On being a fan and then not talking about it

One of the most common moves of cultural studies in the 1990s was to write about one's self. This was usually done in identity and meant mentioning one's race, class, and gender. When academic's attention turned to fandom, it usually meant declaring their own fandom. Over at Aca/Fan, Henry Jenkin's website, Will Brooker talks about why he declared his fandom in Batman Unmasked and why he did not in his second book, Hunting the Dark Knight. It's worth checking out. 

Second Post: The Dark Knight (2008)

My wife often likes to say that a single shot can justify an entire film. Because of this, I have dubbed her a formalist. She is OK with this, even though I make this comment as a fairly committed historicist.

That being said, there is a shot in The Dark Knight that would justify the film, if of course the film needed it. Let the gushing and the spoilers commence:

At the end of the film, the Joker falls off the side of a building after battling with the Batman. Unlike "the poetry" of Batman (1989), Nolan's Dark Knight does not leave the clown prince of crime to fall to his death. Instead, Batman rescues Joker from his demise by pulling him up with a grappling hook. Hoisted upside down from his leg and flapping in the wind, the Joker explains his philosophy of life. However, tellingly, the image that the audience sessis not of the Joker hanging upside down. The image has been inverted so that he appears right side up, with his jacket floating up behind him and flapping eerily in the wind. For the audience, this simple trick of inverting the negative's direction produces a certain amount of estrangement. The Joker appears at once normal, but the world appears strange. More tellingly though, is that the shot is from Batman's point of view. As I discussed in my last post and over here, the real tragedy in the film comes when Batman accepts the Joker's view of society. This shot is brilliant, and again would justify the film if it needed it, because it manages to formally suggest the thematic circumstances of that part of the film.

I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight. . . .

Very Serious: Batusi vs. Bat Dance

This year is an election year and America faces a very important decision. Will we choose between something that is tried and true or something that is a flash in the pan? Will you be doing the Batusi or the Bad Dance? The choice is yours. But remember, the safety of our nation is in your hands.



THE BATUSI

THE BATDANCE



VOTE NOW!

And T. S. Eliot once had the audacity to say that art never improves. Humph.

The Dark Knight (2008)

I.

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, critic David Denby states that the latest installment of the Batman franchise, The Dark Knight (2008), is little bit more than a ponderous excuse for "thunderous violence." For Denby, watching The Dark Knight is to see the Batman franchise polluted. The new film, Denby writes, "continue[s] to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton's original conception for Batman (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle" (92).

There are a number of problems with this statement, and we would be good to point out the most blatant of these first. Batman was just as much a summer action spectacle as the current film. While time may have shrouded Denby's memory, I distinctly remember that the film came out in late June, which is very much a part of the summer. Furthermore, while The Dark Knight promises to be a commercial success and does have its fair share of crass merchandising, this latest production does not seem nearly as coarse or "un-poetic" as this nation's second wave of Bat-Mania.

More importantly, we must note that, while it is true that Tim Burton had a conception for Batman in the late 1980s, it would be false to say that he ever had the"original conception" for Gotham's protector or that his should be held up before all others. In 1989, the character was some 50 years old, and while Burton's take on the caped crusader had its own idiosyncrasies, much like director Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight, Burton's Batman drew its inspiration from equal parts Bob Kane and Frank Miller.

Denby's true critical sin lies, however, elsewhere. The fact that he credits Batman with greater artistic purity and Burton as the prime Batman artiste is not the true problem of his evaluation.
Denby's ultimate fault is that his review commits the ultimate failure of criticism: he fails to see the aesthetic object for what it truly is and instead critiques it against the object that he truly desires. In doing so, Denby commits the same error that all bad fan-criticism does: he demands that the film bend to the needs of his aggressive nostalgia. Many readers of superhero texts do this because our first introduction to a character usually strikes us as the truest. For me, the original Green Lantern will always be Gerard Jones's Hal Jordan, but Showcase Presents: Green Lantern more than illustrates that this version of the character is as deviant from Jordan's 1959 first appearance as Nolan's Batman is from Burton's. However, I do recognize that Jones's interpretation is just as valid as the original and just as valid as the contemporary version of the character. The later writers have surveyed the history of GL stories and have taken those parts of the character's history that seems most useful and speaks most to them and their age.

