Thinking Screens

Is The Dark Knight stinking of Imperialism? one of my dear friends asked, rather answered affirmatively in that post I have quoted. I have still not been able to view the film (holy lethargy and weariness of mine) but I thought I might deal with the question tangentially. Christopher Nolan is a favorite director and I wish to write a bit about his films in few forthcoming posts (thanks Prithwish and Aniket! Did I get your names right?).

I don’t think Nolan’s Dark Knight will stink of imperialism. But there are immense possibilities of doing so. I don’t think it will, because it is Nolan and Batman, or, because of the way Nolan approaches Batman, recalling Batman Begins. I think it might, because Hollywood is a big powerful conservative system, greater than individual visions.

For last few years, blame my middle-youth for that, I am hooked to one of the most enduring genre (genre? or style? or movement? or simply a phase?) Hollywood has ever produced: the Noir. Now, my eccentricity doesn’t allow me to watch more, I am sure that’s the better way to appreciate. Few noirs I have seen triggered thoughts, and I have enjoyed more by thinking about it. Noir builds a ‘world’ of its own, and to me, that is the modern-metroplitan, noir is. The more you brood noirish, the more the America in the ’30s and ’40s, during the Prohibition, after the Great Depression and between the Wars, will haunt you. And it is not exactly the documentary history, but the history as it is viewed through Hollywood what haunts. It is history which turns into a mindscape, filtering out certain essential drives out of events and anecdotes, creating a ‘world-view’. I will gush in a next post about noir, but to sum it up: noir had the courage of viewing America’s darkness without any resulting skirting of issues, neither providing easy solutions. It is noir’s cynicism, its reversal of standard values, its uncompromising tendency to unsettle, its knack for troubles rather than trouble-shooting which has made it probably the most revisited genre in Hollywood’s history. Take any director of substance, he has dabbled with it at least once.

Was watching Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) few days back, considered one of the greatest mob-films (the gangster genre, another output of the period) like The Godfather. I really wished to see a film entirely set in Chicago in the ’30s. My immediate response was: well, not a great movie though very earnestly made. Inspite of those stellar performances by Sean Connery and Robert De Niro and Kevin Costner’s sincere one, I thought that the film should have been more gritty; It rather turned out to be cheerful! I considered the dialogues and situations to be too cliched.  Subsequently, Ennio Morricone’s music continued to haunt and the film settled in my mind. Ask me, I actually liked the ‘Odessa Steps’ tribute to Sergei Eisenstein though it was ripped off of all montage! Then I understood why the film should be treated as a good one. When I was expecting more grit, I was actually hankering for a more realistic portrayal of Chicago in the Prohibition era. But this is where Hollywood is marvellous: it can turn the historical into mythical! Myth being repositories of meanings. That’s the liberatory aspect of popular imagination; well, one aspect of it, and if De Palma decided to take that route, it is neither wrong and the film actually excelled in its cliches. It is cheerful because it knows it is a fable. The thing De Niro does with the baseball-bat: it created new cliches too!

Cover of Batman: The Dark Knight #1 (1986). Art by Frank Miller.

If you thought that I am really rambling, well I am actually not. Take noir, it filters out a ‘world-view’ out of the ’30s and the ’40s America. Take the gangster/mob-films, it turns the period into a myth. If you consider Batman – again, I have read few and I brood more about the better superhero – it is both. First appearing in Detective Comics #27 in 1939, the Bat-world is probably the most enduring paradigm of popular imagination arising out of the situation which still harbors the spirit of the times. I haven’t read any article which discusses Batman in its originary context, but can the Gotham City be anything but Chicago in the 1930s? Is it just a coincidence that Chris Nolan, in his intelligent decision to heighten the second film’s realism-quotient, exactly situates in Chicago?

What my friend ranted against is actually a general criticism of the superhero genre. Well, I think it might be more appropriate to Iron Man, this year’s other superhero-blockbuster. Entirely dependent on the US military-complex, it would be rather too appropriate. But the Dark Knight? I would rather differ.

The system called Hollywood might turn any vigilante-icon into an imperialist goon. Take the worst case: Rambo was not written – I am referring to the novel and the first film – to be a shirtless commie-basher. He was supposed to be a symptom of Vietnam war, but look how easy it was turning him into a reagan-head. Similarly, Batman can easily be turned into such a figure. But I doubt if it has been true in Nolan’s case just because Nolan is more interested in the darker, more mature origin of the franchise. I repeat: the origin.

Go through the strips, comics and graphic novels…since a superhero is an idea which is elaborated by many people (and not necessarily in a linear way) you will find many Batmen. But thanks to Frank Miller and Grant Morrison, he turned out to be the only superhero who grew up after the Cold War. I think this has been possible because Batman is the only icon to encapsulate and preserve the originary world-view: I am talking about the world and times which gave birth to the noir, the gangsters and the mythical Chicago.

