Thank You, John Hodgman.

So Buckaroo Banzai, he’s a neurosurgeon, and he’s in a rock band, and he travels across dimensions, and also there are aliens in New Jersey, and one of them is John Lithgow, and he, alien John Lithgow, throws his head back and snarls, “Laugh while you still can, monkey boy!”

Also there is Jeff Goldblum. You should see this movie. Here, via my favorite famous minor television personality, are the ending credits.

I will be without internet for the next several days and I wanted to make sure you all felt inspired and entertained while I’m away. Remember: walking around in a group, to music, will banish any lousy mood.

Darkness Revisited

After watching a it a second time, hearing it discussed, and listening to reviews, my feelings on The Dark Knight have mellowed; I’m now both less shocked and less impressed. On the “less impressed” front, issues of pacing came to the foreground on repeat viewing, questions about the wisdom of cramming Two-Face into the fourth act arose (also: is it wise for any film to even have a “fourth act”?), and overall my willing suspension of critical thought is over. I now see choppy storytelling, for example, even in such superficially awesome sequences as the lead-up to Gotham General’s destruction, and the problems with the chaotic final sequence are even more apparent. The admirable attempts to include the behavior of the public in the struggle depicted, and examine the our own temptations to turn on each other in the face of an existential threat, culminate in the ferry sequence, a clumsy and obvious device (who on earth proposed employing a gigantic cartoon of a convict to teach everyone a lesson about humanity?) that falls completely flat.

I’ve also drifted away from the feeling I had that the film was overly dark and needlessly violent. Critical analysis, distance, and some sleep has dispelled the claustrophobic, all too real fear that I had walking out. Telling a tense, grim story makes sense when your building blocks are a sociopath vigilante and a nihilistic terrorist. Specifically evoking the feeling that our lives and institutions are truly threatened by a force that will not listen to reason is fair game while Osama bin Laden is still at large.

Alfred’s overwrought speech about some men wanting to “watch the world burn” finds resonance in the existence of a man who gave up wealth and comfort to live in a cave and lob explosives at the world’s mightiest government. The Dark Knight skillfully parallels our story these past few years. Batman and Gotham city leaders initially discount the importance of the Joker, busying themselves instead with the mob, as our government laughed off Al Qaeda in favor of facing down the better understood Communists. Long after being alerted to the threat, our heroes find themselves unable to prevent death after death, just as we’ve had to watch as Bali, Spain, England, and thousands of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan fall prey to our infuriatingly resilient enemy. (No new attacks, my ass. As far as I can tell, Islamism has been a lot more active and a lot more successful in the seven years since September 11th than in the seven years prior to it.) Even capturing the Joker and torturing him doesn’t offer any relief from the attacks or provide any measure of control, as killing Al Qaeda “number twos” left and right and torturing those leaders we’ve taken alive has failed to provide any relief or resolution. Our heroes feel embarassed, impotent, angry, at a loss. Prepared for foes who play by the rules (as the mob are so proud of doing), we lose our cool and step onto the dark side when confronted with the Joker and his lack of regard for rules in general. I respect that story being told. It’s worth telling.

My mom is always telling me to watch for the themes of a movie to be revealed in the first ten minutes. It’s no accident that our opening scene pits not heroes against villains but the Joker against mobsters, one of whom actually makes a speech about the ordered and dignified nature of organized crime’s criminality. The Joker responds, you’ll remember, by putting a bomb in his mouth. It’s also no accident that Bruce Wayne, recovering after a routine night of crime fighting, trades quips about the limits of the superhero with Alfred. We’re watching Batman’s limits tested by terrorism, and his devolution into a scared, prideful, frustrated thug, just as we have, cringing, been watching American honor and lawfulness torn up and cast aside in our panicked response to September 11th.

Finallly, we come to this silly sonar surveillance machine. The movie’s shortcomings make this episode feel tacked on and tacky, but as it’s intended it sits right at the heart of the story. Batman prides himself on being “the world’s greatest detective,” and for two hours we’ve watched as his detective skills – interrogation, forensics, deductive reasoning, traditional surveillance – have utterly failed to stop the deaths piling up on his conscience. Bitter and embarrassed, just like our national security community in 2001, he turns to warrantless wiretapping writ large (and we’ve twice already seen him resort to torture).