For Denby, as far as film goes, Burton's vision of Batman is his prime model. It is the Batman that feels most genuine because it meets those expectations of what Batman should be; but of course these were established by Burton and no one else. We must be aware that Burton's Batman is not the Batman, just as it would be impossible to say that Bob Kayne's Batman is the only Batman, even though Kane was the originator of the character. By this point in time, Batman has become a piece of industrial folklore. He is not the common property of the folk, although many people may feel or think that he has become legendary. Indeed, in many ways he has. The character is a legend, but he is also a copyrighted piece of intellectual property owned by a major media corporation. Nonetheless, while there are an infinite amount of Batman's running a long the rooftops of our collective imagination, there are also many different official versions of Batman that DC Comics and its parent corporation Warner Brothers have propagated. Each of these visions are equally valid. All that defines Batman in his purest form is his origin story (a boy swears to rid the world of crime after his parents are murdered before his eyes) and certain costume elements (the cape, the cowl, and some type of bat insignia). All other elements, including Alfred, Robin, Commissioner Gordon, and even Gotham City are superfluous. As a character, Batman has survived without them at various times in his publishing history and it is likely that one or more of these elements will disappear briefly in the future, although probably not for long.

Burton's Batman is, of course, a Batman that we can all recognize, and which a great many of us delighted in when it first came to theaters. It has all of the essential features of Batman, and has a great many of the secondary ones as well. Furthermore, unlike many comic movies that seem principally ashamed of their source material, Batman does not run from its comic origins or even what we might call their own internal logic. Much like those GL scribes listed above, it takes what it needs from the larger history of Batman and Burton makes it his own. It is this action, making Batman one's own, which allows the 1989 production to fit almost perfectly within Burton's larger oeuvre. Batman is principally concerned with outcasts, moodiness, and masquerade. And while, Nolan's Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight are interested in these themes to a certain degree, I am more than happy to see them moved to the background than have them dominate the foreground. For Nolan's preoccupation with Batman is not with the Dark Knight's personal pain - although his mission does drive the plot - but with how cities function and how they need good people to function properly. Much as I find Burton's Batman to produce its own brand of poetry, I am less drawn to its aesthetic and its message, than I am to Nolan's more useful depiction of Bruce Wayne and his effect on Gotham. For while Burton and later Joel Schumacher were preoccupied with Wayne's pain and demons, and while this can make for interesting storytelling, not many of us are going to find ourselves avenging our parents as masked vigilantes. In contrast, Nolan's Batman series, like a heightened, more fantastic vision of David Simon's The Wire might actually teach us something about our present condition more generally.

II.

If we are going to compare The Dark Knight to a superhero film a more profitable comparison exists between The Dark Knight and the last (and hopefully final) installment of the X-Men franchise, X3: The Last Stand. At the core of the Brian Singer/Brett Ratner trilogy is a political meditation, much in the same way that Nolan's Batman films are preoccupied with the politics and corruption of a single American city. As in the latest Batman installment, X3: The Last Stand also considers what happens when the conception of politics is undermined by something more primal.

In Ratner's production, political issues are mapped along multicultural conceptions of identity. Viewing difference as sacrosanct, many of the X-Men and all of Magneto's terrorist vanguard feel that the newly manufactured mutant "cure" is tantamount to genocide. In many ways, they are right if they limit their claims to cultural genocide, but that is a more complicated matter and deserves a separate post of its own. What is important for our purposes is that amidst the hullabaloo of a mutant cure, is the resurrection of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) as a primal psychic force known as the Phoenix. Unlike sensible Jean Grey, who is dedicated to Xavier's dream of peaceable coexistence between humans and mutants, the Phoenix is overcome with desire for powerful sensations. Represented as pure and nearly omnipotent id, she wants to experience life unrestricted by societal and political constraints; nearly invulnerable, and thus living without consequence, the Phoenix wants to experience "bare life."

This desire causes her to reject the stern political doctrines of Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart), and in a fit of excessive rage, to tear him apart atom from atom. From the rest of the film the Phoenix travels with Magneto (Ian McKellen) and his acolytes. However, she does not do this because she has had a political change of heart or because she shares Magneto's desire to exterminate the human race. She travels with him merely as a means to seek out new experiences. The central problem with X3's thematic construction is that Magneto never recognizes that Phoenix is not interested in his political machinations and that he never pays for this lack of recognition. Of course, Magento is defeated, made into a normal human being by the X-Man Beast (Kelsey Grammer), but Jean Grey plays only a little part in this. The film's identity politics are not challenged at all by the presence of the Phoenix, and this makes the whole plot point superfluous to the film's overall action.

In comparison Nolan's Dark Knight presents us with a Joker (Heath Ledger) who is a self-described "agent of chaos." Much like the Phoenix, Nolan and Ledger's Joker imagines himself as outside the bounds of political order and rule. However, it should be noted whereas Phoneix is depicted as being pure id, Joker's disorder is portrayed more as a Hobbesian in nature. It is the Joker who sees beyond the facile lies society tells itself in order to constitute itself.

It is into Gotham City that Nolan drops this vision of the Joker. Although Athenian in its conception of publicity, Nolan's Gotham is very much that vision of the city that the great Naturalist writers of the late 19th and early 20th century taught us to see. Gotham City, corrupt and dangerous, lives by pumping money in and out of its coffers. While its economy and geography are based around the virtuous model of corporate responsibility, Wayne Enterprises, for too long the city was corrupt and violent. Into this mess, the Batman (Christian Bale) came to rid the city of the mob, to clean up corruption, and most of all to inspire other people to action. Batman's ability to inspire is what makes up the action of the film. For while Batman inspires the virtuous District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) to take action, he also inspires a group of unfortunate copycat vigilantes, and of course, he inspires the mob to hire the Joker to kill Batman. What the mob doesn't realize is that despite the fact that the Joker offers to work for money, his passions are not economic but sadistic in their nature. What the Joker wants is to spread chaos and fear, to show society through sadism, that underneath the thin bedrock of society is a mess of chaos and animal urges. The mob pays for this lack of recognition, but so do many Gothamites, police officers, not to mention Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), Harvey Dent, and the Batman.

In wanting to spread fear, many commentators (Denby included) have wanted to read the Joker's action against our current political climate and declare him a terrorist. Scipio over at The Absorbascon has gone so far as to state that the film makes a real comment on terrorism. What this comment is, he does not tell us, but then again, to be fair, that is not the purpose of his post. These comments are of course not made erroneously. Although they do not elaborate much, their writer's may very well be on to something. There are at least two points in the film, when the Joker is explicitly called a terrorist. But as much as the film wants him to be one, the Joker is not really a terrorist, at least not as we understand the term conventionally to denote. Yes, the Joker spreads terror, but he does so to no political end. His murder and mayhem serve no other purpose than their own ends. Besides his point about society's delusions about itself, Joker is violent for the sake of being violent.

This extra-political activity seems to be rooted in Joker's own familial background. While in keeping with his various origin stories from the comics, Nolan's Joker has no definite origin or motivational incident. However, the one commonality in all of Joker's own given explanations for his behavior lies in a twisted family dynamic, which is essentially, outside the bounds of what we normally consider politics (although it certainly is not untouched by it). Indeed, the political world, even the political world of Batman, rests on top of this uncertain structure: the individual mind which is molded both by society and uncertain forces.

[SPOILERS!]

Where this film truly succeeds is that it concedes some of the argument to the Joker. Unlike Phoenix who is sentimentally dispatched by a tearful Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), the legacy of the Joker is dubious. His mission was not only to kill Batman, but to show that both the high and the low could easily be brought down to their most bestial. At the film's climax he arranges a type of prisoner's delima between Gotham's criminals and its regular citizens. One boat is filled with criminals, the other everyday decent people; both have detonators to the others' boat. If they do not act, the Joker will blow up both ships. Both groups manage to survive the other and the Joker. They are not corrupted. On the other hand, the Joker has also attempted and succeeded in corrupting Harvey Dent, bringing down the city's "white knight" and turning him into the crazed madman Two-Face. Aware of the city's ability to produce publicity, both Gordon and Batman agree that the city cannot sustain the shock of knowing the truth of Dent's fall. It would ruin all the work that the three of them have done to inspire and unify the city against crime and corruption. After Dent's death, Gordon and Batman agree that Batman should receive the blame for Dent's crimes in order to hold the city together. Batman will continue to act for good, but he will be chased and hunted actively by the police in the memory of a Harvey Dent who never truly existed.

In the end, the Joker wins half of the argument, but one hopes not the better half. While the people on the boats never act, Gordon and Batman are persuaded that Dent's fall would undermine the city. It is only through producing an elaborate lie that the city and by extension society is able to hold itself together. Underneath all the political order, rests a falsity we tell ourselves. How we constitute a just society and a political frame work in spite of this, is the problem the film sets forth for us. For in the end, we might acknowledge that society is held together with little more than a series of linguistic acts, but this does not make the bonds, bounds, or rules of a society any less significant. Indeed, the real question of morality will always be one of action, but we ought to think back upon what linguistic acts we make which thus set the boundaries of our actions, and we might want to question the necessity of Gordon and Batman's ruse. After all, while the film implies the consequences of their actions are successful, we will never learn what would have happened if the linguistic act Gordon and Batman rebuilt Gotham society had been less duplicitous and more honest.

On the Latest Weekly Comics

cross-posted with Narrative Review

Up above DC Comics Editor-in-Chief Dan Didio discusses with Mike Carlin about the upcoming weekly series Trinity. Written by Kurt Busiek and drawn by Mark Bagley this series will focus on DC Comics's Big Three: Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

Over the past years DC has experimented with the weekly format in both 52 and Countdown to Final Crisis. Although they have been commercially successful, artistically and critically they have been failures. The disappointments of these series have come from the fact that both 52 and Countdown were written not with their own stories in mind, but as an explanation for a story to follow - a prequel before the original as it were. Thus, 52 was meant to set up the One Year Later time line that was already being told in DC's monthly output and Countdown was written to setup this summer's blockbuster miniseries Final Crisis. Unfortunately, 52 was written by a committee of overextended writers and artists and none of the various story-lines running through 52 adequately hung together, nor did it really set up the One Year Later time line effectively until the last two issues. The less said about Countdown the better.

So what can we expect of Trinity? I remain cautiously optimistic. Unlike the other efforts which were produced by multiple over-committed writers and artists, Trinity will at least have the benefit of a unified creative vision in Busiek and Bagley. As far as I know the series does not have to end some place that is mandated by a corporate crossover. Hopefully, this will allow Busiek to tell his own story which will actually have something of a resolution.

While my hopes are considerably higher for Trinity than they ever were for 52 or Countdown, I think that the weekly episodic format might just be too much for comics. Can one story really last a full year and have the necessary stopping points that the weekly format provides? I'm not so sure. Television manages the weekly format, but then again, the over all plotting of a sitcom or a television drama is a) never a full year and b) not usually totally dependent on an overarching plot structure. But who knows? Maybe I'll be surprised?

This Week in Comics #1: Batman and the Outsiders #1

This week begins a new quasi-weekly feature. Much like Chris's Invincible Super-Blog and The Absorbascon I will be giving weekly reviews of the comics that I read for the week. Luckily for my wallet and my typing fingers, my usual Wednesday stack is something like .5 comics per week and the most I think that I've ever bought was something like six issues, so the reviews will be relatively light and again, quasi-weekly.

This week's purchase is DC Comics's Batman and the Outsiders #1 and comes to us from the creative mind of Chuck Dixon and the talented hands of Julian Lopez. Overall, I found this first issue to be a promising start, but a little slow. Clearly, this first storyline will go for five or six issues when it could probably be parred down to three and be more enjoyable.

The series brings back a title from the mid-1980s. The concept for the original series was that Batman had started his own super-team after his own relationship with the Justice League became strained. While the series was popular for awhile, eventually sales dropped and the title was canceled. Having read a few issues of the original, it's hard to say why the series was ever popular. While there were a few interesting characters on the team, most of them were more super-lame, then superheroes. Take for instance one of the series's more "popular" characters, Halo; Halo's powers literally consist of being schizophrenic and looking like a refugee from an Abba video. The most recent reiteration of the team previous to this new series, ended only a few months ago. This title, scripted by Judd Winnick, presented the Outsiders more as a grown up version of Teen Titans, with a good deal of the team's membership coming from that title. Think Slackers meets Mission Impossible and you'll have a good idea of what was going on.

Thankfully, this new Batman and the Outsiders is taking a much different direction. The current series is un-acknowledgedly built on the back of Wildstorm's The Authority, a titlethat featured characters remarkably like the original Justice League who pretty much extort the world's governments to be peaceful and socialistic. It was in short, a leftist's wet dream. During The Authority's original run, DC (Wildstorm's parent company) found the title's radical politics too much to bear and began censoring the title until it lost much of its audience. However, since the appearance of The Authority, DC has consistently tried to build an Authority-lite team into its mainstream books. Books which have tried the Authority-lite formula have had a hard time finding their voice. Playing within the confines of the DC Universe (DCU), these team books could never be as radical as their Wildstorm equivalents and thus the aesthetic and the supposed "bad-assness" of the series always felt hackneyed.

Luckily, Batman and the Outsiders manages to find the proper balance between the bright spandex view of reality that is the DCU and the proactive stance that was necessary for a book like The Authority to work. Chuck Dixon has managed to find the right scale. The Outsiders cannot blackmail the Russian government to relent in persecuting the Chechnyan people like The Authority, and luckily Dixon does not give us the DCU equivalent (as of yet) of having the Outsiders liberate one of DCU's many fictional third world banana republics or Eastern bloc countries. Instead, the villain here is a corporation which seems to be engaged in some highly suspect research and so Batman sends his newly formed team to investigate. It's not something the JLA would normally do as it involves some espionage and undercover work, but its also not on the same scale as The Authority and so the story does not become ridiculous or parodic. It's not too big and it's not too small. Dixon has managed to find the right niche for this incarnation of The Outsiders.

While much my interest in the book has come from Dixon's ability to blend Authority style action into the DCU mainstream, most of the discussion of this book has been focused on the book's supposed homophobia, and I think it's only fair to mention this in my own review. Feminist comics bloggers like Kalinara have criticized the first issue for its disrespect of lesbians and even relatively apolitical bloggers like Chris Sims have complained that the series seems to have a moment where things become derogatory.

Most of this controversy stems from the fact that Chuck Dixon is one of the few openly right wing comic books who has chided writers for including openly gay characters in their work. Now, most of Dixon's complaints stem from his discomfort with sexuality of any sort being openly stated in comics, but it is clear and clearly lamentable that there does seem to be a double standard at work. Much like the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, Dixon's rules about representation seem to allow for open heterosexuality without it being indecent, but homosexuality always seems to be sexual or sensual and thus a big comic no-no. This does present Dixon with a noticeable problem in writing The Outsiders because he's inheriting the title from Judd Winnick, an author has had gay-rights themed issues in other titles and has made The Outsiders at times, sexually explicit. As such, Dixon inherits a book that used to be everything he hates: it was sexually explicit (although not graphic) and it had two lesbian characters.

