Superman Comics!

I am and will always be a DC man. I guess it comes of watching all those episodes of Superfriends when I was a kid. It saddens me that DC movies have been so crummy lately, though I do have high hopes for Wonder Woman. But I'm allergic to tie-ins and sprawling media franchises. I've seen only one Marvel movie to date (Guardians of the Galaxy, which was light on crossover stuff), and my exposure to the comics is limited to the inept newspaper Spider-Man.

Really, though, the DC trinity captures everything I'd ever want in a superhero. You've got Superman representing science fiction and planetary romance, Wonder Woman representing mythological fantasy, and Batman representing the purely human. What more do you need?

I read some Batman comics last spring, and enjoyed them so much that I decided to move on to Superman. Superman is, of course, the superhero, the exemplar of the breed, descended from the science fictional supermen of the thirties and the long-jumping John Carter of Mars. He's certainly the first superhero I ever knew about. The only comics I read as a kid were Superman comics.

To get myself in the mood, I rewatched Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie, which is, I suppose, the best Superman movie we're ever going to get. That John Williams score still gives me a thrill. What struck me this time around is how closely it follows the life of Christ, with an infancy narrative marked by danger and assumed poverty and a kind of kenosis, a brief boyhood idyll among the green fields and blue skies of Kansas, a coming-of-age and period of testing in the wilderness, and a beginning of work at the age of thirty. The sequel is a lesser movie but still watchable (especially in the recently released "Donner cut"), while the rest of them just go downhill from there.

As I wrote at the time, I was less than impressed with the recent Man of Steel, which replaces the mythic conformation of Superman to Christ's life with a vulgar, superficial, commercially-motivated appeal to Christian consumers (and relentless, painfully overt product placement, which forces us to contemplate an alternate America in which Superman is unknown but IHOPs abound). And I have no desire to watch the grim and superviolent Batman vs. Superman. (Well, maybe just a little desire.)

But we'll always have Superman: The Movie.

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When I read comics, I'm not terribly interested in consistent character arcs reaching across decades. All the metafictional infinite-earths-crisis stuff just makes my head spin. It also strikes me as unnecessary. For me, Superman is a mythical character like Heracles or King Arthur. The stories don't all have to match up. I'm coming at it from the point of view of a casual, occasional reader, of course. At any rate, I tend to gravitate toward one-off stories that seem reasonably self-contained. I'm also not averse to a little tweaking or even subversion.

In making my selections, I tried to find comic books graphic novels that are well-regarded by fans, with 4+ stars on Amazon. I wanted at least one modern take on the origin story and at least one Justice League story. I also wanted stories meditating on what Superman really means as a pop culture icon.

I had the most fun reading All-Star Superman (2005 – 2008), which follows Superman through a sacrificial death-mission into the sun, an episodic account of twelve mythic labors accomplished as a kind of zany Silver-Age bucket list, and an implied immolation-apotheosis. It portrays Superman as a kind of predestined solar deity while sending him on nutty space-age adventures with all his old friends, from Jimmy Olsen (now a flamboyant columnist) to Krypto the Superdog, as he fights for truth and justice against the likes of Lex Luthor and Bizarro. Time-pretzels and near-death experiences return him to his roots on Krypton and his coming-of-age in Smallville. Lex pontificates on what life is all about in an exclusive interview / supervillain prison riot. Sun-eaters eat rogue sentient suns. Superman descends to the underworld with Lois Lane and arm-wrestles for her love. You get the idea.

All-Star Superman is an exuberant, funny, nostalgic, and poignant celebration of the Superman you grew up with (if you're my age, anyway), and more brightly colored than a bubble gum wrapper containing the secrets of the universe. If someone were to read only one Superman comic in their lifetime, I think this is the one I would recommend.

To satisfy my craving for a good origin story, I tried Superman: Birthright (2003 – 2004). There's nothing daringly new or different about it, but then again that's what you want in an origin story: an update hitting all the main points from a contemporary point of view, an exploration and temporal "localization" of a well-known myth-cycle. Amirite?

That's not to say Birthright isn't genuinely engrossing, however. This is partly because it goes far beyond kryptonite in exposing Superman's deep and very human vulnerabilities. It paints a sensitive portrait of the person behind the artificial Metropolis Clark Kent: there's Superman, of course, but there's also Smallville Clark Kent, which you're made to realize is an integral part of his genuine personality. Smallville Clark is who Superman is when he's just being himself.

Superman is a person with dual identities – last son of Krypton and Kansas farmboy – encountering the same obstacles any child adopted as an infant by parents of another culture might face. Much of the story focuses on his struggles to realize his Kryptonian heritage while dealing with the guilt and fear of betraying his adopted parents' love. The meditations on tribal identity that arise during Clark's coverage of an African conflict mirror his eventual adoption of the Kryptonian "S" symbol as his symbol. The story's climax, which involves his troubled boyhood chum Lex Luthor, is, of course, insanely over-the-top, with giant robots and wholesale destruction, as it should be in an decent Superman story, but also dwells on Superman's need to win the trust of a suspicious public.

