Merlin's "Review" of the Batman

 Again, from a rambling set of observations in a couple FB posts and comments. But as I say in the one, this may be the first movie I go out of my way to see more than once in the theater since before the pandemic, and that includes Spiderman: No Way Home ... and I loved that film. But The Batman captures my imagination as a moment in film story-telling unique to our moment of recent history, particularly it's social-justice side.

[From FB posts and my own tag-along comments].

Post 1:

I liked The Batman. My second favorite, but I've concluded that's not as much about the particular Batman as about the project. I think Affleck was wise to drop it: I liked his Batman character, but in the state of the the films he appeared in (thus setting his trend), I don't think there was a project. He put it in terms of finding a story, but I think it's as much about project. The Batman has a very distinct socio-critical project (e.g., the flood-walls = internet menacers meet Katrina [it was in the works before Jan 6, but kind of prophetic for that]). Some might say it's too on the sleeve, and there may be an argument to be made about that, but I'll take it over the "originals" any day (I think Burton's a genius in some of his stuff, and I think Keaton made an interesting Batman, but I'm more than happy to leave behind Jack Nicholson plays the Joker playing Jack Nicholson and whatever Batman Returns was supposed to be ... Forever was my favorite of the originals partly because of Jones and Carey being so fun on their own and partly because that left you free of the sort of obligations of being a "fan" the way you were supposed to be with Nicholson ... The Batman at least has the feel of a real city with a real sprawl to it, very dark but still feeling real ... interesting mix of NYC, Chicago, and New Orleans ... or at least a feel of some big-city version of a bayou-like network of waterways [but some of that may also be recently copy editing a book that touched on Katrina as an outflow of "slow violence" in the area of racial disparity in precarity and protection] ... I've been interested in Gotham as a kind of character since Nolan developed it as a distinctly American city by taking it from a generic Gothic city to being Chicago and then NYC).

One of the elements of the film is whether "the city" can be saved, or is the situation always worse than even "Gotham must be destroyed" (that wonderful line by Ken Watanabe as the fake Raz in Batman Begins, in which Nolan adapts the classic Roman "Carthago delenda est" ["Carthage must be destroyed" ended every senate speech, from whichever side, as a jingo appeal]) ... is it that "the city" always will destroy itself, any city? ("delenda est" is future passive paraphrastic, meaning it has a jussive force, must be ... some might argue it's just  that it inevitably will) ... are gritty politics and organized crime inevitable when you get the kind of population density you get in a city, and especially when there will always be some system of social tiers of advantage coming into the situation (is Plato's philosopher king only a pipe-dream, "real" only in the world of forms, never in the concrete urban world? can Plato's Greek polis never be a reality in a concrete city?) ... and if so, isn't the deck stacked against those who are disadvantaged in being born in the situation? Selina implicitly answers one way and Bruce answers the other way ... Riddler definitely answers in the negative preemptively.

 

[addendum post-FB: Bruce/Batman here winds up a bit like Casey Affleck's character Patrick in Gone Baby Gone, who chooses the naturalness of the real mother even though he knows he has to stay and do the baby-sitting because she's too damn self-absorbed to take care of her child well.]

 I read there are sequels planned. The Joker at the end is the guy who played Druig in Eternals, which seems like it could be a very interesting choice, and definitely fits this project ... this is an extremely different project from the world of the DC "extended universe" of ... basically anything else DC. I liked things about Leto's joker, but it was definitely only part of that kind of world, not this one ... Keoghan and Dano and Farrel are much more this project's kind of villians in the way Pattinson is more its kind of Batman and Kravitz's feel of mixed ethnicity is its Cat Woman (a side of her presentation they play up with having her be the white mobster's abandoned child). They say it's going to be a shared universe, but if it is, it's going to have to bring the rest of that shared universe up to it's level ... and no superman or metas. Reeves is doing something at a level of more distinction from other DCEU/MCU stuff in the same way Nolan did, and the other thing it shares with Nolan's is that it's not a metas world. I still think the first Wonder Woman with Gal Gadot was brilliant, but I don't think that class has really crossed over to anything else in the DCEU (including its own sequel). Joker is such a one-off that it's hard to compare. I felt the same with Logan ... that was the other contender for best single film to come out of the genre (Marvel carved itself a place not just in this genre, but in cinema history overall by what they did with the 22-film symphony, but for me it's kind of like the World Cup in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Ireland wins but Krum gets the snitch ... Marvel owns that field, but Wonder Woman [the first, not the second] is a class above any other film I have seen in the genre to date); Logan was amazing, but while it came from the genre, it didn't really stay in the genre, even in spite of staying in the "meta" realm, it became a western, which is why they could use Shane to such good effect; Wonder Woman came from the genre and stayed in the genre ... Joker pretty much left the genre too and became a social character study.

