selling autographs on the same weekend as the San Diego Comic-Con?)
(At first, the Jonas Venture Jr Museum of Jonas Venture seems like one colossal stab in the back to Jonas Jr’s big brother Rusty — but on closer inspection, Jonas’s impulse seems to have little to do with sibling rivalry. It’s not that Jonas Jr is trying to “steal the spotlight” away from Rusty, Rusty’s whole problem is that he has no spotlight to begin with. And it’s not that he’s trying to “take Rusty’s Place” as Jonas Sr’s son. It seems more to me that Jonas Jr wants to take Jonas Sr’s place — consideration of Rusty’s feelings don’t seem to have occurred to him at all. Rusty may feel slighted or insulted, but, as the old saying goes, you wouldn’t worry so much about what people think of you if you only knew how rarely they do.)
Now let’s look at Richard Impossible. What did Richard do? Richard, apparently, left his “blood” family to join Team Venture’s “Boys’ Brigade” as a kind of Snapper Carr figure. Once he had grown to maturity, Richard married but then tried to combine his “real” family and his artificial family — he took his own blood relatives intothe world of adventure and, in so doing, turned them into hideous freaks and ruined their lives. Ned, rendered into a drooling, walking callous seems happy enough, but Richard’s wife Sally could not stand Richard’s controlling mania and coldness (who’s the real walking callous?) and left him, ending up with, well, ending up with Jonas Jr, another calculating, controlling superscientist.
So Richard tried to wed his real family to his artificial family and the results were disastrous. Now that Sally and the rest of the Impossible team have left him, Richard has been reduced to a shell of a man, haggard and unkempt, prone to drunkeness and desperation. The cold, controlling genius of “Ice Station — Impossible!” is now a shattered wreck — he’s even lost his elasticity, literally his ability to “bounce back” — an apt visual metaphor.
Sally, having left Richard, is now chafing under the smug, condescending personality of Jonas Jr. She’s chafing, but the Ghost Pirates have had quite enough. They decide that they would rather live as miserable independent failures than as servants to the presumptuous, ambitious Jonas Jr. They have taken the blood-family/artificial-family conundrum one step further – they have left their blood families, formed an artificial family, failed in the goals of their artificial family and have now joined a blood family again — only to find themselves, once again, urged to leave their blood family and re-form their artificial family again.
So: Jonas Jr, unhappy with the limits of his “blood” family, tries to re-form his father’s artificial family. His father’s artificial family, who have apparently been wandering in the animated wilderness since Jonas Sr’s death, are only too happy to oblige (Colonel Gentleman’s off-set adventures are only the most alarming of the group — he may sound like James Bond, but he is apparently possessed of the soul of William S. Burroughs — a potent combination indeed). Jonas Jr’s brother Rusty is put out, but Jonas doesn’t even seem to notice — he only criticises Rusty’s “Scooby Doo purple” suit (although Colonel Gentleman’s even more behind-the-times purple suit elicits no comment). His gesture of reunion (with himself as patriarch) even includes the ex-tenants of the island, the Fraternity of Torment.
The Fraternity of Torment have had their artificial family destroyed (by Jonas Sr and Team Venture) but they, too, are more than eager to participate in Jonas Jr’s self-designed coronation. Everyone is grasping for one last glimmer of that golden time that Jonas Sr represents, and Jonas Jr exploits that desire for all it’s worth.
The spoiler, of course, is Brainulo, who pretends to be the “doddering old man” at the reunion but is secretly its cunning usurper (how dispiriting it must be for Brainulo, a man from the distant future, to find himself elderly before he has ever been born). Brainulo uses his massive mental powers not to start his robot Futuro but to cause the hidden fears and desires of the party guests to bubble to the surface. It is perfectly in keeping with the Venture Bros universe that most of the guests have fears and desires wholly unsuitable to the task of wreaking havoc, and the one guest who does was ready to wreak havoc when he walked in the door anyway.
Jonas grasps for his moment, the Ghost Pirates rebel, the buried resentments of a generation boil to the surface in the shape of an Italian self-destruct mechanism (deus ex machina indeed!) and only Richard’s self-loathing, his despair at having been foolish enough to combine his real and artificial family and his inability to rebuild his life, “saves” the day.