Making a summer blockbuster out of the pathetic and disgraceful response of the American government to the 2001 attacks is an odd choice, but a worthy one, and I think it is pulled off quite well, for all my criticisms of this movie’s execution. It’s dangerous casting a beloved superhero in the role of Cheney and Gonzalez, but isn’t that precisely the point? Unspeakable acts have been carried out by those we entrusted to defend us and to defend our ideals, our laws, our values, just as we trust in the unshakable justice of superheroes. The limits and flaws of the humans at the heart of our national security bureaucracy mirror the limits and flaws of the human at the center of the Batman myth. When our hero starts brutalizing the Joker in the holding cell, Gordon tries to assure the audience, and himself, that Batman is in control. He is not. That, more than the Joker’s bombs, is what is scary here. It should go without saying that Batman, and Harvey Dent, and President Bush, and the United States Army and Justice Department, are more powerful by several orders of magnitude than the Joker, and Osama, and any conceivable exterior threat (although for dramatic purposes, the Joker is painted as more of an effective, nightmarish supervillain than Al Qaeda ever has been). The real danger here is not from the terrorists but from the terrified and cowardly response of our leaders, who actually do wield power capable of royally fucking shit up.

The film deviates in the last five minutes from our real world script, because, let’s face it, the real world has not yet provided a resolution fitting for a summer superhero epic. The downfall of Harvey Dent, kept by a wise protector from the citizens of Gotham so they won’t lose heart, is very public (and very disheartening) knowledge in our version of events. If there is anyone sacrificing their reputation, as Batman chooses to do, within the Bush administration, it is in service not of the public good but of some higher up, and even more disgraceful, public servant. Still, at the close of this film Batman is chastised, shamed, and frantically trying to salvage some shred of his good intentions instead of actually fighting evil or furthering good. Running and hiding is about where we find the legal team in Washington, worrying over their accountability for war crimes and retroactively making legal all the disgusting things they’ve been up to. It’s a grim story, capably told, and ultimately a wise decision to use well-worn American myths to dramatize our current moral crisis. I’d chose this frightening tragedy over pure escapism any day.

Batman stories have usually found ways to have some fun watching the struggle between criminality and righteous vigilantism, and should continue to. Batman Begins featured a ridiculous, exhilarating Batmobile chase across rooftops and along a highway, and Bruce Wayne stands in for the audience when he shrugs off criticism of these theatrics and calls them “damn good television.” The Dark Knight’s visual centerpiece is a tractor trailer being flipped upside down, which is thrilling to watch, but never quite achieves “fun” because of that sense that for all his gadgets and cool, Batman is still not in control, and the Joker just won’t be stopped by a mere car crash. The bleakness of The Dark Knight is appropriate only once in Batman storytelling, and a sequel will have to back off the moral realism a little in order to keep Batman a character worth watching stories about. There are so many readily available ways to do this. A Batcave would be welcome. The revision of the now destroyed Batmobile should be fun, and its design should express Bruce Wayne’s competence and confidence instead of a war zone mentality.

Something that struck me as I turned over the parallels between the character of the Joker and modern terrorists was his use of video threats. We’ve seen so many videos since 2001, of threats, declarations, hostages and beheadings, that those that Heath Ledger’s Joker employs seem almost obscene, and are without question the most terrifying moments in the film. This is not an invention by Christopher Nolan, however. I’m not an expert on the history of Batman’s villains, but I know of at least two instances – Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” and Burton’s “Batman” – at least twenty years old that feature the Joker’s use of video technology to terrorize. I’d be interested to learn when the character was first depicted doing this, and how closely that paralleled real world terrorists using videotaped threats. Terrorists of the seventies certainly used this tactic – how quickly was it echoed in the comics? Or, unlikely as this seems, did the Joker’s behavior actually predate that of actual terrorists?

Don’t Call It A Comeback

There’s a lovely tension between grandiose dreams and reality, the fearless imagination and its fruits on one side and the rich pleasures of patience, hard work, compromise, acceptance, gratitude and humility. Our creative impulses, and our wildest successes, seem to feed on unfettered ego, reckless risk taking, and a belief in the possibility of improbably things. Our actual productive work, on the other hand, seems to spring from an acceptance of things as they are and the discipline to work within those boundaries. Most of our media, skewered as it is towards the glamorous, the rapid, the dramatic, and the visual, celebrates the grandiose dreams over reality. We are shown over and over again fables of personal transformation and reinvention, but rarely see the process of incremental change described, and when we do, more often than not it is through a montage, a dishonest and absurd cinematic device designed to reconfigure real effort to fit the dimensions of fantasy.

