trickster | Multiple Enthusiasms

Via IO9, a link to a Moviehole interview in which Robert Downey, Jr. trashes DC and The Dark Knight:

My whole thing is that that I saw ‘The Dark Knight’. I feel like I’m dumb because I feel like I don’t get how many things that are so smart. It’s like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I’m like, ‘That’s not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.’ I loved ‘The Prestige’ but didn’t understand ‘The Dark Knight’. Didn’t get it, still can’t tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I’m like, ‘I get it. This is so high brow and so f–king smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.’ You know what? F-ck DC comics. That’s all I have to say and that’s where I’m really coming from.

Now first, it’s worth noting it sounds incredibly tongue-in-cheek.

But as I noted in IO9’s comments, I don’t think that makes it necessarily less true.

I noted just after seeing the movie that I hadn’t terrifically enjoyed it. I don’t think I actively disliked it, mind you, because I thought it had a lot of strengths and I thought I could see what it was going for, which I admired. Much of it had a very noir feel. Anyone who’s read my collection (as always, free here) probably picked up that I enjoy noir, as two of the stories are noir. I think the best thing Billy Faulkner ever wrote was The Big Sleep and that was because Chandler did it first, and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is among my favorite movies.

The thing about The Dark Knight as noir was that Nolan nailed the atmosphere but not really the conflict, which caused the writing to suffer. I can quote The Big Sleep off the top of my head–

“I don’t like your manners.”
“And I’m not crazy about yours. I didn’t ask to see you. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners, I don’t like them myself. They are pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings. I don’t mind your ritzing me drinking your lunch out of a bottle. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.”

But not so much The Dark Knight.

I think it was a little too dark, especially when Batman Begins had some nice, humorous touches (Morgan Freeman ftw [and: get well soon!]).

But I think my biggest problem was with the Joker. I’ve seen people cite the Joker, as a character, as the thematic counterpoint of Batman/Bruce Wayne, but he’s in fact not if solely because he has neither motivation nor backstory. The reason Bruce Wayne/Batman works is that we know how and why Bruce Wayne took up his cowl. We know his personal inciting incident (the death of his parents), and why he does what he does. We in addition know that he constantly wrestles with his own anger: witness the moment in Batman Begins when Wayne sneaks a revolver into the courtroom but then decides not to use it.

We know nothing of the sort about the Joker. Not where he came from, not why he does what he does. We don’t know why he paints his face. And most importantly, we don’t get any sense that he wrestles with his demons like Wayne does, or even that he has them. If we knew that he wrestled with them at some point and gave himself over to them in precisely the way Wayne refuses to, it might be effective. But we don’t.

“Agent of chaos” is one-dimensional characterization and lazy motivation at best and insulting at worst. At first I tried to view the Joker as a trickster-esque character, but he’s not that, either, because the trickster is amoral, beyond morals, lives by a slightly different moral compass than the rest of us but still has that moral compass. It’s why Jack Sparrow works so well. Total embodiment of the trickster archetype. And true, we don’t know his backstory, either, but we know his motivation, or, if we don’t, at least realize he has some.

Because of that lack of motivation, because it’s never clear what the Joker wants (he seems to start out wanting to kill the Batman, but it later turns out he feels the Batman “completes” him and seems to want to challenge Batman, which he never really does), the movie suffers. Especially in the final half-hour or so when every major character has an existential speech about the nature of good and evil and herodom so that they can telegraph to the audience everything the movie itself could not. The final half-hour of The Dark Knight may well be the most egregious example of telling over showing, lazy filmmaking, expository speech, and handing all your major characters philosophy theses as dialogue because you don’t trust what you’ve just made to stand on its own I have ever seen.

Oh, and after having seen Ledger’s performance, I still think Nolan missed a huge opportunity in not casting Christian Bale in triple roles as Bruce Wayne, Batman, and the Joker.

Just got back from an afternoon IMAX showing of The Dark Knight.

I have very, very mixed feelings about the experience as a whole, not to mention about the movie in particular. Warning: here be spoilers.

First, IMAX is awesome, but you’ve got to sit toward the back of the theater or it’s just too big. I mean, huge. Ginormous. I saw The Matrix: Reloaded in IMAX, and I think it’s one of the reasons I enjoyed it on first viewing.

