Wrap Up to Nolan's Batman Trilogy

Over the course of his Batman trilogy, Nolan has produced three distinct films with a shared aesthetic.  Although each film takes place within the same canonical Batman universe, they take increasingly different positions on the political issues of the day.  Since Momento, his first full length film, Nolan has always been interested in pop-philosophy, and this did not change when he was given a much bigger budget to work with.  For this he gets a lot of credit.  But what has been disturbing over the course of the three films is their gradual drift into conservative ideology.

It's easy to read Batman Begins as a rebuke of America's foreign policy during the "War on Terror," what with its questions about justice and vengeance and where the line between them lies.  But all of these questions are brought up naturally and are carried along by characterization.  They fit right at home in a Batman movie.  And the fact that Batman is fighting against terrorists (albeit comic book terrorists) draws an obvious parallel between the events in the film and America's foreign policy. 

A lot of these same questions came up in The Dark Knight, which is arguably a better film (I kind of wish I had bumped it up half a star in my rating) even if it doesn't handle the larger issues as well.  The part of the movie that people on the left criticized the most was Batman's cell phone hacking.  In the climax Batman hacks into all of Gotham's cell phones so he can use them as some sort of sonar devices in order to track down the Joker.  Plenty have noted the similarity between Batman's phone hacking and the actual phone hacking done by the government.  But while Batman's decision to essentially take over all the cell phones in Gotham is obviously a violation of privacy, it is arguably nowhere near as invasive as the NSA's search through the e-mailand phone conversations of American citizens.  Do we really want the government listening to the conversations between friends, family, and lovers?  First of all, the issue is simplified.  Of course, the audience wants Batman to broach the law because the Joker is about to blow up two boats.  Nolan has basically constructed a ticking time bomb situation, which also happens to be a situationthat has never occurred in real life.  (Besides, if you only have a matter of minutes, wouldn't the mad bomber just be able to hang for that short period of time?  The hypothetical sort of defeats itself.)  This is radically different from having the government creep into our personal communication network over the course of years.  And the movie's proposed solution, that we just blow up the capabilities when we're done with them, just doesn't cut it in a democracy where not only do you set a precedent, but that precedent can be later used by someone you wouldn't trust.  (This is why we must be just as critical of Obama when he skirts the law as we would have been with Bush). 

Still, The Dark Knight comes up with some interesting questions, including whether we would be ready to disproportionately punish criminals if it means that we can save our own necks.  Unfortunately, Nolan loses all of his ability to pose interesting questions in the third installment, The Dark Knight Rises.  Where the first two films offered interesting queries about the world we lived in, for the third film I had to actively ignore some of meager attempts at social commentary in the third film in order to enjoy it.  Ultimately, I liked the film thanks to its ambition and the care it takes with its characters.  Still, Nolan's attempt to deal with questions of social justice and class wouldn't cut it in a freshman philosophy course, and they certainly don't work on screen.  As I mentioned in my review, the entire set up is unclear to begin with.  (Is it the underclass who are trashing Gotham or just the prisoners, or are they being treated as one and the same?)  Perhaps the most laughable line in the entire film comes from Selina Kyle's friend.  When the two of them are surveying the damage done to a ransacked mansion, Selina remarks that this was someone's house once, to which her acquantance says, "Now it's everybody's house."  Don't you see, people?  If we ask the wealthy to pay a marginally higher tax rate, then it will be total bedlam!  Granted, I'm not sure if this is exactly what Nolan is saying, but I don't think he has a clue as to what he is saying either.

The end of the film winds up pitting those in power, the police force and the wealthy aristocrat Bruce Wayne, against the prisoner population of Gotham.  The status quo must be set right.  This is an inherently anti-populist view of the world.  It is only those few elites who, in the old world, could exert control over the many that must regain control and set things to the way that they used to be.  Batman as an archetype can be used as a political symbol for the left or the right.  He does not inherently signify a particular ideology, so I don't think positioning him as a neoconservative is automatically wrong.  But I do wish that Nolan would acknowledge some of these issues, which he at least attempted in the second film. 

 

I’m reminded of Frank Miller’s work on The Dark Knight Returns, which asked us to question whether or not we should condone the actions of a vigilante.  Throughout the book, Miller uses news style interviews of Gotham’s citizens to show how different people project their own fears and prejudices on Batman’s actions.  Some decry his actions while others praise him.  And then, in the midst of these opinions, one man on the street gives the following viewpoint: “Batman? Yeah, I think he’s a-okay.  He’s kicking just the right butts – butts the cops ain’t kicking, that’s for sure.  Hope he goes after the homos next” (45).  The line is brilliant because the reader can feel himself agreeing with the man until the brutally bigoted last sentence.  Here, Miller asks us to question populism in a more complex way than Nolan.  At what point should we shield the minority from, as the philosopher De Toqueville called it, the “tyranny of the majority”?  But Miller teases out these issues in a couple of sentences when Nolan couldn’t do so over the course of nearly three hours.  It is not that the issues that Nolan brings up shouldn’t be discussed.  It is that these issues should be discussed with nuance, vigor, and intelligence.

