Dark Knight discontents
It has come to my attention, via yesterday’s comments, that there are folks out there who not only dislike The Dark Knight, but who find it an abomination — or, as berkeley314567 puts it, "a steaming pile of clusterf*ck." I will not be able to begin proper analysis until Tuesday at the earliest, but until then I’d very much like to hear from folks what they don’t like about the movie. To you folks, I’d like to know what you had heard, what you were expecting, where the movie failed you, how it fell short. Well-stated opinions will be respected and specifics will be greatly appreciated.
I will say this: the folks who compare The Dark Knight to The Godfather or Crime and Punishment I think miss the point (R. Sikoryak notwithstanding). I think a comic-book movie to compare to the tragic grace and penetrating social analysis of The Godfather is just over the horizon, but The Dark Knight is better described as a foursquare, meat-and-potatoes pop-culture action thriller that delivers the goods with spectacular visuals, excellent acting, superb shooting and, for the purposes of this journal, an uncommonly intelligent script. It does not tell us anything profound about the corruption of the human soul, and it does not intend to. I would compare The Dark Knight, instead, to The Fugitive, Alien, Star Wars (that is, episode IV) or The Silence of the Lambs — all movies with pulp roots and grandiose spectacle that transcend their genres and achieve substantial dramatic weight through skillful plotting and firmly grounded, well-performed characters.
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.“)
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.)
The Dark Knight
Saw this at a midnight show at my favorite Westside multiplex, the Century City AMC. Serious analysis will have to wait for another day, but here are some thoughts.
I keep thinking about The Godfather. When The Godfather was released in 1972, the gangster movie had been, from the ’20s, a pulp genre, not taken seriously by intelligent filmgoers. (I remember when The Godfather Part II was in theaters in 1974. I was too young to see it, but I had an art teacher who I respected and admired, and he said that he was not planning on seeing it because it was “a gangster movie — worse, a sequel to a gangster movie.” He said the words “gangster movie” the way I might say the words “child molester.”) By finding some universal truths in the genre and applying some compelling, elegant plotting, The Godfather took the gangster movie into the realm of high art, and for my money it and The Godfather Part II are still the two greatest movies ever made.
(The Silence of the Lambs also comes to mind as a pulp genre narrative elevated to high art — and there are many points of comparison between it and The Dark Knight, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.)
The Tim Burton Batman movies, no question, blew my mind. They are grand and operatic and weird and dark and very, very cool. The Schumacher Batman movies — well, let’s just set those aside for the purposes of this discussion. Batman Begins was a whole different ball game, a comic-book movie with a complex plot and a dark, gritty vision. But there was still a little too much of something in there — it was still a little too operatic, occasionally even a little silly. It wanted to take itself very seriously but it was still hampered by what was “expected” of a comic-book movie — grand characters with evil schemes, ludicrous action sequences and over-the-top plot points (Batman calling the bats of Gotham City to his aid comes to mind).
The Dark Knight is a whole giant step beyond. It’s a serious crime drama that happens to feature well-known comic-book characters, in the same way Casino Royale is a sophisticated espionage thriller about a complex figure whose name happens to be James Bond. It’s not Batman Begins Again or Batman: Bigger, Faster, Louder. It doesn’t even feel like a sequel. It’s a crime narrative unto itself, one that draws on the Batman ethos for its pop-culture resonance but exists solely on its own terms.
The Batman comics have, occasionally, achieved the seriousness and complexity of plot that The Dark Knight has, and the best of the stories have also succeeded in being wicked cool, but The Dark Knight takes Batman into a whole new realm of thoughtful consideration. It doesn’t merely work as “a comic-book adaptation,” it works as a movie. A knowledge of the Batman world might help someone navigate the hugely complex narrative that unfolds in The Dark Knight, but is unnecessary to enjoy it as a movie. I’ve read Batman comics and thrilled to the notion of Gotham City as a grand, dark imagining, but the Gotham City of The Dark Knight feels like a real, recognizable place, not a symbol but an actual city, a place worth thinking about and saving. Frank Miller may have made Batman “adult,” but The Dark Knight makes Batman actually grow up.
(I see that certain people, regardless of what this movie is, are still marketing it to kids, with happy-meal toys featuring the Joker with his scarred, hideous face. I wish they wouldn’t do that. I have nothing against movie-based toys, my house is littered with them, but The Dark Knight is not a movie for children in any regard and should not be marketed as such.)
DC vs DCU
Tonight’s bedtime conversation with Sam (5).
SAM. Is tomorrow a school day?
