Acephalous

Some thoughts on Gotham and its potential

So, as noted yesterday, I went on Graphic Policy Radio and discussed the series of premier of Gotham, which you can listen to here:

The more serious discussion concerned how a show whose conclusion is foregone can actually survive -- after all, even though Gotham is going to focus, somewhat Wire-like, on the internal conflicts of the police and various criminal organizations, in the end we all know that the situation's going to deteriorate to the point at which the only answer is a wealthy orphan patrolling the night in a fetish bat outfit.

Still, that leaves room for a good 10 or so seasons of watching the city fall apart, and that could certainly be gratifying, but only if the series creators understand what they have and how to use it. Which brings me to the second David Simon reference in this post, because I think the show's ceiling could be something like Homicide: Life on the Street.

Consider how that show began, with Tim Bayliss catching the Adena Watson case, and how it haunted him through all six-ish seasons. In a similar fashion, you know the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne are going to haunt Gordon, and you know that he -- like Bayliss -- is going to form an unhealthy attachment to both the case and those left in its wake.

Do I think Gotham is going to reach these heights? In all likelihood not.

But do I think that it has a higher ceiling than most quasi-procedural cop dramas currently on television? I most certainly do.

On a side note, we also established the most appropriate possible context for one of those Internet traditions I started awhile back:

SO JUMP OFF THAT BUILDING YOUR THE GODDAMN BATMAN

You know -- because he is.

ATTENTION: New Internet Tradition

After spraining my entire back yesterday, I woke up in a mood this morning. So when I was assaulted on Facebook by a series of positive messages about how I should be optimistic about everything, and because I’m an asshole, I wrote:

Just so you know, every time you post one of those “inspirational” or “optimistic” quotations on Facebook, in my head I append “So jump off that building, you’re the goddamn Batman” to the end of it.

But this should totally be a thing. Like so:

If you don’t know how to edit things on the Internet, well, all the better. The people who double-rainbow-with-wolf-and-moon these things don’t either. What have you got?

UPDATE: So:

So thank you laura:

Also:

Some interpretations are fascinatingly wrong, others just plain.

Grant Morrison went on Kevin Smith’s radio show and, as he dedicates his life to doing, blew your mind with his wholly original interpretation of Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke:

No one gets the end, because Batman kills The Joker. [...] That’s why it’s called The Killing Joke. The Joker tells the ‘Killing Joke’ at the end, Batman reaches out and breaks his neck, and that’s why the laughter stops and the light goes out, ’cause that was the last chance at crossing that bridge. And Alan Moore wrote the ultimate Batman/Joker story [because] he finished it.

Putting aside the fact that Morrison is the perpetually whining junior party in a feud with Moore, the idea that Moore “finished” the story of Batman and the Joker in The Killing Joke requires you misunderstand not only the structure of the book itself, but of the entirety of Moore’s structurally obsessed early work. Consider, as proof, a single page from Watchmen in which Moore accomplishes in nine panels more than Morrison did in all the pages of his magical masturbatory experiment in narcissism combined. But we need not even go there, because The Killing Joke fundamentally refutes Morrison’s contrarianism: the point is not that the story is “finished” but that it never can be. Even the dialogue circles back on itself:

That’s not the Joker, but a substitute with a painted face; the dialogue, however, is the Joker’s. After twenty-three silent panels, we have words. Moore frames The Killing Joke by floating the premise without the punchline in the first non-standard panel in the book, but it’s actually uttered in the last non-standard panel in the book:

This is because the books folds in on itself. The conflict between the Batman and the Joker is circular: it begins and ends in a “lunatic asylum,” and the non-diegetic words in that first panel are actually spoken aloud by the Joker in the second. Also significant is that they’re about the place they’re not spoken in, which happens to be the place the Joker will eternally recur inevitably be returned. But it’s not just the Joker whose words are eating their own tail:

As demonstrated in the post I linked to earlier, the central panels in Moore’s work at this time are inherently important, and this is the central panel of the fourth page of The Killing Joke. But it’s not just its placement in the structure of the page that’s significant — the structure of the panel itself is. The Batman and the Joker are presented here, center-page, as mirrors images of each other. Their faces are identically shadowed, their hands identically held. The slight perspectival asymmetry chops Batman’s fingers off at the knuckles and introduces a hint of uncertainty into an otherwise impassive panel. The only problem is that that’s not actually the Joker, but the Batman doesn’t know that yet, so he’s delivering an obviously prepared soliloquy in which all the dialogue is doubled: “Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you.” And it’s doubled in a way that makes literary critics swoon: in the service of overcoming a tired binary. The point of all those doublings is singular, because the Batman wants to avoid the inevitable “just once.”