I would recommend Superman: Birthright to anyone looking for a sensitive, modern take on Superman's origin story.

Now, you know how Superman stands for truth, justice, and the American way? Have you ever wondered what might have happened if his rocket had landed, not in Kansas, but on a collective farm in the USSR? Wonder no more, my friend, but pick up a copy of Superman: Red Son (2003). It's bizarre, terrifying, and a bit sad, with a mind-bending twist at the end. All of which is to say, it's right up my alley.

Life under Superman the benevolent communist dictator is about as fun as you might imagine. Oh, but he has only the best of intentions, comrade! Intentions that gradually transform him from the workers' champion into an incarnation of the all-seeing, all-knowing Big Brother of 1984 (complete with compulsory brain surgery), in an arc not unlike that of the pigs in Animal Farm.

Red Son interweaves Superman's public career with an alternate history beginning in the Eisenhower administration, pitting him against chess-wizard supergenius Lex Luthor and everything Luthor can throw against him. Superman's presence in the USSR sparks a kind of superhero arms race. The time around, the USA is on the losing side, growing increasingly isolated and eventually turning into a capitalist North Korea.

Wonder Woman comes into the story, throwing in with the USSR and adopting a Soviet version of her usual costume. Batman is a freedom fighter / terrorist with a distinctly Soviet backstory, a crazy, creepy grin, and a bat-ushanka with earflaps. Colonel Hal Jordan, a.k.a. Green Lantern, is a crazed, commie-hating zealot who went off the deep end after years of waterboarding in an Asian POW camp.

Red Son uses its inversion of actual history infused with heavy overtones of George Orwell to prompt questions about American foreign policy yesterday and today as well as the nature of human progress. Not bad for a comic book. What's more, the art is really cool, resembling Soviet propaganda posters at some points and the old Fleischer cartoons at others.

Red Son isn't to everyone's tastes, but I thought it was terrific.

The Superman mythos is subjected to even closer scrutiny in Kingdom Come (1996), which takes place in the not-so-distant future, pitting an older generation of out-of-touch, retired superheroes – Superman and company – against a younger generation of amoral, violent vigilantes who've begun tearing the world apart in ruthless turf wars. Narrated by a pastor who views and sometimes takes part in events in a series of visions, replete with ominous quotations from the Book of Revelation and fiery visions of angelic battles in the heavens, it looks and reads at times almost like one of William Blake's books of prophecy. It's an unabashedly religious, quasi-biblical comic-book apocalypse whose antichrists are metahumans like the horned Magog and "the Captain of Lightning and Thunder" and whose false gods are the superheroes of yore.

I imagine this hit a nerve in the late nineties, when everyone halfway expected the world to end with the coming of the new millennium.

Kingdom Come is more a Justice League story than a Superman story. It features pretty much everybody you've ever heard of, and probably some you haven't. For me, Batman steals the show. (As he always does.) He's a cynical, hardboiled old recluse whose battered body is now encased in a steel exoskeleton, remotely patrolling Gotham's streets with scary, crime-fighting robot drones from a ruined Wayne Manor. Wonder Woman, as beautiful and high-minded as ever, battles demons of her own as an outcast from Themyscira.

But Superman is the central protagonist, no doubt about it. He swings from bitter hermit to fascist avenger, coming out of self-imposed retirement after millions of people die in a superhero-sparked atomic blast, only to make things worse before he makes things better. The battle that begins as a riot in Superman's Kansas Gulag is like something out of a Brueghel painting, ending in a second holocaust that leaves the barren battlefield strewn with charred superhero skeletons.

Are superheroes really a blessing, or are they a curse in disguise? That's the question Kingdom Come asks without offering a satisfying answer.

The art is quite different from what you typically see in comic books; quite different, and quite beautiful. It was executed in gouache, using black-and-white underpaintings with a transparent color overlay, touched up here and there with airbrush or opaque paint. Lightning flashes. Flesh glows. Metal gleams. Every page is a feast for the eyes.

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As you can probably tell, when it comes to Superman – who seems hard to write for – I gravitate toward the meta. There are some other Superman stories I'd like to dip in to. Before I do that, though, I may try to acquire some well-regarded, fairly modern (post-crisis) Wonder Woman comics, in anticipation of her upcoming film, the trailers for which look pretty cool. Do you know what Wonder Woman's theatrical debut is? The Lego Movie. Isn't that wrong? For her sake, I hope they don't come out with another stinker.

Superman and Bishop Ussher

Today I happened to watch some of the terrific Fleischer Superman cartoons from the early 1940s with my almost two-year-old daughter (this is what we do for fun). I'm very fond of them (see here and here for my loving slideshow tributes), less so of the war-propaganda installments produced after Famous Studios took over.