Second, what is it with long-ass sequels? Seriously, first movie performs well and suddenly people think it justifies three frickin’ hours? It’s like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Spider-Man 3; you cram too much shit into them and they just bloat. I saw Pirates 2 at the El Capitan theater in Hollywood and was restless for at least the final third of the movie.

This movie was at least better in that regard, but it was still a solid twenty minutes too damned long, while during the final ten or so I felt completely bludgeoned over the head by the “message” it was trying to send me home with: blahblahblah hero blahblahblah survivor blahblahblah what we need more than what we want blahblah.

The tone was sporadic: at times dark and intense, at times tedious to the point of boring. I mean, come on, Batman wears a giant layer of body armor he modifies, in the first ten minutes of the movie, to be both faster and lighter, and then, when it comes down to it, when he finally fights the two characters who become the major villains of the movie,

he fuckin’ talks at them!

(and that’s not even mentioning that apparently the Batsuit gives Bruce Wayne a tracheotomy every damned time he puts it on. Batman speaks in some weirdo gravelly mumble like he’s both smoked too many cigarettes and is just about to hurl)

And let’s talk about those villains.

About midway through (so: at the seven-hour mark), Aaron Eckhardt’s Harvey Dent gets half-blowed up and becomes Two-Face. Who has a gruesome make-up job (that comes off on his hospital pillow, by the way), as well as a big ole’ eyeball he can’t lube because he no longer has eyelids, but which never actually seems to bother him. Dent may well be the best character in the movie and certainly has more dimensions (which isn’t difficult, considering most of the others seem to have one); Eckhardt plays him at first heroically and then later tragically.

The other villain is the Joker, as played by Heath Ledger in borrowed vaudeville clothes and make-up he stole from James O’Barr; somewhere, Brandon Lee spins in his grave. Except: Lee actually has motivation in the story, and while Alfred has a nice speech that some guys just like to watch the world burn… well, meh. I’ve heard some talk of posthumous Oscars. I ended that sentence because I didn’t want to mention Ledger in the same one. It’s not a bad performance, exactly; in fact, it’s fun, in parts, and creepy in a few, but overall it’s not even nearly as good as Depp’s in the first Pirates movie.

And I mention that role for a specific reason: two vaguely trickster-y characters in two summer blockbusters lauded for the roles. But Depp’s Jack Sparrow is not just more nuanced but even more consistent than Ledger’s Joker. There’s quite ado that the Joker is just chaos and has no rules, which is all well and good, but ultimately, there’s no motivation for him, so ultimately he doesn’t really want anything Batman can stop him from getting, besides chaos, and that’s just boring.

Ultimately, it’s a bit sad, because Batman, more than most superheroes, is defined by his villains. The Joker is his ultimate nemesis, and I give Nolan kudos for not killing him in the end. I think that was one of the major flaws of Burton’s Batman movies; it should be a rule that you’re not allowed to kill the villain in a superhero movie, because the point of villains in comic books is that they always come back. The Spider-Man movies keep killing characters that have been around in the comics for half a century; the Joker’s been around since even before then, I think.

It’s the one thing Superman Returns got right; you don’t kill Lex Luthor. Superman’s allowed to beat him (that’s why he’s the titular character), but you can’t kill him.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I like the tone Nolan went for, for the most part. It’s like superhero noir–Batman noir–which was cool. And suitably dark, in places. And the characters seem to wrestle with their roles even if it’s not exactly clear what they’re really wrestling with. Wayne seems vexed–very, very vexed–over his cowl, but yet keeps right on donning it. He seems to want to give up the cape racket altogether at some points, but yet he builds some weirdo sonar doohickey that makes for some half-assed special effects in the final act we all saw in the eighties and didn’t really work much better then.

Oh, and I don’t care how strong your body armor is: you don’t jump out of a penthouse apartment in Gotham City, catch a girl on the way down, plunge onto a car you dent, and survive with nary a scratch. Last time I saw somebody jump off anything of great height (in the rad In Bruges), Brendan Gleason literally lost his arm.

But no, Batman and the girl manage to quip between them.

There are nice touches here and there. And I mostly enjoyed the experience. It ain’t a bad movie, or anything.

Still, I had more fun at Ironman, and enjoyed it way more as a movie. There was a superhero movie that knew what it was doing.

This one?

Not so much.

Multiple Enthusiasms

Infinite jest. Excellent fancy. Flashes of merriment.

Tag: trickster