Entries tagged with “Batman” from Patell and Waterman's History of New York

My younger son, Caleb, was born exactly five years ago. He's lived his entire life in Union Square and, like a good New Yorker, has adopted the Dark Knight as his superhero of choice.

For his birthday, Caleb requested that his mom bake him a "Batman cake." She obliged.


Like many a tyke with a late summer birthday, Caleb will be having a party with his friends after Labor Day. "A Batman party, Daddy."

As Robin once said in the days of my youth, "Holy Guadalcanal, Batman!"

For you aficionados, that's season 2, episode 28, "The Bird's Last Jest," first broadcast on December 8, 1966. You can check it out below. Robin's remark comes at about the 3:02 mark.
 

This morning we gave our last lecture of the semester in Writing New York. Most years we've taught the course, we end with Angels in America, and hence on an optimistic note (and with a blessing, to boot!). This year, with the financial crisis causing a lot of media hand-wringing about the return of the crime-ridden 70s (a scenario not everyone dreads, it should be noted), we decided to end on an urban gothic note with Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns.

As I've written elsewhere, when I was a kid I was a DC kid, and given that I came of age in the mid 80s, the two biggest comics events for me were TDK and Watchmen. Of course when I first encountered them I still lived in a small town in the mountains of northern Arizona and had never been to New York, which is, perhaps fitting: New York was, in my imagination, a city ripped right out of Detective Comics. I might have imagined its geography more like this, though:



(via)

The other night I watched a movie from the same era as the Miller novel -- Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys. (Schumacher would go on to make, among other things, the neo-camp be-nippled Batman movies of the mid-90s starring first Val Kilmer and then George Clooney.) It's been quite a while since I'd seen Lost Boys -- probably since I was 16 or 17. I noticed in the background of the comics shop where Corey Feldman and his brother work -- their cover for their real jobs as junior vampire slayers -- a Miller poster I had hanging in my bedroom and that I still have rolled up in a closet somewhere. Maybe it's worth something; I can't even seem to find a picture of it on google images.

When I was about that age I drove with some friends to the San Diego Comicon. (One of my friends had self-published a comic book and was looking for a distributor; didn't pan out as planned on that occasion, but he's since had a fair amount of success with his own publishing company and more recently sold a series of fantasy novels along with movie rights.) The highlight of the Comicon for me was a panel featuring Miller, who must have been around 30 years old at the time. He seemed to be very moody and mysterious. He signed my issues of Dark Knight Returns -- this was, of course, back when it was still only available in its four original installments, not as a single volume the way it's packaged today.

Anyhow, back then I vowed I'd someday teach both TDK and Watchmen in college classrooms. How nerdy was it that I already knew I wanted to be a professor? More nerdy than wanting to teach comic books?

Today's lecture didn't leave any time for discussion, which was a little anti-climactic since it was the last day of class and there're no discussion sections this week.

The particular point I'd hoped to discuss has to do with what some critics identified as Christopher Nolan's impulse, especially in The Dark Knight, to draw on what I take as Miller's ambivalence toward his hero's moral and mental outlook. Like Alan Moore in Watchmen, he seems to be asking what the world would be like if someone really dressed up in a funny costume and started to fight crime. In Miller's world, Superman gets coopted by Reagan, much as Moore's Dr. Manhattan becomes a tool of Nixon's military industrial complex. Batman would seem to be an antidote to such fascist impulses, and yet it's clear that Miller's also grappling with the mental trauma at the heart of the Batman origin myth. Batman is damaged goods. His heroism is likewise damaged. Is it necessary? Or only necessary to him, a sort of narcissistic wound? Moreover, Miller seems to link Batman not just to traditions of urban gothic, detective fiction, and gangster noir -- or to the then-recent media sensation of the Bernie Goetz case -- but also to the iconography of frontier violence and vigilante violence we tend to associate with cowboy politicians like Reagan and George W. (Hence the horseback splash above?)

In Nolan's hands, as I noted last summer, this sort of ambivalence -- what does it mean to make a mentally damaged hero a figure of American justice? -- led to all sorts of conflicting readings of the most recent film. Batman tortures the Joker to get information: therefore, Batman is Bush? And the Joker's Al Qaeda? Is the movie, as the original Wall St. Journal op-ed piece that started the firestorm in the blogosphere, a conservative defense of the War on Terror? Or is Nolan exposing the evils that flow from state sanction of a "world without rules"? I suggested in class that Miller was similarly ambivalent about Batman, but that his ambivalence constitutes a critique of the Bush/Cheney War on Terror, not a rationale for it.

Am I right that in questioning Batman, Miller and Nolan are getting at something foundational about American origins in violence? Or is there a more redemptive treatment of what Miller was trying to do with the character -- or the country? Or the city for that matter? 

 

So I've spent the better part of the last week holed up in a cabin somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, without the Internet, about as far from Gotham as you can get. The Movie was playing in town on the local one-screener, of course, since we're still talking about planet Earth, but we skipped it in favor of fly fishing and hiking from ski lifts to waterfalls.