Just once he would like what cannot happen to happen, so it’s not without a little irony that this dialogue reappears later:

Minus the “just once.” Just as the Joker’s words from the end of the book are superimposed on the beginning, the Batman’s speech — which the Joker’s never heard, because that wasn’t him in Arkham — so too are the Batman’s words from the beginning of the book superimposed on the end. The absence of “just once” is a self-undermining irony. That the caption bubble is a box indicates that they’re not the Batman’s thoughts. He’s not thinking about the speech he gave, Moore is re-presenting them as an echo. He’s reminding the reader that Batman’s trying to escape the cycle of violence, incarceration and escape in which the pair are locked. Only they can’t escape each other, because they’re damaged in the same way.

This should be a familiar argument to anyone who watched The Dark Knight, but Christopher Nolan castrated the pathos of Moore’s argument. In The Killing Joke, the Joker has a definitive origin that — go figure – mirrors the Batman’s: the accidental deaths of his wife and newborn child break him just as the murder of Wayne’s parents broke him. They both had what the Joker wants to impose on Gordon when he shoots his daughter Barbara: “one bad day” centered around the loss of family members. The whole book is a reflection upon the damage done by “one bad day,” and in the end it valorizes Gordon for not responding to his bad day by dressing like a flying rat or serially poisoning the water supply. But the point is that this book is about the relation of past to future, a chance …

I’m not going to harp on the language, visual and actual, of mirrors and reflections and doublings in the b –

– ook. But it sorta won’t let me n –

– ot. It’s just asshole like tha –

– t. Like that. I mean, the final fight takes place in a fun house in front of mirrors that distort their respective reflections, which means that in that second panel above, they’re not only distorted reflections of each other, their reflections are distorted reflections of their distorted reflections of each other. (Moore clearly values structure over subtlety at this point in his career.) For one to kill the other would be a kind of suicide neither are willing to commit.

They’re both the damaged products of “one bad day,” endlessly reflected in the fun house mirrors they stand between. That each reflection further distorts the other into infinity is kind of the point of the book.

The man in the fetish bat costume isn’t any healthier than the clown in the purple suit, and the more they interact, the sicker they become. Each reflection is a further distortion. Their interlocking stories always begin and end the same way, but along the way they inflict a little more damage on each other. You’d think one of them would snap eventually, but the point of Moore’s exercise is that neither ever will. Both responded to their “one bad day” with an excessive commitment to the willed necessity of their new identities: they differ from ordinary men only in their strength of will.

Morrison’s brilliant and wholly original idea — which has been floating around so long it’s been addressed in the introduction of one reprint and the conclusion of another — is an ignorant misreading that cuts against all the other grains in the book. It only seems plausible if you ignore the abundant evidence of its wrongness, including the first three panels of the book:

And the last:

Which combine in way that summarizes the story of the Batman and the Joker: on a dark night and rainy night, the Joker does something the police can’t handle. The Batman is required. His headlights in the book’s third panel announce his arrival. The Batman subdues the Joker, who can then be contained by the police again, hence the sirens announcing their arrival in the third-to-last panel of the book.

On a dark and rainy night.

Don’t make me mention that those panels are distorted mirrors of each other.

The Dark Knight Returns and The Zack Snyder School of Literal Filmmaking

Not wanting to spend the entirety of my life figuring out how to put the entirety of my life into boxes and move it across the country, I decided to watch the animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Directed by Jay Olivia and released in two parts in 2012 and 2013, it belongs to the Zack Snyder School of Literal Filmmaking, in which the idea is to replicate particularly stirring comic panels on the big screen by unwittingly mangling the elements that make them stirring.

Consider Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen. We don’t even need to venture past the opening credits to see where the film misses the point. But before we do that, I should note that I’m not complaining generally about a lack of faithfulness in adaptation. Comics and film are different media and ought to be treated as such. I don’t mind if changes are made that alter the narrative in an interesting fashion. But Snyder preaches fidelity as his ethos, so taken at his word, deviations from the comic in his films aren’t “interesting alterations” so much as the “necessary accommodations” of adapting any medium into another. These changes are being made by a lover of the source material who would never be unfaithful to the “spirit” of the original. For what it’s worth, I think Snyder’s dead honest about his commitment to accurately representing both individual panels and the “spirit” of the original work on screen — he simply happens to be terrible at doing so. Back to the opening minutes of Watchmen, in which Rorschach’s investigating the Comedian’s murder. Both the novel and the film begin with a close-up of the Comedian’s iconic image before pulling back to the skyscraper window from which it fell.

Book:

Film:

I’ve turned on the subtitles in order to make the difference between the novel and the film clear. Although both pull back to great heights, in the novel the emphasis during the slow transition from the ground floor to the Comedian’s apartment is on the content of Rorschach’s journal. You can tell because it occupies a little more than a third of the first three panels and the other visual information is merely repetitive. This isn’t necessarily the case when a camera zooms out — and readers of the novel recognize that there is relevant information in the third panel — but in this case seeing some anonymous man walk through the pool of blood isn’t necessarily useful information. (Readers might associate the anhedonic tone of the journal and the callousness with which the redheaded man walks through the pool of blood, but who among us was that clever at eleven?)

