Emphasis on “dark.”

So Batman. Emily and I saw it last night (her second time, my first). I’m not going to write an exhaustive review here and I won’t spoil any plot elements for anyone. I’m just going to say that this is the comic book movie I’ve been waiting for — this is the one that gets it. To explain what I mean by that, here’s a little personal history…

In the early 80s I got really into comics. I was in 7th grade and my best friend, Chris Smith, introduced me to the world of real comics collecting. Before then I’d read the occasional super-hero book as a young child and loved them, but here was an entire subculture devoted to these awesome things and I wanted in! My personal favorite was Spider-Man and I started buying as many Spider-Man books as I could find (much to my mom’s horror – I still remember her incredulous remark after my first trip to a real comics shop, “you spent FOUR DOLLARS on a COMIC BOOK???”).

When I got to Vermont in 1983 I started hanging out with a different class of comic book nerd. It turned out there was such a thing as “taste,” even when it came to comics, and not all comic books were created equal. Some were good and some were bad, and it wasn’t (as my 12 year-old self assumed) a matter of how good the character was (Spider-Man is cool, Daredevil is lame!), but rather it was all about the creative team — the writer and artist on a given book. Who knew?

Six months later, as I was honing my taste bone for comics, someone put a copy of Saga of the Swamp Thing #21 in my hot little hands and I realized that comics had the potential to be much more than I ever fathomed when reading even the very best that Spider-man had to offer. Comics could be great. They could be Art.

It turned out that my own coming of age was coinciding with comics’ coming of age. Alan Moore, who had penned that issue of Swamp Thing, was poised to reinvent the entire medium in 1986 with his masterpiece, Watchmen. That same year, another watershed book hit the stands that, with Watchmen, heralded a sea change in the comics medium. It was a Batman book by Frank Miller (often referred to as “The Dark Knight Returns,” but that was technically just the title of the first issue of the four-issue series). In that year, the super-hero genre of comic books grew up and proved to comics fans that there were deeper, darker and more fulfilling stories that could be told in the medium.

Now, 2008 is poised to be the year that the super-hero genre in movies grows up. As good as the first two Sam Raimi Spider-man films were and the first two X-men movies and Iron Man — and any other so-called “good” super-hero film from the last ten years — as good as they are, they’re still just popcorn — there’s no nutrition to be had there — no protein. I’ve been waiting for super-hero movies to undergo the shift that super-hero comics went through in 1986. And wouldn’t you know, just like in 1986, it’s The Dark Night and (probably) Watchmen that will help make the shift happen in 2008.

Nolan’s first Batman film almost succeeded at this. The first two acts seemed to be leading up to something special — the kind of movie that both delivers on the action/adventure/SF level, but also tells us something about the human condition — and that’s as good a definition of “art” as I can think of. Does the work tell me something — on any level, however abstract — about what it means to be a person on Earth? Nolan’s first Batman film almost went there. But then the third act had this goofy microwave aerosol spray plot that was straight out of the 1960s TV show and it failed as a complete piece.

Not so with The Dark Knight. This film goes there. Nolan uses the characters and the tropes of Batman and does what only the absolute greatest of Batman’s writers (Moore, Miller) have done before — he rototills the soil of Batman and reveals in its roots what it is that makes the characters tick and what is is that draws us to Batman in the first place. He tells us something about ourselves, and that’s something that no other super-hero movie I can think of has succeeded in doing so far.

There are other things to talk about with The Dark Knight — a few specific plot points that failed or were confusing, some unnecessarily acrobatic camera work, and of course, the 800 lb. gorilla that is Heath Ledger’s excellent turn as The Joker (the real star of this film and if he’s nominated for an Oscar it ought to be for Best Actor, not for Best Supporting Actor). But I’ll leave those details for another post (or the comments if anyone wants to engage me there).

Anyway, go see this thing post haste.

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On July 24, 2008, Alex C said:

Hey Bill – I agree with most of what you wrote. However, I also agree with most of what Stephanie Zacharek wrote in her review at Salon.

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/07/17/dark_knight/

Basically, she and I agree that while the movie was a success on many levels, it was a failure of editing. When I left the movie I told Butthead that, odd as this may sound for a 2-1/2 hour movie, it felt rushed. The last hour of the movie was basically one big climax and it was really hard to follow what was going on. Important points of plot and setting were just barked semi-coherently in voiceover between jump cuts of frog-marching SWAT guys and vertiginous IMAX pans.

It’s funny, cause I usually reserve my strongest criticism for the script, but it this case I think the script was strong, it just was too long for the intended running time of the film, and the editor had to make too many tough choices about what to cut to make it fit.