The Prohibition and Depression era Chicago was America inverted. One can write miles to explain why, I am trying to be precise (looking at the length I have already churned out): the era actually drove the final nail in the coffin of the Great American Dream, i.e it is the land of opportunities where everyone gets his chance to make it decent or big; it is not Europe with centuries-old hierarchical structures, America’s boon was its lesser burden of history. But that the dream is an impossibility was ruthlessly proved during the ’30s and the ’40s: it was proved easier to make it bigger in the rough and indecent way, that is what was being proved in the streets. Sometimes you are left with no other ways but the rough and the indecent. Take the cases of the immigrants, consider the way they arrived with the hope of starting anew and then discovering that it is arduous to prove yourself to be a truly decent American; and then you start mourning and frantically preserving your better origins and land up in cultural contradictions: is it preferable to be an American of the ‘allowed’ future or should one remain true to the roots, how long does it take to be a legitimate American (consider the Italians and Sicilians in tales like The Godfather)?.  Greed, corruption, violence, power was swaying everywhere and the system turned out to be all wrong. This is the moment when you start imagining superheroes; you pit this world against the superhero and he sets things right. But if you start ‘internalising’ this world within the superhero? Well, a Batman is born. Few people who have already read my scribbles before know that I like to consider the Gotham City as a mind in itself!

It is easy to consider Batman as a capitalist fantasy. Recall how stinking rich papa Wayne was?  He was that impossibility: a benign industrialist. Well, okay, comics are places where you dream. But isn’t Batpower entirely derived of those lucre, filthy or not? Everyone knows that Bruce Wayne doesn’t have any superpowers, he is just cerebrally superior and he has the state-of-the-art technology at his disposal. He might turn out to be the nether-side of capitalism. Bruce Wayne is just that what died away with industrial capitalism: the dream of a capitalist progeny, rich dad begets richer son.

And he was not any other dad; he was the father of Gotham City, papa Wayne was. But then Gotham city mugged and killed him off: that’s patricide! (Incidentally, Batman Begins is inundated with father-figures played by senior actors, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Liam Neeson…and isn’t it interesting that Batman was finally pitted against one of his mentors?) So logically, revenge would be to kick asses of the poors who did it and do it in a way which the public face of capitalism wouldn’t allow. But this is where Nolan and David S. Goyer’s script got it politically right! Bruce Wayne understood that the man who shot his parents shouldn’t be the one he will be fighting against, he should fight against power and more elaborately, the system which keeps Gotham City in its hellish status-quo. What died with Thomas and Martha Wayne is the possibility of an altruistic capitalism. Yes, it is the moment when the great American dream died. What was left is the real face of capitalism in its most vicious. And Bruce Wayne turned into a capitalist gone wrong! Just to observe, the Bat-industry inside Batcave produces nothing which can be sold! It involves no exploitation of labour, no profit! Batman is the aborted son of capitalism. He is the symptom which emerges after repression (I am speaking psychoanalytically) and a symptom is not a cure, it cannot be healed unless you address its deeply embedded roots and if it cannot be healed all you are left with is the option of suffering and enjoying it. Batman is too introverted to be propagandish.

And then the ideas of ‘escalation’ (Gordon’s words in the finale of Batman Begins). Just because of Batman’s presence Gotham City will be infested with increasing degrees of criminality (in other words, if he is banished, Gotham might be a safer place to live in). Just read it in terms of capitalist competition, since he is the most powerful, he will generate the most powerful competion right there in his place! His is the task of a Sisyphus, it won’t be ever complete. And when he faces his final foe, he faces the most incorruptible evil. Joker isn’t driven by profit or greed (I know he has burnt dollars in the film), he is pure id if Batman is Gotham City’s superego. It is Batman who is shivering at the edge of moral corruption because Joker tests his endurance, teases him to release his brutality, coaxes him to be his other face. I can recall the unleashing of Arkham Asylum in Nolan’s first film, it is nightmarish because the unconscious was being released (Nolan has still not been able to achieve the nightmare; if he achieves it, he will cease to produce a Hollywood blockbuster; I am recalling the brilliant and ‘un-readable’ Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Dave McKean). Now you have too many crooks to bring in to the book. Much has been written about how Batman painfully stretches the limits of vigilantism, how the notions of justice, revenge and decency are questioned … I won’t repeat them.

If someone is true to the Batman spirit (I think Nolan is), it will be difficult to produce something easily imperialistic, because Batman is essentially dialectic, riddled with contradictions and schizophrenia and is a dream turned deliciously wrong. It was a critique of the superhero genre from the word go, though being the exemplar. It is impossible to produce something monolithic and linear through Batman if you are sincere. I know a myth is open to be contemporanised, but a myth also is a repository of historical meanings, it preserves the Weltenschaung of an era. The heart of Batman, I argue, lies in that pre-Cold-War era when American popular imagination was in its most fertile and fearlessly self-critical, when the noir and the gangster genres were born. It just gave a damn.

Pure Id, Incorruptible Evil: Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight

I dreamt I am two-faced, dear blog. Half of it is painted with a purple grin, the rest is hooded as if it is hiding a scar. One appears shameless, another covering a shameful eye. Before the grin menacingly reminded the scowl that he makes him ‘complete’…they were talking. When they are…sometimes…poised to kill each other, they recall that they are supposed to, born to, destined to talk with each other, interminably.

When the hood asked “why are you what you are? Bizarre and faulty?”, the grin answered, after looking up askew, rolling eyes clockwise twice and anticlockwise once and pretending once-in-a-lifetime introspection: “because I look the way you see me, I am the way you react to me, I am what I provoke in you, i am what you are afraid to be!”

“You are scarred, challenged, amputated and incomplete!” the hood hissed and invited the final wordplay, replete with chuckled glee.

from a post to be published elsewhere.

And for die-hard Batheads: The Sequart Continuity pages on Batman