It really is kind of weird reading the wikipedia page for the film and the production background involving Affleck and a project that connected with the DCEU to date, because this final project is anything but.

Post 2:

 The Batman may be the one film I have to see more than once in the theater again. It's not happened since before the pandemic, not even Spiderman: No Way Home, which I loved. While unintended, obviously with the timing, The Batman is still kind of Batman in a post-Jan-6 atmosphere. A friend made the observation, when we both got into Person of Interest, that it was kind of Batman in a real post-9-11 world (the reclusive billionaire with the invincible man in the suit), a project able to do what Batman couldn't in examining 9-11 impact through the Batman lens, because you usually don't have real world events intersecting with super-hero worlds except maybe the World Wars, and both PoI and the Nolan Batman trilogy were under the influence of Jonathan Nolan. Obviously you can't have a post-Jan-6 real world in Batman, but the present film may at least have that atmosphere, kind of the flip of PoI being Batman character types in a real post-9-11 world, this being the atmosphere of post-Jan-6 in a Batman world (and don't think for a second that January 6, 2021, had nothing to do with race).

Human Language Observations about random TikTok

 And it TikTok anything but random? :) 

TikTokers Confused on "Bucke List"

[Copy over from FB post I did randomly)

Although, I have an explanation: to most tik-tockers ... 2007 might as well be 1950 ha ha ... and it's actually a known literary technique too ... most of the best fictions arrive with their world having a feel of history built in but without specifics, just a "feel," a murky past, and that in turn has psychological roots that are explored a little in the first scene in Inception where Cobb talks with Ariadne and asks her to remember how they actually got to the cafe at which they're talking, which she can't because it's a constructed dream,but we want to fill in implied backstories .. but only implied; it's not so much about a group having a shared imagination/hallucination as it is about a human desire to enter our stories in a world already formed with some things whose stability as established things is evidenced precisely by our very inability to track them clearly. Even J.R.R. Tolkien uses it in Lord of the Rings. He had been working on the history of the lands in Middle Earth and Arda for decades before he wrote the LotR, so if Merry or Pippin encountered ruins back in some hills near Dunharrow, Tolkien surely knew whose ruins they were more than any other author who ever introduced any ruins in any fictional world they created, but instead he makes a point of saying how the origins of these cultic-type ruins had been lost to memory, nobody now remembering exactly who those people were. 

 

And some histories are there that not many notice for things people want to assume have undergone etymologies that have been lost but really might not be (just as the 2004 book here evidences some prehistory the tiktokers have missed in pinning down the creation to the 2007 film). I have a book on my shelf on Cracker culture in central Florida, and before the term was a racial slur on all whites, it was less caustically used in our setting for poor tenant or squatting white farmers of Celt decent in central FLA, with a distinct cuisine that is probably the root of the name "Cracker Barrel," and a lifestyle fully on display in the 1946 film The Yearling with Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman; I have a book on my shelf on Cracker culture by a scholar at Florida State, with pictures of the 7 or 8 different known styles of cabins Crackers used, and one of those styles is sure to fit the cabin in The Yearling rather well ... and that book relates that the original use may well have been derogatory, as the first record is by an English king talking about a certain section of London being full of celt-descent "crackers" (my personal theory for that is based on years ago being told by a guy originally from Dublin that, if I was ever over there, the way to sound like a local is to ask "what's the crack?," only I found out someplace else that it's of Gaelic origin and originally spelled "craic" ... so the king's comment would be like if somebody around here noted how rednecks always say "'sup?" as short for "what's up?" and started calling them "suppers" ... and then of course, some might think it had something to do with the way they ate meals, just as some might think the present slur "cracker" has to do with the whiteness of saltine crackers, although there could be a connection in the other direction that somehow morphed with a tendency to onomatopoeia [words that sound like what they are, like "snap" and "crack" and "thump"; but it would have to be back a ways, as evidenced in the Goblin whip-cracking song in The Hobbit, but then Tolkien smoked a pipe and that supposedly comes from Native Americans ... cross-pollination and the history of words as organically evolving things is so funky]). 

