Haven’t seen the new Batman movie, which I expect to enjoy, but which I do not expect to change my life. Have read a half dozen reviews, though. Because of the reviews, I bought and read two supposed classics of the Batman comics, Morrison/McKean’s Arkham Asylum and Moore/Bolland’s The Killing Joke. Was not nearly as impressed with the former as its creators appear to have been. Enjoyed the latter pretty much. The concluding joke is great and I love it, though it could have been almost any good joke, the point being that these two enemies couldn’t help laughing together.
(Yes the joke deals with insanity, and the Joker could be interpreted as saying he is the second lunatic and the moral outlook that the Batman offers is like the beam of light the first lunatic proposes, but there is such a thing as taking exegesis too far.)
As much as I love comix, I have become weary of the grandiose thumposity so many are trying to inject nowadays. Simply cannot take Frank Miller seriously as a philosopher, sorry. His understanding is on a par with “I thank whatever gods may be/For my unconquerable soul.” What is it with all these lame thinkers presuming to seriousify comix? I mean, I like a realistic-ish story. My criticisms of early superhero comix are not that they didn’t deal with serious subjects, but basically that they were too preposterous to enjoy. I need a little suspension of disbelief. Believable motivation matters to me. Physical plausibility too (note I do not ask for probability.)
Admittedly, I’m a hard case. I thought Iron Man was fun and witty at the beginning, and then degenerated into just another large-machines-going-wack conclusion. I wondered how come the Christopher Reeves wannabe playing Superman in Superman Returns can fly faster than light but has trouble catching up to a falling plane, or how come the plane doesn’t just crumple when he pushes on its nose to stop it. I enjoyed Hancock (though it left a lot of important questions hanging), but couldn’t help wondering how come nobody in movies or comix seems to understand that if you throw a bully a thousand feet in the air and catch him five and a half feet from the ground your superarm is going to cut him in half. It aint the ground that kills you when you fall, kids, it’s the deceleration. All than energy with nowhere to go. Somebody take a physics course, for crying out loud. That way, when you violate physics you can do it wittily, like Alan Moore having Tom Strong and Paul Saveen discuss phlogiston (though he misspells the word).
That allowed, I must say that I find this dark brooding “serious” stuff to be just vamped-up simper fi (spelling intended). I’ve grumbled in other places about Miller’s Nietzschean flatulence, so will spare you. Afraid I find Arkham Asylum more of the same old same old, though. Based on the mad philosopher’s dictum that if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes back, as it seems to me. Oh that’s a nice high-sounding justification with a veneer that imitates deep thought, but to me it looks like cheap pseudo-Lovecraftian horror-for-horror’s sake.
The Killing Joke is considerably better as a story (Moore couldn’t write a bad story if he tried), though it trades on the same old overworked notion, that in fighting our enemies we become like them. Is that the best these children can do? Is this the pinnacle of contemporary moral and philosophical thought? Today’s storytellers seem to me a bunch of vaunters congratulating themselves on their moral courage for being unafraid to look the darkness in the face. Hasn’t the possible darkness of existence been considered a few times already, and more powerfully and usefully? Heart of Darkness? MacBeth? Othello?
Part of the trouble, I think, and others have commented on this, is that these creators appear to wish to be superior to the artform they work in. It is not deep enough for such deep thinkers, that’s the implication. Maybe the reason that stance doesn’t work for me is that I have never counted myself superior to a good story in any form, whether in comix or plays or movies or novels. As I say, I found the early comix silly, and I definitely felt superior to the sort of intellect that could think a being from a distant planet with many times the gravity of Earth would not only look human (instead of like say a tank), but actually be able to mate with humans and produce babies. But the remedy for this lackwittedness is not basso profundo incantations to the inutterable darkness of the soul.
I find this pose everywhere nowadays, not merely in comix. A dear friend of mine, a Cormac McCarthy fan, recommended No Country for Old Men, which I had already seen. I believe it is understood, as most of McCarthy’s work is, as (again) a fearless look at the essential darkness of being.