But at any rate, today I noticed something odd in The Arctic Giant, which pits Superman against a thawed-out "Godzilla" clone (though the actual Godzilla was still more than a decade in the future). The voice-over at the beginning announces the monster as having roamed the earth "millions of years ago in the Mesozoic Age." Pleasingly accurate according to the scientific theories of our time. But here's the nameplate on the museum display:

Let's send it through my state-of-the-art html auto-processor:

TYRANNOSAURUS
HABITAT     SIBERIA
DISCOVERED DECEMBER 1940
AGE  ABOUT  2,400  B.C.
DONATED BY ALFRED R. LEY

Stop the presses! 2,400 BC??? That's not what the voice-over guy said!

Being the weird sort of person I am, I couldn't stop thinking about this all day. Then, while washing the dishes, I suddenly recalled having read about Bible-based chronologies many years ago. Various persons, including the Venerable Bede and Sir Isaac Newton, have attempted to construct these, but the most famous is probably the Ussher chronology proposed in the seventeenth century by the Irish bishop James Ussher. I remembered that his chronology sets creation at 4004 BC.

So now I've looked it up, and confirmed my suspicion: according to Ussher's timeline, the Flood took place in 2348 BC, or about the date given on the nameplate.

What's the story here? Is the date a joke on creationists? Is it a subversive visual comment by a creationist animator? Recall that the Scopes Trial had taken place only about fifteen years before. What did the animators know about the voice-over and when? The other "scientific" aspects of the nameplate are so ludicrous that it's possible to see the entire thing as a joke. Especially since Willard Bowsky, one of the two animators, also worked on the hilarious Arabian Nights Popeye cartoons. (Bowsky was killed in action in France two years later.)

Unfortunately, my diligent Internet search for the mysterious Alfred R. Ley failed to turn up further information. In fact, I appear to be the only person on the entire Internet to have noticed the disparity. Hence the post. I'm actually kind of disappointed. I thought this was the sort of thing we invented the Internet for in the first place.

Watch the cartoon here if you like; it's public domain, as are all the Fleischer Superman cartoons. I've been into reading Superman comics and watching the Richard Donner films lately. No doubt I'll have more to say about the Man of Steel before long.

Comic Book Adventures

So, I've been reading me some Batman comics. Surprised? I don't put them down in my "Books I've Read This Year" list because I have my dignity, you know? Anyway, it's been a very, very long time since I read an actual honest-to-goodness comic book. But I like Batman so much that it seemed high time to delve deeply into the actual, um, literature. Graphic literature.

So far I've focused on the iconic entries of the eighties and nineties. I think my favorite is Year One (1987) by Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, et al. I love the way it drops the Batman story into the gritty urban reality of a Scorsese film. It was obviously inspired by Taxi Driver at several points. It also reminds me of Serpico. The art is awesome: clear, dynamic, and distinctly noirish, with dark, muted colors and free-flowing hand lettering. I much prefer it to the polished, digitized look of more recent comics. And the part where Batman battles the police in a bombed building and calls bats to make his getaway is super cool.

I also think Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986) is really great. It cracks me up, actually. With its over-the-top TV segments and epic brutality, it reminds me of Paul Verhoven's satirical sci-fi actioners, especially RoboCop (of which I'm rather fond). Its Batman is like a humongous, creeptastic Dirty Harry; the girl Robin looks about the size of his thigh. I know it's a polarizing comic. Personally I don't care much for the art. But as for the general plot, I think that Batman and Superman are big enough to take a little satire. Some people need to take a chill pill. It's got a storyline of almost mythic proportions, with tank battles, atom bomb detonations, apocalyptic showdowns, and Batman retreating to the underground with a creepy race of mutant followers at the end.

Another fave is The Long Halloween (1997) by Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale, et al. It's got more of a slow-burning mystery plot, using the origin story of Two-Face to describe the descent of Gotham from merely crime-ridden to downright maniacal. The story, though suffering a bit from serialization (and the apparent need to work just about every single villain into the plot), is supremely engrossing. And the expressionistic art, with its big pools of black, snaky pen lines, and dynamic linear perspective, is simply beautiful. Every page is a joy to behold.

One thing that gets on my nerves a little bit is its constant use of one-liners from the Godfather movies. Do it once or twice, and it's a sly allusion. More than that, and it gets cute. All the time, and I start thinking that maybe the writer hasn't done all that much homework on the Mob. Halloween also takes a lot from The Silence of the Lambs. In general, I've noticed that comics are much more open to lifting material from mainstream sources than, say, books or movies. Not that that's a bad thing, as William Blake says in my sidebar. But it has to be done artfully.

Still, The Long Halloween is a monumental piece of work, and the chief inspiration for what's probably the greatest superhero movie ever made: Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.

A more recent entry that I've enjoyed, though not nearly so much, is Hush (2003) by Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee, et al. The art is beautiful, though so polished that I find it a bit boring at times. It does have lots of heaving bosoms, rippling muscles, and gritted teeth, if you like that sort of thing. The story is OK, too; it just suffers from expanded universe syndrome.

