X-Men: Apocalypse

X-Men: Apocalypse (3.5/5)

In order to enjoy the recent X-Men films, the first thing you have to do is completely ignore issues of continuity. These films don’t so much ask the audience to suspend disbelief when it comes to their fictional timeline as they ask you to wrestle your disbelief to the ground, lock it in a safe, and catapult it into the stratosphere. The same character reappears in different times at widely different ages, events from film to film are conveniently forgotten, and characters don’t seem to age over the course of decades. In X-Men; Apocalypse, for instance, Havok, who joined the X-Men twenty years prior in 1962, looks like he’s still in his mid-twenties. Maybe you can pass this off as some good genes, but then why does he have a brother, Scott Summers (Cyclops), who’s still in high school? You could go mad trying to diagram a timeline of the X-Men films.

But this wasn’t always the way. The X-Men movies are a fascinating example of how superhero films have evolved over the last fifteen years. Appearing after Blade but before Raimi’s Spider-Man, the original X-Men film attempted to take the sometimes goofy premise of the comics and ground it into something that resembles the world we live in. At the time this enraged the nerd community who were upset that Wolverine was too tall and the X-costumes were too drab. But it payed off handsomely with the general public and helped start off our current superhero obsession.

As time went on and people became used to the idea of people who had incredible powers and silly names and costumes to go with them, superhero films have embraced many of the elements that make superhero comic books unique. There’s less concern about grounding these movies in the “real world.” Currently, Marvel’s films are moving towards a match-up between its heroes and an evil man who sits in a throne in the middle of space collecting magic rocks. Likewise, the X-Men movies have embraced time travel and the idea that mutants had a massive impact on important historical events.

I’m all for increasing the insanity quotient in the modern superhero films because I think it’s what makes the genre unique. Sure, every now and again I want to watch a Nolanesque, semi-realistic representation of Batman, but when our characters can shoot beams of energy from their eyes, sometimes realism is overrated. So I don’t think Apocalypse would have worked as a villain in earlier iterations of the X-Men films, but an ancient mutant who convinces others to worship him as a God and transfers his consciousness from person to person to obtain immortality seems right at home sixteen years after the first X-Men movie debuted. Overall, X-Men: Apocalypse is overstuffed, overlong, convoluted, lumpy narratively, and the third act goes on for far too long. Which is to say, it’s a superhero film made in the past five years. Other than these common complaints, Apocalypse is an enjoyable ride that benefits from director Bryan Singer’s deft eye.

Subscribing to overt Darwinism, the film’s titular villain has an even more extremist view of human/mutant relations than Magneto, and he spends the film, naturally, threatening the extinction of all of humanity. For the film’s first half,Apocalypse gathers his “four horsemen,” soldiers who will aid him in his conquests. But as the film opens, we’re introduced to Apocalypse in ancient Egypt over five thousand years ago. This introduction plays like a little narrative itself, and one of the my favorite moments in the film is the first shot, which consists of a moving bird’s-eye shot that renders the Sahara Desert into abstract lines before the camera pans upwards to reveal massive pyramids. The intro ends with the betrayal of Apocalypse by his human worshipers who have devised a way to bury him deep in the ground. The events go by with few words, Singer preferring to tell the narrative visually.

Later in the film, Singer takes a meta-dig at the third X-Men movie, which was hastily directed by Brett Ratner. The well-crafted intro fully justifies Singer’s choice to throw some shade like a hip-hop MC. My suspicion is that of all the characters in all of the X-Men movies, Singer probably relates most to Quicksilver who had the showstopping moment in the previous entry, Days of Future Past, in which he moved so quickly that time appeared to crawl to a near stop. Once again, Quicksilver saves the day, this time from an explosion that tears apart the X-mansion. Sure, it’s a cover of an old favorite, but Singer manages to tweak the formula enough to make it just as fun and exciting as in the previous film. As a director, Singer also has similar control over the placement and movement of characters. Quicksilver is a representation of his near godlike power, a comment on the director’s mastery of the mise-en-scene.