I was not so impressed as my friend. Pointed out that the killer played by Javier Bardeem is an extremely rare type of human, unfazed by doubt or emotion. Most people (by far), though capable of cruelty, are confused and subject to self-questioning. I have never in my life met such a remorseless human, and I have met a lot of people. Our current story-tellers seem to be in love with the type, though, and as a result the moral choices they describe seem extremely unrealistic. Of a piece with America’s foreign policy, I would say—instead of dealing with things as they are, substitute a highly theoretical and unlikely ultimate polarization. Is it better to torture or to let innocent people die? If your children were in a burning house and you could only save one of them, which one would it be? Face a lot of that sort of decision, do you?
We are being seduced into spending our moral energy on highly unlikely and highly artificial choices, and basing our whole behavior on such conundra, while ignoring the immediate evils we might actually do something about.
As for Brian Bolland’s story The Innocent, appended to The Killing Joke, which Bolland (rather smarmily to my taste) congratulates himself for having written—it is based on a moral misconception. The character’s argument is that most people behave well out of cowardice, not out of true desire to do the right thing, and that such cowardice is not really morally admirable. True enough, but the conclusion does not follow—the character therefore decides it is necessary to do a horrible thing, just one, in order to have something to compare good behavior to.
This is a quick shuffle from a crooked deck. Never mind that the character reads to me as a sick fuck who is glorifying what he really wants to do, and that his supposed goodness is as cowardly and fraudulent as he says most people’s morality is. The thinking seems tight enough if you don’t look close, but it only holds if all you are concerned about is yourself. If you are concerned about the welfare of others, the “cowardice” of conventional morality is definitely beneficial. I had just as soon you not shoot me in the head, thank you, and if it is fear of punishment that causes you to refrain rather than morality and selfless love, well, hell, I’ll take the deal. You may be a moral coward from some ultimate point of view, but I’m alive.
Again, hasn’t this been done before? Isn’t that the point of Crime and Punishment, which is, among other things, a refutation of the Nietzschean idea of the superman? Raskalnikov wants to imagine himself as a superman, but finds out, too late for his victim, that he has a conscience. In my view humans are almost always like Raskalnikov, and almost never like remorseless superbeings.
One last question: Why is it always necessary for the supposed ubermensch to destroy in order to demonstrate uberority? Some of us suppose that the ability to create and be kind is the truly superior faculty.
Oh, so much I want to say in response to these many good and provocative thoughts. I think your last point resonates most strongly with me right now, and it reminds me of Frank Miller’s oft-quoted statement after the publication of his Dark Knight Returns and Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen—“Alan Moore provided the autopsy and I provided the brass-band funeral” for the superhero genre.
I’ve always wondered how Moore felt/feels about that characterization of his work and about being yoked together with Miller there. Because while Miller’s only superhero work of late is a brass band encore (All Star Batman and Robin), Moore eventually turned his post-Watchmen efforts to the creative possibilities still left in the superhero genre (if seasoned more heavily with pulp and sf tropes) in his Superman pastiche Supreme and in Tom Strong, etc. He seems to have realized, or at least to have more fully embraced, that to create is the superior achievement. (I also wonder now if “autopsy” is too limiting a term for Watchmen; maybe it was a controlled burn?)
As much of a Morrison fanboy as I am, Arkham Asylum has always left me cold, to the point that I avoided his work for years after I read it, assuming it was all more of the same overwrought pseudo-seriousity. I’m glad to see that he mostly got it out of his system. Although his recent Batman run hasn’t lived up to expectations—maybe Morrison and Batman just aren’t made for each other?
On The Killing Joke: I actually thought Dark Knight (the film) handled its “not everyone will crack like the Joker when faced with life’s horrors” moment more convincingly than Moore did, though I won’t go into detail here lest I wander into spoiler territory. I haven’t read that Bolland story and now I’ll be sure not to.
I’ve written about my ambivalence about McCarthy before and so won’t go into it again; I read The Road recently and enjoyed it pretty well, but it did nothing to improve my feeling that after Suttree, McCarthy has continued to narrow his range to the point that maybe I’m just not that interested in what he has to say any more, nor so enchanted with how he’s saying it.