Point being: Snyder’s made the minor directorial decision to move the interior narration of the journal to when Rorschach actually appears:

Same lines from the first panel of the comic, they’ve just been shifted forward to remove the mystery of their author. There’s just one problem: in the film, the implication is that Rorschach’s thinking about the awfulness of the city when he discovers the Comedian’s badge. His behavior’s motivated by his disdain for the people he deigns to protect. His anger drives his actions in a very conventional manner: this man named, clearly identified as Rorschach, is a moralistic vigilante who prowls the streets at night preventing crime, picking up shit from sewer drains and inexplicably using grappling guns. He’s in a mood — the only one he ever has — and he happens to find something that sets him off again. Not so much in the novel:

Notice how quiet Moore and Gibbons’ panels are. By shifting the narration from the zoom out to Rorschach’s discovery of the Comedian’s pin, Snyder’s demonstrated that he fundamentally misread those three panels. The point of them — which will be made more strongly shortly — is to establish Rorschach’s skills as a detective. It’s too easy to turn a character of Rorschach’s pedigree into a mindless vigilante, which is why Moore and Gibbons use Watchmen‘s opening pages to establish his credentials as a detective. He finds evidence of the Comedian on the street; stares it down in attempt to ascertain where it came from; then decides it must have fallen. Only then does he look up at the building. It’s a slow and contemplative progression of panels that the film turns into an minor action sequence complete with “all the [drowning].” And of course once Rorschach arrives on scene:

He says nothing, because he’s investigating. He’s thinking his own thoughts about what he sees. If he had a Watson or a Wilson or a companion he’d be vigorously shushing them at this point because he needs to think. In the film?

He’s thinking that right there as he’s perched in the window. He’s not being an effective detective — he’s being a bitter blogger stuck doing something else but silently composing posts he’ll write when he gets the chance. Even though they made the juxtaposition of the journal clear when he first opened his mouth by having him “think-read” “Rorschach’s journal, October 12, 1985,” the manner in which Snyder uses the non-diegetic voice-over in the scene makes it appear to be a interior monologue, right down to the emphatic eighties-action-hero-overstatement of his final “No.”

It’s actually a little more complex than that. Interior monologues are typically considered to be non-diegetic — in that they don’t come from a source visible on-screen — but I’d argue that, in film generally, they’re diegetic inasmuch as they are coming from a visible source, e.g. I can see Rorschach’s head and think I’m hearing his thoughts as he’s having them. Which is why this is a little complex: he’s not actually thinking the thoughts the audience is attributing to him, unless he’s got an perfect recall and is reciting his journal to himself. In 1985. Or possibly later if this is a flashback. All of which is only to demonstrate how needlessly complicated Snyder’s made this scene in order to streamline it: now Rorschach’s journal is introduced while he arrives at the Comedian’s apartment. He thinks nothing’s lost by transposing Rorschach’s mad rantings onto his work as a detective. He’s wrong.

The point of keeping Rorschach’s journal distinct from his detective work in the opening pages is to create, in the mind of the audience, a distinction between the man and the mask. The man, Walter Kovacs, is a violent sociopath; the mask, Rorschach, can channel the man’s tendencies into productive policing and temper his violence. This distinction indicates that he’s going to be a character whose psychological state is difficult to read. It’s almost like people will see what they want to see in him because he’s wearing a fucking Rorschach test. By which I only mean to suggest that despite his fidelity to the panels, Synder’s missed the entire point of the scene in order to make it more conventional. That’s why his Rorschach says quite a bit more than Moore and Gibbon’s:

Rorschach’s “HUNH” and “EHH” are thinking noises of the sort people make when lost deep in thought. In the third panel, Rorschach recognizes that the size of the interior of the closet seems odd; in the fourth, he improvises a means of measuring the closet’s depth; in the fifth he measures the exterior; in the sixth he measures the interior. And Moore and Gibbons are clever enough to emphasize the crook in the hanger. It’s literally in the dead center of the fifth panel — meaning it’s in the dead center of a page scripted by Alan Moore and therefore quite important:

Only when he compares the location of the crook on the interior in panel six does Rorschach realize that there’s a secret compartment. These panels are evidence of a process of deduction at work. He’s more than a vigilante obsessed with a citizenry slipping into sin — he’s a proper detective who’s capable of improvisation in the course of his investigations. Or he opens a random closet, slides the clothes aside and sees a button:

Then he presses it. Great work there Detective Rorschach! Not sure how you thought of that! I think my point is obvious: Snyder may be faithful to the design elements of particular panels, but more often than not he entirely misreads the significance of the work he slavishly imitates. Now that I’ve established that, I can say that a similar dynamic is at work in The Dark Knight Returns: panels from the graphic novel appear on the screen in a manner that demonstrates the Olivia, the director, didn’t quite understand their import. Consider this action sequence in which the Batman runs across a tightrope from one building to another:

Is shot square in his symbol and staggers:

Begins to fall:

Then fires his grappling gun at an escaping helicopter:

This sequence seems like typical heat-of-the-moment Batman: expensive body armor and years of training allow him to routinely do the impossible. He doesn’t need to think — he’s a man of pure reaction. Even after all these years of not being the Batman — the word “Returns” is in the title for a reason — his instincts allow him to act unconsciously. Such is the impression created by the adaptation. One problem: although that last capture above does reproduce an iconic silent splash page, the rest of those panels should sound, via interior monologue, like this:

Whereas with Rorschach there should’ve been no interior monologue, in The Dark Knight Returns there should have been. The point of the book is that Batman’s falling off buildings worried about having a heart attack and trying to console himself on the dignity of his impending death. Those are very un-Batman-like things to be thinking in the middle of a fight. Eliminating the interior monologue has reduced him to his body — which I grant is the point of many a Batman story, e.g. Bruce Wayne escaping the vaguely Asian pit in The Dark Knight Rises. It’s just not the point of this one. It’s the opposite of the point. But as with Synder, the desire to be faithful to the original work has resulted in something utterly different and more mundane. I led with the discussion of Rorschach because I don’t want people to assume that I’m making the common criticism that comics handle interiority better than film because we can “see” people think in them. That’s not the point — especially not with a Frank Miller book, since the tone of the interior monologue comes straight from film noir’s tradition of voice-overs — which, of course, comes from the first person perspective of the detective novels on which they were based, but that’s not the point either. The point here is that the films of two of the greatest graphic novels of the 1980s are both significantly worse than they have to be because they were adapted by people who fundamentally didn’t understand how they worked.

They’re the equivalent of a parrot trained to greet visitors with a hearty “Hello! Good to see you!” It doesn’t have a fucking clue what it’s saying but somehow we’re convinced we hear language.

As long as the "conversation" about guns concerns hypotheticals about fictions ...

... I don't see the harm in adding more fictions to the hypotheticals. Given that the opposition's evidence is the "millions" of home-invasions that've been thwarted yearly, or most probably even hourly, by gun-savvy Common People Who Love The Constitution More Than Dirty Liberals Do, I don't see why Dirty Liberals oughta restrict themselves to reality. And so:

Q.E.D.

Beats telling people that you're Jewish

SEK spies an OLD LADY being crushed by the Christmas tree she's trying to remove from the roof of her car.

SEK: Do you need some help with that?

OLD LADY: Yes, some would be nice.

SEK: Let me take that.

SEK accepts far more weight than this tiny muscles can bear but whatever.

OLD LADY: Thank you. It's good to know someone has the Christmas spirit.

SEK: I'm not a—

OLD LADY: You have the spirit, whatever you are.

SEK: (well-nigh collapsing) I'm not anything.

OLD LADY: Everyone is something.

SEK: Nope.

OLD LADY: Everyone.

SEK: So I get to choose?

OLD LADY: Everyone gets to choose.

SEK: Then I'm Batman.

OLD LADY: Excuse me?

SEK: If I get to choose, I'm Batman.

Which makes Batman the liberal fascist of what now?

For a split-second, I liked Grant Morrison a little, then I realized he'd made me jealous of Jonah Goldberg, and hated him all the more:

This exchange occuers in the third issue of Batman Incorporated, which unfortunately doesn't end the "Is Batman a conservative?" debate by having the Batman repeatedly punch this Goldberg-proxy in the face. That said, Bulldog may not actually be a Goldberg-proxy, since we all know he's a "monster-man," not a "man-monster."

ACTUALLY: Given that that's Bruce Wayne in disguise in the green there and he's chosen his own rogue's gallery, I suppose it's safe to say the Batman is, at the very least, implicitly punching the Goldberg-proxy in the face repeatedly. Damn it, now I'm tempted to like Morrison again.

The Dark Knight Rises is not a conservative film.

At least not in the way that conservatives think it is. Christian Toto contends that "everyone not blinded by liberal ideology" can see that The Dark Knight Rises is critical of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and that the film is therefore "downright conserative." There are two significant problems with his claim: logically, it is not necessarily true that any cultural artifact that's critical of the Occupy movement is conservative; and visually, the optics of Bane and his followers don't correspond to those of the Occupy movement. The logical problem is easy enough to dismiss: I can criticize the rhetoric and tactics of the Occupy movement without being instantly transformed into a conservative. The visual problem isn't that much more complicated, because this is what Bane and his followers look like:

I would like to ask Toto and John Nolte and every other conservative whose claim that the object of the film's critique is the Occupy movement is predicated on obviousness whether the heavily armed fatigue-garbed lot pictured above look more like this:

Or this:

I would like to ask them to examine these images closely and count the number of raised weapons in the first and compare that to the number being raised in the second and the third. Then they can tally up the number of bandoliers and re-purposed fatigues and wrapped heads there are in each of these images and compare those too. If they possess a shred of intellectual honesty they'll have no choice but concede that Bane and his cohorts more closely resemble Afghan mujahideen from the 1980s than Occupy protestors from last year. Toto claims that only those "blinded" by ideology could fail to recognize the similarity between the people in the first and second images. But it seems to me that only someone who is actually blind could be convinced that there's a greater correspondence between the first and second than the first and third.