You see, unlike practically every other fanboy in the galaxy right now, I prefer my superhero stories to be self-contained. I avoid Marvel movies for that reason. They're like sitcom crossover episodes, or The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones. Ugh. To me it makes the superhero concept too familiar. I like Batman to exist in his own dark little universe, where you never quite lose the surprise and wonder that there is such a person as Batman. Bring Superman into it, and superhero-dom starts to feel like an exclusive yet chummy clubhouse.

But I do very much like Superman on his own turf. I'll probably delve into some of his comics before long, though I'm more familiar with them from of old. For me, Batman represents the mythologizing of hardboiled fiction and film noir, the melding of gothic horror with urban drama. Superman, on the other hand, seems to more akin to John Carter, Tarzan, and the supermen of early sci-fi. Both are inspirations in my own writing.

Oh, last but not least, I also read The Killing Joke (1988) by Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, & Co. A little sadistic for me, but I like the way it explores the weird love-hate relationship between Batman and the Joker. Its "origin story" for the Joker, presented through flashbacks in a delightfully noirish, nightmarish style, is distinctly underwhelming, but then again the Joker himself undercuts its reliability at the end of the comic. And the ending about as artful as they come. I mention this one mainly because the animated film, starring the voice talent of Mark Hamill, is soon to be released. I watched Batman: The Animated Series every day after school when I was in junior high, and, to me, Mark Hamill is the Joker. (Never knew it was him at the time, though.)

So, what's next? Do I venture into the New 52? I don't know if I'm ready for that yet, especially with all the dithering about DC has been doing lately. There are still a few titles from the eighties and nineties that I have my eye on.

Tim Burton's Batman

Yesterday was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Batman, Tim Burton's 1989 film. This came to my attention because Yahoo! News, which I read every day, being a man who likes to keep abreast of important current events, has positively deluged us with stories about it. (This is neither here nor there, but I sometimes wonder if someone (Warner Brothers, in this case) puts down cash for these stories. For instance, I recall seeing quite a few articles about the cast of Full House earlier this year. Not that I read them or anything.)

Anyway, the fact that Batman is a quarter of a century old has me feeling slightly dated, as it was my favorite movie when I was a teenager. I didn't see it in the theater, of course. We went to the movies only rarely, and never to see something as dark and violent as Batman. I was ten at the time. That Christmas I received the VHS tape as a gift from my Granny, but my parents wouldn't allow me to watch it until I was fourteen. Fourteen!

Why they singled out this particular film I'll never know. It did depict Antoine the Gangster being fried to a crisp by a joy-buzzer, but then again we sat down and watched movies with gun violence and nudity as a family. What makes it more ironic is that we got Big Top Pee-Wee at the same Christmas, and no one blinked an eye. Now, Big Top Pee-Wee is a sick, twisted little film, featuring Pee-Wee Herman, unsavory character that he is, happily two-timing away with some not-so-subtle, er, Hitchcockian imagery, his girlfriend winding up engaged to four acrobatic brothers, the Shim (half man, half woman) married to shimself, the ringmaster married to a little lady he keeps in his pocket, a reluctant pig-hippo romance, and various other things. But it was for kids, so no problem. That's the Eighties for you.

Well, being a parent myself now, I know better than to be critical of these little inconsistencies. The truth is, they (the A.P.s) probably did me a favor, because I was of an age to really appreciate Batman when I finally saw it. Once I did see it I watched it repeatedly, obsessively, almost, until it was displaced at the top of my list by The Road Warrior. (I guess I go for dark stories about loners and outcasts.)

What did I like about it? Not the plot, of course, because it's impossible to like (or dislike) something that doesn't exist. What drew me to it was partly the visual style, and partly the tableau it presents of a dark hero who is himself somehow a part of the chaos and madness he fights.

The portrait of Gotham is dark and apocalyptic, with city streets that look like something out of Piranesi's prison pictures. Its visuals owe a great deal to German Expressionism; the final scenes in the ridiculously tall Gothic cathedral are lifted straight from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The buildings, the news office, the Axis chemical plant – all seem drawn from some nightmare extrapolation of noir cinema, a black cityscape heaped upon itself by a confused, obsessed mind, akin to the urban imaginings of Proyas' The Crow and Dark City, or the sublime middle act of Phantom Lady (1944).

And as for the dark vision of Batman, well, I recall that people objected to it at the time on grounds of nostalgia, but in my opinion the darkness is part of his DNA. It's a far cry from the campy Adam West period, yes, but Batman existed before that. His persona originated at the beginning of the noir era, and his adventures have varied quite a bit in tone. I've mused a bit about Batman's role as the dark knight and its relation to mythology and the hardboiled school of literature; for instance, here, and here, and here.