Perhaps more later after I fill some boxes . . .
you win the day with “simper fi”
for me, The Road is the one, though its takes a suppression of one’s plausibility reflex to take it in. plus he set himself up nicely for some sequels where he gets to rebuild society frontier-style
I didn’t really like NCFOM the book all that much, too much Andy-and-Barney-in-purgatory-chat. I thought the movie ironed a lot of that out rather nicely
>>>Today’s storytellers seem to me a bunch of vaunters
>>>congratulating themselves on their moral courage
>>>for being unafraid to look the darkness in the face.
Ding! I think you’ve just nailed the overall zeitgeist there. From Cormac McCarthy to Don Delillo, through superheroes to tv shows and films (I think the literary critic from The New Yorker, James Woods – I know, funny name – said that it was a faux brooding face as a shody reaction to 9-11. That it happened, and everybody was feeling ashamed in writing about shoes, fantasy or whatever else that wasn’t ‘serious’ stuff. So a entire culture blinked, like a frightened child, and made a serious frowny face yelling at his mom how he is a serious boy now).
Which I find it to be very much hand-in-hand with power worship of the recent years, the macho bravado turned into dark anti-heroics (which became the old days’ golden hero—because worshipping a too-perfect boyscout is kinda fairytale-ish and gay), and the vague homophobia and overall self-imposed frightened grayness and blandness of overall pop culture.
Just let us be intelectually honest and exchange the killers and the proposterous “intimidating” figures (which are more telling about the readers and the author’s fears than revealing anything about the world itself) with equivalent ones. Just exchange Barden’s character with T-500 or whatever cold blooded killing machine (ooh awesome concept!) and a bit of the Two-Face and the Joker. It’s just people pressing themselves on a fantasy subject with some allured fear and some hope it’ll rub off on them, to have that notch on their belt, to see what the ‘sheeple’ can’t face (it’s the bashed goth geek phenomen spread wide – everything must signify one’s own superiority by knocking others down). Middlebrow work (almost perfectly made to a production workings of book-2-film), product of the same thing that created the possibility of a president dressing up as a cowboy in our age (although I’m still hoping for a Pirate-dressed president).
It’s the Clenched Zeitgeist (what is clenched is up to the reader). But it’s becoming self-aware, it seems, out of the little tunnel it put itself in.
Truly lovely text. Thank you.
I guess this very interesting exchange raises in my mind two questions that are quite different, for I think this post is really tracking down two different though related trails.
One: What is the art of the comic? I love a one word definition of poetry that someone once used in a lit class. “Condensation.” Of course that is inadequate to the whole, but it does a good job for a single word. What is the one word, or 25-words-or-less definition for the art of the comic? And, on what level would one classify the genre? Is it a genre that stands alone, or would you say it holds a relation to literature like musical theater does to opera.
Two: What about the brooding of contemporary artistic work? C.S. Lewis once said that Literature “enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides.” Do you think that the problem with the artistic brooding is not the brooding (Othello being a case in point) but, it is getting beyond the brooding to the enriching of competencies or as Steinbeck might phrase it, to enhancing the perfectibilities of humankind. We are a depressed society. It shows in the artforms.
I may be an incorrigible romantic, but I do think that the point of things, including art is to break through the darkness and depression to kindness and love. If it doesn’t do that, then perhaps it all is a joke.
Yeh, Arkham Asylum is forgettable. What Nolan does in The Dark Knight, though, is to Cuisinart various different interpretations of the Batman mythos in the expectation that it’ll leave the audience thinking: we get an Alan Moore Joker who wants to be perceived as the Grant Morrison Joker and a Frank Miller Commissioner Gordon whose moral authority is kind of undercut by events. Also Alfred on the Straussian Right and Lucius Fox on the libertarian Left.
I don’t think the Coen brothers’ take on Cormac McCarthy is as serious as McCarthy’s take on himself: they’re incapable of avoiding ironic distance, particularly with respect to hardboiled masculinity.
To Josh: Have seen The Dark Knight and enjoyed it thoroughly since I posted. Not sure I agree about the Frank Miller Gordon—where are the foul cigars, the Ayn-Randish bluster? I liked Oldman’s Gordon much better, but then I think Miller is, simply put, puerile and silly. I liked the rest of your commentary on the movie, though. Especially enjoyed your Straussian Alfred (I miss the days when he was just a butler, sigh) and libertarian Lucius Fox. Had of course my usual quibbles—for example, where does the Joker get all those explosives and all that artillery? That stuff is registered out the kazoo, and private citizens can’t get their hands on it. It’s pretty much restricted for sale to the military, corporations, and terroristic warlords who hate us.