Dark Knight phenom
Well, the people have spoken and The Dark Knight is a genuine pop-culture phenomenon. This goes beyond “oh hey, Batman movie,” or “thank goodness, two and a half hours of air conditioning, that crummy Journey to the Center of the Earth only gave me 90 minutes.” The Dark Knight has captured the zeitgeist, made off with the summer and changed everything forever.
Why?
I have my own theory, but let’s examine the hypotheses offered by the media:
this I suppose — the audience who made Brokeback Mountain a runaway smash probably weren’t necessarily itching to see the complex crime drama of The Dark Knight, and Ledger’s death certainly focused a lot of attention on the project. But then, where was that audience when it came to I’m Not There — which featured Ledger, and Christian Bale, and Cate Blanchett? Was Heath Ledger even a “movie star” in the sense that, say, Will Smith or Tom Cruise is a movie star? That is, could he deliver an audience on the strength of his name alone? This is not a knock on Ledger, who was a wonderful actor, or his performance in The Dark Knight, which is as good as you’ve heard. Perhaps it’s a case of the right actor in the right part, not unlike Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man or Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, where the performance illuminates a role the audience thought they knew and captures the imagination of the public in unexpected ways. Or perhaps it’s more like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, and Ledger’s Joker is simply the right performance in the right movie at the right time and is an unrepeatable phenomenon.
2. According to the Wall Street Journal, The Dark Knight is a smash hit because — wait for it — because the public secretly supports the policies of President George W. Bush. That’s right — Mr. 27%, the most reviled president of the past, oh, hundred years or so, is secretly a hero, an action hero, to a huge movie-going audience, who vote with movie attendance instead of their voices. Take that, Rendition/Valley of Elah/Stop-Loss, etc, etc, etc, Batman has come to show that America loves torture! Did you know, when you paid your money to see The Dark Knight, that you were revealing your advocacy of George W. Bush? I didn’t, but it appears the Wall Street Journal knows better.
But seriously, does Batman = Bush? I’ll admit that the popularity of The Dark Knight reveals something in the present moment of our national character, but I’m guessing “advocating torture” isn’t it. But maybe The Dark Knight does say something about our national anxiety vis-a-vis the Great and Glorious Unending, Unwinnable War on Terror. So let’s take a look at this:
A. The Joker is certainly a terrorist of a very pure kind — he doesn’t even have an endgame, nothing less than the complete destruction of the social contract, or his own death, will placate him. We, as Americans, certainly felt that way about the terrorists of 9/11 — nothing they did made sense to us, we couldn’t begin to understand their motives or beliefs. But does Joker = Osama? Isn’t it kind of weird when the real-life bad guy attacks and destroys gigantic skyscrapers (and the Pentagon!) and the movie guy, the comic-book movie guy, settles for a hospital and a couple of ferries? I’ve been reading complaints about how the Joker “couldn’t have possibly” loaded oil-drums of gasoline into this or that building, or placed the explosives to blow up the hospital, or planned this or that in advance. Well, Osama bin Laden planned that attacks of 9/11 and damn near achieved everything he set out to accomplish — and he’s the real-life guy! What does it say about us, and about our supposed secret support of George W. Bush, when we just kind of shrug our shoulders and let bin Laden get away, but pick over the supposed impossibilities of the plan of a comic-book movie villain?
(and, as
notes below, the analogy of Joker = Osama would only be apt if the Joker blew up the ferries and Batman therefore decided to go after Lex Luthor instead.)
B. Like George W. Bush, Batman does, essentially, bug everyone’s phones, without their permission, in order to catch a terrorist. Unlike George W. Bush, however, Batman makes it clear that he’s bugging everyone’s phones without their permission in order to catch a terrorist, not just because he feels like it or it will bring him more power or will make his political enemies weaker. Batman also refuses to take control of the phone-bugging whatsit — he puts it in the control of Lucius Fox. Whereas Bush put his phone-bugging law (if that’s what you want to call it) in the control of Dick Cheney. If Bush had put FISA in the control of Morgan Freeman, I’m guessing everyone would be a whole lot happier about it.
C. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et alia, created a policy of torture for prisoners. This, according to the Wall Street Journal, is the nub of The Dark Knight and the reason for its popularity. We recognize that torture is illegal and immoral, but, damn it, sometimes you have to get your hands dirty when you’re dealing with psychopaths.