On the internet people like to bandy about the word pretentious, but it is often used incorrectly.  When people call a work of art pretentious, what they really mean is that the film is too difficult or esoteric for them.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines “pretentious” as “Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed” (OED).  So a pretentious work of art is something that thinks it has more to add to the conversation than it actually does.  The Dark Knight Rises is often pretentious in the truest sense of the word: it is not nearly as smart as it thinks it is.  But, I would still rather watch something with a pretense to greatness than a film that doesn’t even try.  I might not love The Dark Knight Rises as much as I wanted to, but I do respect its ambitions. 

The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises (3.5/5)

By now even those who dislike Christopher Nolan’s Batman triptych have been so beaten into submission that, in lieu of screaming “uncle,” they have conceded that the trio of films serve as a sort of repository of all of the anxieties running through the first decade or so of the new millennium.  They may disagree about the quality of the films themselves, but after seven years everyone agrees that these movies have established themselves as important cultural artifacts.  In particular, I’ve enjoyed that Nolan has somehow managed to hoist his personal vision of the world in front of millions and it has still connected with large swaths of audiences.  The blockbuster as personal missive approach to filmmaking has become increasingly rare, because either the audience or the studio have rejected those directors (see: Lee’s Hulk, Singer’s Superman Returns, and Raimi’s Spiderman series).  These days it seems as if Nolan is one of a few directors with the clout to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on his own personal vision.

So where does The Dark Knight Rises, the epic finale square with its predecessors?  Does it consistently meld its fantastical premise with a real world aesthetic like Begins?  Does it successfully tangle with questions of ethics like the sequel?  Well, not exactly.  At two hours and forty-five minutes, the film is unwieldy (how could it not be).  But it still manages to stick its landing, providing a satisfying and logical conclusion to one of the most distinct movie series of the last ten years.

The Dark Knight Rises plays out like a dialectic of the first two films, stringing along the two main threads of the previous installments – the League of Shadow’s terrorist attack and the moral fall and death of Harvey Dent – and combining them.  Because the people of Gotham still believe in Harvey Dent’s martyrdom, the lie concocted by Batman and Gordon at the end of The Dark Knight, they have come together and passed something called the “Dent Act,” which has helped clear the streets of criminals.  It isn’t exactly clear what was in the Dent act, but apparently it was controversial enough for some politicians to push for repeal.  The dramatic cut in crime has formed a city that no longer needs Batman as its protector, and Bruce Wayne hasn’t worn the cape and cowl since the end of the second film, eight years ago in movie time.  After a stunningly shot jail break in mid air, the film opens with a large gala at the Wayne mansion, but Wayne himself is absent, leading one party-goer to suggest that he may be growing out his finger nails and filling jars with urine in solidarity with Howard Hughes. 

 

During the gala one of the maids, suspiciously played by the headlining starlet Anne Hathaway, makes her way into a largely abandoned wing of Wayne manor.  Of course, Hathaway is playing Selina Kyle, better known as Catwoman (although that name is never used).  And after a confrontation with her reclusive host, she slips out with some pearls and copies of Bruce Wayne’s finger prints.  The pearls are for her while the fingerprints are for a mysterious new player in Gotham who happen to be a front for the League of Shadow, the same terrorist organization that trained Bruce Wayne and then later attempted to destroy Gotham in the first film. 

Like a lot of people, I was skeptical of Hathaway’s ability to play Catwoman.  She has a tendency to find roles that take advantage of her mostly chipper attitude, and I wasn’t sure she would be able to convincingly beat up guys twice her size on screen.  Luckily, my skepticism was misplaced.  Hathaway is easily one of the best elements of the movie.  Most of Nolan’s Batman films are shrouded in a decidedly pessimistic view of humanity, an element that is both refreshing in a blockbuster but also, at times, oppressive.  Hathaway provides a respite from the heavier aspects of Rises because she’s one of the few characters who seems to actually enjoy herself from time to time.  When she first stumbles upon Wayne during her burglary she starts by playing innocent, but when he calls her out on her lying Hathaway’s entire demeanor shifts, from the way she speaks to how she holds herself.  Throughout the film Hathaway plays Selina Kyle as mercurial, and we never really know which side she’s on or whether or not she has gained or lost the upper hand.

The central protagonist, however, is Bane, the new leader of the League of Shadows.  Rumors about Bane suggest that he comes from a prison pit in one of the more brutal corners of the world.  It is nearly impossible for any prisoner to scale this pit and gain his freedom, and although many of tried, Bane is the only one who has made it out alive.  Bane’s approach to leading the League of Shadows is different from Ra’s al Ghul’s.  Where Ra’s obscured the violence of the terrorist group through reasonable sounding rhetoric and Liam Neesom’s proper British accent, Bane himself appears to be brutality incarnate.  Without hesitation he guns civilians down but seems to prefer killing people with his bare hands. 