Until today, that is, when we caught a plane to Seattle (and a smaller one from there to central WA) and, within a couple hours of dropping off our bags, hit the theater.

Until it heads off to the fabled Giants Causeway in Antrim, Northern Ireland, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is a New York film, like its predecessor, 2004's Hellboy. As I wrote in my post on Hancock, New York is still superhero central. (Though I'm told that Gotham City in The Dark Knight, which opens this week, is meant to be seen as a version of contemporary Chicago.)

In Hellboy 2, the elvish prince, Nuada (played by Luke Gross), emerges from under the streets of Manhattan to declare war on humankind. And underneath the eastern end of the Brooklyn Bridge is the troll market, which seems to be Del Toro's homage to the famous cantina scene in Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). Last Sunday's Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times featured an article about Del Toro's fascination with fantastic creatures and the diaries of artwork in which the inspiration for Hellboy 2 took shape. [Click here for a multimedia version of the article.]

In both Hellboy films, the title character (played by Ron Perlman) chafes at being kept out of view and hidden from "the outside world." He lives, after all, at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Development, located in .... Trenton, New Jersey.

Tomorrow is a red-letter day for fans of the Batman. In addition to the release of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins on Blu-ray DVD in both a regular and a special edition, tomorrow brings the release (straight to DVD and Blu-ray) of the animated feature Gotham Knight.

The animated film bridges the gap between Batman Begins and its sequel, The Dark Knight, which opens in theaters on July 18. It tells the story of how the Batman hones his craft in the aftermath of the events of Batman Begins, through six interlocking chapters: "Have I Got a Story For You" (written by Josh Olson, who received an Academy Award nomination for A History of Violence [2005] ), "Crossfire (written by Greg Rucka), "Field Test" (written by Jordan Goldberg), "In Darkness Dwells" (written by David S. Goyer), "Working Through Pain"(written by Brian Azzarello), and Deadshot" (written by Alan Burnett). Each segment features art from a well-known Japanese anime director. Kevin Conroy, who provided the voices of Batman and Bruce Wayne in the art-deco-inspired Batman: The Animated Series (1992-95), reprises the roles here. (By the way, the fifth and final season of that series will also be released tomorrow on DVD, along with the fifth season of Teen Titans, Robin's spinoff series).

My younger son has become very interested in Batman lately and both he and his older brother have been fascinated by the posters for The Dark Knight. They both accept, however, that the film is going to be too "scary" for them. I made the mistake of telling them that there would be a new animated film released at the same time that would be more appropriate for them. Unfortunately, that was before I discovered that Gotham Knight is rated PG-13 and saw images on the film's website.

Instead, I think I'll show them the 1966 Batman, a spin-off of the campy television series starring Adam West, which I loved as a child, much to the consternation of my kindergarten teachers. It's available on DVD and has just been released on Blu-ray.

Last night, I saw the new Will Smith movie Hancock, which happened to be showing around the corner during the evening, despite the fact that it officially opens today. Smith plays John Hancock, a reluctant superhero who's equally drawn to saving people and to hitting the bottle, not necessarily in that order. He doesn't care how much collateral damage he causes, and the opening scene features mayhem on the freeways of Los Angeles that ends with a car impaled on a skyscraper. Indeed, if you're a New Yorker, one of the pleasures of the film is watching downtown L.A. get trashed with a glee that is usually reserved for the Big Apple in big budget pictures like Ghostbusters (1984), Smith's own Independence Day (1996), or The Day After Tomorrow (2004). In fact, in the aftermath of the opening freeway scene, the Los Angeles police chief complains to the media about Hancock, wishing that the superhero would just go bother those people in New York.

New York, after all, is a far more familiar stomping ground for superheroes than L. A. Frank Miller is supposed to have said that Superman's Metropolis is New York during the day, while Batman's Gotham City is New York after dark. In the "Afterword" to  Batman: Knightfall, A Novel (Bantam Books, 1994), Dennis O'Neill writes that "Batman's Gotham City is Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November." 

"Electric Earthquake," the seventh episode of the Superman cartoons produced in the 1940s by Paramount Pictures and Fleischer Studios, is clearly set in Manhattan; likewise, the earliest Batman comics are set in New York. The panels at right are from Detective Comics 31 (1939) and indicate that the setting is "the dark of a New York night." (Click on the image to get a closer view.) The 1978 film version of Superman, starring Christopher Reeve, makes use of famous New York landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center. And other comic series, including Spiderman and Daredevil, are set in New York.

Hancock is an odd movie; after a surprising third-act revelation, it transforms itself itself into something other than the superhero version of Arthur (1981) that the teaser and trailer would lead you to expect. Hancock is a lot messier and edgier than Iron Man (2008). The early reviews have been mixed, but I tend to agree with David Denby in this week's The New Yorker, who argues that Hancock "suggests new visual directions and emotional tonalities for pop." And Will Smith, Charlize Theron, and Jason Bateman are all terrific. Go see for yourself.