Example, hopefully spoiler-free: in a suspenseful sequence that cuts between several parallel lines of action, one of the characters reads a note directing her to look in a direction. We see her look in that direction but we do not get to see what she sees! If they felt obliged to shave that 1-1/2 second shot, imagine what else they felt was necessary to get rid of.

Do you think the DVD will have a longer cut that restores some of the cutting-room floor sweepings?
On July 24, 2008, billsimmon said:

Alex,

And I agree with your criticisms — there were several narrative shortcuts that were unnecessarily confusing that probably happened in the edit room. Maybe there will be a 3-hour special edition or something.

Regarding the scene you mention specifically, however [spoiler alert], I saw the film last night and nothing was cut there. The (bad) cops leading the judge to her car tell her to open the envelope and it would tell her “where you’re going.” The word “up” told her where she was going — up. Ka-boom. Isn’t the Joker clever?
On July 24, 2008, billsimmon said:

I should add that while there is no missing shot in that particular scene, it was still the victim of bad editing. The scene changes break up the cops’ instructions and the punchline enough that I thought the same thing as you after my first viewing. I only got it after the 2nd viewing.
On July 26, 2008, casey said:

Yeah, editing was suspect in a couple of places —notably the Leahy scene. After the Bat and Rachel take the (literal) plunge, we’re left hanging. Did the Joker just leave the party? Who lets Dent out of the closet? Where do B-boy and ladypal scurry off to?

That said, it was an incredible movie. Ledger scarred me deeply.
On July 29, 2008, odum said:

Agree/disagree. Movie was great. Don’t get all the concerns about it being muddled or convoluted. Actually thought it was fairly straightforward. Maybe all the critical hubbub about it being complicated inoculated me.

But big, big, big disagreement on your greater premise. That this is the first comic movie that “gets it,” and your tying it to what you see as comics “coming of age” which just happens to parallel your own (which is no coincidence).

Maybe it’s a combination of intellectual defensiveness over the years combined with a deep personalized appreciation for the medium, but hardcore comics fans who want to see the medium get its due often end up working against that goal through their idiosyncratic narrowcasting of what the medium “is” and “isn’t.”

IMO: People talk about comics as modern mythology, but that of course is a misnomer. Mythology was religion, people thought those stories were real. What comics start off as is something we dont want to admit because we think its also kid stuff (and its not); fairy tales. Often Jungian in their quality, comics start from primal, archetypal places which is why they can resonate with kids and with grown ups, and they end up – if not always critiquing the human condition, then describing it.

But there are two big effects of fairy tales, beyond simple fascination and entertainment – they frighten on the one hand, but there is also an element of wish fulfillment, and that’s where the escapism can come in. We hardcore fanboys often diss the escapist qualities because they’re so mainstream and “accessible,” but in doing so we’re dissing a fundamental quality of the genre – and in the process working to narrowly define comics as just those comics that speak to us personally.

Put another way; ours is the first generation that grew seamlessly out of our childhoods. We don’t see the need anymore for clean rites of passage, or “now I am a man and have left all the things of childhood behind” rituals or benchmarks that may have served a purpose culturally once, but now just serve to cut us off from some of the coolest parts of ourselves arbitrarily. As a result, we’ve brought much of the medium into adulthood with us, which is awesome – but the medium existed before our generation. Saying that the medium has “come of age” says that before the 80′s (much of which was utter comics crap), it was immature. Half-baked. Incomplete. Proto-comics.

And that is just so untrue. Golden Age, Silver age, EC comics – they were not “underage.” They were comics. Some bad, some good, some great. The point is that they were different from each other, as well as what you usually see now. I do think we should celebrate the expansion of the medium, but not by undefining what has come before… because then its not expanding, is it? Its growing in one direction, but we’re chopping it off behind us – and that POV is not conducive to the long-term health and viability of the medium.

“Batman Begins” totally “got it,” IMO. It set goals and clearly succeeded with aplomb – they just weren’t the goals you would’ve set… but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a mature, brilliantly conceived and executed comics-to-film experience that was a credit to both media. Similarly Iron Man was a roaring success at every level, and a good example of a merging of the 2 media, rather than simply a movie version of a comic book. The new Hulk movie was good, and respectful as a comic book movie – but failed on the fundamentals of content and imagination…. but its failure was not because it wasn’t a fair representation of comics-to-screen – it was – just a representation of comics that… well, failed on content and imagination. I think you can have a film that “gets it” in a cross-media sense, but still doesn’t “get it” in the broadest artistic sense.