His followers also have a religious-like devotion, dutifully sacrificing their lives upon a simple request, which Bane makes in the same perfunctory manner that a boss might when asking for a TPS report.  But it’s not exactly clear why Bane himself garners such allegiance from his acolytes beyond the mythology surrounding his emergence from the pit.  Tom Hardy, who has put in some great performances in his career, is constrained by a mouth piece that not only serves to obscure his facial expressions, but also distorts his voice, which ends up sounding like Sean Connery with laryngitis.  The end result can look menacing in a fight, but when Hardy has dialogue to deliver, his tools as an actor are hobbled.  This is no more apparent than when Bane gives an impassioned speech to Gotham’s downtrodden, but the audience can’t even see his mouth move, and his vocal range is electronically suppressed.

Bane’s goal is not only to break Batman but also to hold Gotham hostage, cutting it off from the outside world and allowing the city residents to turn on each other.  After a vicious battle against Batman where Bane methodically dismantles his opponent, the League of Shadows proceeds to blow up any egress from the city and arm a nuclear weapon, which they are prepared to detonate if the U.S. military takes action against them.  The sequence is impressive in the way that it manages to make the stakes suitably and improbably high, a difficult task coming off of the threat of the Joker.  While Batman is trapped in the same prison that once held Bane, the citizens of Gotham plot to bring down the League of Shadows.

Bane’s ideology and the film itself are peppered with pseudo-populist sentiment about inequality and class.  Selina Kyle, who has had to scramble to survive her entire life, resents Wayne and his high society peers.  And when Bane has finally cut Gotham off from the outside world his first move is to release all of the prisoners from jail.  Unfortunately, the film’s handling of class issues is muddle at best and downright moronic at worst.  After Bane releases Gotham’s prisoners, waves of the resentful underclass spread out over Gotham smashing the homes of the city’s economic elite.  But it’s unclear if all of this terror is a part of some Marxist dialectic, or if they’re just angry prisoners.  The film suggests that the Dent Act, which is vaguely defined, has prevented parole for many of the prisoners and has in turn stoked much of their anger.  But later, these criminals form a twisted version of the judicial system in a kangaroo court headed up by none other than Dr. Crane a.k.a. the Scarecrow.  We’re supposed to be incensed by a court whose sole purpose is to sentence its subjects because the verdict of guilty has already been determined, but we’re not asked to question whether the Dent Act affected potentially reformed convicts who may have lingered in jail for years, or wonder about the potential for false conviction present in most attempts to create a tougher, more rigid judicial system. 

All of Nolan’s philosophizing has the bong scented whiff of a dorm room soliloquy.  In the previous films the ethical and moral questions were wonderful thought puzzles buried within exciting action movies, but here the very premise of these concerns fall apart the moment you think about them.  The obvious contemporary parallel to the film’s class anger is the Occupy Wall Street movement and the 2008 financial crash.  But is the inclination to open prison doors and suspend the right to a fair trial really all that similar to increasing the top tax bracket by three percent and reinstituting economic safety guards put in place after the Great Depression, like the Glass-Steagall Act?  Nolan himself has distanced the film from real world events and claims that much of it is based off of the Charles Dickens classic A Tale of Two Cities.  And at times it seems as if Chris and his brother Jonathan want to be writing novels instead of making movies (which would explain the incredible amount of exposition that at times bogs down their plots).  But this doesn’t necessarily solve the problem that, unlike much of Dickens’s work, the moral quandaries found in this film are not well thought out.

 

But despite all of this, I enjoyed the film.  When it started to wobble, and it does from time to time, the movie got a boost from the emotional resonance that carried over from the first two movies.  Nolan does not treat this Batman series as a movie studio franchise, a fungible property that can be turned out by any number of studio approved directors.  If anything The Dark Knight Rises puts a cap on the series, and anyone would be hard pressed to awkwardly continue Nolan’s story except for Nolan himself (and my guess is that he will be out of the Batman business for some time).  This is a situation where the studio should wait a decade or so, give the audience some distance from Nolan’s vision of Batman, and then completely reinvent the character with a young and hungry director.  Whether you loved Nolan’s movies or hated them, you must admit that the character has so clearly become his in the public eye that it will take some time before anyone will accept a Batman film that isn’t helmed by Nolan.  Rises may not reach the heights of its predecessors, but its surprisingly moving denouement proves that it is possible to spin fully realized characters out of a world of superheroes. 

Addendum: in the next week or so I will have a brief write up detailing my thoughts on all three of Nolan's Batman films.  This short wrap up will allow me to discuss the relationship between all three films in more detail.  