And the very end, in which Gordon underlines the point by saying it aloud. Clumsy. Overkill. Fatuous. Nor would I be so quick to assume citizens must be spared the depressing fact that a good man can be corrupted. Have pretty much had enough of people making these decisions for me without asking. If “the people” are so lame, why are you saving them, hero? Seems to undercut your pronounced faith in them when they refused to blow each other up. I think all that concluding bushwah was just an adolescent gesture in the direction, once again, of dark significance.
But hell, I LIKED the movie, honest.
Why, by the way, is it such a crime to be critical of things you enjoy? Most viewers and readers act as though unless you surrender all your critical faculties at the front door you are attacking the work. I never surrender my critical awareness, not in books, movies, comics, music, religion, science, life, or my own work. The attitude reminds me of the you’re-either-for-us-or-against-us brand of “patriotism,” the implication that unless you are an autonomaton you’re being picky. Is it so confusing to think that one may simultaneously be entertained and yet retain one’s intelligence?
I’d say McCarthy takes himself pretty seriously, as evidenced by all his other books, though it is possible the Coen brothers take him more seriously than he takes himself. Movie and comic writers tend to honor lit writers with a heavy-handed reverence, whereas fellow writers find it difficult to be so sobersided about the putative majesty of the stuff.
Did anyone notice, by the way, in The Road, the Britishisms—”I’d a deck of cards,” references to “the bracken”? What? I thought he was a rough tough writer of Western Americana.
While I’m nattering on, I am moved to add a few notes on Watchmen. When I saw Dark Knight, there was a preview for a movie of the Watchmen, to appear in 2009. Looked pretty interesting, and caused me to go back and take a look at the graphic novel.
I know it was a thunderous revelation at the time, but to me it is a long way from Moore’s best work—I favor Tom Strong, Tomorrow Comics (except for the ho-hum cutesiness of Cobweb—afraid the no-underwear thing doesn’t particularly set me buzzing), Top Ten, and Smax. There’s a bit of Nietzscean special pleading to Watchmen, too, certainly a thumping and insistent grimness which is not probatory with regard to existence, but merely furthers the purpose of the narrative. In particular, I find the notion odious that it is necessary for some brave soul to take responsibility for killing a half a million people in order to “fix” what is wrong with America and the world. Moore is too subtle to advocate such a thing himself, laying it off on Adrian Veidt, but the comic seems pretty clearly sympathetic.
Have seen this sort of bombast from science fiction heroes often enough, and perhaps it would not be worth commenting on except that some poor reader might mistake it for serious thought.
There are many reasons such a course of action is wicked, but here’s the A-number-1 basic fact: THINGS DON’T WORK THAT WAY. If you presume to slaughter a half million in order to improve the situation, you had better be damned sure the results are next thing to inevitable. However, nobody but NOBODY can predict human behavior that accurately. Has anybody out there in the world of comix heard of chaos theory, of sensitive dependence on initial conditions?
As it happens, we have a perfect test case. The events of 9/11. By the logic of Watchmen, those events should have united the American people against a common enemy, and saved our society, and apparently some people thought they would.
Look at us seven years later, quarreling worse than ever, the institutions of our culture failing disastrously on every hand. Listen, would-be heroes: IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY.
I’m late to this, sorry, but I had to take last week discovering that Starkville had several new bars.
I did enjoy the new movie, but no, it wasn’t life changing. As far as Arkham Asylum—I was once a dedicated Grant-fan, but that book always left me cold. Perhaps it was the simplistic, and ultimately unsatisfying, “look into the dark night of the soul,” or maybe it was the muddy and distorted visuals by Dave McKean. I think I own it, but if it got lost, I wouldn’t know.
