A New Era for America...And Fiction?

I haven’t said anything on here about the major event that happened last week, the election of Obama as president. It’s a huge thing, and a great step forward for the country. How well will things actually turn out? Can he undo all the awful things done by the Bush administration? It’ll be a while before we have the answers to those questions, but I think there is a tangible hope about the country’s direction now, a major contrast from the Bush era post 9/11 loss of agency and hope that we could ever have something better.

Back in 2000, the major narrative of the election was, there’s no difference between the two parties, they’re just two sides of the same coin. Hearing that today, that Bush and Gore are the same, it sounds absurd. A lot of people say that it doesn’t matter who’s president, things will be corrupt all the same no matter who’s in power. I think the Bush administration has proven that decisively wrong. Bush has remade the government in his image, he’s created two wars based on lies, both the “war on terror” and Iraq, and fundamentally changed the tax structure, such that Obama’s attempt to go back to what’s essentially the Clinton era tax system is called socialism. If Bush was not elected, we would not have gone to war in Iraq, I think that’s the best testament to the fact that who is in power does matter.

Admittedly, it’s a lot easier to make a mess than to clean things up, and if there’s one major worry about the Obama administration, it’s that people will jump all over him too quick, and say that he’s failing before he even has a chance to get started. But, ideally he’ll be able to do something different and make the world a better place.

The political climate of the nation influences a lot more than just policy, look at the pop culture that’s emerged in the Bush administration, everything is dark and brutal. Once goofy, over the top characters like Batman and James Bond have been reimagined as starkly realistic warriors in a morally corrupt world. I think the resonance of works like Casino Royale and The Dark Knight is largely due to a general pessimism in the world, a feeling that there’s no time for frivolity, even our blockbuster films have to be grounded in reality. While they’re really strong movies, a vast improvement from the goofy excesses of late Clinton era Bond and Batman, both films are notable for the fact that the heroes get very little joy from what they’re doing. They’re on a mission, and are constantly forced to sacrifice elements of their humanity as the films go along.

Grant Morrison is always perceptive about the cultural climate his work goes out into. The day-glo pop optimism of late period Invisibles fits perfectly with a world where the Cold War has just ended, and for the first time in fifty years, we had no enemy to battle. That’s exactly what happens in the story, this illusory war collapses and the characters are liberated to move on to the next stage of humanity. But, a year after the series ended, we got a new illusory war, one that sounds like something Sir Miles would jokingly propose, a “war on terror.” Think how absurd and sci-fi that sounds. It’s like Jack Kirby in the middle of the Fourth World. In a world where we fight imaginary wars, maybe our fiction has to be hard edged and brutal, as if we’re trying to make those wars real. Couldn’t you read The Dark Knight as an elaborate Bush era fantasy, this chaos is what will happen if we don’t have total control.

The position of chaos in popular mythology says a lot about the culture we’re living in. The Dark Knight is about a character fighting to keep the world in check, to hold back change and preserve the status quo. Compare to the Clinton era opus, The Matrix, which posits super-cool chaos warriors who go through the world destroying all symbols of authority in their path. Part of the reason that the later Matrix films failed is likely that people found it harder to relate to characters who want to destroy the status quo after suffering through an event like 9/11. Neo and Trinity are the kind of characters that Batman would be taking on in his attempt to keep a fragile hold on order.

Part of the reason why I find Morrison’s work on Final Crisis and particularly Batman RIP so interesting is that it’s so distinctively tied to the world we’re living in now, a dramatization of the end of the Bush era. Final Crisis’ Slayer album cover aesthetic is all in service of a story that’s designed to “let evil win,” before bringing things back in an explosive burst of hope. It’s a way to exorcise our demons, to pass through the ultimate terror and show that humanity will always come out strong. It’s appropriate that the last issue of Final Crisis will come out within a week of Obama’s inauguration, to kick start the new era.

RIP is even more interesting because of the way it turns Batman from a protector of order into his own force of chaos. Pretty much all the Batman films are dominated by their villains, Morrison’s great achievement is to make Batman himself the most interesting character in the comic. Over the course of RIP, we see a guy who’s exerting all his mental energy trying to maintain control, to hold back the force of chaos. In doing so, he finds himself in a war against the Black Glove, an uber-powerful organization that is so devious, he can never hope to defeat it. It’s Batman’s own war on terror, and one of the most powerful scenes in the arc is when Jezebel suggests that Bruce himself was the one who created the Black Glove, because he couldn’t deal with not having an enemy to fight. He is addicted to being Batman, and having this ultimate enemy, one he can never defeat, justifies the billions of dollars he spends on gear.

There’s a pointed criticism of the military-industrial complex there. Jezebel ponders what the money he’s spent being Batman could have done in a third world country. Instead, Bruce chose to fight a war that will never end, a war that eventually upsets his mental state and turns him from an agent of order to an agent of chaos.

It’ll probably take a few years before we see works that reflect an Obama era view of the world, but I think we will see a move away from the intense emphasis on ‘realism’ and darkness. If the world becomes a better place, art will reflect that too. Maybe in the next Bond movie, James will finally be able to have a little fun without feeling so guilty about it.

Berlin Alexanderplatz

It’s taken me a while, but last night I finished Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz series. I’ve really liked all the Fassbinder stuff I’ve seen, particularly The Marriage of Maria Braun, a really pop, exciting film that’s got such a different attitude from most period pieces. I’d always heard that Berlin Alexanderplatz was in many ways his masterpiece, the one work that contains all his obsessions, but it was the promise of an insane, surreal two hour epilogue that had me really excited about the show. The epilogue did not disappoint, nor did the series, which has its ups and downs, but on the whole is a really fantastic work.

Most of the writing about the film calls it the longest single narrative film ever made. I think that sentiment comes out of the inherent bias a lot of old school film people have against television. The work was made for TV, and originally shown on TV. It’s broken up into episodes, which may flow together seamlessly, but so does The Wire or 24, and those shows aren’t considered the longest films of all time. I suppose the fact that Fassbinder wrote and directed all of it does make it a more singular work than something like The Wire, but at the same time, if it’s shown on TV first, in weekly episodes, that makes it a TV show. And, in that respect, it’s a clear forerunner to a lot of the more arty and esoteric TV shows that have aired in the US in recent years. The Sopranos is the one that springs immediately to mind, simply because of Gunther Lamprecht’s resemblance to Gandolfini as Tony Soprano.

The series has a frequently scattershot narrative approach. Particularly in the earlier episodes, it seems more like a series of short stories centered around Franz than a single coherent narrative. There’s the episode where he sells Nazi newspapers, the time he stays at someone’s house and gets drunk, and son on. Once Franz meets Reinhold, things start to cohere a bit. There’s the great episode where Reinhold continually passes his girlfriends to Franz, which becomes a lot clearer once we reach the epilogue.

Until the epilogue, I didn’t totally get the significance of a lot of what happened. I followed all the events, and understood on a basic level why Reinhold killed Mieze, and why this was so devastating for Franz. However, the epilogue gives a new overall significance to their relationship and Franz’s friendship with Reinhold. Obviously, the epilogue is a really challenging piece of work, a masterpiece of cinematic subjectivity that recalled the descent into madness chronicled in both finales of Neon Genesis Evangelion. A character utterly broken by the world wanders through his own subconscious, constantly taunted by reminders of the world that has driven him to insanity.

In the case of Franz, it’s the pull between the better parts of himself, his desire to stay out of crime and live a good life, and the seductive pull of the criminal world, which is represented by Luders and Reinhold. At the start of the work, Franz decides that he’s going to be good, he’s going to work hard and make it on his own. The show then chronicles the failures along the way that lead him to insanity at the end.

After losing his arm, Franz is nearly broken. But, he’s saved by Mieze, a woman who loves him and believes in him. She will prostitute herself to support them if it means that she’s able to be with Franz. Franz is described as her pimp, but I don’t really see it like that. When her john does come around, Franz is just sort of there, making conversation, but by no means in control of what Mieze does. As a conversation about the uselessness of cripples earlier in the show makes clear, Franz has a lot of self esteem issues. Wtihout his arm, he knows that he can’t support her, and that’s why he’s willing to go along with the arrangment, as long it lets him be with Mieze. I really like the way their relationship is played, from the reckless abandon of them getting drunk together in the apartment, to the way that Eva plays the benevolent mother, pushing the two of them closer together.

Mieze clung to Eva after leaving her own parents, and now Eva is giving her a new parental figure/lover. Notably, Franz is essentially a castrated figure in his relationship with Mieze, he may have sex with her, but he doesn’t have the power, and thus he takes on the hybrid role of father/lover. When it is just Franz and Mieze, they have an essentially utopian relationship. She knows nothing of his criminal life, and he keeps a stark division between the ‘dark’ side of his personality and the part that he shows her.

His relationship with Mieze, and to a lesser extent, Eva, is what supports him through all the bad times. His relationship with Reinhold is what pulls him back into the darkness. Franz can’t help but want to show up Reinhold by introducing him to Mieze. He brings Reinhold into their apartment, and for some reason, hides him under the covers of the bed. Later, Eva and Mieze ponder why Franz would put Reinhold in their bed. The obvious missing answer there is that Franz he uses Mieze as the excuse to put Reinhold just where he wants him. But, I don’t think Franz or Reinhold are really aware of how they feel about each other. Franz has this dark side in him, and by bringing Reinhold into the house, he deliberately breaks down the wall between his dark side and the good part of him that Mieze knows. Once that divide is broken, he proceeds to assault Mieze in a scene that plays like an exact echo of the oft repeated death of Ida.

The assault on Mieze is the key turning point in the film, setting up her eventual death and Franz’s descent into insanity. Afterward, Franz takes Mieze away to the woods, an idyllic place, totally removed from the gritty, urban world we’ve seen in the rest of the film. Despite the visible scars on her face, things are good here. However, when they return to the city, Mieze makes Franz take her to the bar where he hangs out. He denigrates the losers that he spends his time with, but still brings her along. Bringing the good and pure part of his life into the corrupt part engineers his own destruction.

