MEDITATIONS ON MILLER

I don't have any plans to review THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, Miller's 2001 follow-up to the 1986 DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. However, with the help of Google I see that I did insert one observation on the messy sequel in my 2010 essay LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION:

It's a little harder to talk about narrative or significant values in TDKSA because it's something of a jumble of Scenes Frank Miller Thought Would Be Really Cool. 

But I felt I should make a few comments on the 2001 work, given that I, like many fans, probably expected more of the same when Miller teamed with Brian Azzarello on the 2015 DARK KNIGHT: MASTER RACE. I don't know what the critical consensus on MASTER RACE was, though Wiki asserts that it received more "positive reviews" than TDKSA. But for me, reading MASTER RACE was like reading a thirty-years-later sequel to TDKR in terms of the continuity of theme and content. True, MASTER RACE used a lot of stuff from TDKSA, but I almost felt that Miller and Azzarello were simply obliged to pick up on story-material executed by some other bozo, the way (say) Roger Stern might concoct a good story based on some moldy, half-forgotten plot-thread.

Of course, that's just an idle fantasy, since I know that TDKSA wasn't an exception in the Miller oeuvre. There's also HOLY TERROR, to which I gave a negative review despite my tendency to condemn all the politically correct hand-wringing I saw from most critics at the time. I faulted TERROR for its many narrative failings, but Miller also produced a number of lame projects that had no connection to his ostensible political leanings.

For instance, there's the 1994 one-shot SPAWN/BATMAN, a monumentally stupid crossover that combines the worst excesses of writer Miller and artist Todd Mac Farlane. Whereas TDKR had been basically respectful to the Batman mythos despite pushing some of its characters to extreme positions (Batman has sadistic tendencies, Catwoman becomes an implicit prostitute), SPAWN/BATMAN seems to be the birthplace of the near-parody known as "the goddamn Batman."

Speaking of which, about eleven years later Miller and Jim Lee teamed up to produce an even more acidulous version of the Caped Crusader, in the form of the 2005-08 serial ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN.

Yet, even though I think all three of these are mammoth wastes of time, I feel that they aren't simply the work of a disinterested hack. All three spring from Miller's distinct creative impulses, which include (1) a conviction to move the reader with any number of visceral appeals, and (2) a tendency to defuse all the intense visceral stuff with sprinklings of absurdist humor. When I look upon these three Miller misfires, I see them as Miller letting his taste for absurdity overrule all of his other creative propensities.

That said, 2001's TDKSA, while it sometimes seems like Miller's love letter to the craziness of Silver Age DC (right down to a gratuitous reference to the Legion of Super-Heroes). does have a few inspired moments, which is more than the other three have going for them. I've forgotten a lot of the silly shit in the rambling storyline, but I must say that I was amused by the idea that some weird version of Robin-- less a DC creation than the "Burt Ward Robin" of television-- becomes immortal in order to take down Batman, and even has conversations when his head's been separated from his body.

 Happily, though, MASTER RACE didn't continue in this dubious direction-- more on which later.

THE DARK KNIGHT REBORN (1987): REVIEW EXCERPT

As a preface to my impending review of THE DARK KNIGHT: MASTER RACE, I decided that the short mythcomics review I posted for the 1986 DARK KNIGHT RETURNS was insufficient for my needs. That blog-review was short in part because many years previous I’d already written a longer piece for COMICS JOURNAL #114 (Feb 1987). During that period I was not yet a word processor convert, so I sent the JOURNAL typed pages at the time. If I say so myself, this was one of my best essays for the JOURNAL, as well as being the only essay of mine selected for reprint in a scholarly volume, CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM (also the most remunerative). I considered retyping the original review for a blogpost, but it’s just too damn long. Therefore I’m opting to post only a portion that will tie into the MASTER RACE review.

---------

The heroic role of Batman as a parental protector and spiritual "father" to his children is glibly oversimplified by Cindy Carr's review in the VILLAGE VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT. She parodies the book thusly: "Dammit. Someone has to stand up to the subhuman cretins who terrorize innocent law-abiding citizens." Said review then goes to characterize the first two volumes as "neoconservative propaganda" and Batman as "Rambo in a cape."

