Final Crisis #5: 'Into Oblivion'

Final Crisis as a whole is a really curious event. Taken in the context of the DCU as a whole, it feels rather disconnected. I don’t even really read any DCU books other than Morrison’s, but just from the online chatter, you can tell that it isn’t as huge a deal as Secret Invasion was over at Marvel or previous Crises were, simply because it isn’t really a crossover. The story doesn’t sprawl out over the whole line, it’s very concise and focused to a specific set of books, and I think that set of books has been remarkably successful because most of them are a piece of Grant Morrison’s DCU. This book is his little corner of the world, full of heavy violence and Silver Age insanity living back to back, all infused with a glorious over the top energy. I still think the series lacks the emotional resonance of Grant’s best works, but it’s full of crackling energy and an epic good/evil quality that will hopefully make it a fitting capper to the many years of Grant’s work in the DCU.

I think the best way to enjoy the book is to look at it as very much a companion piece to Batman RIP, a cleansing ritual in which the DCU will reach its low ebb, then burst forth again in a new, better way, in the Fifth World. And, just as Batman RIP was about uniting the many different corners of the Batman mythos, this series is about exploring the DCU in all its strange and contradictory elements, focusing particularly on those which Grant has rehabilitated during his time there. We get appearances by three of the Seven Soldiers here, and in his treatment of characters like the Marvel Family, you can see what Grant’s been writing down in those fabled notebooks of possible character revamps.

This entire work feels a lot like the missing piece of Seven Soldiers, the actual invasion of the Sheeda. Seven Soldiers was notable because it let you see this awful threat obliquely, through what we picked up in the various miniseries, never connecting them all for the full on ‘war.’ Batman RIP/Last Rites, Superman Beyond and FC: Submit all function like the Seven Soldiers miniseries did, filling in the gaps of what happened around the big threat. I think Final Crisis is the only crossover that I wish had a lot more tie ins. I think it would have worked better if it was structured as a two month weekly series, where every book in the DCU told a story set in the world of the series, all overseen by Grant. There’s so many stories to be told in this world, and I’d love to see even more of what Grant had in mind with the story.

Anyway, on to the issue itself. This issue is largely about plunging everyone even deeper into darkness, even as the cracks in the plan begin to shine through. This is the battle to create a new and better world, even as Darkseid creates a populace with one mind to serve him in braindead oblivion.

I don’t love the opening bit of the issue. I never particularly liked the Green Lanterns, their powers are so vast, it seems hard to tell stories with the characters. Admittedly, I haven’t read Geoff Johns’ recent run, but even in JLA, Green Lantern often served as an all purpose deus ex machina. What the scene does set up is the way that Darkseid’s lieutenants have infiltrated all areas of the DCU. I like this concept, and I think it works well to pave the way for the fifth world. The Gods of old now wear mortals, if evil gods can do this, good gods could do this too. Way back when the series was first announced, there was speculation that Batman and other current heroes would replace the New Gods, and I think it would be incredible to see Batman channel the spirit of Orion and just tear apart Darkseid’s world.

This is the final battle of the Fourth World and it’s being played out on the DCU. When this war is over, there will be a new set of new gods, and the DCU will be a healthier, shinier place. But, for now it seems that the gods of New Genesis are dead, and the gods of Apokolips reign. It plays a lot like the fiction suit concept from The Invisibles. The gods are wearing the identities of people within ‘the game,’ and manipulating them to their own ends, only these aren’t the benevolent 4-D beings of The Invisibles, they’re using this possession to destroy the DCU.

The creepiest of these is Mary Marvel, who’s being worn by DeSaad. The crotch rub on Captain Marvel Jr. is already an infamous moment, and she seems like the pure embodiment of this wild youthful embrace of total evil. DeSaad is definitely getting a lot of joy out of being able to wear this girl, and use her body. Grant has talked a lot recently about the fact that the DCU is always going to revert to the status quo, so he might as well push it to extremes on the journey. That’s what this comic is about, taking the DCU to its nastiest, darkest place before soaring back into the light.

The thing that separates it from something like Identity Crisis or even Miracleman is that it’s not trying to bring the horrors of the real world into the superhero universe, it’s taking the evils within the DCU to their extreme. That’s why we’ve got a gang of tiger soldiers going out to hunt people, the concept is ridiculous, but Morrison makes it look badass. And, it’s answered by that fantastic two page spread of our heroes going into action.

I heard somebody call this issue the Silver Age taken to its darkest extreme, and I’d agree with that. It’s got the frantic storytelling pace of a Silver Age comic, and the total embrace of the craziness of a superhero world. Like Batman RIP, it’s about finding the psychological resonance inherent in these comic book characters.

I’ve been reading The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test recently, and it’s interesting to see all the acid heads of that era constantly referencing comic books. They saw themselves as superheroes, they saw that as the evolutionary path to move humanity forward. That’s the inherent power in the concept, the draw of reading about people who are better than us, people we can hope to be one day. This comic is about that evolution, the war that we all fight against oppression and single mindedness in our society.

We are fighting that war everyday, we’re fighting an army of corporate influences out to enslave our minds, out to make us forget that our lives can be more than just this. Wonder Woman and her furies are the people who’ve given up their dreams, given up on ever being happy and decided that it’s easier to just surrender to the routine and go along with what society wants them to be. But, we can be Hawkman too, fighting in the sky to save ourselves from Anti-Life. It’s easier to go through life without thinking. That’s what Hawkman reacts against when he proudly declares that “Life…is all struggle!”

I wish that more of the critical commentary on this work was about the way that it relates to our world and the political place we’re at right now. I hate when writers on entertainment blogs say that politics is off limits. The best works of fiction, even if they’re as seemingly removed from our world as this one, are all about the world in which they’re created. Grant’s an astute social critic, and his works always capture the zeitgeist of the moment in which they’re created. To read The Invisibles is to trip back to the mind space of the 90s, and you can tell a lot about the change in times by comparing his JLA to Final Crisis. This is a heavier time, but we’ve still got people fighting on the edge of perception to make the world better.

One of my favorite scenes in the issue is Mister Miracle’s call for action. Of course he’s not dead, we’ve already seen him rise up and miss death at the end of Seven Soldiers. If he can come out of the ground, surely he can survive a bullet. That does raise the question of Batman as the fifth world’s incarnation of Mister Miracle? Is he the host for Scott Free?

Anyway, the critical thing here is the Metron pattern. This is sigil, designed to channel the god Metron into the reality of the DCU. It’s the same kind of thing we saw in The Invisibles with King Mob channeling Lennon, only in this case, the gods of the Fifth World are able to literally visit them and influence the world. I really hope that the last issue involves an army of people united by the positive god, wearing the Metron symbol, and going out to battle the army of Apokolips.

Also notable in the scene is Shilo’s description of Darkseid’s fall, “A devil-god is dragging us down with him into a deep, dark hole in time.” This is exactly what happened to Shilo in his own Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle series, a mini that should be essential reading for understanding Final Crisis because it contains the entire series in micro. The DCU is now experiencing the plunge through awful permutations of reality that Shilo went through, and it will need to die before punching out the grave infused with a new fifth-world energy.

Along those lines we get the great scene where wheelchair bound Metron from the Mister Miracle series runs into Nix Uotan. Nix is at his lowest ebb, he’s lost faith that there’s anything more than this world. He remembers a life he used to have, a life of wonder and magic, but now it only comes out in dreams and drawings. He has lost his faith and seems on the verge of succumbing to Darkseid. The entire series is contained in his arc, the loss of the wonder, and in this scene, its glorious rebirth. I love the way the Rubik’s Cube becomes a motherbox and wipes out the guards so quickly. The hypercondensed storytelling works in this issue because it’s centered around this one struggle. Each side makes salvos at each other, and this time, good has won one.

But, things go bad again very quickly during the chilling Darkseid speech. We’ve all seen these sort of evil speeches before, but here, I was just overwhelmed by the amount of evil on display. This is the superhero comic taken to 11, an entire universe in peril to the point that even Lex Luthor is worried. Darkseid has command of the world, they are united and one behind him, a hivemind extension of the ultimate evil, and only a few heroes remain to do combat with it.

One of them is Nix Uotan, who has realized himself into some kind of fifth world superhero. Parituclarly notable here is the transition page where the heroes he drew from many worlds float in the air. His side of the story ties back to what was going on over in Superman Beyond. The core of it seems to be that it is our belief in the heroes that matters, the apperance of Metron reaffirms Nix’s faith in himself and lets him actualize as a hero again. In All Star Superman, Morrison posited the idea that Superman was actually the creator of our world, and his good qualities are an archetypal well from which humanity will always pull. Superman will always be there because we need him to save us, and if we believe in him enough, he’ll be there. Because that’s what heroes are, and the bigger the threat, the bigger the heroes.

I’m still loving this series, I wish it came out in a more timely fashion, but I think it’s going to be looked back on a lot more kindly than it’s being received now. It really is drawing on all Morrison’s DC work in a way that is virtually unprecedented. I love the fact that Batman RIP continues here because it ties everything together in a fascinating way. It feels a lot like Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, an acknowledgement of the fact that all these stories hail from the same mind, and an attempt to reconcile the contradictions and ideas within.

Batman #682: 'The Butler Did It'

It’s great to get another issue of Morrison’s Batman so soon after the end of RIP. This one doesn’t exactly clear up the many mysteries that still linger after RIP, but it does a great job of showing us the revised history of Batman that Morrison’s used to underlie his run, and ends with a brilliant twist that ties Batman’s run so far into both his own Final Crisis mythology and Kirby’s New Gods mythology. The initiation never ends.

Ever since the major shift in tone with the Torture Chamber three parter, Morrison’s Batman run has been a series of death and rebirth experiences, with Batman facing down an essential darkness that plagues humanity, all on his quest to reach a higher level of existence. In the last issue, we’re led to believe that Hurt may in fact be the Devil. He is a pure source of evil that Batman has been fighting against his whole life. But, in the DCU, who’s the true source of evil. Why, it’s Final Crisis villain Darkseid, and as we find out at the end of this issue, Batman’s Thogal experience continues after RIP ends when he finds himself at the mercy of Darkseid’s eugenics experiment.

The major question left unanswered between RIP and this issue is what exactly happened to Batman after the helicopter explosion. I don’t think that was ever meant to be death for Batman, and this issue makes that clear. Sorry to everyone in the media who reported last issue as the death of Batman, but he’s back alive and imperiled again in this issue. Perhaps real death, or true transcendence awaits at the end of Final Crisis, but for now, he remains earthbound.

This issue reinforces the thematic ties between the Batman run and Morrison’s Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle miniseries. Batman #681 was essentially what happens with Mister Miracle after the end of Seven Soldiers #1, of course he’s going to rise again, and of course he’s going to do battle with, and triumph over evil. That is the nature of heroism. But, both series have their heroes dealing with something a bit more complex than simply battling evil, it’s all about doing battle with someone who’s out to destroy their minds. Shilo’s trippy journey through a myriad of alternate realities, each one bringing him closer to total despair mirrors what happens with Bruce in RIP. I love that kind of storytelling structure, breaking down strict narrative reality and replacing it with a shifting subconscious realm, where you can read the story as simultaneously a straight up, twisted superhero narrative, or as a meditation on the hero’s fractured psychology.

Last issue, Bruce talks to the evil monk about how during Thogal you see a mix of past, present and future. Here, Bruce flashes back through his entire career, as part of a psychic interrogation by The Lump. I’m not sure that we really needed another spin through the Batman origin story, but it is nice to see the schizophrenic history of Batman synthesized into one linear issue.

We start with the darkness of Batman’s early days, when he’s thoroughly committed to battling criminals, and never takes his eyes off the mission. Time blurs and soon he finds Robin entering his world, bringing “color” to their “monochrome lives.” Morrison makes a good case for Robin being essential to the Batman mythos, in the same way that Miller did over in Goddamn Batman. Robin makes Batman human, he makes him about more than just avenging his parents’ murder.

We next spin through another trippy 50s flashback with my favorite panel of the issue, Bruce and Batwoman facing a strange beast on another world, or maybe just tripping on acid together in the batcave. There’s a constant emphasis on chemicals in the story, and one of Morrison’s big concepts is that many of Batman’s strange adventures can be written off as side effects of exposure to Joker gas and other chemicals. In the cave together, I love Batwoman’s rambling monologue, “…my soul dying…on another planet…oh god…when our souls die…we die too.” It’s the sort of stream of consciousness raw emotion that Morrison does better than anyone.

Next, we reach the introduction of Simon Hurt. Here, he’s equated with Darkseid’s Lump monster, a parasite that digs through Batman’s memories and uses this knowledge to attack his weak points. Hurt is the Lump, and he is, in some ways, Darkseid. He’s all the evil that Batman’s ever faced, and this Final Crisis story is just a heightened stakes version of the same stuff we saw in Batman RIP.

This section has a strange panel in which they bury Alfred, then all of a sudden he’s back. I’m not that familiar with Batman history, but I believe this refers to a death of Alfred at some point in the 60s, before he came back during the TV show era. I do like Morrison’s nod to the 60s series with Batman and Robin stream of consciousness solving a riddle. However, I can’t help but wish that JH Williams had been drawing this. His ability to blend styles from disparate time periods together would have made this a much more visually compelling issue, and also helped clarify the changes in Batman’s world over time.

As Robin grows up, and away from him, Batman claims that he never liked any of this goofy stuff anyway. The dark age Batman reasserts itself, “Crime. Madness. Horror. These are the things I understand,” and a reinvented, more insane Joker beckons. Presumably, the next issue will deal with Batman’s dark journey through the 80s, and end in a way that sets up his final fate in Final Crisis.

But, this issue ends with a brief spin through an alternate universe, where Bruce is not Batman, all part of the process of keeping Bruce unaware that he’s under psychic interrogation. It’s understandable that he’s so paranoid, it seems like someone’s always trying to destroy him. I’m reminded of the quote from “Robin Dies at Dawn,” echoed in Morrison’s run about eyes, thousands of eyes watching. Batman thought he defeated Hurt, but now he’s part of something larger, a conflict with Darkseid and the essence of evil itself.

Morrison definitely uses some old tricks here, the journey from pulp age to silver to Bronze recalls Flex Mentallo’s similar structure, and a lot of material in Seven Soldiers. Is any medium so obsessed with its own history as comics? Whereas New X-Men and Marvel Boy were largely about new pop concepts that tie in to Morrison’s own philosophy, this is a book about riffing on comics history, and exploring things from within the DCU, rather than from our own universe.

But, I think there still is enough fresh stuff here, and I like the way it bridges the gap between the themes of Final Crisis and the themes of the rest of Morrison’s Batman run. This is another aspect of the ongoing Thogal process, the plunging into darkness before an emergence into light. The entirety of Final Crisis is a kind of Thogal for the DCU, it must die before it can eradicate its flaws and darkness, then return a stronger, more healthy entity.

Final Crisis has gotten a lot of bad press lately, be it for the lengthy delays or the art switches, but I think once all the story that Morrison wanted to tell is out, and removed from the hype, it’s going to be looked back on as a great storytelling experiment. It’s on the road to synthesizing most of his DC work to date into a single story. Batman’s running in, Superman’s running in, 52 is running in, Seven Soldiers is running in, JLA is running in, it’s all coming together in this epic, and I’m hoping he gets the chance to tell the story he wants to tell, and give the DCU the glorious rebirth it deserves.

Batman #681: RIP Conclusion: 'Hearts in Darkness'

“Hearts in Darkness,” the conclusion to Batman RIP, continues the recent trend in Morrison’s work of creating issues that are hypercondensed on the page, and just expand in your mind after reading. As such, I’ll admit that after finishing the issue for the first time, I was a bit underwhelmed. Was exploding in a helicopter a fate worse than death for Batman? What was the big reveal of who the Black Glove was? The issue doesn’t fulfill the expectations that had been built by both Morrison’s comments and DC’s framing of the storyline.

The way I read RIP, the “fate worse than death” doesn’t refer to what happens in this issue, it refers to the storyline as a whole, Bruce’s adoption of the Zur-En-Arrh persona and his descent into life on the streets and insanity. This issue is the triumphant return of Batman, literally rising out of the grave, back in his regular outfit and revealing how even in his insane state, he’s managed to stay one step ahead of the Black Glove because “Batman thinks of everything.” Batman can go away at the end of this issue because his purpose is filled, he’s inspired enough people to continue his mission, and his confrontation with Hurt at the end is the final stage of his journey through Thogal, the conquering of his greatest fear.

When I read The Black Glove hardcover, and the subsequent RIP issues, I didn’t think there would be a big reveal about the identity of the Black Glove, I thought Hurt and his crew were the Black Glove. Surely, Hurt was evil enough, you didn’t need a shocking twist that Alfred was behind it all, or something like that. It’s mostly the marketing hype that leads you to expect something so shocking this issue, admittedly some of that is Morrison’s fault, but future readers will judge the book on its own merits, not the hype.

The significance of this issue, and the run as a whole, is underlined by the red and black flashbacks to Bruce and the monk speaking in Nanda Parbat. Bruce speaks of experiencing hallucinations in the darkness, the blurring of past, present and future. This sounds exactly like the torture chamber three parter that preceded RIP, but what is the “place that’s not a place” that he refers to? That could be the opening page of this issue, where he lies in darkness, awaiting rebirth. It could be where his primary self went when Zurr-En-Arrh Batman was in control. While he was Zurr-En-Arrh Batman, his rational self was able to process all the weird stuff that happened to him, and come up with the plan he could use to take down the Black Glove.

This issue raises the question of what exactly Batman was experiencing during RIP? Was he totally insane, as it first appeared, or was he actually one step ahead of the whole thing, as this issue implies? Here, Bruce claims that he always knew Jezebel was evil, and his “love” for her was an act. On some level, I think that makes the story less satisfying, but I’d argue that it isn’t as simple as reducing everything to two competing acts, with Bruce’s as the successful one in the end.

One could argue that Zur-En-Arrh Batman is the Batman that Bruce imagined himself to be as a child, the raw force of nature who could destroy Joe Chill and save his parents. With his gaudy, multi-colored outfit, he resembles a child’s fantasy, and the last page of this issue makes it clear that Zur-En-Arrh actually refers to the last moment Bruce had with his parents before they were killed. Earlier, Hurt talks about how Zur-En-Arrh is a totally Freudian power construction, a Batman without emotional ties, just pure combative energy.

This entire arc is designed to mimic the experience of Thogal, as in The Invisibles, the initiation never ends. For Bruce, Thogal is the equivalent of meeting Barbelith, only he’s more about the journey within than the journey without. Bruce has gone through all these strange adventures, which he’s struggled to synthesize together in the Black Casebook. The great mysteries of the universe lie inside himself, and that’s why this arc, and the series as a whole, is about Batman confronting the worst in himself and deciding to press on.

Earlier in the arc, Jezebel plays her trump card, and calls Bruce’s whole life into question, confronting him with that darkness inside himself that he found in Nanda Parbat. Jezebel thinks she can blow Bruce’s mind by raising the question of whether he’s the evil force that’s been out to get him all this time, but Bruce is one step ahead, he’s already thought of that too when he asks the monk if he “I have been, even unconsciously, my own worst enemy?” Knowing that he could be turned even on himself, he creates this backup personality, drawn straight from the trauma of his childhood, and lets it take control when he seems to be in the clutches of the Black Glove.

I don’t think that Bruce is “acting” when he goes through the whole thing with Honor Jackson and the heroin addiction. I think he put the regular Bruce Wayne away, and let Zur-En-Arrh Batman go through the “weapons grade crystal meth” attack. The real Bruce is tucked safely away, waiting for his moment, and subconsciously guiding Zur-En-Arrh Batman where he needs to go. Reading the arc now, you could see Bat-Mite as the lingering remnant of Batman’s sanity, helping him get where he needs to go, then leaving before Batman confronts the worst of things. His sanity is tucked away and Zur-En-Arrh Batman goes through the Joker poisoning and Jezebel’s betrayal. I think the betrayal does hurt him because the Zur-En-Arrh Batman doesn’t want to believe she’d betray him, even if regular Batman is thinking many steps ahead, already planning how to take her down if he needs to.

One could even read it that Batman has to retreat to the Zur-En-Arrh personality just in case she’s right, and he is the Black Glove. The implication in this issue is that Hurt is the Devil, and I think that interpretation fits, but the read that makes the most sense for me goes back to the first introduction of the Black Glove, they aren’t even an organization really, they’re everything out there that could hurt Batman. It’s Jezebel, it’s Hurt, it’s the third Batman, and in the end, Batman defeats them all. It’s notable that Hurt mentions trying to take away Batman’s purpose by taking all the criminals off the street. Those criminals are just part of the same game that Batman plays, it’s what The Joker represents. They have a kind of bargain, but the Black Glove is differnet. By removing his everyday threats, they force Batman to confront something deeper, his own existential purpose. They make him question himself, and the thought is that he won’t be able to withstand their torture, that they’ll always be one step ahead.

The Joker thinks the Black Glove is naïve because they believe that they can beat him. The Joker may be totally insane, but Batman always remains one step ahead of him, finding the pattern and connection between his seemingly random action. As we saw in “The Clown at Midnight,” The Joker prides himself on the constant reinvention of himself, but Batman always “builds a new box around me.” That’s the conflict, and in that sense, The Joker functions as an evolutionary imperative. Batman must become a better crimefighter to keep up with what The Joker does. That’s why he went through Hurt’s experiment in the first place, he wanted to be able to feel what The Joker feels.

Hurt took advantage of Bruce’s desire to see the dark side, and implanted in him the insanity trigger. At that point, Batman wasn’t ready to deal with what he saw in the hallucination. That’s probably why he went to Nanda Parbat and underwent Thogal. He lost this battle against himself in the isolation chamber, so now he’ll take it one step further, and purge the demons within himself.

The Joker here seems to function as more of a John a Dreams type character than the pure evil of the Black Glove. Simon Hurt is predictable because he’s always going to do the evil thing, The Joker frightens them because they don’t know what he’s going to do next. Here, he essentially takes Batman’s side and tells the Glove that they’re fucked, they shouldn’t have left Batman out there because even if you think you’ve got him beat, he’s always one step ahead. As Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the character made clear, he’s often evil, but he’s more interested in producing chaos. I also like the absurdity of The Joker getting tossed off a cliff by Alfred and Damian.

Throughout the story, there’s great little character moments with Batman’s allies. One of Morrison’s most underrated strengths is his ability to distill the essence of characters in a very small period of time. I think that’s why he’s such a brilliant comics writer, no one else can make you care about people in a few panels like he does. The moment between Robin and Beryl here is fantastic, and makes you want to see more of the two of them together. And, all we need to know about Damian is captured in that one panel. The Club of Heroes doesn’t do that much here, but we understand all we need to know in those couple of pages. It does make me wish that the Robin RIP tie in focused on Robin and the Club of Heroes battling the Club of Villains in Gotham, I’d have loved to read that.

The issue reminds me a bit of the finale of this past season of Doctor Who, with its cameos from everyone on the series to date. Even as Batman passes on the cowl, we know that he’s inspired a legion of people who will fight crime and keep his mission alive in his absence.

Batman climbs out of the grave in a pretty awesome sequence. I still see people cracking on Tony Daniel’s art a lot, but I think he did a great job with the arc. Sure, JH Williams or Quitely would have been better, but I think Daniel gives things a pulpy energy that the two of them might not have captured. I love the way he draws The Joker, and I love the crazy 20s pulp hero look that Hurt has. I also think he does a good job of showing Jezebel’s loss of control, culminating in her deadeyed plane ride look. I think Daniel’s better than Kubert was at the start of the book, and he’s crafted some of the most memorable images in any Batman comic ever. A lot of that is Morrison’s script, but Daniel has gotten better and better as things have gone on. And, I think the juxtaposition of all these wacky happenings with his very 90s Image style worked really well.

I think Morrison does a great job of conveying the turning point in the arc. It starts with the Bat-Radia, which turns out to be a transmitter, connecting him to the Arkham security system. Where did the Bat-Radia come from in the first place? Was Honor Jackson a John a Dreams like entity, helping Bruce fulfill his mission for the universe? Or was it that Bruce had left the radia somewhere, knowing that he could use it in the event he had to resort to his backup personality? I’d argue that it was part of the autopilot mode he went into when he became Zur-En-Arrh Batman. He built that radio, and didn’t consciously know what was in there until it was needed. Batman writes in the casebook about not knowing how things would play out, he would have to just “trust preparation to see me through.”

The Joker abandons the Glove, and Batman rises from the grave. Then, Hurt’s guests start to turn on him. The religious and political figures here echo the crew from The Invisibles’ “120 Days of Sod All,” only this time they’re confronted with their own sins. They enjoyed being in the presence of evil, but now things are spinning out of control, and they’re going to be held accountable for their sins. Batman’s raiding their mountain fortress, and they just want to get out of there.

This leads up to the final confrontation between Batman/Bruce and Hurt. Hurt is that which Bruce can never destroy, the doubt within himself, the fear of betrayal and pain, the guilt about what he’s done. Hurt tries a number of tactics to get to Bruce. First, he plays on the idea that as Batman, Bruce is really the same as the Black Glove, attacking the poor in a never ending attempt to make up for the trauma of losing his parents. He positions Bruce’s nightly patrols as something analogous to the “fox hunts” that Sir Miles does with homeless people.

Then, he quotes Batman’s own words from “Robin Dies at Dawn,” the isolation chamber story. I read that original story a few weeks ago, and it’s a good story on its own, but doesn’t really delve deeply into the psychological implications of what happened. Morrison does a great job of expanding on the basic ideas, and appropriating some of the imagery, like the strange stone idol face. Here, Hurt taunts Batman saying, “I must put away my Batman costume…and retire from crime-fighting!” Hurt is playing on all Bruce’s fears, in this case, the idea that he’s so insane, his personal crusade is endangering the lives of others.

Hurt then claims he’s Thomas Wayne, playing on Bruce’s ultimate fear, the idea that not only was his father evil, but he was the one who killed his mother. If Thomas Wayne was behind it all, then Batman’s crusade against violence was totally misguided. Hurt says that “Wayne became Hurt,” he has warped the image of Thomas Wayne into this insane doctor. That’s also what he threatens to do to all Bruce’s loved ones, spin them into drug addicts and criminals as he spoke to Alfred about earlier. Does it really matter if Thomas Wayne is Hurt? Hurt will create a new reality in which Bruce’s parents were evil.

Now we come to the one moment in the issue that I still find a bit underwhelming, the revelation of Hurt’s ultimate plan. As I just said, it makes sense, but it doesn’t seem like the ultimate capper to this storyline. I suppose the significance is the idea that Bruce has very few good things in his life to cling to, he exalts the memories of his parents, and his adopted father, Alfred. To tear them down would be to destroy the foundation of Batman, the last piece of humanity that existed before Bruce had to become Batman. But, I don’t think it totally works as a topper to everything insane that’s come before.

I do like the pay off on the next page. Batman poses the idea that he’s found a “pure source of evil” as he reached “the limits of reason.” If Batman is pure reason, always prepared and ready to deal with anything, it would make sense that his greatest foe would lie at the limit of reason. Perhaps that was the journey through the entire arc, his time as Zur-En-Arrh was a journey beyond reason to insanity. Now, he finds himself not quite believing that Hurt could in fact be the devil. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, it doesn’t matter in the end. Ultimately, the Black Glove is Batman’s ultimate foe, they will always win. But, in punching through the glass, Batman shows that he is the Black Glove, and he can destroy the evil that opposes him by destroying himself as well.

Bruce has sacrificed himself, confronted the ultimate evil within and come out stronger, but he’s going to become something else for now. In The Invisibles, we saw humanity move into the supercontext after ending the war that had raged forever. Here, Batman has been in a war with the Black Glove his whole career, what does he become after defeating them? He will evolve and become something else, leaving the Batman identity to someone else. As we saw in the page that opens this issue, and come after the end, “Batman and Robin will never die!”

The issue ends with a flashback to the birth of Batman. On one level, this shows us where Zur-En-Arrh comes from, the misheard final words of Thomas Wayne. If Hurt is the ultimate source of evil, he would know everything about Bruce, and he would know that those words would have a major significance for Bruce. By equating Hurt with Bruce’s father, his defeat becomes the ultimate cleansing. Bruce has passed through the worst shadow, this endless Thogal, and perhaps come out as something closer to the happy kid we see here.

I’m curious to see how Morrison handles the character when he hopefully returns to the book in the spring. Will we see the long promised “hairy chested love god”? I’d like to see him keep up the psychedlia of these issues, but perhaps spin it in a slightly more positive direction. Either way, it’s great that we’re getting another issue this week.

In the context of Morrison’s work as a whole, this arc and Final Crisis continue the style he first used on Seven Soldiers, the hyperdense comic that requires a lot of work to unpack, but is incredibly fulfilling to analyze and ponder. It’s interesting to read criticism of the issue because the comics world often seems totally backward from what’s praised in other arts. Nobody’s telling The Wire to do more done in one stories, or not rely so much on continuity, but here, people criticize Morrison’s Batman because they have to do a little work to understand it. Morrison may work on the most mainstream characters, but he’s using a very complex storytelling method, much more so than in his 80s superhero work or JLA. It does rely on the reader to fill in some gaps, and people can call that sloppy plotting, but I prefer it because it gives you a lot more. This issue took me over 25 minutes to read, and a lot of thinking to fully understand. That’s the sign of a great work, and it’s also why Morrison is the best writer in comics. He understands that the 22 page comic needs to be more than just what’s on panel, it’s got to be a world that’s downloaded into your head and gradually unpacked over time.

It’s strange that a comic this dense and tied into the rest of Batman continuity should get such media attention for “killing” Batman when actually reading the book makes it clear that he’s not actually dead. But, if it gets more people to check out Grant’s work, all the better. He has no illusion that Bruce will not eventually get back to being Batman, it’s the journey through the story that matters, and this was a great journey.

Ultimately, I don’t think the issue is the most shocking revelation in seventy years of Batman history, but it’s a great capper for RIP and Morrison’s run as a whole. If we don’t see anymore, I’d be disappointed, but still satisfied. This arc is my favorite Morrison work since Seven Soldiers, a constantly confounding, strange and complex story that gets to the core of Batman in a totally different way than you’d expect. I think my favorite Batman comics story is still The Dark Knight Strikes Again, but this is a close second. And, considering there’s seventy years of Batman stories, that’s pretty good.

Australia

Australia is the kind of movie that makes you remember what movies can do, it’s the kind of movie that wraps you up in the story and creates more than just striking images, it creates incredible film moments. Most movies are about telling stories, they go through the beats of the story in a perfunctory way, playing out the script to its conclusion. Some movies spend a lot of time on the visuals, and create beautiful images. But, truly great filmmaking is about a lot more than capturing interesting images. It’s about combining those images with music, and the emotion you get from being engaged with the narrative to create something transcendent. Watching this film, I kind of knew most of the story beats, things proceed as you’d probably expect them to, but, like the best stories, it made me doubt that what I knew would happen would happen, making the moment that might seem objectively inevitable so powerful in the happening.

I love both Baz Lurhman’s previous films, but see flaws in them as well. Moulin Rouge is a really frustrating movie for me in some ways because there’s moments in there that are as amazing as anything in cinema, think the love song medley atop an elephant, which culminates in an utterly exhilarating, swirling 360 camera shot, or the harrowing “Come What May” finale. But, then there’s moments that are just awful, like some of the goofier stuff with the Bohemians, and the “Like a Virgin” sequence. Romeo and Juliet is equally full of brilliant moments, the scene where Juliet walks past the fish tank with angel wings on is one of the most memorable single images of film in the 90s, and I love the overwhelming neon crosses lurking in the background of seemingly every scene.

Australia scales back on some of the eccentricity of his previous films, and their hyperpop postmodern aesthetic. It feels in a lot of ways like a lost film from classical Hollywood, epic in scale and emotion in the way those films were. An epic romance between an initially stuck up society lady and a roguish, but charming man against the backdrop of war could just as easily summarize Gone With the Wind as it could this film. Most classical Hollywood films didn’t have the veneer of irony that lies over so much of our cinema, and culture in general, today. We can watch them and laugh at the overblown scores or overwrought acting, disparage the films instead of engaging with them. Admittedly, some of the films were just bad or overdone, but at its best, classical Hollywood managed to make films that created these exquisite emotional dramas and then played them to the hilt.

Think of Casablanca, a film that holds up today, and will forever. It’s such a perfect mix of personal drama and larger scale conflict, using the war to magnify the individual stories. Without the war, the Rick/Ilsa drama doesn’t mean as much, and without their relationship, the war story feels remote and intellectual, instead of emotional. The oncoming troops may be a real danger for all involved, but we feel that danger because of what it means to our heroes. One of the few films more recently that captures that feel is The Empire Strikes Back. That’s a film that features a similarly big score and emotional scale, the doomed lovers and the evil empire are the same, only the circumstances are different.

Australia manages to capture that same feel, with its blend of interpersonal romantic drama and larger scale conflicts, each accentuating the other. It’s not the most innovative or groundbreaking film that Baz has done, but it made feel so much for the characters, get so absorbed in the emotional moments, that’s why I loved it.

The film has two fairly distinct parts, the cattle drive section resolves itself in such a way that the movie could end there and be perfectly satisfactory. This sequence has a lot more in common with most classic Hollywood Westerns than most of today’s gunslinger driven Westerns. Driving cattle around, was always the big thing, with the conflict between the wild and civilization as the centerpiece. The film echoes the iconic opening and closing shots of The Searchers a number of times, with its positioning of Sarah in the door frame, looking out at her ranch. The traditional Western deals with a protagonist who is too wild for civilization, and spends his time on the outskirts, making new territory safe for the people in town. Hugh Jackman’s Drover fits this description pretty neatly, and as is typical, he meets with up a civilized woman, who he in turn brings into his world, liberating her from stuffy societal expectations, and freeing up to a new kind of experience.

Like a lot of old Hollywood stars, Nicole Kidman has a very specific star persona. She has taken on a wide variety of roles, but there’s always an essential coldness to her, and Baz plays on that cool here by starting her out as the very English ice queen, then gradually melting her through her relationship with The Drover. Nicole is widely known, but I don’t think she’s ever been a huge draw at the box office. A lot of people dislike her, and my favorite roles of hers do play on that image, particularly her work in The Hours and Dogville. There’s a lot of joy in watching Sarah learn to do these wild things, like try to herd cattle or try to console Nullah after his mother died because we want to see Nicole Kidman do the same things. How would Nicole Kidman talk to you if your mother died? She can’t express feelings, right? Well, the film plays with that, and lets us see her develop in the kind of person who can feel.

In this film, the conflict between the wild and civilization is incarnated in Nullah, the mixed race child. He is not at home in either world at the beginning, bound by Fletcher and societal rules that could get him taken away from home and sent to a mission. Over the course of the film, he embraces both sides of his personality, using the Aboriginal ‘magic’ to connect with his grandfather, and save the cattle from going over the cliff. That moment was one of the awe inspiring bits I’m talking about. We watch the cattle running wild, the horses teetering on the edge of the cliff, tension is huge, magnified by Flynn getting run over. It’s all building up to this lone kid standing on the edge of a cliff, hoping to hold back the horde, and then he does it. In film, it’s the build up where you really feel things. Even if the cattle ran over the edge, that would still be kind of an emotional release, you’d know what was going to happen. The tension is in uncertainty, in the cattle running at this kid as he grits his teeth and prays that he can stop them.

Another great setpiece is the entrance of Sarah, The Drover and the cattle into Darwin. It’s an epic scale scene, with hundreds of cattle running around. Normally, why would you care who gets the army’s beef contract, but the film makes you care. You’re caught up in this struggle, even if the villains are pretty one note evil guys, not unlike Moulin Rouge’s Duke. It’s the emotional engagement that matters, and as tension builds while The Drover is looking for a way to stop the cattle, you’re caught up in that moment.

I think a large part of the reason why I loved the movie, and why so many seem to have mixed opinions on it, is the film’s total lack of irony or distance. We’re so used to watching films that put emotions in quotations marks, that leave enough distance that if a scene doesn’t work, you can just say, well, you weren’t really supposed to care anyway. It’s safer to do that, if you shoot something that’s supposed to be bad, whether it be bad or good, you’ve succeeded. This film turns the emotion up to 11, and if you’re not engaged with the narrative, I’d imagine it would come off as cheesy. But, the more you risk, the greater the payoff. By trying for real emotion, the film will ether totally grab you and put you through the wringer, or leave you cold. I don’t need a film that everyone’s going to like, I’d rather have a film that some people will love and some will hate. I loved the film so much, I feel like everyone would love it, but I suppose it is just as possible that people would be bored, or react against it.

After the cattle stuff is over, we get the wonderful kissing in rain sequence. One of the things I love about all Baz’s films is that he really thinks in cinematic terms. The visuals are the characters’ emotions, flooding forth onto the screen. Then, there’s a bit of a Return of the King situation where we get what could very easily be an ending to the film, only to segue into some darker times, as everyone leaves Sarah behind, and the war comes to Australia. The war section of the film is even stronger than what came before, culminating in the film’s best setpiece, the bombing of Darwin/rescue of the children sequence.

Watching this sequence made me that a filmmaker can still get this kind of budget to not do a sequel or blockbuster action movie. It’s an idiosyncratic, singular vision, and Baz got the money he needed to realize it. It’s so rare that you get a big budget movie like this, and if the Oscars are worth nothing else, they’re worth it for making these movies financially viable. Without both the prestige and financial reward that Oscars bring, the studios would have no reason to fund a film like this.

The scene uses a lot of outright melodramatic techniques to engage you emotionally. There’s the lengthy period where the Drover believes that Sarah is dead, her belief that Nullah is dead, and of course the fact that there’s twenty helpless children endangered by evil enemy soldiers, and for a time, we’re led to believe they’re all dead. I just wanted them all to get back together, and be happy again, and I think that’s a testament to the film. This one passed all those intellectual filters, that feeing that movies shouldn’t just have a happy ending, I wanted everyone to be okay, and was riveted as they all struggled back together.

Visually, I love the way they made Darwin look, a post apocalyptic world set against an expanse of surreal orange sky, or the way the soldiers were faceless specters that arose out of smoke and disappeared back into it again. The rescue of the children was really well done, leading up to that most melodramatic of moments, Sarah waiting, hoping that Nullah will return even as everyone says she has to leave. She’s going to go, but the boat’s right there, how can she not see it? And then, Nullah starts to play “Over the Rainbow,” and it’s just totally heartrending. She hears it, the song crosses the sea, and she looks out to them and they’re there. This finally leads to the reunion, drawn out shots build the suspense, until finally we get the embrace and reunion we’ve been waiting for.

The story ends with a reconciliation of the wild and the civilized, of white and black. King George will take Nullah on walkabout, but he’s not going forever. George also says that this is “our land,” he’s accepted Sarah and The Drover, he knows that they love Nullah and respect his values. It’s a mysterious ending, the story will continue even though we’re not there to see it.

This is my favorite film of 2008 so far. It hit me on a deep emotional level, and felt so much more alive and urgent than most movies out there. You can see a joy in the storytelling, a love for the material and a total investment in the emotional world of the characters. That’s what great cinema is all about, and this is great cinema.

Star Wars: A New Hope

I’m rewatching “the trilogy” this weekend. I suppose future generations might think of Lord of the Rings, or perhaps even the prequels when saying the trilogy, but for me, there’s only one set of films that will forever be known by that name. I think it’s so hard to look at the Star Wars films as films, apart from the merchandising empire, and the troubled prequels and other spinoffs. I wrote about this a bit when I reviewed Empire last year, and I think the release of the Clone Wars film and animated show has only exacerbated a lot of the issues already out there.

Watching Star Wars this time, what jumped out at me was a couple of things. One was the astonishing production design. There’s so many iconic visuals from the film, the Darth Vader outfit, the stormtrooper outfits, the various ships. It’s easy to forget that all of these things didn’t just exist, somebody had to go through and design all this stuff. Lucas pioneered the concept of the lived in universe, and that’s really what you feel as the film begins. This is something that exists somewhere out there, and we’re just looking at it. Lucas had a documentary background, and this film does have a slightly edgier, more verite feel than the other films in the series. It’s got a carry over from 70s filmmaking, while the other films in the series feel more timeless.

That’s not just true of the visual style, the principles of the film are very much in tune with that 60s generation. I think part of the reason that these films are so much more successful than the prequels is that the conflicts of the prequels are very complex, and more ambiguous. The story of the prequels is about the gradual corruption from within of essentially good institutions. I think one of the most audacious things that Lucas did in the prequels is to make it clear that to some extent, the Jedi had become apparent, and were complicit in their own downfall. Obviously, that sort of genocide is never justified, but the Jedi largely bring it on themselves by trying to stifle all of Anakin’s emotions, and not evolving with the times. Anakin was prophesied to bring balance to the force, and that’s what he did.

What the Jedi in the prequels, and even Yoda in Empire and Jedi say is that you have to disconnect from your feelings to be a Jedi. Yoda doesn’t seem to understand why Luke would run after his friends, surely his training would take priority? What Luke does in Jedi is channel his emotions into fighting the Emperor and Vader, he’s not removed from the world, his friends are his strength, the rock that lets him pull Vader back from the brink and ultimately pave the way for a new kind of Jedi, one that’s less monastic, more integrated with the world.

The thing that frustrates me about the prequels is that the ideas are a lot more complex than those in the original trilogy, and when you talk about the films from an analytical point of view, they’re full of endless material for analysis. The issue is with the moment to moment to execution, and just one good script pass, and someone to tell Lucas to hold back on the CG and you’d have a trilogy of masterpieces. I think a large part of the problem is that Lucas sees things in big picture terms. He saw the prequels as something he had to do, to complete these vague outlines he had from years ago. It’s like building a house that’s architecturally incredible, but a total mess inside, so you can’t totally love it. I read once that if Revenge of the Sith was a foreign film, people would absolutely love it, and I really agree with that. Look at Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, the same kind of philosophical musings that Western critics loved in his other films were criticized when they actually heard them spoken aloud in English. I think it’s easier to give leeway to a foreign film because we assume that weird stuff is a cultural difference, and the dialogue in Clones or Sith would play a lot better with that in mind.

But, there’d still be the CG issue. I think one of the things that people who use a lot of CG in films forget is that the joy of special effects wasn’t just about telling the story, it was the spectacle on its own terms. There’s a reason George Melies was both a magician and a filmmaker, special effects should have that “how’d they do that” element, and on the original trilogy, that’s definitely there. Watching Jedi, I have no clue how they got so many ships flying around, watching the prequels, you know it’s just CG. I think CG can look totally photorealistic, and still take us out of the film on some level when we know that it can’t exist in the real world. When you’ve actually built something, it’s there and we believe it because it exists. With CG, it’s a lot trickier, and I think that leads to one of the key things that artists have to keep in mind in a new CG age, namely just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should, sometimes limits help art.

Looking at the mishmash special edition cut of ANH that’s on DVD, the CG elements jump out as totally removed the rest of the film’s world. The incredible documentary realism of the film is broken when you’ve got a giant animated lizard walking around. That Jabba the Hutt scene is probably the worst offender, but those random CG critters in Mos Eisley take you right out of the film. Now, maybe that’s truer to Lucas’s original vision, but film is a medium where reality and vision have to meet in order to work. There’s a reason that totally invented universes frequently fail, it’s because the crazier you go in someone’s vision, the more difficult it can become for people to engage with it. The CG environments of the prequels feel inherently unknowable on some level, while we can all relate to the desert or snow or barren industrial corridors. In the end, film isn’t about throwing the images in your head onto the screen, it’s about working with actors and set designers to find a way to realize those images in a believable way that works with the narrative.

If you want to pass a couple of hours, head over to The Secret History of Star Wars, a site that looks behind a lot of the myths surrounding the production of Star Wars, and explores how the films we’ve got now came about. The key theme of the site is the idea that what made the original trilogy so great was Lucas’s collaborative partners. On the original Star Wars, it was his wife, Marcia Lucas, and screenings with his creative friends, like Coppola and De Palma, that helped shape the film into what it is today. The basic thesis is that Lucas didn’t “lose it” with the prequels, he just lost the strong collaborators who could help realize his ideas in successful ways.

I think that’s true for a lot of artists. A lot of times you need that Lennon/McCartney antagonistic relationship to keep pushing things forward. Once people decide that you’re a genius, and you can surround yourself with people who won’t challenge you, it becomes a lot harder to make good art. I still love the prequels because I see so much brilliant filmmaking there, and can look past some of the surface flaws, but those films don’t match up to what the original trilogy was.

Anyway, going back to the original film itself, watching it what really jumped out this time was how Lucas reconfigures the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey myth to fit with the concerns of the world at that time. It’s simultaneously a very classical story and one that deals with what’s going on in the world, and I think those are the best kind of blockbusters, the films that really resonate with people. The only film since I can think of that fuses these two things so well is The Matrix. I love art cinema, but there’s something amazing about watching a film that can simultaneously be as artistically successful as this one and incredibly popular.

So much has been written about the connections to classical mythology, but the film also feels very much at home amidst other 70s cinema classics like Easy Rider. This is a film about a young man’s journey away from his boring home to a kind of Buddhist enlightenment in a politically radical protest group. It’s a fusion of 70s spiritual and political concerns, all the while taking on a government that abuses peoples’ rights and tries to stop this ragtag band of freedom fighters. I think Star Wars is one of the best films that kids could watch because it instills values that are very positive. Unlike most blockbuster films, it’s a refutation of the status quo and governmental order. It’s a call to revolutionary action and consciousness evolution. I think it’s easy to forget that when you focus on the coolness of the fights, but listen to what Obi-Wan says about the force here, replace the lightsaber with a bong and you’ve got Easy Rider.

What Obi-Wan is telling Luke is essentially the path to enlightenment, about transcending the material world and existing on a higher level of consciousness. The blaster shield helmet sequence is about Luke learning to look beyond the material world and realize that there’s more out there. As Obi-Wan says, “Strike me down and I’ll become powerful than you can possibly imagine,” he’ll finally transcend this reality and become one with the force. Han Solo is a materialist, as are most of the Imperials. They denigrate this “old religion,” the Empire is a world that doesn’t believe in anything more than cold physical reality. Ironically, it’s run by a borderline insane Sith lord, but I’m guessing the Emperor didn’t show that side of his personality much in the later years. It would have been appropriate to end the series with the Emperor never existing at all, the idea that they built this Emperor figure as a way to create a self sustaining bureaucracy, a pyramid scheme where everyone reports to someone higher up, but there’s no one at the top.

Having the heroes as “rebels” is by no means something only Star Wars did. Most blockbusters involve battling some kind of oppressive force, but what Star Wars makes explicit is the idea that revolution is a viable thing to fight for. In a post-Bush world, I think it’s inspirational to watch a film like this and see those small planes fly in and destroy something so much larger. We just kind of took it for the past eight years, where was our rebel alliance? The sad reality is that most of us would just live under the Empire and not try to fight back. I think the live action Star Wars show could get great mileage out of exploring the way that the Empire tries to frame the Rebel as domestic terrorists, and uses the “war on the rebels” as an excuse for huge weapons projects like the Death Star. I also think there’s something very relevant about the idea that you can build this gigantic battle station and have it undone by one person who’s totally committed to take you down. That’s why we can never win this ‘war on terror’ when all it takes is one insane person to take down anything we can build.

Another notable 70s era element is Leia. In recent years, the strong female protagonist has become something of a must have for action movies, they’re not just there to get rescued, but at the same time, they still exist as an object for male lust, a supporting character for the central male hero. Here, the narrative initially places her in the damsel in distress role, but once she gets rescued, she takes total control of the characters, and leads them out of the Death Star. She’s the political leader, and has the most agency in the narrative.

I saw Star Wars when I was three or so, I have no memory of a time before I’d seen Star Wars, I was always obsessed with the movies, they’re what made me want to make movies myself, starting from an early age. So, the films are just sort of logged in my subconscious, and as such, they’ve influenced my perception of the world. I never saw women as the sort of “princesses” you see in most Disney movies, objects to be rescued and adored, Leia is how I imagine a princess should be, doing her own thing and taking charge when she needs to. There is something of a love triangle in the film, but it’s only the men who talk about it, she’s not really involved in the romantic side of things, she’s too in to her mission. Admittedly, in Empire, Leia takes on a more traditional romantic role, but the brilliance of that film is the way that her and Han are treated as equals. It’s very much that 30s Tracy/Hepburn equal partnership kind of relationship.

Star Wars has the unfortunate reputation of marking the end of 70s auteurist cinema and instituting a period of soulless blockbusters that persists to this day. To some extent, that’s true, but it’s no fault of the film that it connected with so many people. Watching the movie, I did wonder why I sometimes have such a commitment to make more obscure films. Isn’t there some joy in making a movie like this, something that’s smart and true, but still accessible to a lot of people. Hollywood dreams of making four quadrant movie, films that appeal to all audiences, and I’d imagine a lot of filmmakers want to do that too, but it’s so tough to do. I think most “four quadrant” films wind up aiming squarely at 13 year old boys. Star Wars is a film that kids can watch and love, but I wouldn’t call it a kids movie, or a family film or anything like that. It’s a throwback to classical Hollywood in a lot of respects, a movie that everyone can love.

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.