Some of the most popular ones were mixed bags, I’ll admit – Superman II (which I dearly love) couldn’t help but make fun of itself as if to say “don’t worry, I know its just a comic book,” but it was still worth it as a film. The Kilmer and Clooney Batman movies seemed like they were made by someone who’d never cracked a comic of any kind and were probably a bit contemptuous of them.

My point is getting drilled into the ground. There have been plenty of comics movies that “got it” before DK; Ghost World, Akira, A History of Violence, even some of the much-maligned Alan Moore adaptations more or less “got it” IMO – they just didn’t get the particular source material itself very well.

My definition of “art?” Making the intangible tangible through one of any number of media. And that’s intentionally broad. It may speak to “the human condition” actively, or just passively, simply because it clearly expresses some aspect of humanity. Sometimes that just means making us smile.

Gritty is great, sure. But all art doesn’t have to be. Comics are no different. People are complicated enough to require a lot of different art pressing a lot of different buttons. There are lots of different flavors of protein – it just depends on which particular variety each individual person is being deprived of.

/soapbox
On July 30, 2008, Alex C said:

Some other comic movies that “got it” (i.e. were more or less faithful to the source):

* Spider-Man 1 & 2
* Iron Man
* Blade
* Hellboy
* Sin City
* Superman 2 (arguably)
* 300

But I think Bill and Odum are talking past each other. Bill was more narrowly talking about “deeper, darker and more fulfilling stories” which, let’s face it, Blade and Spider-Man were not. Odum is right that Ghost World, Akira, and A History of Violence *were* deeper etc but except for Akira — which was already a movie by the time we heard about it — those came long after Bill went through puberty, so they don’t count towards the thesis Bill outlined in his first few paragraphs.

By the way, I liked Batman Begins because it explicitly evoked the Batman of the *70s*, not the super-gritty 80s Miller Batman. In the 70s Batman was gallavanting around the world as a sort of secret agent, with the sultry daughter of Ra’s al Ghul and a motley cast of associates, and playing politics back home with corrupt Gotham bigwigs like Boss Thorne and Hugo Strange. And the Joker had some *really* scary storylines around 1977 (esp. The Laughing Fish and The Sign of the Joker) — see

http://www.steveenglehart.com/Comics/Detective%20Comics%20469-476.html

http://popcultureshock.com/features.php?id=1364
On July 30, 2008, Alex C said:

> Golden Age, Silver age, EC comics – they were not “underage.” They were comics.

Actually, they were quite explicitly underage, due to the overweening Comics Code. And you can directly attribute characters like Bat-Mite to its juvenilizing influence on the entire medium. In the 70s some writers started to break out and make comics with more adult themes, notably Denny O’Neil making Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy a smack addict:

http://www.titanstower.com/source/libearly/drugsroy.html
On July 30, 2008, billsimmon said:

Well, to be fair, EC comics predated the code and were “adult” in the sense that parents and government officials got enraged by their kids having them, but Gaines was definitely marketing his books to kids, who made up the VAST majority of the comics market in the 1950s. In that sense, they were “underage.” But even these graphic “adult” themes were sensationalistic and mostly narratively unsatisfying.

And when I say films that “get it,” I don’t mean films that were faithful to their source material — after all, the Adam West Batman film/TV show in the 1960s was on some level “faithful” to the goofy Batman comics of that time. I mean films that get what’s great about comics from the perspective of a discriminating adult consumer of literature — films that aren’t merely action/adventure wish-fulfillment yarns in tights — which, as good as they are, Spider-Man and Iron Man basically are. Don’t get me wrong, those films are GOOD at being action/adventure wish-fulfillment yarns in tights, but sometimes I’m looking for something a little more meaty.

Ghost World is meaty, but my post was very specifically about the super hero genre. Indy comics don’t suffer from the just-for-kids stigma of super hero books.
On July 30, 2008, odum said:

“from the perspective of a discriminating adult consumer of literature”

…and at that, I stand by my points. One can be a “discriminating adult consumer of literature” and very much enjoy Spider-Man. There were moments I was genuinely moved in both SM and SM2.

Again, its that your very subjectively defining what makes something “meaty.” In its way, “The Iron Giant” was every bit as “meaty” as “A Clockwork Orange,” if you have eyes with which to see, as they say.

I think we get into trouble when we describe ourselves as “discriminating adult consumer(s) of literature” based on what we reject, rather than what we enjoy.
On July 30, 2008, billsimmon said:

I think we get into trouble when we describe ourselves as “discriminating adult consumer(s) of literature” based on what we reject, rather than what we enjoy.

I think that’s sort of what the word “discriminating” means, right? It’s differentiating one film from another based upon a given criterion, in this case, whether or not the film in question tells us something interesting about the human condition or is merely a good time. That was working the definition of “art” I provided in my post and it was decidedly not based on what I “enjoy.” I get that you reject the premise, but since it’s a subjective call, what are we disagreeing about, exactly?

