The Thing About BATMAN

What for me vampires are to the world of ghouls, Batman is to the world of comics. They are both the key to unlocking the value of their respective mythological forms, because they exist so distinctly on a foundation of human struggles. They are, in their most fundamental form, elaborate symbolic stage plays for the innately pompous but nonetheless fascinating concepts of good, evil, belief and redemption.

Chris Nolan's recent rehauling of the Batman franchise is quite simply the best thing that has ever happened to comic book cinema. Reimagining the filmic introductions and conflicts of Bob Kane's magnificent creations that were first attempted by Tim Burton in the eighties, Nolan gives us, at long last, the Batman of noir, quasi-morality and metropolistic tragedy that we all need. The issues of societal and sociological complexity that are broached are, admittedly, handled with groaning heaviness, but at least they're fucking there. And there's plenty more that the latest film, The Dark Knight, does perfectly.

The foremost is, of course and no prizes for guessing, Heath Ledger. It's at once a shame that the young actor, who had only just begun to show that he had potential to be an icon of DeNiro caliber, must leave behind a comic book villain as his legacy. But, in his defense, I believe that Ledger has pretty well changed the world of film villainy forever and ever amen. His haunting and extraordinary performance as The Joker, Batman's ultimate comment on the dark side of human nature, hooks in with frightening and tragic power to the instability of The Abused Child, The Feared Leper, The Angry Anarchist, and most importantly, The Lonely Man.

Although Aaron Eckhart turns in a very nicely arced performance as Harvey Dent, who is manipulated into a horrific fall from grace (from Gotham's D.A. Angel to "Two-Face"), it is Ledger's Joker that steals the show at every turn, because he is such an intriguing dark symbol. We do not and shall never know who he really was, before his disfigurement and ensuing insanity, but that's the way it should be, because his purpose is not to show the dialectics of the human soul, as "Two Face"'s is. The Joker's only signs of humanity are the bad ones - resentment, cruelty, loneliness. He is a live wire of negative response to a cruel world, an exposed nerve of conditioned disdain and anger. He exists to show us all the kind of monster us mortals can create from one another, much the way Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter did, in his first (and only his first) film appearance.

Not only all this, but he's there to show that Batman is only a hero through the murky morals of Gotham city. They aren't so different, these two immortal characters. They walked the same miserable paths all their lives and then, as if by the flip of Two Face' mythic coin, came to different conclusions. Their "battle for the soul of Gotham", as The Joker very rightly puts it, is founded on nothing more than a conflict of beliefs... and an emblematic town that will do what its ruling giant tells them.

The thing about BATMAN is quite a simple one. Kane's vision and Nolan's synchronize with beauty in this latest feature, for they both take a distinctly gothic, tragic and metaphysical view of their seemingly pointless craft: The Dark Knight tells the tale of a lively philosophical debate, taking place far too late. The delicious ambiguity of the Batman universe created Gotham City, and it's because nobody spoke up one way or the other that it did. Batman and The Joker are taking their stands - they ask that each of their citizens do so as well. Suddenly I can't seem to stop thinking about that damn coin of Harvey's; spinning, spinning, spinning into the dark night.

*Thanks to Martin Kingsley for an editorial note on the finer points of Thom Harris.

Vampires

I'm wide awake on the bathroom floor

I’ve never felt this cold before

I must have let the day slide in

Cuz the dark is gone and light sits thick and ready to begin

I fear the stake

Is too high to waste

And all man’s slothful efforts were in vain

I forgot the way you do it here

Blind and mad with fear

Of the Lord

But I’m never doing that again

To live scared stiff of my own end

Amen.

I feel my love

In my blood

Flowing fast to where there’s not enough

I hear the prey

Call my name

The Plan

1. Convince the Woolworths institution that I am, in fact, privy to the intricate and delicate art of STACKING SHELVES that they have thus far deemed me unfit to do, and accept their apologetic job offer.
2. Subsequently work that job any and all hours that I am not sleeping or attending classes for higher education.
3. Use the money saved to visit New York City and enjoy it
4. Obtain another job upon return with the highest of recommendations from Woolworths
5. See 2
6. Find a place to live and move there
7. Become moderately successful with the music caper or do a PHd and teach University punks what for.
8. Be Happy
   

And Song the Fourth

A working model for poetic meditation on the intense pathos of insanity and the insanity in pathos.


Tuesday Pills

I heard a voice on the wind

She said, ‘The danger’s over.’