Okay. First of all, in The Dark Knight Batman does not torture, nor does he advocate torture. He does, admittedly, slam the Joker around the police interrogation room, but he applies no systematic program of torture. Many other characters in the movie give cryptic arguments for torture, saying that since the Joker has no rules and no limits, we are hobbling ourselves if we don’t act the same. But what Batman argues is the opposite — he staunchly believes that, whatever the cost to him personally or to Gotham City as a community, we must have rules. Here he is, in the actual situation the Bush administration has been warning us about (a bomb is about to go off and the only way to find out where it is, etc) and he refuses to torture the Joker. Oh, and guess what? When the Joker “talks,” his information is incorrect and serves only to make Batman’s situation worse. So it seems that the Joker fully intended to give the information about “the whereabouts of the bombs”, but intended to do so only when doing so would deliver the maximum hurt. I agree that The Dark Knight has provided the US with a cinematic arena to air their anxieties about the issues of the day, but the Joker is not Osama and Batman is not Bush.
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3. Hype. Business as usual. Hollywood shoves a cynical, designed, focus-grouped corporate product down the collective throat of the US and the US gladly takes it. The audience are sheep, the critics are bought, it’s all just commerce.
I don’t buy this theory. For one, I pay pretty close attention to advertising campaigns, and I found the campaign for The Dark Knight clear, sober and refreshingly free of hype. The audience for this movie was, somehow, ready for it months before it opened.
When I saw Iron Man at a Thursday-before-opening midnight show, a preview for The Dark Knight came on and the audience went berserk. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the preview, it made the movie look slick and fast and clever, but all previews do that. But the Iron Man audience roared when the Batman logo came on and screamed its approval when the preview ended.
(There are, of course, some similarities between Iron Man and The Dark Knight. Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne are close cousins, narratively speaking, and each movie view its protagonist through a more-or-less “real-world” lens. Iron Man barely seems to belong to the same genre as the silly, romantic Superman Returns — which I think also contributed to Iron Man‘s surprise success.)
If anything, the hype for The Dark Knight didn’t even begin until after people had already seen it. The advertising, somehow, promised less than the movie actually was. There are billboards for The Dark Knight up all over the place in Santa Monica, and few of them offer any sense of the sweeping, multi-layered crime drama the movie delivers. One billboard features the Bat-Pod crashing through a window, one features Batman in front of a burning building, one features the three main characters wielding their key props — all standard comic-book-movie promotional images, but by far the least interesting and least representative images from the movie. No, Warner Bros did something very strange and very unusual for a corporate investment as important as this: they promised a fun, slick, splashy “superhero movie” and then delivered something quite different, and quite more.
My own theory:
It’s a good movie.
I know, I know, that’s just crazy talk. But having seen it twice and looking forward to seeing it again, and then owning it on DVD and taking it apart scene by scene at my leisure, let me tell you: an audience knows when a movie is good, and they’ve been so starved for good movies for so long by a Hollywood system that is destined, in so many ways, to deliver safe, predictable thrills and spills, that when a movie comes along that combines an excellent script, a rich, compelling drama, a crisp, efficient shooting style, an interesting take on contemporary anxieties and talented actors giving clear-eyed, lucid performances, well, by gum, an audience will go see that movie.
(Yes, the fact that it’s Batman punching the Joker and not, say, Reese Witherspoon worrying about the rights of detainees makes it “fun” and therefore “okay” for a mass audience to go and enjoy, but I have heard no one yet say “Go see The Dark Knight, it’s fun.“)
Synopses of movies I haven’t seen, based only on their posters: Swing Vote
Based on the font and the logo design, I would guess that Swing Vote is some kind of high-protein diet shake, like Ensure. The words “Swing Vote” imply something having to do with national politics and something having to do with easy sex. The picture of Kevin Costner, on the other hand, connotes neither. Instead, it says, “Come see Swing Vote — Kevin Costner is in it, and he would be oh so happy if you did. Why look, he’s turning on the charm. He’s even got all dressed up for you in his ratty faded t-shirt and his backwards baseball cap, and gone a month without shaving.”
So I’m guessing that Swing Vote is about a middle-aged man who has trouble finding the time to eat right, who turns to diet shakes and national politics to help him dress better and learn to shave.