 

Some even play up the ambiguity even more intentionally noticeably for effect: In one scene in the Battle Star Gallactica reboot, Lee Adama tells president Rosalyn, "like my father always says, 'sometimes you gotta roll the hard 6,'" and when she asks, "I always wonder exactly what that phrase means," he replies "you know ... I don't really know.," giving the impression it's a phrase with no origin that's any longer known, maybe some type of dice-game chance thing lost to memory, but it actually has a very clear logic in the realm of the show, which is set in space, with fighter craft that operate in zero-G and no atmosphere (evidenced by one episode where Gallactica jumps into atmosphere to launch fighters and then jump out and is plummeting like a rock while she launches them), and thus do things alien to our aeronautics, which relies on pressure created by airflow at speed; we could never do a complete 180 degree turn on the same line, simply completely flipping in mid-air the way the show sometimes shows Viper fighter craft doing, and in military location description, 180 degrees is your six o'clock, hence all the action/war/solider jargon of "I got your six" = "I got your back," but even with the fastest turns we can do in our air-based flight, those 3 and 4 G turns push the blood out of the head (a cousin's husband flew in the first Gulf and told me when I was a kid about how, going into these turns, they would take a deep breath and hold it hard going into these high G turns to try to have the pressure keep the blood in the head and avoid "brown outs"), and in that zero-G world, the turns the ships can do can pull a Viper jocks foot off the pedal controls without extreme pressure, evidenced in once scene by Adama loading on weight on top of the leg sled in the gym on Starbuck's injured knee to show her she wasn't ready to go back in the cockpit, and hence, a complete 180 in a viper would be indeed a "hard six" done in a roll, a "rolling the hard six" ... but the writers did a beautiful job of showing how such understandable material origins get put into the murky past behind the incredibly interesting habit we humans have of using language to analogize, like saying "rolling the hard six" to speak of hard decisions, and then that can intersect with and mutate with completely other histories of the same word, like rolling a dice with numbers on it in games of chance (and, whatever else that show was about, it was about the texture of human experience ... and nothing evidences that texture more than the gymnastics with do with language and the stories we tell in it) ... so funky.

On Adaptions of the Bible (oddly, sprung from Book of Boba Fett)

This is material from an FB post shaing a video on things from first episode of Book of Boba Fett, and an aside I put in a comment instead of main post turned into a more full piece on a certain type of project on Biblical material. 

 The video is here:  

 

The main post is this: 

Kind of Star Wars nerdy, but also a lot of cool exposition of literary qualities and resonances with a larger world of art and culture, from a larger sci-fi tradition larger to ancient cultures; I do think Favreau and Filoni are going for a larger world of resonances in creating an extended social order and geo-political world in the wake of the empire (itself a respected area of historical study, social orders of various scales in the wake of empires), in addition to the western genre 

 

The Comment delving int biblical material is this 

I like the socio-political world-building project in a fictional realm like this. I should note though that I am not a fan of the same in relation to the Bible, including the psychologization side of the social. I think that if you want to look at what the social texture of the world of the historical life of Christ was like on the personal and interpersonal level like that, the more productive place to look in the modern world would be Arabic peoples in the Middle East, particular Islamic ... just as Arabic as a language has been much more conservative over the centuries in its development and is thus much better to consult for productive comparisons in studying biblical Hebrew than is Aramaic (the theory is that the three languages descended from a parent language that was a proto-Hebrew); I think that in the socio-psychological aspect that is analogous to that linguistic thing, people are very shaped by the land and developments of how groups and cultures have adapted to existence in it and that, were you to talk to Jesus of Nazareth and the group who regularly traveled with him, you would find the same disjuncts as a suburban American that you would find if you were in rural areas in the Middle East: things you find humorous they would find enigmatic and odd and vice versa, not just knowing inside jokes or not, but the very way of experiencing humor ... I think that what you get when you get Western 20th/21st-century Christians hypothesizing the socio-psychological character of the experiential world of biblical events is usually simply a social and personal quality that looks a lot like that of the world form which the modern maker comes (including political biases and the like). 