This is a significant criticism, not because it is true, but because it shows that Miller did not quite succeed in distinguishing his product from the trashy level of RAMBO, though there are numerous subtleties to DARK KNIGHT that RAMBO and its ilk do not possess. It's hard to see how a critic could label the work "neoconservative," insofar as Book I contains a panel juxtaposition in which a TV interview asks two men-on-the-street for their opinions on Batman and gets a favorable review from a conservative bigot who hopes "[Batman] goes after the homos next" and an unfavorable verdict from a liberal hypocrite, who preaches reforming the socially disadvantaged but would "never live in the city..."

_____

Of course the very concept of a vigilante summons up images of Nazi storm troopers and the Ku Klux Klan, so knee-jerk negative reactions are to be expected. by seeming to identify Batman with such reactionary forces, by not clearly setting Batman apart, Miller has perhaps left himself open to such criticisms, thus obscuring the real essence of his thought-- that is, to provoke debate of the issues, without allowing his personal authorial voice to intrude, by using Batman as a "wild card" who fits none of our standard categories.

END EXCERPT

END NOTE: Since writing the above, I have come to see the RAMBO franchise to be something more than simple "trash." However, there's no question in my mind that Batman is both a better conception and has had a much greater impact upon popular culture.

MYTHCOMICS #4: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS

PLOT-SUMMARY FOR THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS 1-4: Not needed this time as I'm talking about one major myth-theme in the work. Besides, no comics-fan worth his salt hasn't read it, IMO. Oh, and I already reviewed the story way back in some issue of COMICS JOURNAL.



Some time after the commercial if not critical success of Frank Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, I attended a convention-panel on which Gary Groth grilled Frank Miller about TDKR. By then Groth’s patrician contempt for Miller’s work was well-known, but though I’m sure that Groth must have asked all manner of probing questions, I only recall one. The essence of Groth’s rather nerdy query was finding fault with a sequence in TDKR #2, in which Batman nonlethally subdues a criminal gang with a spray of rubber bullets. Groth said something like, “You do know rubber bullets can kill people, don’t you?”

I don’t remember Frank Miller’s reply, but what he should have said was, “Not in Batman’s world.”

There are many fascinating symbolic aspects to Miller’s rewriting of iconic DC characters, but the most important one is the matter of the Wrath of the Batman. In 1986 Miller was far from the first to have transformed Batman’s image from that of a cool avuncular crimefighter to that of a vigilante haunted by trauma and barely repressed fury. But no one took the idea as far as Miller did.

I mentioned earlier that TDKR hasn’t always enjoyed a good critical reputation. I’m convinced that this is not because of assorted gaffes, like Groth’s carp about rubber bullets, nor is it about Miller’s supposed “bad writing.” For most critics, including but not limited to those of elitist orientation, TDKR’s sin is to validate vigilantism, and thus, supposedly, to validate “fascism” as well.

In our world, it’s unlikely that any act of vigilantism has been morally justifiable. But as I noted earlier, Batman’s world is not our world. As with the plot-device of inquisitorial torture, which I examined here, the idea of an absolutely correct vigilante justice—one that never victimizes the wrong target—is the very cornerstone of Batman’s world. It’s a world with its own laws, the laws of thematic escapism.

Precisely because Miller can frame the Bat-Wrath in terms of a world he himself called “Romantic,” he gives it a greater depth, a greater resonance, than one finds in a work of thematic realism. It’s often overlooked, amid all the fulminations about fascism, that Batman’s trauma-born rage nearly masters him at several points in the story, turning him away from life and toward death. Yet though half-cavalier about his own death, Miller’s Batman consistently refuses to cross the line that real fascism never hesitates to violate: he will not take life. Groth’s carping about the “rubber bullets,” intended to task Miller with the reality-principle that would doom real-world vigilantism, clearly misses that Miller is using the “fantasy-principle” to make a salient point about an iconic character.