But there was no one, so then

I’m hearing voices again.

I saw a man on the road in town,

saying, ‘If you need a cry, then here’s a shoulder.’

But when he spoke, there was no sound

So I’m seeing things now.

The newspaper is full of messages, and

It's all tantamount to me being missed

And wanted home. “You’re not alone”.

The secret people, they’ve heard my tapes

And they love what I do and the way that I play,

They tell me so on my phone,

Their code is in the dial tone.

Oh, and I’m not so bad

What did you expect to have

Happen?

Oh, and i’m not that scared

I know I’m almost there

So it might not happen this afternoon, but

The whole world is going to love me

The whole world is going to love me soon.

My friends are getting married

I didn't think I'd have to confront this for at least another five years.

El Orfanato... y por qué Películas Espantan

It isn't very often that a film experience is enhanced by a vocal and expressive cinema audience. I've only been privy to about three instances of that happening. The first two were due to the communal sense of fandom and wonder that came with seeing Harry Potter and The Simpsons on the big screen amongst others who felt the same way as I. The third was last night's cozy nine o clock gathering in Nova Cinema on Lygon st, where a few dozen Melbournians, myself included, came to see Juan Antonio Bayona's El Orfanato (The Orphanage).

I have yet to hear so many screams in a theatre in my life. And each, I would say without fail, was closely followed by a very genuine and warm laugh of delight. It was the sound of a people desensitized by shock value and real societal terror discovering with joy that they could still be scared by a movie. It was a beautiful, wonderful sound.

The Orphanage is not a terrifying film, not in the way that films have terrified audiences in the past (mostly in the sixties and seventies). It is, however, profoundly creepy, and this thick, pervasive foundation of creepiness, which takes on a cinematic delight all its own, strips away the audiences' defenses so that when it punches us (which it wisely seldom does) , we are knocked to the floor. But, as I say, we are happy to be there. That's what we paid for.

Perhaps the physical presence of other filmgoers, the dark cinema and the atmosphere of engrossment thereby produced made the movie seem better than it was. But I say no film can be better than one which flowers in the environment just described, which is exactly what The Orphanage does. It is a film with such a wicked understanding of how horror works. It takes both its protagonist and its audience on a steady and solid regression back to our days as children, when horror was not an abstract filmic concept, but a living breathing thing in our hearts that flared up at midnight when we heard a noise we couldn't account for. There is a scene in it toward the end when our heroine unearths a descending staircase into pitch darkness. This reveal provoked laughter from the people around me that was not at all inappropriate. It was the unnerved, self conscious laughter of people who can't believe they've been manipulated back to this horrible place that they thought they outgrew when high school started.

It was laughter, because we are more or less adults who are in on the illusion. As adults, it's the only reaction to give: "Ahahaha they totally did it. They totally did it right. That's scary." It's our helplessly intellectual nature shielding us from the reason we're laughing: we're scared. Really, truly. Our terrified inner child is standing right there with the heroine, staring down those steps to nowhere, coming to shaking grips with the realization that there could be anything down there in that darkness, anything, anything at all.

Northern Wisdom

The greatest thing about Northern Exposure was that it was a series that simply should not have worked. The fish-out-of-water premise is solid enough, but the Kaufmanesque, profoundly bizarre and ahead-of-its-time eccentricities in every other specific should have left it dead in the water, an unpleasant blotch of debris that never had any cohesion to rely on. And yet, as if by magic, the ship floats, the show engages and a miracle takes place: we learn to love it. Northern Exposure is a clanking, Wells era contraption that somehow still manages to fly, and on the strength of this simple boost of faith proceed to tear up the sky.

Few would argue with the series' own analyst and philosopher, worldly ex-con and radio personality Chris Stevens, when he inadvertently summarizes the series motto: "It's not the thing you fling, but the fling itself." This is the most beautiful way of contextualizing and and rationalizing Northern Exposure's dizzying depth of insanity, expressed in a quintessentially Northern Exposure decorum. But tonight my gratitude to the show's writers is caused simply by this gorgeous and poetic paraphrasing of the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche, articulated by Chris toward the end of a dream-episode whereby Rob Morrow imagines he has a sleazy Jewish twin (played by Rob Morrow). The quote is as follows, and could stand in its beautiful blending of modernity and classic romantic philosophy to be one of my favourite quotes ever:

"It's like brother Nietzsche says: being human is a complicated gig. So give that old dark night of the soul a hug... and howl the eternal yes."