I’ve long been a proponent of “stop making comics terrible.” That doesn’t mean they can’t address serious concerns or be powerful fiction or memoir (I’m thinking anything by Los Bros and Fun Home, especially)—just that so often the “dark (k)night of the soul” junk doesn’t read well. It’s not any good. The basics of storytelling aren’t there (cough, cough, FINAL CRISIS) and so what’s meant to be a thunderous arc comes across as confused, or muddled.
As far as the uber-destructor: it’s harder to create than to destroy. It’s just that simple. And sadly, I think we can list a number of modern destroyers of classic characters that took years or decades to develop, and precious few brand-new characters that have any possibility of existing more than a few limited series, maybe spitting out a hardcover. The legends have already been created—by legends themselves, now—and we’re simply left with a sandbox in which those toys are endlessly smashed and reconfigured, nothing more, nothing less.
Meme-challenge: Name five characters created in the last five years who shall endure, or rather, are even worthy of endurance. Retreads don’t count (i.e., the new Latino Blue Beetle (who I dig)).
As to Watchman: the thing that worries me about 9/11 is that it COULD have worked that way. But again: it takes genius and subtlety to create something new—something, arguably, our Adrien Veidt had in spades. And something the corrupt Bush Administration had absolutely nothing of.
In terms of the American sandbox, instead of creating something new with all that raw material, they simply kicked over what fragile structures we had. And for that, they are true bastards.
I fail your meme-challenge entirely, which I think proves its thesis.
Yeah, I found the visuals of AA pretentious rather than profound.
9/11 could have worked that way, but what are the odds? Given the unknowable complexity of human culture, can anybody, no matter how smart, predict the outcome of a given event? My answer would be no. When I first saw the footage of the airplanes crashing into the towers, my first thought—and this is the honest truth—was, Oh no, oh no, my country is going to be consumed and maybe destroyed by hatred. That hasn’t exactly happened yet, but it is closer to what did happen.
Do you gamble half a million lives on a hunch? Besides, I was never persuaded by Adrian Veidt’s supposed genius. A bit of quick mumbo-jumbo about William Burroughs-style cutting and pasting, supposedly the ability to discern the zeitgeist from random displays, a technique which has since pretty well been discredited, but must have seemed hot stuff in the eighties. Otherwise, the enormity of the horror he creates is used to prove his genius, and his genius is used to justify the horror—a completely circular argument. If you are going to show me such an act as reasonable (let’s not even get into morality), you had better convince me of the genius of the one proposing it.
As I have often said, only a genius can render genius credibly. Moore is close to genius, if not one in fact (he may be—in the arts, it is frequently difficult to tell close up—Shakespeare had to wait more than a hundred years for general recognition, Mozart was ignored, and so on), but I think he failed here. Doc Manhattan is far more successfully imagined, but I have quibbles there too.
What worries me is that someone will take Veidt’s approach seriously. Veidt, even if we accept his surpassing genius (which, again, I do not), does not exist. He is a character in a story. It is easy to make things come out the way you want in a story. Life is immeasurably harder. In my opinion, we have no geniuses capable of such discernment. Actually, in my very strong opinion, after lifelong thought, I do not think genius has anything to do with it. Being a genius does not mean that you can avoid the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which increasingly seems to me to be of a piece with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. It is a fundamental limit on knowability. The point of chaos theory is that complex phenomena are not merely more difficult of resolution, but inherently unpredictable. Even if we had an Adrian Veidt, he could not know the results of his actions.
I do agree with you about the Bush league, though, with regard to both their venality and their stupidity.
Aside to Josh: I took another look at Batman: Year One, and now I believe that is the Frank Miller Gordon you were talking about, not the Gordon of The Dark Knight and DKR. That Gordon is indeed close to the Oldman Gordon in Nolan’s film, and though he is improbably skilled in the martial arts (ALL of Miller’s heroes know 17 brands of martial arts—even though we never see them practice, and only practice creates competence—and ALL can break arms and legs and recover in a matter of days), he doesn’t smoke foul cigars and broadcast butch faux toughness relentlessly.
Apologies for misreading you.
From out in the sticks, on someone else’s computer…
Acute as ever, Jack—the “grandiose thumposity” is insufferable when coming from the lips of an adult: it’s one thing to give characters a simplistic, symbolically predetermined world to live through, but after a while they do all start to seem intellectually stunted. So go read a book, Batman! For God’s sake get some perspective.