Batman films have this tendency to subtly ask difficult questions about the role of heroism in an ordered society, generally leaving them unresolved. Burton’s vision of Batman standing before the neon Axis sign encapsulates this. Wayne Enterprises is responsible for creating (and losing) the microwave emitter in Batman Begins and the nuclear reactor in The Dark Knight Rises, while Batman himself is credited with the rise of the Joker in The Dark Knight as well as in the 1989 Batman.

Jack Nicholson’s Joker is, of course, quite entertaining to watch. He's a hoodlum turned mad supervillain but also a pretentious avant-garde artist-vandal. His acts of sadism and terrorism (the shoot-out at City Hall ("It's your uncle Bingo!"), the disfigurement of Alicia, the mass poisoning ("Love that Joker!"), the anniversary parade) are self-conscious pieces of performance art. In the museum desecration scene he and his goons "decorate" pieces by Rembrandt and Degas and other masters while pointedly leaving a Goya (?) intact. ("I kind of like that one, Bob.") It's darkly amusing that his appreciation of Vicki Vale's work parallels Bruce Wayne's; they make a number of the same comments regarding Miss Vale. ("Nice apartment. Lots of space.")

All that said, it's too bad that Batman is such a plotless movie. It's of a piece with Tim Burton's other works, which generally strike me as visually brilliant but spiritually empty. I never have cared for Batman Returns, though other people seem to regard it as the better film. It's just got too many cheesy parts. And the later, non-Burton Batman movies that came before the Nolan rebirth are too stupid to comment on, except to say that the batsuit should not have nipples.



Wingéd bat flies by night.

Mysterious Mechanical Monsters!

And now for something completely different. I enjoyed culling the pictures for my last Superman post so much, I thought I'd do it again. If you've seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, you'll recognize the robots in this cartoon.

Infant of Krypton, Man of Steel

I wrote in my last post about having watched the 1940s Fleischer Superman cartoons. Some of them have astonishingly beautiful animation and should be seen by anyone interested in dieselpunk. Just for fun, I've culled some of the more striking images from the first cartoon ("Superman," or "The Mad Scientist"). Enjoy! (Or better yet, go watch some of the cartoons.)

"In the endless reaches of the universe, there once existed a planet known as Krypton, a planet that burned like a green star in the distant heavens. There, civilization was far advanced, and it brought forth a race of supermen, whose mental and physical powers were developed to the absolute peak of human perfection. But there came a day when giant quakes threatened to destroy Krypton forever. One of the planet's leading scientists, sensing the approach of doom, placed his infant son in a small rocket ship and sent it hurtling in the direction of Earth, just as Krypton exploded. The rocket sped through star-studded space, landing safely on Earth with its precious burden: Krypton's sole survivor."

The Superman we Deserve?

So, I saw that new Superman movie.

Let me begin by saying that I've always had an interest in Superman. I grew up watching the old Fleischer cartoons, the movies, the television shows; I even read a few comic books. What makes a superhero iconic is that he takes some few aspects of our culture—tensions, aspirations, conflicts—and embodies them in a dramatic way. So here we have Clark Kent, an immigrant adoptee growing up in Smallville—flyover territory—just trying to fit in and be a decent American, attempting to make it in the Big City. As a person of mixed ancestry who came of immigrant families, who's done what he could to fit into small towns with varying success, who's lived in the Cultural Center of the Universe (Austin) without particularly caring for it, that appeals to me. I think it does to a lot of people.

Man of Steel certainly touches on this. I particularly like how the boy-Clark's extreme hypersensitivity isolates him from the other children at school. The treatment—the way his foster-mother teaches him to focus his senses—seems owing to the experiences of people with autism disorders. Having such a disorder myself, I found the depiction quite powerful, and potentially useful in explaining how we perceive things. It gave me another way to identify with Superman.

So you see, I'm already well-disposed toward Superman for many reasons. I generally can't stand superhero stuff, but Batman and Superman I like. Which is what makes it so unfortunate that my reaction to this movie is a resounding "meh."

It's heavy on CGI action and light on character and plot, which is disappointing, considering that it was written by Nolan and Goyer. We go straight from the spectacular opening on Krypton (I mean, it's supposed to be spectacular, but to me it just looks like a big cartoon in which they could make pretty much anything happen) and the planet's destruction to a grown-up Clark Kent saving people from a burning oil rig. His boyhood is handled in flashbacks. Which is OK, except that that's where the only interesting drama is. Kevin Costner, channeling Field of Dreams, is wonderful to watch. Russell Crowe, not so much.

You see, the thing I like about Batman Begins is that it shows Bruce Wayne finding his own path, building his persona. It's a messy, halting process. We all know where it's going to end, but there's something absorbing about the storytelling. We see him building his knowledge and skills, forming his philosophy, exploring his future lair, gathering his arsenal. There's something elemental about a hero creating his own weapons, as Siegfried reforges his father's sword.