There's a solid reason that Bane and company more closely resemble the mujahideen than the Occupy protestors: they're from the same part of the world. Batman Begins opens with Bruce Wayne being recruited in a Bhutanese prison and then scaling the Himalayas to train with the League of Shadows. The prison pit in The Dark Knight Rises is located near the northern Indian border with Pakistan, and the majority of those imprisoned in it aren't chiroptophobic American billionaires. That Fu Manchu mustache sported by Ra's al Ghul belongs to a tradition of racist caricature of people who come from China and Japan and India. The geographic and narrative cues align with the visual to demand that the League of Shadows be seen as an old school Oriental menace whose politics amount to whatever-frightens-white-people.

Only in this last sense can the projection of conservative politics onto The Dark Knight Rises be understood: the only thing the League of Shadows shares with the Occupy movement is an ideological commitment to frightening white people. That both are successful says nothing about the film, but speaks volumes about the conservatives watching it, who have invested so heavily in their illegible projection that they makes claims like:

Gotham City is thriving as the third film in the trilogy opens. Harvey Dent’s legal legacy is so profound there’s no longer a need for Batman. He’s retired, bum knees and all, while crime continues to decline. So clearly the city’s punitive system isn’t corrupt, and we certainly don’t see mass economic woes.

Toto is wrong on all counts. Far from "thriving," Gotham is a city in which orphans have taken to living in the sewers to survive. Dent's legal legacy may be "profound," but it's also founded a lie and maintained by mass incarceration. Crime "continues to decline," but the prisons overflow with criminals whose prosecutions were legitimate, because "the city's punitive system isn't corrupt," so all those prisoners must have committed the crimes of which they're accused. Finally, Toto fails to "see mass economic woes," even though, to return to where this chain of inept summation began, ophans have taken to living in the sewers to survive.

In this case, the competing political interpretations of The Dark Knight Rises are not the result of the multivalenced nature of all aesthetic objects so much as simple incompetence from one of competitors. There are sophisticated arguments that the film's politics don't square with contemporary liberal or leftist thought—see Aaron Bady or Henry Farrell or Jeff Spross and Zack Beauchamp—but it's no coincidence that those analyses are eminating from the left. Conservatives aren't accustomed to considering cultural artifacts with the seriousness they merit, and so on the rare occasion they want to claim ideological kinship with one, they have no idea how.

Initial verdict on The Dark Knight Rises:

Very Return of the Jedi. It's not nearly as dark or accomplished as its predecessor, and it descends into maddening silliness at times, e.g. every time Bane "opens" his "mouth." More on the politics, as well as some general comments of the spoiling variety, from someone the Washington Post contacted as a "Batman expert," can be found below the fold.

Let me preface this post by noting that I'm extremely fond of both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, and have written extensively about the thematic and technical accomplishments of both:

• Batman Begins I (horror)
• Batman Begins II  (scene structure)
• The Dark Knight I (interrogation scene)
• The Dark Knight II (benefit scene)

So I don't want to read any comments about how someone with a doctorate in English Literature would be predisposed to disliking The Dark Knight Rises because, if anything, the opposite is true: I've studied Christopher Nolan's films and am intimately familiar with the hallmarks of his style. Now that that's out of the way, I'll be blunt:

This is easily the least accomplished film in the trilogy. Batman Begins is the most structurally sound (in narrative terms) and thematically coherent of the three: Nolan orchestrates his narratives such that they advance forward in time, indepedently, as they build Bruce Wayne into a believable character. The Dark Knight is structurally and thematically chaotic by design: Nolan can't seem to decide which scene belongs where (but cuts to it anyway) and is so indecisive about the film's argument that I can plausibly claim that it's all about dogs. But that structural and thematic anarchy is acceptable in a film that belongs to the Joker: form follows content and the both are better for it. The Dark Knight Rises shares its immediate predecessor's commitment to structural tumult and thematic incoherence but lacks a compelling motivation for doing so. The charitable version of this argument would go like this:

Nolan's narrative is disorganized because Bane claims to be committed to an ideology very similar to the Joker's. The only problem with that argument is that it's not true: his heart belongs to a fascistic order that values discipline and loyalty above all else (the League of Shadows) and the plan he carries out requires military precision. He protects the nuclear device by moving it and two decoy convoys around Gotham in a coordinated fashion. The device is ultimately lost because he adheres to the plan so rigidly that Gordon and his cohorts are able to create a map that tells them when and where each convoy will be at a given point in time. The Joker's plan? It doesn't even make sense. But The Dark Knight can be forgiven its formal incongruities because the resulting confusion enhances the experience the film. If a sequence seems make no sense it's because the Joker's lost the plot. If nobody appears to know what's going it's because nobody knows what's going on. Lest this seem unnecessarily abstract, let's consider an example of the interpretative consequences of the film's formal difficulties:

In Gotham's sewers, Bane recruits those like himself—the insecure thumbsuckers raging with a sense of entitlement, desperate to justify their own laziness and failure and to flaunt a false sense of superiority through oppression, violence, terror, and ultimately, total and complete destruction.

