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I was going to throw up something rather substantive this weekend, but instead I was occupied with something I might write about in the future. Or not. (It was boring, don't worry.) Two quick thoughts:

(1) I generally get annoyed when people cross subjective and objective types of reaction to art - actually, it pisses me off to an unreasonable degree. I especially find it annoying when people express a strong subjective opinion as objective fact, especially immediately after someone expresses exactly the opposite opinion. This bugs me most, because it seems most misplaced, with acting. If someone's just said that Joshua Jackson is really good on Fringe, and your experience is that he's an unwatchably bad actor, shouldn't you consider the fact that lots of people disagree? Shouldn't you say "Jackson just doesn't work for me, for reasons x, y, and z, and I'm somewhat perplexed that people think he's really good?" Why would you say "Joshua Jackson is wrecking this show with a horrible performance"?

I think I notice it here most because I often seem, on the one hand, less bothered by performances other people find bland or unconvincing, and on the other hand not especially impressed with performances other people thought were transcendent. This surely has to do with my own experience as an actor, which gave me lots of opinions (not necessarily any insight, though! - I wouldn't claim for a heartbeat to speak for other actors, or actors in general). So when everyone's bagging Anna Torv's performance in the pilot of Fringe, which I watched yesterday, I didn't feel one way or the other about it. And (uh oh!) when everyone was applauding Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, I wasn't especially impressed. I'm not going to be the "provocative" guy who claims that Ledger only got the acclaim because he died - I don't think that's true, except perhaps at the margins. And I thought the Joker character was very well portrayed/presented/whatever onscreen. It was very effective, and the thing that worked best about the movie for me.* But I felt a lot of it had to do with the writing and the costume and the makeup. Ledger's performance, in my opinion, was very very very good, and a lesser actor would have made a hash of it, but once you clear the hurdle of someone attempting to ham it up, I just don't think it was very hard. I don't think you needed to provide what the film required. There's multiple layers and complexities here - you could point out that much of the time a really great movie doesn't require Great Acting, and Great Acting in the way we understand it can seem kind of awkward and forced, which is how lots of people received, e.g., Sean Penn in Mystic River - but I just feel like whatever Ledger's considerable talents and potential, playing The Joker didn't sratch the surface. I have a suspicion that any of the other actors considered for the role would've evoked more or less a similar response. But all of that has to be filtered through my personal conviction that playing scary, creepy, and scarily creepily nuts isn't a particularly difficult thing to do, and that while Anthony Hopkins is enjoyable as Hannibal Lecter, he's just kind of dicking around artistically compared to something like Remains of the Day. (Which isn't a bad thing. Different movies have different requirements.)

*Which, incidentally, I liked more than the critics who hated it, but liked less than everyone who wrote hate mail to the critics who hated it; I thought it was inferior in conception and execution to Batman Begins. I have reasons for feeling that way, but they're incidental here and they don't add up to much that I would consider objective - well, I think my reasons are objective, I think it's a fact that the movie's plot doesn't work as well as its predecessor's, but whether that matters to you as much as it did to me is entirely up for grabs. The major reason I think The Godfather, Part II is better than The Godfather is because I think the sequel's story is infinitely superior in its construction - it's an artful structure, for one thing, and it manages to actually have a well-developed and coherent plot, as evidenced by one movie covering several months in some detail and the other one covering almost a decade in isolated scenes.

(2) I'm reading, and this will be entirely unsurprising, Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball. Two things that I find kind of jarring: (a) typos. Multiple types in the first couple hundred pages. It's really kind of perplexing to me. (b) the book makes basically no concession to the notion that someone unfamiliar with Simmons' column might be reading. If you start reading someone's column it becomes clear, if they have a particular personality or schtick, that you've stepped into an ongoing narrative, sort of like picking up a TV show in season 3. There are things that aren't really going to be explained for you any more. I would've guessed that in writing a gigantic (and so far, very good) book, Simmons might've gone a little out of his way to be more accessible to someone who didn't read his stuff every week. I guess I shouldn't have thought that, since he's said on his press tour that it's basically the same voice he uses for ESPN, but R-rated. (So far I'd call it a soft R. Mild language, drug use, suggestive situations, brief nudity.) So he makes a gimmick of providing fake explanations of his pop culture references for readers in 2025, but much of the ephemera about Simmons' style really would be inaccessible to someone reading in 2025, and some of it would be inaccessible now. Given that one of the delights of the book is that some of the facts he dredges up about the pre-24 hour news era of professional basketball are the sort of thing that require footnotes to say "Seriously, I'm not joking," which make plausible other wild facts which require him to footnote that he is, in fact, joking, it's jarring to find him making other jokes that a somewhat less savvy reader might not realize weren't true. The subject of the book is intended to be somewhat timeless, and in its substantive approach I'd say it is, but a lot of the flourishes sort of float by weirdly; if in a column Simmons talked about the debut of the Ralph Samson Face, even if he had to explain the Sampson reference (which he does in the book), the general schtick is understood for readers of his column previously familiar with the Faces of Derek Lowe, Peyton Manning, etc. I mean, you can sort of work out what's going on, I presume, but it doesn't flow as easily as it does for the experienced Simmons reader. Just think it's an interesting choice; I wonder if it'll affect the perception of the book years down the road. (One of Simmons' reasons for writing the book is that he quite correctly feels that, compared to baseball, there's an embarrassing dearth of quality basketball books, and his pick for the best ever, John Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game, was out of print when I tried to buy it last year.)

