Joker and The Isolated Man

Author’s Note: This was originally written for another outlet, but for a variety of reasons didn’t appear there. Since Oscar has reinvigorated the discourse, I present, for posterity, my thoughts on “JOKER”.

The city is a hunting ground for predators, obscured by steam rising from a river of human filth, where a man who has been wounded in his soul can find no release for urges he does not fully understand. He only knows that he is a creature of the city, a city at once intimate and hateful, and that it drives him away, even as he cannot escape it.

Such is the world of the “lonely man” films of the late 1970s and early 1980s. A discrete sub-genre focused on urban isolation, they were a hallmark of the era, prompted by the national trauma of Vietnam and, in particular, the economic and social collapse of New York City – where the crime rate hit record numbers, power went out entirely in 1977, and the President denied a bankruptcy bailout.

It is this world which “JOKER”, the new film by Todd Philips, seeks to imitate and inhabit. Its antecedents are not just echoed in its vision of 1981’s Gotham City (a clear replica of that crumbling New York), but in the numerous homages to specific films of the period, most prominently Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy”. But for all the surface references and similar story hooks that “JOKER” uses to make its referents known, it fails to capture the innate heart of those films: that cruelty is emergent, not directed, and that we should hold some sympathy for the human beings who both suffer and inflict.

“Taxi Driver”’s Travis Bickle hopes to gain notoriety by assassinating a senator, after he fails to make a human connection with Betsy, a campaign worker for that very politician. He composes fractured letters home to his parents, painting pictures of an important government job and a steady relationship. When he encounters Iris, a child prostitute, his intervention on her behalf suggests she should be back, leading an archetypal teenage life in the suburbs. In the film’s explosive climax, he forcibly rescues Iris from her violent pimp, Sport, and pantomimes his own suicide. The film’s epilogue – possibly real, possibly imagined – sees Iris at home, her grateful parents responding to her rescuer, and Travis reconnecting with Betsy as someone she can tacitly admire. Though final frames of undirected tension indicate that Bickle has not escaped his paranoid impulses (if he is not simply dreaming the moment whilst bleeding out), he certainly recognises a more coherent vision of society he does not know how to enter.

“The King of Comedy”, by contrast, concludes with the solitary triumph of its protagonist. Personal connections may have failed, but assault, kidnapping and extortion have done their work. The public – at a distance, through the medium of celebrity – have embraced Rupert Pupkin now that he has forced his way onto their screens. His rewards follow: a book deal, public appearances, fame and fortune. That sequence may also be in his head, but the mood is not tragic. Unlike “Taxi Driver”, the tone is at once sarcastic and condemnatory. It is plausible – terrifyingly plausible – that the public would embrace Pupkin once he has entertained them, despite the human wreckage he ascends from and leaves in his wake. His victim, Jerry Langford, is assaulted and brutalized, but “The King of Comedy” regularly reinforces that the public can see Langford only as a commodity for their entertainment. They don’t see the real person there – any more than they do for Pupkin. They only see what they want, and for this, the film finds them wanting. The spotlight isolates, the camera just another artefact of distance for the human being.

The internet has created a meme around the Joker declaiming that “we live in a society”, but “JOKER”, in fact, declares precisely the opposite. It has no use for, or belief in, the benefits of other people, and consequently sits at odds with the very proposition regarding the dangers of isolation that “The King of Comedy” and “Taxi Driver” both share. “JOKER” posits that there is no worth in integrating with society. If the “lonely men” films show people pressed up against the glass, looking longingly at a world they cannot know, “JOKER” suggests the better course is to simply smash the window.

The willingness to act against society without regret sets “JOKER” apart from the “lonely man” films, in which the struggle to integrate is key. It is that very struggle that permits the sub-genre to serve as a brilliant reference by which to humanise superhero fiction. The act of donning a mask and a false identity is inherently isolating. To use that position of loneliness to try and inhabit the society you live in is the same struggle (as it must be) for Bickle, Pupkin and all their celluloid cousins. For this reason, an older, and more coherent, association has been drawn between them and Batman, not the Joker.

1987’s “Batman: Year One” reimagined Batman’s origins as pathological, painting Bruce Wayne as a criminal driven to brutalise criminals, obsessed with his own impending death. A pre-costumed Bruce Wayne, determined to clean up the city, walks out amongst its red-light district and seeks to prise a child prostitute away from her violent pimp, Sport. “That crazy vet bit – man, that’s old” hisses Sport, hanging a lampshade on the non to a film from eleven years prior. The narrative connects Batman to Bickle, driven by the same obsessions, similarly isolated and on the cusp of self destruction. If 1986’s “The Dark Knight Returns” postulated an apocalyptic vision of what Batman could become, “Year One” suggested that this is what he always was; that in between the panels of every four-color right hook over the theft of a giant penny, the grim obsessive was there, hidden but able to be unearthed by the demanding reader.

What separates Batman’s heroics from Bickle’s futile struggles, however, is his ability to connect. “Year One”’s lift from “Taxi Driver” ends with the pre-costumed Bruce Wayne stabbed during the struggle, clutching his wound, stumbling home to Wayne Manor to die. In the depths of his despair, Bruce Wayne has a choice: call Alfred to patch him up, or slip quietly into the night. At that moment, in one of the iconic images of Batman’s history (depicted first in Batman #1 but reinvented here in a predestined hail of smashed glass), a bat flies through the window, and Bruce Wayne, inspired to live, summons Alfred to keep him alive. In that moment, Batman is born.

Most interpretations focus on the bat and the promised transformation, but it’s not the only key to the scene. In “The Return of Bruce Wayne”, written some 23 years later, the moment replays centred on the butler instead. Bruce Wayne needs help to survive. Batman isn’t Batman until he asks someone else to help him.

This is not an isolated incident. Forget brooding alone on rooftops, the bulk of Batman’s stories are about a man who overcomes loneliness. Even ignoring his wider participation in the DC universe’s more fanciful continuity, Batman has been alone only rarely. Batman has acquired no less than six Robins, three Batgirls, and two Batwomen. Alfred, Harold the Mechanic, Ace the Bathound, the list goes on. “Year One” pairs Bruce Wayne’s inner monologue with a young James Gordon’s, and ends with Gordon waiting for his friend on a rooftop. Christopher Nolan’s Bruce Wayne begins his crusade by whispering “now we are two”.

Though Scorsese is rarely approached as a moralistic film-maker, his innately Catholic background encompasses a vision where no person is without sin, and consequently, every person is on a personal battleground between annihilation and redemption. There is the sense of something lost in both Bickle and Pupkin, a sense of the better men that you might be able to reconstruct from the fragments. Both films, though ultimately ending in at once similar and yet remarkably different modes, recognise the need for human beings to find connections to better themselves. A sense that, torn apart from others, we fall prey to our worst influences, and thus, implicitly, that a community has an ability to draw us back from slipping too far into darkness. The core of the Batman narrative suggests that even for the most damaged of us, there might be a way out. If it is more graced than Scorsese’s “lonely men”, it inhabits the same moral universe.

“JOKER”, on the other hand, is almost solipsistic in its makeup. It attempts – by granting vulnerability – to graft humanity onto comic books’ most famous serial-killer. Unfortunately, in painting the struggles of Arthur Fleck, its solitary hero, it fails to give him a world of other people to inhabit. K. Austin Collins, also looking at the links between “Taxi Driver” and “JOKER” for “Vanity Fair” wrote that much of the issue with “JOKER” was “….how rotely, how condescendingly, the movie animates the tortured soul at its center…Joker presents us a world in which Fleck is constantly trod upon, and the movie is so singularly intent on proving this point that most every other part of his life, everything that isn’t a chance to reiterate Arthur’s trauma and psychosis, slyly evaporates from view.”

