Re: batman review

PilloryClinton — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:02:13 -0000

I love you Keef.

Wonky blog and all.

n+1 is interesting. The tone to say the least is out of fashion and prolly costs readers but their loss.

Re: batman review

PilloryClinton — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:45:45 -0000

I think some of your objections are handled, fairly, above. But I agree that Bats's justification -- it's closer to improvisation, really, a steely pressing forward -- is rejectable. I think it's hard not to reject. I don't see Bats as a good guy here in the end and I don't find his methods applauded, much less propagandized by the film.

These n+1 guys perplex me because I they're very fucking smart and yet, and yet. Intellectuals shouldn't like to be ugly. Where is the pleasure in that? They make it hard for the people they most need to inform to listen to them. Hence they're talking mainly to each other, and none of their novels earn out.

And their blogs suck.

Re: batman review

PilloryClinton — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:37:18 -0000

Yeah, yeah: God bless n+1 for running the sole thinking review of this movie. What the review doesn’t explain—at all—is the commercial success thereof, though. If it’s unedited and badly acted and incompetent and lacking levity and joy, etc., and its joylessness is only absolved by a crude allegory defending an attitude toward warmaking our glorious democratic process is now in the process of renouncing, what is the big deal?

Is America made of suckers?

Wherever mass culture is making all the wrong choices, I get panicky, because we have to worry about the very idea of democracy then. So it’s convenient that very idea is obsessively picked at in the film.

The hero of this movie is probably not Batman. Let’s start there. It is named the Dark Knight for a reason. Nolan must have thought that with a title like that, his theme was difficult to overlook, but your review assumes ol’ Bats is the Good Guy in a real old-fashioned sense that has nothing to do with what I saw on that screen.

Good Guys Do Not Negotiate with Terrorists (this is the USA we’re talking about) but Bats wants to. He is just lost. Gotham is so sick. Even the criminals have no ethos any longer and don’t stand for shit. He decides to give in, at that press conference you’ll recall where the Mob is Pissed and Scared. They convince him his dubious moral stance—allowing people to die basically just so he could keep being a crime-fighter the way he loved—is wrong. He accepts their verdict. But Dent surprises him.

I’ll get back to Dent in one sec. For the rest of the movie you’re looking at a Bats who does not know good from bad with any clarity. He uses extra-legal tactics, yes yes yes, he beats up (tortures? not by John Yoo’s definition) the Joker, precisely as the Joker desires. And he loses control in the process, and becomes something very worrisome. He is no hero in that interrogation room. I don’t think the most impressionable twelve-year-old in Appalachia would think otherwise.

And then in the overwrought boat scene at the big finale, when neither boat explodes, Bats completely misinterprets what’s happened.

“The people of Gotham proved you wrong,” he says— or something. He doesn’t see the Mob’s democracy on both boats was favoring blowing up the other. The people voted for injustice. And justice was only effected thanks to strong leadership on one boat and cowardice on the other. And Bats doesn’t get it.

At the end there, Bats takes responsibility for Dent’s murders. He is strong enough to outrun the cops and he believes himself strong enough to continue seeing Real Justice and fighting for it, even when everyone’s against him. He believes this even though he spent much of the movie mired by every sort of doubt, controlled by his emotions, and swayed by the will of a mob whose true intent he misinterprets. It’s hard not to walk out of that theater thinking Batman’s overestimated his competence, and that he might easily become the sort of terrorist the public now believes that he is.
He is dark and he is muddled and either evil or verging thereon. That, the movie seems to me to say, is where you land when you begin improvising on matters of justice.

And Dent! The Good Dent in that portrait hanging before the crowd! How can a movie that shows you an image like that at its finish possibly be read as propaganda for a state like George Bush’s USA. The message of that image is transparent: your heroes are false, especially when the government’s pimping them.

I know that you are n+1 and must be snark-o-riffic and despise everything, and that the more popular it is the worse it is because democracy sux when it comes to making cultural choices, but I am confused by your review. It’s really hard to read that film as propaganda—for this country, at least. You’d have to want to.

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