That’s not to say that Miller’s Batman is squeaky-clean. Throughout TDKR’s narrative Batman takes clearly sadistic pleasure in maiming the criminals he refuses to kill, which is without question a diversion of his wrath against the man who killed his parents: “who stole all sense from my life.” But in an escapist world, even sadism can be sublimated to redeem the world. And thus in the end Batman refuses a dramatic Viking death and chooses to preside over an underground Maquis-style movement that will “bring sense to a world plagued by worse than thieves and murderers." And it doesn't matter whether or not one believes that what Frank Miller thinks of as "worse" is what the reader would think.

In Batman's world, Batman is The Law.

EVERYONE EXPECTS THE SUPERHERO INQUISITION

Over at the Sean T. Collins blog (whose sesquipedalian name I refuse to type out) he began an essay on superhero torture by saying:

"I suppose there's a degree to which we must give superheroes beating criminals for information a pass just by the nature of the genre, the same way we give their vigilantism a pass but probably wouldn't approve of anyone in real life kidnapping a criminal, pounding the shit out of them, and hanging them unconscious from a lamppost outside One Police Plaza. But I think that a good writer, on some level or other, owns up to the ickiness of this behavior."

And after referencing Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and some current JLA story I've not read, Collins ended:


"At any rate, isn't torture what bad guys do?"


My reply is appropriately Batmanesque: "Yes and no."


A more articulate reply will probably take more than one essay, so right now I'll confine myself to (a) defining what is meant by "torture" in this instance, and (b) defining how I see it functioning in a narrative context.

First, let's take torture. In an earlier essay I made a distinction between two forms of violence that I felt had been conflated by early comics-critics Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, thusly:


"...I have to anticipate how these two deceased intellectuals might have found fault with my assertion that the paradigm of the adventure-genre (hero fights villain with both having the ability to defend themselves) does not match the paradigm of classical sadism (victimizer tortures victim, who has no ability to defend him/herself)."

Though both men repeatedly attacked the comics-medium as a breeding-ground for sadism, most of their examples of comic-book violence were drawn from stories featuring violent combat, rather than tales focusing on some helpless victim being tormented, though *here's* an example of an exception, from THE THING #9 (1953):






















However, by itself the picture doesn't tell readers why the hoods are tormenting the girl: whether they're doing it simply for the pleasure of cruelty (which would put the scene in Sade's territory) or (more likely) in order to gain information.




Since torture for cruelty's sake is performed for different reasons than torture for information's sake, it seems logical to specify that the kind of torture Sean Collins references is the latter type, which I'll term "inquisitional torture." To the best of my recollection, Legman and Wertham never referenced scenes of heroes wreaking torture on villains, as Collins does above, though probably they could have found such scenes without much effort if they'd looked.



Inquisitorial torture had certainly been around in fiction for a long time prior to the birth of Superman. It's likely it reached its most prevalent (and cliched) form in various offshoots of the crime genre, where it gave us such gems of dialogue as, "Let me beat it out of him, captain!" And though the superhero genre was a fairly distant offshoot from the dominantly realistic crime-genre, Superman's first printed adventure does end on a note of inquisitorial torture, as the Man of Tomorrow sweeps up a criminal conspirator and dangles him from a high building in order to force the malefactor to tell all.

It goes without saying that none of Superman's juvenile readers (and maybe not all his adult ones) would have worried about any consequences stemming from the hero's literally high-handed machinations. Certainly none of those readers thought Superman a "bad guy" for forcing info from a criminal, because narrative omniscience allowed both the hero and his readers to know absolutely that the man was a criminal and so deserved rough treatment. The same would probably hold true for any stories in which Batman or Captain America slapped or punched a crook around to make him disclose needed info. To my knowledge that's as far as most Golden or Silver Age heroes ever went, and usually the crooks gave in so quickly that the heroes weren't forced to indulge in prolonged clobberings, in contrast to your basic Fiendish Orientals, who implicitly enjoyed torturing for pure cruelty's sake.


So it seems demonstrable that this basic, "muss-'em-up" level of inquisitorial torture wasn't viewed as "bad" by the reading-audience. In fact, I'd say that it was approached in such a cavalier fashion that it was little more than a rote storytelling device, whose purpose had more to do with building narrative tension than wallowing in the violence as such. Though superheroes were always omniscient as far as discerning bad guys from honest citizens, said heroes weren't quite omniscient enough to know where all of the evildoers hung their hats, and so "unfriendly persuasion" was necessary.