Throughout the film, Singer brings a real director’s vision to the proceedings. As in Days of Future Past, he dabs splashes of primary colors in an homage to the film’s comic book origins. (Singer’s interest in use of light goes back to The Usual Suspects where he translated film noir’s chiaroscuro into expressionistic lighting). He also makes great use of both foreground and background. Nightcrawler, who like in X2 is a standout character, will often pop into the foreground of a frame disrupting the original focus of the shot. In one particular scene, Magneto confronts former coworkers who have outed him as a mutant only to be interrupted by Apocalypse. When Magento tells Apocalypse, who at this point he doesn’t know, not to try and stop him from killing these men for their betrayal, with the wave of a hand, Apocalypse simply melts these men into the floor. These victims who are slightly out of focus and in the background of the shot suddenly and unexpectedly fall to their death. The scene is visually surprising because it makes use of foreground and background and occurs in a single shot where another director would choose to cut. (The use of superpowers are particularly gruesome in this installment,)

While another 2016 superhero film, Captain America: Civil War, easily has a stronger script, there are times when Singer’s understanding of the visual language of cinema makes the Russo brothers look like they should go back to directing boring old television because they don’t quite have the chops to keep up. And about that script. The film is all over the place. There’s a moment where the newly recruited X-Men are captured by Stryker, the U.S. colonel responsible for Wolverine’s adamantium claws. This detour takes us away from the central conflict between Apocalypse and the X-Men, and in all honestly it seems like these events occur solely for a brief Wolverine cameo.

And while it would kill fourteen-year-old me if he heard me say this, Apocalypse just isn’t that interesting of a villain. When reading X-Men comics I thought he was a great villain because he looked cool and was incredibly powerful, but his motivations are mostly retreads of the more conflicted and thus more intriguing Magneto. And the only reason why Apocalypse apparently needs his four horsemen henchmen is because he’s named Apocalypse, which, come to think of it, was pretty much the same reason in the comics.

As the X-Men films have become more complicated, they have also become more unwieldy. But there’s still plenty to like about the latest X-installment. Sure, it doesn’t have the immediate hook of two generations meeting across time like Days of Future Past, but there’s enough to set the film apart from the current glut of superhero films that I’m curious to see where we go next.

Star Wars: Dark Empire I

Star Wars: Dark Empire I (2/5)

If Heir to the Empire reintroduced Star Wars to the novel format, then Dark Empire reintroduced Star Wars to comic books.  Dark Empire was a major event that ushered in the era of Dark Horse’s reign as the next guardian of Star Wars in comics.  Of course, it’s not like Star Wars hadn’t found their way into the comic book format previously.  From 1977 to 1986, Marvel comics published a Star Wars series, but the results weren’t ideal.  The Marvel iteration of Star Wars has largely been ridiculed for introducing a new main character that pretty much looked like Bugs Bunny in space.  Perhaps as a corrective for Marvel’s perceived unseriousness, Dark Horse doubled down on the dark and gritty aspects of Star Wars.  Unfortunately, the results are just as laughable as Marvel’s giant trash talking bunny.

Dark Empire I takes place after the events of Heir to the Empire. The Empire has fallen into its own civil war among different warlord factions, and in order to sew confusion, the Republic has used commandeered Star Destroyers to swoop in and further decimate Imperial forces.  As the story opens, Han and Leia are rushing in to rescue Luke who is leading troops on the ground.  But after they finally fight their way to Luke, an anomalous “Force storm” sweeps through and picks up Luke and Artoo like Dorothy and Toto in the tornado.  The Force storm is both figuratively and literally nebulous.  It’s not clear what its purpose is other than to separate Luke from his friends and to whisk him towards the series’s big bad, which also happens to be the big bad from the films: the Emperor. 