From the Great Gatsby to Batman, radical transformation is equated with deception and loneliness, yet glamorized and admired. These myths, and warnings, hang over all the plans I make to break with the past and set out in new directions. On the first of the month I will attempt to combine a move to a new apartment with a new haircut, new relationship status, new job, new career goal, and new educational status (and new frequency of blog posting), hoping that it all adds up and jump starts a new chapter in my life. I don’t want to scold myself for dreaming, for hoping, for styling myself after the great stories I’ve heard. After all, resisting the appeal of our myth of starting over could well lead to the opposite outcome, that of an awful stasis and complacency. I do need to put in some effort to remain grounded in real work, though. My synapses have been trained by the computers and movie screens and fast food joints in my life to expect instant gratification, and seek it. It’s a rather banal observation, I know, but this illusory high just doesn’t cut it. Especially not when it comes to personal transformation.

I’m afraid of stepping into the future, into uncertainty. I’m afraid of setting myself up for real failures by going after things I really want. I’m afraid of collecting things – education credentials, work experience, wealth, social networks – for fear of losing them, letting them down, not doing them justice. This has made me think about the non-attachment preached by many philosophies, the claim that it is desirable to avoid attachment to material things and worldly outcomes because you then remain free of them, free of their power over you. You certainly avoid the fear of loss that comes with attachment. Part of me is quick to chose attachment and fear over freedom any day. It seems noble to invest in the world and suffer the consequences of being intertwined with it, i.e. not being in complete control of your destiny, not being insulated from the heartbreaks and disappointments of the world.

I’m still wondering, though. There’s something about a fearless resignation to your own powerlessness over final results that enables, rather than preempts, engagement with the world. I know in my own experience that fear has been more of a barrier to work and progress than a result of it. I want to accumulate attachments, I want to found relationships that I’m scared of losing, break ground I’d be mortified to retreat from. I want to courageously throw in my lot with others, like the economy that becomes interdependent with others through trade. I want to see attachment as a good thing, like the fear of mutual harm that drives countries into ever closer cooperation, and the collection of wealth as positive, like the expanded opportunities for choice and joy in a rich civilization compared with a poor one. This makes sense to me. Yet there is also this indirect, unclear disagreement within me.

I can’t predict how this will play out as I (if I) establish a more settled, wealthier life for myself. I imagine there will always be a balancing act between investing in and engaging with the world, and remaining unafraid of the potentially painful consequences of that interaction. Maybe there is some hidden synthesis between the two that I have yet to access. What is clear, today, is that attachment to hypothetical, future assets is nothing at all but a drag and a heavy cost, and my a priori fear of attaining these things in the first place can safely be jettisoned without endangering any engagement with the world. In fact, fearless non-attachment seems a necessary precondition to it.

Darkness

Every time I leave a movie about super powered, larger than life, mythic men careening around the world (smashing things humans cannot feasibly smash, picking up things we humans absolutely cannot), my muscles are tense, my back is straight, I feel filled with deep strength. Forget the movies. This storytelling – tales of gods and heroes – can move me in this way without a big budget and a thousand-strong special effects team. Each story has its own weight, smell, texture. I sharply remember leaving the first Spiderman movie knowing I could climb walls. I was as light, excitable, joyous and wild eyed as I’d been since careening around trees as a kid – and for a moment I could remember no good reason, beyond a regrettable failure of imagination, for the absence of playful, epic wall scaling from our lives. This summer I’ve had the pleasure of walking out of both The Incredible Hulk and Hellboy II with the knowledge that, were the power in my shoulders and chest set free, were I able to manifest that coiled energy I can picture inside of me, cars would be mere playthings, my city a playground, and I would dance with the world of heavy, serious objects like a wrestler, like a god.

I just walked out of The Dark Knight, and my chest is tight, and I feel the isolation that is the sensation of being super powered in a world of the normally powered, and I don’t walk to speak to anyone, and my face is set in determination. Tonight I am determined to make it across the parking lot. I have resolved to not hit anyone on the way home. I will bring my iron will to bear on figuring out what the fuck just happened to me.

I am, as are many of my fellow humans, effortlessly familiar with violence, destruction, and mayhem conjured up in vivid detail for my entertainment. I like to see the world of the dangerous and the scary captured by a screen, and I like paying money to see it, exercising control over it, consuming it. The great things of this world, be they cities, vehicles, buildings or people, make fantastically exciting toys in the world of make believe. I have never seen a car chase or fist fight or a depiction of a vast metropolis swallowed by tsunami that I didn’t enjoy; I have never seen an action set piece I found disturbing, or excessive, or distasteful. If a movie fails to hold my attention, I turn away. If it is shoddily made, I laugh at it. If it requests all sorts of suspensions of me – ethical, narrative, logical – I go along with it, because why not? What’s the harm in a movie? Why not flex our incredible ability to manifest our wild imaginings on a huge wall?