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight (4/5)

By now we’ve been trained to expect a franchise’s second film to be its darkest.  This precedent was arguably set by Empire Strikes Back, which managed to end on a surprisingly bleak note for a blockbuster film.  This trend continued with Back to the Future Part 2, which brought us the terrifying Biff controlled Hill Valley, Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, which introduced a heart collecting Thuggee cult, and D2: The Mighty Ducks, which placed our pee wee hockey team in the middle of geopolitical turmoil.  In this sense, The Dark Knight does not disappoint.  If in the first movie Batman struggled against questions of retribution and revenge, in The Dark Knight he confronts untethered chaos as embodied in Heath Ledger’s Joker.

The movie begins in media res, as the Joker’s men rip off a bank housing the unjust enrichments of Gotham’s mob.  The heist’s “punch line” happens to be the fact that the Joker has told each thief that he should kill the others in order to cut down on the number of people who will eventually split the money.  The only thief who survives happens to be the Joker in disguise.  This is one of many robberies the Joker has committed, all of which targeted the holdings of Gotham’s organized crime, a move so brazen that one of the bank’s guards even asks “Do you know who you’re stealing from?”  I think it is safe to say that the Joker does in fact know who he’s stealing from. 

This string of robberies stretches back to Batman Begins where Gordon tells Batman that a bank was ripped off by a lunatic who left a joker card as his calling, which means that the heist that opens the sequel does a nice job of connecting both films.  The Dark Knight further maintains the global scope of its predecessor.  Gotham’s mob community (who have sorts of inter-familial meetings along the lines of the Algonquin round table) are involved in an international money laundering scheme that stretches across the globe to China.  In one of the film’s best sequences, Batman decides to forcibly extradite Lau, the head of a Chinese corporation that is in league with Gotham’s underworld.  Not only does Batman glide from one Hong Kong skyscraper to another, but he also devises a way for to hitch a ride with an in-flight airplane with Lau in tow.

The series of decisions that lead up to this abduction lend the world of Gotham some real life weight.  Like an episode of Law and Order, the district attorney Harvey Dent confers with Lieutenant Gordon in order to determine how best to take down Gotham’s mobsters.  The two then decide to rely on Batman’s ability to perform an extra-legal extradition.  The police procedural aspect to the film accomplishes something that we rarely see in the comic books which are often concerned with flitting from one action panel to another: presenting the Gotham as a living, breathing city.  It is certainly in-keeping with Christopher Nolan’s goal of grounding the superhero film in reality, an objective that is often achieved on the level of aesthetics, if not often on the level of plot.

The Joker pulls off a series of criminal acts that look more like thought experiments than traditional crimes.  He threatens to continue killing Gotham’s citizens until Batman reveals his identity to the public, and when Harvey Dent turns himself in as Batman in order to calm an agitated public, the Joker attacks Dent’s SWAT team convoy in a dazzling set piece.  Later the Joker will make Batman choose between the life of Gotham’s one true hero, the law abiding Harvey Dent, and Wayne’s childhood friend Rachel Dawes, graciously recast from Katie Holmes to Maggie Gyllenhaal.  And in the film’s climax two ferries, one containing everyday citizens and the other criminals, must decide whether or not they want to blow the other up in order to save their own lives. 

All of these Sophie’s choices could have easily come across as the product of a freshman college student’s philosophy 101 term paper, if not for the byzantine, contorted, and scene stealing performance of Heath Ledger as the Joker.  Despite the fact that Ledger’s Joker only appears for a grand total of ten and a half minutes in the entire two and a half hour movie, he successfully hijacks the film.  I think it is safe to say that Ledger’s performance would have received the same accolades even if it weren’t for his untimely death.  Ledger frequently smacks his distended lips as if he is never quite satiated, and at times he moves in a waddle in what is some unknowable inside joke.  Perhaps the film’s most iconic scene occurs when Joker swerves down a street in a stolen police car, stretching his head out of the window and enjoying the wind on his face.  It is in this moment that the Joker seduces the audience to his point of view.  For just a second we get to see the joy and absolute freedom of anarchic will.  I have always felt that a great portrayal of the Joker lies not in his body count (although there’s plenty of that here), but in his ability to convince an audience that his form of freewheeling violence might be just a little enjoyable.

As a villain, the Joker poses a problem that’s distinct from the League of Shadows.  Where the League of Shadows was an ideological terrorist group bent on refashioning the world in their own image, the Joker is pure bedlam.  His reasoning is inscrutable and thus unpredictable.  Like in the best horror movies, a genre from which Nolan also borrows, the Joker is scary because he defies traditional Enlightenment notions of reason.  Where half of Batman Begins was dedicated to the origins of its title character, Joker is distinct because we are denied an origin story.  He does provide a shifting narrative of his scarred face, but he’s an unreliable narrator switching out his traumatic beginning whenever he feels like it.