Early on in the 90s extended universe, artists weren’t shy about bringing back fan favorites.  Not only does Dark Empire I resurrect the Emperor but it also showcases the return of Boba Fett.  For me the question of what to do with the Empire in the extended universe was somewhat tricky.  It would be nice if these stories fully illustrated how vast this galaxy is instead of rehashing major conflicts from the first trilogy.  There were times when the main villain was so strong that it hardly matter—Thrawn in Heir to the Empire, for instance—but resurrecting the Emperor results in a serious case of diminished returns.  The Emperor’s rebirth is attributed to, what else, clones.  But it’s a little more complicated.  Through the magic of retconning, The Emperor has always been a quasi-ghostly being who is so infused with the power of the dark side that he burns out his physical body and must replace it with a new clone body from time to time.

The Emperor has whisked Luke away in order to offer him, once again, the chance to rule the galaxy by his side.  (Presumably, the Emperor created the Force storm, but like a lot of the comic’s story, this isn’t exactly clear).  Improbably, Luke decides to agree to join the Emperor in order to defeat him from inside his organization.  This doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Luke’s plans look something like this: first, ally with the Emperor; second, become consumed by the dark side; and, finally, the Emperor is destroyed!  I think there are a couple of steps missing from this process, and I have a problem with the idea of joining the dark side being treated in the same manner as going undercover in the mob.

While Luke is playacting his own version of Donnie Brasco, the Republic is fighting off World Devastators, the next iteration in a long line of super weapons that plagued both the New Republic and unimaginative Star Wars EU fiction.  Naturally, the World Devastators, which feed on a planet’s raw material in order to produce more weapons for the Empire, are an even greater threat than the Death Star.  Declaring whatever new technology the Empire has conjured as even more dangerous than the Death Star became routine in 90s Star Wars stories, presumably an avowal made by an Imperial commander while giving his audience metal horns and being backed by a gnarly Dave Mustaine solo. 

Sensing that Luke is in trouble, Leia convinces Han to mount a rescue, but instead of heading straight to Luke, the two make an inexplicable detour to Nar Shaddaa, a moon that is completely inhabited by lowlifes, bounty hunters, and other assorted criminals.  It’s not clear what Leia and Han wish to accomplish by visiting this place, but it was probably just an excuse for the writer to reintroduce Boba Fett who shows up to chase Solo and his wife.  If Boba from the films was a man of few words, coolly carrying out his mission, then the Boba of Dark Empire is his inbred cousin.  While chasing Han, Boba Fett is continually bumbling as he tries to kill his mark.  If you hated how Boba Fett died in Return of the Jedi, then you will absolutely loath what they have done to the character in this comic.  I will concede that the artwork of CamKennedy, best known for his work on Judge Dredd and 2000 A.D., really clicks during the Nar Shaddaa section of the work.  There’s something about his rough, cynical artwork that melds well with Star Wars’s underworld, even if it seems unsuited to the wide angle battles in other parts of the story. Kennedy would go on to serve as an artist on a Boba Fett series later on, and, likewise, his artwork captured the grittier aspects of Star Wars surprisingly well. 

The entire narrative is pocked by those unnecessary explanatory captions where the author over explains everything that’s happening.  So the reader is presented with an image of the Republic and the Empire battling and the caption then explains that the Republic and the Empire are battling.  You would think that with the judicious use of these captions that the reasoning of Han, Luke, Leia and the rest would make sense, but you would be wrong.  The dialogue is alternatively bad and hilariously bad.  Perhaps my favorite moment in the whole series is when Leia mans the guns of the Millenium Falcon and says to herself, “Luke is right…I can feel the Force moving through me…guiding my hands in the terrible task of war!”  In fact, most of the critiques of the prequel trilogy, that the characters were thinly drawn or that the dialogue was stilted, could just as easily be leveled at Dark Empire I.

And yet, over the years Dark Empire has received a mostly positive reputation, and it’s often found on lists of best stories from the Star Wars EU.  Part of its reputation might come from the fact that, as the title suggests, it’s a rather dark story.  But it’s the kind of dark that confuses humorless cynicism with adult storytelling, the kind of “mature” narrative that most early teens are susceptible to.  Over the years a lot of those teenagers who first read Dark Empire have grown up, and if they ever revisit this series, I can’t imagine they would be anything other than disappointed.  