Now I will admit that as I grew up in the 1960s, I don't believe I saw a lot of inquistional torture by heroes, even of the "muss-'em-up" variety, in the mainstream comics of my time. Thanks to the postwar anti-comics crusade in which Wertham participated, most 60s comics were fairly restrained, even formalized, in regard to how much violence they showed. I feel sure that there must have been instances of "roughing up," utilized as I said for the purpose of building narrative tension, but all I can think of is the schtick in SPIDER-MAN #10 where the hero terrifies a thug into talking through the clever use of a phony spider-monster. As newsstand comics-sales declined in the 1970s, however, the major companies would slowly start pushing a harder brand of violence in the hope of reaching older audiences.


Because I grew up in a time when scenes of inquisitorial torture were rare in the comics, it's possible that I have a predilection to see such scenes as having a purely narrative (and hence non-ideological) function. In other words, a scene with Captain America beating up the Red Skull to make him talk is not necessarily emblematic of the fascism in American culture. I can think of comparable scenes that *might* imply a real ideological stance as such, as when Mike Hammer hauls ass on Dirty Commies in KISS ME DEADLY, but not every such scene carries ideological weight. All cats may look grey when one dwells in the darkness of ideological thinking, but the light discloses quite a bit more variegation.


I'll also admit that scenes of inquisitorial torture never had much significance to me. Since they show one character managing to overcome the will of another, they certainly provide some sort of dynamizing thrill to the audience, whether used in superhero yarns or crime stories. But they certainly weren't as thrilling as the fight-scenes, where the hero could theoretically lose (and at least might have to get help from some ally to win out). Such inquisitions were far more of a foregone conclusion: the hero would slap the villain around a bit and the villain would give in. Such scenes were too drably functional to incite any great moral concern, which is more or less what Collins is talking about when he talks about the possibility of giving such scenes "a pass;" i.e., recognizing them as essentially escapist and so not responsive to the concerns of realism.

And yet, Collins *does* question whether or not some scenes of more extreme nature don't require that their authors 'fess up to "the ickiness of the behavior." Certainly one of his main examples, Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, is one of the pivotal works that made the scene of inquisitorial torture a focus rather than a simple narrative function, and so in my next essay I'll talk more about the moral ramifications of the superhero inquisition.

DAVID BORED? WELL...

Maybe the fault lies in David Bordwell's own expectations, rather than in the films that he says made him bored and depressed.

Now I can think of any number of failings that I could mention (and have mentioned in one case) in two of the summer's big superhero flicks, IRON MAN and THE DARK KNIGHT. But it's hard for me to imagine someone who was open to the "superhero experience" being bored with BOTH of these works. I mean, if you don't like a light, humorous take on superheroes or a dark, theoretically-weighty take either, then there's not a whole lot left. It's like saying you can't stand light humor or "black comedy" either: it doesn't fill one with a lot of confidence as to your take on comic matters.

(At the conclusion of the essay Bordwell notes, "Comics aficionados may object that I am obviously against comics as a whole. True, I have little interest in superhero comic books..." No, Mr. Bordwell, I don't think any comics-fan would label you against comics as a medium because you don't have a taste for superheroes. Most contemporary comics-fans, even those who are heavily invested in superheroes, are pretty hep to the notion that there can exist fans who like the medium but not the superhero genre. We've had a little thing called THE COMICS JOURNAL hanging around for some thirty years to remind everyone of the distinction.)

The supposed failings of the two films doesn't occupy much space in Bordwell's essay, the bulk of it devoted rather to the question: "Why comic-book superhero movies now?"

To this end Bordwell ruminates on a wide variety of possible reasons that led to this cinematic upsurge of super-doers. None of them are precisely wrong-- and all of them are better than the "zeitgeist" explanation which Bordwell and I both oppose. But it seems to me that Bordwell fails to see the forest for the trees: fails to see how the upsurge in superheroes stands in continuity with the more general renaissance of fantastic adventure-heroes generally. For instance, Bordwell talks about how STAR WARS revolutionized the FX resources available to makers of things cinematic, but says nothing about the widespread audience acceptance of both the genre and its type of hero-- which would have been aimed largely at juvenile crowds in earlier years-- paved the way for a greater acceptance of the heroes who wore their underwear on the outside of their suits.

