Cravenomena

Jingle Bells,
Batman smells,
Robin laid an egg.
The Batmobile lost a wheel
and the Joker got away…
Hey!
– Ancient proverb

Pee-yoo. Batman stinks.

As if he needed further proof that he was secretly born on another planet and walks alone bemusing what strange creatures these mortals be, Craven has listened to the accolades and kudos heaped upon THE DARK KNIGHT, Christopher Nolan’s latest entry in Warner Bros.’ Bat-Franchise, mystified, nonplussed and wondering if the hosannah-singers saw the same movie he did.

Even granting that Heath Ledger’s final performance as the Joker was an outstanding, genre-transcending accomplishment… that Sir Michael Caine has enough charm to make any old turd sit up and sing, “What’s it all about, Alfie?”… and that Nolan knows how to make a bat-cycle (if not Maggie Gyllenhaal) look sexy… THE DARK KNIGHT remains a protracted, pretentious exercise in the sort of glib nihilism which passes for depth in the attention-deficient, unmindful weltanschauung of modern America.

I repeat: Batman stinks.

Bear in mind, this is coming from someone who has been as big a chiropteraphile as ever imagined cajoling Aunt Harriet, flapping William Shakespeare’s head back and sliding down a pole with his teenage ward. Holy idol worship, Batman! As a child, I knelt at the Altar of the Caped Crusader. I watched Batman on television, scrawled in Batman coloring books, drank Kool-Aid from a Batman sip cup, wore a black-and-yellow Batman logo on the left breast of my favorite shirt, washed my hair with shampoo dispensed from a Colgate-Palmolive Batman Soaky and plastered Batman Colorform stickers all over my bedroom. As a teenager, I faithfully collected each issue of BATMAN, DETECTIVE COMICS, WORLD’S FINEST, BRAVE AND THE BOLD and every other DC comic book that featured Gotham’s favorite masked man. Even as a grown man, well past the age when I should know better, I have maintained a shrine of beloved Bat-Merchandise. Into my forties, I remained the same Batnerd! Same Batgeek!

So you might expect that Christian Bale’s unsmiling interpretation of the Gotham knight would have me swooning and emitting involuntary, high-pitched whimpers like my other Batman-obsessed friends. However, such has not been the case.

As it turned out, Craven saw THE DARK KNIGHT on opening night, having been invited to sit with an old college friend and his three teenaged children. For all of what felt like eight interminable hours, Craven hunched in his seat, abiding, persevering, enduring the tedious onslaught of inutile anguish and suffering which substituted for narrative, quietly bemoaning the character assassination of beloved persona like Alfred (therein transformed from the sometimes befuddled but always faithful domestic of the comic books into a neocon ex-guerilla whispering murderous koans into Bruce Wayne’s ear like a cockney Dick Cheney), despising equally the gratuitous excursions into sick torture porn and the pat denouements of these unnecessary tangents, and struggling not to laugh out loud every time Batman opened his mouth. (Since I have often admired Bale’s acting in previous films, I choose to imagine his utterly ludicrous vocal affectation in this film — sounding for all the world like John Byner channeling Clint Eastwood — was foisted on the actor by Nolan or some cartoon-damaged Warner exec. I simply can’t believe the same actor who graced last year’s remake of 3:10 TO YUMA with a superbly understated and unostentatious performance could have come up with that silly strangled duck impression on his own.)

Again, some of the acting in THE DARK KNIGHT is top-notch. Like the aging magician he portrayed in 2006 in Nolan’s THE PRESTIGE, Caine conjures chuckles from thin air and offers them like daisies from a pretty girl’s ear, with a twinkle and a hint of smirk. Impossibly square-jawed Aaron Eckhart hold his own as good guy/bad guy Harvey “Two Face” Dent, especially before ignited oil turns him into an Iron Maiden mascot. LOST favorite Nestor Carbonell manages to make an impression despite a restricted boilerplate role as Mayor Garcia.

And then there’s the late Ledger, whose daredevil showcase of a performance is so bursting with brio — and even joy — that, ironically, it’s the Joker’s screen-time which provides the only life-affirming gleams in the film’s otherwise dismal, exanimate proceedings. Ledger glides through the movie like a surfer tube-riding in the curl of a giant hollow wave. Just when you think he’s been swallowed by the crushing crest of the film’s darkness, he shoots back into view, his energy and wit enlivening the leaden gloom like a phosphorescent flare, seemingly as effortless as breath.

But other talents are squandered. Bale is allowed no opportunity to act under the charcoal eye makeup and misshapen bat helmet which makes him look like the Ebonite interrogator from the old OUTER LIMITS series. Morgan Freeman is completely wasted as Lucius Fox. Maggie Gyllenhaal, usually an attractive presence, looks dumpy, unhappy and constipated throughout.

Among the film’s many rankles are its occasional jibes at the Bush Administration. Anyone who knows Craven knows that to say he holds no love for George W. Bush and his cohorts is a gross understatement. Nevertheless, I was annoyed to distraction by THE DARK KNIGHT’s attempts to make a statement against the Bush White House, considering how the film otherwise seems to spring from the very mindset that gave us the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib and constitution-skewering revisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Consider:

Young Bruce Wayne is born to a wealthy, well-placed family. Wayne — let us, for brevity’s sake, call him “W.” — eventually launches an attack on terrorists, an attack rooted in his family history, in which he throws gobs of corporate money, the latest big-buck technology and old-fashioned torture techniques into fighting a “smart war.” Throughout, he is guided by the older, hawkish advisor who thinks nothing of withholding information from W. when it suits his purposes. In fighting his enemies, W. justifies invading the privacy of every Gotham City citizen, even over the protestations of his own staff.

For a movie which so vividly celebrates the “with-us-or-agin’-us,” superpower mentality of the current administration, to jab snarkily at President Bush is the height of Hollywood hipocrisy.

There was a time when superhero stories were an antidote to nihilism… when colorful, playful, pure imagination augmented the more disturbing power fantasy aspects inherent in Bob Kane’s notion of an anonymous, masked vigilante doing battle with outlandish villains in the urban jungle.

That time has passed. Many fans of THE DARK KNIGHT (and BATMAN BEGINS) consider the films’ much-vaunted “darkness” as a return-to-form for the Batman. They point to the character’s earliest stories, in which the Caped Crusader wielded a handgun and thought nothing of throwing bad guys off rooftops. These fans consider the campy BATMAN series of the 1960s the nadir of Batman’s 70-year career, and they will tell you what they like about the Nolan films is their “realism.”

But this is the worst sort of historical revisionism and mythologizing. The truth is, for most of Batman’s comic book career, his stories were fanciful, colorful and lightweight. Batman was a big-hearted good guy who kept a giant penny in his Batcave and tossed milkbones to Ace, the Bat-Hound. It was only in the late 1970s that he began to turn “dark,” and even then, his heroism was never in question. Which is why, when Frank Miller reinterpreted the Batman in the late 1980s in his justly celebrated THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, his take on the character had the power to shock so many. But now that the hardboiled pathology which Miller introduced only a couple decades ago has superceded the Batman’s more fundamental, longer-lasting heroic qualities, the character has gone bad, in the sense of a good kid turned petty criminal, or an apple laced with black rot. Sadly, like that apple, nowadays…

Batman stinks.