The odds of discovering something deliberately insightful in a John Nolte review are always vanishingly slim. I know that. But half the blame for Nolte's inability to grasp the most basic of plot points belongs to Nolan. Members of the League of Shadows aren't "insecure thumbsuckers raging with a sense of entitlement," they're an army who can coordinate convoys with military precision. Nor are "laziness and failure" terms that apply to an organization whose members successfully perform a controlled demolition of Gotham's infrastructure. Also, these people made a Batman. In short, Nolte pulled off the impressive feat of getting the League of Shadows exactly wrong. His politics may have predisposed him to mistake a paramilitary organization like the League of Shadows for the Occupy movement, but Nolan's direction encourages Nolte's misunderstanding.

Which is only to say: in this instance Nolte's stupidity can be excused. Tomorrow I'll address instances in which it can't.

You know who wouldn’t mind watching a film in a gun-free zone?

This guy:

Because he also saw something terrible happen at a theater. The only person who thinks that guy would support filling the air of a crowded theater with crossfire would be a good idea would be the one who drew him.

Why Bane? No, why Bain?

By now, you’ve already heard too much about this ridiculous story:

Have you heard this new movie, the Batman movie, what is it, The Dark Knight Lights Up or whatever the name is. That’s right, Dark Knight Rises. Lights Up, same thing. Do you know the name of the villain in this movie? Bane. The villain in The Dark Knight Rises is named Bane, B-a-n-e. What is the name of the venture capital firm that Romney ran and around which there’s now this make-believe controversy? Bain. The movie has been in the works for a long time. The release date’s been known, summer 2012 for a long time. Do you think that it is accidental that the name of the really vicious fire breathing four eyed whatever it is villain in this movie is named Bane?

To answer the question that’s asked, it’s no coincidence at all, because of this:

But that’s beside the point. The real question—the one that no one seems to be asking—is why Bain? I know the real reason is ego cheap and clean, but it boggles the mind that these titans of industry decided that their public face should be the homonym of a word which means, according to my Oxford English Dictionary,

1. A slayer or murderer; one who causes the death or destruction of another.

2. a. That which causes death, or destroys life. b. Poison. Also in comb. in names of of poisonous plants or substances, as in Dogbane, Henbame, Leopard’s Bane, Rat’s Bane, Wolf’s Bane, etc.

3. Murder, death, destruction.

4. That which causes ruin, or is pernicious to well-being: the agent or instrument of ruin or woe, the ‘curse.’

5. Fatal mischief: woeful or hapless fate.

6. A disease in sheep, the ‘rot.’

Which means that a group of seemingly intelligent people—at least as judged by their inherited wealth—sat around in a board room one day and decided to christen their corporation with a name whose most positive association is “[a] disease in sheep, the ‘rot.’” The fact that any of their failures could be accurately described as having been “the agent or instrument of ruin or woe, the ‘curse’” never seems to have passed their respective minds. It’s the equivalent of opening a company called We Exploit Child Labor for Great Profit, then wondering why no one seems to want to buy your jeans. And yet one of the minds responsible for this feels himself qualified to serve as the Executive Brand of the United States of America?

He’ll homonously be the bane of America as much as he and his party literally are.

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 7/09/13)

Films:

• Batman Begins (classic horror) - Christopher Nolan 
• Blow-Up (I) - Michelangelo Antonioni 
• Blow-Up (II)- Michelangelo Antonioni
• The Dark Knight (I) - Christopher Nolan
• The Dark Knight (II) - Christopher Nolan
• Fellowship of the Ring (conventions of high fantasy) - Peter Jackson
• Fight Club - David Fincher
• Fight Club (II) - David Fincher
• Fight Club (III) - David Fincher
• Ghost World - Terry Zwigof
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki
• Superman - Richard Donner
• Superman Returns - Bryan Singer
• The Dark Knight Returns (animated) - The Zack Snyder School of Literal Filmmaking
• 30 Days of Night - David Slade

Television Shows:

• Avatar: The Last Airbender - "The Ember Island Players" 
• Breaking Bad - "Buyout" I (Naturalism)
• Breaking Bad - "Buyout" II (Realism)
• Breaking Bad - "Say My Name"
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All," Said the Fly to the Money Pile
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All" the Invisible Lines and Immaterial Connections
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All" Until You're Not
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Hush"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels" - Buckling the Frame
• Doctor Who - "The Eleventh Hour"
• Doctor Who - "Amy's Choice"
• Doctor Who - "Vincent and the Doctor" 
• Doctor Who - "The Pandorica Opens"
• Doctor Who - "The Big Bang"
• Doctor Who - "The Impossible Astronaut"
• Game of Thrones - Embiggening Men in "Blackwater"
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Poor Will
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Bran
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Catelyn Stark and Jon Snow
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Will and Bran
• Game of Thrones - "Lord Snow," you're no bigger than a half-man
• Game of Thrones - Everyone is alone, everyone is surrounded in "The Wolf and the Lion"
• Game of Thrones - How circular is "A Golden Crown"?
• Game of Thrones - Table-setting and brain-burning in "You Win or You Die"
• Game of Thrones - Learning to use "The Pointy End"
• Game of Thrones - Swords! Swords! Swords! in "Baelor"
• Game of Thrones - "Valar Dohaeris," Indeed. But who? Where? To what end?
• Game of Thrones - Eyelines of miscommunication in "Second Sons," Part I
• Game of Thrones - Eyelines of miscommunication in "Second Sons," Part II
• Game of Thrones - It's always been "Rain[ing in] Castamere," because yes, I am trying to break your heart
• Game of Thrones - Awful Greek words that apply to "The Rains of Castamere"
• Hannibal - The frail horror of shallow focus
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - "What will become of the children?" Why, they'll be raped and murdered, of course."
• Leverage - "The Van Gogh Job"
• Louie - "Daddy's Girlfriend II"
• Mad Men - "Don and Sally in 'A Little Kiss'"
• Mad Men - "The Ballad of Peggy and Pete, Redux, in 'A Little Kiss'"
• Mad Men - "The Grown-Ups"
• Mad Men - "Shut the Door.  Have a seat."
• Mad Men (I) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men - Who owns "The Other Woman"?
• Mad Men - Hands and hands and hands in "Commissions and Fees"
• Mad Men - Nostalgia, forestalled, and "The Wheel"
• Mad Men - "It's not the tooth that's rotten," it's "The Phantom"
• Mad Men - One foot in "The Doorway"
• Mad Men - "Collaborators" in the Secret, Sacred Curb Dances of Suburban Love
• Mad Men - Is the Awesomeness of White Men really "For Immediate Release"?
• Mad Men - Fencing with shadows over "The Quality of Mercy"
• Mad Men (I) - "In Care Of" what? OH REALLY?
• Mad Men (II) - Disappointment "In Care Of" Convention
• Mad Men (III) - Who's "In Care Of" What Now?
• The Walking Dead - "Days Gone Bye"

Comics:

• American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang
• Blankets - Craig Thompson
• Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
• Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
• Kick-Ass (I) - Mark Millar
• Kick-Ass (II) - Mark Millar
• Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth - Warren Ellis
• 30 Days of Night - Steve Niles
• The Walking Dead (word-specific panels)
• The Walking Dead (picture-specific panels) - Robert Kirkman
• War is Boring - David Axe
• Watchmen (panel construction) (I) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (panel construction) (II) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (responsible film criticism) - Anthony Lane
• Watchmen (unfilmable film filmed) - Zak Snyder vs. Alan Moore
• Watchmen (students as murderers) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (Dr. Manhattan as a figure of the reader) - Alan Moore

 Themes:

• On Poorly Executed Claustrophobia in Film and Television
• On Effectively Executed Claustrophobia in Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium Now Easier than Ever to Find!

It's a permanent fixture in the right sidebar now, and I'll continue to update it regularly. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a terrible cold to attend to. (Stupid midterms wreaking havoc with stupid students' stupid immune systems ...)

Holy Terror, Frank Miller!

In 2006, Frank Miller announced a forthcoming publication called Holy Terror, Batman! in which the Dark Knight would go to Afghanistan and get in a fistfight with Osama bin Laden. He claimed it would hark back to an earlier era in comics history when, for example, Superman would marshal his many powers to annoy Hitler:

All well and good, except DC didn't think the Batman brand would be enhanced by being aggressively associated with the worst elements of the Bush administration, and so the world was spared Holy Terror, Batman! Until a few weeks ago, that is, when Miller published Holy Terror, a book about a Batman-type vigilante who teams with a Catwoman-type thief and a Commissioner Gordon-type chief to defeat a series of terrorist attacks against a Gotham-type Empire City. (Miller's roman à clef is so obvious I believe DC might be able to sue for copyright infringement.) Let me begin by warning you:

This book is more terrible than I'm leading you to believe it is. It's Batman as written by Pam Geller after she and Glenn Reynolds split a box of wine. Only worse. Where the art isn't muddled it's obscured by a dense bank of unnecessary Eisner spritz. Human proportions—especially female proportions—remind anyone who may've forgotten of his directions to Jim Lee on All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder:

Less human than human.

Alyssa's post on the sentimental core of Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman is spot on:

I was surprised by how incredibly sweet the comic is. I wasn’t really expecting that. The basic premise, for those not in the know, is Lex Luthor finds a way to essentially give Superman fast-developing cancer, leaving Superman to do a lot of bucket-list things: give Lois Lane the chance to experience his powers for the day; nail one last scoop for the Daily Planet; go back and visit the grave of Jonathan Kent, his adopted father; save the world one last time.