DAD. No. It’s Presidents’ Day. Do you know who the Presidents are?
SAM. Yes.
DAD. Yeah? Can you name one? Who was a President?
SAM. (patiently, as though to a dull toddler) George Washington.
DAD. Do you know what the President does?
This Sam is less clear on. Which is just as well at this embarrassing point in our nation’s history.
I start to say that if the United States is the DC Universe, you could look at George Washington as Superman, but then I realize that if I say that, the next question will be “Then who is Batman?” and I don’t have a clear answer for that.
Clearly, George Washington is Superman. He was the first, arguably the most important, debatably the best, and most importantly the “original.” But then, indeed, who is Batman? Is it Adams, contemporary of Washington and close second in defining the young nation’s ethos? Or is it, say, Lincoln, the most beloved of the presidents, the tall, dark, brooding loner president, the tortured insomniac, haunted by the deaths of his loved ones, the one who broke the rules for the sake of the greater good?
Does that make Wonder Woman Thomas Jefferson, the warrior for peace, architect of our most precious freedoms? Or is she more like Franklin Roosevelt in that regard, giving our enemies a bitter fight while generously giving our poorest and weakest a fighting chance of their own? That would make Truman Green Lantern, saving the world with his magical do-anything world-saving device.
And who would be an analog for colorless chair-warmers like Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur? Are these men Booster Gold and Blue Beetle? Clearly Rorshach is Richard Nixon, Alan Moore practically begs us to see the parallels, but what of Kennedy, Nixon’s shining twin? Is that Ozymandius, or is he a simpler man, a purer spirit, someone like Captain Marvel? Or is he Superboy and his “best and brightest” cabinet the Legion of Superheroes in the 31st century?
And how to categorize corrupt, incompetent disasters like Grant, Harding, Hoover and Bush II? Is Reagan Plastic Man, effortlessly escaping ceaseless attack with a smile and a quip? And what about Johnson, weak on foreign policy but a genius in the domestic realm, who is that? Or William Henry Harrison, who caught pneumonia during his inaugural parade and died a month later? Or Grover Cleveland, who served, left office, then came back and served again?
Or perhaps the metaphor is imprecise, perhaps the US presidency is unlike the DCU after all — perhaps it’s more like the X-Men, where weak individuals are granted extraordinary powers and yet are still hampered by their combative attitudes toward each other and their under-developed social skills. In the X-Men you have heroes who might not turn out to be heroes after all. And vice versa.
Or maybe we’re looking in the wrong direction, perhaps the US presidents aren’t the “good guys” at all. While Bush II has so far shunned the metal mask and hooded cloak of Dr. Doom, he has certainly succeeded in turning the US into his own private Latveria. And any given Republican of the 20th century can lay claim to being the Lex Luthor of the bunch, brimming with brilliant, short-sighted schemes to make himself rich while destroying other people’s lives and property.
And, if they were given the choice, is there any serious doubt as to whether Americans would elect a comic-book character over a living, breathing human being?
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.
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.
Justice League (part I)
The Justice Lords would like a word with you.
My son has turned me into a geek.
I never read comic books as a kid. I think the first comic book I ever read was Watchmen in 1985. I read Dark Knight Returns after Tim Burton’s Batman movie came out. I didn’t start reading comics until Joel Silver asked me to work on the Wonder Woman movie in 1999. Even then, it was all “just research.” It was more fun than reading Dickens (mostly), but I never considered it a pursuit in and of itself.
My son has changed all of that.
He loves superheroes. He can’t get enough of them. When he wakes up, his first thought is about someone he needs to look up on Wikipedia so that he can draw a picture of them. The Marvel splash-panel I posted last week is only one of dozens of superhero drawings that lie scattered in heaps around the house. His walls, floor and shelves are plastered and stacked high with drawings and figurines. (Strangely, every time I’ve tried to interest him in an actual poster showing the same superheroes, he’s never interested; they never “look right” to him.)
Part of it, I know, is related to his interest in dinosaurs, which recently reached its saturation point. That is, like the dinosaur world, the superhero world comprises another world of tiny pieces of information for his rapidly-expanding mind to categorize. In dinosaurs, you have plant-eaters and predators, in superheroes, you have good guys and bad guys. Among plant-eaters you have long-necks and short-necks, among predators you have therapods and oviraptors; among good guys you have metahumans and “regular guys in costumes,” among bad guys you have aliens and robots. And all combinations of the above. (His interest in dinosaurs supplanted his interest in trains, which occupied the first half of his life.)