I’m still mulling Dark Knight, which I thought was excellent—strangely, though, I’m not so bothered by the lack of criticism among people who liked it, as I am by the lack of criticism among people who didn’t...it seems strange that even the most negative of comics bloggers have had more respect for the material—by which I mean the actual film, not just its riff on the comic or the property in general, or “society”, or “darkness”—than many of the people who are supposed to critique movies for a living. But, these people don’t seem to have much time for critique: too busy with other things to allocate the necessary respect for a story. Strong words from me, I guess, but as appalling as “thumposity” is in works, it’s even worse when it shows up in critical readings of works. I think.
What do you guys make of the film’s ending with Gordon’s distinction between Dent as “the hero we needed, not the hero we deserved” and Batman as “the hero we deserve but not the hero we need”?
In one sense, it’s tempting to read that ending as Gordon distinguishing Batman as a kind of flawed hero, as the vigilante who must bring justice to Gotham outside of the law and outside of their perception of what is moral, right, and wrong. On the other hand, Gordon’s comment comes at this moment when Batman has done something selfless, allowing himself to be blamed for the deaths of 5 police officers (and various citizens). We’re told that he can “take it”...that he can carry that burden because that’s what the people of Gotham need him to be.
On the flip side, Dent is hailed as a hero in death, as the hero the city needs, the example of goodness with a face and a sense of justice within established moral codes (ie, the law).
But the problem is that, when Gordon says this, he KNOWS the truth about both Dent and Batman and that these distinctions are based on an illusion (though it’s put to the audience that they are necessary illusions) on the nature of heroism in the public mind.
Doesn’t the insistence that the people need a certain kind of hero suggest that heroism (or just goodness in general) is malleable to the point of being manufactured by a culture that “needs” it?
Or did the Nolans need to wrap the ending in a nonsensical bow so as to encourage us all to forget that the last 45 mins of the film could have been the third film?
And by the way, did anybody else think that the scene in the building at the end (the one where Morgan Freeman helps him with the sonar bat-vision) was way too much like a video game? Something about Morgan Freeman telling me to watch out for the guys on the top floor brought back flashbacks of my undergrad days spent playing way too much Counterstrike.
Can’t answer the video game question, having played no video games but Glider (an old one) and solitaire. Which probably disqualifies me from commenting on anything from the last two decades.
My opinion (I stress the word) on the “hero we needed” beeswax—and remember, I must say again, I really liked the movie—was that it was just more bullshit overinflated pretentious rhetoric.
A simple question: Who do you think most of the people who saw the movie identified with, Batman or the poor schlubs who have to be protected from the truth, the hoi polloi who don’t deserve Batman? My guess is Batman. And yet the movie is breaking all box office records, which means a whole lot of people are seeing it. What are the odds that all of those people, or even a significant percentage, are like Batman?
Yeah, right. So the movie-goer accepts the argument of the movie that citizens must be protected from the truth by “heros,” but by all odds the movie-goer IS the citizen being so deluded? Does that make sense?
It is my firm conviction that the whole approach is antithetical to true democracy. I am sick of the specious glorification of the uberhero who knows what we need better than we do. Any sort of horrible action can be justified on such a basis. The Joker justifies his actions on a similar basis. Every cottonfreaking human alive thinks he or she knows what everybody else needs better than everybody else does. That’s the whole point of democratic safeguards and of telling the truth, countering that very tendency. This is a STORY, for crying out loud. It should not be taken as a serious case for peddling illusion and subterfuge.
I think your point about the manipulation of the truth is well taken. If we accept the prepared illusions of the illusion-makers, how shall we know the real thing when we meet it? If our notion of the hero is a construct, how shall we recognize the real heroes?
And yet, to take a break from unpacking boxes and stroke my beard re: the question of Moore’s sympathies for Adrian Veidt, this is where Moore always ties me up in knots. Because yes, absolutely, he is sympathetic toward him, and yes, absolutely, the world after 9/11 would seem to prove his pseudo-pyschohistorical maneuverings impractical and wrongheaded (in addition to being, you know, morally reprehensible).