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon (4/5)

            Over the course of his career, Michael Chabon has built a body of work that seems determined to prove that, paradoxically, we may engage with complicated, real-world entanglements through escapist literature.  Kavalier and Clay detailed the Jewish immigrant experience by looking at the early formation of superheroes and comic books.  The Yiddish Policeman’s Union took on questions of national identity and sovereignty while telling a noirish mystery adventure.  At this point it seems strange to see Chabon come to reality through the decidedly un-otherworldly genre of the personal essay.  Chabon’s collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, gives fans a glimpse into the real life obsessions that have made his novels unique imprints on the world of literature.

            Anyone who has read his magnum opus Kavalier and Clay knows that Chabon is perfectly capable of writing novels of intellectual and physical weight, so it is somewhat refreshing to read this series of airy musings that might be best read during a sequence of lazy afternoons.  Chabon’s ruminations are evenly split between autobiographical exploration and pop culture inquiry.  In one of the more intimate essays, “The Heartbreak Kid,” Chabon recounts flashes of his first marriage and waxes nostalgic about his relationship with his first father-in-law.  And yet just a couple dozen pages prior, he was tracing the evolution of Legos and doing his best impression of a septuagenarian while decrying their recent glut of licensing deals.  But perhaps the best individual essays of the collection happen when the autobiographical and the cultural cross paths, like in “A Woman of Valor” where he compares his wife to the Jack Kirby superheroine Big Barda (which, if you are a DC Comics fan, is perhaps the most romantic sentiment ever uttered). 

            I had the good fortune to briefly talk to Michael Chabon while he signed my copy of this book.  During our brief back and forth, my wife asked him if Manhood for Amateurs was a response to his wife’s collection of essays Bad Mother (which is also excellent, by the way).  He said that he wrote Manhood as a sort of companion piece to Bad Mother.  After hearing this I couldn’t help but line up both books.  The essay genre seems like a more natural fit for Ayelet Waldman, who managed to go to some difficult places in her writing.  Wanting to limit an audience’s access to your personal life is a perfectly reasonable reaction to writing non-fiction, but it would be a lie to say that it doesn’t in some manner limit this collection.  Still, I’ve always felt that it is sometimes necessary for an author to write minor works in order to prove he is a major artist.

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. 

Moonrise Kingdom

Moonrise Kingdom (5/5)

Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom opens with the sound of the composer Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” which breaks down, piece by piece, each section of the orchestra and then later builds it back up.  The work is reminiscent of opening up a pocket watch in order to see all of the gears working in conjunction.  It is not lost on the audience that as Britten’s music is deconstructed, Anderson presents the inside of a household, using perfectly choreographed camera movements, that is itself immaculately designed by the eye of an idiosyncratic artist.  This got me thinking: is Wes Anderson one of our greatest creators of fantasy worlds? 

It might seem strange to suggest that Anderson should be mentioned alongside people like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and George R.R. Martin.  You won’t find dragons or magic spells in his work, but what you will find is a hermetically sealed universe that seems to jump wholesale out of the mind of a singular artist.  Is Anderson’s fetish for vintage audio equipment that far removed from Tolkien’s love of medieval verse?  While every one of Anderson’s films is created in a world that is slightly out of step from our own, of all his live action work Moonrise Kingdom seems to rest out on its own plane of existence. 

And much of Moonrise Kingdom’s potency comes from the understanding that children and adults inhabit distinct and separate realms.  The film takes place in the 1960s on a sleepy New England island, New Penzance, which is not only largely separated from the mainland but also bares a name that would look comfortable written on a map of a fantasy world.  This close knit community is frayed when two young children, Sam and Suzy, go on the lam, making their way deep into the woods of the island thanks to skills Sam has picked up attending the Khaki Scouts.  As the children retreat into the wilderness, the adults scramble to catch up with them.  As we move back and forth between the adult world and the world of children, we understand the distinct sort of dysfunction that infects both.  In the 1960s both Sam and Suzy might have been called “trouble children.”  Sam is an orphan who doesn’t fit in well with his foster family (in fact, his foster father decides that he won’t invite him back to the house after hearing about his flight) and Suzy is prone to outbursts of violence and rage.  But where the children have trouble suppressing their emotions, the adults, in typical Andersonian fashion, hide their dysfunction under a laconic haze.  Suzy’s mother and father (played by Francis MacDormond and Bill Murray) are mired in a loveless marriage, which has led her mother to take up with the local police chief, Sharp (Bruce Willis). 