If the League of Shadows represented Al Qaeda, then the Joker represents the anthrax attacks that followed.  Where the Twin Towers attack was a sickening spectacle, the anthrax attacks only furthered America’s belief that violence could strike any one of us at any time and was arguably just as influential in convincing Americans that it was a good idea to invade Iraq as the 9/11 attack.  To this day, it is still entirely unclear who was involved in the anthrax attack and for what reason.  As the Joker tells a mentally and physically scarred Harvey Dent, “If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger, will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all, part of the plan.”  Likewise, Americans seemed perfectly comfortable with the idea of civilian and military deaths within a war zone half a world away, but the moment that our own sense of security comes under attack, then we readily sacrifice hundreds of thousands of innocent foreigners and thousands of our own soldiers just so we can open our mail in peace. 

The central idea of The Dark Knight, that we are willing to cross ethical lines when the personal safety of ourselves and loved ones is broached, is embodied in the character of Harvey Dent.  While we see shadows in the corners of Dent’s personality early on—he is surprisingly tolerant of Batman for a DA—the film explicitly positions him as the opposite of the caped crusader, as a man who works within the system and still manages to put criminals behind bars.  At one point he is referred to as Gotham’s “white knight.”  But over the course of the film Dent becomes tarnished.  He begins bending rules, even threatening to shoot a suspect in order to garner more information.  When the Joker blows up half of Dent’s face, then he goes into full on Inigo Montoya revenge mode. 

Any fan of Batman knows that Dent is playing the role of Two-Face, one of Batman’s most complex villains.  While I’m sure most moviegoers were happy with Two-Face’s appearance, as a longtime fan of the comics I was a little disappointed in his inclusion as a second tier villain.  The character also got short shrift in the campfest Batman Forever (again, playing second fiddle).  Even at two and a half hours, The Dark Knight feels increasingly overstuffed (I haven’t even touched upon the subplot of the Wayne employee who uncovers his dual identity), and tacking on Two-Face feels like there are too many balls in the air.  Besides, when will this great character get the full spotlight he deserves?

In some ways The Dark Knight is a messier film than its predecessor, but it more than makes up for it by being a much more ambitious film as well.  Arguably the greatest improvement between the first film and the second is Nolan’s increased comfort shooting action scenes.  This is apparent in a showdown between the Joker brandishing a machine gun and Batman on a high tech motorcycle.  The scene becomes a clash of wills, the Joker employing Batman to break his code against killing, willing to sacrifice himself to prove man’s infallibility.

The Dark Knight ends on a note of nihilism.  Batman must become the villain in order to maintain Dent’s role as a hero, because otherwise the masses would lose faith in social and government systems.  In Nolan’s world there’s a deep distrust of the people.  And while he does suggest that at times everyday people might surprise us and make the moral decision, ultimately this is overshadowed by the central characters who give in to a code of no code.  It is this anti-democratic point of view that not only makes the film an intriguing in its own right, but also makes it a unique blockbuster.  What other multi-million dollar success stories are as critical of the type of widespread populism that makes the summer blockbuster possible in the first place?  I may not agree with The Dark Knight’s view of the world, and at times its theorizing can be incredibly thin, but it is a rare big budgeted film that makes us question our own moral fortitude. 

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne (4/5)

Listen: Bruce Wayne has come unstuck in time.  The last we saw of Batman, he had been zapped by Darkseid’s omega beams, but instead of killing him, they actually sent him into the past.  The Return of Bruce Wayne follows Bruce Wayne as he skips from one century to the next getting in all sorts of adventures.  It’s the kind of set up that’s bursting with potential and any writer worth his salt would jump at the opportunity to write stories about Batman battling the pirate Blackbeard, caught in the middle of a prehistoric intertribal feud, or solving mysteries in Puritan New England.  But we don’t have just any writer at the helm of Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne.  We have Grant Morrison that insanely inventive but wildly uneven Scottsman.

The Return of Bruce Wayne follows Morrison’s writing on Final Crisis, arguably the absolute nadir of his major comic book work.  Most of that series reads as if Morrison was vomiting up ideas and hoping that a few of them stuck.  What’s most frustrating about Grant Morrison is that he is, when at the top of his game, a tremendous talent.  His first creator owned invention, The Invisibles is a wonderful distillation of his interest in magic, countercultural movements, and mind melting time travel.  But when he superimposes those interests onto the world of superheroes, the results are often mixed.  I sometimes wish Morrison had a mentor around like Gertrude Stein who famously told a young Ernest Hemingway, “Start again – and this time concentrate.”  Luckily, The Return of Bruce Wayne, while far from perfect, is some of Morrison’s best work with DC’s major characters. 