The constant repetition of Fleck’s circumstances centers a shorthand of his pain over, say, the black single mother who lives down the hall, with whom Fleck can idealize a relationship, but who the film makes no effort to understand. It doesn’t interrogate its premises. Where Bickle and Batman alike are tortured on the precipice of transformation, Fleck’s psychology can withstand no real tension. It’s too fragile for that.

If Fleck’s own psychology is so thinly drawn, why marry it to the already famously amorphous Joker? If all we know of Fleck is that the film wishes us to feel sad for him, and him alone, why are we expected to associate that empathy for an unrepentant mass murder?

Of the Joker’s variety of origins – from demon haunting Gotham to largely sane mobster with an affectation – only one posits him as a failed comedian, 1988’s “The Killing Joke”. Though like “JOKER”, this story presents the Joker at his most horrific, it is notably distinct in that it portrays the Joker as formerly connected to family, initially unwilling to do harm, then seeking to demonstrate that others are just like him. Like Pupkin or Bickle, that version of the Joker is trying, in a warped way, to connect to others, Batman included. Fleck doesn’t seek to be understood, because there is nothing to understand. He seeks, instead, only to be known.

Through Dick Sprang’s giant typewriter stealing Crown Prince of Crime, Cesar Romero’s moustachioed chuckler, Neal Adams’ long-faced vaudevillian triggerman and Jack Nicholson’s ‘homicidal artist’, the Joker’s behaviours are so diverse that we can only make limited universal statements about what he wants. The common element from all is that they thrive on being seen. A crime that doesn’t garner attention simply isn’t worth it.

It is this need for attention, not connection, that “JOKER” shapes – intentionally or not – as a worthy quest. Unlike Pupkin forcing his way onto television, or Bickle’s self-destruction, invisible to the dozens of people he ferries night after night, Fleck is literally invited to take centre stage. The public’s appetite for cruelty is such that as a murderer, Fleck is an unlikely folk hero, as a failed comedian, he is a welcome spectacle for their appetite for blood. When Fleck slides into murder he experiences no struggle – only satisfaction. This is his moment, his chance to finally be counted.

Ultimately, “JOKER” reduces the act of mass murder as justifiable reciprocity for bullying. “You get what you deserve” says Fleck, tortuously laying out the film’s message in a final monologue, that becomes an unlikely rallying cry for the rioting mob of clown murderers that follow him. “You were mean to me.” This latter line, amazingly, is not presented as a joke – the film is careful to ensure that though Fleck’s scale is disproportionate, he never targets a character we don’t see engaged in some act of callous cruelty. There is no tension between the individual and the anonymous mass. There is only one man in agony, and a world of targets.

“JOKER” orbits two dark stars. The first is entitlement, the sense that something that should be had is denied. The second is demonstrativeness, a need for people to witness the injustice of this. Not to remedy it, because the film encompasses no concept of remedy. Circumstances cannot be changed, but agonies can be seen.

The internet age proves that regardless of your opinion, over large enough samples you can find like-minded individuals anywhere. Attention, consequently, becomes a form of social acceptance – a means of flying your flag and finding your tribe. There are no formal gatekeepers – it requires only differentiating oneself from the morass of content that is otherwise out there. “JOKER”, despite its 1981 setting, is born from that culture, the sense that if you can get your message out there, you’ll find people who agree with you. It does this by suggesting that the disenfranchised will gleefully congregate in the image of a subway murderer. For this, it borrows the Joker’s image, suggesting commonality even in the utterly abhorrent. In its world, the only thing we share is pain.

This isn’t presented as satire, like “The King of Comedy”. We aren’t asked to chuckle at roving bands of murder clowns as an abstraction of the things we do accept. The film frames them instead as the logical consequence of a society with a mass of unheard men (and they are men, I don’t recall seeing a female murder clown amongst the dozens pictured), finally understanding that their suffering is valid. Fame is the catalyst that transforms Fleck’s agony from private to public. If he is entitled to retribution, aren’t they all?

The film’s most elegant metaphor might occur by accident. In one scene, Arthur walks into an automatic glass door which fails to open for him. Irritated, he flails at the sensor – until it is pointed out he’s trying to enter through the exit. He was never invisible. He was just going in the wrong direction.

With Apologies To Jack Vance

Market-day in fair Daltembra, on the banks of the fulsome Scaum, was often a choleric affair. It was customary to see some purveyor of goods accosted by a prospective or retrospective customer who took issue with the price or quality of the wonders which were to be, or had been, vended. At times, these disputes came to blows, and more than one debate had been put to a permanent end by the swift application  of a poignard more pointed than any argument.

Cugel the Clever, who made it a matter of principle to disdain all such conflicts on his own peregrinations, spun on his heel and made a hasty exit between the awnings of two tents as a dispute between strangers grew increasingly caustic.

“Such folly, each to accuse the other of purloining,” he sighed. “The bane of the merchant class is that they esteem lucre over their personal dignity.” As he mourned the peccadilloes of his fellow Daltembrans, he secured his money pouch – perhaps a shade heavier than it had been in the idle moments preceding the argument – in his belt.

The makeshift alleyway between the tents deposited him in a shadowy corner of the market square, but he noted with increasing dissatisfaction the rising shouts from the direction of the conflict.

Glancing around for some form of occupation which would permit him to blend better with the more placid customers, he spied a covered wagon. Its awning was the tanned flesh of the grennic. The steps leading to it were wood, but cunningly wrought to have the semblance of rough-cut emerald. The sign above the travelling shop simply read “GOOP”.

With a single tap on the wood he summoned the merchant. To his surprise, the wagon belonged to a slender-framed woman, with a cascade of golden tresses falling down her nape to gather around her shoulders. Dwarfed by the heavy wrap that concealed all but her head, she smiled wanly at Cugel, even as he noted a knot of tension in her posture.

Cugel mused that she may have had a maidenly discomfort at being alone with a stranger and sought to put her at ease with gallantry.

“Greetings, fair merchant. I am Cugel, a buyer of some means and renown.” He favoured her with a bow. “I assure you, my interest is only in fair exchange. What goods do you proffer?”

“Paltrow is my name,” said the merchant. “I am a dealer in remedies, tonics for the mind and body, both subtle and gauche.” She gestured to the arch of the wagon. “In my youth, I was a mummer, and some call me Paltrow the Disingenuous for my skill at theatrics, but I assure you that beyond that portal lie restoratives of only the highest quality.”

“And the meaning of GOOP?” asked Cugel, indicating the sign.

“The proprietary remedy of my shop,” smiled Paltrow. “Simply step inside and I will gladly show you all, but you must permit me this: each customer is brought last to the GOOP itself.”

Even if Cugel were not intrigued by the curious nature of her offer, he felt compelled to absent himself from the potentially harsh conditions of the market square, and thus strode forward boldly towards the wagon. “Let us be about it.”

Inside, dim indigo light from an unseen source illuminated a chaotic panoply of items. Philtres and alembics lay scattered and propped amongst knotted weaves of strange design, while crystal structures poked out from behind mummified creatures of unknown provenance.

Paltrow reclined on a cushioned divan, and motioned for Cugel to do likewise on an equivalent furnishing. For the present, he declined, continuing his examination of the goods. At last, he came to a rounded stone, smooth to the touch but with pits and flecks concealed beneath its convex surface. A slight point distinguished one end from the other.