 

Wes Anderson clues us into his interest in world making through a series of books that Suzy brings along on her retreat with Sam.  These books carry fantastical names like The Francine Odyssey, The Disappearance of the 6^th Grade, and The Girl from Jupiter.  This need for escapism obviously parallels the children’s flight into the woods.  To disappear into the world of fantasy isn’t far off from dropping off the map and slipping out from under the expectations of adults.  Anderson constructs this universe with the help of a map as well as the narrating power of Bob Ballaban, who doubles as a wizard-like character who figures out how to catch up with Sam and Suzy.  As the film progresses, it becomes further and further detached from our world.  In fact, at times it seems as if Anderson is applying techniques he learned in his animated film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, onto a live action palate.  This allows him to ratchet up the scope of his film towards the end by introducing a flood that seems to be borrowed from one of the world’s most famous fantasy epics, The Old Testament. 

But of all the great fantasy writers out there, perhaps none pervade Anderson’s universe more than the great artist, Charles M. Schulz.  Anderson, never one to be shy about his influences, even names a dog Snoopy.  In Peanuts, Schulz may have created one of the longest lasting fantasy worlds, stretching out over a half of a century.  And while he may have made the adults invisible (they only appeared in the TV specials as indecipherable and disembodied voices), he never ran away from adult concerns.  Where Anderson creates a world where two misfits can largely escape the dysfunctions of the adult world, Schultz had his prepubescent characters shoulder the crushing burdens of existential malaise.  And yet, there’s something refreshing about the optimism found in Moonrise Kingdom, along with much of Anderson’s work (an optimism that Schultz often struggled to find).  He manages to be both critical and highly empathetic towards his characters.  For Anderson, a fantasy world isn’t so much a retreat as it is an invitation, and one that I am never hesitant to take up. 

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?”

About that Before Watcmen announcement...

This Wednesday the comic book loving world gave a collective sigh of inevitability when DC Comics threatened us with the release of a series of prequel comics to the beloved Alan Moore comic book The Watchmen. There's not a single comic-loving individual who didn't react strongly to the idea that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's immaculate vision might be sullied at the hands of a company more interested in a quick cash grab than in the artistic legacy of one of its most heralded accomplishments. Hell, even DC Comics seem aware of the firestorm they might set off, describing the new series, Before Watchmen, as both "highly anticipated" and "controversial," as if to say, "yeah, maybe we're pissing all over Moore's work, but what are you going to do, not read the series?" This statement would then be followed by a cigar chomping executive releasing a belly-shaking laugh.

Voices across the internet have reacted in a variety of manner, and there are some obvious objections to Before Watchmen. Over at NPR they ruminated on how prequels might ruin the cultural capital that The Watchmen has built for not only itself but for comics as a medium. Others have, understandably, treated the original book as sacrosanct, suggesting that no one should ever mess with Moore's artistic vision (most notably, Moore himself falls into this latter camp). But I would like to discuss two things: first, the idea of prequels and second, the idea of artistic fidelity.

Prequels are a tricky proposition in any medium. On the one hand, we should probably be thankful that we are only getting prequels and not actual sequels to The Watchmen, which ended on a wonderfully unsettled note. But of course prequel stories come with built in problems of their own. The most obvious problem is that we already know what will happen. A great writer can use this to his or her advantage. Greek tragedies, for example, got plenty of mileage out of the fact that the audience knew things were going to end poorly for the characters on stage. But for whatever reason, from the Star Wars prequels to that Wolverine movie, prequels have been unable to take advantage the audience's prescient like knowledge. Instead, these prequels have played out like the opening of Indiana Jone and the Last Crusade, showing us where every little personality trait and quirk came from over the course of a single story.