While Reinhold and Mieze represent opposite poles of Franz’s morality, Meck is somewhere in the middle. He’s always nice to Franz, and helps him out early in the film, but at the same time, he encourages Franz to get involved with Pums, and prolongs his involvement in the gangster’s world. Earlier, Reinhold attempted to exert control over Mieze, but she rejected him. In the bar scene, Reinhold uses his leverage over Meck to lure Mieze into a trap. Meck offers Mieze the chance to learn more about Franz’s background. She loves Franz so much, she wants to know everything about him, and Meck takes advantage of that love to destroy her.

Meck’s betrayal is at least partially motivated by the fact that Franz forgives and talks to Reinhold after losing his arm, but seems incapable of speaking to Meck. I’d argue this is because Meck is too much like himself, torn between the good and bad. Franz idealizes Reinhold because he’s alluring, like the devil himself. It’s Reinhold’s nature to be evil, and Franz can’t blame him for it, but Meck should know better. It’s Meck’s moral capacity that makes Franz hate him, he knew how dangerous that mission could be for Franz, and still went along with it.

Meck drives Mieze out to the same place she and Franz went to escape from the city. In a cruel echo of that scene, Reinhold draws her out, brings her to the woods and attempts to seduce her. The scene is strange because Mieze fluctuates between fear of Reinhold and at times attraction to him. Perhaps she, like Franz, is attracted on some level to the evil that Reinhold incarnates. Or, maybe it’s that she hopes to understand what makes Franz so devoted to Reinhold. This guy shoved him out of a moving car, made Franz lose his arm, and yet he remains loyal. If Mieze can make herself love Reinhold, maybe she’ll be one step closer to Franz.

Earlier, we saw trading women function as a way for Reinhold and Franz to have a relationship by proxy. The woman involved changed, the two constants in the relationship were Franz and Reinhold. Here, Mieze becomes involved in that cycle, the difference being that Franz has real feelings for Mieze. Unlike earlier, he doesn’t want to lose Mieze, and that means that he doesn’t want to be with Reinhold in their strange way anymore. By killing Mieze, Reinhold will exert total power over Franz’s life, and ensure that he has no rival for Franz’s adoration.

The last episode of the series is the most intense and emotionally potent. Opening with the bizarre image of Franz in Mieze’s clothes, we proceed through a series of events, including a lengthy botched robbery sequence, which are made all the more foreboding because we’re constantly waiting for the bomb to drop on Franz, for him to find out about what happened to Mieze.

One of the things I love about the series, even before the insanity of the epilogue, is the way it takes place in a heightened emotional reality. Fassbinder will have the characters behave in strange, unnatural ways as a way of illuminating their inner mental state. I can see that bothering some people, as the work swerves from raw naturalism to totally stylized, melodramatic behavior. But, I find it enhances the emotions because it makes the entire work incarnate the characters’ mental space, the world is their feelings. In the final scene of the series proper, Franz finally finds out that Mieze has been killed, and he just laughs uncontrollably. It’s uncomfortable and strange to watch, surely not the way that someone in reality would behave after hearing this revelation, but it works perfectly in context.

The ending is so full of portentous foreboding. We’re expecting Franz to assault Eva in the same way he did Ida, to act out against the injustice done to him, but he just laughs uncontrollably. On one level, it is deeply disturbing to find out that Mieze has been killed, but he had been sitting there depressed because he thought that she walked out on him, that she never loved him. But, he’s found out instead that she did love him to the end, the good part of himself is validated, he is someone worth loving. This happy discovery meshes uneasily in his brain with the growing realization that she is in fact dead, and Reinhold did it, which leads to his insanity in the epilogue. I particularly like the title after episode 13 which says something like, “Franz has reached the end of his journey on this mortal plane. Now, we break him.”

I love the sort of psychologically subjective, surreal filmmaking we see in the epilogue. More than any other artistic medium, I think cinema has the ability to immerse you in a character’s mental state, and use a combination of visuals, music and dialogue/narration to create a rhythm and feeling that becomes trance like and hypnotic. You see it sometimes in features, certainly people like Fellini created really interesting, psychologically subjective stuff, but the most powerful examples of this kind of filmmaking have all come in television. The reason for that is that something that surrealism works best when it also has a grounding in emotional reality. If you just watched the epilogue on its own, it would probably still be an interesting experience, but it wouldn’t have the emotional or intellectual impact that it does here. The thirteen episodes that preceded it give us the grounding to understand what the scenes in Franz’s mind mean, and also allow us to relate the at times seemingly random sequences to everything that happened previously, and therefore understand it all more than we otherwise would have.

It reminds me a lot of the ends of two other series, Twin Peaks and Neon Genesis Evangelion. The last episode of Twin Peaks, and segments of Fire Walk With Me are as purely experimental filmmaking as anything Lynch has ever done, but they’re also profoundly emotional because we understand the symbolic system he’s built. Berlin Alexanderplatz’s epilogue reminds me the most of the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion, both the TV finale and the End of Evangelion film. The last episodes of Eva, like this film, focus on a character traversing the ruins of their own mind, a traumatic experience in reality has forced him into a regressive mental cocoon. And, like the finales of Eva, this epilogue is at times oblique, but always visually fascinating and strange and exciting filmmaking.

The epilogue, for all of its visual insanity, does a brilliant job of tying together the at times seemingly disconnected events of the series into a linear whole. Characters I barely remembered from earlier in the series were brought to the fore and connected with later events. I particularly like the way that the incident with Luders and the stuff with Reinhold were brought together. Luders got Franz involved in petty crime, and ultimately led to him betraying the kindly widow who had associated Franz with her late husband. Now, that widow is associated with Mieze, and Luders becomes a proto-Reinhold. Franz has been on one journey throughout the series, he already started to fall at that point, Mieze was his last chance to save himself, and her death sealed his descent into insanity.

Much of what I was discussing earlier, with Reinhold and Mieze as the poles of Franz’s morality, comes out of the epilogue. Literal angels walk through the scenes with Franz, but the only devil is Reinhold and the Pums gang. The epilogue also makes the homoerotic subtext of the Franz/Reinhold relationship into text. First, there’s the scene in prison where Reinhold expresses love for his fellow prisoner, and a desire to never let him go. It’s such a contrast to the way Reinhold behaved earlier, it makes clear that Reinhold repressed his homosexual urges through chronic womanizing and his weird partner trading with Franz. It was only in prison, where homosexuality was socially acceptable, that he could comes to terms with his true desire.

Throughout the epilogue, there’s a bunch of scenes that spin the Franz/Reinhold relationship through a variety of homosexual iconography. There’s the surreal scene where a makeup wearing Reinhold whips a similarly madeup Franz, all in a strange homoerotic hell, filled with steam, leather and naked men crawling through the dirt. There’s also the fantastic boxing match scene, which is perhaps the best encapsulation of Franz’s love/hate relationship with Reinhold. He’s there to beat up Reinhold, to avenge Mieze, but he winds up kissing Reinhold. That scene is visually realized through a surreal rear projection that turns Franz and Reinhold into tiny warriors in front of a massive, constantly swirling crowd.

Just on a visual level, the epilogue is a joy. I wouldn’t disagree with critics who say it could be tightened a bit, but the brilliance of it far outweighs any demerits. The most striking visual sequence is Franz’s trip through a slaughterhouse. It’s a huge break from the aesthetic of the rest of the film, all white and red, bright instead of dark. The scene also features a great meta moment, where Fassbinder himself watches the scene, backed by the two angels. Like Wong Kar-Wai, Fassbinder has a ‘uniform,’ a fedora and big glasses. He looks really cool here, an appropriate meta intrusion in light of the fact that this whole sequence is his dream of Franz’s dream.

Like the best surreal imagery, the slaughterhouse scene also functions as a multi-layered metaphor of what is going on with Franz. He had his arm cut off due to his involvement in the Pums gang, and Mieze has died at their hands as well. They tear him up and destroy him. But, there’s also the dark allure there, which is represented in a later scene, where Franz goes back to the slaughterhouse and finds an orgy in progress. With no energy to do otherwise, Franz jumps into the mix.

The other really notable thing about the epilogue is the use of music. I love the fact that he used contemporary tracks, the Kraftwerk song in particular becomes a haunting anthem, a rhythmic base for the visuals to build on. I love period films that use contemporary music, any period film is as much a reflection of the time it was made in as the time it’s depicting. So, using the musical language of the contemporary world helps tie those connections together. The greatest problem with period pieces is making the characters feel alive and relatable, and using contemporary score can help make that easier. Fassbinder’s got great taste, and the soundtrack to this final episode is killer.

The surreal parts of the epilogue are juxtaposed with scenes from the real world, showing Franz’s descent into insanity. They’re pretty harrowing to watch, to see the guy we’d spent thirteen hours with broken and drooling in a mental hospital. The lengthy scene where three psychiatrists debate what to do with him is one of the few scenes here that runs a bit long, but it’s interesting thematically. Two of the psychiatrists want to give up on Franz, after all this is a convict who’s been accused of murder again. Why should we bother trying to save him? But, because we’ve been through so much with Franz, we do want him to be saved, we know that there’s still a human being left in the swirling mess of mental trauma.

In the dream world, Franz plays through endless variations of his core traumas, in the same way that the series endlessly repeated the murder of Ida. Looking at it now, I feel like those repeats of the murder sequence were designed to show that Franz is still consumed with guilt over what he’s done. The threat of that violence is present in every relationship he engages with, and the scene is consciously evoked both when he is attacking Mieze and in the last episode, when Eva stands where Ida did, and we’re just waiting for Franz to snap. In the dream, the loss of his arm is echoed again and again, replayed in an ever changing haze of characters and circumstances.

I’d argue that the entire epilogue is about Franz’s inability to choose between Reinhold and Mieze, between the good side of his personality and the bad. In the first scene, he is adrift without Mieze, the constantly spinning camera in a broken down war zone evoking his own unsteady mental state. He finds Mieze there, and for a brief moment, all seems well, but she disappears and he must travel on through his mental landscape, seeking a final mental resting place.

This struggle in Franz’s mind eventually leads to the destruction of his passion, of the lifeforce that made him who he was. This is most vividly dramatized in the epic crucifixion scene, which serves as the climax of the surreal journey through Franz’s mind. Betrayed by his best friend, he is placed on the cross and perishes as atomic bombs explode in the background. It’s an amazing scene visually, a great fusion of classical iconography and more contemporary images of apocalypse. We’ve been with this guy for fourteen hours now, and it’s nice that he gets an appropriately over the top send off.

