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. 

A Groundwork of Metaphysics of Internet Piracy

 Arguments about internet piracy have, like piracy itself, ravaged the internet at least since Napster’s wonderful explosion in popularity followed by its just as glorious collapse.  But recently an article written by college student and NPR intern EmilyWhite has reignited this always contentious debate.  On NPR’s All Songs Considered blog, Emily White details her music buying experience, or, more precisely, a nearly total lack of it.  Through the process of friends who uploaded songs onto various devices, Kazaa, and ripping albums from her university’s radio station, Emily estimates that she has only bought perhaps fifteen albums in her lifetime, but owns around 11,000 songs.  Wisely, Emily feels somewhat guilty about this.  She notes that many of the flippant, poorly thought out solutions to the problem of easy access to free music, like “sell more t-shirts,” are completely inadequate.  But she also doesn’t really offer any solutions of her own beyond a vague call for a more convenient way to access music.  (Is clicking a mouse really all that inconvenient?)

Emily’s article garnered a slew of rebuttals, the most popular being the response of Dave Lowery, singer for the bands Cracker and Camper Von Beethoven and current professor of music business.  Where Emily’s solutions were somewhat vague, Lowery’s response was far more interested in clear details, and while I certainly don’t agree with everything he writes, I’m fairly certain it does a nice job of voicing the larger frustrations felt among the musician community.  The debate expanded from there with people taking both sides.  In the ensuing discourse there were two go to assumptions that really got under my skin: 1) generation gap politics and 2) coddling the young.  These might seem contradictory at first, but upon further examination they fit nicely next to one another. 

A quick glance at any comment board that dealt with Emily’s post will garner a slew of arguments about generational norms.  The act of stealing tens of thousands of songs, the argument goes, can be chalked up to those worthless millennials who are selfish and want everything handed to them, never mind that a generation ago the means to illegally download this number of songs just didn’t exist.  David Lowery’s post, at times, falls back on this generational finger pointing, and it’s one of his weakest arguments.  Travis Morrison, of Dismemberment Plan fame,responded to the assumption that millennials must some how be more morally bankrupt than past generations by noting that he as well as many of his friends stole music all the time back in the day.  Of course, he doesn’t really deal with the fact that it used to require a good amount of effort to steal back in the day where it has become nearly labor free today. 

Regardless, some of this generational resentment comes down to a vague anxiety plenty of baby boomers have that their place in the world of popular culture is quickly being replaced.  Couple this with the fact that the decline of the middle class tracks with the political rise of the baby boomers, and you have an entire generation worried about their own legacy and willing to lash out at their youngers.  Recent years have done damage to the narrative the boomers have constructed of themselves: principled actors who protested against the Vietnam War out of moral convictions and helped form a more open society.  Of course, this narrative is hurt by the fact that Nixon actually won the youth vote in his election runs, suggesting that plenty of the baby boomers were less concerned with American imperialism than they were with the fact that now they were being asked to sacrifice in order to support our overseas adventures.  In other words, no one cared about the war when the poor were dying, but as soon as the middle class were asked to join, then the youth culture of the late 60s started to pay attention.

This generational resentment finds its way into plenty of arguments, and my guess is that we will be seeing it for some time.  The other obnoxious trend I’ve noticed surrounding the Emily White article is a protective, sometimes condescending, tone people take when defending 21-year-old Emily.  There are a number of posts that accuse Lowery of “yelling at a 21 year old,” as if she isn’t old enough to handle a rebuttal to her public statement.  In one particular defense of Emily’s original post, written confusingly enough by another person named Emily White, the author begins by telling the first Emily that she “wrote a great blog post!”  (yes, with an exclamation mark).  I know that if you’re 21, then you’re just barely old enough to drink.  But you’re also old enough to handle some criticism.  You’re considered an adult at 18, and we do no service to young adults if we don’t call out their dumb ideas as dumb ideas.  When Emily writes that what she really wants is some vague notion of convenience, it’s perfectly acceptable to tell her, “You know, Emily, that’s kind of stupid.”

What is perhaps most frustrating aspect of the internet piracy argument is the fact that people are constantly speaking past one another.  There are those who are concerned with making sure that musicians can make a decent living so that they can make more great music.  On the other end, there are those “free culture” extremists who rightly note that technology has shifted the old business models, pointing out the benefits of this new technology, but plug their ears when people start talking about reasonable compensation for artists.  There are two related but separate issues at stake in this conversation.  First, the macro issue of business models and corralling the buying behavior of large groups of people.  Second, the micro issue of individual moral choice.  We might agree that downloading music without compensating the artist is a bad ethical choice, but that doesn’t mean that the problem will dissipate any time soon.  This means we must come up with a new business plan to better address this problem and make sure that artists receive enough compensation to continue to produce great art.