“What is this piece?” he enquired.

“The distillation of the Crystalline Egg is sure to eradicate any distemper of the humors,” avowed Paltrow the Disingenuous, shuffling her oversized gambeson upon her ectomorphic frame.

“Hmm. Much is promised by this wonder tonic!” Cugel exclaimed, weighing the object in his upraised palm. “Might I test its efficacy by way of a sample?”

“Alas,” said Paltrow, shaking her head, “I cannot allow samples, for even a modicum of insertion renders the Egg subject to such pressures as to disqualify it for subsequent users. Like so many things in life, it is an all or nothing proposition.”

Cugel cleft his tongue to the roof of his mouth, and emitted the low whistle that he was wont to sound during stressful arbitrations.

“Am I to buy with no opportunity to gauge the value of the item?”

“I esteem it most highly,” smiled Paltrow. “Surely that is enough.”

With this, she simpered a little at Cugel who, touched by her pulchritude, relented from his indignant tone. “I do not seek to question your judgment. Only to select, from what is most assuredly the finest collection of its kind assembled, those items which best suit my own constitution.”

She clasped his hands. “Such discretion shows only that your principal quality is discernment, something I knew from the moment I observed your aura. Here, let me show you a wonder.”

So saying, Paltrow produced from behind the couch a garment similar to her own. Swiftly, she spun a curious dance around Cugel, ending each flourish with a pass of her hands to knot the cloth. In a matter of moments, Cugel was attired much as she, though Cugel noted that she wore a significantly looser fit.

“The shirt hagrides,” Cugel mused, stretching his arms as best he could to stroke the garment pressed against his flesh.

“Some have said, some have said,” Paltrow nodded sagely, “But this does not account for the quality of person providing their mane. My shirts are knitted by blonde monks, drawing solely from their own head’s growth. Thus, you see, comfort is assured.”

Cugel wrestled at the knots binding his wrists tight, and frowned.

“The product may be refined, but I have reason to suspect our definitions of comfort vary.”

“Ah,” Paltrow smiled beatifically, “But mine is correct.”.

Still merry, she pushed Cugel down upon the divan, where his restricted posture necessitated a fully prone position.

“It is a curious sort of merchant,” averred Cugel, “who seeks to restrain a paying customer from perusing their wares.”

“Customers in these latter days seek experiences and not mere consumables,” said Paltrow. “And I am no merchant, but a wellness consultant.”

“Nonetheless, in clothing me in this garment, I note you have relieved me of my coin purse.”

Paltrow smiled thinly. “Thus proving my expertise: you have lost weight already.”

Paltrow freely turned her back, her earlier skittishness forgotten. “Now, what else can I show you?”

Cugel, whom circumstances had often conspired to restrain in ropes of all kinds, knew of techniques to slip his bonds. He sought only scant moments to draw the alchemist’s eye away from him as he did so. “Those items at the back,” he gestured with his chin, “what is their mechanism?”

Paltrow shuffled to the rear of the wagon, stopping just before a small curtain, to hold aloft a stoppered jar.

“An apt question indeed! Behold this potive!” Extending the jar in a white hand, she uncorked it. A haze of amber vapors poured lazily from its lip. “But a few deep inhalations will render the recipient free of all troubling dreams and concerning thoughts. Some say that it makes of the frequent partaker a lack-wit, but I say no-one of sense could ever question such a remedy.”

She moved athwart Cugel’s couch. “This product I am more than willing to let you indulge in, so as to ensure nothing that has transpired concerns you.”

Cugel had made use of the time to free his hands from the knots. Nonetheless, unsure of what other capacities Paltrow could draw upon, he kept them concealed beneath the garment.

Paltrow sat beside him, brandishing the jar. She was careful to keep her own face far from the spout. “Now, to your sample,” she said.

“Hold a moment!” exclaimed Cugel. “A question, if I may.”

“What purpose knowledge,” averred Paltrow, “if you are only to forget it?”

Cugel shrugged, as best he could beneath the heavy gambeson, conspiring to keep his face tilted away from the fumes. “The same might be said of all learning.”

“True enough,” conceded Paltrow. “Ask, then.”

“Oftentimes merchants tend towards the effulgent, rarely do I meet one of your surprising lissomness,” murmured Cugel. As he spoke, commanding Paltrow’s attention, his hands deftly wended unseen towards a delicate limb. “How do you manage it, amongst what must be a trying lifestyle?”

“My own health is maintained by an extract of berries from the Acai Bush, thrice boiled in the tonic of the Sloane Park Fountain,” spake Paltrow. “A less potent philtre than that which you will now ingest, but not without its impact.”

“Yet I detect some slight withering of your hands,” said Cugel.

Her eyes wide with shock, Paltrow glanced downwards at her slender fingers, taking her eyes from her detainee.

At that, Cugel sprang forth, gripped the healer’s wrist tightly and wrenched it sideways, shattering the jar upon the ground. 

“My jar!” wailed the false apothecary. “In accordance with ancient custom, in damaging it you have forfeited sums to me equivalent to its value. I must emphatically state that it is worth much more than the meager coin you possess.”

“Enough of such blandishments!” declaimed Cugel. “You have injured my liberty and made free with my person. For this, there can be but one redress. Reveal to me the secret of the GOOP.”

“I cannot abide stress,” whined Paltrow. “The very makeup of my nature abhors it most violently! Cease your remonstrance, and I will show you all.”

With little more exchanged between them, Cugel marched Paltrow to the rear of the wagon. “Cast aside the curtain,” he intoned.

Sparing him only a hate-filled glance, Paltrow pulled the curtain back with a single violent gesticulation. Beyond lay a bath-sized vessel, rounded, and inlaid into the floor of the wagon. Within roiled a prismatic liquid, bubbling sporadically and spurting gouts of colorful radiance up, only to splash back on its sloshing surface.

“So you see,” said Paltrow. “The GOOP.”

“What is its function?”

“Observe.” The pseudophysician snatched a pair of plain brown sandals from a nearby bin and cast them into the scintillating mire. With a ripple, they disappeared below the surface.

“Some form of solvent?” inquired Cugel.

“Patience,” counseled his interlocutor.

A moment later the liquid smoked and ejected a strange set of slippers, pointed and curled at their tasseled end, with a sole made of some elastic material.

“Thus do I secure the wonders of my shop. I theorize that it is a juncture of some kind, a portal to some unimaginably distant aeon, which operates on the mercantilist principle of like-for-like exchange.”

Cugel, though keeping a watchful eye on the slender saleswoman, took some moments to observe the GOOP. “Has anything living emerged from the cauldron?”

“At times,” said Paltrow nervously. “At times. But as with all things, it is dependent on what is cast forth.”

“Of course,” said Cugel, placing both hands on her shoulders. “Only reagents of the highest quality.”

Sometime later, Cugel flicked the reins and spurred his fiacre onwards along the westward trail out of Daltembra, along the banks of the fulsome Scaum. Approaching him on the road, in a state of consternation, were two itinerants, one shuffling with a marked limp. They hailed him.

“Well met,” cried Cugel. “I charge you though, keep back from the dobbin which pulls my cart. The beast is newly acquired, and I am yet to gauge its temperament.”

“A most remarkable creature,” said one of the travelers. “What is it?”

Cugel smiled. “I acquired it myself from a distant land. It is the only one of its kind kind I know. It pleases me to call it a gwynath. I am Cugel, a trader in salubrious remedies and restorative wonders.”