This argument, over what constitutes “art” and what is merely “entertainment,” has been going on for a very long time and we’re not going to resolve it here, but I do want to make sure I’m not being misunderstood.

I am making the claim that not all movies (or comics or novels or paintings, etc.) are “art,” using the definition laid out in my post. Some movies — some good movies — are merely entertaining yarns that are fun and well-executed, but don’t elevate my experience as a human living on this planet beyond the 2 hours spent enjoying myself in the theater. Some movies don’t change me. Most movies don’t — particularly most super hero movies — not because they contain super heroes, but because there is a built-in assumption that the comics medium is juvenile and incapable of being more than wish-fulfillment adventure yarns. This assumption is wrong. As evidence, I point to the work of Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, and a few others on a short list of comics creators that have transcended the form. The Dark Knight belongs on the list. Spider-Man 1 & 2 do not, IMO. SM 1 & 2 were great fun and eloquently captured everything I loved about the SM comics and for that, I love them, but art? I don’t think I’m being an elitist by denying the films that label. But, beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, so your mileage may vary.
On July 31, 2008, odum said:

Points where we deviate, I think:

1. You define something as “art” based on how it affects you personally – the very essence of a subjective definition. As in “I know it when I see it.” I define art as the media – and then subjectivize it through qualifying it as “bad” art or “good” art… or effective or ineffective, or whatever. I don’t think that how it touches or doesn’t touch me should qualify a term that is in use well beyond me. I think this is especially true if you ascribe such a particularized purpose to art as needing to “change” you.

2. I guess I just don’t see that the medium was “transcended” because I don’t see that it needed any “transcending.” It’s just a broader medium now, and we’re all better off for it, methinks.
On July 31, 2008, billsimmon said:

Saying every movie, regardless of quality, is a work of “art” and then distinguishing between “good” art and “bad” art isn’t very satisfying to me, and here’s why: A film like Spider-Man 2 can succeed at everything it aspired to — looks great, captures the flavor and tone of the comics, is exciting and entertaining and occasionally touching, and gives the viewer a great two-hour ride. While a film like Catwoman can fail all of those tests. Spider-Man 2 is “good” in all of the ways we expect it to be and Catwoman is “bad.” My whole point is that The Dark Knight does stuff that neither of those films do — it has layers of meaning and it made me examine myself a little bit. The labels “good” and “bad” become a little weak at that point. I don’t want to gush too much here — it was not the greatest film I’ve ever seen or anything, but it was the first super hero movie I can think of that had that kind of depth. I’m using the word “art” to make that distinction. You can use whatever word you’re comfortable with (or simply disagree with me), but do you see what I mean at least?

I just don’t see that the medium was “transcended” because I don’t see that it needed any “transcending.”

See Alex’s point about the Code. The time frame I picked wasn’t just because I was getting hairs in funny places at the time, it was also the beginning of the direct market (bypassing the news services) and the proliferation of comics specialty shops, and the time when comics publishers began to take creator’s rights more seriously (DC was way ahead of Marvel on this and I suspect that’s why writers like Moore and Miller were drawn to them). And yes, the dimming shadow of the Code was a huge influence on the growing-up of the content of comics in the early 80s.

For a good example of the influence of that period of time on comics, read a Roger Stern Spider-Man arc from the early 80s (Stern was a “good” writer from that time) and then read a Bendis arc on Daredevil from a couple of years ago. Both are mainstream Marvel books written by top writers in the field from the two different eras. The difference is night and day in terms of story and character complexity. Mainstream comics writers can go places now they never could have 25 years ago and it was Miller and Moore (and a short list of others) who made that possible. That’s what I mean by “transcended.”
On August 3, 2008, NickC said:

Thanks for explaining the “UP” thing, Bill. I saw the movie once and had no idea wtf that was about.

I didn’t like what I read by the girl at Salon. She takes this excellent script/story for granted, saying “It shouldn’t be hard to write good stories around [the Batman chars]” and then calls it “pretentious poot.” Wha??? She’s way off–writing this good is rare.

Perfect it ain’t, but (as perhaps Zacharek doesn’t realize) there are 1,000,001 things to screw up with a movie like this, and Nolan avoided about 988,000 of them.

And maybe if she’d read a Batman comic she’d know that the Joker spends plenty of time in Arkham asylum…the point is the Joker’s relationship with the Bat, and the director handles it well. Honestly, I think Salon would have done better asking someone like Bill to write the review, who at least understands the Batman universe.