I am still astonished by this, and I’m not sure I trust or understand the feeling, but I may have just seen a movie that was too violent. I mean this like people mean it when they wander into a shoot-em-up after a life of crocheting, when they feel unexpectedly assaulted, shaken to the core. The Dark Knight felt like the weight of millions upon millions of dollars, and decades upon decades of mythology, and two and a half hours of rumbling bass speakers, being brought to bear like a sledgehammer on my chest. In a bad way. Specific choices that were made, especially in the screenplay and the location work, felt aggressively hostile towards me – me! the guy in the cushioned seat who pays for this sort of thing routinely! – and around the two hour mark, I began to seriously question the wisdom of releasing such oppressively bleak spectacle on the public.

First and foremost, the city The Joker assaults in this film is my city. This is not Gotham at all. This city is aggressively bright, violently realistic. Gone is the over the top, comic book grime and darkness we saw in Batman Begins (and every other Batman iteration). Gone is the clever and impossible monorail system, which definitively distinguished our fictionalized New York from the real one, gone is Wayne Tower and its embodiment of an alternative, abridged, and toothless version of city history, gone is “the narrows” with its endless and eternal yellow steam. The first shot of the movie shocked me: I could not believe I was looking at this bright business-like city in a Batman movie. Right away I was reeling, having lost all my comforting gothic footing. This is bright white stone and glass towers, not an ounce of exaggeration in sight. When our hope falters and our protagonists do such a poor job of setting things right, as police officers die in the line of duty, residents are tense, scared, and angry, and the city slips away from those who would order it, protect it – this feels like an assault. This is the most brilliantly plotted, meticulously planned, well financed assault on my emotional security I ever hope to endure. We are bereft, the poor audience, of Wayne Manor, and the Batcave, and any ounce of fun or irony or innocence, and instead we have lower Manhattan, or some city dolled up to look just like it, subjected to full on attack by the most evil, frightening, and powerful villain I have ever seen depicted on film.

Forget Max Shreck and Penguin, Cruella deVille, and the idiotic, self-parodying megalomania of Lex Luthor. All are laughable, amusing, and insignificant. Heath Ledger’s Joker wants your city torn to pieces. He wants to torture you and hear you beg for mercy. Most devilishly of all, he has no motivation for any of this except his own amusement and a desire to cut those of us who believe in symbols, structure, and goodness down to size. Why such a creature was projected on 3,000 screens for two and a half hours at the stroke of midnight tonight I may never understand. Our eventual victory is slight and gut wrenching in the face of such capable chaos. The movie lets us escape with our city intact and Batman alive, but just barely, and at the cost of all the grand feeling that comes with a protector, a superman, a hero. We are left spent and dirtied, relieved to crawl away with one or two decent men left breathing, while the monster has come within inches of tearing apart everything we love. If this hyperbolic, cartoonish language seems unlikely to be a sincere description of the events in a Batman movie, you haven’t seen how bright Gotham’s gotten since we last saw her. You aren’t aware of how well lit and familiar these places are this time around, and you may not have heard that full daylight is now fair game for supervillian activity, you may not have gotten the memo that real hospitals where our vulnerable loved ones are lying now threatened by escaped Arkham’s inmates, you may not realize that the nightmares we’ve been writing about tormenting fictionalized caricatures of ourselves for years, well, they’re knocking at the door, your actual front door, and they’re about to make you wish you never imagined them.

It almost makes you sorry to see those mid-nineties Batman films that were such a failure on every level recede into the past. What I wouldn’t give for a bright bauble of a failure, with happymeal-ready villains and sets that evoke Disneyland and Hell and every fantasy in between, anything but the real world, and anything but a real city where you might conceivably live. Instead, tonight I had to sit through a masterpiece, a brilliant and masterfully executed film depicting the death of heroism and myth and grandeur, telling of the triumph of an insane disregard for human life and the frightful power of violence and fear, all played out in front of my astonished eyes, eleven dollars, thank you very much, have a safe trip home, please come back at Thanksgiving for Bolt!

I will be waiting in line for the next one. I have respect and awe for the people who put this film together, every step, every nut and bolt, every second. I can’t help but second guess them, however, remembering that Alan Moore eventually disavowed his The Killing Joke as being too dark, and excessively so. That character – that Joker – may have no place in polite society, and make no mistake, comic books may have a self selected and savvy readership but this wide release blockbuster is going to make itself felt all over and through polite society. I can only hope that others let this wash over them and distance themselves, as I could not, from these city streets and these legends that maybe they don’t love so dearly or take so seriously. I hope it doesn’t get to them, this darkness masquerading as entertainment in their multiplexes.