“Then this is the GOOP cart, as I surmised!” cried the limping traveler. “Take us to the mountebank called Paltrow at once! I seek urgent restitution for the pains I have suffered through the use of her Fundamental Steamer!”

“Alas,” mourned Cugel. “She has departed to pursue her studies closer to their ineffable source. I have only recently acquired the business.”

“Then our quarrel is with you,” said the burlier of the travelers, producing a scramasax from a concealed scabbard. “If you have assumed the assets of the business, it falls upon you to make redress.”

Cugel assayed the pair and smiled. “There is no need for such inhospitable demonstrations. If you will join me in the rear of the wagon, I am sure we can resolve any disputes once and for all.”

Civil War Diaries

Last night I went out and saw the excellent Captain America: Civil War.

That word – excellent – is all I’m going to say in the sense of an overall qualitative review. Drilling down on more overall praise would be redundant at this point. Go see it, you won’t be disappointed.

What I did want to get down is some thoughts about why it works. I’ve deliberately tried to keep it spoiler light. You can read this. These are only bullet points, but I think they’re all worth noting:

The Russos: People have been wondering how the Russos established themselves with such surety as action directors, but it’s worth noting that the main skill they draw upon here is not actioneering (though more on that in a moment), it’s character balance. The brothers cut their teeth on Arrested Development and Community – both character focused comedies that needed to keep everyone’s story line clear whilst allowing them to ineract. Servicing separate arcs but shifting emphasis from one character to another and finding time to make the people that they’re depicting compelling. Do we recognise a pattern here? Civil War juggles an AMAZING number of characters, and whilst some of them get a shorter shrift than others, every character gets at least one significant beat in their overall arc. That’s amazing, given how easy it would be (and has been in other films) for characters to get lost in the shuffle. As action directors, they still know to serve character with their action sequences, and keep those sequences in service to the story. Quick case in point – at the beginning of the film, the action sequences are shot with “shaky cam” – blurred, kinetic, rapid cuts. Even in these sequences you can still divine what’s going on, but the fights feel fractious and chaotic because that’s how the characters are feeling. It reflects chaos that is critical to the story, without betraying the overall capabilities or visions of the characters in service to that chaos. Later in the film, when battle lines are more clearly drawn, the direction of the action sequences becomes clear – steadicam. Wide angle shots. Long pans from character to character. In one notable multipartite slugfest it comes as close to anything I’ve ever seen in recreating a splash page from a comic book without feeling too still or slavish. Everything moves, and continues to move, but the action sequences derive more and more focus – following the arc of the film as chaos becomes clear. This is how you direct a superhero film.

Character First: The comment I made above about how the Russos come from a character focused background? Well, they’re equally well served by the script and the performances, all of which focus on key motivations for the characters. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that both RDJ and Chris Evans have spoken more openly about staying on with Marvel after this one, as they’re obviously given the lion’s share of the work to do as actors and that must feel satisfying when there’s this much meat to it – but they’re not the only ones. Ideology and motivation are made clear in ways that feel intrinsic to the characters, but are also subject to change which arises naturally out of the course of events in this film. Much of the film (not that it stints on action) is taken up with dialogue – people considering, reconsidering, debating, finding and losing common ground. This works because we have a clear and defined sense of who they are and what they want. That’s true for the new characters too, T’Challa and Spider-Man who each get enough time to explain their motivations for this film and set them up for future endeavours. There’s never a moment where the conflict here is driven by anything other than character – no flashy deus ex machinae, no papering over the cracks. This is about people who behave in understandable ways. Leading on to my next point…

They’ve Earned It: It sounds kind of facile to say this, but it absolutely needs to be said: even moreso than The Avengers (which I’m not trying to discredit, I’m just saying it operated by different rules), this is the proof of concept movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The movie works without it, but it works so much more effectively because of it – references to old beats and conflicts (a sequence where Captain America raises his fists, a beat where Steve and Bucky stand next to each other, when Tony notably at one point says “I changed“), self-contained arcs within the movies which nevertheless reflect the overall themes of the universe. We know who these characters are and what they want, and they feel so wholly inhabited by their actors that where some people have less screen time, it’s still remarkably effective because we know who they are. Marvel has smartly saved itself spadework in introductions for the most part – there are reintroductions that allow us to get straight into the good stuff. The movie centres around events of a lot of the previous films, but in the aggregate, not the specific. It’s less about the precise recollection of any particular events (though as I say, the Easter eggs are there for people who are looking for them), and more about a general recognition that this is the next stage in an overall extant and internally consistent world. In full credit to its writing, it smooths out previously spiky edges, without ever diminishing the content of what comes before.

The Civil War: Is so, so much better conceived than Civil War as depicted in the comics. Avoiding spoilers here is difficult, but suffice to say that a compelling argument is drawn for all participants, in a way that in no way diminishes that they are men and women of good will and integrity who are driven in different directions. No-one needs to carry an idiot ball. No-one needs an out of character heel turn. The film is about the inherent conflict in doing the right thing. How that is interpreted, the price one needs to pay for it, both its burdens and its benefits. Unlike certain other hero vs. hero movies, there’s no sense that any of these characters are less than heroes and perhaps more critically, it never EVER suggests that there’s anything facile in the heroic ideal. This is a Captain America movie, and even moreso, I think, than Winter Soldier, it functions by taking Cap as a person of integrity and making him the fulcrum of how people interpret integrity and, well, righteousness in a complicated world. Those complications aren’t cynical, but they are real, and it’s to the film’s credit that it never tries to provide simple, facile answers or jingoistic ooh-rah-rahs.

The Joy: This is probably the last, most critical piece, but it also really matters. This movie is fun. Not just funny (though it is that, jokes and quips abound without ever diminishing the serious moments), but generally wondrous about the things it’s allowed to do, without ever being self-indulgent. There are superheroes galore on screen, and they do superhero things – perform incredible feats, awesome stunts, clever tricks, amazing chases, a mix of unstoppable power and incredible grace. That character distinction comes to the fore too, you get a sense of what every character can do and why they’re valuable to the MCU as a whole, but part of why they can do that is how they do that: seeming to really revel in these characters being superheroes and these being awe-inspiring things to do and see and be. I have a rule about Doctor Who, which I’m also starting to apply to superhero properties – the more you can see daylight the more of an indication that the storytellers are confident in the wonder of what they’re creating. They’re unafraid to put those creations to the test under the light of day.

When it’s this good, they shouldn’t be.

Christmas In Ravenloft

‘Twas the Night before Yuletide, and all through the Domains
The poor tortured victims looked up from their chains.
Strahd’s victims were hung in the dungeon with care,
Because if hung poorly, they’d be liable to tear.

The bodies were nestled all snug in their graves
Unlike poor Azalin who fevers and raves
Madam Eva in kerchief, and I in Strahd’s trap,
Were anxiously listening for a final snap

When out in the woods there arose such a fire,
That it looked to the world like a funeral pyre.
I sprung from the trap with adventurer’s vigour
Leaping clear as I heard the click-clack of the trigger!

The moon rose, blood red from the fires below,
and cast ghastly shadows along drifts of snow
When what to my febrile brain should appear,
But strange lunar illithids, eldritch and queer.

With their dripping proboscises stretched to my brain,
I knew in a moment I had gone insane.
But now, to my poor madman’s mind became clear,
The sound of their mind-flayer moans to my ear:

“Now Xeplz! Now K’rstrix!
“Now Ythrid the Mangler!”
“Now Ulthrig and Maktox
The Cerebral Strangler!
To the top of the Castle! To Ravenloft’s spire!
We must keep our meeting with that fateful vampire!”