But here’s the thing: Immediately after 9/11, and I think this is part of what gorjus was getting at, we did have a version of the Watchmen ending: Good vibes about America all over (most of) the world, liberals and conservatives put down a good 90% of their rhetorical bludgeons, lions and lambs making eyes at each other and changing the sheets, etc. Good grief, America was wiling to unite behind George W Bush, whose attempts at leadership were embarrassing and half-hearted even in the moment. Sure, a lot of us knew he would foul it up. But those first couple weeks after 9/11 were not a bad approximation of the Watchmen hugfest.
And then it all went to hell. As of course it would. But: Doesn’t Moore suggest that Veidt’s own opinion of his “success” is wrong-headed? Vedit asks Dr. Manhattan, “It all worked out all right, didn’t it? In the end?” He thinks it’s “the end,” and they can draw the curtain; or, to put it in different terms, he’s thinking in narrative arcs, in monthly adventure comic format. Dr. Manhattan has read all 8 volumes of the still-being-published TPB series, though, and he’s thinking about trying to read the manga: “Nothing ever ends.”
I dunno; you’ve all read the series more recently than I, and my copy is somewhere in the bottom of this pile of crap, so I can’t speak too specificaly to the tone of the conclusion. (Except to note that “Nostalgia” is the scent that everyone is big on—and as Don DeLillo reminded us in 1983, “War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say good things about their country.” Or words to that effect. That’s pretty close. See earlier note on location of my books.) But maybe the Doc is closer to Moore’s view there than is Veidt?
The other maybe-kinda implicit critique of Veidt’s scheme is in the final scene with the first Silk Spectre; Veidt’s plan relies upon humans being predictable, manipulable, upon the world being basically a giant Skinner box. Yet we see her planting a kiss on the picture of her rapist. Now, this is problematic in about a thousand different ways. But I wonder if it’s meant to be problematic in that way—if we’re meant to see it as something so unaccountable, unpredictable, and bizarrely/purely human that it stands as an implicit rebuke to Veidt’s whole plan, along the very lines that Jack has criticized it above?
I dunno. I may be reading too much into it or giving Moore too much credit. He wrote the book he wrote, and he chose to end it with Veidt’s “triumph”—as Jack notes, it’s a troublingly seductive ending that promises order and peace if the right Strong Man is playing Big Daddy, which is part of what got us into this stupid mess with the Bushies in the first place and what might keep us in it for another few years with St. John. That ending is more persuasive than these little moments I’ve noted. And I’ve a knee-jerk habit of leaping to the “Maybe this is really a critique of the thing it purports to be” response even when the thing is just exactly what it purports to be. (This is however an useful classroom tool.) Moore could be awfully preachy in the 1980s, and it may make more sense to see this as his mounting the rostrum once again. Nevertheless, these moments near the conclusion nag at me and stick in my mind.
This is fun.
Hey, Professor Fury, good to have you back. Yeah, your points are good, and I have thunk em myself. The Silk Spectre falling in love with her rapist is one of my favorite things about the book, as most human.
I don’t know. Maybe Moore is hedging his bets. I noticed Doc Manhattan’s not demurral but lack of agreement, too. Is it enough to carry a the point, however? I think the weight of the narrative works against a few minor caveats. If your point is that Veidt is mistaken, I think as a storyteller you should make the point. What happens next? In the comic, things pretty much work out. My point isn’t that they can’t, but that we have on way of knowing, and betting the lives of half a million people on it is rather extreme. Like I say, I won’t even argue the morality of the act. If I knew for certain the human race was doomed unless I helped slaughter a half million, yes, I would have a hard moral choice.
The point is, for me, there is absolutely no way to know such a thing.
As for the aftermath of 9/11, maybe. I remember a little flush of togetherness. I felt similar things after my high school football games. But when we say that it WOULD have all turned out good except for Bush, aren’t we right back in the guessing game with Veidt?
I also remember that reaction I had, oh no, my country is going to be consumed by hate. Don’t forget that in all that togetherness there was a great deal of anger and hate too. We got a crew of venal clowns who used that anger and hate, but it was there and anger and hate are always corrupting influences.