Oh, and there are some tiny other people in the movie.
Mantis update: spotlight on Booie
I caught Booie in the act of shedding his skin this afternoon. He’s a little blurry in this picture, because he’s swinging back and forth trying to wriggle out of his old skin. His old-skin feet are attached to the ceiling of his container. Eagle-eyed readers will note that it seems he has at least eight legs. The three disappearing out the top of the photo are his old-skin legs, the four sticking out from his sides are his new-skin legs. You can see his old tail-skin curling up like a new-year’s-eve party favor as he struggles to get his body out of the confines of his old skin. At bottom, his head is a blur as he swings himself to and fro. His front paws are in the “praying” position.
Seconds later: plop! He’s escaped from his old skin and now lies, helpless and rubbery, on the floor of his yogurt container. I was a little concerned for him for a few minutes, because it’s quite unlike any of my mantises to lie face down in the dart like this, but I knew that they are often a little weak after the big struggle of escaping their old skin. And look how fresh and minty green his new skin is!
Here’s his old skin, now empty of mantis. This is, I believe, Booie’s fourth skin-switch — they seem to go through a skin a week. Which I guess is easier than taking a bath.
As Booie was recovering from his skin-shedding, Brown Behemoth Ceiling nabbed another cricket. He’s a real outlaw savage now and has had at least three crickets in the past 24 hours. I got this shot as he was in the act of beheading this little fella. Pinocchio will have togo without a conscience and Buddy Holly will be singing solo — this cricket is reserved for dinner.
Mantis update
click to embiggen.
Look at these beasts! The brown behemoth in the first picture, that’s li’l ol’ Ceiling, now about three and a half inches long and chomping down hungrily on his first adult cricket.
The 3-inch green monster in picture 2 is Snacks, and this photo has caught him in a rare aggressive pose. Moments before taking this picture, I had put his first adult cricket into his house. Snacks immediately went ballistic — he curled his tail up like a scorpion and “put up his dukes” as you see in the picture. He took several rage-filled swipes at the cricket but could not land a blow — the cricket kept hiding behind sticks and leaves. This made Snacks absolutely apoplectic — he stood in this position for several minutes, hunt-and-kill chemicals flooding through his brain, claws in a rictus of preparation, even after the cricket had moved on to less dangerous areas of the 4×2″ container Snacks lives in. Snacks was so predatory that when I put my hand in his container to try to move the cricket back into his line of vision he attacked me! I’ve never actually been attacked by a mantis before, normally the most aggressive they get is that they climb up on my hand to try to get out of their container. But Snacks lashed out at me as though I were a soft, juicy cricket smaller than himself and I felt what Jackson Publick would no-doubt call The Grip Of The Mantis! Now, Snacks is, as I say, only three inches long and a stick-like insect, so I was never really in any danger, but for a split second I knew how it felt to be a cricket. (We have since made up.)
The pint-sized 1.5-inch pipsqueak in picture 3 is our old pal Booie, still the runt and still bringing up the rear. Booie just recently made the jump from fruit-flies to baby crickets, and is something of a picky eater. The other two will go pouncing after whatever I put inside their containers, but Booie will let a baby cricket hop happily around his container for days before deciding to go ahead and eat it. I’m thinking that perhaps he’s secretly a vegetarian.
More mantisy goodness below the fold.
I’ve noticed that their eyes change color from moment to moment, depending, I think, on the light and their mood. Sometimes their eyes will be solid black, sometime they will be solid green (or brown), and sometimes they will have little dots of black in their otherwise solid-green (or brown) eyes. Here we see Ceiling, who has developed into a fine brown mantis, in the middle of enjoying a bite of cricket. If you have the nerve to click on the picture, you’ll be able to see that he is sucking out a big bubble of cricket-blood and, in fact, his mouth is full of it at the moment, his mandible wide and his head swelled with the intake, as his eyes turn green with blood-lust.
This moody nightscape shows Snacks after he’s finally nabbed his cricket and is in the process of instructing it in the ways of the food chain. You can’t see it that clearly here, but Snacks’s eyes have gone from almost-entirely minty-green to a bulging black.
Here, Snacks pauses in his dinner to give the camera his very best cute-puppy-dog look.