Like dry bones that rustle in crypts then expire,
A rattle arose as they climbed ever higher
So up that bleak summit the illithids crawled,
Whilst inside Strahd’s victims still wailed and bawled

And then, with a squelching, I heard on the roof
The castle come open, to display its dark truth
I knew then my end would be painful and gory
As Strahd von Zarovich arose in full glory.

He wore a long cape, from his throat to his heels,
And he bore two sharp fangs that his snarling reveals.
His hands wrung like talons before each fell guest,
And a ruby-gold pendant gleamed red on his chest.
His eyes – how they glimmered! His hair – sleek and black!
His cheeks high and sunken! How straight was his back!
His cruel mouth was drawn in a rictus so grim,
that even the illithids seemed scared of him.
The sword at his side, well, it looked like a prop,
It hurts to describe him, so reader, I’ll stop.

But then, to my mounting surprise and dismay,
He shook rich with laughter, and oh, so did they.
The mind-flayers it seemed, bothered Strahd not the least!
For they were his guests for a dark Yuletide feast!

With a twist of his neck and a wave of his hands,
The Dragon arose and obeyed his commands!
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
As the Yuletide beast took to the sky with a jerk!

And the illithids leapt to it’s plum-pudding back,
And it covered the moon and left the forest black!
This was no mere wyrm that they set out to ride,
But a great Christmas Dragon I’d soon be inside.

And the last thing I heard as I sailed down its throat,
Was the smooth voice of Strahd as it rung out to gloat:

“True, we are monsters, and souls do we lack
But hell, what is Christmas without a shared snack?”

THE END

A Little Note on the Big Sleep

I’m typing this on my phone, unable to sleep. I was going to post something like this after Bowie passed, but refrained in favour of keeping my headphones in for a couple of days and letting forty years of great music wash over me.

And now Alan Rickman’s dead.

Kurt Vonnegut – the writer who I may think of most in times of stress – said that his enlightened Tralfamadorians would greet all deaths with a simple “So it goes”. In part because we live in a universe where all things move toward their end, but in a larger part because time, on blessed Tralfamadore, is an illusion. People who mean something to us are always where – or at least when – they were when they came to mean that thing.

It’s a lovely sentiment. But the time machine we call memory is imperfect, and I at least have a little too much Dylan Thomas in me to summon up that clarity without a little rage. Some losses are too keen to make for good philosophy.

For the most part.

I do – as I think we must – think differently of artists whom we love.

When Terry Pratchett died, my mother called me. To see if I had heard, to check I was okay. This is a process that had been missed for actual relatives. But I was okay. And here’s why:

Except in fortunate, specific, cases we don’t know the artists we talk about. We have fleeting glimpses. Formed impressions. Often, they’re not the people we thought they were.

But why should they be? The attachment we feel isn’t to a person. It can’t be. It’s to their art, and to the idea of their art. We feel sympathy for their friends and family. We mourn the passing of the idea.

And for art, well, So It Goes. Songs play their final notes, curtains fall, books come to an end. But the ideas of that aft stay with you.

Art – we must always remember – is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It’s not affection, or inspiration, or even beauty. It’s an act of creation. All art is something out of nothing. It’s something new entering the world.

Matter, they say, can never be created or destroyed – only changed. But artists add things to our base sphere. Those things remain.

The Tralfamadoriansams are right on this one: art is outside time. The book is waiting for you to pick it up again. The song is waiting to be played.

The impulse to mourn often comes from our sense of loss. The dead don’t mourn. They have gone on to joy or to nothingness. We feel the pang if songs they might have written we never got to hear, parts they may have played we never saw. But EVERY part or song or book or painting or cathedral is more than we had any right to expect.

To borrow from another artist who touched my life immeasurably, without me giving back: I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.

But I will say, be grateful, and take comfort.

The fact of art itself is nothing less than a miracle. To quote another artist whom I love (present tense, because I experience the art now, and not the man, passed), Orson Welles:

“Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash – the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we’re going to die. “Be of good heart,” cry the dead artists out of the living past. “Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.” Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.”

I couldn’t say it better. Isn’t it marvelous that I don’t have to?

Balance to the Force

This is “the” The Force Awakens post. It’s probably the only big one I’m going to do – the movie a few hours in the past for me now, filtered through first impressions and subconscious dream states. (Sleep and then wake/for better hot take, as the old saying goes).

I’m not going to talk too much about the film overall here, though. I will say that this is going to be SPOILERRIFIC, so please take a step back if you don’t want to be spoiled – and you don’t – go watch the film first and come back afterwards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Everyone done?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Good.

 

Alright, so a little bit of light preamble: I liked that a whole lot. Loved it, in fact. Was it a little light on the exposition? Yes! But that’s okay, because it’s STAR WARS. I don’t mean that in a pure fandom sense, I mean that I have always thought Star Wars works better with a few gaps in the margins. The archetypes are broad enough that you can fill in the mysteries yourself, and it gives future installments bits and pieces to explore. Were there some retreads of A New Hope beats? Of course there were, not only because fans were hankerin’, but because Disney has a multibillion dollar IP to service, and they need to do it in such a way as to be sure audiences are going to be happy. They have every reason to be. It looks pretty, the new cast is great, the old favourites function marvelously, and the various balls are kept in the air. Well done, Disney, JJ, Star Wars and company.

More importantly though, rather than try to conceal what it borrows from the earlier films, The Force Awakens wears it proudly on its sleeve, and it does so for a purpose: this is a handover film. Of course there are X-Wing/TIE Fighter dogfights, fascist goons, masked villains, strange coincidences, desert landscapes, firefights, cute droids hiding secret plans, and aliens. That’s what Star Wars is. Han Solo gets to play a major role in the film not just as a creaky mentor, but as the custodian of Star Wars itself. “It’s true. All of it,” he says, as was seen in the trailers – but what’s more important is who he is saying it to: Rey and Finn, the new generation of Star Wars leads. Later in the film, as they face down Kylo Ren after he has done the “unthinkable” and kills Han Solo (the clearly telegraphed unthinkable that SUCCEEDS nevertheless, based on the gravelly way Harrison Ford says “Ben”, by the way), the key words of the franchise are exchanged: “It’s just us now.”

This is the film that had to be close to the old Star Wars so that Star Wars itself can be passed on. To whom it is passed on is the important point.

I want to talk about Kylo Ren.

It is no accident – can be no accident – that Kylo Ren is the flawed inheritor of the greatest of all possible Star Wars legacies. He is the son of Princess Leia and Han Solo, trained by Luke Skywalker…and he sucks. I don’t mean the character sucks, he’s great, but he’s great because he despite all his privilege isn’t very good at his job.

Can you hone in on the key word in that sentence? The Force Awakens says that the presumptive natural inheritor of Star Wars is, in fact, not such. Despite the legacy bequeathed to him, he’s not a Jedi (or a Sith). He’s a failed state. The crackling, semi-functional lightsaber he wields? Again, not an accident. Deeply symbolic. He can’t build a lightsaber. He is no Jedi. The knowledge and power he has acquired is half-borrowed, half-stolen. Think about what Ren says when torturing his victims. “I can have anything I want”. Think about the temper tantrums when someone gets away from him.

He’s a spoiled, frustrated, privileged asshole. He’s also – in case it missed your notice – the principal white male of the new generation.