The fact that each issue of The Return of Bruce Wayne is largely self-contained reigns in Morrison’s more self-indulgent tendencies.  While there is an overarching plot dealing with Darkseid’s attempt to use Bruce as a weapon, the story is mostly episodic.  The best moments in the series occur early on.  In the first chapter, Bruce Wayne is found in a prehistoric cave and discovered by a tribe of early men.  The story is told from the perspectives of the cave men, so we cannot understand anything Wayne has to say, since he is speaking in modern day English.  The tribe has a run in with another group of cavemen lead by none other than Vandal Savage, and Bruce Wayne must take on the mantle of the bat in order to fight his way out of their clutches.  At the end of this adventure an eclipse occurs, which sends Wayne skipping along to the next point in time with only echoes of his memory still in tact.

Wayne then finds himself in an early 17^th century Gotham run by Puritans.  There Wayne befriends a pagan who lives by herself, hidden away in the local woods.  He also becomes an inspector who uses his still intact detective skills to solve crimes in colonial America.  Morrison has fun with these jumps in time.  The story takes on an epic scope, even if it mostly takes place in and around what would be modern day Gotham.  Wayne leaps through time even as he stays relatively grounded in place.  Morrison also builds a fun mythology around Wayne’s time traveling adventures.  The cape and cowl he brought back from the future, as well as his first appearance as a Bat-like god, appears to later influence the Miagani, a nation of Native-Americans whose culture revolves around the bat. 

And because this is a Morrison book, it can be read as a meta-commentary on Batman as a character.  Each time Bruce Wayne reconstitutes himself in time, he essentially forms himself into a different variation of Batman.  This is reminiscent of ways that Batman has been reinvented throughout his seventy year history, from his beginnings as a hard boiled vigilante to his role as a pop art icon in the 60s to his transformation into an anti-hero by Frank Miller in the 80s.  But Morrison is also commenting on the number of archetypal heroes that make up Batman’s DNA, including the bat as a totem symbol, the Western gunslinger, and the film noir detective.

But, unfortunately, Morrison isn’t able to keep up this level of storytelling.  As the series runs on, he spends more time explaining Darkseid’s plan to charge Wayne up with omega energy so that when he reaches the present day, he will destroy the planet.  These cosmic level shenanigans are far less interesting than the individual adventures Wayne had been having throughout time.  And eventually the story devolves into a bunch of technobabble you might find in an episode of Star Trek.  Still, the good outweighs the bad, and unless you’re one of those who absolutely cannot stand Morrison’s brand of insanity, then there’s plenty to love in The Return of Bruce Wayne.  At the very least, the series proves that no matter the century, Batman will always be cool as hell. 

Batman Begins

Batman Begins (4/5)

In a pivotal moment in Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is ordered by his mentor Ducard to execute a man from a small village who has been accused of killing his neighbor because he coveted his land.  Wayne demurs, telling Ducard that the villager deserves to be tried for his crimes before punishment is meted out.  If we merely execute the man, Wayne argues, without a procedure in place to check our baser tendencies for retribution, then the result is not justice but rather retribution.  The question of where we draw the line between justice and vengeance becomes the core theme of Christopher Nolan’s first foray into the Batman mythos, and it is a question that seems particularly suited to the character of Batman.  It is also a question that had been all but ignored in the years following the September 11^th attacks.  In many ways Batman Begins is the quintessential post-9/11 film that manages to smuggle moral quandaries into a big budgeted blockbuster when the larger discourse surrounding terrorism seemed content to ignore basic questions of justice. 

Tellingly, the villains of Batman Begins are an international terrorist organization by the name of the League of Shadows and headed by a mysterious character Ra’s al Ghul.  It is later revealed that the League of Shadows has been around for centuries and exists to level empires that have become too big for their britches.  But before the League of Shadows reveals themselves as the villains, they first serve as a training organization for Bruce Wayne, a billionaire driven by the death of his parents to travel across the globe in an attempt to understand the world of criminals from the inside out. 

Perhaps one of the most brilliant moves that Nolan makes in the film is to spend nearly half of the movie on the training and origins of Batman.  When Nolan’s Batman film was release, it had been nearly eight years since the disastrous Batman & Robin, a film so poorly received that it single handedly killed of the multi-million dollar franchise.  Where Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin attempted to resurrect the camp and humor of the old Adam West Batman series (although Schumacher’s film didn’t have one-tenth of the whit of the 1960s TV show), Batman Begins endeavors to shroud the superhero’s origins in as much realism as possible. 

The film cuts back and forth between Wayne’s training with Ducard and his lost years dealing with the death of his parents.  In recounting Batman’s origins, Nolan decides to include one of the most controversial figures in all of Batman’s seventy year history: Joe Chill.  Plenty of Batman nerds (myself included) have argued about whether or not the murderer of Thomas and Martha Wayne should even have an identity.  Those of us who prefer the anonymous mugger version of the story claim that because the murderer is never caught, any criminal, whether it’s an everyday bank robber or one of Batman’s rogue’s gallery, can serve as a stand in for the man who killed Batman’s parents.  I’ve often found myself on the anti-Joe Chill side of this argument, but Nolan’s treatment of the character has forced me to rethink my position.  Instead of a low life scumbag who murdered two people for a handful of cash and some jewelry, Joe Chill is portrayed as a desperate figure who turned to crime in the midst of an economic recession.  And his killing of the Waynes looks more like a man who acted out of fear than sadism. 