Believe me, I like Moore. But all my logical and narrative instincts tell me this story is wack. Seductive, but wack. It isn’t that people don’t have the right to tell stories the way they want to. I just feel that precious little hard criticism has been attempted on this particular piece, and I get nervous when cultures seem to be basing their behavior on the emotional pleadings of stories. As far as I know, no one else has raised the questions about Watchmen that I have. Why not? Since such thinking is everywhere nowadays, shouldn’t somebody be raising those questions?
Once again, my main point is simply that nobody but nobody can predict human behavior, for fundamental reasons, not for reasons of stupidity. If Moore meant his story differently than I am taking it, I am reading it wrongly. But what I am really arguing against is not so much how he meant the story as how most people take it. I think how most people take it is unmistakably as justification. All I want to say is Wait. THINK about this.
More to Fury: Sorry to rush off. Had to watch The Daily Show and Colbert.
Yeah, this is fun. I suppose we are debating heavy topics, but who said that couldn’t be fun?
The first thing to say about The Dark Knight (unless you want to start by nominating Ledger for Best Actress right away) is that the movie is dark, literally and figuratively, and it’s just that blur that makes the summer blockbuster exciting, and worth more than a glance at its record breaking (in the silly season) box office gross. Dark in its noir-influenced (entangled and unresolved) twists of plot as well as its tricky (double double) take on the idea of the hero, The Dark Knight is also filmed in such low light throughout that the viewer who’s let out into sunshine should be prepared to stumble around at first, even in shades, while the eyes struggle to readjust. Dimly or even barely lit, the spaces of the film (impersonal, nowhere spaces, mostly) recreate in their zero degree architecture and lack of light the space of the movie theater. The framed spaces of the film, interior and exterior, scream letterbox: Gotham City has been formatted, we might say, not merely to fit but to be a screen, so that what we are seeing is in part our own seeing ‘as in a glass darkly’. The illumination is fitful and weak, the sudden enlightenments (an occasional white shirtfront or pale jacket does brighten the gloom and of course when things blow up great billows of flame fill the screen) are brief, most of the time the characters grope in an obscurity we share: a darkness that even when natural seems intentional (is intentional). The “bat signal” isn’t the only signal that shows up better when the sun goes down: read it that the movie’s many layers of murk are always in some part self-referential. Obviously good and evil have been, in Western culture, lined up with black and white—and the movie mobilizes that binary in some traditional ways (Bruce Wayne is filmed putting on a white shirt for a scene in which he appears in a blue shirt, the film’s “hero” is blond and blue-eyed) and complicates the issue in others (of the film’s few fair-haired characters given significant screen time, one is a Russian, and perhaps the most literally light-filled moment in the movie is when the Joker appears dressed all in white, in the daylight, the hospital he’s blowing up on fire behind him). What we might want to say is that this obvious binary (dark and light) has been complicated in order to enact and symbolize the other binaries the film is having problems with: good and bad, female and male, American and foreign, sane and crazy, normal and “freak,” and—finally—reality and illusion. If the point were simply that at “(K)night” all cats are grey (and the film makes some gestures toward such a claim), there would be little to discuss, but the cats or acts in this film are like the darkness itself, meant to be understood as both natural and intentional, meant to both invite and foil interrogation. In short the anamorphic figure for the film itself might be a minor character, one of the joker’s mobilized crazies, apparently the only person caught at the scene of the attempt on the mayor’s life. His giddy failure to recognize the danger of his situation, like his wide, wet eyes and fixed smirk, seem signs of pride, while his silence is easily (by his interrogator and the audience) mistaken for strength—until we’re told to let it go, informed that we’ll never get anything out of him, that what we’re facing is (just) “a schizo.” In that instant in which someone who seemed to be full of information is revealed as empty we have a symbol for the many dead end attempts to understand which characterize our post 9/11 if not postmodern condition. But (like the act of terrorism itself?) the ONLY thing this pretend policeman ever was, of course, was a message, wearing, if not “his heart on his sleeve,” the name of the criminal’s next victim over his heart. “It’s not about the money,” the Joker mutters, “it’s about…sending…a message.” But if the message isn’t about money—or rather, in the few places that the message isn’t about money—the message is about messages.
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