But at the same time (and this should really go without saying), just because a large number of people are stealing music does not make it ethical for you as an individual to also engage in this same behavior.  This part of the argument reminds me of Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative” from his treatise, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.  In this text, Kant attempts to provide the basis for an understanding of morals that are universal, separate from any particular time and place.  In order to deal with this problem (and I’ll skip all of the intricate abstraction that he develops), Kant comes up with the idea of the “categorical imperative,” which he defines, in its simplest terms, as the maxim that “I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law” (70).  So in order to adjudge whether or not illegally downloading music is an ethical choice, we should ask ourselves what would happen if everyone were to make the same decision.  Obviously, if no one paid for music, then the entire industry would pretty much fall apart, and we would have a lot less great art in the world.  In fact, those who pirate music have benefited greatly from those of us who have purchased our music over the years (or mostly purchased our music, as the case may be). 

We need to have both a discussion about the micro and macro aspect of internet piracy.  Each of us should determine what sort of ethical choices we need to make.  But at the same time, it is unrealistic to believe that people will automatically just stop pirating, especially cash strapped college students who love music.  And as we have this conversation, let’s not confuse the overarching issue of business models with individual ethical choice. 

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. 

Slate Writer Doesn't Know How Language Works

 On the always contrarian website, Slate.com, Tom Scocca takes aim at those who drop references to the critically adored television show, Mad Men.  His argument is…well, I’m not exactly certain.  He’s angry because people keep on talking about this show, and he hasn’t seen it, and this makes him upset.  At one point towards the end of his article he suggests that using pop culture allusions don’t always fit the topic at hand, which would have been a legitimate argument, but it only comes up once and it is in reference to a journalist making use of the show The Sopranos, not Mad Men.  The title of the article is “Don Draper’s Shocking Secret: He Doesn’t Exist: Why do Mad Men fans and the New York Times mistake the show for reality?,” which suggests that, at its core, his argument is about semiotics, or the study of signs, like language, and what they mean. 

Semiotics first arose from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in the early 20^th century, but it really flourished in the work of French theorists in the decades following World War II.  Perhaps one of the most accessible introductions to the use of semiotics is Roland Barthes’s collection of essays, Mythologies.  In Mythologies, Barthes attempts to uncover the underlying meaning of a whole series of cultural signs.  For him, everyday objects like children’s toys or Greta Garbo’s face are representative of something deeper, hidden underneath the play of surfaces.  In his introduction, Barthes explains his purpose in the following manner:

The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the “naturalness” with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history.  In short, in the account given of our contemporary circumstances, I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse, which in my view, is hidden there. (11)

 

Barthes seems frustrated that ideas and concepts that are culturally made are being treated as absolutely natural or “true.”  Most of how we view the world is in fact constructed for us, and Barthes is hoping to uncover and tease apart these culturally made ideas.

But back to Scocca’s article.  While it is difficult to fully determine what he is trying to say, at least part of his argument hinges on the fact that there are “true” signs and there are “false” signs.  Scocca seems upset because characters like Don Draper don’t exist.  He writes, “He [Don Drapper] is a pattern of lit-up dots moving in front of your eyes for one hour, on Sundays, during the season run of the Mad Men program, which mercifully ends this weekend.”  (Part of Scocca’s apoplexy arises from the fact that a lot of people talk about this show, and he doesn’t like it, except that he admits that he hasn’t watched it, which means that no one has strapped him into a Clockwork Orange like contraption and forced the show on him).  Obviously, Don Drapper isn’t a real person.  Instead, he is a signifier for a whole host of social and cultural issues: capitalism, the generation gap, existential malaise, masculine constructs, etc.  But Scocca doesn’t seem to understand one thing: everything that he writes is also a sign.  When Scocca writes about the 1960s, they do not just immediately manifest themselves before us.  Like the television show Mad Men, he is using a series of signs (in this instance, words) to stand in for the decade in question.  In other words, Tom Scocca’s argument doesn’t exist.  Everything he writes is a pattern of lit-up dots on our computer screen.  (In fact, we might ask Scocca what he thinks of other terms that come from fiction, like quixotic or Kafkaesque). 

But Scocca appears to believe one set of signifiers is greater than another.  He seems to think there is some “true” 1960s out there that we can grasp in our hands.  One signifier is tangible and the other signifier is not.  He writes, “In the collision between the actual and the simulacrum, the simulacrum is winning.”  But everything he just wrote and quoted is in fact a simulacrum.  Like I stated, Mad Men is also a signifier for a whole number of things, most often the culture of the 1960s. But a "history" of that time is also just a signifier. If you open a historical reading of the 1960s, you don't open the book and enter into the thing itself. You read an interpretation of that era, which, funny enough, is exactly what Mad Men is.

You might argue that Scocca is concerned with the accuracy of Mad Men’s interpretation of the world—that there is a good deal of evidence about the decade that we can latch onto in order to determine cultural mores, dress, music, etc.  But this doesn’t seem to be the case.  There will always be competing versions of the 1960s.  Even well educated historians will differ on how best to interpret that decade.  A sign, after all, may be read in multiple ways.  Besides, perceived “accuracy” never enters into Scocca’s argument.  Let’s take the quote he uses about the turtle neck, taken from a New York Times article:

Francesca Granata, an assistant professor of art and design history at Parsons the New School for Design, traced the garment's high-fashion roots to the '60s, when, she said, ''Pierre Cardin and YSL reinvented the men's suit with a turtleneck instead of a buttoned shirt and a scarf instead of a tie.'' (Think more Paul Kinsey than Don Draper.)