 

I think the better way to think of biblical characters is much more like an icon than a photograph. I think there is a point to acknowledging that there would have been personal and interpersonal psychological and social dimensions there, that the "flesh" of "and the Word became flesh" would have involved that, but I don't think we have the access to it that a supposed photographic reproduction would claim and I don't think that having such is the point of the Bible. I am fine with a Christ who speaks in the voice of a priest, be it the reedy voice of a tall stringy priest or a short froggy slow priest (being Catholic, where only a priest or deacon reads the Gospel from the pulpit and even in the long narratives on the feasts when a lay person reads the narrative and the congregation says the crowd's part, only the priest reads the words of Christ), I don't need a version of Christ and his disciples written by Shakespeare (even if I thought WS was all he was cracked up to be [I am more of a Tolkien school of thought on that, who differentiated between what he calls narrative art and elements like drama and indicated in a letter once that he thought it was futile to look for good plot etc. in WS, and I think more than anything lamented the assumption that drama is the core of literary art to the starvation of narrative quality, a move in Western literature very impacted by the prevalence of WS, in spite of whatever his strengths might be in other aspects of poetry etc.; he's undoubtedly a huge effect in the Western canon that you must study, in part because of his deployment as cultural justification of a cultural identity that was the center of a secular empire, but just as the fact that one MUST study the seminal figure of Descartes if one is to get the modern shift in Western thought does not mean Descartes was correct or a GOOD influence, the fact that one MUST study WS to get anything that happened after him in the Western literary canon does not mean his influence is all good, unless of course one is a straight-up Anglo-triumphalist, which I'm no; I think on those levels, WS is a mixed bag], and even if I thought contemporary projects of that type with biblical material lived up to WS)

 

I must say that I say all that in caution; I have encountered people who do gravitate to those projects who I think to be infinitely better people than I, infinitely more genuine and charitable.

I should also say that I don't put Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ in that category. Whatever arguments may be made about that project, including what impact personal faults on Gibson's part have on it, it's not this particular thing I am talking about here with the application of socio-psychological modeling to the biblical material in the name of realism. Gibson's scenes are much more like tableaus (fitting his stated goal of a Caravaggio tone, thinking his movement in painting terms like icons) and his dialogue is very sparse and mostly restricted to what is in the Gospel accounts. And what is added is obvious and open about being highly interpretive symbolism (nobody thinks that there might have been a bald, androgynous Satan walking around holding a bald man-baby that looked like Pilate, not in the way contemporary Christian audiences think that Christ might really have joked around with the disciples in this way that actually looks more like a 21st-century work retreat), even the rare added "funning around" scene has a highly symbolic thrust: Christ and Mary laugh, with him teasing and her rolling her eyes when she tries to figure out what he means by sitting at the higher table he's working on, and that table really defines what the scene is doing in the film: the low table is Middle Eastern and the higher table is European, fore-shadowing the world-stage movement in which Christianity would be involved over the next thousand years; whatever one thinks about that shift itself and Western European interaction with the East (Near, Middle, and Far), the elements of that scene are more about that world-stage movement than about a psychological personal realism for its own sake (not that Gibson's film is devoid of dramatic elements [as neither is Tolkien's work], but they function differently in the more icon/painting-style film ... It crushes me when I watch Mary reach out in kindness, some confusion but always kindness, and Peter cringes away from the touch out of shame, and it's absolutely haunting the way she sweeps with her hands through the air, lower and lower to the floor, and then puts her face to the ground as if she can feel what the scene reveals in then going down through the floor to see Christ hanging by the wrists from a ceiling directly below her, looking up as if he can sense her through the stones and dirt) ... Other added elements also have historical resonance, like "Why is this night different from all other nights?" from the Passover seder ... if you have read Elie Wiesel's Night and can get how he works with imagery from the Jewish religious tradition (nutritionaless snow flakes and a scrap tossed by a German woman into a rail-car full of emaciated humans for amusement, turning manna imagery into false hope and inhumane baiting), you know that that line can have some very dark resonances from 20th-century European history; Even the Ecco Homo line, not interpolated, can bear world-historical symbolic significance: I was talking an intensive course in Latin around that time and the instructor was saying he didn't like that they had it pronounce with the soft C (the "ch" when two of them) rather than the hard C that would have been historically accurate for that time, but he conceded at leas as far as, "ok, I can see you point," when I said that, for a film like this, that line embodies more than the material detail of the one historical moment, much more of the development of understanding of the Incarnation over millenia, even maybe resonances with somebody like Nietzsche using it as a title for a work with a very different take on it.

Here is a video of the Mary and Jesus through the Floor tableau scene