The Watchmen is as fully realized a fantasy world as Narnia, Middle Earth, Neverland, Utopia, Oz, and even DC Comics own world of superheroes. But in order to fashion a world that seems real and lived in, you have to allow for some unknowns. The author Michael Chabon writes that when reading Tolkien, like most of us, he was always intrigued by those blank places on the map, places named but where characters never actually visited. I'm of the mind that those blank places make a fantasy world feel huge and lived in, because whatever is going on with our heroes and their quest, we know that there are a million other stories that are not being told. This is why one of my favorite details about the original Star Wars movies was the inclusion of ancillary characters like Wedge Antilles, the pilot that seemed to always be around for the major battles, but who never had more than a few lines in each film. We knew that this character must have had some incredible adventures over the course of those three films, but we also knew that we were only seeing snippets of them.

To fill in the blank areas in The Watchmen books would only make the universe seem smaller and less unruly. Besides, the original book already does a fine job of fleshing out these characters. What more do we need to know? I guess these comics could elaborate on what Ozymandias's weird bio-engineered tiger thought of his master's solution to nuclear war.

The next issue I have with Before Watchmen is a little trickier. One of the announced authors of the series, J. Michael Straczynski, notes that Moore himself built a career of appropriating the work of others, whether he was working on Swamp Thing or playing in the world of Victorian literature in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. So what's good for the Moore is good for the Straczynski? Besides, even The Watchmen was based, in part, on characters from Charleton Comics, which DC had bought just prior to when Moore embarked on writing the Watchmen series. And even I have to admit that DC managed to wrangle some impressive talent to write this series. I'm more than a little curious about what a Rorschach series written by Brian Azzarello or a Minutemen series written by Darwyne Cooke will read like.

First, I would answer that characters like Batman, Superman, and Swamp Thing (all of which Moore has worked with) were designed from the beginning to continue as long as people want to read stories about these characters. So they're a different breed than Night Owl or even Allan Quatermain and Sherlock Holmes. Just like Moore, Sir Author Conan Doyle became famously incensed when the French author and Doyle contemporary Maurice Leblanc put Holmes into one of his Arsene Lupin stories. So what's the difference between Leblanc stealing Holmes and Moore stealing Holmes? In a world where appropriation has now become established as a legitimately creative act, can we really blame the authors of Before Watchmen?

A cop out answer would be that Doyle was still around when Leblanc borrowed his creation, just as Moore is around to see his characters taken from him. Although I have decried DC's decision from the beginning, I don't necessarily think that it is unfair to borrow Moore's work. Unlike Moore himself, who famously hates on any sort of film adaptation of his work, I have always approached movies like V for Vendetta and The Watchmen with a certain amount of curiosity. Of course, none of these films have ever been successful adaptations, but that doesn't mean there will never be a successful adaptation of an Alan Moore comic. Instead, I think that the single biggest issue that will prevent a great appropriation of Moore's work is fidelity to the source material.

I know that the common reaction to any adaptation is to claim that if only the artist were faithful to the "original" vision, then maybe the end results will achieve the same kind of greatness. This was the mantra when The Watchmen movies was about to arrive. And that film was far more faithful to its source than any expected. It was also a slog and a bore. There are plenty of problems with The Watchmen film, and its slavish devotion to the source material is one of those problems. The director, Zack Snyer, who isn't a terribly smart fellow, didn't realize that what works in a comic book doesn't work on film. Conversely, Moore hasn't been terribly devoted to immaculately recreating the vision of the authors who he is taking from. Instead, he uses the work of others as a jumping off point to go in whatever direction he wants.

What scares me the most about Before Watchmen is that the original book has become so sacrosanct that the artists will do little than ape Moore and collect a paycheck. There might be someone out there who could do something interesting with The Watchmen characters, who could put their own spin on that universe. But judging from what I've seen of DC's decision, I doubt this will be the case. Maybe in fifty years or more, a young upstart will take Ozymandias, Rorschach, Night Owl and the rest and create something truly fantastic and unique with those characters. But until then, we should probably leave Moore's creation alone.