Here's an example of some more tree-only vision:



"During the 1990s, less famous superheroes filled in as the Batman franchise tailed off. Examples were The Rocketeer (1991), Timecop (1994), The Crow (1994) and The Crow: City of Angels (1996), Judge Dredd (1995), Men in Black (1997), Spawn (1997), Blade (1998), and Mystery Men (1999). Most of these managed to fuse their appeals with those of another parvenu genre, the kinetic action-adventure movie."



Now, Bordwell doesn't define "the kinetic action-adventure movie," but since he calls it a "parvenu" I'll assume that he's not dealing with all adventure films stretching back to the original BEN HUR, but to a specific subgroup action-films that emphasize kinetic action over drama. He doesn't pin down the beginnings of this alternative mode, though he does assert that the crime film, among others, took on greater prominence in the 1970s:

"As the Western and the musical fell in the 1970s, the urban crime film, horror, and science-fiction rose. For a long time, it would be unthinkable for an A-list director to do a horror or science-fiction movie, but that changed after Polanski, Kubrick, Ridley Scott, et al. gave those genres a fresh luster just by their participation."

This jibes with my own opinion (and incidentally, Pauline Kael's) that one of the key films that effected this reshuffling of genre-privileges was Don Siegel's 1971 DIRTY HARRY. Certainly DH has a more "kinetic" visual style than a roughly-similar crime film from 1968, Gordon Douglas' THE DETECTIVE. So I have no argument that there is a distinct action-adventure mode like unto the one Bordwell describes. However, it's not enough (for me, at least) to say that the "appeals" of the two subgenres were somehow "fused." What we see, taking the "forest" view, is most forms of the action-adventure film began to move toward wilder and more outlandish scenarios which some critics of the 1970s would surely not hesitate to call "comic book-y" (meaning, of course, that they were like superhero comics, not like CASPER THE FRIENDLY GHOST). The makers of the action-adventure films moved toward the outlandish for the same reason the makers of superhero films did: wild action and spectacle sold tickets. Thus it may not be coincidence that six years after DIRTY HARRY, the space-opera came into its own with STAR WARS, which I would say had more long-term influence on the eventual renaissance of filmic superheroes than Bordwell's example of THE MATRIX.

Thus, our differences as to the influence jazz. And I guess that given Bordwell's disinterest in superheroes light and dark, I'm not really surprised that these films bored him. But I'm not sure why they "depressed" him, though I presume that it has to do with "the shift from an auteur cinema to a genre cinema"-- more on which later.

YOU GOTTA LAUGH

I could spend fruitless hours rebutting this article:

http://zeroforconduct.com/2008/07/26/throwing-down.aspx

But what's funniest about it is this line:

"But it’s gotten to the point that superheroes comprise the substantial percentage of movie options we have now, in one form or another, and to avoid them as a grown-up you’d have to avoid cinema."

Comics-fans will find this familiar as it's what a goodly number of comics-fans have been saying about the state of the comics medium since at least the 1970s.

Now it looks like, instead of superhero comics being marginalized by the Greater Expectations of the Mainstream, the superheroes stand poised to be the barbarians at the cultural gates!

Only temporarily, I imagine.

But it's funny anyway.

MY SO-CALLED DARK KNIGHT REVIEW

(As with my Hulk piece, the following is not a general review of all aspects of the Chris Nolan THE DARK KNIGHT movie (2008): the type where I say that I liked Gary Oldman's centered performance or disliked Christian Bale's Billy-Bat-Gruff take on the Batman voice. This is essentially a look at how the director of TDK chose to respond to various elements of the Batman mythos in translating it to the cinema-screen.)

"What is impossible yet probable is to be preferred to that which is possible yet incredible."-- Aristotle, THE POETICS.

