Batman Reborn

I don't often write out and out disclaimers. That said: Disclaimer -- I wrote this after an eerie confluence of events [freak summer storm and bad seafood] left me shivering in the dark with no internet, stomach in knots, curled fetally in an uncomfortable faux leather chair for the better part of 24 hours with a deadline looming. Less horrible on its own merits than horrible next to the article [only realized in my brain] I wanted to write.

Still, it touches on some things I'd like to talk about. So please do.

Batman, from it's earliest incarnations as a pulp comic in the 1930's, has been about fear. Five feature length movie adaptations in, Hollywood types have finally seemed to figure that out. Credit capitalism and the realization that obsessive 30-something comic readers are a tremendously powerful demographic who don't like being condescended to. Credit also the notion that blockbusters needn't be vapid and riddled with plot holes to attract crowds.

But before we get into all that, let's talk some more about fear.

I have fears of my own, as we all do. One of them is a recurring nightmare. It is a nightmare much like the ones that haunt Bruce Wayne after that fateful plunge into a well led more or less directly to his parent's death.

Mine goes like this, ever the same: Two women are perched next to each other, on stools. The younger and prettier of the two is asking her older, more ornately-dressed, vigorously-implanted and ornately-jeweled colleague questions I can't hear. The older, weighed down my countless strings of faux-pearls, gushes visibly about this topic and that. Finally, the young woman asks a question I can hear: "tell me about the . . ." She pauses, looking a little embarrassed and devious, "nipples."

The old woman looks about to jump from her skin with joy. "Oh God, I saw it. The batsuit has nipples! Nipples and a huge codpiece!" Her tone shifts, turning confessional: "This new Batman is all about sex and being sexy."

Violence on television doesn't scar children, Entertainment Tonight does.

No, Joel Schumacher, Batman isn't about sex and any attempt to sexy him up makes for an absurd and ill-wrought hodgepodge of innuendo and pointless homoerotic speculation [See: Batman Forever; See Also: Batman and Robin]. Even if Batman were gay it would not be the defining crisis of his life. He'd never have to come out to his parents, because they're dead. He'd never worry about the acceptance of his peers because, if given the chance, Bruce Wayne would never hang out with anyone. He'd sit around brooding in the day time, probably in a cave somewhere. Then, at night, he'd go out and beat the piss out of purse-snatchers to assuage his guilt. He might have random, impersonal sex to assuage his Batlibido, but he'd do that straight too.

Thankfully Batman Begins trades codpieces for Kevlar and rubberized nipple-like protrusions for an obsessive and candid exploration of Batman's genesis. Director Christopher Nolan [Memento] and writer David S. Goyer [the Blade trilogy] set a perfect tone early, and take the time to explore the intricacies of the character from his driving, formative neuroses to the discovery of the Batcave and the vagaries of prototyping the Batsuit.

They correctly understand that Batman's two greatest abilities are his recklessness and his tremendous buying power.

Of the four actors who have now played Batman, Bale is the best at expressing Wayne's consumptive, internalized grief. Where previous actors and scripts have played Batman like the ultimate bane on any kind of social life, Bale helps suggest the opposite is true, that dealing with Gotham's idle rich is the curse. That characterization, given the circumstances, feels much more authentic.

Watching Bale try to fit in with the upper crust, affecting that haughty air and playboy demeanor is a fish-out-of-water experience that Nolan deliberately makes surreal with pacing and simple sight gags. This is neither the life Bruce lives, nor the one he wants.

The trial and error process Wayne and Alfred go through to test and retest their designs is wonderfully archival, adding further to Batman's humanity in general. This has been the most interesting aspect of the Batman paradigm, the super hero with no super powers, and Nolan and Goyer bring that aspect to light for the first time.

Beneath the growth of Batman as a symbol, and as a technically achievable crime-stopping force, is Bruce's internal growth, from a youth blindly striking out at elusive revenge to a young adult refining and grappling with the nature of justice. It's no simple task, differentiating between the two, and this tension lurks throughout the film, informing and adding emotion to each encounter with evil.

The most satisfying moment, though, comes near the end. After a climactic fight and clever planning, Batman overpowers and outthinks his nemesis, leaving him hurtling toward death. At the moment of recognition, when the nemesis realizes his life is rapidly waning, he closes his eyes and sets his jaw. He doesn't scream or run or curse the name of Bruce Wayne. There's no fist shaking, only cold realization. And fear.

