…And also, at last, a use for the pomegranate.

So I’m taking the day off, to catch up on moderately fun stuff I’ve been sidelining for a while. One of which is the following rant, cross-posted from my buddy BentGuy’s blog (permalink forthcoming), where he’s graciously invited me to do a walk-on.

So here it is, in all its glory:

***

The Frog Jumps Out

Well, I can sure pick ‘em. Hey, readers of BentGuy’s blog — here are a few thoughts I had that I was going to put in a comment, until they grew and grew, and then grew some more until I started to have thoughts about the thoughts themselves, and then thoughts about the thoughts about the thoughts…

And it all starts with cell phones.

Specifically, with the rather odd fact that our provincial governments seem reluctant to ban their use in motor vehicles. B.C.’s own Attorney-General offers the explanation that a law against cell phones in cars would be too hard to enforce. My father, though he voted Liberal, finds this funny: “the seat-belt laws were hard to enforce, too” he points out, and he’s right. But such is the state of things today that there’s even a better example, of a more basically unenforceable law, with far less justification behind it, that nevertheless gets followed.

That would be the ban on smoking within six meters of doors, windows, bus stops, awnings (awnings!) , the windward side of ferries, etc. etc. etc. BentGuy, the bastard, thinks this is funny, because he isn’t a smoker (and I am, I should be careful to point out)…but I think it’s funny for quite a different reason. I think it’s funny because there is no cop so slack-ass that he or she can afford to waste precious time enforcing this unenforceable law, pulling out tape measures to make sure the magic six-meter limit isn’t challenged. Because you know, within the six meters you can get cancer! But outside the six meters it’s totally safe. Hey, and you can’t smoke in a car with a kid who’s under sixteen years of age, that’s not safe, that’s poor parenting! Soon as the sixteenth birthday comes though, you’re on your own, kid.

A lot of these laws are stupid. Cars can idle within six meters of a doorway, window, awning, what-have-you, but people can’t smoke there. Hmm. Of course we wouldn’t have this problem if the government just banned the sale of tobacco, would we? Dangerous stuff, this tobacco. Health Canada says it kills innocent bystanders, the province says it’s too dangerous to be smoked under an awning, where people might go…and yet it’s an over-the-counter product. Pretty much sounds about as safe as plutonium. And yet anybody can sell cigarettes, just so long as they don’t DISPLAY THE PACKS.

So…does that sound right to you?

This all ties together in a minute or two, I promise. But before we get started, I’d just like to say that, as a smoker, I would fully support a ban on the importation and sale of tobacco. Fully. However, I think the current law is awful, pernicious, Draconian bullshit.

But then again I guess it really doesn’t matter what I think, because you know what? Everybody mostly obeys that unenforceable law, anyway. That’s right; even though no one’s gonna catch you breaking it, and even if they do it’d have to be a mighty slow news day for anybody to want to do anything about it, and even though you’ve got to figure there’s just about no way in hell you’d ever walk away from a courtroom having to pay any sort of a fine because you smoked publicly when you know perfectly well we’ve got a girl coming over in 2010 and come on you guys, we’ve got to get this place cleaned UP…!

Yes, EVEN SO…!

…Still for the most part, people choose to obey this law. Even though they quite plainly do not have to.

And therefore, the obvious question: so why would it make any difference if a law banning cellphone use in cars was hard to enforce?

It wouldn’t make any difference, and yet the government won’t contemplate passing such a law, and that’s a red flag, and I ain’t joking. Twenty years from now Jane Fonda’s going to be taking home a Best Actress award for her work in the movie about the cell phone conspiracy, and how awful it was, how compromised they all were in the governments, the regulatory agencies, etc. etc. Because, look, these cellphones really are the cigarettes of the twenty-first century, you know? And maybe they’re even worse than that. Because microwaves scything through your skull is probably at least somewhere on a continuum with smoke swirling in your lungs; whereas secondhand smoke is probably NOT on a continuum with two tons of metal being ineptly piloted down the street at forty kilometers an hour. I mean we can’t even get this behaviour banned in a SCHOOL ZONE, for heaven’s sake! And people can’t even cross the street competently while talking on a cell phone, I’ve seen ‘em try and they can’t do it. George Romero’s zombie-as-consumer stuff looks pretty out of date, now…and as for the supposedly dangerous nature of zombies themselves, did I mention that people talking on cell phones can’t even cross the street with a sufficiency of skill? No one notices, because they’re all on cell phones too. They’re zombies too, and just like in the movies there’s fast zombies and there’s slow zombies.

The fast ones are in cars, right?

But the slow ones are VERY SLOW INDEED, and you can see it. Man, I might worry about a zombie cat, or something. Sure, a cat; a cat might get me. But a zombie human-person? Never in a million years, my little friend. I’d already be three blocks away before they even realized I had once been there. SLOW. Mindbogglingly slow. But very nimble when it comes texting, I suppose…

…And you know, something’s sure as hell screwy around here, isn’t it? Because I’ve been thinking about this for about a month or so now. I’ve been kind of musing aloud about the dark side of cell phones, to friends, family, even strangers. About waste disposal problems, for instance! These things are little sachets of lead and mercury, nightmares waiting to happen, and we’ve not only mass-produced them but we’ve made them disposable. DISPOSABLE PHONES. Nobody even pays for them, they just give ‘em away for nothing with the contract. New contract, new phone, throw the old one into the landfill. If you built a house out of these things, the government wouldn’t let you live in it. But if you just wanna hold one next to your ovaries for a couple years before tossing it on a pile to get rained on, that’s fine. My God, we treat ‘em like they’re plastic bags, trillion a year, no problem, we just throw ‘em in the sea and watch ‘em kill our fish. NO PROBLEM. Jesus. We’re through the looking-glass here, people. And (again) you know what?

No one wants to know about it.

No one wants to know about it. I’ve talked to dozens of people about cell phones over the last few weeks, and NONE of them want to hear it, to the point where they do what little kids do, they ostentatiously change the subject and pretend you won’t notice. Which is very serious business, because that’s practically the sort of behaviour we normally associate with big-league taboos, like CRIME. They don’t want to know, and they’re not GONNA know. La-la-la can’t hear you. You could get in a fistfight over this kind of thing. That’s how bad things have already gotten.

And that’s why it took me so long to write all this down, because none of it adds up. Even cigarettes were never as touchy a subject as this, you know, so…what the hell’s going on? That’s what I asked myself.

What the hell IS all this nonsense? Where’s it all coming from?

And then I figured it out: cellphones and all their wireless-telegizmo cognates aren’t the cigarettes of the twenty-first century, after all. They’re the BIG OIL of the twenty-first century, instead. And the reason governments don’t want to regulate them is because they’ve got an AWFUL lot invested in them. Because every time someone’s not using their cellphone, somewhere money is not being made; and if we all threw away our wireless gizmos tomorrow, the next day Apple and Microsoft would both get their stock price chopped in half, and people would lose their homes. Two out of every three dollars slated to come down the pipeline of the Internet wouldn’t arrive on anything like schedule, should we all toss our Blackberries back into the bushes on Monday morning. And so this isn’t just big business anymore; like oil, it’s become our life’s blood. And it’s polluted as hell, but we can’t afford to notice. We can’t afford to notice, until it’s too late to do anything about it. Once it’s too late, we can notice, and that’ll be fine, because we’ll already be screwed, and therefore not responsible. But right now, just as all this stuff’s just set to go absolutely stratospheric, no: no, no, no. Don’t you dare look. Just shut up about it. Oh, look, a pretty birdie…! LA-LA-LA…!

I think a good rule of thumb would be: nothing really serious ever gets done about a problem on a governmental level until food shortages hit. Seriously, if cancer caused food shortages it’d probably be cured by now. Food shortages: where salami tactics turn and start slicing the other way! It is the one thing people will always pick up torches and pitchforks for, the one thing that can topple any government, anywhere. Hey, why do you think Lenin starved his millions? To prove it could be DONE, of course: his greatest proof of success. How proud he must have been. And then after he successfully took away food, he started to take away truth…next step: oxygen! The Soviet Union never did get quite that far, though, and just look where it is now, eh? But once you’ve starved a few million people just for, y’know, kicks…well, you’re pretty much committed to a course of action at that point, aren’t you? At that point you’re sitting on a big time-bomb, basically, I would imagine…

And, sorry, where was I? Oh, yes: hey, thanks for letting me guest-post, BentGuy! Hmm, just thought I ought to get that out there, before you got tired of reading…

But there aren’t going to be any food shortages caused by cellphonoid telegizmos…so the revolution she is not happening I t’ink, senor. Because one thing propaganda’s not any good for is when you’re starving to death…but hey, for everything else it works pretty well! The Internet is “clean”, you know; every piece of hardware that supports it is filthy as smoking itself, but the Internet ITSELF…! Is perfectly clean. Green and enviro, all the day long. This is the same sort of thing you hear all the time. I caught a guy near my place basically driving a truck with a projector mounted on it, shining fashion ads on the sides of buildings. “Guerilla marketing,” he called it, and with the biggest dare-you-to-do-something-about-it shit-eating grin I have EVER seen plastered on his face he told me:

“Hey, it’s just light, right?”

When actually it isn’t, of course. I mean undeniably it is, in fact, light — hell, it’s BRIGHT light, goddamnit! — Asshole! — but it’s nothing like “just” light, it’s also camera, lens, bulb, projector components, computer set-up, office supplies, freakin’ BIG-ASS TRUCK…a can of paint would probably be more environmentally sensitive, once you total it all up. And what “guerilla marketing” means, it means the guy who owns the building that the ads are projected on hasn’t been paid for the use of his space, nobody doing this stunt’s got a permit, he needs to get a police scanner so he can stay ahead of the cops…etc. etc. These guys also powerwash stencils for Telus Mobility — hey, we’re back to cell phones! — into the sidewalk near my house.

“Hey, we’re just cleaning the pavement, right?”

Actually, wrong again; cleaning is what I do to it when I go down there with a wire brush and obliterate your ad. See, now we’re both Boy Scouts! Hooray! I was so inspired by your volunteer efforts to clean up the city that I decided to pitch right in, and in honour of your cleaning pattern I chose one that duplicated it in negative!

What am I gonna do about it. Shessh. I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do about it, if I catch him at it again. I’ve going to take the business card he STUPIDLY gave me, and I’m going to take it down to City Hall and I’m going to register a complaint. “Sustainable advertising for a greener tomorrow”, is what it says on the card. “Sustainable advertising”, pfeh. You know, maybe propaganda isn’t good for absolutely everything shy of a food shortage, after all…

But for cell phones that line’s more than likely gonna work. It’s just how you get to the Internet, it’s “just light”, obviously, eh? It’s just a screen and some buttons.

It’ll kill millions, but outside of that it’s harmless.

And this is why governments hesitate to regulate this activity, because just like Lenin they would then be committed to a course of action. Sitting on a time-bomb. Just ONCE regulate it, and you’ve set a precedent for regulating it, you’ve admitted it can cause harm, even though it’s “just light”…that’s where the “too hard to enforce” thing comes from, and the “but hands-free is okay” thing too — it ISN’T too hard to enforce, and clearly hands-free is NOT “okay”, but my God if we can just find one way not to have to LOOK at what the problem is, just for ONE MINUTE MORE…!

Then maybe we’ll be able to say later that we TRIED to do something about it, but y’know WHO KNEW, am I right people?

Big Oil. Of course to you and me they are known by their street name: cars. We totally lost the whole battle over the car thing. Haven’t yet lost the war, but the first few skirmishes, oh yeah. Definitely lost those. And just relatively recently, with the whole helmet thing — and God I’m glad BentGuy’s writing about that, because I swear I never THOUGHT of it before, but it’s all so flippin’ obvious now!! — there was a bit of rhetorical dirty work going on there too. “You’re the ones who aren’t being safe, where are your helmets! I thought you were all “into safety”, but you have no helmets? WHAT A BUNCH OF HYPOCRITES, YOU’RE JUST BLAMING THE POOR CAR FOR YOUR OWN RECKLESSNESS…!” Textbook stuff, straight off the playground. No, you are. No, you are. I know you are, but what am I. La-la-la!

Even if somebody gets killed while wearing a helmet, see? “Well, I can’t understand what happened, he was wearing a helmet as you’re required to do, so I guess it must’ve been some sort of FREAK ACCIDENT…”

But I think at some point the time-bomb goes off. And by the way, did you hear? Amazing news: apparently if you put a frog in a pot of cold water, and then bring it slowly to a boil, THE FROG JUMPS OUT! Yeah. Frogs: they’re not stupid, people.

And neither are we.

So here is something we can all do, and it’s easy. Turn to the person next to you wherever you may happen to be, and say this:

“Hey, ever notice that on the news when there’s a car crash, no one ever says whether or not the person driving was on their cell? Maybe that’s because they don’t think to say it. Like, it just doesn’t come up. I mean, if none of the drivers were talking on their phones when they crashed, you wouldn’t mention it, right? It’s be like saying “the driver was fully clothed”, you just wouldn’t say it. So…I guess that means it’s only the people who aren’t on their cell that get into crashes, eh? Like, it’s safer to drive while talking on the phone. It’s safer. It’s SAFER.”

“Anyway, that’s what I told your son and daughter yesterday.”

And just like that, ladies and gentlemen: the frog jumps out.

Hey, thanks for having me!

***

So in case you were all wondering…yeah, that’s what I was doing today. That, and the sandwiches and the limeade, and also a rather nice Belgian witbier now that I come to think of it. Hey, and what timing I had, on Marketplace Wendy Mesley was asking the ex-politician who now heads the Canadian Cellphone-Human Love Association how come their promotional material says “don’t worry about your kids using cellphones, it’s perfectly safe!”. His response: Health Canada has not called it unsafe.

WENDY: Other countries seem to think there’s a risk involved. They issue advisories about kids and cell phones.

FACE-MAN: Well, those are just precautions. Nothing’s been proven.

I leave it to the reader to imagine the ensuing course of conversation. As for me I think it’s probably time I had a snack.

]]> http://circumstantial.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/capicolli-sandwiches-pomegranate-limeade-port-salut-cheese-and-rain-at-last/feed/ 1 pillock http://circumstantial.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/da-fug/ http://circumstantial.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/da-fug/#comments Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:33:22 +0000 pillock http://circumstantial.wordpress.com/?p=1113 ]]>

Man, I’ll tellya:  sometimes this apartment’s like a trap.  So many things to not do, and so little time to not do them in…wandering around in a…well…

However I will very shortly be on the hop, and then I think we’ll start to see some action.  Got a post I wrote yesterday pretty much lined up and ready to go…a post I began on Friday trickling down soon after, I trust.  Though it may take a little while longer for that one, because it’s all about how I finally laid my hands on all of Seaguy 2, and then scoured the Internet for commentary, but then got tired and went to bed.

Spine-tingling stuff!

Okay, time to jump.  More directly, Internet.

What’s the connection, you may ask?

Well, it’s a little bit Shakespeare, and a little bit Kurosawa…and a little bit of something else too.

I think.

Haven’t quite worked it all out yet.  But then again that’s what a blog’s for, so…

Pass me that hammer and them tongs, and let’s get to it!

…And begin with Rigoletto, my first opera.  Just went to it a couple of months ago, and I have to tell you, it was fantastic.

I know, I know…you see no reason to believe me.

But as long as we’re in the land of not-believing, here’s another thing I could ask you to chew on a bit:  which is that opera and comics have an awful lot in common.

No really, they do!

The opera stage is just like a page, you see:  people stand around and exposit in song for minutes at a time, perhaps with an arm raised, and it’s often very boring stuff — “oh no, Father, look out behind that tree…!” — but in the context of the artform it’s tremendously meaningful, charged — CHARGED! — with an almost inexplicable sense of dramatic motion.  Even though no one is moving.  But, well…and we ought to know…

It’s also because no one is moving.

I could tell you a whole lot about my first opera experience, I could tell you a lot about my history with opera as well, but I’ll just tell you this instead:  the opera fans love their thing for exactly the same excellences that we comics fans love our thing for…for the genius of the composition that’s truly arresting, that implies so much movement it’d almost be less thrilling to actually see it…that’s peopled with characters so stock and so sloppy that you couldn’t possibly care about them for their own selves, but that for that very reason they can let a virtuoso execution really shine through.  Comics.  Opera.  There’s a relationship there.  We’re talking about highly stylized forms;  which also means (at least in the popular stuff) very simple forms…and to a degree it’s pretty lowlife stuff.

I mean, take Rigoletto.  A hunchback court jester seething with rage at the aristocrats he amuses, who — SPOILERS! — protects his beautiful daughter, that they all think is his lover….and it all comes out as spite, that earns him a terrible curse.  And he may be out of Victor Hugo, but he ain’t no Quasimodo…and he may make your skin just crawl slightly, but that doesn’t mean he’s Iago either.  And yet what is he, if not a weird and unsettling mixture of those two?  And, not just those two.  Only in comics could you really get away with something like this:  Rigoletto is fifteen different dramatic ingredients thrown into a blender and set on frappe — Rigoletto’s an impossible idea, too unfocussed, spasmic, all over the map, dumb…I mean, he’s gotta be a hunchback too? There’s got to be a curse too? The secret girl has to be his daughter? Oh of course, of course, and yet goddamnit it’s all really too much, and the opera isn’t even that long;  I mean how the hell are you going to cram all that shit in there?  What’s the point of making it so complicated, eh?  Really, it’s TOO MANY NOTES, and what in God’s name is so special about this topic that it needs THAT many notes?  They stop short of giving Rigoletto adamantium claws, but that’s about all the restraint you’re going to get…and in a way it really makes you question why.  Hey, why no adamantium claws, anyway?  Hey, whaddaya some kinda cheapskate?

Away back at the beginning of the Century of Psychology, Freud saw Wagner’s Ring and it stunned him.  Later on, when it met Jung, it practically caved in his skull.  An unconscious part of the mind, good God, do you think it’s possible there might really be one?  Of course the idea goes back a long, long way…at the very least it goes back to Homer, who has Hector address no one in particular, asking:

“But wherefore does my life say this to me?“

But Hector, man, I just can’t answer that one for you.  Who knows why the Gods change their minds?  Whoever it is who knows that, it sure isn’t us.  Though there has by now been a LONG history of people trying to answer your question, we still got nothin’…and we’re probably lucky we’ve even got that much.  But one thing we do have, is a lot more ways of posing the question, than we ever did before:  and you can thank literature and drama for coming up with the idea, and psychology for figuring out that the idea might have hidden bases, and I guess you can thank the modern mind for choosing to dwell on it to such an unhealthy degree, to the point where it clearly wants to just play and play and play with it, like a kid with a mudpie.  Rigoletto himself is a character that’s been done twenty times better…

And yet it’s his very lousiness, it’s the incredibly desultory nature of his “tragedy”…

…That for some reason makes us care?

I’ve said before that pop culture’s chief virtue is its transgressiveness — and make no mistake, the thing called opera buffo is as pop-cultural as any Shakespeare play, which is to say it’s as pop-cultural as anything, anywhere, has ever been.  Up to and including comics…

By which I mean:  it’s surely right up there with us.  Opera and Shakespeare and us:  we’re the trinity of Pop.  Even music has a tough time matching us.

Because even music has a hard time doing what (say) Artesia does.  Oh, Artesia…I think I said this before too, that it is just such a horrifying agglomeration of tips and tricks and cliches that one really couldn’t stand the thing at all, were it not for the fact it’s so obviously made with great passion, as well as with great care.  I’d be a mean man indeed to suggest this comic wasn’t loved by its creator;  and I’d be a meaner one still to dare to suggest it wasn’t pretty well-lathered with skill.  And all for such a silly subject!

It’s mystifying!

Ridiculous gods and maps and names — Artesia puts the ridiculousness right out there and up in your face.  But then again they do say that good artists imitate, but great artists steal — heck, until my friend Tyche shoved it in my face I had no IDEA how much Bob Dylan just flat-out stole, for example…and, yeah, it’s very much our matter, I think.  The recurrent matter of modernity — I mean we forgive Homer and we forgive Shakespeare and we forgive Victor Hugo, but that’s only because we’ve got much bigger problems now, to wit:  what the fuck are WE gonna make, and how can we justify it?  Great artists steal;  artists working from 1985-2009 try to make stealing extra-nice…

Which is probably a mistake, and notably not one that passionate, competent Artesia (I mean ARTESIA, that’s the NAME, for heaven’s sake WHAT?!) even seems to think of.  But then again maybe that passes for a species of genius, in these crazy days…

…Of modernity, I keep saying that…

But, what the hell is modernity?

It’s a slippery term.  You could argue Hector possesses a modern mind, and indeed many stalwarts of the Century of Psychology have done just that;  modernity was certainly, inarguably on the go during the Enlightenment;  and then there’s bloody Shakespeare, and we’re still only talking about the Western Canon.  Look, Bloggers, “modernity”:  better give it up as a hope of something definite, you know what I mean?  I can think of sixteen definitions off the top of my head, that conservatively fit;  there are hundreds more slapdash and off-the-cuff ones that have almost no truth to them at all, except they have a little truth that every other definition lacks…and so I tellya, we’ll be figuring this out ’til the day we die, if that’s what we want to do.  Because it’s bloody complicated…

…From a certain perspective.

I mean, look at Watchmen.  Now there’s a perspective, eh?  Voltaire said that one must be absolutely modern, and that’s exactly what Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s work is…it’s about as modern as you can get.  It is obsessed with modernity, in fact;  all the flaws and contradictions, all the little stupid truths and stupid habitual excisions of truth that are SO EMBARRASSING to those of us who are not superheroes…yes.  And the thing is, none of us are.

And another thing is:  the superheroes aren’t, either.

Now there’s your “absolutely modern” — the characters themselves are all but nullities.  Why should we care about them?  An angry girl in a yellow nightie who knows tae-kwon-do.  A rich idiot in an animal costume, with dangerous gadgets, who feels unfulfilled.  A brutal madman in a mask who lives out of an alleyway, eating garbage.  There’s nothing to any of them, and oh God if there really were…

Well who could stand it?

Being a real superhero…

It sounds awful.

“Artesia” wrestles with it, in her way — enmeshed in a million silly and mystifying details, but she’s enmeshed in them.  And so are we, as ridiculous as that sounds.  All trapped in a million cliches, stranded on a million fantasy-maps.  Artesia’s strength is that it’s just this, yes it really is, and now what kind of story can you tell with it?  Watchmen’s no different, in fact that’s (pretty inarguably, I take it) the point of Watchmen:  these stylized representations are rather ostentatiously ridiculous, self-cancelling even, as far as fantasies go…but we didn’t make them up, and guess what they do appear to be good for something.  Good at cracking the shell, and getting to the meat inside.  And this manner of feeding isn’t so nice, maybe;  but it’s what we’ve got, and without it there may be no sustenance at all.  Modernity goes back as far as Homer, because Homer is as far back as we can remember:  stories of gods transplanted into tales of human anguish, with God-principles abstracted from them and controlling them, and making a bloody mess that we can’t help but search for some coagulant purpose.  Achilles and Ajax and Demetrious and Nestor:  none of it is original, but then that’s the problem that justifies the story.  Rigoletto is like the freakin’ scrapple of tragedies:  it’s all the leftover bits from everybody else’s story pressed into a loaf, but that doesn’t make it bad, it just makes it a thing you have to eat with the most delicious kind of sauce you can figure out.  In this case:  music, and virtuosity.  Assured performance.  Wonderful execution.  Inspired mise-en-scene.  Without these it is literally nothing;  might as well be a crap Wolverine story.  I mean who cares?  Nothing is so ridiculous as this, after all.  Nothing else carries with it so very little reason to care.

And yet we do care;  and here’s the thing.

Here’s the thing, O Modern Ones, you many Hectors wondering what the hell’s going on!

The transgressive world may be a silly one, but it induces a lot of non-silly feelings that are hard to achieve elsewhere.  We manage to care for Rigoletto, and this is impossible, or at least it ought to be;  it’s like caring for Iago, the one who does ill for ill’s sake because he likes it.  We manage to worry about Artesia, even though — give me a break! — the D&D memory-quilt world she lives in is one where the worst thing that can happen is that she wins.  God knows what we’re supposed to feel at the end of Watchmen, though the superheroic ending is planted right in our laps as plain as day.  Happy for Dan and Laurie?  Well, sure, but not because they’re good characters:  only because they’re sung so well.

And at the end, it’s as though Rorschach gets up and sings a final aria…

And the audience is suitably purged of pity and fear, but it’s not too plain whether or not the good guys have won…if indeed there are any good guys.

Quick lesson in opera to go out on:  the opera we know today is opera buffo, the silly opera:  the common people’s opera.  Where meanings are mixed;  where social conformity isn’t reinforced.  And the “high” opera died the day that opera buffo was born:  prescriptive entertainment, that told you what you should feel, and couched it all in Biblical terms so you couldn’t argue with it.

You see, you’re not supposed to like the “lower” form of this kind of theatre.

But you do, don’t you?

You do care, I think.

This post I had planned for several months;  and the way I had it planned, it was going to be really good.

Oh, well…that didn’t happen, I guess.

Still I hope you may not have thought it a complete waste of time.  And if you did…well, bub…

SNIKT.

You know, so here we have the late night movie back — which is terrific, because the CBC can show anything they want, uncut, anytime.  MASH was on the other night, and I believe I may have complained about it (my God, I think they cut some swearing, actually;  I mean I hope to hell I’m wrong about that, because they DON’T HAVE TO);  Magnolia was on a while before that, and it was a very trying experience, because there were SO many commercials that it took about FIVE HOURS to watch it.

And then last night, it was All About Eve.

Now, All About Eve happens to be my stock answer for “what’s your favourite movie”, and as such it is a movie whose pace and rhythm I’m intimately familiar with…sort of like most of the better Star Trek episodes, I know when stations cut scenes because I know the dialogue cold, I know how the tension’s supposed to rise, and for how long…I’ve imbibed these things thoroughly.  And you wouldn’t believe what the Star Trek-showing stations I get are in the habit of cutting out, I swear to God…

…But back to Eve.  If you thought it was the most hokey old thing you’d ever seen, you wouldn’t be far wrong, and I wouldn’t deny it:  in many ways it’s a movie most perfectly-suited to fifteen-year-olds who join the Drama Club, which I suppose is one of the more damning things you can say about a movie.  And yet it wouldn’t be that if it didn’t also boast a certain kind of perfection — I’ve often said that what separates an artistically-minded kid from an artistically-minded adult is that kids don’t think as well as adults, but they observe better…and there’s a lot of elegant things to observe in Eve.  It’s a movie full of felicities, enormously neat and tidy and well-drawn, and occasionally the beautiful ease of its flow even threatens to eclipse the amazing fact that you can see Margo Channing thinking, as Bette Davis acts her out…so, somewhat childish, maybe.  But — at least for me — never less than worth watching.

I couldn’t watch it last night, though!

Because everybody knows that one of the worst things about watching a movie on TV is that sometimes it’s hacked-up so much that we cut away to a commercial in the middle of a scene — and you know CBC used to be really good about that, actually? — but this is worse than that by far, and it’s the same thing I complained about with Magnolia and MASH (and, it occurs to me suddenly, The Bishop’s Wife too), but in Eve I could really feel it, because I know that movie’s rhythms so well, and because it really is all rhythm, and if you take that away from it you ruin it.

Not that this sort of thing wouldn’t ruin any movie:  because at one point during my aborted attempt to watch it last night, four minutes of commercials gave way to six minutes of movie, and then another three minutes of commercials immediately following it.  And I defy anyone to enjoy sitting through that anyway, you know?

But when all the commercial breaks are only blocks of in-house advertising for other CBC shows, then you’ve got real problems.  Because then it’s not even about the almighty buck coming in, is it?  But about it going out, instead.  Or in other words:  it’s about being god-damn cheap.  And yet there are so many ways of being cheap, and most of them aren’t as dumb as this.  Anyone ought to know that you can’t cut a movie fifty-fifty with ads anyway, but if you’re absolutely committed to it for some dumbass reason…then still the one thing you would not do, in the ordinary course of bad decision-making, is cut it up fine.  Six minutes of movie sandwiched between seven minutes of advertising.  SIX MINUTES! Surely that crosses some kind of line, of taste or intelligence if not both at once.

It was the best thing on TV, at that hour.  And yet it was unwatchable, even by me, and in fact I only sat still for it even as long as I did because I already knew it.  If I’d been coming to it fresh, I would’ve given up at the beginning of the third commercial break, when I realized I was going to have to sit through that goddamn promo for The Hour again, that that’s what I was being interrupted for, that that’s what was considered urgent here.  Not knowing the movie’s quality, I wouldn’t have had a reason to take this faux-hipsterish face-slapping past that point:  because I wouldn’t've known what I was trying to get back to.  And so even AMC is not this bad.  The old CKVU, with its thirty-minute station breaks full of pictures of tugboats and Chuck Mangione, was not this bad.  This is simply no way to run a railroad.  Unless, that is, your intention is to run it into the ground.

Not that I’m saying the abuse of the late-night movie that’s going on here, stems directly from that intention.  But let no one be so ridiculous as to suggest that the current government doesn’t want that god-damn CBC gone, just about as quickly as it can be managed, and let’s not pretend there isn’t any pressure being exerted in that direction:  let’s not imagine that the atmosphere at the public broadcaster isn’t becoming thicker and denser, in the hope that one day soon it will simply choke.  Ideologues know that the easiest way to persuade people a thing is broken is to break it — and as a rule, any quango exists largely to please its maker.  So would it be going too far to say that the crappification of the late-night movie is a symptom of this particular need to please?  In the ordinary course of the CBC life cycle, a change of government means new sticks and new carrots, tools of a new political mandate that are first employed with vigour, then gradually forgotten about as realism replaces ideology.  But the goal of this government is to break that cycle, so you can forget about the carrots.  Heck, you can forget about the sticks, too.

In quangoes, when times get tough the natural reflex is to circle the wagons.  You can circle them too tightly, though, and that’s when you find yourself using carrots as sticks, and sticks as carrots, in desperation.  Well, if you’re not getting any more carrots or sticks, don’t you have to make the ones you’ve got pull double duty?

It’s a natural impulse;  but in this case it’s a deeply mistaken one.  Because no one is watching the movie for the ads, and so the ads can potentially keep people from watching the movie, which would make the ads worthless, and then what will you do with that promotional platform once its value is gone, and hey whose idea was this anyway?

You would, perhaps, say you have no choice.  And as it happens, you would be right about that:  you don’t.  Because if I’m choosing to turn off the TV rather than watching MASH or The Bishop’s Wife…

Or ALL ABOUT EVE for God’s sake…!

…Then you really don’t have a choice, because this isn’t working, and you’re going to have to try something else.  I don’t want to see the CBC go anywhere;  I think it’s a much better broadcaster than most other people do, I probably watch CBC more than I watch any other channel.  Look, over here:  CBC, I’m your audience, for heaven’s sake…

But I can’t physically tolerate the late-night movie any more.  I can’t watch it;  it just makes me mad.  So how do you plan to replace my lost viewership then, eh?  If you don’t bring me back, you’ll have to find somebody else…will you perhaps start running ads for the late-night movie during The Hour?  That might work, I suppose…hell, you might be doing that already, I wouldn’t know, I dislike The Hour intensely…

But you’re gonna have to do something, I’m telling you.  Because you’ve found a way to make me change the channel away from something I really love, on a station I wholeheartedly support, at a time when there’s nothing else on I want to see, and that can’t be good news.

So just think that over a bit, won’t you?

…Happy Birthday to me.

I’m behind on my reading.

Picked up a few things, got a few more on order:  however today I did remember to visit the LCS to pick up a Batman And Robin.  From a cursory scan of the blogoverse, people like it well enough, but feel a bit disappointed by it.  Not enough action.

Of course where Morrison and Quitely combine, there’s always action:  it’s just stored in a non-standard location.

It’s been a long time since I gave a damn about a Batman comic.  I like Batman fine in the abstract, naturally — just like all the other underwear-clad superpeople of youth — but it’s all the CRAP swirling about those characters’ heads, that has nothing to do with me, that makes me shun the world of floppies.  Today I browsed the racks looking for Seaguy (wasn’t there — gotta order it), and it truly is remarkable how many comics there are that I don’t want to read.  There’s just nothing in them that attracts me:  they’re empty.  And it isn’t like they have to be monumental works of world literature:  the inner eleven-year-old living behind my eyes has very specific needs, but they’re not difficult ones to satisfy.  Batman comics:  I want to care about them.  Just give me a reason.

I liked this one.  Having missed Morrison’s Batman run in its entirety, and not knowing Damien Wayne from a hole in the ground (barring Amypoodle’s wonderful Batman #666)…nevertheless the little punk interests me.  Snot-nosed Robin.  Here my vision splits into two frames:  in the first, I am an eleven-year-old boy looking for identification figures, and one of the notches on that key is definitely snot-nosery — and trust two Brits to remember that so-important element of children’s stories!  Which is, of course, just what this is.  I mean, just look at it.  Look at the title, for goodness’ sake.  “Batman And Robin”.  That’s a kid’s book, though you the experienced comic-reader might be forgiven for missing that fact, due to the look of the thing…but it’s been an awful long time since we’ve had captions and thought-balloons in superhero comics, and although a lot of people seem to regard that as some sort of technological advancement, it isn’t:  it’s just a stylistic choice, and its merits are all site-specific.  Sometimes the merits aren’t particularly in evidence:  a given story might be worse with captions and thought-balloons, but it isn’t really better just because they’re not there.  But this one’s better, because the technique serves the purpose:  that I’m not subjected to Damien Wayne’s inner monologue here is a positive pleasure, because I don’t want to hear what he’s got to say — at least in this first issue, I already know everything I need to know about him.  He’s a little puke, just like me.  And likewise…

…The other frame of my vision is the guy in his forties who’s been buying comics all his life, and that guy isn’t fixated on Robin, but on the Batman who used to be Robin, and then went and did all these other things for a while.  Identification is there, too, and so deeply embedded that it’s hard to think of anything that could ruin it…

…Unless it was being subjected to Dick Grayson’s inner monologue, which I tell you quite frankly is something up with which, after more than three decades now, I will most certainly not put.  Here’s a character who outgrew himself long ago;  outgrew all his own secret thoughts, too.  Honestly, I don’t care about that stuff anymore, and I don’t need to see it.  Really and truly.  Dick and Damien talk to each other, because they have conflicts;  thus, we can actually see the conflicts right there on the page.  And, guess what?  Those conflicts are kind of interesting in their own right.  One identification is a brilliant, stunted child with far too high an opinion of himself — a little aristocratic prick.  The other is a character who’s moped and brooded his way through the last two decades in a way exactly like a brilliant, stunted child with far too high an opinion of himself, who isn’t an aristocratic prick…

…Who’s at last gained a measure of adult self-knowledge, right along with a big fat aristocratic inheritance.  All the Nightwing, Nightwing-and-Robin, and replacement-Batman and Robin stuff we’ve had over the last quite long while now has always seemed a bit…perfunctory, if you were inclined to be generous.  Why doesn’t this guy just get on and do something?  Who the hell is he?  Why is he forever popping up, threatening to be interesting or relatable, only to disappear again two seconds later?  Always a very special guest-star…but then always going off somewhere to play St. Elmo’s Fire with the other Young Adults, every day drawing straws to decide who’s gonna be this story’s Emilio Estevez, who’s going to be the Kiefer Sutherland this week.  But, good heavens, the Seventies are a long way back, now, and so are the Eighties…for most of the time since, this character’s been unable to hold focus effectively for more than ten minutes.  And there’s no reason for that.  He’s just lines on paper, he’s just letters on a screen.  It should be easy to write and draw him well.

But Robin is a character belonging to the 1940s, and Nightwing — “Robin, all grown-up” — is a character belonging to the 1970s.  You can do a couple things with Robin by riffing on what’s gone before — different versions of Robin, reflecting changing times.  But with Nightwing there’s no “what’s gone before”, so there’s no riffing possibilities available.  Once he’s “all grown up”, what’s left for him to do except “grow up some more”?  And yet there’s really nothing there, to hold anyone’s interest for long.  You can do ten years of it.  Maybe fifteen.  But then eventually that well’s going to go dry.

Isn’t it?

Well, it is, and it did, and yet here I am actually interested in what Dick Grayson has to say again, and that’s a remarkable achievement…not least because it ought not to be a particularly remarkable achievement.  One thing Morrison and Quitely never do is skimp on what’s thematically necessary, and they haven’t skimped on it here either — so this is your basic Summer Comic, it practically shimmers with it, and what a relief that is.  I’ve gotten so damn bored with the grim perfection of latter-day Batman, I’ll tellya, folks.  Give me a little Quitely-as-Neal-Adams for a change.  Let’s break a mould, here.  See if this all can’t be made fun again, like it was when we were kids.  A kid’s comic book, by God!  You know, they told me these couldn’t be made anymore.

Now pardon me, I must go and try to get this water-taxi company I know of to take my money.  I think you’d be surprised how reluctant they are to do it!  God knows why.

Or, maybe I should just chuck it, and let somebody take me out for a nice dinner instead?

You know, the older I get, the less time I have for dealing with other people’s procedural bullshit.  That ocean water is calling me, and there’s no doubt about it;  but they’re telling me you can’t get there from here just because it’s where you want to be, and somehow I don’t feel myself in much of a mood to say “I believe you” just because it’ll make their jobs easier.  What about my job?  Which just for today is to not have to buy a pig in a poke if I don’t want to.

The ocean.  I’ll get there tomorrow.  But for today, I’ve got Batman And Robin…

…And a fridge full of goodies.

So maybe I’ll just stay home today, and catch up on that reading of mine.

Well, well…what a pleasant surprise.

After reading my occasionally less-than-flattering review of some issues of Robotika I got my hands on a year or so ago (?) — though I still fear I may not have been sufficiently flattering about the parts that impressed me! — the author/artist, Alex Sheikman, was kind enough to ask me to review the relaunch of Robotika soon to emerge from Archaia Studios, scripted and co-plotted by David Moran, with colours by Joel Chua.

And, what a difference a year or so makes!

I’ll tell you this: it’s truly gorgeous stuff, and it’s all about the framing. The framing, and the close-ups, and the action. Admittedly, the story seems a bit slight at times, and I’m not sure something wouldn’t be lost if the reader wasn’t already familiar with the DIY Heavy Metal mash-up that was Robotika v.1…truthfully, though, it’s hard to care much about that, when pages have as much pop as this. No offence meant to Mr. Moran’s perfectly natural dialoguing skills, but I would imagine I’m feeling his contribution as a scripter much more strongly in a visual sense: Alex’s vastly-grown skill as a storyteller is surely what we have to thank for the pictures, of course…for the wonderful way that stops and starts of time are communicated on the page, and space is cut-up, distorted, cooked at 375 degrees for half an hour and then served nice and piping-hot on a square plate with some sort of hand-made chutney…but as a guy who makes his living by collaboration (and also as a guy who’s been fortunate enough to see a Robotika: For A Few Rubles More script), I have to say: it’s good to have a friend who can put up some proper scaffolding for you, too. It’s good to have a prep cook. Not at all to underrate David’s scripting, as I said: CG sounds natural and also recognizable as herself, and that’s a career in any league…but the main thing’s about pace. And brother is there some good pace here, in fact the pace is the second-most very engaging thing on the page here, and far moreso than what you might find (say) in your average superhero book which — it’s awful to say — is made up by today’s version of the Old Pros. And very good they are on theory, too…

But I think Alex and David could take ‘em in an actual dust-up.

There’s some visual verve here. You folks won’t recognize it, I swear. The sputtery start our artist had back in Robotika v. 1, some things a-poppin, others lying a bit flat on the page…it is all full of pop here. And why?

It’s the close-ups.

That’s where the action is; you won’t find a single close-up in this Robotika that doesn’t make you jump, laugh, nod, throw up the Ozzy hands…in fact if the book has a flaw, it’s that the real action is only in the close-ups. Long-view compositions are incredibly static, I would guess by design…because there are very few medium-shots in this book, and it’s by that device that the eye is always being shocked. Everything is framing, did I say that already? The close-ups actually look like they are mere arbitrary segments of a much bigger and more claustrophobic picture, and sometimes the frame is dropped and sometimes it is pushed-in…sometimes it jostles for position with other, nearby frames, and sometimes it seems distended, busting at the seams from the volume of stuff that’s inside it. Of course part of the credit there must go to Joel Chua’s astoundingly peppy colouring…take a bow, Joel! Good Lord, somebody snap this fella up! (uh, hold on, he’s already been snapped, hasn’t he?)…that crowds and charges every panel with a density that’s awful rare…why it’s practically still mooing when it comes to the table. Sixty-four pages, and they all gleam, and not only do you care what happens, you also get that pleasure all-too-elusive these days of caring what’s happening…so let me give this book my highest praise, which is that it caught my interest, and once it caught it held it, and I was not bored, and it was a pleasant half-hour, worth the time spent…

And sometimes I even gasped, or laughed, or threw up the devil-horns.

No, it isn’t up there with the greatest of the great. It isn’t up with what the hypertalents crap out in their sleep, either. But you know what, fuck that shit: these are young guys, working on their craft, and they’re growing by leaps and bounds, and we get to see it. And is it the most pleasantly surprising relaunch I’ve ever seen? Actually it is…because that these guys give a damn about what they’re doing practically bleeds through on every page, and you can’t mistake it. Hey, it actually wasn’t my cup of tea, when you get right down to the brass tacks…!

Hah!

I loved it, though. Would Buy. Will certainly follow if I get the chance. And I totally want to see this team do a space-opera comic, one of these days. This is a bit of punk rock, here…lotsa energy.

Lots of promise, too.

Out third week of June. Rush thou to the comic-book store, and flip through it on the rack to see if you like it.  Well, what higher recommendation is there, than that?

Nice job, fellows.  Keep up the good work.

It’s right outside my window, and it’s been going for some time now, and it is LOUD.  So all of you waiting to hear about the excellent Robotika relaunch will have to wait until tomorrow.

It is excellent, though.

Jesus Christ, think I might just have something to drink, you know?  At least it isn’t a loud ODOUR, I thank God for that, I really do…

John Candy as Poirot, in the SCTV parody of “Murder On The Orient Express”:

“Perhaps…zee train itself ees a murderer…!”

Hey, it’s not the craziest idea I ever heard of.

Way back when Batman Began, I amused myself by imagining that the apparent inconsistencies and fuck-ups in that movie were entirely deliberate: in service to a somewhat unusual theme, for what you’d expect to find in an action movie, superhero movie, or coming-of-age movie.

Of course, this was just a supposition, a theory: I still could’ve been wrong about it.

But because of this little pet theory of mine, when I went to see The Dark Knight in the theatre I was on the lookout for just such inconsistencies in that movie, that might hint at a similar thematic treatment. And I thought I saw a couple of them.

But boy, was I wrong.

They’re everywhere.

So for all that I’ve had my fun saying it’s probably wrongheaded to read too much of allegory into TDK, it seems I may have to eat a bit of dark, flapping crow about it now: because either this movie is much more complex than I originally gave it credit for, or it’s a colossal screw-up on a scale simply unprecedented for a big-budget studio picture. Are there no well-paid continuity-checkers? Actually, forget the continuity-checkers, they’re not even necessary as far as catching this level of inconsistency goes…this stuff’s out there.

And you know…I didn’t even notice!

Even though I went in there looking for them!

But that’s how this stuff works. It’s a magic trick: pledge, turn, and prestige all in one. All the sleeves are turned inside-out, but we get misdirected from it…and it’s all on purpose…

Because the movie itself, just like its villain, is an unreliable narrator.

And that is what this is all about.

So we’ll start small: Batman jumps from one parkade level to the next, and lands on the Scarecrow’s van. It’s an absolutely stunning comic-book scene, straight out of Marshall Rogers. The cape looks fantastic.

Except, he lands the wrong way round.

Look at it again. He does.

Oh, what’s that? You say you don’t care? FOOL! I care, a LOT! I freaking LOVE it, that he lands the wrong way around!

Because don’t you see that it’s all on purpose?

Let’s stay small, and take another: Lucius and his bloody jokes. It gets TIRESOME, because it’s supposed to. It’s misdirection. It is so stupid, that we’re always paying attention to it…! Bruce Wayne and Lucius Fox stand some feet apart, as Bruce Wayne explains that no, he doesn’t want a more stylish sport-jacket, he wants a new Bat-suit. Lucius looks down at the sketch in his hand, unfolding it: “ah, you want to be able to turn your head.”

But how did he get that sketch into his hand?!

If you think about it for one second, you will see that the ordinary way this scene would go is for Bruce Wayne to hand Lucius Fox that paper with the Bat-sketch on it. I promise you, however: he doesn’t. Regular movie:

BRUCE: “Ha ha, no here is what I want, Lucius! Observe as I utilize the space between us filmically, in order to place it in your hand and thus advance the plot while producing the opportunity for a cool composition!”

LUCIUS: “Oh I see, Mister Wayne, I say as I take it from you, it is a new Batman costume that you want! And from your drawing here it seems you want to have more mobility! I employ my expressive facial movements in close-up to signify that your previous gesture had great emotional meaning for me, in that I realized you were the heroic protagonist of this superhero movie, who wants to do better still than you have been, because you’re awesome!”

Regular movie: that’s how it shakes out. This movie: a lot of Twin Peaks dream-sequence stuff, instead. Lucius’ hands are basically full of creamed corn, all of a sudden. But we don’t notice…

…Because we’re not looking, and this will not be the last time Lucius ostentatiously misdirects us out of our drawers, believe me. But let’s get back to that later; first let’s just bear in mind the fact that it will be over an hour until we see this new Bat-suit, and that when we do it will be in the context of another magic trick altogether, in an altogether different context. There are so many things in this movie that we never see: this is only the first of them. Think about it, hold it in your mind, for just a second…now it’s gone. But what’s that behind your ear…?

Is this your card…?

Why is the new Bat-suit even mentioned?

Never mind, we’ll come back to that. Let’s look now at the admirably-understated motif of the spiral: the ramp in the parking garage. This whole movie is a spiral: it takes Batman Begins and moves it forward, but in a curved section, and upwards…we never notice. Hey, remember those bat-men here, those wannabes? Watch as Nolan makes them disappear too…poof! Were you expecting some comment on the old “super-hero-fascist-bad” social deformation thing, here? Hope you didn’t blink, friend…!

Uh…

But that’s not actually the beginning, of course. The real beginning is when the Joker carefully steps…steps…manoeuvres…

…Manoeuvres his henchman into standing in front of the bus, as it backs in through the wall of the bank at high speed, thus killing him.

Or…wait.

It backs in?

Through the wall? Of the bank?

Misdirection again, folks: the Joker has manouevred you just exactly as he’s manoeuvred his flunky. You try to approach, to see…he shifts, you shift…the masks try to suss each other out, across a tension-filled distance…

And then WHAMMO. What you end up looking at, is the one thing you have to look at, for the trick to be successful. What you end up not looking at, is the one thing you have to not look at, for the trick to be successful. And that thing is usually the biggest thing. Because it’s a performance, okay? This is a comic-book movie. The bus can’t back in through the wall to split-second timing, that can’t happen. Hey, for that matter, there’s little reason for the dizzying zip-line scene at the very very opening of the movie…that’s not necessary either…

And, not to just skip around and ahead, but how does the Joker affix the pencil to the table?

It doesn’t matter, because he speaks an absolute truth when he says: “and now the pencil has disappeared.” Well, naturally.

It was never there. By which I mean: you did not see it.

You only thought you did.

Why “how about a magic trick?“, for heaven’s sake? I mean really, should we take anything at face value in a movie like this? The Joker just suddenly “decides” to do a magic trick? And the filmmakers have nothing to do with that choice, I suppose.

Of course they do.

Let’s jump ahead again! In Batman Begins, Batman does not “punch people out, Bam SOCK!” — instead there is a flapping of black fabric and a sound of some kind of ninja flurry, and the bad guys fall to the sound of the bat-wings that terrorized Bruce Wayne in the cavern under Wayne Manor when he was a boy. Neat touch. Here it’s different, though. Batman punches, in this one, blocks kicks, snaps limbs all rectilinear and steps into people, pushing them along…and the black flapping frenzy is reserved for the visual chaos of the bat-sonar. Itself pushed along the curved section, and up one storey, you see?

Everything spirals up, in this one.

Also note that the bat-sonar takes less time for Bruce Wayne to develop, than the new Bat-suit takes Lucius to make…

Of course, it seems he’s been working on it for a while now!

So we’re told!

But of course that’s plainly bullshit!

Jump back down now; land, impossibly, the wrong way ’round.

The Joker isn’t crazy. He says he isn’t crazy, in the most believable way possible. He’s not crazy! He isn’t. He isn’t.

Is he?

I don’t know: all the upright men of Gotham do seem to experience a very weird lack of panic at the more bizarrely freaky scary developments in this movie…maybe they’re crazy? Alfred doesn’t want to apply jojoba oil to the Russian ballerinas on the sailboat…is he crazy? Oh, poor Alfred, only there to voice meaningless sentiments that properly belong to the guy sitting behind me in the theatre…half the time, but then the other half of the time you say remarkably profound shit that no one seems to even hear. Hey, how does a comic book work? Does it make sense?

It doesn’t, really, does it?

No, and neither does this…but this is really quite in your face about it. Bruce Wayne wants to fall back up into a plane, and Lucius, like Walt Disney, licks his chops at the prospect of a really cool piece of pseudo-acrobatics…but Bruce also never leaps out of the plane, as he promises he will, and so it isn’t as Pirates Of The Caribbean as all that, after all, and…hey, what the fuck happened, man? I was waiting for that!

They set me up…!

And then they made me forget. Suddenly, somehow, he’s just standing there on top — on top! — of a building. How? Why? I won’t go back to the “Shock And Awe” bit, I said my piece on that in “Allegory Revisited“…but I will note that if Bruce Wayne and Alfred have a conversation about his limits…God, but Alfred is such an old woman, isn’t he…?

MISDIRECTION!

…Then really there is a substantial allegorical bit in there, and here, and over here, and is this your card, America? Because it’s all about America after all, as it turns out, but not the way you expect…

Because it’s all about how America can’t afford to stop and think about what’s going on.

Yes, all that is logic and consequentiality…America can’t stop to think about that. Can’t. Big flapping wings. Inability to move on. And not that the Bush presidency political stuff isn’t in there, because you KNOW it is…but there’s something more primal, here. Limits?

“Please God, keep them ever-mysterious”, wishes Bruce Wayne.

Poor bastard: he gets his wish.

Let’s jump around and ahead again for a moment: talk about that hospital. HOLY JUMPIN’ CATFISH did that thing blow up good! YEE-HAW!!! Incredibly ridiculous: that’s not “gasoline”, Joker!

Whatever that is, it’s not cheap…!

Jump back: let’s look at Maggie Gyllenhall. Eerie how she replaces Katie Holmes, right? I wish she’d lived, so that they could’ve found yet another actress who looks disturbingly like the old actress who played the same role. One hopes desperately that in the next Batman movie (and oh yes, there will be a next one), that this mysterious unknown next Rachel will appear to Bruce Wayne as a ghost. As a TRICK…!

Or a clue.

It is all about the tricks and the clues, anyhow.

Because man, you know…I kind of felt she was a ghost already.

Jump back. You know, the conversation between Lucius and Chinese Osama in Hong Kong doesn’t make any fucking sense at all. Watch it again. Watch carefully, too, the lame business with the magic cell-phone: it doesn’t make any more sense than Lucius unfolding the magic piece of paper that the creamed corn is in, back in the boardroom when Bruce Wayne revealed the meeting had all been a bit of misdirection.

Our Chinese Osama even says it’s ridiculous…echoing Lucius himself, as it happens, a little earlier on. It actually verges on totally awful, as indeed the whole movie does. It’s a mess. Everything is lantern-hanging here, there are lanterns everywhere: yes, we already deliberately pointed out that it makes no sense, thank you for noticing. Now observe this extreme nonsensical corporate breast-beating, this pseudo-polite tough-talk sparring, that makes no sense at all. Seriously: it makes no sense. And now whatever you do, don’t think about how a witness might go about smuggling a loaded gun into a courtroom, or what would have to happen to the whole world if he did! Concentrate on Eric Roberts’ smug bad-guy face instead….my God, the man practically shines like an obnoxious sun in every scene he’s in, we are not meant to look elsewhere! BAM! SOCK! POW! We’re not meant to look at anything we’re not supposed to.

SHOCK AND AWE! Okay, I lied. Because here we’ve got Batman’s voice, too: we are not meant to look around. Not meant to. Growl. What is that growl distracting us from? What is it we’re not seeing, in the lights over Baghdad?

No one dies at Bruce Wayne’s party. Even though the Joker is there. You would’ve thought he’d have made them all fight it out with broken champagne bottles. It didn’t happen. But don’t blame the Joker. He would’ve killed them all, if he’d only been given the chance…! But Nolan switched the scene. Just as Batman writers and artists for years upon years have switched the scene, “making their own luck” — a real-life Joker would never be sent to Arkham only to escape again and again, and continue his mass-murder rampages. Think, for two seconds. This isn’t Batman’s fault. It isn’t Gordon’s fault, or the fault of the police, the lawyers, the judges, the citizens of Gotham…it’s the authors’ fault, of course. But why would you complain, when you get Batman stories out of it?

Hey, how did that “get fragments of the bullet, set up a range, find a fingerprint, then an apartment number” thing work, anyway?

Well, obviously it didn’t.

What about the brilliant plan of Gordon’s to throw himself in a bullet’s path?

Really low-percentage plan, Jim.

Gaping holes? You want gaping holes? I’ll give ‘em to you. How did Batman find Harvey when he was working over the Joker’s goon, and at just the right time? There’s no way he could’ve done that. How did he figure out the goon was an Arkham patient? We never see him figure that out. How did the Joker get from one side of Gotham to the other in a heartbeat? In a car? He fucking teleported. This is a comic-book movie, with real talent. Space and time don’t need to apply. No reviewers even complained about this, I swear. None of them even noticed. I didn’t notice.

That’s Nolan’s genius, here.

Keep ‘em focussed on the party where no one dies. Beat beat beat. Beat away at the lunacy. Bruce and Rachel could never have survived that fall, NEVER. The school bus never backed in. Batman never made his way to the top of that building in Hong Kong. There was no pencil. Creamed corn is everywhere, seething. If this was a comic book, we wouldn’t accept it. Nothing here makes sense.

It’s truly gorgeous stuff. Wanna know how I got these scars?

Batman gets shot, in the Hong Kong adventure.

Then suddenly, he is behind the shooter.

Oh, it’s Shock and Awe, all right. I watched that scene five times on slo-mo. Batman teleports too. And I don’t know how anyone could call that a mistake.

Jump forward. It’s interesting to me that the Joker thinks the moment when one ferry will blow another up is at the last second…but if we think about this for a first second…

The prisoners aren’t in command, never are in command, of their ship’s detonator.

The cops are. Like a dozen of them. With guns. The prisoners don’t even rush them.

On the other ship: like three hundred innocent people.

It’s a rummy problem, eh? But not really. Because all the “bad” cops have to do is not press the button. That’s all. And all the “good” cops have to do is wearily press it, or not. Should’ve been over in a minute…the tension, that is. Because like all of the Joker’s plans the only threat is sleight-of-hand…and only if you believe in it are you phuqued. Also like most of the Joker’s plans it relies on everything going just so…but he can’t make it go just so, and doesn’t even try to. Mayor Batmanuel might have overruled Gordon about putting prisoners on the ferries…

But we will assume the Joker had another contingency. He always does! Because after all, he’s not crazy…

But how crazy would the prison guards have to be, to wait until the last second to press that button?

What was it, that they thought they were waiting for?

Let’s JUMP, now, to a big one. A big inconsistency, a big issue. Not the biggest. But big. Something everyone wants to know.

If Batman told R’as, “I’m not going to kill you…but I don’t have to save you…”

Then why did he save the Joker, whom he despises much more?

This one, I’m happy to report, is straightforward. It’s about Batman’s vengeance on the Joker. Think of it this way:

“I’m not going to save you…but I don’t have to kill you.”

He does save him though, but give the man a break, it’s a good comeback. It is beautifully inverted. The Joker, of course, doesn’t care if he lives or dies! He just wants to fuck with Batman! But Batman says no to that.

What a beautiful character this Joker is. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if I was fifteen years old and going to a pot party, and I was the guy getting the movie…yes, this, THIS, is what I’d get. Everything is crooked here; no one ever does the thing they say they’re going to do. They tell us what they’re going to do, and then they don’t do it. Everything’s corkscrewy, like a corkscrew. This isn’t just a bunch of loosened threads, as in Batman Begins. This is a whole weave of loosened threads. This is barely fabric at all.

Jump sideways!

There are only two, maybe three scenes people really care about in this movie. Okay maybe five. Let me just preface my remarks about all of them by saying: REALLY? Harvey rejects pain medication?

I tell you what, no he doesn’t. Not unless he’s a supervillain already. But okay, look at that coin come down (by the way, why the FUCK!!! does Batman save that coin for him?!?!? This is freaking Velvet Goldmine levels of not-making-sense, here!), down on the wrong side, where it never had a wrong side before…it’s brilliant. Harvey was never responsible for anything before; everything always came up okay for him, because he made his own luck. Now he’s responsible because he can’t…it’s screwy, I tell you! And he is Two-Face at that moment. That’s when he snaps. Under the weight of the world. And…okay, the biggest moment in the movie: the Joker as nurse, to Harvey. And this would have been an extremely amazing scene even if it did make sense, eh? But oh Lord, it so doesn’t. It is the one scene in the movie that cannot — CANNOT! — be explained! Because I said Harvey was Two-Face at the moment the dark face of the coin came down…but that isn’t really true, is it? Harvey isn’t Two-Face until he doesn’t shoot the Joker.

But, there is no reason for him not to shoot the Joker, is there.

Heck, he could always be Two-Face the next day, right? You’d shoot the Joker. I’d shoot the Joker.

But it’s a comic-book movie. So the journey just isn’t as important as the destination, you know?

Nolan gives us all destination.

Ordinarily, this doesn’t work.

But in this movie, it does.

Let’s talk a little Jim Gordon, the everyman with whom no one sympathizes. The psychological insulator, between Dent and Batman. No, let’s not talk about him. He’s invisible. In this movie, he’s invisible…until he’s not. Time and again. He’s real, but he’s not there: like us. Meanwhile Harvey Dent is there but not real: he’s an illusion throughout. I mean the man starts as No-Face…he might as well have been called “White-Man”. There’s absolutely nothing to him, as soon as you see him it’s like a Jump. Bruce’s endorsement of him is cruel indeed: he doesn’t care who Harvey Dent is, he just chooses to believe in what suits him…his belief is strictly provisional…

Jump. Here comes the new Batman mask, the one with “mobility”. Wait, jump back. Question: how long is this movie, anyway? Answer: a hell of a lot shorter than “Spider-Man 3″, but it’s still plenty long enough to realize that Batman never gets into that cell with the Joker. It just doesn’t happen.

It just doesn’t happen. There’s only one FUCKING DOOR…!

But Batman’s got a new mask, and Gordon was just there…seriously, whenever that guy leaves a room, he drags a vacuum behind him. Invisible plot-lubricant. Suddenly he was there…suddenly he’s not…

But oh look: suddenly, on the opposite side of the room, it’s Batman.

Pop! He’s just there.

Absolutely impossible. This, if anywhere, is where the Joker’s “won”. Because Batman’s changed: he’s gotten personal. This isn’t armour anymore, it’s skin: he can be hurt in it, he speaks with the Batman voice when he doesn’t need to (even to Lucius!), he doesn’t have properly human eyes anymore (think on that, Bat-fans!), he’s become the thing that the Scarecrow saw in Batman Begins…and he’s done something really, really forbidden by getting in that cell when he can’t possibly do so. This is where Bruce Wayne commits to the Batman persona, not as a guise but as an identity, where the Hong Kong foreshadowing of “what the, how’d he get up there…?” finally pays off. This is the start of a whole new movie, right here: where Batman gets limits, because he finally becomes someone other than Bruce Wayne in a mask, and he just does shit from now on, superhumanly…as Bruce Wayne’s face, his voice, his very “secret identity” itself is made to disappear…or at any rate it’s in serious danger of disappearing, and he must get it back somehow by the movie’s end.

Not that the Joker makes it easy for him. It is almost too hard to go on, Bloggers: the Joker plans for Batman to find him when he can’t, so of course he does, and then — impossibly! — the Joker’s ready for him. Except, he really isn’t. Look again, this is all just chaotic shit, it really is. Dark, flapping wings; storms of bats. Everything the wrong way ’round. The action sequences versus the cops don’t make sense. Look again. LOOK AGAIN. The way Lucius pinpoints the Joker doesn’t make sense. LOOK AGAIN. It all becomes creamed corn, in the end. Everything the Joker does makes sense…if he planned to go crazy and become a supervillain. But, how in the hell, as good a planner as he is, could he plan for that? When he can’t do it, not really do it, until the “new” Batman shows up in his cell, finally for him to properly try to fuck with. Everything bootstraps itself, in this movie, pulls itself up…and around…like a, like…like a…

Yes. Well. Say, how is it that the mobsters manage to contact the Joker anyway? Do they use their one phone call, and ask the operator to connect them to a playing card? Alternatively, how do the people way back at the party not end up knowing Bruce Wayne is freakin’ Batman? Because I am not the sharpest spoon in the drawer, friends, but I think even I would’ve figured that one out…

They said it was “escalation”. Remember?

But that’s the wrong word.

This is a superhero action movie that cheerfully eats itself right up in front of you, licking its lips, and then it asks you (while you’re staring at the bizarreness of it) to pass it the salt, and you look down at the salt…and the salt’s not in front of you, it’s in the movie’s hand instead, and at that moment it SLAPS you with the other hand, and you spit out your ravioli all over the carpet…I’m telling you, this movie’s like watching Mission: Impossible while incredibly stoned. This movie’s the Showgirls of superhero movies. This movie is a goddamn satire…oh, thank you, yes the crow looks perfectly done, my compliments to the chef…

And thus it is absolutely and 100% full of shit. It is absolutely and 100% fucking tail-yanking, chain-rattling crap.

And absolutely and 100% one of the most brilliant things I have ever seen. Allegory? Check out this for allegory, I despise Lucius Fox and I want to punch him in the face. Also, Jesus Christ is Alfred an old woman, and I want him to punch Lucius Fox in the face. Bruce Wayne is an idiot throughout, a sentimental meathead whose mental compass points south-southeast AT BEST, and if you look carefully, the guy goes flat-out nuts. Harvey Dent is a fucking blond-haired lantern-jawed cipher, who does a lot of acting. Jim Gordon is not even there.

Misdirection’s everywhere!

Because what this really is, is the Adam West “Batman” played STRAIGHT, and for CHILLS…or to put it another way, it’s a dream gone well off the rails, that the dreamer has to somehow put back together by the time time runs out…a dream that he has to drag himself out of. Very Batman, really. But some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb, you know?

Hey, how about a magic trick?

Jesus, how about one.

Nothing up my sleeve but Gary Oldman. I defy any of you to watch this movie three times and say it makes sense. It’s pure genius. It’s absolutely retarded. It’s drug-addled. It’s “this happens, then this happens”. If Batman Begins was about the necessity of rejecting other people’s ideas about your identity, this movie’s about what in the HELL happens once you’ve done it…once you’ve seen it, and liked it. And what happens is: congratulations, you are now the proud owner of a big double-handful of creamed corn. TA-DAA…! And now, for my next trick…

…I’m going to make you believe me.

And now…the disbelief…has disappeared. Applause, applause! It is just what I wanted from a superhero movie! It was smart.

And of course, Heath Ledger was bloody marvellous in it.

Would see again.

Possibly, stoned.

…And some other stuff that’s been waiting on deck for quite a while now.

Like:  a review of Alex Sheikman’s new Robotika…

And that goddam Batman movie review.  Jesus, how long ago was that?  Who even remembers that now?  What the hell have I been doing all this time, anyway?  I’m turning into one of those absentee bloggers, it’s horrifyin’.  But I thought of a damn good title for something today, the new record’s almost finished, and the Vancouver Canucks are stinking out the joint so far in their playoff run.  Well, as a friend of my Dad’s used to say, once one thing starts moving, so does everything else.  I think I may even have a post coming on a bit of opera.

By the way, how did Dollhouse end, anybody know?  I don’t really see how spoilers could be an issue, at this point…

…I want you to come on, honeychild, I beg of you…

So…

My friend died.

I wish you’d met her, friends of mine. She was like me, only smarter and with a much more heartwrenching turn of phrase. She was a poet.

Today I gave her a eulogy.

…A tin-painted roof, buried under a thousand pounds of rain. The whole world smudged-out, and turned into the bottom of the ocean. I wouldn’t've survived this, if it wasn’t for you guys. And she would’ve been pissed, if I died. So you’ve got my girl’s thanks.

It’s better than my thanks, too; because my thanks doesn’t come with “accidentally” dropped angel-feathers, that a person could pick up.

Got your reds, you’ve got your greens and blues.

Goodnight, darling girl of mine. I think you’ve turned into the biggest constellation in the sky, today. Man, just take a look.

You’re really something.

See you again, one time soon.