I must admit that my favorite part of any news story about an Alan Moore adaptation is the inevitable quote from Moore himself. And of course he doesn't disappoint in this regard. Reached for comment, Moore stated, “I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.” This little jab, although wonderful in its curmudgeonly execution, isn't true exactly. Much of the comic book world has moved on from the cynical brand of deconstruction popular in the 80s and 90s. This is evident when books like Kick Ass unsuccessfully attempt to return to the well dug by artists of the 80s and 90s, and that book in particular has served as the nadir of deconstructionist trend, lacking the craftsmanship and wit found in a book like The Watchmen. Instead, some of the most interesting work in the world of comic books (specifically those of the superhero variety) have come from authors who, instead of running away from the unserious nature of comic books, have embraced the absurdist stories of the silver age. Authors like Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns have done a fine job of finally breaking away from the deathly seriousness of the 80s and 90s. Since a good deal of the comic book community has moved on from the influence of The Watchmen, it seems like an unnecessary retreat to return to that time and place. But, I suppose it could be worse. A lot worse:

American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar

American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (5/5)

“Cleveland: You’ve Got to Be Tough”: this unofficial slogan of that industrial city off the shores of Lake Erie was smattered across t-shirts in the 1970s. In the following decades a lot has changed, but the one thing that has remained constant is our perpetual underdog status. Our sports teams don’t win championships and even several decades removed from the collapse of America’s industrial engine, we’re still the butt of jokes. But that’s not to say that we don’t take pride in the city. Fully expecting to lose, every year plenty of Cleveland sports fans crowd into the Jake or the Browns Stadium. We also have our share of famous artists from the region that we like to name check from time to time, from Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison to Oscar winner Trent Reznor. But perhaps no single artist better epitomizes the city than indie cartoonist Harvey Pekar.

Harvey Pekar was a lifelong resident of Cleveland. As recounted in the collection American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, he first became interested in the medium of comic books after striking up a friendship with underground cartoonist, and occasional greeting card artist, R. Crumb. But unlike Crumb and other underground comic book artists who found their way to the one of the coasts where they found a reasonable amount of recognition, Pekar remained in Cleveland his entire life, toiling away as a file clerk in a local VA hospital while managing to pump out a series of often understated, always brilliant autobiographical comic shorts.

In some sense, Pekar is Cleveland and Cleveland is Pekar. Much like his home city, Pekar is a perpetual goat, slogging through the years and struggling to maintain a grip on himself. Most of the comics written for American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar were published in the 1970s and 80s, a time when the wide open possibilities found in the 60s counterculture were beginning to collapse. Likewise, Cleveland’s economy, which had once helped fuel the postwar boom, had capsized.

So we often find Pekar pontificating on the different racial factions of Cleveland and the rise to power of conservatives following civil rights. In one particularly affecting comic, Pekar relates the story of Emil, a European immigrant who worked in Cleveland’s steel mills. Emil begins his time in Cleveland as a union radical, but as white flight and economic depression take over the city, his attitudes change displaced by a racist view of the white and black culture clash of the 70s. Pekar of course sees Emil’s views on race as absurd and more than a little naïve. Emil doesn’t seem to realize the sort of racial tension that have built up in the African-American community over segregation and discrimination. But he tells Emil’s story empathetically as a missed chance for shared understanding. In a later story, “Jury Duty,” Pekar recounts his experience being chosen for everyone’s least favorite civic duty. He finds himself being co-opted by an out of control judicial system that overlooks crimes of the wealthy and powerful while judges have become increasingly draconian on the poor and powerless. Pekar decides that he cannot be a part of this out of balance system and stymies the judge and prosecution by telling them that he wouldn’t feel right determining someone’s guilt when he has no control over what punishment is dished out. In these moments his life as a sixties radical peeks through the grey of oil shortages and Reaganomics.