So a conversation between us will go something like this:
S. Dad, what do you know about Magneto?
D. Magneto can control metal with his mind.
S. Is he a good guy or a bad guy?
D. Magneto is a bad guy.
S. And does he have superpowers or is he a regular guy in a costume?
D. He has superpowers. He can control metal with his mind.
S. Yeah, but he’s not super-strong, and he doesn’t have, like, heat vision or anything.
D. Yeah, but he can control metal with his mind. That’s his super-power.
S. But how did he get like that?
D. He was born like that. He’s a mutant. That’s the difference between X-Men and The Avengers. The X-Men were all born with their powers, the Avengers are all regular people who had accidents.
S. But what about Wolverine?
D. Wolverine is an X-Man.
S. But he’s in the Avengers! And so is Storm!
(one trip to the Marvel Encyclopedia later)
D. Okay, but Wolverine and Storm were in the X-Men first.
S. And is Elektra a good guy or a bad guy?
D. Elektra is kind of like Catwoman. Sometimes she’s a good guy and sometimes she’s a bad guy — it kind of depends on where you happen to be standing at the moment.
And so on.
(Of the many differences between DC and Marvel, one of the most striking, from an “adult trying to explain comic book heroes to a child who can’t read yet” point-of-view anyway, is that the lines of good and bad are drawn much more clearly in the DC universe; in Marvel, characters are zipping back and forth over the line all the time. How do I explain that the Punisher, who slaughters people with guns, is a good guy, while Batman, who despises guns and never kills anyone, is also a good guy? Or for that matter, how do I explain that the Hulk is a good guy, when no one, not even the Hulk, thinks he’s a good guy? And how do I explain how the media in Spider-Man’s world shapes the public’s perception of him, making a good guy look bad?)
Anyway, long story short, there’s this show, Justice League, that a year or so ago just hit my son like a truck.
I can’t explain it. He liked the Bruce Timm Batman show, but it was always a little too scary for him. He liked the Bruce Timm Superman show, but the plots were a little too complex for him (typical conversation: Sam: Who’s that? Dad: That’s Lex Luthor. Sam: Is he the bad guy? Dad: He’s the bad guy. Sam: Then why isn’t Superman fighting him?). But Justice League hit him just right. Something about the family dynamics of the group, Superman and Batman and Flash and Green Lantern and Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter and Hawkgirl all in the same show, bouncing off each other and having their own adventures, somehow that clicked in his brain in a way that the individual heroes’ shows did not. The complications, which I would have thought would have made the show more difficult to follow, instead gave him more to feast on.
Now then: none of this means that I’ve been watching all these shows with him. Normally, these shows exist as something for Sam to watch while mom and dad get to spend 23 minutes having a conversation or eating dinner. But one night a few weeks ago, I called my wife to dinner and she didn’t come. Ten minutes later she wandered up from the TV room as though in a daze and said “I’m sorry, I got caught up in Justice League.” And I made a sound like Scooby-Doo does when he’s confused, and when after everyone went to bed I stayed up to see what the hell was so interesting about this episode of Justice League.
Check this out: the episode (it’s a two-parter) is called “A Better World.”
The show begins like this: Lex Luthor has somehow become president and is, apparently, about to destroy the world. Superman busts through White House security and confronts him in the Oval Office. Lex sneers at him and says “Go ahead, arrest me, put me in jail, I’ll just get out again, I always do, you’ll never be rid of me, you know that,” and Superman sighs and says “Yeah, you’re right,” and kills him. Just kills him. Just turns on his heat vision and zaps him, right there in the Oval Office. And Luthor falls over in a heap. Because Superman could totally do that, you know. Who would stop him? No one can stop him. Why didn’t he do it a long time ago?
And Superman just stands there over Luthor’s body. There’s no triumph or release, just grim silence. And Wonder Woman comes in and sees the dead body and says “…Oh. (beat) Well, I guess it had to happen at some point.” And the crisis is over, poof, all the world’s problems are solved.
Fade out. Roll titles.
Cut to: two years later, and the Justice League has all new uniforms, a new name (The Justice Lords) and they never leave the Watchtower (that’s their spaceship), because they never have to, because there is no crime. There is no crime because, as we come to find out, the Justice League has lobotomized all the criminals. We visit Arkham Asylum and find Joker and Poison Ivy and Two-Face and everyone else cheerful, model prisoners, milling around the grounds like pleasant, happy zombies. Gotham City is so clean and bright it looks like Metropolis. There’s an incredible scene where Justice Lord Superman is battling Doomsday (whom, aficianados will know, once killed Superman in the comics) and, just as Doomsday is about to go into his “MWAH HA HA” victory laugh, Justice Lord Superman zaps him in the forehead and we watch his brains melt down the sides of his face and Doomsday gets a queer, disconnected, disappointed look in his eyes as he slumps to the ground, still alive but no longer dangerous; somehow, it never occurred to him that Superman possessed the power to lobotomize him.