The trailers certainly hinted that Finn was going to be the Force user touched by the titular awakening, and although that’s not off the cards yet, it’s not the narrative of this movie. Rey is the true inheritor of the Light Side destiny – at least for this film – and it makes this abundantly clear by having Luke’s lightsaber fly to her hand. “You need a teacher,” hisses Ren – despite the fact he’s been wounded by Finn already, that he’s made mistakes at almost every turn. The whole film comes down to that fight in the woods.

And then Rey beats the shit out of him. He’s wounded, and tired, and clearly having a hard day – but that message can’t be any clearer. The true inheritor of the Star Wars legacy is a woman. She is given both Luke’s lightsaber AND the Millennium Falcon. There can be no doubt. Star Wars belongs to her now, with Finn as the second principal figure. (And thank God for Daisy Ridley and John Boyega, because damn me if I don’t feel they both can carry it.)

JJ copped a bit of flack for his remarks about Star Wars moving to include women now – but it’s clear with the benefit of film context that he was trying to say something vital about what the film is. 

To put not too fine a point on it: Kylo Ren is a Star Wars fan. He’s an insider – he knows all the old stories and all the players involved in it, and he’s a seed planted from the first moment a Princess clapped eyes on a scruffy looking nerf-herder. He thinks that makes him entitled to Star Wars. But it’s not for him. He has no right of ownership.

The Force Awakens is a movie which hands over Star Wars to the next generation, but it’s also a movie about who that next generation needs to be. Not the entitled legacy of another white man who feels he has been promised a victory he neither earned nor deserved, but belonging to those who can feel the Light Side of the Force, from all kinds of backgrounds who understand what it means, beyond all the trappings. Go where the heart goes, and the trappings will follow.

Much can be made of Kylo Ren’s complicated feelings about his father – the man who made him, but who, as the man says himself “will just end up disappointing you”. That observation can’t be divorced from the very complicated legacy of George Lucas. Lucas isn’t the villain of the piece, thankfully. It’s not what the progenitor of the franchise deserves. If he’s represented by anyone, it’s the creaky Han Solo, going back to his roots. Reminding us of what was great about Star Wars in the first place. Rather, the villain stems from the attitude of a total jerk who feel that he’s somehow been “betrayed”, that he is (and in so far as he represents certain segments of the audience, that they are) the true custodians of Star Wars. Yeah, that’s the Dark Side speaking, motherfuckers. That’s the opinion of the man who kills Han Solo. You don’t get to lock the gate and keep the key. The Force is part of all living things.  You want to talk about bringing balance to the Force? That means it gets shared equally.

When Solo recognises Rey and Finn as his successors (and he does, that’s not a subtle point), he’s standing as the head of the comet – the titular expression of the old Star Wars verse that these new kids are the ones we’re following.

The Force Awakens succeeds not just in making a Star Wars movie which functions as a Star Wars movie with all the fun and all the trimmings (which was the bar everyone prayed it’d clear), but as a Star Wars movie which is to an extent about Star Wars and the culture surrounding Star Wars without undercutting all the fun and trimmings we’ve been waiting for. Take a victory lap, JJ. You’ve earned it.

Ren might turn back into Ben Solo before the next few films are done. It’s happened before. But for Episode VII at least, the conceptual markers are clear. Star Wars is what it always was, but there really are fresh hands at the wheel.

 

Imagined X-Men Speeches, Part One

Storm: “Here’s the thing none of you seem to realise, Captain. We’re going to win. You can kill our best and brightest, you can “accidentally” sterilise us with poison gas, you can be damn sure we’re going to get in our own way and fight ourselves and make a mess of things. But we’re going to win. We’ve always found a way before. Life has always found a way before. Because we’re the future. And you of all people should know you can’t fight it. The X-Men are just here to help ease the transition for you.”

 

It’s To The Tune Of “She’s So High”, Okay?

He’s blood, flesh and bone
Transported chromosomes
New touch, smell, sight, taste and sound

But somehow he can’t believe
That this has really happened
The experiment went wrong
And something weird has happened
Yeah, yeah

‘Cause he’s the Fly…
It’s revolting, skin is moulting
He’s the Fly…
Not Seth Brundle but a bundle of man and insect
He’s the Fly…
It’s revolting

Stuck to the roof above
At first his lady love
Thinks he’s the best of everything

But what could a fly like he
Ever really offer?
He mutates more frequently
And it becomes a bother

‘Cause he’s the Fly…
It’s revolting, skin is moulting
He’s the Fly…
Not Seth Brundle but a bundle of man and insect
He’s the Fly…
It’s revolting

He opens the machine
Plans to merge with his queen
Make a genetic family

But somehow she can’t believe
That this is gonna happen
Also she’s pregnant as well,
And she can’t let this happen
Yeah, yeah

‘Cause he’s the Fly…
It’s revolting, skin is moulting
He’s the Fly…
Not Seth Brundle but a bundle of man and insect
He’s the Fly…
It’s revolting

Fake Openers For Fake Thinkpieces

‘”I-want-to-fit-in,” enunciates Patrick Bateman, brought to a kind of synthetic half-life to a pre-Batman Christian Bale in 2000’s American Psycho. The evenness of the statement is made clear as sublimated fury, not only desperation to fill some gaping chasm in the heart of the secret self, but also rage at the very act of being questioned in his carefully modulated banality. Bateman was in murders and acquisitions mergers and acquisitions, chosen by Bret Easton Ellis to represent a particular kind of 1980s successful homogeneity, but in the modern era, he might well have functioned excellently as an executive for the Disney Channel with his obsession with middle-of-the-road pop music, and his burning, all-consuming desire to conceal the monster within…’

…

‘The Laysan duck is what’s known as a ‘dabbler’, a form of surface feeder. Endangered, and restricted to the Hawaiian Islands, it’s somewhat ironic that it was first codified by Lionel Rothschild, scion of the great Rothschild banking house of Europe. A consummate zoologist, Rothschild was also the banker that the spectre of his name conjures up, and a member of the British Parliament. He was, in fact, a dabbler, but like the Laysan duck, dabblers in the world of big business have become endangered, even as the wealthiest 1% grow to control more wealth and assets. The key to that control, it turns out, is accretion and segmentation rather than diversity…’

…

‘Snap! Crackle! Pop! The onomatopoeic elves that guard breakfast cereals represent a simple elegance that has continually resisted attempts to modernise (or as the Simpsons would have it, Poochify) them. But does the iconography of the breakfast table hide a deeper cultural conservatism? “Breakfast is seen as family time,” says Gregory Baines of the National Nutrition Council. “We live in an age where people increasing divide for lunch and purchase cooked dinner, but breakfast is still mostly prepared at home, and shared by at least most of the family. Preserving the icons of earlier, ‘family-oriented’ campaigns taps into this nostalgia.” It seems straight forward enough, but one of those breakfast icons is under threat, with calls for the Lucky Charms leprechaun to be abolished as promoting pagan practices recently renewed…’

NB: These are not real hot takes, and I vouch for neither the facts nor opinions therein.

Superman (vs Batman?)

I’ve been thinking a bit about Superman this weekend. I’ve been reading the tie-in miniseries to DC’s big summer event “Convergence” (I haven’t touched Convergence itself, which everything seems to be screaming was a wise instinct). On Saturday, I got the back half of a set of two-part miniseries’ I was particularly interested in. Goodbyes to Renee Montoya (in a poignant piece bringing what is, effectively, several characters’ two-decade story to an end), Wally West and his kids, and Barbara Gordon as Oracle, complete with her two strongest relationships intact: Black Canary and Dick Grayson. All these comics meant a lot – not the least for the way in which the creative teams managed to craft some great stories around the limitations of a crossover – but also for the fact that, for these characters, who have been gone for a while, they served as a proper goodbye, rather than the truncated semi-appearances that they had in the immediate pre-Flashpoint era.