But in Man of Steel, bam, Clark overhears army guys talking about a buried alien aircraft (in a bar, of all places), then, bam, he goes and finds it, then, bam, he sticks Jor-El's flash drive in the computer (luckily it hadn't been destroyed or lost when his clothes burned off in that rig explosion), and receives a virtual visit from his father's "downloaded" (!) consciousness, and gets his Superman suit and his commission to go help people and bring hope and all that. (How exactly was that suit just hanging in the closet? The ship had been there for thousands of years.) This is right at the beginning: Superman's persona and mission are handed to him by Daddy. And then here comes General Zod from the Phantom Zone.

The thing about these big CGI epics is that, visually speaking, pretty much anything can happen, which tends to make them loud and dull. Take Superman battling this world engine or whatever it's called. These big metal snake things come out at him, and he fights them, and it goes back and forth, and then he gets down into the blue laser beam somehow, and flies up it, and destroys the thing. Meanwhile things are getting smashed up pretty good in Metropolis. Now, is there any reason internal to the story why he couldn't have destroyed the engine ten minutes earlier? No, because it's all just ad hoc, designed for visual titillation and nothing more. The action falls flat because we're not given enough information. But there's really not any more information to give, something that becomes increasingly apparent as you watch. It's like kids playing with action figures, making it up as they go along.

Much is made of the salutary effects of Earth air, which is said to be thinner and more nourishing than Krypton air. As to how thin it is, I have no opinion, but, sure, I guess I've always found it nourishing. It's a nice combination of carbon dioxide, oxygen, nitrogen, and so on. This, together with our young sun's radiation, is what gives Superman his superpowers (including, er, eye-beams and flying). Even if we leave aside the question of why the far-advanced Kryptonians haven't discovered this themselves and used it to their benefit, it's hard not to notice that it isn't handled consistently. But I'm not going to waste my brain cells trying to explain all the contradictions.  Maybe I'm just missing something. Maybe not. It doesn't really matter, and it clearly didn't matter to the writers.

People keep saying that this is an angsty Superman, but I don't see that. Actually, the movie is full of warm, easy platitudes about faith and trust and life and so on, but their impact isn't earned by the script. Nothing is earned by the script. It's emotionally unsatisfying. And don't even get me started on the cardboard Lois Lane. And the product placement. I mean, there was one part where it looked like a Nikon commercial.

Well, I seem to be getting my curmudgeon on, so I'd better stop there. Tonight I think I'll watch The Dark Knight again.

The Harrowing of Gotham

I've been meaning to write a bit about The Dark Knight Rises. I've mentioned that I seldom go to the movies. This is mostly because the theater sends me into sensory overload, but also because I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere. We do have a movie theater, but it's a little scary, and seldom shows the kinds of movies I like to see. For Batman I braved it, though. I was quite overwhelmed by the film; I even drove all the way to the city to rewatch it at a Nice Theater.

The critical response to it at the time was positive but a little on the tepid side. Certainly the film has its faults. The plot is ungainly. There are noticeable holes and contrivances. More annoyingly, it tries too hard to conceal the true identity of the Miranda Tate character, almost to the point of dishonesty. If you want to spring a surprise on the viewer, you have to do it honestly. We all know that actors can act like anything they want, but real people in real situations can't, and there are some psychological obfuscations here that amount to miracles. Not fair. You have to lay everything out on the table. If the viewer guesses it, fine. It won't matter if the story is good enough. A story that depends on withholding information is a weak story. A great director, like Hitchcock, will actually underscore whatever it is the protagonist doesn't see, use it to ratchet up the tension, and then still somehow shock the viewer.

So the film has its faults. But it also has great beauty—a rich and gloomy majesty—and I don't think it got enough credit for that at the time. For one thing, Christopher Nolan clearly has great integrity as a director. He refused to bow to the scourge of our times, the 3D format. He also (I've read) refused to film digitally as a point of craftsmanship. CGI effects were used sparingly, preserving a sense of exhilaration wholly lacking from various eye-popping extravaganzas. (Peter Jackson, I'm talking to you.) Nolan actually used miniatures, life-size models, and sets. What a concept!

The Batman movies are generous movies. They give us more than they have to. They are far more beautiful than we have any right to expect of a superhero movie. Every shot in The Dark Knight Rises is artfully arranged; it uses stark chiaroscuro and an almost monochromatic palette to powerful effect.

Part of the problem with the reception of The Dark Knight Rises is that the film really sits better as a myth or a fantasy than an action adventure. Symbolism abounds. As fire was a motif in The Dark Knight, so is ice a motif in this film. It begins with the image of the bat encased in cracking ice and ends with the city surrounded by a river of ice like Dante's Cocytus. The climax takes place on a snowy morning in the dead of winter, when Batman returns from the dead—the underworld—and sets the city free. The typology of the film places it squarely in Northrop Frye's "mythos of summer": romance.