“You lookin’ at me?” His dinner completed, Ceiling addresses his provider and asks “You want a piece a me? I just ate a cricket bigger than my head, you want a piece a me?” (Please note that Ceiling, and Snacks before him, are shown hanging from the ceilings of their enclosures. The pictures have been rotatedto reduce feelings of vertigo.
Venture Bros: Tears of a Sea-cow
Pity Dr. Dugong. No matter how lame his backstory, or how inadequate his one-robot security system, he still apparently has had enough success with his study of "gentle sea-creatures" to build himself a Stromberg-like undersea fortress. Does he deserve the fate he is given here, a point-blank blast in the face from The Monarch’s not-at-all-phallic over-sized electronic bazooka thing?
Further thoughts on The Dark Knight
Well, as good as it is, it’s better on a second viewing. I went on a double-date with a screenwriter pal and our wives. Screenwriter joked, “I liked the first three movies, but the last two I thought were a little too much.” By which he meant, there is enough plot in The Dark Knight to fuel five summer blockbusters. No one could possibly walk out of this movie and complain they hadn’t gotten their money’s worth. It seems like every fifteen minutes or so there is one blockbuster sequence or other that would have been the climax to any other movie, but The Dark Knight just keeps going and going and going, more surprises up its sleeve, more betrayals and double-crosses, more reveals and reversals. It makes The Departed look somnolent, it makes Heat look like a comic book and it makes Tim Burton’s Batman look like Leslie Martinson’s Batman.
My wife is something of a plot-nazi. Often, we go see some well-turned-out spectacle or other and I sit through the whole thing with a big goofy grin on my face, wondering at all the color and texture, and afterward I’ll turn to my wife and say “Well, what did you think?” and regardless of whatever pleasures the movie has to offer, she’ll zero in on one fault in the plot that ruins the entire narrative and the movie’s pleasures will immediately evaporate. For The Dark Knight, she had exactly one question on the way back to the parking garage. That question answered (it regarded how the Joker was financing his operation), she declared that the plot was air-tight. So you can take that as a strong recommendation: Todd Alcott’s wife finds the plot of The Dark Knight air-tight.
Heath Ledger’s performance on a first viewing I foolishly just kind of accepted as a given, but on a second viewing I’m fully confident that this is a bad-guy performance to stand alongside Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Perkins in Psycho, Javier Bardem in No Country, and Robert DeNiro (or Mitchum) in Cape Fear. Ledger’s Joker is grand and simple, bigger-than-life and frighteningly real, full of bold choices and yet detailed and human. I think it’s safe to say that it’ll be hard to watch Caeser Romero in the part for a while. Ledger’s Joker is both so mesmerizing that you can’t look away, and yet so horrifying that you feel you have to, for fear of catching his eye. Whatever is wrong with him, you know you don’t want to catch it.
A full analysis will have to wait for the DVD release probably, but one of the things that struck me on a second viewing was the sheer number of echoes, parallels and mirror-scenes, one character doing something that is then answered or repeated by another character in a different context. For instance, I was admiring the way Bruce Wayne was able to dismantle a shotgun while not looking at it, and then remembered that Harvey Dent does the same thing with a handgun earlier on. There are dozens of little moments like this but I prefer to keep this spoiler-free for now.
Some have responded to the complexity of The Dark Knight‘s plot by saying it is an ensemble drama. I myself felt pretty strongly that it had three protagonists. On a second viewing, let me just say: make no mistake, The Dark Knight has one protagonist and it is Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne, through his decision to end crime in Gotham City, creates a situation where, as Alfred puts it, the worried gangsters of Gotham turn to a man they don’t fully understand. That is, if Bruce Wayne did not create the Joker, hecreated the situation where the Joker could flourish. He set the plot of The Dark Knight in motion. His actions inspired the Joker to his mayhem, and inspired Harvey Dent to be Super DA, to be the man who would do, legally, what Batman can only do illegally. Everything that happens in the movie leads back to Bruce Wayne’s actions, his attempts to make Gotham City a better place to live. The Joker is his chief antagonist and Harvey Dent is his friend, the man who symbolizes the Gotham he wants the city to be — everything the Joker wants to happen to Gotham, happens to Harvey.