In the above excerpt, the academic being questioned suggests that the turtle neck symbolized the changing cultural mores and generation gap of the 1960s. The author then uses Mad Men as a point of reference, a show that happens to use clothing to symbolize the changing cultural mores and generation gap of the 1960s. It is unclear why it is okay to rely on the language of the "expert" and not the television show, especially since they seem to be saying the exact same thing. One means of signifying the 60s is more "true" (the academic's words) where the other means of signifying the 60s is "false" (the images on a television show), even when signifiers are coming to the same conclusion.  For Scocca, any sort of fictional art is a false signifier, even when it happens to be accurately representing the world.  Scocca is falling into the old trap that Barthes observed about fifty years ago.  He thinks that there is a natural world he has access to that is not built by an interpretation of various signs.

Of course, as someone who is interested in fictional narratives, I have pony in this race.  It is an old discussion that goes back at least as far as the novel itself.  People seem to think that just because something is a fictional retelling, then it can never tell us something “true” about the world.  Just this year, the Pulitzer Prize awarded no prize for narrative fiction, despite having some well regarded books in the running.  Many have argued that this is a result of a culture that denies that fictional stories can tell us something true about the world.  But while the form is certainly different, the same arguments that take place out in the “real” world also occur in the fictional universe created by authors.  When Charles Dickens wrote about work houses and orphanages, he did so after learning about these places through his own experiences and through newspapers (which happen to be made up of a series of signs).  He then made arguments about the dehumanizing effects of these places, but he did so through characters, dialogue and narrative.  

The true difference between fiction and non-fiction texts is that fictional texts take work.  In order to uncover what a novel is trying to say, you must first engage with it, determine what argument lies underneath its entanglement of metaphors.  A non-fiction text, by contrast, is didactic.  It comes right out and tells you what it wants you to know.  This can be useful, but it can also be problematic.  A work of non-fiction is always trying to convince us that it is absolutely “real,” when it is always an interpretation of the world.  Besides, the difficulty inherent in the novel is also why it is useful.  In a world where information is presented to us in small bites, there’s something to be said for the exercise of deciphering a text and engaging with its argument.  The world is a complicated place, and fiction never lets us forget how much of a tangled mess we live in. 

The Mice - For Almost Ever Scooter

The Mice – For Almost Ever Scooter (4.5/5)

The Mice is a Cleveland punk outfit from the 1980s.  They’re the sort of group whose chief audience these days happens to be music geeks interested in local scenester history.  I, in fact, fall into this niche audience, and anyone who is similarly interested in Cleveland’s 70s and 80s punk scene should snatch up this piece of history immediately.  But even for those less inclined to delve into the minutia of the rust belt’s interlocking history of musicians, For Almost Ever Scooter reliably delivers a set of should have been classics. 

The Mice’s poppy yet aggressive sound will be familiar to anyone who grew up listening to music in the 90s.  An entire subgenre of pop-punk rose in popularity thanks to the surprise ascendance of Green Day and The Offspring.  While there were quite a few bands that you might term “diamonds in the rough,” many of these bands were characterized by sped up music that served to cover up their lack of hooks or general songwriting talent.  For bands supposedly in the punk tradition, they seemed far too shiny and clean—presumably more interested in the diamonds than in the rough.  So when professing my love for The Mice, I have to ask myself why do I love this scrappy band from Cleveland and not all of the imitators who suddenly appeared ten years later?

For one thing, they’re great craftsmen.  As time moves on, music scenes tend to move further away from their original source of influence.  Green Day was obviously a bigger influence on Blink 182 than, say, The Undertones.  The result sounds like a copy of a copy.  The Mice write great little packets of punk noise, but “Rescue You Too” and “Little Rage” prove that they can also whittle out a mid-tempo ballad in the tradition of 70s rock.  The Mice also benefit from lead singer Bill Fox’s delivery that’s just scruffed up enough to lend some gravity to his bratty attitude.

While the majority of the songs off of For Almost Ever Scooter are concerned with unrequited love (female names figure into a large portion of their lyrics), The Mice also have a political bent.  Several songs bring up the specter of empires that have faded away as obvious parallels to the United States.  In “Not Proud of the USA,” Fox sings, “Look at Rome and Babylon / Even Egypt sat beneath the sun / Now it looks like their days are done.”  It might seem strange that a band would sing these lyrics in the mid-80s.  After all, a few years later would see the fall of the Soviet Union.  But the collapse of the rust belt served as a canary in the coal mine for many in Cleveland, and the lack of decent, stable jobs for high school graduates has been cited as one reason for our present day sputtering economy.  In this instance, it was because The Mice were located way out in the “fly over states” that they had a prescient understanding of the world.  Maybe it’s time we start ignoring the buzz bands from Brooklyn and start asking what the rest of the country has to say.

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?”