The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero. We may call these three stages respectively, using Greek terms, the agon or conflict, the pathos or death-struggle, and the anagnorisis or discovery, the recognition of the hero, who has clearly proved himself to be a hero even if he does not survive the conflict. A three-fold structure is repeated in many features of romance—in the frequency, for instance, with which the successful hero is a third son, or the third to undertake the quest, or successful on his third attempt. It is shown more directly in the three-day rhythm of death, disappearance and revival which is found in the myth of Attis and other dying gods, and has been incorporated in our Easter. (The Anatomy of Criticism)

In The Dark Knight Rises we see this threefold structure in multiple ways, from Bruce's three attempts to escape from the pit to his defeat by Bane, disappearance from Gotham in its hour of need, and return at the last minute. Bruce/Batman even has a kind of sacrificial role, like Attis: he was the scapegoat driven out of the city at the end of The Dark Knight, while at the end of this film he immolates himself as a nuclear holocaust, delivering Gotham from its long darkness and winter.

The central form of romance is dialectical: everything is focused on a conflict between the hero and his enemy, and all the reader's values are bound up with the hero. Hence the hero of romance is analogous to the mythical Messiah or deliverer who comes from an upper world, and his enemy is analogous to the demonic powers of a lower world. The conflict however takes place in, or at any rate primarily concerns, our world, which is in the middle, and which is characterized by the cyclical movement of nature. Hence the opposite poles of the cycles of nature are assimilated to the opposition of the hero and his enemy. The enemy is associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life and old age, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigor, and youth. (ibid.)

Ultimately, the foe is the dragon—leviathan—identified with the sterility of the land and the impotence of its king. There's an almost mystical feeling in The Dark Knight Rises that, though things may seem all right on the surface, the city is sick. What is it sick from? An ingested lie. Bruce Wayne is sick too, and from the same malady. The decay of the city and Bruce's senility are one. The unsettling peace won at the end of The Dark Knight wasn't a real peace. The lies have to be exposed and bear their fruit before true healing can come. Bane himself shows that he understands his role when he calls himself "necessary evil."

I do like Bane considerably. He's an urban Lord Humungus, brutal yet articulate, a composite of countless revolutionaries leading men into deeper darkness, the warlord of a city cut off from the outside world by forces of the state like the Duke in Escape from New York. But he isn't an antagonist you can really feel much enmity toward. As he himself noted, he isn't the real foe. The real foe is the knot into which Bruce's life and the life of Gotham have gotten tied, the labyrinth in which they've gotten lost.

In the folk tale versions of dragon-killing stories we notice how frequently the previous victims of the dragon come out of him alive after he is killed… Hence the symbolism of the Harrowing of Hell… Secular versions of journeys inside monsters occur from Lucian to our day, and perhaps even the Trojan horse had originally some links with the same theme. The image of the dark winding labyrinth for the monster's belly is a natural one, and one that frequently appears in heroic quests, notably that of Theseus… In many solar myths, too, the hero travels perilously through a dark labyrinthine underworld full of monsters between sunset and sunrise. (ibid.)

This last may serve as a template for the narrative arc of the trilogy. Bruce journeys through the underworld from the day he falls down the well and is attacked by bats. The bottleneck prison of The Dark Knight Rises is a kind of huge, nightmare version of his well, and the crazy Escheresque labyrinth of the pit is an image of the maze in which he's been lost since he was a boy. His escape is a harrowing—he drops the rope behind him as he leaves—and so is his liberation of the police imprisoned beneath the city.

Then, as day dawns, the dark knight fights alongside the police at last. The city is set free—aptly described through a famous passage from A Tale of Two Cities quoted at length in the movie—and Bruce, dead now to Gotham, is liberated to live a life of obscurity in the sun.

It is a beautiful movie, a dark masterpiece.

The Dark Knight

I left off my previous post by asking the origins and significance of the Man With No Name. Well, to me it seems clear that he's the modern version of the quest-knight, but with an ironic twist.

 

The subtext of Chandler's The Big Sleep is heralded by its opening description:

Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

This anticipates the moment when Marlowe comes home to his apartment to find the vicious, lascivious Carmen Sternwood, his damsel in distress, naked in his bed:

I looked down at the chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.

The quest-knight of the twentieth century is no knight in shining armor, but a dark knight, an anti-knight. He is conscious of no code of honor but his detachment and self-consistency. His quest is a hopeless one, its object meaningless like the Maltese Falcon or destructive like the Great Whatsit of Alderich's Kiss Me Deadly. And yet he pursues his path to the bitter end. His literary ancestor is the hero of Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," who struggles alone across a tortured landscape to an end without hope, yet rings out his challenge defiantly in the face of certain doom. That Stephen King professes his Gunslinger to have been inspired by both Browning's poem and the protagonist of the "Dollars Trilogy" underscores this connection.
 
And what of the significance of the Man With No Name? Why are we so obsessed with him? Does it really need to be explicated? The answer is all too clear. The wasteland of the modern quest is our civilization.

     The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

Malory's blighted land fell into ruin through its king receiving the Dolorous Stroke, an echo of the Eden myth. But in our time man in his perversity has engineered his own dolorous stroke, has sown the sere fields with the seeds of his own destruction.