With no crime to fight, Justice Lord Batman has turned to science and has made an important discovery: he’s stumbled across a parallel dimension, where the normal, regular old Justice League with their colorful costumes and bickering ways are still wasting their time, struggling through a world filled with supervillains. The Justice Lords take pity on the poor old alternate-dimension Justice League (who we realize, in time, are our dimension’s Justice League; that is, the whole first part of the show is taking place in an alternate dimension and the protagonists don’t enter until the beginning of Act II) and, in a gesture of kindness, kidnap them and take them prisoner so that they can clean up the other dimension too. And so Act III has the Justice League taking on the Justice Lords, which, you can imagine, is difficult because they are, in fact, the exact same people, only a teeny bit more ruthless. And on the one hand, you don’t like the Justice Lords because of that ruthlessness, and on the other hand, it’s like — well, how come the Justice League took this long to get their act together? And the tension is unbearable because, as the title suggests, the Justice Lords have truly made their world better, and the Justice League is actually fighting to make it more chaotic and dangerous.
Bizarre enough? It gets better. To solve the problem of the Justice Lord Superman, whom no one can subdue, the Justice League must turn to Lex Luthor, who is still alive in this world, and who has the scientific knowledge to build a super-power-sapping device (“device” being the operative word here). Luthor will zap the Justice Lord Superman so that the good-old Justice League can take back control of our world (or, rather, relinquish control of our world). In exchange for his super-power-sapping device, the Justice League grants Lex a full pardon for all his past crimes and makes him a free man.
In the epilogue, we see a sobered, grateful Lex at a press conference, vowing to give up crime forever and — you knew it had to come — announcing his bid for the presidency. And the cycle begins again.
And I’m sitting in front of the TV with my mouth hanging open. This is a far cry from Superfriends. In the span of a 45-minute superhero cartoon, Bruce Timm and company have just told me more about society, civilization and justice than I ever learned in a season of Law and Order. Sure, Superman could just kill Lex. Of course he could. Why doesn’t he? That would make everything better. All it takes is the will to do so. And that goes for all the Justice League. Why bother negotiating with murderous thugs? Why not just kill them? They obviously have the power to do so. Why put up with giggling psychopaths who have nothing to contribute to society? Why not just kill them? And then, dumb as it sounds, it hit me: that’s why they call it Superman’s “Never Ending Struggle for Truth and Justice.” The whole point of the Justice League (and their real-world counteparts) is not to rid the world of crime, but to be vigilant in the fight against it. And then I was reminded about something regarding God as well. The DC superheroes were always modelled after the Gods, were they not? Well here’s the answer to the great question, Why do the Gods allow evil to exist?
Okay, enough for now. I’ve barely scratched the surface of my thoughts about this show. There’s a three-part episode where, get this, the Justice League goes back in time to World War II, in order to…restore Adolf Hitler to power.
Suffice to say, it’s no longer Sam saying “Hey, let’s watch Justice League!” Instead, it’s him saying “Can I watch Scooby-Doo?” And I’m saying “No, c’mon, let’s watch Justice League!” Now I know who all the characters are and what their backstories are (Did you know Hawkgirl was a detective on her home planet?) and what’s more, I care about them in ways I never have before. And I will get into the reasons for that in Part II.
I leave you for the moment with what is probably my favorite moment in the series, and emblematic of its genius. There’s a robot (AMAZO) who has the ability to imitate the powers of any superhero it sees. If it sees the Flash, it can run at the speed of light, if it sees Green Lantern, it can fashion a magic power ring, etc. It sees Superman, and acquires all his powers, and starts smashing stuff up. Batman, who has no powers to acquire, is the only one capable of fighting it. Thinking fast, he takes a lump of Kryptonite out of his pocket and lobs it at the robot, who collapses like a ragdoll and falls into the river (Batman reasoning that if AMAZO has acquired Superman’s strengths, he might also have acquired his weaknesses).
And Wonder Woman comes out from under a piece of rubble and says “So, what, you just always carry around a piece of Kryptonite with you?” And Batman scowls and mutters “Call it insurance,” and dashes off into the night.
Because he’s seen the “Better World” episode, probably.