I also read Dan Jurgens and Norm Rampund’s Convergence: Superman. As much as this was a goodbye (and indeed, it promises a new status quo for those characters were we ever to see them again which might well change the nature of things), it also felt like saying hello again, because this was Superman, in a way I hadn’t seen him for a while. Whatever your opinion of the merits of the story (which I liked a lot), its greatest strength was the deployment of Superman in a way that was authentic to his character and served by it. Though there have been some offshoots and some derivatives we’ve seen lately – some of whom call themselves Superman, right enough – it felt like seeing an old friend I hadn’t seen in a long time.

It was only natural to contrast this with the dominant Superman images of late – the post-Convergence Superman of the bloody knuckles and the buzzcut, the rainswept wrathful god of Man of Steel and Batman v Superman (vs, damn it, it’s not a court case) and wondering how it keeps coming to that.

I’m not – exactly – going to post a full exegesis of Superman’s character, because fundamentally everyone reading this is likely to know what it is, or at least what I’m suggesting it is, in its core aspects. Honesty, decency, integrity, selflessness, bravery and compassion. Superman. You know what he’s supposed to represent.

Why do people keep trying to change him? That isn’t an empty rhetorical question, nor an implied attack. I’m not even saying people are wrong to – I’m just thinking about why they do. And I think, fundamentally, I’ve arrived at an answer today.

The common objections to Superman tend to amount to the idea that he’s boring, usually expressed by the idea that nothing ever challenges him, that everything is too easy to be interesting. I’ve always found that to be a pretty fallacious argument, because superhero stories generally manage questions of scale effectively. You can say that you find the threats faced by Superman unbelievable, but not that he’s not threatened – he’s routinely put up against his betters in power, or his ostensible equals in ingenuity. He often wins, but that’s because he’s the hero of the story, and they usually do, at least in superhero stories. There’s no qualitative difference in six guys with sticks fighting Daredevil and six guys with space lasers fighting Superman in terms of the threat; the actual threat level is zero, it’s an invented scenario, and the characters are in the same amount of danger at all times – whatever the author wants to happen to them will happen. No-one ever says The Hulk isn’t threatened, or at least, not in the way they talk about Superman.

If your argument is that he’s too “cosmic”, that space aliens and herculean feats feel too “big” for you, that’s a different story, and I hear that argument bandied about a bit too. I’d be much more inclined to believe it if I heard it more often about any of the other fundamentally implausible superhero characters. But while there are always personal preferences, the numbers don’t stack up – readers (in so far as the word ‘droves’ can apply to comic books nowadays) flock to equally implausible premises, the Flash has proven successful on TV and for all the complaints leveled at the Thor films, the fantastic setting is rarely among them.

So, what are we left with? That he’s a milquetoast, a goody-goody. For all the jokes about it, however, no-one seems to count that as a principle mark against Captain America, or Captain Marvel, or any other character you might choose to seek to raise to moral stakes. These are stories about heroes for the most part after all, and heroes tend to be – on average – good folks.

These are all questions, and I said I was thinking about answers, I know. So, what do I think it is?

I think it comes down to the assumed nature of the audience, and the assumed nature of their wish-fulfillment fantasy.

It’s no secret that WB/DC is actively courting, as its primary demographic, males between 15 and 35. Studies suggest that the lower end of that age range may not be their core demographic at all – at the very least- but it’s the demographic where they’re targeting their marketing and their aimed appeal. So, why don’t they want Superman?

It’s part of the reason that DC places such a primacy on Batman (to be fair, to usually significant success) because the nature of the fantasy in that demographic has changed from what DC comics were originally designed for. In his initial incarnation, Superman was aimed at kids, usually just preadolescent, and was a power fantasy. The essence was pure wish fulfillment: what if I secretly had the power to reshape the world as I saw fit?

Superman’s moral sense made that acceptable, rather than monstrous – the audience knew Superman was genuinely looking to help others and would generally succeed. Rendered palatable, it becomes a scenario of power capable of surmounting challenges, a fantasy not restricted to, but common to children.

Batman, on the other hand, has become a fantasy not just of power, but of defiance. Criminals run Gotham City, but Batman defies them. The media say that he’s a menace, but he defies them. The police hunt him as a vigilante, but he defies them. Wronged grievously, now he’s going to set everybody straight about what’s what, even if they hate and fear him. It’s why arguably the longest shadows cast over Batman come from The Dark Knight Returns, because that book is fundamentally a fuck you to everyone: street gangs and the urban poor who comprise them, disaffected yuppies, the government, the military, the establishment, Superman, lovers and friends. All of them are responsible for part of the world Batman lives in, all of them are trying to restrain him, all must be defied. Batman’s not just about fixing the world, he’s about beating people to do it – and I don’t just mean violently. Batman punches up against authority figures, and down against criminals – he is, quintessentially, a man going it alone. In The Dark Knight Returns, Robin and the Sons of the Bat both volunteer, but ultimately there’s no sense of peerage there – they try and fail to fully comprehend and live in Batman’s shadow, carried on in his wake – and that is the best anyone can do, in that narrative.  This is reinforced in tonnes of ways in other Bat-narratives in varying degrees of subtlety: it’s why Batman falls on goons and they’re just out cold, or why he disappears when his friends are halfway through talking to him. It’s why Alfred and Robin are around, most often nowadays, to be pushed away in the service of “the mission”, so Batman can have people he cares about, but who just “don’t understand”.

It’s not just about power, it’s about feelings of persecution and alienation. “Screw all of you. I can handle this without you.” Spider-Man feels a continual tension with how much the community dislikes him, but Batman to a degree relishes it – it’s his chosen modus operandi. He doesn’t play well with others, and more and more the narratives that surround him suggest that he’s right not to, because they’re holding him back.

It’s not the only construction of Batman’s character by a long chalk, but it’s a common one. It’s so common, I think, because it speaks to elements of the demographic DC are attempting to chase, and it’s the element that translates well into that version of adolescent angst and persecution complex. Batman as a two-fisted Holden Caulfield.

It’s a notable aside, by the way, that this is particularly true of Batman, who exists in a bubble of rarified privilege – a straight, white, physically perfect, genius billionaire tough-guy. This is the guy who modern society most wants to embrace as a part of the community, the dominant paradigm of “people like us”. Bruce Wayne is effectively as far from an “outsider” as one can really be – which is probably why his “alienation” narratives are so easily appropriated by privileged people who still want to feel like their anger and difficulty with isolation is justified; an audience crying out that despite all these advantages they have it worse off than anyone knows.

This is the narrative of “the badass antihero”, a dominant cultural icon I’m sure I don’t need to analyse or explain. Badassery tends to be a function of being capable of “playing by your own rules”, walking away from the conventions that restrain you from being all you can be. That’s the fantasy – that you could take all comers, and march your own route without people being able to stop you.

Although I’ve spoken about this as an adolescent fantasy (particularly a male adolescent fantasy, and particularly still a privileged male adolescent fantasy), it’s not the only walk of life it translates to. Particularly following the path of DC’s assumed secondary demographic – men between 30 and 50, say, they’re also a demographic who are attracted to the narratives of how they’re being unfairly oppressed by strictures, and how “badasses” break out of them. Call it the Breaking Bad effect, men restricted and feeling isolated by economic pressures, unfeeling bosses, an uncertain world, and the sense that they don’t have the opportunities that their parents had.