Now the immediate controversy at hand stems from Batman, supposedly unintentionally, goading his lesbian teammate Thunder into outing herself and her girlfriend/teammate Grace. Thunder is enraged when Batman refers to Thunder and Grace's "special" relationship. According to Batman, he only meant to say that they were good friends. Thunder is the one who misunderstands and believes that he is speaking euphemistically and thus, degradingly. Much of the criticism from Kalinara and Sims has to do whether or not Batman would know about their lesbian relationship and whether or not Batman would ever speak like this. I've come to understand that this level of nuanced true-to-character stuff will vary from writer to writer, particularly in an age when DC editing is as bad as it is. Would Batman would refer to someone as being "special" friends without understanding the implication of the word "special"? One would think that he would be quite sensitive to these type of implication given the fact that he's spent most of his adult life as a single man living with young boys and a domineering, elderly gentlemen; but I cannot say for certain whether or not Batman does know about what the word "special" implied beyond what I read in the text. Dixon's version of the character seems not to know what he was doing, even if as readers we think thinks this makes Batman an idiot and not the world's greatest detective.

Kalinara particularly criticizes Dixon for Thunder's reaction to Batman's usage of the word "special", which admittedly, does seem so over the top that it paints her as irrational. There seems to be more truth to this critique then whether or not Dixon is being true to Batman's character. Thunder does seem to be unhinged at Batman's remark, even when you do consider that she is rightfully upset that Batman is trying to fire her from the team.

However, is this as homophobic as Kalinara makes it seem? I don't think so. Or at least, I'm reluctant to say from this one issue, or rather from this one scene which consists of little more than a few panels. I'm willing to wait and see what happens over the next few issues to see whether or not Dixon's ideological biases (which I clearly do not agree with) override his ability to tell a good story. What I can say for now is that the scene is awkward and it is a blemish on what is an otherwise good story. Whether or not it is awkward because it suffers from Dixon foisting his beliefs onto the story, I am at this point, undecided. In the past I have seen Dixon portray right wingers as political nuts and I've seen him write what I thought was one of the best girl-positive series in a long time, Batgirl: Year One. I have high hopes for this series; I think it might be able to make some minor advances in the superhero genre, at least in terms of the DC mainstream. That being said, I take the critiques of Kalinara with more than a grain and salt and I do have my reservations.


Addendum: Boy, was I wrong about Dixon. As later issues showed, Dixon took a kind of sleazy interest in the sex lives of his lesbian characters. Rather than succumb to homophobia, Dixon's Outsiders read like a hastily executed frat-boy wet dream.

Holy Fiction, Batman!

According to scientists, children do believe that Batman thinks Robin is real. At least not at first.

In a recent study, scientists were interested in seeing if children could understand the difference between fictional worlds. While it has long been observed that very young children can tell the difference between reality and fantasy, it was unclear whether or not they could determine the difference between fictional worlds. Thus, children were asked a series of questions that concerned whether one fictional character believed another fictional character to be real. For the most part children agreed that Batman would think Square Bob Sponge Pants, Blue (of Blues Clue fame), and Finding Nemo were fictional creations. However, scientists were baffled when the children answered that Batman thought Robin was fictional. Did children think that Batman lived a very elaborate fantasy life? It turns out the results were anomalous and might stem from children’s inability to see things from Batman’s perspective. Why they can see things from a talking sponge’s perspective and not a grown man is baffling, but whatever. When asked whether or not Batman could “touch Robin” (this just sounds bad) or “talk to Robin” the children agreed that Batman could.

When I was a kid I wouldn’t even play with different lines of action figures. Part of this was no doubt due to the fact that my He-Man and Superman action figures were radically different sizes, but I also remember saying in my child-like squeal to a friend not in the know, “They’re from different universes though. Superman doesn’t even know who He-Man is.” As you might have guessed, I was not very popular.