I like the way that Fassbinder mixes all kinds of iconography in the epilogue. Our minds exist at the crossroads of the past and the present. In the hazy realm of the subconscious, it makes perfect sense to jump between 20s Berlin, a contemporary slaughterhouse and the pure surrealism of the crucifixion scene. Sure, this could result in an unfocused jumble of scenes in the wrong hands, but here, it’s all in service of the story, of illuminating this man’s mind, and that’s why it works so well.

In the end, we return to Franz in reality. I was surprised by this because I assumed that the atom bomb sequence was a symbol of his death. It turns out that in many ways, that was a correct assumption. Franz’s body didn’t die, but the person he was expired. Rather than engage with the conflict between two extremes of good and bad that raged in his mind, he essentially shut himself down and became a resigned shell of a man. He testifies against Reinhold, perhaps the best evidence that he’s given up the fire, cutting off his arm didn’t do it, but at this point, Franz is done with Reinhold.

The final scene of the film shows Franz in his new job as a night watchman. He does his job, wandering from car to car, but at this point he seems like an old man, just doing his daily routine, nothing more. He has become a mindless person, and you could certainly read that arc as a comment on Germany itself at the time. After the fire of the Weimar period, it probably felt nice to surrender to the total control and security that someone like Hitler promised. But, in doing so, they obviously enabled many terrible acts. Without the passion for life that Franz had, he becomes nothing more than a sheep.

Berlin Alexanderplatz isn’t an easy work to undertake, and its long absence from distribution probably only added to the legend. Fassbinder’s work at times has an alien quality that I find unnerving. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a wonderfully made movie, but it’s absolutely painful to watch. That was probably what he was going for, to accentuate the melodrama of a Douglas Sirk movie, but in so doing, he makes a film that’s just emotionally brutal. The advantage of Berlin Alexanderplatz is that you spend so much time with the characters that you get used to the world. Particularly from the introduction of Mieze on, the work is very easy to engage with and full of entertaining nuances. I think spending so much time with his work here will make it easier for me to engage with any other Fassbinder films that I watch.

It’s hard to believe that one man could make as many films as Fassbinder did in as short a period of time. There are directors who don’t direct 15 hours of content in their entire career, he did it in one year, and directed several films around that. It’s also hard to believe that he would have the chance to make a series like this for German television. Until recently, you’d never see a vision so idiosyncratic and singularly auteur-driven on American TV. I’d argue that only The Sopranos and Mad Men feel as fully realized as this series does. This is the best of what TV can do, and I love that Fassbinder had the chance to do a story on this scale.

So, in the end, Berlin Alexanderplatz is a masterpiece. It’s got some rough patches along the way, but the epilogue fuses everything together into neat thematic cohesion, and makes it a lot easier to understand some of the seemingly disconnected sequences earlier in the film. I really enjoyed the first thirteen episodes, and then the epilogue was like crack for me, exactly the sort of thing I want to see in a film, strange, visually and musically experimental, and all in the service of illuminating character psychology. Those two hours are the sublime, surreal capper to a thoroughly engaging series.

Astonishing X-Men: #1-12

I would seem to be the target audience for Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men. I love Joss’s work, I loved Claremont’s X-Men, and I loved Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. But, I don’t quite feel the love for Whedon’s own X-Men stories. Having read half the run now, it hasn’t totally gelled for me yet. It’s definitely well put together, but it lacks the crazy improvisatory feel that both Claremont and Morrison’s work had, and I feel is kind of essential to making a great X-Men comic.

Astonishing is a decidedly prestige comic, a much more cohesive package than Morrison’s messy run on the title. John Cassaday was given time to draw every issue, no Igor Kordey fill-ins here. In the early going of NXM, the jump from Quitely to Kordey really hurt the title. It was a schizophrenic read, where the story had to work in spite of the art. Here, the art is totally consistent, but even reading it in the trade, you kind of feel the impact of those delays. Morrison’s X-Men felt like the X-title, he defined the world and made it feel like a whole bunch of other stuff was happening, but his book was the only one that mattered. Whedon’s X-Men has a similarly sealed off feel from the rest of the line, but in this case, it makes it feel a bit like an Elseworlds, a piece of fan fiction he wrote as a tribute to both Morrison and Claremont.

A large part of my problem with the book comes from the fact that I consider Morrison’s ending salvos on the title to be a pretty definitive conclusion to X-Men. I don’t think any stories really need to be told about these characters post Here Comes Tomorrow. Obviously they’re going to be told, but I’d have been more interested to see Whedon tackle a different batch of characters than the ones Morrison was dealing with. The stuff with Kitty and Piotr works better than the Cyclops/Emma Frost for me because Whedon’s able to put more of a stamp on them and go into new territory. But, in general, it’s hard for me to read what’s essentially a sequel to Morrison’s run when Planet X and HCT were the perfect pop avant garde wrap up for years of X-stories.

In that respect, the toughest issues for me to read were the first couple. There, Whedon presents the idea that the X-Men should present themselves as superheroes again instead of the stylish emergency rescue team of the Morrison run. This means getting new costumes that just don’t work for me. I love a lot of Cassaday’s art here, but when he’s drawing the team in costume, they just look weird. Cyclops’s outfit is the biggest offender, it’s like he’s wearing a giant condom, and after the ultra-stylish Quitely outfits, it’s hard to go back to Wolverine wearing a blue and yellow spandex jump suit. I much prefer the Morrison outfits, but I suppose these outfits are part of the thematic missive that the X-Men should present themselves more as a superhero team.

To this end, there’s an attempt to integrate them into the larger Marvel Universe as a whole. I always prefer the X-Men when they’re sealed off in a world without other superheroes or space travelers. Generally speaking, most sci-fi works have one central conceit that defines their world, in Terminator, you can buy that robots come back from the future, but it would stretch credibility if Sarah Connor all of a sudden could fly. Similarly, I like the idea that the one conceit of X-Men is that mutants exist, throwing in other superheroes and aliens like Ord just takes it further and further away from the reality based storytelling that I think serves the title best. My favorite eras of Claremont’s run were Paul Smith and the Mutant Massacre to Fall of the Mutants, when the book was grounded in something closer to reality. As such, Ord doesn’t really work for me as an X-Men villain, he doesn’t say anything interesting about the characters, he’s just sort of there.

To enjoy the book, I had to get past the fact that it wasn’t trying to do the same thing that Morrison did. Morrison’s goal was to take the best aspects of Claremont, jettison the rest and explode the book into the 21st century. Now, you could argue that he failed in his mission and by the end had reverted to simply replaying the same X-Men vs. Magneto conflict that had been going since X-Men #1. But, I think the ragtag bunch of X-Men left behind at the end of that storyline was decidedly different than what we’re used to from the title.

Morrison riffed on the archetypal X-Men stories through the lens of his personal thematic concerns, and I suppose that’s what Whedon does as well. Kitty Pryde is in many ways the template for all of Whedon’s strong, but neurotic female protagonists. She’s a remarkable character, so vastly different from most female comic book characters, who are statuesque goddesses, and Whedon makes her the star of his run to date.

In general, the character stuff works really well. I like the way he writes Scott and Emma, though the endless teasing about Emma possibly working with the Hellfire Club doesn’t bode well. Also, I have issues with his more aggressive Wolverine. I prefer the zen warrior Morrison wrote, and even though a gag like Logan’s “I like beer” thought caption is really funny, it diminishes the layers that both Claremont and Morrison wrote into the character. But, Scott and Kitty work really well and function as a strong emotional center for the story.

Most of my issues come from the plotting. I like the idea of the mutant cure, but it doesn’t really go anywhere, which leaves us with Ord and Danger, two really weak villains. The beauty of Claremont’s run at its best was the fact that there weren’t really any villains, just a whole bunch of moral ambiguity. Danger and Ord are very one note villains, they have motivations, but they’re not interesting in any way. The Danger arc in particular is nonsensical, and falls prey to the same logical absurdities that any evil computer story, outside of HAL, has. Shouldn’t Whedon have learned his lesson with “I Robot, You Jane.”

So, I’ve got a lot of conflicted feelings on the book. It’s objectively better than the vast majority of X-Men books, but I got more of a charge reading the early part of Mike Carey’s run than I did reading this. I suppose it’s expectations, there I was surprised by just how much I liked Bachalo’s art and the character stuff Carey was doing. Here, I’m getting what I paid for. It’s good, but there’s no real surprises. But, perhaps the rest of the run will treat me better.

TV Roundup

I’m watching a whole bunch of shows this season, and while nothing’s totally wowing me, there’s a bunch of good stuff out there. Most of my favorite shows air on a more haphazard schedule, Mad Men just ended, Battlestar won’t resume until January and Doctor Who is just throwing out episodes whenever they feel like it. In bad news, Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse will now be airing on Fridays, which is pretty much acknowledging it’ll never be a big hit. I hope that the awful timeslot means Fox will give the show a longer leash, we shall see. Anyway, here’s the shows I’m watching now.

Life on Mars

Right now, I’m really liking the show. The premise seems better to a limited series, as with the original, or even better, a film, and after the weak second episode, I wasn’t sure if it was going to work on a week to week basis. But, since then, we’ve got a couple of really strong episodes, and an alright one last night. For me, the show’s greatest strength is the sense of place it conveys. I don’t know if it’s an accurate depiction of the 70s, but even if it’s just a depiction of the mythic 70s created in our culture, I like spending time there. I think it’d be annoying to run into a lot of the hippie mystic characters from the time in real life, but I love watching them on film. Our world may be in a paradigm shift now, but for the last eight years, things have been pretty dire, and it’s nice to look at a time when people were interested in expanding their consciousness and changing the world.

The show’s strength is the trippy interludes that happen every so often, like when Sam got dosed with LSD. Those are really interesting visually and tie in with his existential dilemma about why he’s in the 1973 and what it means for his existence. In general, Sam is a really likable, fun lead to watch. He, along with Michael Imperioli always keep things interesting, even when the show falls into rote police procedural territory. My major concern looking ahead is that the show becomes a 70s issue of the week police procedural, and after a certain point, the trippy material will slip away. After Sam runs into everyone he new from the 2000s in the 70s, what’s left for the show to do beyond just tell stories about him in the 70s? I still don’t see the show lasting more than a season or two without radically shifting its premise at some point. Still, I really like what I see, and the presence of three Wire actors in last night’s episode helped keep things rolling along.

My greatest concern beyond the simple in sustainability of the premise is the fact that each episode seems to end with Gene siding with Sam on whatever argument they had, and doing the right thing instead of the morally corrupt thing. The problem with that is if you do it every week, shouldn’t Gene just evolve morally at some point? It seems like we’re heading towards that TV problem where every initially edgy characters gets worn down into an ally, and is given something in their past that explains why they do evil things. It can be a lot more interesting to just let your characters do bad things, and explore them from there than to try to make everyone live by 2008 morality in a world that doesn’t necessarily hew to that morality. The show needs to go edgier, and go stranger, but I don’t know that a first year show having some ratings issue is going to get the latitude to do what they really need to do.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

This is a show I had essentially no expectations for. I didn’t see the theatrical movie because reviews were so dire, but I figured I’d check out the first TV episodes. It’s strange that a Star Wars TV show has gotten so little heat as this has. I guess it’s because it’s targeted at kids, but I don’t see anyone talking about this. I suppose that’s the consequence of the prequels, in the mid 90s, any piece of Star Wars material was cherished, now with so much more out there, it’s just not that special any more. But, perhaps it’s best that this show comes in with lower expectations. I don’t think it’s a great show, but it’s pretty entertaining, and occasionally touches those emotions that the classic trilogy hit so well.

The major flaw for me is the animation. It all looks like a video game cut scene, I don’t know why they chose the wooden puppet look for the characters. The stuff without people is really pretty, but the people look awful. And, there’s a lot of the same issues as the prequels have, the inexplicably retarded battle droids, and lack of really well defined characters. Anakin here is used as kind of a blank slate hero, lacking the moral ambiguity that the character should have.

But, there’s also some good stuff. I like the way they depict the clones, people who are all similar, and struggle to find ways to define themselves. They exist for a mission, but still hope to carve out an individual identity. The space battles are pretty great, and the liberal swipes from the original trilogy make for some nice action sequences. The best episode for me was the one in which Anakin, Obi-Wan and Padme sneak aboard the Malevolence to destroy it from the inside. That had the fun adventure feel of the OT that the prequels rarely captured. I don’t love the show, but it’s got its moments. I just wish that I was more excited about a weekly Star Wars TV show.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Continuing a theme, I really like some things about this show, while others frustrate me. I was getting close to losing interest when they dropped the fantastic episode about John going to therapy, all the while being observed by Cameron and Sarah. That episode conveyed the difficulty he has trying to express himself and grow up while dealing with both the pressure of his future destiny, and the constant watching eyes of his mother.

But, amidst interesting character stuff, there’s a lot of random b-movie action that doesn’t really go anywhere. It’s a show focused on narrative, not characters, and that means that things can get a bit samey. How many episodes have centered around our characters hunting down some random Eastern European guy? Monday’s episode did surprise me with Cameron’s brutality, when she killed the three guys who had robbed them.

There’s always some interesting stuff in each episode to keep me going, but the show isn’t making it to great. It’s like Buffy pre “Surprise,” I watch it, I like it, but it doesn’t really capture my imagination. The tough thing with watching any series as it goes is you don’t have the benefit of a pre-existing critical response. I stuck with Buffy and Babylon 5 because I knew they would get better, who knows what will happen with this show? It could become a classic this season or it could just keep going along as it is. Right now, I’m liking it enough to keep watching, the quality fluctuates, but for every weak episode, there’s a solid one.

The Office

I’ve written about my mixed feelings on the US Office before. I do really like the show, but I was so emotionally invested in the original, I’ve never been able to really get into the Pam/Jim stuff in the same way. My least favorite aspect of this show is definitely Pam and Jim, I find them both unlikable, precisely because they’re so engineered to be likable. In yesterday’s episode, Jim is called smug and arrogant, but rather than engage with this criticism, it’s revealed as a lie. I think it would have been a lot more interesting to deal with the idea that Jim hating his job is reflected in how he does it, and play with his flaws. But, they choose not to engage with it, and instead we get the annoying cutesy Bluetooth stuff.

The supporting characters have always interested me more. I really like what they did with Ryan. The Holly arc was solid, but I’m getting tired of the Andy/Dwight/Angela triangle happenings. I still enjoy the show, but I don’t think anything this season has been as focused as the post-strike episodes last year.

How the Internet has Changed Film and TV Criticism

I don’t think most people really consider the way that the internet has totally changed virtually every aspect of our lives. Future generations will never know a world where print media was the only option, where every video ever made wasn’t available to you on demand, or where you could send a message to anyone anywhere and get it to them instaneously. The internet itself is constantly evolving, and I think one day people are going to be incredibly frustrated by the fact that we’ve kept such a poor historical record of how the internet has evolved. Could you find a web page from 1998? What did that site look like? In the future, it might be impossible to find records of those sites, and it’ll be lost to history in the same way that a lot of early films are, because no one thinks that something so seemingly transient would ever be interesting as a matter of historical record.

All of this is a prelude to discussing the way that the internet has influenced the development of film and television in the late 1990s and 2000s, both on a production and on a reception level. The internet has been a great boon for television, while its influence on film has been less beneficial. The central reason for this is the nature of the internet news cycle. On the internet, something happens, is discussed and disposed of immediately for the next thing. It’s not a matter of talking about last month’s thing and feeling dated anymore, it’s a question of talking about yesterday’s story and feeling dated. For TV, where there’s a constant stream of new material, this is great, allowing for a continuous, evolving discussion centered around a single thing. For film, it’s not so good.

The vast, vast majority of internet writing about film doesn’t actually engage with films themselves. In the internet journalism cycle, the actual release of the film marks the end of our interest in it. You can find hundreds of sites that will tell you what’s in development, and repeat the same pieces of news that circulate all over, but how many actually engage with films themselves and discuss them in anything beyond a thumbs up/thumbs down type review. Those reviews are usually published as the film is released, and are targeted at people who haven’t seen the movie, and are wondering whether they should see it or not. There’s a utilitarian quality to most writing about film, it’s designed more as a product guide than an exploration of art.

In general, most internet film writing is centered around that should I see it or shouldn’t I dichotomy. All the news reporting before the film comes out, be it casting or test screening reports, is about trying to find out if the film will “rock or suck.” This usually reaches its fever pitch the week before the film comes out, when the media is saturated with articles about the film.

But what happens when a movie comes out, when people can actually see the thing? At that point, most discussion of the film totally dissipates and with very rare exceptions, it’s not written about again, outside of an occasional report on box office performance. The news cycle is designed to always be writing about new movies, you don’t want to be the guy publishing a review of W. today, that film is so two weeks ago. When it comes to awards season, I’m usually sick of reading about the film before it even gets an actual release. With There Will Be Blood, I felt like there was already a backlash/reverse backlash cycle before the movie even came out in that one theater in NYC opening weekend. I’m sure it will be the same for Benjamin Button this year.

What this writing cycle skips is actually writing about films, analyzing and exploring them as works of art. Admittedly, a lot of films don’t deserve this sort of consideration, but most movies, even bad ones, have something interesting to say about our society and the world that produced them. Most Hollywood movies reveal elements of our social value system, and the priorities of twenty-first century America.

With this blog, I aim to analyze and explore what films are really about, and why they do or don’t work. I usually do discuss what I do or don’t like, but not in a traditional review context. My goal with writing is not to tell you whether or not to see the movie, it’s to ponder what the movie means after seeing it. For me, the process of writing about a film is the final piece of the viewing experience. Writing about a work like The End of Evangelion allows for a sustained meditation on an incredibly dense work. By unpacking that work, I’m getting to the core of what Anno intended with the film. People spend years of their lives making a film, surely we can invest a bit of time to ponder it after the initial viewing experience.

The problem with this is that there is inherently a more limited audience for an in depth discussion of an individual film. Outside of massive blockbusters like The Dark Knight, most people won’t have seen a movie, and we’ve got this anti-spoilers culture that’s going to be mad if you reveal plot details. But, I love to read really in depth articles about movies that I’ve just seen, analysis that reveals not just whether a film worked, but also why.

The films that do inspire a lot of in depth internet discussion along those lines are ones that are ambiguous and leave you with a lot of questions. Mulholland Dr. was discussed extensively online, primarily in the context of people wanting to know what happened. Most people believe that cinema exists primarily as a conveyance for narrative, and as such, they’re only interested in exploring the film more if their desire for a narrative is not instantly satisfied. Mulholland Dr. plants seeds in peoples’ minds, it gives them all the basic set up for a mystery, then doesn’t tell them the answer. They want to know the key to the puzzle box, and that’s understandable. Analyzing Mulholland Dr. reveals all kinds of depths and meanings that you wouldn’t instantly get, but that’s true of most good movies, even ones that don’t leave you scratching your head for narrative meaning.

And, from the perspective of trying to make movies, just writing about movies, and trying to understand the way that they create emotional beats and feelings will help you more than any three act fill in the blank structure. You can use your own viewing experience as a kind of laboratory, pulling data out that and trying to figure out why certain images work better than others, why some scenes produce an intense emotional reaction and others don’t work at all. I think a lot of that also gets into psychiatric self analysis. I’ve narrowed down specific elements that always hit me in a strong way, and am then able to use similar narrative constructions or images in my own work.

Admittedly, I don’t have the chance to write as much on here about the movies I see as I’d like to. I’d love to be able to sit down and write 1500 words on every movie I see, but time is limited, and I wind up writing about the things that really spark my imagination and demand analysis. On the blogs I read, I’m much more interested in people who write in depth analysis of works than the sort of rote reviews of the week’s releases that are all too common.

I think the biggest problem comes down to perception. There’s this feeling that if you’re writing about last week’s release, you’re behind the times, and as such, we don’t see much writing actually about a film’s content as opposed to the circumstances of its release.

And, in general, I think the internet, along with TV on DVD, has been the biggest factor in validating TV as an art form. The internet showed conclusively that people do watch every episode of shows, that they are interested in challenging shows with heavy continuity and are willing to do the work to engage with those shows. I’m guessing that in the pre-internet days, producers would play loose with continuity because they figured nobody would notice. But, starting with shows like The X-Files, the online audience kept better track of continuity than the actual writers of the show. I think shows like Buffy or Lost are intensely aware of their online reputation, and play to that audience without considering the ‘average viewer.’

The internet isn’t a great medium for discussing film because you’ve got only a limited amount of fuel for the fire. With TV, each episode allows for discussion both of what just happened, and to ponder what happens next. Admittedly, there’s still a vast non-internet viewing audience out there, but I feel like online TV fandom has helped to foster the golden age of TV. If you judged shows by internet feedback, The Wire would have been the highest rated show of last year, barely topping Battlestar Galactica. There’s this internet watercooler that encourages viewing of quality shows, I saw so many people writing about The Wire, I just had to check it out.

And, because the show is available on DVD, I can catch up and watch the show as it’s meant to be watched, not just watch one episode, get lost and never check it out again. TV has changed from something where you just tune in for an episode, it’s become like reading a serialized novel, and DVD gives you the chance to start from the beginning.

Unfortunately, there’s often a slight delay between audience response and ratings. Everyone on the internet loves Arrested Development and is furious that it was cancelled, but none of them actually watched it when it was on. It’s only a few shows that can achieve internet dominance and ratings success, think The Sopranos.

A lot of it comes down to the decline in shared cultural objects in a fractured multi-media age. One of the amazing things about The Sopranos finale was that after it aired, it was just omnipresent in the media. It’s very rare that a work of art so great should achieve such mass success. And, once you’ve got a high level of exposure for the work, you can get deeper analysis and more discussion.

So, ironically the internet has allowed for more film and TV writing than ever before, but in fracturing the audience, it’s also taken away the shared cultural experience of watching movies at the same time. Concurrent with the rise of DVD, the theatrical experience, particularly for indie films, has largely been replaced with a Netflix viewing several months later. How can you write about a movie when so few people actually see it at the same time? I guess it ultimately comes down to just exploring a work when you find it, and maybe others will find it in their own time.

Mad Men: 'Meditations on an Emergency' (2x13)

Mad Men’s season finale is full of creeping menace, an impending apocalypse that makes all the characters abandon their inhibitions and be true to their own desires in a way we don’t usually see on the show. Watching it today, it’s ironic that they should be so scared of the Cuban Missile Crisis, we know that it will all blow over, but the show gives a good sense of the very real feeling that the world could end tomorrow, left as nothing but ashes. In that sense, perhaps the key line of the episode is Peggy talking with Father Gil, where she says she’s scared the world might end tomorrow, and he says that’s true any day, and we should live as such. In this case, it takes a crisis to make all the characters reassess their lives, and confront the issues that have been simmering under the surface all season.

Unlike the past few episodes, it wasn’t the Don story that really hooked me. The most interesting pieces of this episode centered on Betty and Peggy. We finally find out what actually happened to Peggy’s baby, she gave it up because she didn’t want to live that life. Don’s advice to her from the flashback scene makes even more sense now, much like Don just walked away from his family because they didn’t match with the image he had of himself, Peggy chooses to give her baby away rather than struggle to deal with what it would do to her perception of herself.

She’s definitely still feeling the emotion of what she did then, but she’s not guilty in the way that society probably feels she should. Father Gil tells her that she’ll go to hell if she doesn’t atone for what she did, but there’s really no way for her to do that. She made her choice and it’s working out for her, she’s ascending in the company and living out a dream she couldn’t have even imagined really happening a few years ago. One of the best scenes in the episode is Peggy revealing what happened to Pete. That is her confession, the moment when she finally acknowledges what happened, and realizes that though it might hurt, she did make the right choice.

Things are more complex for Pete. He clearly has strong feelings for Peggy. At home, he might want Trudy to obey him, but outside his marriage, he’s attracted to a stronger, more independent woman, not unlike Don Draper himself. At first he’s hurt by the fact that he could have had Peggy when he first met her, but still chose to go through with the marriage to Trudy. Later, he’s hurt by the fact that Peggy had the perfect excuse to be with him, the perfect chance to save Pete from his loveless marriage, but instead chose to give away his child and go on with her single life. You’d expect Pete to be mad at her for giving away his kid, after being so thoroughly against adoption early this season, but we get a more human side of the character than we’d seen early in the season. He’s hurt by the fact that Peggy doesn’t want to be with him, and the realization that he’s left alone with no one but Trudy.

Elsewhere, Betty has to deal with her own unwanted pregnancy. Peggy had the freedom to do what she wanted with her kid, she doesn’t live within the societal code that prevents women from getting abortions. The scene with the doctor at the beginning is particularly effective at setting up the societal status quo, women may not want to get pregnant, but if they do, they don’t have any choice but to go through with it. Eventually they’ll get over the reluctance and realize it’s good, right?

Betty opens the episode by rebelling against her doctor’s wishes. She goes riding, and soon finds herself drinking in a bar, flirting with that guy. I really like the look and feel of those scenes, the moody darkness of the hallway where she waits for the bathroom. It reminds me a bit of the red hallway from Irreversible where Alex gets attacked. The past few episodes of the show have done a fantastic job of creating mood and menace just through the cinematography and character behavior.

It’s notable that Betty doesn’t have this tryst until Don confirms to her that he did sleep with Bobbie. Betty knew it, but she needed to hear him say it for it to be totally real. Why does she sleep with the guy? Part of it is that she’s got nothing to lose. The world is on the verge of ending, she’s already pregnant and deeply unhappy, so she might as well do what she’s been tempted to do all season. I think it’s also about getting even with Don, showing that she can do the same things that he can. When she finds out she’s pregnant, I think she knows that she’s either got to take him back or get an abortion, and though she’s more independent, but at that point in time, it’s just not likely that she’d go through with an abortion. So, by sleeping with the guy, she can feel more equal with Don, she’s not crawling back to him, she’s got her own secrets too.

I don’t know how that bodes for the future of their relationship. It could be a cleansing thing, they’ve both betrayed each other in a way, and now they could come back and be together. Or, it could just as easily be symptomatic of the fact that despite Don’s eloquent note, they aren’t really meant to be together at all, and this reunion is just postponing the inevitable. This arc has obvious parallels with season five of The Sopranos, where Carmela kicked Tony out of the house, and he eventually found his way back in because she couldn’t support herself without him. The major difference is that Betty seems to be doing okay, she tells Don that she’s gotten used to being on her own. She can deal with it because she’s essentially been on her own anyway, Don spends so much time working, as long as she has his money coming in, she’s fine. Unlike the Carmela story, Don has a legitimate job, and his check is still sent home, so she still controls the family finances.

For Don, the season finale is largely about selling himself to Betty, trying to prove that he’s a changed man and should come back home. His letter to her is the same kind of pitch he’d make to a client, and like most of his pitches, it’s successful. The major question is why exactly Don chooses to come back? I’d argue that it’s largely about rediscovering the reason why he chose that life with Betty in the first place. In the flashback last week, we saw Don when he first met Betty, giddy with the initial spark of love. He probably won’t feel that again, but after spending so much time adrift, he realized that on some level the family he’s built isn’t just for show, he does have strong feelings for the kids, and for Betty. He has taken them for granted, and much like the end of last season, being alone made him realize that without them, he’s not much more than those European gang of vagabonds he met in “Jet Set.”

Part of it may also be that it’s easier for Don to go back to that world than truly try to build himself up again. What would he do in California? He may love Anna, but he doesn’t have a life there. Going back to New York, he’s got a job, money and security. The journey he took over the course of the season parallels the original Dick Whitman journey, abandoning his family and drifting before finding security and perhaps love with Betty. Only this time he’s coming back to the same people he abandoned. I particularly like the first scene where Don returns, and Betty yells at him saying that she doesn’t have the luxury of going to find herself. Don can just walk away and come back, but people depend on him.

Notably, when he does return, the world he left behind is falling into disarray. There’s the overarching Cuban Missile Crisis, of which he was blissfully unaware out in California, but there’s also the sale of the company. He’s invested a lot in Sterling-Cooper, in making it work with his idea of what advertising should be. Now, he finds Duck trying to warp it to match his vision, a more corporate and less personal concept of advertising. Don doesn’t agree with that, and he seems to win out now, but for how long?

By the end of the episode, Don has essentially restored the status quo. We know that the world won’t end, this crisis will pass, but underneath the seeming normalcy, even more ill feeling is brewing. Everyone’s had to confront things that they probably didn’t want to deal with, and those scars will linger. The season ends on a melancholy note, everyone seemingly gets what they want, but feels even worse because of it.

Ultimately, the characters seem to find their greatest happiness in transgressing societal expectations. Don is relaxed and happy in California in a way we’ve never seen him in New York. He took a vacation from his life and became someone else, with none of the problems the ‘Don Draper’ identity carries. But, as the vacation goes on, it accrues its own problems, a lingering guilt at abandoning his children. They are his link to Betty, and I think a large part of why he comes back is that he doesn’t want to be the kind of awful father that he had. He knows how much that can mess someone up, and even if he doesn’t love Betty, he wants to come home for the kids.

Betty loves the fact that she can walk into a bar and just have sex with someone. She eats that chicken after, just cold right out of the box, not caring about societal decorum. But, again, she can’t do that forever. The first transgression is exciting, to do it again would just get depressing. That’s the problem that Don had with his affairs, he started them to get away from his wife, from responsibility, and soon found out that he was involved in complex relationships that took as much of him as his marriage did.

On the whole, I thought this was a fantastic season, richer and deeper than year one, the rare TV series that becomes true art. I love all kinds of TV shows, but few are as smart and meticulously constructed as this one is. I don’t think this episode was the high point of the season, for me that “Jet Set,” but it was a really strong, emotionally potent conclusion, and as that last fade out was happening, I was hoping for just a little bit more. I didn’t want a season this good to end.

Batman: RIP: Part II (#678-680)

When we last left Batman, he was sprawled over in pain, contemplating the idea that the Black Glove may in fact be nothing more than a figure of his childhood-trauma fueled imagination And now, things get weird. The last few issues of RIP have all been amazing in their own way, pushing the character to a place I’ve never seen him, doing things you’d never expect Batman to do. Batman doing weapons grade heroin while homeless on the street? Yup, this is not your everyday Batman story.

Issue #678 begins with Batman’s Black Casebook account of Doctor Hurt’s isolation experiment. As I mentioned earlier, interpreting the bizarre excesses of Silver Age stories as mental dillusions brought on by psychological experimentation has a lot in common with what Alan Moore was doing in Miracleman. I think the central difference is Alan Moore’s story is about trying to find a way to incorporate these stories into a rational universe. The absurdity of those stories is evidence that they could not be ‘real,’ and his interest in that run is exploring what a character like Miracleman would do when confronted with reality.

Morrison’s interest with this run is basically to explore what it means that Batman experienced all these things, and what that does to his mind. He’s lived a schizophrenic life, jumping from strange experience to strange experience, and that’s gradually broken down his sense of self and reality. The only constant has been his childhood trauma, the death of his parents. That’s the reason he became Batman, and no matter what changes, that trauma lingers. Morrison then uses the Silver Age stuff as a way to spin a stranger story, taking elements of Batman’s insane Silver Age hallucinations and translating them into reality. If he lived through those stories, he believes they are real, and consequently, the lines all blur and we wind up with the insane purple suit Batman from the end of this issue.

In the casebook, Batman says that “I don’t want to know what goes on in the Joker’s head. I have to know.” His mission to eradicate crime, and The Joker is his greatest foe because he’s so utterly unknowable. He can be a goofy Silver Age prankster criminal one day, and a Killing Joke style murderer the next. The Joker is able to seamlessly move between selves, as we saw in the “Clown at Midnight” story. Batman is not able to integrate his many different selves as easily, and I’m guessing the end result of RIP will be the synthesis of crazy Silver Age Batman and gritty Batman into a new stronger Batman at the end.

Notably, Morrison places a major emphasis on Robin in Bruce’s narration. The central trauma at the heart of this arc is the “Robin Dies at Dawn” story, in which Bruce drives himself insane over guilt he feels for letting Robin die. Robin is the counterbalance to Batman, drawing him closer to humanity and not letting him indulge in his greater excesses. This is the same story that Frank Miller’s telling over in the Goddamn Batman, Robin humanizes Batman. It’s notable that as RIP goes on, Batman disconnects from everyone, living in his own head, he goes gradually more and more insane.

The majority of this issue chronicles Bruce’s time living as a homeless man on the street, along with his spirit guide, Honor Jackson. As I mentioned earlier, I see a lot of similarities between this arc and what’s going on with Don Draper over in Mad Men. In both cases, we’re watching someone strip their personalities to the bare essence, taking all the societal trappings that have made them who they are and getting to the core underneath. In this case, the wealthy Bruce Wayne self is totally destroyed by Doctor Hurt, and consequently, the wealthy, well equipped Batman is also destroyed, to be replaced by the homeless insanity of Zurr-en-Arrh Batman.

I love the alien quality of Doctor Hurt in these first few panels. Surrounded by demon henchmen, lit only in grey and red, he’s the most menacing Batman villain since the Joker. I particularly like the fact that somehow DC allowed Batman to be injected with “weapons grade crystal meth” in an issue that came out the same month as The Dark Knight movie. Could you imagine a kid who just saw The Dark Knight going in to buy a Batman comic and coming out with this? You’d either have someone who’s totally put off, or a comics fan for life. Normally, there’s a moral code that’s used for superheroes, mainstream characters like Batman. They don’t indulge in crystal meth, thankfully DC fell asleep on this story or something and is just letting Grant run wild with it.

At the end of the story, we find out that Honor died a while ago, from the $100 bag of heroin he bought with the money Batman gave him, another great twist that just messes with the Batman character. Anyway, I’d argue that Honor is the same essentially entity that we later see incarnated as Batmite. Both of them are either figments of Bruce’s subconscious, the piece of him that becomes Zurr-en-Arrh, an autopilot that keeps him going even when his conscious mind is destroyed, or they’re fifth dimensional entities, like John a Dreams in The Invisibles, inserted into the game to fulfill a specific role and help Bruce defeat the Black Glove. And, as Batmite says in #680, “Imagination is the fifth dimension,” so I guess they’re both.

Either way, Honor helps Bruce “get into character” as a homeless man, the first step towards rebuilding him into the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh. It’s interesting that Honor talks about making “a declaration,” then puts on a sign declaring himself a Gulf War Veteran. Batman is a soldier in his own war on crime, and now he’s come back mentally damaged, unable to fit in with mainstream society. The heroin addiction ties in with that, so many Vietnam vets became addicted in the course of the war, and found no support system to help them when they came home.

At the end of the ‘odyssey,’ Bruce finds out that all Honor wanted to do was buy some booze. But, in the process Bruce rediscovered something about himself. He still doesn’t know who he is, but he’s getting his fighting skills back, and he’s seeing the clues again. He’s thinking like Batman. He soon finds out that Honor was dead, and is offered a bag of heroin, “the keys to heaven.” Batman has reached the bottom, he’s alone the streets, doing heroin and left with nothing except a bunch of scraps of cloth.

He now shuts off his conscious mind and reverts to his backup persona, the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh. Stitching himself a new costume, he emerges sublime and ridiculous on the final splash page. On the one hand, this story is full of darkness and grim and gritty tropes, but the costume here totally undercuts it, as does the great Batmite “uh-oh” line. Bruce has gone fully insane at this point, he thinks it’s all a dream, he couldn’t be Batman. This leads to the classic line “For in my hand…I hold the Bat-Radia. And I…I am the Batman.” Of course, the Bat-radia is a beat up transistor radio, at this point, he’s so insane that his skewed perception of the world makes him believe that he actually is sane. Well, whatever works.

The next issue opens up with the classic scene where Batman is on a roof talking to some gargoyles. In another so insane he’s sane moment, Batman asks Batmite if the Gargoyles were really talking and is reassured, that yes they were. I love Batmite, the absurdity of the character and the juxtaposition of this crazy looking hallucinating Batman and Batmite with the gritty world of Gotham. Another instant classic line is Batman telling Batmite to be quiet, “Shh! The city’s talking.” This bit ties in with the city magic from The Invisibles, Grant’s first pop magic column, the idea that if we shut off our conscious minds, the forces underlying the universe will speak to us and answer our questions. Batman sees the city now as “a machine designed to make Batman,” he sees no coincidence, everything has a purpose and tells him something. He has transcended to a magician’s consciousness. Perhaps it’s delustory, perhaps there was no tracking chip in his teeth, but either way, he’s doing his thing and it’s working.

Next up, we get an explanation of the whole Zurr-En-Arrh thing. Morrison has equated Batman’s 50s and 60s adventures to one decade long acid trip, all finally catching up with him. He built this Zurr-en-Arrh world in his mind during one those trips, a fantasy world where he’s like Superman, lacking the mental anguish he has in the regular world. During the isolation experiment, Batman reached his low ebb, and as a result, built a backup personality so that would never happen to him again. That’s who the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh is, his spare self who will take over when the original breaks down.

I continually see people cracking on Tony Daniel’s art, but I think he’s a perfect fit for this arc. The dirty Image 90s style grounds everything in a ‘reality’ that’s totally broken by the crazy things that he’s got to draw. I love the panel here of Batman pulling on the purple mask, his eyes clearly exposed, as well as the weird looking shot down at the bottom of the page where Batman stands in front of the mirror shirtless, and we see Batmite with some weird tentacles coming out of his back.

Even as Batman stumbles deeper and deeper into isolation, we see the seeds of his rescue and salvation brewing all around. In this issue, there’s the great scene with Cyril and Beryl, setting the stage for the eventual return of the Club of Heroes to help Batman battle the Club of Villains. I love those characters, and Cyril kills it in the last line “Club of villains? Can’t have that, Beryl. Better put in a call to the lads.” The run is tightening up, that seemingly disconnected “Club of Heroes” arc is playing a larger and larger role in what’s going on now.

From there, we jump to a red herring scene playing with the idea that Doctor Hurt is in fact Thomas Wayne. I love the crazy 1920s style pulp villain look Hurt is rocking at this point. Despite the fact that the whole Club of Villains ostensibly tracks back only 10 years, Morrison plays it more like the whole of Batman history happened in real time along with history. John Mayhew’s films look like they’re from the 1930s, and Batman’s isolation experiment, despite taking place “ten years ago,” feels more like it took place when those comics were published, in the 50s. I like that strange treatment of time, it fits more with what we know as readers, even if it doesn’t make sense within the diegetic world. Hurt promises that “We’re breaking the Batman at midnight,” and at this point in the story, he’s done a pretty good job. They may have committed that classic villain mistake of letting the hero go after you’ve got him, but in this case, the goal is to utterly destroy him, and it doesn’t look like Bruce can really get it together to get back at them.

Batman has a fantastic scene where he roughs up Charlie Caligula, promising to see through him with the Bat-radia, prompting Charlie Caligula to exclaim “You’re nuts! You’re crazier than all of us!” Except for one of course, the club of villains are all imitators, trying to live up to The Joker, just like the Club of Heroes tries to live up to Batman. Batman breaks down Caligula’s tics, and proceeds to assault him with a bat. This is what it’s come to for Batman, beating this guy up in the theater where he went to his last movie with his parents.

This brings us to issue #680, and the inevitable confrontation between Batman and the Joker. I love this entire arc, but this issue has been the high point to date. It’s got all the intensity and edge of your seat stakes that are so often absent from big character corporate superhero comics. While I have issues with both this book and Final Crisis, I think Morrison has done a fantastic job of creating stories where every page feels like it could hold a massive revelation, or an incredible, unforeseen moment.

That’s hard to do in the DCU, where everything tends to normalcy. I think a large part of it is the fact that Morrison has essentially disconnected from the DCU as a whole and opened up his own little corner of the universe. I don’t see how this book can mix with something like Trinity, that’s supposed to be a back to basics Batman story, or even the Paul Dini stuff, which has a similar modus operendi. In those books, obviously Batman isn’t going to die, but in this Morrison book, it’s possible, and I think Grant has essentially stopped caring about what the people who come after him do. Final Crisis may be getting essentially ignored by the rest of the DCU, but reading his books, it’s an epic, crazy story full of really meaningful events. Few moments in big superhero comics can match the sudden return of Miracleman last issue, or the descent of Turpin to Darkseid. Will it be the new status quo for the universe after Morrison is done? Probably not, but much like with New X-Men, you can usually just stop where he does. His last Batman story can be the last Batman story, All Star Superman can be the last Superman story and “Here Comes Tomorrow” is the end of X-Men. So, who knows what else Batman is doing, but in this corner of the universe, he’s totally losing his shit.

There’s a very dirty, creepy vibe to this issue, starting off with the images of the people coming to the event. We’ve got an old man with a little girl, an oil sheik, a cowboy, a military dictator. These are the people who run the world, and they’re all here to watch the utter destruction of the Batman. I’ve heard the issue compared to “120 Days of Sod All” from The Invisibles, and I can definitely see the parallels. These are wealthy people who live beyond the limits of the law, and can do whatever they want.

The scene where Bossu discusses his transformation with The Joker is another disturbing highlight. He lives a normal life, but longs for the total insanity of The Joker. This whole thread reminds me a lot of Seven Soldiers, of The Whip wondering at which point she stops feeling like an imitator and stops feeling like a superhero. Bossu works so hard to be evil, but society just doesn’t see him that way. They’re in awe of The Joker, and he has to put on a mask to capture what The Joker has naturally. Particularly disturbing is the idea that Bossu wants to do awful things to his daughter that “polite society” will not permit. In this moment, this danse macabre, they all seek to transcend polite society and legitimize their evil. Too all of this, The Joker simply yawns.

Batman and Batmite part in a scene I mentioned earlier, where Mite says that imagination is the fifth dimension. Batmite claims that he is the “last fading echo of the voice of reason.” I think it says something about Bruce’s insanity that a floating elf dressed as Batman represents his voice of reason.

Over at Wayne Manor, we get the return of the well written Damian, not the bratty teenager of Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul, but a brutal assassian in the body of a twelve year old. The action sequence here is well done, setting up a lot of tension, then paying it all of with the badass return of Damian. This issue has a ton of momentum, from the cross cutting buildups, so the tension of the rest of the book makes the scene with Gordon seem tenser and more apocalyptic than it would in isolation. The cross cutting also works really well during the Batman/Joker confrontation, where our glimpses of the Club of Villains only enhances the epic nature of the confrontation. This is the ultimate battle, such that all these people have traveled miles to see it, to watch The Joker finally destroy Batman.

Next up is the final stage of Batman’s descent into insanity. For Doctor Hurt and his crew, fighting Batman is an elaborate intellectual exercise, an attempt to outdo the master detective at his own game. For The Joker, it’s pure instinct, he just walks into the room and is able to finish the job better than they ever could.

Batman and The Joker are fighting in what looks like the black lodge from the last episode of Twin Peaks, all black curtains and checkerboard patterns. There, The Joker expresses his anger at Batman breaking their ‘pact’ by shooting him in the face. The Joker doesn’t care about the fact that the guy who shot him wasn’t the ‘real’ Batman, his mind doesn’t see the world that way. Batman shot him, nobody can dispute that. This leads to that particularly nasty panel where he cuts his tongue in two, evoking a serpent.

This leads to the brilliant exchange where The Joker says that Batman’s attempt to understand him, to find meaning in the dead man’s hand and the search for the Black Glove is not life, “that’s just wikipedia.” Batman clings to the idea that there is a rational explanation for everything that happened to him, that there’s an elaborate conspiracy out there, and if he can just knit together all the different threads, he’ll be able to find the meaning of it all. Batman has descended into this strange Zurr-En-Arrh state, but if he can discover the meaning behind the Black Glove, it’ll all be worth it. But, what if there’s no meaning? What if his attempt to find out what it’s like to be the Joker was all futile?

The Joker pulls back the curtain and behind the glass is Jezebel, crying. Batman pulls back his hood, and the relentless backup personality recedes. He no longer speaks in those purple word balloons, he’s left with the uncertain speech of the human Bruce. Jezebel was a reminder of what he was clinging to, the human attachment that kept Batman from being like the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh all the time. Jezebel is his only hope, his chance to be a better person, to grow up and stop being Batman. In #677, it’s Jezebel who equates his being Batman with being trapped in a prolonged state of adolescent trauma. She wanted to help him grow out of it, but he only fell deeper in.

And then, Doctor Hurt and The Joker toast their ultimate victory. Bruce is tripping out behind the glass, trying to use the bat-radia to save her, only to find out that she has turned, she’s been in on it the whole time. Or, so it appears. I’m still not sure whether Jezebel was actually evil the whole time, or whether they’ve done something to turn her. There’s a lot of gas and weird stuff floating around, so it would make sense for her to be mentally altered in some way. But, at the same time, her being evil would fit. Doctor Hurt’s plan hinges on totally destroying both Bruce Wayne and Batman. Having Jezebel find her way into his heart, then tear it up would be the perfect way to cap off Bruce’s insanity, to utterly break him.

At this point, Bruce has totally exhausted the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh persona, he’s broken and collapsing on the floor. Evil has won, and it looks like we’ll soon see exactly what the fate worse than death that awaits Batman is. Unfortunately, we’ve got to wait until November 19th for that.

But, I’ve really got to give huge props to both Grant and Tony Daniel for this issue. Reading Final Crisis, there was an underlying disturbing darkness to everything that was going on. This issue amps that up to the extreme, every single panel is full of tension and evil. Those final moments are utterly devoid of hope, they represent Batman literally brought to his knees, with absolutely nothing left. I didn’t think I could be this concerned about Batman, or this anxious to find out what happens to him next. This story is a masterpiece, and though I still have issues with much of the early run, this last ten issues or so is as strong as anything Grant’s done recently.

Certain stories just hit me on a deep level. I think All Star Superman is an objectively better book than this one, but nothing in that book excited me as much as the insanity of these last three RIP issues. It’s messy and frantic, and alive in a way that very few corporate superhero comics are.

Final Crisis #4 and Final Crisis: Submit

After a lengthy delay, yesterday brought us two Grant Morrison Final Crisis books in one day. It would have made a lot more sense to put Submit out a week earlier, if only because it’s meant to be read first, and I think most people will have read issue 4 before they read Submit. But, the scheduling on this series has been a mess, and hopefully it will live on in trade as just a good story, not a frustrating serialized experience. Obviously, I’d like to see an issue every month, but if all the issues are as good as this one is, I’d rather wait than have a finished product. This is the most focused and emotionally singular issue of the series to date, the moment when all the build up is over and we’re trapped in the awful world of Anti-Life. Darkseid’s won, and there’s nothing left but hope.

Submit is far from Morrison’s finest work, but it’s a solid enough story, and does a good job of showing us in more depth one of the many potential stories floating around the Final Crisis parent book. Unlike most crossovers, I think Final Crisis really would have benefited from more tie-in books that actually tie in closely with the story. I read the first two issues of Final Crisis: Revelations, and they’re a messy, hard to follow story that’s more about Greg Rucka playing with his pet characters than actually tying into Final Crisis. That’s a valid choice for him, but I’d have loved to see more stuff like Submit. It would have caused an even greater scheduling mess, but it would have been interesting to see a weekly book running parallel with the main series, and that weekly book could have detailed a lot of the smaller stories that are happening beneath the surface of Final Crisis proper.

I was frustrated by the earlier issues of the series because of their frantic jumping from spot to spot. I think it works on a narrative level, hyper-compressing the collapse of the entire DCU into just a few issues. But, it made the series hard to engage with emotionally. This issue spends more time with fewer characters, and consequently, it’s a lot easier to get emotionally wrapped up in what’s happening. Notably, thought FC, I’ve wanted to see more of every storyline. Reading here, I wanted to see more of Grant’s Green Arrow and Black Canary, more of the weird Darkseid world, and of course, more of the Super Young Team. I’d have loved to see Submit style one shots for all the little pieces of the story.

As I was saying, Submit works as a good exemplar of what’s happening to everyone. The story itself is a bit post-apocalyptic cliché at times, and I was confused by that moment where the Tattooed Man’s son shoots Black Lightning, but on the whole, it works. One of the central themes of the series seems to be the unification of superhero and supervillain against this larger threat. The old definitions of good and evil no longer have meaning when all individual thought and freedom is being wiped away. It took this crisis to make it clear that the best way to save a villain is to be kind to him, to show that he’s not a villain at all. Once Black Lightning sacrifices his life to save the Tattooed Man’s family, Mark comes around and realizes that maybe the heroes aren’t so bad at all.

This leads into FC#4, where Ray assumes that Mark is actually a superhero, and he’s taken into the confidence of the Justice League. It calls back to the moment in The Invisibles where Jack restores Sir Miles’ aura, and in the process, makes it impossible for Sir Miles to hate him. The best way to defeat an enemy is to make him not be an enemy anymore. It just sometimes takes a bigger enemy to make that possible. I’m guessing we’re going to see a lot of the villains team up with the heroes to battle Darkseid, and Libra. We already saw hints of that with Lex Luthor, and there’ll probably be more to come. It’s a shame that we can get this kind of message in comics, but out in the real world, political candidates still speak seriously about fighting a ‘war on terror,’ and condemn anyone who would think about actually trying to talk to our enemies and try to understand them rather than bomb them.

Anyway, on to Final Crisis #4. The issue is unified through depictions of a world ravaged by the effects of the anti-life equation. The equation here is very close to what we heard in Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle, the series that is the clear prelude to everything that happens here. This issue in particular reminds me a lot of Seven Soldiers on the whole. The big heroes have been taken off the board, and it’s up to a bunch of b-listers to prove themselves worthy and save the world from this overwhelming, evil threat. While I enjoyed Morrison’s JLA, I generally like his big superhero epics that focus on more ground level heroes, not the big three. When you’ve got Superman involved, the stakes have to be raised so high to make it threatening at all, but when you’re dealing with a guy whose only power is to shoot a bunch of arrows, the threat feels more legit. These small enclaves of heroes, cut off from each other, all struggle to stay alive and defend their corners of the Earth.

They fight filled with the human spirit, filled with concern and love for each other. That is the force that will ultimately outlast anti-life. The Justifiers are made to believe that the only thing that matters in the world is serving Darkseid, is living for Darkseid and dying for Darkseid. In Kirby’s original Fourth World stuff, the Justifiers served Glorious Godfrey, a charismatic preacher who preached the gospel of anti-life, of cutting oneself off from emotion and free thought in favor of an adherence to the nihilistic conformity to the braindead regime of Darkseid. The critical page in this issue is the depiction of the Darkseid factory, where people “Work! Consume! Die!”

The force of Darkseid is about reducing people to slaves to routine, about removing the joy from life and replacing it with empty service to an evil god. It’s easy to live our own lives fueled by anti-life, to drift into a routine that reduces us to braindead zombies unable to think for ourselves, unable to create new things and better our situation. To serve anti-life is to become trapped forever in the status quo, to hate all things, and exist in the same way forever. The core battle of the Fourth World was the progressive invention of the New Gods versus the dark stagnation of Apokolips. Now, the entire world has been turned into Apokolips, and the Justifiers struggle to extinguish any spark of individual thought or resistance. Taken into anti-life, it seems so much easier to just stay the course and serve Darkseid. It doesn’t take any initiative, and you’re just like everyone else. But, that doesn’t make it right.

It would appear that things are at their low ebb. But, sparks of hope do resonate throughout the issue. Across the world, heroes are fighting back, and Green Lantern is setting up forces for a last stand. I liked seeing Black Adam, and as I was saying before, it seems that he’ll team up with the heroes to fight a battle that trumps their own differences. It was also good to see the Ultramarines and Superbia again, as well as Bot’swana Beast and the Great Ten. This story doesn’t feel particularly connected to what’s going on in the rest of the DCU, but it’s full of ties to Morrison’s own DCU stuff, and it looks like it might serve as a proper finale to twenty years of work.

The most notable sign of resistance is the read of the Metron mark. We first see it The Tattooed Man, whos’ got the full Metron going on. The life equation lives on, hidden beneath the surface, but still there. And then, in my favorite moment of the issue, Shilo Norman and the Super Young Team burst forth from some kind of dimensional barrier, all of them wearing the Metron tattoo on their faces. It was such an awesome moment when he returned, but things quickly go South when he’s shot. This is nicely juxtaposed with the Darkseid crew saying “Freedom’s spirit falls.” But, I’m guessing the entire series will function as a larger retelling of the Mister Miracle story from Seven Soldiers. Death is just a part of the anti-life equation, and Shilo has overcome it before and will overcome it again.

The entire series has had the feel of a giant superhero Robert Altman style ensemble movie, and the last few pages are the “Wise Up” sequence from Magnolia, everything’s hitting its low point, hope being extinguished in a glorious burst of cross cutting, all structured around the return of Darkseid. After doing some great work with Ollie and Black Canary earlier in the issue, Grant tears it all apart, turning Oliver into a Justifier. Is it possible this is part of his plan? Maybe, but that doesn’t make the shot of Black Canary looking down at the world, knowing that something bad has happened to him any less sad. But, she’s a leader, and she goes to work.

Throughout the issue, the world of Darkseid’s crew feels diseased and evil, and it all culminates in the crowning of Turpin as Darkseid. His voiceover chronicles the raging humanity within him, his futile attempt to hold back the darkness. The world collapses around him, the spirit of freedom is shot down, and the war is over. “The choice is simple. There’s no choice at all. Only Apokolips and Darkseid. Forever.” The way the scenes are juxtaposed, the heroes’ battle becomes a representation of the internal battle within Turpin. It’s as if he sees all these other scenes in his mind, all these failures to resist the Justifiers, and in the end, he himself falls too. These scenes are incredibly creepy, and by the end, you can barely recognize Turpin, he’s become all Darkseid.

I really loved this issue. It’s harrowing and epic in a way a lot of superhero comics try to be, but very few actually reach. The jumps between stories don’t arbitrary and distracting as they did from time to time in the first few issues, because of the central event in the issue, all the stories are really a single story, the battle of life against anti-life. So, it’s one emotional arc even as we jump from group to group. And, the ending is great, much like the darkness at the end of Batman #680, this is the feeling of total dissolution, that everything’s gone to shit and there’s nothing we can do about it. But, the Metron symbol is still there, it will echo from beginning to end, and as long as people fight, anti-life will never be totally victorious.

Batman: RIP: Part I (#675-677)

Previously, when Grant Morrison wrote a major mainstream superhero title, he wrote it with a lot of his voice and ideas, but also a general respect for what that title had been and what readers expect from it. So, New X-Men might have some philosophizing about the single human organism and the nature of evolution, but all the core elements of an X-Men story remain in tact. I don’t know that any of his mainstream superhero works have gone as far out there as Batman RIP does at times. It’s a surreal journey through the debilitating mindscape of Bruce Wayne/Batman that features, among other things, Batman becoming homeless, Batman getting addicted to heroin, Batman hallucinating gargoyles talking and Batman wearing a red/yellow/purple costume and hitting people with a baseball bat. And yet, as strange as things get, this is also what I want from a Batman story. It’s got a huge all encompassing threat and the most menacing Bat-villains to appear in a while. It’s got some mixed moments, but on the whole I loved the storyline.

This story follows almost directly from the three part Third Batman story, in which Batman actually did die, for a couple of minutes. First up is the prelude issue, #675, in which Jezebel finds out Bruce’s true identity. This issue plays very differently in light of what we see in #680. The end of that issue implies that Jezebel has been one of the masterminds behind the entire scheme, so it’s excruciating to look at her tap into Bruce’s guilt as a way of getting him to open himself to her emotionally and reveal his secret identity.

Next up is the start of RIP proper, and the introduction of the ‘Club of Villains.’ It’s notable in a story about Batman’s psychological dissolution that all the villains he faces should be the foes of different versions of himself. In the ‘Clown at Midnight,’ The Joker talks about the inevitability of Batman, the Joker/Batman dynamic will forever play itself out, and it makes sense that so many of these villains also use a clown theme, and visually echo The Joker. And, like the Club of Heroes is in awe of Batman, they’re in awe of the Joker. The Club of Villains looks vaguely absurd at first, but as the story goes on, and we get more and more drawn into Batman’s psychosis, their appearance makes more and more sense. The world warps so that they become normal.

As the storyline begins, things are going well for Batman. He’s still running at full speed, despite concerns from Robin and Alfred about his need for recovery time. The criminals left in Gotham are all lame wannabes, and when it comes to the Green Vulture, Batman won’t even hit him, to legitimize him as a criminal. But, the best of all is Bruce’s relationship with Jezebel. He sheds the mask and walks in to kiss her in a wonderfully over the top romance novel cover image. The image is particularly interesting bcause it has Bruce in a state that’s between Bruce Wayne and Batman. Just seeing her like that, partially in the Batman outfit, represents so much trust. We won’t see him like that again until the end of #680 when his trust is rewarded with betrayal.

Alfred and Tim talk about Bruce, in a conversation that likely has resonance with what the final fate of Batman will be. Alfred describes Thogal as the “rehearsal, while living, of the experience of death.” The meditative experience is about confronting the darkness then returning to the world reborn. You could read the entire storyline as a Thogal experience, Batman confronting his greatest darkness, his greatest fears, shutting down his surface personality and retreating into his mental ‘cave.’ He then allows the Batman of Zurr-en-arrh persona to take charge and guide him back to the light.

The issue ends with our first glimpse at the reborn Joker. I really like the way Grant and Tony Daniel reimagine him, wearing this long Butcher’s coat/dress thing, and very controlled, slicked back hair. He’s stylish in a way the guy with a purple suit rarely was, as Batman spins out of control, the Joker seems to get it more and more together. But, more on the Joker shortly.

The next issue is where everything turns to shit for all involved. Batman is increasingly paranoid, in the absence of major criminals in the city, he becomes more and more convinced that the Black Glove is behind it all, an omnipresent crime organization that’s perpetually one step ahead of him. But, what if the Black Glove doesn’t exist? What if Bruce/Batman is so addicted to the war on crime that he’d invent this organization as a way to ensure his war never ends? This is the question that Jezebel raises when they’re together in the bat-cave.

I absolutely love the scene where she tells him that she loves him, and she wants him to get better, to get over the trauma of his parents’ death. Batman comics have always treated that as a perfectly valid motivation for a lifelong battle against crime, but in this moment, she tears it all down, calling his cave “a disturb ed little boy’s response to his parents’ death.” She says this in front a giant dinosaur, and a giant penny, two utterly absurd symbols of the world that Bruce lives in. Perhaps Morrison is pointing out the incongruity of Batman’s inherent craziness and the attempt to ground him in this very gritty, very real milieu that so many 90s and 00s comics have. He is emotionally damaged and alone, drawing others into his psychosis so that he’ll feel better about himself.

But, Bruce won’t hear it. He continues to spin an increasingly paranoid story about the Black Glove, about how he’s got two mainframes seeking out data. In the previous storyline, Batman talks about how he’s always formulating plans, trying to stay one step ahead of his enemy. His mind is his greatest weapon in the war on crime, but that also means that the fight is driving him insane. Now, it’s the absence of criminals that’s destroying him, he assumes that this is a plot so sophisticated, he can’t even see the seams. And that’s why Jet believes that he created the Black Glove, as a way to keep himself in the fight, to not have to confront the trauma that lies underneath everything he’s built.

Now, in light of what Doctor Hurt says, it’s likely that the Black Glove actually is masterminded by someone, not Bruce himself. But, I still love the idea that the Black Glove is the resentment of the Bruce Wayne that could have been, the person who would have exited if he’d gotten over his parents’ death and never become Batman. Batman at this point is like Bush’s America at this point, so addicted to wars that it’ll create one out of nothing if need be.

This leads to the fantastically surreal scene in which Bruce’s psyche dissipates and he is taken over by Zur-En-Arrh. He sees that purple mask again, a weird, creepy image.he collapses and the Black Glove rushes in. In retrospect, it would seem that Jezebel deliberately came there to do this to him, to break down his identity and make him react like this. It ties in with what Doctor Hurt was saying earlier, that their greatest achievement will be the utter destruction of Batman.

The issue is about the utter destruction of Bruce’s confidence. Jezebel reduces everything he’s done to a damaged child’s attempt to cope with something he couldn’t deal with. It’s hard to watch her tear down everything that Bruce has built. She’d probably tell him that the billions of dollars he spent in his one man war on crime could have been better spent giving food to third world countries, or something like that. She implies that all Batman is arrest Bruce’s psyche and prevent him from growing.

But, this is just the beginning. Next time, Bruce/Batman is utterly destroyed, and then reborn again in a strange, new persona. I’ll be writing that up soon, as well as the new issue of Final Crisis.