By transforming the motivations for Chill’s crime, Nolan expands the question of crime from the actions of individual actors to notions of systemic economic and ideological circumstances.  In fact, when the League of Shadows reappears in the film’s climax, it is explained that the organization first attempted to level Gotham by leveling its economy, causing the recession that lead to criminals like Joe Chill.  This is an astute account of how terrorism works.  Many forget that one of the chief goals of the September 11^th attacks was not merely the indiscriminate killing of innocent people; it was also an attempt to embroil the U.S.in foreign wars in order to bleed us dry with deficit spending.  By emphasizing the economics of crime and terrorism, Batman Begins asks us to question the root cause of violence. 

The first half of Batman Begins is so well crafted, so methodical in its pacing, that it’s almost a shame that Bruce Wayne has to suit up in the second half.  Batman’s origins are so compelling that Nolan could have done the entire film without a single appearance of the cape and cowl.  (In fact, I’ve always felt that a TV series that followed Bruce around the world as he trains to become Batman would be a big hit).  The second half of the film is decidedly overstuffed, and it suffers from a glut of villains, a problem most superhero franchises don’t run into until the sequels.  Batman faces off against the League of Shadows, Gotham’s crime boss Falconi, and the deranged Scarecrow.  Any fan of the comics has to object to the inclusion of the Scarecrow in this film.  While his psychological obsession with fear and terror fit neatly within the themes of the movie, the Scarecrow is such a strong villain that it’s truly a shame he doesn’t receive the sole spotlight.  This may be a complaint reserved for comic book geeks, but as a member of this group, I must object.

Nolan also struggles when filming action sequences.  He uses so many quick cuts that it is nearly impossible to see what is going on.  At times this is intentional, such as when we are supposed to see Batman’s hit and run techniques from the point of view of the criminals themselves.  But there are scenes later on that use the same choppy camera work for no particular reason.  At one point Batman has to fight four different ninjas, which sounds like the coolest thing ever.  But unfortunately Nolan slices and dices the fight choreography, making the entire thing nearly incomprehensible. 

But perhaps the film’s single most glaring misstep is Katie Holmes’s tone deaf performance as Bruce Wayne’s childhood friend, Rachel Dawes.  Whenever Holmes attempts to be charming she tends to smile with half of her face, which can be downright frightening.  But in her defense, she is given some of the film’s worst lines of dialogue.  Even Katharine Hepburn couldn’t deliver the phrase “Some of us have work to do” without sounding like a stuck up prick.  Superhero films have not always been kind to their female characters, and Batman Begins perpetrates this boy’s club tradition.

Batman Begins is a much more uneven film in its second half than in its first half, but it still manages to meld big summer action with surprisingly nuanced questions of how we understand terrorism.  When Wayne refuses to executed the villager accused of murder, he asks us to question how far one can go with retribution before you become the very object you are fighting against.  How many indefinite detentions, indiscriminate aerial bombings, extrajudicial executions can a nation participate in until it is perpetuating the same kind of violence it has sworn to stop.  Batman Begins proves that when those in the media stops asking tough questions, popular culture can sometimes smuggle them into the public debate under the guise of entertainment. 

The Dark Knight of the Soul

Batman is the greatest superhero.  Sure, there are some other contenders.  Spiderman’s mixture of everyman foibles and web slinging escapism absolutely put him in the running.  Wolverine’s blue collar attitude also has his promoters.  And we might even throw a nod to Superman because he started this whole crazy mess to begin with.  But, for my money, Batman is still tops. 

            Batman has reigned as the greatest superhero thanks to two important elements: 1) the introduction of a “why” and 2) his malleability.  Batman was the first superhero in the golden age to explain why he decides to dress up and fight crime.  Where other superheroes spent entire issues explaining the origins of their powers, Batman didn’t have powers to begin with, so Bill Finger and Bob Kane decided to give him a motivation.  Michael Chabon explains the importance of the question “Why” in his classic novel about young Jewish comic book writers, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &Clay:

                                    “The question is why.”

                                    “The question is why.”

                                    “Why,” Joe repeated.

                                    “Why is he doing it?”

                                    “Doing what?

                                    “Dressing up like a monkey or an ice cube or a can of fucking corn.”

                                    “To fight the crime, isn’t it?”

            “Well, yes, to fight crime.  To fight evil.  But that’s all any of these guys are doing.  That’s as far as they ever go.  They just…you know, it’s the right thing to do, so they do it.  How interesting is that?”