And more than that—a furlong on—why, there!
     What bad use was that engine for, that wheel,
     Or brake, not wheel—that harrow fit to reel
Men's bodies out like silk? with all the air
Of Tophet's tool, on earth left unaware,
     Or brought to sharpen its rusty teeth of steel.

Atom bombs and napalm; strip mines, pollution, and mass extinction; abortion and genocide and voluntary sterility; mind-shattering drugs; the fragmentation of culture, the confusion of tongues, the dissolution of the family, the ebbing of faith. Man's imprisoned demons have burst free and now stride across the landscape like giants.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Across this dark landscape the Man With No Name advances. Like Galahad, he is an outsider, his identity an enigma. Like Galahad, he has a magic touch when it comes to getting things done. He cuts through the red tape of institutions grown impotent or corrupt, throws down the tyrant, and sets the captives free. His activity is a kind of harrowing of hell. Lily-white he's not, but there is an integrity to his blackness. He is self-transfixed like Percival, sullied like Bors, excluded like Lancelot at the waste chapel. There is no Grail at the end of his quest, and yet he still goes on and on. His cynical idealism is a substitute for faith, his detached persistence a substitute for hope, his vigorous action a substitute for love. He's not the knight the world needs, but the knight it deserves.
  

~

 
People are too apt to view the quest for the Holy Grail as a relic from an age of chivalric idealism. The earthy fabric of which Malory's Arthurian tapestry is woven gives the lie to this, but modern readers still tend to forget that the context of Le Mort d'Arthur is not the fifth century, but the fifteenth. It was an era of impending dissolution. The medieval social order was crumbling. There were signs and portents, wars and rumors of wars. Corruption was rife. Princes pursued their ambitions apart from any moral code. Malory himself was something of a social outcast, a man of violence who ravished women, abused clergymen, and single-handedly fought his way out of prison, the living archetype of the Man With No Name.

  

Predictions of an immanent apocalypse are pretty common these days. They come from all quarters, from religious fundamentalists and climate scientists, from New Agers and politicians, from tabloid journalists and mainstream filmmakers. But ours isn't the first era of such social anxiety. The end was looked for in pre-Reformation Europe, and also during the Danish invasions. They say too that the reign of Justinian was troubled by bearded stars, earthquakes, and pestilences. It was a time of disorientation and transformation. Europe was entering the Dark Ages. What if anything do our own anxieties presage?

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Man With No Name

There is a certain vein of twentieth-century stories and films that I find myself returning to over and over again. I've mentioned how watching Mad Max and The Road Warrior was something of an epiphany to me. I eventually discovered that its protagonist is but one incarnation of a stock figure of twentieth-century mythology: the Man With No Name. Other versions include Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op (most memorably in Red Harvest), Akira Kurasawa's nameless samurai (Yojimbo, Sanjuro), the protagonist of Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" (e.g., A Fistful of Dollars), Stephen King's Gunslinger, and the latter-day Batman of Christopher Nolan. Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Hammett's Sam Spade also come to mind.

The same themes seem to crop up in each case. The backdrop is invariably post-apocalyptic, sometimes fully realized and sometimes not. There's the hellish, hopelessly corrupt mining town of Personville ("Poisonville"); chaotic, post-feudal Japan; the practically extinct border hamlet of San Miguel; the post-apocalyptic Australian Outback; the dark streets of Gotham where powerless city officials are overruled by grotesque mass-murderers. Raymond Chandler laid his finger on this common theme when, in a discussion of the pulp detective story, he wrote:

Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning how to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.

This found its most striking expression in Robert Alderich's darkly ironic film noir Kiss Me Deadly, in which the protagonist moves through an incoherent ruined culture and achieves the goal of his quest in a mushroom cloud.

The Man With No Name is always an alienated loner. Usually he is a wandering stranger or outcast with no preexisting ties to the community; even when he is not, he has an alter ego to make himself one. His appearance speaks a close kinship to the common enemy and cynicism toward the goods of civilization, leading the "citizens" to distrust him. Thus Max wears the black leather of the vermin of the wasteland, not the white garments of the commune-dwellers he is called upon to protect. He regards the nascent community with scarcely concealed derision. The parallels between Batman and the Joker are touched on in Tim Burton's Batman and brought to the fore in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. Or again, Sanjuro ends with the confrontation between the nameless samurai and his dark counterpart; they own their kinship but fight to the death, the protagonist killing his opponent in a shocking fountain of blood.

The Man With No Name is an agent of chaos, not an agent of order, and must depart as soon as his work is done—or even be driven out as unclean, as Batman is in The Dark Knight. His modus operandi is aptly described in Red Harvest:

"Plans are all right sometimes," I said. "And sometimes just stirring things up is all right—if you're tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you see what you want when it comes to the top."

Whence this modern myth-cycle? What is its significance? I'll attempt to describe what I think about it in the next post.