However, the hallmarks of Morrison's work, according to renowned comic scholar (and Alyssa's occasional interlocutor) Douglas Wolk, are:

reality-bending metaphysical freakouts dressed up in action-adventure drag; metaphors that make visible the process by which language creates an image that in turn becomes narrative; a touch of feel-good self-improvement rhetoric; faith in the the power of pop and popularity to do magic; and skinny bald men who are stand-ins for Morrison himself, heroically conquering sadness and making the world evolve. (Reading Comics 258)

If those two descriptions seem at odds, that's because they are. Morrison is a talented but unintegrated artist. What do I mean? He can be as aggressively annoying as Wolk's flattering account of him suggests. Incorporating proxies of himself into narratives about the nature of narratives and claiming that magic makes these metaphorical selves visible? That is, to quote my advisor, pure "postmodern gee-whiz wankery." It's cleverness for the sake of being hailed as King Clever, and it grates on my every last nerve because it's so clinical and intellectualized.

AND YET.

I came to graduate school to study the works of James Joyce, whose complex wankery far outstrips anything Morrison's attempted, much less accomplished. So why does Morrison bother me in a manner Joyce doesn't? The short answer is that, at his best, Morrison doesn't bother me at all. When is he at his best? As Alyssa notes, it's when he's stripped a story to its emotional core and presented its complexities not as worthy subjects in and of themselves, but as natural consequences of a human narrative. Of course, the protagonists of these "human" narratives are rarely human: in All-Star Superman, it's Superman; in We3, it's a trio of weaponized house-pets.

That is to say: Morrison seems to have a problem elevating actual humans to a position worthy of simple human sympathy. A kidnapped pet or an orphaned alien are worthy of sympathy because they aspire to be more than their outsider status allows them to be. But an average human being? He or she is what he or she is—short of a magical authorial intervention that's as likely to land him or her in Sade's castle as provide anything resembling hope or help. The only transcendence average people can acquire is by proxy, e.g. Lois's "acquisition" of Superman's powers on her birthday.

In short, I don't find in Morrison much in the way of human sympathy for ordinary humans. This is where—their shared love of verbal and narrative pyrotechnics aside—I find Morrison lacking what Joyce possessed in abundance: because behind the modernist wankery that is Ulysses is a simple story about a man dealing (poorly) with a crisis he knew was coming but couldn't avert. It's a powerful story because of its fundamental humanity, not, as would be the case with Morrison, despite it.

This must be the world's way of telling me it's time to rejoin it.

They made this just for me, put it on in Los Angeles and everything, yet somehow I missed it:

Via Scott McCloud. 

That's right: The Doctor as Batman via Scott McCloud. 

And I missed it. 

How do you take your average orphan and turn him into a lunatic in a fetish-bat costume?

The Joker, of course, has a theory:

But his version, from Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, is only technically correct.  Bruce Wayne did have "one bad day," yes, but it was different from the "one bad day" the Joker had:

The difference could be that wives and children can be replaced—for tax purposes, if not in our hearts—whereas birth-parents cannot, but while that's true, that's not the most significant difference.  The most significant difference—the one that, despite not knowing the secret identity of the Batman, the Joker deeply understands—is that "one bad day" is far worse when, instead of being told of a death secondhand, you witness it yourself.  Hence, his plan:

Batman is always Beginning again

(I never thought I'd dip back into this well, but then life happens and there you go.)

Heath Ledger notwithstanding, I think it's fairly obvious that Batman Begins is the better of recent reboots.  Nolan structures the first film not around an admittedly ingeniuous performance, but around a modified classical dynamic, by which I mean, he abides by his Aristotle.  It opens with the most incentive of incentive moments—a boy watching his parents murdered before his eyes—then proceeds to a classic peripeteia*—that moment of reversal when the boy who witnessed his parents' murder decides to forsake revenge and fight all crime instead the responsible criminals.  It need not bear mentioning, I don't think, that the deus ex machina, which Aristotle would otherwise despise, in this case fits within "the unity of action," because it has "an air of design" that's well-nigh indisputable. 

The real crux is the film's anagnorisis—or "revelation" in the I-murdered-my-father-made-kids-with-my-mother-sense—which occurs at a time Aristotle would've approved of, but not in the way he'd prefer.  You'll remember that, early in Batman Begins, the recently returned Bruce Wayne takes his horny butler's advice and invites some models to go swimming in a restaurant with him:

Nolan's use of a medium-long shot there is deceptive, as these aren't really women so much as beards:

I'm not saying they're all legs and hair, the cropped medium shot notwithstanding—but for the purpose of the plot, Nolan certain reduces them to as much.  (We're just going to skip over the scene of them skinny dipping, you know, for the kids.)  The point is that these women are props, mere things Alfred suggests Bruce Wayne should acquire should he not want to be discovered as the Batman.  So, then, anagnorisis avoided ... except:

The love of Wayne's life can't even look at him—and not just because I caught  bad capture.  She's just watched him escort two soaking models from a hotel she's about to learn he bought, so she shouldn't want to look at him.  But when she does, he makes a plea: