RAW Batman Review
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Scanned from _Magical Blend_, #25.
"Have You Ever Danced With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight?"
by Robert Anton Wilson
Well I have finally followed the herd and tromped down to my
local movie theatre to see _Batman_ and I can tell you the
the experience was not at all unlike Bad Acid. I had thought
I was going to see another spectacular but empty "epic" in
the _Star Wars-Superman-Indiana Jones_ tradition of American
"good clean fun"--a lot of mindless violence between
cardboard cut-outs of "good" and "evil." Instead, I found a
_film noir_ that looked as if the ghosts of Dali, Bunuel and
Orson Welles had all had a hand in it, aided and abetted by
Wilhelm Reich and a horde of estistentialists. It was as
escapist as a split lip, and I think it's the best film
about the Reagan-Bush era since Carpenter's _They Live_. You
haven't seen such shadows and overhead pans since the last
time Orson Welles got enough money to make a movie the way
he he wanted to do it, and the musical score (especially the
organ solos) is alone worth the price of admission.
"It's a study in dark and light," Kim Basinger, the actress
who plays Vicki Vale, said in an interview. "I represent
light." The remark is a bit of an understatement. In fact,
Ms. Basinger has been garbed in white dresses, especially in
the last third of the film, and is treated rather kindly by
the (compared to the other characters, who all look ugly, or
sinister, or a few bricks shy of a full load, or as if they
had escaped from _The Andalusian Dog_) but she represents
something less metaphysical than "goodness." She represents
the only point of sanity in a world gone psycho, the world
of Iran-Contra, the pitbull and Morton Downey Jr.
Steven Spielberg, evidently miffed by the complaints that
his technically superb films have no depth, has started to
add levels of resonance; but all of his levels, as far down
as he goes, are equally shallow. _Batman_ goes as deep as
_Frankenstein_ or _King Kong_ and will become, I am sure, as
much a part of folk-lore and as frequently quoted as either
of those masterpieces. Like all first-rate Hollywood films,
it leaves you in perceptual confusion about whether it is a
very good bad movie or a very bad good movie.
The film hangs on a few logical points that neither the
comic book nor the TV series ever confronted overtly.
Batman, we all know, wears black. But isn't it usually the
villain who wears black? Somehow, despite this, we have
previously been persuaded to accept Batman as a hero. In
spectacularly gloomy technicolor, however. Batman looks even
more like a villain, in contrast to the gaudy multi-colored
clown suits of the Joker, the erudite and poetic *nominal*
villain who seems more like an unhinged concept artist than
a criminal of any sort we can understand.
Bats, and man-bats, are associated with vampirism. The logo
for the movie takes advantage of this; it looks like both
the familiar Batman symbol and a vampire's gaping mouth. The
first thing we hear about Batman in the film, before we even
see him, is that he sucks the blood of his victims. We
mightexpect him to have a Transylvanian accent.
But wait--did I say his victims? Well, yes, that does seem
to be the logic of the situation. The people Batman has
killed before the film begins didn't actually have their
blood sucked (I think; you may have to see this film several
times to be sure of anything) and they were all criminals,
of course, but nonetheless, set against the towering, black,
half-faceless, never smiling, totally sinister figure of
Batman, the first thugs we see on screen seem victims as
surely as a mouse seems a victim when a cat pounces on it.
The hoods' fear that their blood will be sucked seems
altogether reasonable under the circumstances, in the world
they inhabit.
We are obviously being seduced into a film that is devoted
simultaneously to amusing dolts (the path to box office
success) and subtly undermining the reality-grids of
everybody in the audience with more than a half inch of
forehead. The first shot sets us in non-linear space as
surely as a Picasso painting or the famous three-minute
tracking shot that opens Orson Welle's _Touch of Evil_.
Welles, in that classic shot, kept both his camera and his
actors moving over three blocks of city streets, in so many
different directions that we were jerked to attention,
trying to figure out what was going on (and what was
happening to the bomb we saw in the first two seconds). The
opening shot of _Batman_ is a bit shorter and has no actors,
but the camera also careens madly through a set that totally
disorients us. That is a warning of what is to come.
By the time we find we are in "Gotham" we also recognize
that this nightmare-city is a cross between New York,
Detroit and Dante's Hell. Gotham is Orson Welle's sleazebag
Los Robles of _Touch of Evil_--all the grime, all the
garbage, all the corruption, all the dirt, all the
violence--but miles wider and (it seems) even miles higher.
It is Phil Dick's Black Iron Prison in _VALIS_, the mad
universe where mankind has been confined by the Demiurge
which is attempting to blind us to the Gnosis.
The first cop we see in _Batman_ is both physically fat and
morally corrupt, like the first cop we see in _Touch of
Evil_. When Bruce Wayne (Batman) and Vicki Vale sit down to
eat, they start at a table so long they can hardly hear each
other's voices, and end at a tiny table where they are
practically nuzzling: a reversal of the famous alienation
sequence in _Citizen Kane_. The film is replete with similar
in-jokes for Welles addicts: tributes to the man who first
discovered film could be _noir_ . . .
If Batman is, as I think, an anarcho-surrealist attack on
the conventions of mass market melodrama (which it pretends
to follow with owl-like solemnity), it is especially
interesting to how the "hero" and "villain" react to the
charge that they are mentally unbalanced. The Joker (Jack
Nicholson in another Academy Award performance) is first
told he's crazy, by an associate, when he unleashes a
particulary eldritch and inhuman laugh after killing a rival
gangster. With the sweet reasonableness that is always
alternating with his total mania, the Joker asks sagely,
"Haven't you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?"
In fact, Joker's crimes move slowly from rational felonies
for profit into surrealist outrages and something like the
Halloween pranks of an especially cunning and nasty child.
Yet he laughs like hell continually and may be considered in
the process of trying to cure himself of the traume
inflicted when Batman, that merciless one-man lynch mob,
threw him into a vat of chemicals.
Batman (Michael Keaton) has an even more interesting
rationalization for his own insanity. With an almost
Pythonesque touch, the film has him, as Bruce Wayne, start
to confess his double life to Vicki Vale. He stumbles and
hesitates, looks embarassed. She says she will understand.
Kim Basinger's delivery (as Vicki) suggests that she thinks
he is going to tell her he's half-Gay or likes to wear
ladies panties or something of that sort. They are
interrupted, and only after several other scenes does she
discover Bruce's real secret. "But that's *abnormal*" she
cries at once--the only voice of sanity in the film, as I've
said. Indeed, transvestism and/or homosexuality certainly
seem like reasonable lifestyles, probably even to a Falwell,
compared with Bruce's compulsion to dress up like a *bat*
and commit murder and/or mayhem on people he thinks deserve
"punishment." (Is this really a Feminist film in disguise?
Is Vicki, as the only point of sanity in a mad world, the
walking refutation of the mad machismo of both the nominal
hero and "villain")?
At this point the logic of the film seems to undermined the
logic of the original Batman myth; but not quite. Bruce
Wayne has answer to Vicki's charge to abnormality:
"What's 'normal' in a world like this?"
And that has always been, of course, the logic of
surrealism. After World War 1, the surrealists hung toilet
bowls in sculpture shows and painted things like _Debris of
an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a
Telephone_ precisely to force everybody to ask, "What's
normal in a world like this?" Punk Rock and Heavy Metal
today are still asking the same question. In a world where
the govern ment is telling us "Just say no" while telling
its favorite coke dealers "Just fly low," dressing up like a
bat and taking the law into your own hands makes as much
sense as painting Campbell soup cans or making a movie that
simultaneously glorifies, challenges, satirizes and (with
Swiftian irony) rationalizes a vigilante with a fetish
costume . . .
The moronic Bronson and Stallone "one man above the law"
films glorify vigilantism with the logic of right-wing
para-noids. _Batman_ both challenges that folk fascism and
poker-facedly "defends" it on the eminently Existentialist
grounds that in a universe without morals or meaning
everybody has to create their own reality and take
responsibility for it.
All in all, Bruce Wayne/Batman makes more sense than George
Bush, Oilie North and the rest of Ronnie Reagan's Guns,
Cocaine and Assassinations Glee Club. But so does the Joker,
and that is the really subversive message in the darkest of
all _film noir_ nightmares.
"You *created* me," Joker says to Batman in the climax; and
indeed Batman did dump the poor, deranged chap in toxic
waste and start his mania rolling.
"*You* created *me*," Batman replies with equal passion; and
indeed Joker shot Bruce Wayne's parents which started *his*
mania growing.
Both Batman and Joker are partly right, in linear causality,
but neither is as totally right as he imagines in this
nonlinear universe. There hasn't been such a poetic Jungian
moment on film since the four sadists came out of their
castle, at the end of Bunuel's _Golden Age_, and each one of
them looked exactly like Jesus Christ in popular art.
The weed of crime bears bitter fruit, the Shadow once told
us; but this dark film tells us the Wheel of Karma has
Strange Loops. Batman created Joker, and Joker created
Batman, and Gotham created both of them. Who created Gotham?
Either Man or God, or both of them, and if this is what Man
and God have done, what is left to believe in? The Joker,
after wrecking an art museum, decides to preserve one
painting, by Francis Bacon. Like the poetry of his best
lines (and he gets all the best lines), this seems to imply
Joker understands the universe he's in better than Batman does.
It could only be more pointed if Francis Bacon had painted,
instead of a slaughterhouse, Ronnie and Nancy grinning
wholesomely, with a thousand dead Nicaraguans sprawled
behind them, and the Contras packing the cocaine for Oilie.
******
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
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As the Government of the United States of America is not, in
any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in
itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or
tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never
entered into any war, or act of hostility against any
Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no
pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce
an interruption of the harmony existing between the two
countries.
-- The Treaty of Tripoli, entered into by the USA under
George Washington
Roy. Just Roy.
> herd and tromped down to my
> local movie theatre to see
> _Batman_
Damn - better late than never.
Perhaps this should be cross-posted to alt.procrastination. Or maybe
you were meaning to x-post it to alt.procrastination, thought, aw, fvck
it, there's a good show on, and why not post it later?
Nicaraguans? Contras? Ollie? What, did I slip into another "I Love the
80's" flashback? Jesus in Adidas I hope not, once around on the
Bandstand! is enough.
/Roy, take your baby by the hair
Pull her close and there there there
Take your baby by the ears
And play upon her darkest fears ....
Alex Russell
> News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
>
> Scanned from _Magical Blend_, #25.
>
> "Have You Ever Danced With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight?"
> by Robert Anton Wilson
>
>
> ******
>
Isn't this review about 15 years too late?
I'm not sure I understand why RAW wants to apologize for the Joker's
crimes, while condemming Batman's actions. Batman didn't throw the joker
into the vat on purpose. The joker killed everyone he killed on purpose.
A hearty laugh after the act of murder doesn't make it "all right".
I felt that stating Batman was an "anarcho-surrealist attack on the
conventions of mass market" was a bit of a stretch. The film does invite
the viewer to think about what is right and wrong, but I didn't see even
an hint about promoting anarchy. Corruption and apathy were the main
problems in Gotham.
I feel a bit wierd actually replying to this review.
Alex Russell
joec...@mindspring.com
>80's" flashback? Jesus in Adidas I hope not, once around on the
>Bandstand! is enough.
It's interesting, I started reading the review thinking it was about
the new, recently-released version of Batman, and I read about halfway
through before I realized he was talking about the old one.
The more things fail to change, the more they stay the same I guess.
Eddie Vroom
> I'm not sure I understand why RAW wants to apologize for the Joker's
> crimes, while condemming Batman's actions. Batman didn't throw the joker
> into the vat on purpose. The joker killed everyone he killed on purpose.
> A hearty laugh after the act of murder doesn't make it "all right".
Consider this: Brutality laid bare and unmasked is just raw brutality.
Brutality metered out in doses by rules seems to inevitably turn into a
sick, crazy-making labyrinth of sadism.
BTW, as I understand it, our State and Federal legislatures are churning
out more new laws every year than the year before. And they don't even
READ them first. In fact, they can't, due to the length and complexity
of the documents.
--
the Tortured Spark - a Light in the Dark
the Mystical RevvedErrand Doktor Eddie Vroom
you gotta walk like a mannequin, roll like a tire
act on reaction, dodge the big spud fryer
- Devo