Most big-budget movies can't be bothered to even create a coherent plot. It's wonderfully edifying to see Nolan and Goyer craft a story so tight that it not only
reins in all of its many plot lines, it even manages to bring its thematic elements and image patterns full circle. When this happens it feels like closure. Catharsis. Things I desperately needed after the bat nipples.

In the preceding two and a half hours, I knew I was being entertained by a good and faithful comic book movie. In that moment--jaw set, eyes closed--I realized I was watching a great film.

Read the full thing here.

A Darker White

The White Stripes : Get Behind Me Satan

Whatever else can be said about them; whatever hope can be expressed that the MTV set likes an ambitious, bluesy rock band; whatever complaint can be lodged about how the band's success might be affecting their work, The White Stripes know how to write a kick ass single.

De Stijl had “You’re Pretty Good Looking [For a Girl]”, White Blood Cells had “Fell in Love with a Girl”, Elephant had “Seven Nation Army”.

Get Behind Me Satan has “Blue Orchid”, a frenetic delta-blues-meets-butt-rock pot boiler that multi-tracks a massive guitar sound like if Billy Corgan produced a Judas Priest album. While up-tempo, the song is propelled by a bleak, venomous undertone the innocence-obsessed White Stripes have never expressed before. From vague foreboding at times to out and out betrayal, the dank corruption of adulthood pervades the entire album.

“The Nurse” intersperses fierce drum hits with calypso-inflected marimbas, alternating Caribbean rhythms with metal crunch, to drive home a simple point: When you’re at your lowest, beset on all sides with nowhere to turn [etc, etc], it’s the person you trust most who’s going to work that knife between your ribs. And twist.

The refrain, “I’m never gonna let you down, now,” isn’t at all convincing.

“Red Rain” nicely juxtaposes the sweet innocence of childhood [A la “We’re Going to Be Friends” and, really, all their previous work] with the bitter, gnarled mess of everything after.

You think not telling is the same as not lying, don't you? / Then I guess not feeling is the same as not crying to you

That’s a great couplet that balances outrage with naiveté very well. That tension, though, is present even at the level of instrumentation. As Jack sings “If there is a lie, then there’s a liar too / If there’s a sin, then there’s a sinner too,” Meg plays a set of children’s chromatic desk bells, sounding like those of a clock, signaling an end to blamelessness.

Jack White seems to view childhood not only as a time of innocence, but also of virtue and purity. Both the platonic friendship of “We’re Going to Be Friends” and the quaint love of “Fell in Love With a Girl” demonstrate this.

Here though, on “Passive Manipulation” that obsession turns straight creepy, as I suppose it was eventually bound to [call it Jackson’s Law]. It’s slightly ambiguous, but Meg seems to be singing out against Carl Jung’s Elektra complex, and also perhaps against its Appalachian corollary: dating within the family. I don’t know. Lyrics provided without commentary:

Women, listen to your mothers / Don’t just succumb to the wishes of your brothers / Take a step back, take a look at one another / You need to know the difference / Between a father and a lover.

Kudos for urging temperance, Meg, and for keeping the song under 30 seconds.

While the drumming is better than any of their other albums, Meg still couldn’t earn a seat at the kit of my seventh grade jazz band. Jack’s riffs, though, are percussive enough to pass, and adding elements like the marimba and those crazy bells to Meg’s percussion repertoire create enough novelty and depth to lighten the burden of her bratty cymbal-crashing.

I’m not sure who is responsible for it, but one of them knows how to shake a mean maraca.

The only other song that really would have benefited from some polishing is “Little Ghost”, a bluegrass caterwaul that really doesn’t fit with the rest of the record. A better context would probably be the b-side of Loretta Lynn’s “Portland, Oregon”, or anywhere on her gorgeously schizophrenic Van Lear Rose.

But even Ghost’s impromptu, back-porch ambience points in a good direction, toward a band that, having made a technically ambitious album in Elephant, is anxious to apply what they learned to churning out off-beat, ebullient, and densely emotional [if occasionally creepy] records.

All the best elements from De Stijl and White Blood Cells have returned from a short break [Elephant was mostly disappointing] with a new and intriguingly sinister pallor. The dissonant crunch of lost innocence has never been this much fun.

Read the full thing here.