But Pekar isn’t normally cited for his views on large socio-economic issues. He is instead well known for looking at the quotidian aspects of life that seem to be constantly nipping at his heels. Pekar’s narratives often eschew the traditional structure of the short story, which are often comprised of three acts, a climax, and a denouement. Some of his shorter works, which are usually around a page or two, consist of mundane small talk heard on the bus or around the office. He might take on the subject of the punishingly long hours of a weekend with nothing to do where he dreads work on Monday morning but still cannot stand the lost time of the weekend. Mundane trips to the grocery store or helping a friend move can sometimes transform into a meditation on art and commerce or an existentialist crisis. Or these trips might just include a wry observation or two. Pekar feels no need to provide a clear justification for why these narratives exist. Instead, many of them feel as if they are little moments cut from a much larger reel of his life. And when a stray observation is used to tie up the end of the narrative, it’s thrown out there as nothing more than a possibility, as if Pekar is telling us, “This might be the moral of the story. Take it or leave it.”

Because of its everyday subject matter and occasional pontifications, the arc of Pekar’s work is impossible to parse with just one or two comics. These larger collections of American Splendor, then, are an ideal format for really digging into Pekar’s work, and The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar is an especially helpful starting point. While the American Splendor series consistently returns to subjects that directly affect Pekar’s life, the comics gets a lot of mileage out of these limited topics, and often his own life becomes merely a jumping off point for a whole host of issues. Pekar himself is not an artist, and has had to rely on wrangling others to illustrate his work. This has actually helped bring out the many facets of American Splendor in a way that a single artist would be insufficient. And each artist seems better suited to different aspects of Pekar’s work. R. Crumb, perhaps his most famous collaborator, brings out Pekar’s interest in racial, linguistic and cultural difference among the disparate ethnic groups of Cleveland, from Jews, African-Americans, Eastern Europeans, and Italians. Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm do a fantastic job of illustrating the nooks and crannies of urban life in Cleveland. Gerry Shamray, perhaps my favorite artist in the collection, delves into Pekar’s mental state, portraying a man at odds with himself, a man who is capable of great insight while at the same time unable to fully clamp down on his emotional distress.

And it’s this contradictory nature of Pekar that makes him a fascinating subject, despite the fact that he lacks the obvious trauma or grand life narrative that characterizes most memoirs and autobiographies. Pekar often pits his words and images against one another. In one story, “Ripoff Chick,” he describes a frustrating courtship of a somewhat daffy girl who’s unselfconsciously new age. While Pekar’s actions towards this woman are often troubling and always hilarious, he’s increasingly critical of his own behavior. Pekar freely admits that his disdain for this woman is at odds with his goals of, essentially, making his way into her pants. And so this split between Pekar the desperate curmudgeon barely containing his rage and disdain towards others brushes up against his exacting critical eye. This contradiction is easy to relate to. We aren’t all word boxes floating above our lives commenting on the world, just as we are not brains disconnected from our bodies. Instead, in our daily lives we are a bundle of emotions and energy that we sometimes have little control over. It is only in reflection that we can maintain a measure of repose. It is to Pekar’s credit that he puts himself in the crosshairs, dissecting not only those around him but his own anxieties as well.

But what is arguably the greatest achievement of Pekar’s work can be found in his somewhat ironic title. Most artistic works that use “American” in their title, or merely take on the mantle of an essentialized American experience, play in the arena of the upper middle class. Think American Beauty or American Pastoral, or even works by authors like Jonathan Franzen or John Updike. As a college dropout who purposefully chooses a tedious day job so that he can actually own his free time, Pekar does not easily fit into the normalized view of who the “idealized” American is. Instead, Pekar undercuts the totalizing effect of American as an adjective by linking it to his largely idiosyncratic life that, paradoxically, ties into experiences shared by many in the United States but are largely invisible in American art. And that’s the genius of Pekar’s work. The mundane, individualized aspects of Pekar’s art feed into universal existentialist questions that we all must confront. Somewhere between Anton Chekov and Jerry Seinfeld lies Harvey Pekar. And the world is much better for his having lived in it.