A note on Harvey: Two-Face is my favorite Batman villain, and without giving anything away, let me just say that the treatment of his character in The Dark Knight is the most full-bodied, complex, sympathetic, heartbreaking and horrifying we are likely to see in a generation. My only real sadness about The Dark Knight is that I would like to see a whole movie just about Harvey Dent. My wife, who is familiar with Two-Face through Tommy Lee Jones’s screaming, cackling camp-fest in Batman Forever and Bruce Timm’s thoroughly horrifying interpretation on the Batman Animated show, had forgotten that Harvey Dent is Two-Face, and, during The Dark Knight found herself thinking “I like this Harvey Dent character, he’s interesting and new, I wonder where this is going.” And then, upon realizing who he was, and what modern movie-making technology is capable of, spent a good portion of the movie in a state of sickened dread.
Favorite reactions to The Dark Knight
As I was walking to my car after the movie last night (that is, 4:00am) most of the 20-something crowd (well honestly, who else is going to go see a movie at 12:45 besides 20-somethings and 40-something nightowl screenwriters? There was a combination of both sitting next to me — a 20-something nightowl screenwriter who actually brought his laptop to work on his spec script while waiting for the movie to begin) were high as kites over the Dark Knight experience. There was one unhappy young lady, however, who seemed utterly baffled by a movie that she saw as a punishing ordeal. “What was that movie even about?” she cried, “What was the point of it all?” as her friends looked at her in bafflement. “What were you expecting?” one of her friends offered. “He didn’t even rescue anyone!” wailed the young lady in reply. The inflection of her remarks indicated to me that, for this woman, the “superhero movie” genre brings with it certain expectations: larger-than-life evil villains determined to destroy the world, incorruptible strongmen who stand for truth, justice, etc, damsels in distress, and a moral stance on the side of absoluted good. And yes, The Dark Knight fails to deliver on all those expectations.
Some critics complain that the plotting is “muddled” or “scattershot” or “herky-jerky.” I disagree. It is certainly complex, with many different plot strands to sort through, but I never found it anything less than absorbing and fleet. (I’m seeing it again tonight, and report more.)
Other critics (sometimes the same as above) and even some fans found the action sequences baffling and incoherent. Again, they are certainly complex, but I had no trouble following the action. Sometimes I thought it could have slowed down a little bit to savor this or that detail, but I wasn’t the guy making the movie.
David Denby, in the New Yorker, laments that “Warner Bros. has continued to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton’s original conception for Batman“, a criticism that makes me laugh out loud and, quite obviously, misses the point of the whole movie. As though Tim Burton’s “original conception”, with its Prince songs and very bad special effects, was somehow “the genuine article,” a primal document, as though the fifty years of comics that had preceded Tim Burton’s “original conception” don’t count, as though the predecessors that Burton drew on (Frank Miller, Fritz Lang, Ridley Scott for starters) never existed. And don’t get me wrong, Tim Burton’s Batman blew my mind — in 1989.
Every now and then I see someone comparing to The Godfather Part II, which, as I said yesterday, is silly. Comparing it to Heat, however, is perfectly appropriate, except that The Dark Knight covers a lot more ground at a much faster tempo. I also find it to be the less operatic of the two, in spite of having its protagonists be a guy in clown makeup, a guy in a bat suit, and a guy with half a face. The other movie it reminds me of is City Hall, which, frankly, could have used a psychopath in clown makeup and a guy in a bat suit but had to make do with Al Pacino and John Cusack.
Everyone is talking about Heath Ledger’s performance, and I say “good job!” But since few are mentioning Gary Oldman, let me do so here: I think Jim Gordon is one of Gary Oldman’s greatest creations. It’s true that Heath Ledger vanishes into his role, but he’s got the makeup to help him with that — Gary Oldman vanishes into Jim Gordon with nothing but a pair of glasses and a moustache. He was more visible in Dracula, f’r Chrissakes. Oldman has always been a wonderful technician and has often specialized in The Bold Choice (cf Leon, Hannibal,The Fifth Element) but here I don’t see an “actor” anywhere in evidence, just a hard-working, middle-class Gotham City public servant, a man who loves his city and hates the things he has to do to make his family safe.
(Come to think of it, there is a scene that shows Jim Gordon’s daughter. But she looks rather too young, like, 5, to be a credible Batgirl.)