None of this is to say, by the way, that these are bad metaphors, or wrong topics to analyse – I love Batman (though I prefer him less like this, which he often is) and Breaking Bad was great. I do, however, think that because of the culture of privilege with which the idea of this coveted outsider status often interrelates, and because of the reprehensible behaviours it can be used to justify (particularly towards the genuinely disenfranchised), it needs to be analysed, and not uncritically presented as a heroic narrative.

It also doesn’t work at all when transposed to Superman. Superman, unlike Batman, is not motivated by a sense of alienation. It’s antithetical to almost everything about the character – because unlike Batman he has every reason to be alienated and manages to overcome it. A literal alien, he nevertheless ends up with two sets of parents, a best friend, a devoted girlfriend/spouse, a set of allies and friends who respect and love him and a community that embraces him. Superman has the power to do anything, and nobody to defy. There are tyrants and villains for him to fight, absolutely, and in some stories they seem to be winning, but fundamentally, his core narrative is about how people will embrace you, if you give them the chance, and if you care about them back.

Batman’s afraid. This isn’t particularly deep analysis, it comes up all the time. He’s afraid, and he uses his fear to drive him to make a world he finds less scary. The shadowy forces of nameless crime, twisted monster criminals determined to commit atrocities, allies more powerful than you who you can’t really trust: the Other, who might be plotting against you. Superman, on the other hand, has no reason to be afraid. To borrow from Grant Morrison’s commentary about All-Star Superman:

“He wouldn’t puff out his chest or posture heroically, he would be totally chilled. If nothing can hurt you, you can afford to be cool. A man like Superman would never have to tense against the cold; never have to flinch in the face of a blow. He would be completely laid back, un-tense. With this image of Superman relaxing on a cloud looking out for us all in my head, I rushed back to my hotel room and filled dozens of pages of my notebook with notes and drawings.”

Superman doesn’t need to be afraid, to put up walls, to go it alone. Superman isn’t being pushed aside by necessity, it’s his whole goal to draw people close to him – and the narrative reinforces that this is a rewarding experience. That’s part of what makes him do things like ask people to stop fighting him all the time – because he’s had an opportunity to consider that care and co-operation is what gives you the best outcome. He’s not afraid of weakness, so he can afford to care about and trust people. He can be open without being vulnerable, because he’s invulnerable.

And openness is antithetical to the anti-hero narrative, because the anti-hero narrative presupposes that people are out to get you. It plays into your sense of being wronged, so you can feel justified about it. Perhaps the best thing about Superman is he’s genuinely above that impulse, which is pretty unworthy, when you think about it.

Unless you change him. You make a world that hates and fears Superman, that scrawls “false god”  on his statues, that hunts him down with secret government projects. You isolate him by making him an “unwilling killer”. You make him scowl, and you put blood beneath him, suggesting that he’s keeping people out, in anticipation of the next violent confrontation. Suddenly, it’s about “badassery” again – Superman may be hated and feared, but he’s going to do things his own way, damn the detractors, who just don’t understand him.

He’s gone across to the demographic I was talking about before, because he doesn’t challenge their sense of isolation, he reinforces it. He’s trying to make them buy Superman comics, and (from a financial perspective, more importantly) see Superman movies, because he’s telling a subcategory of alienated young men that they’re right to feel alienated, that the best heroes are persecuted.

The tragedy, of course, is that this is a pretty terrible idea. For three reasons:

1) Because it’s going to reinforce a “heroic” narrative that rejects co-operation and understanding in favour of apex predator competitiveness and resentment.

2) Because – and this is important – it’s going to create a message that the most privileged group (Superman’s a white straight American male, remember) is the one who is the most persecuted. Note that, in so far as we see superheroes of colour on the big screen (noted exception of Blade but that’s nearly 20 years ago now in his first incarnation) they’re fundamentally well-integrated co-operative types – Anthony Mackie’s easy-going, community spirited VA counselor Falcon, and Terence Howard/Don Cheadle’s decorated and establishment War Machine – they’re not complaining about how they’ve got the short end of the stick. Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow is allowed a degree of angst and inner turmoil (to the credit of the character) but note how it is all couched in a narrative of atonement – when Black Widow went it alone, she was a “monster”, and she’s trying to make up for that by becoming part of a community; the same goes for Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch, in ways I won’t detail because Age of Ultron is just out. The exception to this is Jennifer Lawrence’s excellent Mystique, who in the for some reason glossed-over Days of Future Past is allowed to walk her own path as an actualised person despite the “handicap” of being a woman (though the X-Men are always a special case).

3) Because it’s been pretty much proven to be wholly ineffectual. Man of Steel made money, and in many ways wasn’t a bad movie (there’s a lot of good in there, which I’m willing to discuss another time), but it didn’t do Marvel business really, nor draw anywhere near as much affection from the broader audience or critics (though there are vocal defenders, who, interestingly enough from a wholly unscientific observer analysis seem to group in the demographic who enjoy “badass antiheroes). The aggregating complaint over time? Not necessarily that it was “too dark” (although that’s common) but that it’s joyless. This feeling of joylessness doesn’t come from the disaster or the stakes (no-one says that about the full scale alien invasion in The Avengers or the fact that the American government is planning to kill everybody in Winter Soldier), or even the civilian casualties (which are played sadly more as a non-entity than a plot point) but because the narrative is an isolating one. The Marvel movies have successfully perfected, at the least, one formula – ostensibly isolated characters coming together, co-operating and letting other people in. The wildly popular Guardians of the Galaxy ended with our ragtag hero team literally joining hands and winning with the power of love. There are tensions in letting other people in, but the Marvel movie universe also posits distinct rewards, and the audiences respond. While it doesn’t always hit the mark, the MCU at least, I would say, generally tries to be an inclusive one, rather than an exclusive one. It’s exclusionary elements seem to be bugs, not features. This might be why the Marvel movies seem to be more popular with a more diverse movie-going audience.

It’s no coincidence that DC chose Zack Snyder as their centrepiece director, and the blame can’t be laid at his feet, because this is the man who made a version of Watchmen that pretty clearly posited Rorschach as the hero of the piece and Warners knew what they were getting when they hired him. The manner in which the direction of DC has refocused implies a degree of line-wide refocusing on “badass rebels”: look at the concept art of the DC Cinematic Wonder Woman, scowl and sword aloft in grimy armor, ready to fight all comers. No open-handed diplomat there. (Big aside: They’ve done this for Aquaman too, but he’s actually a perfect character to do it with, so I have less qualms about it – Aquaman’s narrative is that of an outsider, and he has the 21st century Western World pretty much constantly fucking up his protectorate, mixed with the responsibility of being a sole and absolute ruler – he is alienated and has reasons to be angry, plus by virtue of standing for the environment and by casting a person of colour, they change the goalpost of what being a rebellious outsider means. I actually dig this construction a fair bit – pending script).

They’re trying to get lightning to strike twice (or more, remember how many Batbooks we ended up after the launch of the New 52?), but the problem is they kill the distinctiveness and interest of their universe by doing so, and more, that this is unlikely to be out of a great artistic fidelity to the cynical, but out of a cynical cash-grab itself. It’s using cynicism for cynical ends, and it’s scaring the fearful, Othering the Othered, and alienating the alienated to do so. That’s pretty much the antithesis of everything Superman stands for.