            “I see.”

            “Only Batman, you know…see, yeah, that’s good.  That’s what makes Batman good, and not dull at all, even though he’s just a guy who dresses up like a bat and beats people up.”

            “What is the reason for Batman?  The why?”

            “His parents were killed, see?  In cold blood.  Right in front of his eyes, when he was a kid.  By a robber.”  (94-95)

Finger and Kane were the first people who realized that a comic book character could have an interior life.  Batman is the first psychologically conflicted superhero.

            But being the first doesn’t also make you the best seventy years later.  Employing a “why” has been put into practice for plenty of superheroes since Batman, and has lead to Spiderman’s wonderful mantra, “With great power comes great responsibility.”  Batman is also the greatest superhero because he is so malleable.  So long as a handful of necessary elements are put into place, an artist can make Batman his own in a manner that is unheard of for other superheroes.  There is no Batman; there are merely a bunch of Batmen.  Because Batman’s story may be told and retold with variation again and again, he never becomes stale.  And different versions, sometimes even when they conflict in their retelling or ideological point of view, seem perfectly legitimate.  It doesn’t break the mythology if the killer of the Waynes escapes justice or if that killer, Joe Chill, is later caught by the police.  Both are acceptable retellings that may transform, ever so slightly, the meaning of Batman’s origin, but, ultimately, they don’t break the Bat. 

            So why am I talking about Batman?  Well, as many of you know, there happens to be a new Batman movie coming out this summer.  It’s a little, independent piece called The Dark Knight Rises.  (It seems as if everything rises in movies these days: machines, apes, Cobra).  Well, in the next few months I want to take a look at the two films that lead up to the final film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.  I remember enjoying Nolan’s work on Batman, although I haven’t watched The Dark Knight since it was in theaters several years ago.  I’m also a fan of Nolan’s work in general, to varying degrees.  On the internet these days Nolan is either hailed as an artistic God and the true inheritor of the mantle of Stanley Kubrick (yes, there are people who think this), or he is decried as an overrated hack.  Well, for most of us he is neither.  He has made some great films and some uneven films (although he has yet to make a terrible film).  I also don’t believe that his version of Batman is definitive.  It is the creation of a singular artist, but it is also nothing more than a single perspective among many.  In my views I will try to look at how Nolan transforms the Batman mythos to reflect Western anxieties in the decade following 9/11.  But if my interpretation isn’t up to your liking, then all I can ask is, “Why so serious?”

All Star Batman & Robin #8 (1/5)

All Star Batman & Robin #8 (1/5)

This review should be unnecessary. This kind of piss-poor writing and snail paced plot should be dismissed and choked to death with lack of sales. Except that the name Frank Miller is on the cover, which for some people is the mark of quality no matter what. After all this is the man who's comics are turned into box office money and one of the few names non-comic book readers actually recognize. So when his name is on the cover people give him the benefit of the doubt, far too much benefit and far too little doubt.

I'm not a Frank Miller hater by any means. I think he's got a great sense of pulp and I even enjoyed The Dark Knight Strikes Again which was a hilarious send up of the Bush administration. Most people defend All Star Batman & Robin by saying it's a parody of DC comics and shouldn't be taken seriously. I'm all for poking fun at comic book conventions but there's not much that's actually funny. Thanks to Miller's lazy writing most issues have focused on a superhero from the DC showing up briefly but not doing anything to further the plot. In this issue it's Hal Jordan's Green Lantern and the "gag" is he's dumb. The entire scene consists of a rooftop exchange between Hal and Batman. Hal is eating a hot dog (hilarious!) and he's unable to find Batman hiding in the shadows for the first half of the conversation (what a Laruel and Hardy combo!). Batman then calls him a "moron" about fifty times and tells him they'll meet later. In eight issues there has been an issue and a half worth of plot (and this is being generous). The pointless cameos have ground this series to a halt.

If anything All Star Batman & Robin is a parody of Miller's writing style. The over the top violence and "grit" lose all meaning because it's so absurd, and when you start making fun of yourself without realizing it readers are going to look over past work and wonder if they stand up as well as they once thought. The Joker is portrayed as a date raping serial killer. The psychopath Joker characterization too often leads to striping the character of any of his defining personality. Where are the twisted punch lines and tortured logic that's his m.o.? All Miller did was make a generic sociopath and give him white skin and green hair. This is the kind of thing a Frank Miller wannabe does, not the original.

I remember reading that Miller said this series was supposed to be a prequel to his classic The Dark Knight Returns, but I don't get that feeling anywhere. The first sign of of a connection is that the weird shirtless Nazi woman with swastikas painted on her chest makes a brief cameo. So if there are any fans of that flash in the pan Frank Miller creation feel free to pick up this issue but for anyone else stop inflating this man's ego.