Aristotle doesn't detail what he considers to be "impossible" in the Poetics, but as he's not opposed to the presence of gods in serious drama and epic-- only to their use in the "deus ex machina" form-- I imagine that any events or beings that have a tinge of the metaphenomenal would meet this criterion. (Aristotle's favorite play, OEDIPUS REX, sported such an event in the form of an oracular prophecy and made reference to assorted fantastic beings, ranging from the gods themselves to the monstrous Sphinx.) But the first part of the quote makes clear that even the seemingly impossible should obey laws of probabilty. To my ears this sounds a lot like modern science-fiction's "one-gimmee" rule: once a writer begins a tale by introducing a strange phenomenon-- what Cioffi calls an "anomaly"-- into an otherwise-stable setting, afterward that writer is expected to observe laws of probability about how the anomaly acts and what it can do.

Conversely, in the second part of the quote, Aristotle is taking issue with writers who are willing to toss out any improbable event for their audience on the theory that it is remotely POSSIBLE, even though not probable. Aristotle clearly considers this psuedo-realism to be far more of a cop-out than invoking gods and monsters to serve as elements of the dramatic action.


Which brings us to the Nolan DARK KNIGHT. The fantasy of a costumed, high-tech vigilante operating at will in a modern metropolis is essentially an "impossible thing" which the Batman concept asks you to grant, irrespective of whether the hero battles fairly-probable versions of real-world criminals or other "impossible things." Here the metaphenomenality obtains not from a showier form of fantasy, like Superman juggling suns, but the equally-far-out idea of Batman possessing a ninja mojo so insuperable that a whole city of cops and criminals can't suss him out. But once the audience grants this impossibility, one should expect that within the parameters of that fantasy Batman acts according to some laws of probability. Often in melodramatic action films those laws may get a little bent-- say, in BATMAN RETURNS, the hero. framed for murder by Penguin, goes through considerable trouble to expose the villain's perfidy but somehow forgets to get himself exonerated on the murder-charge. But Nolan's DARK KNIGHT not only breaks the laws of probability, he even calls attention to his doing so, as if counting on his audience to ignore what he says and pay attention only to the characters' hyperbolic emotionalizing.

Nolan's primary plotline in TDK bears some similariry to Edward Zwick's 1998 film THE SIEGE, in that both concern a major metropolis reduced to chaos by the threats of terrorism-- by Islamic fanatics in Zwick's film and by the mad menace of the Joker in Nolan's. But Nolan's approach to the terrorism of the Joker is to tie it into a motif of renunciation throughout both TDK and Nolan's earlier BATMAN BEGINS. Almost as soon as Nolan's Batman begins being Batman in the first film, he seems eager to quit the whole racket, and he seems even more so in TDK. Along comes the Joker, who starts a spree of systematic killings and claims that he'll keep it up until Batman reveals his identity and surrenders himself to police-- presumably to be killed one way or another once Bruce Wayne is out in the open.

Batman's initial response makes all the sense in the world: "There's no proof that the Joker will stop killing," or words to that effect. And yet, perhaps 30-40 minutes later in the picture, Bruce Wayne suddenly becomes willing to make the Great Sacrifice to supposedly stop all the killing.

Now, this development is an example of Aristotle's "possible yet incredible" device. It's certainly within the bounds of POSSIBILITY that Bruce Wayne could lose his mind and submit to the Joker's whims, even having stated that he doesn't believe his surrender will stop the Joker. But it's certainly thoroughly IMPROBABLE, especially coming from someone who's supposed to be smart enough to maintain his Bat-secret from the criminal hordes, etc.

To his credit, Nolan manages to shuffle his cards fast enough that many viewers don't get a chance to see Wayne go through with this incredible dopiness, because Wayne's crimefighting colleague Harvey Dent stands up and claims that he is Spartacus (or something like that).

Now, the basic plot of the villain who threatens innocents to subdue the hero is not itself at fault. It is conceivable that one could engineer a situation in which Batman faced a villain whose grudge against the hero was so specific that, yes, Batman could believe that that villain would stop killing innocents once Batman himself was out of the picture.

But Nolan doesn't come close to attempting even this level of probability, and given the many other sloppy, overblown scenes throughout TDK, I'm reasonably sure that probability was far from his thoughts. Like many, he may have thought that the existence of an impossibility in a film granted a writer to banish the probable as well.

Given the space I've just devoted to just aspect of the movie-- albeit the most central one-- I should probably close this up and make my further thoughts on it as a Part II--