Cause I Know All None Of You Are Dying To Read My Thoughts

Trying to get right to the point and glide past my longer than normally long absence from blogging:

What I find distressing about all I've read of the pundit-driven* commentary against Roman Polanski's potential extradition is that those few voices that aren't primarily focused on the difficult task of being as morally contemptible as possible (I AM LOOKING AT YOU ANNE APPELBAUM) are gesturing in the direction of a reasonable argument but completely missing the seriousness (and thereby failing to make their point) of what their comment implies.

This is the argument, more or less, that it's been a long time, he's an old man, he hasn't repeated his crime, Samantha Geimer has said she doesn't want him subject to legal action, and there's accordingly no purpose served by bothering to prosecute him. (Might as well note that while it's true that so far as we know, he hasn't raped - in the violent coercive sense of his victim's testimony - anyone else, it's not true that he hasn't committed what in the United States would have been and is statutory rape - the crime he pled to - because he carried on a relationship with a fifteen year old Nastassja Kinski, which may have been consensual on its face but under the precepts of American law could not by legal definition have been consensual.) There are two interesting prongs of legal-philosophical argument here that are, to put it charitably, underdeveloped, and perhaps in conflict.

Taking first the victim's wishes, the fact of the matter is that under American law this doesn't mean a damn thing. In practice we are of course reminded of many cases where at the urging of the victim in a crime like, say, domestic abuse, the state declines to file charges (but in part this is because the victim herself would be an uncooperative witness), and the pleadings of a victim's family have certainly swayed decisions (prosecutorial and judicial) about sentencing. These are instances, though, where our criminal justice system is for better or worse (in my opinion, just to get the cards out, worse) bending away from its stated purpose both in philosophical underpinning and statutory fact. The criminal system doesn't work on behalf of, or for the benefit of, the victim (that's what the civil court system is for). My bullshit half-knowledgeable half-conjectural take on this fact is that it stems, at root, in early Germanic/Anglo-Saxon law, and the weregild concept. That society had a long history of violent retribution leading to endless bloody cycles of revenge which were ultimately detrimental to the health of the society as a collective, so blood revenge was replaced by the progressive (for then!) and repugnant (for now!) concept of the blood-price, or weregild (literally the man-money, or more properly man-payment, man-debt). Your station in society determined your worth; in essence, there was a kind of inverse price on your head at all times, which was the amount your potential killer would owe your family if he in fact killed you. This is in some sense still the system we have in the modern civil proceedings of wrongful death suits, but without the creepy actuarial tables detailing the relative worth of men, women, slaves, etc. It's also, in the criminal legal context, a first step in realizing that allowing the victims to drive punitive action instead of the state was harmful to the state (I mean, a murdered slave might be atoned for with gold, but in practice the family of a murdered man didn't usually want the weregild, they wanted to murder the killer and his family, which is probably also still true for many/most people today). By the time we get to the present, we have a long established Anglo-American legal system which prosecutes criminals not on behalf of the victim but explicitly on behalf of the state, and which does not, in its official capacity, recognize the desires or needs (such as they are) of a victim('s family), because the state is concerned with the offense against society at large and against the state's own authority, which would be equally offended by allowing the victims to pursue common revenge.

In practice, our legal rhetoric is still heavily veined with pleas about getting justice for the victims and their families, but this is contrary to the letter and spirit of our legal system, a common example of the common phenomenon whereby human instinct strains against the civilizing bounds of human intellectual theory. And of course I've been writing about circumstances where the victim desires to see her assailant punished, when the case in front of us is a case where she desires, more or less, to not see that. This is just simple consistency, though; you can't have a fair legal system which accommodates a victim's request for lenience but disregards her request for vengeance. In our system as currently assembled, Samantha Geimer's wishes simply aren't supposed to matter from the state's perspective. There are two ways in which you could argue that they should matter: the less ambitious one is further from the folk-concept of justice under consideration, but can be integrated into the OTHER prong of arguing that Polanski should be let alone; the more ambitious implies a complete reordering of our legal system's precepts which hopefully would not lead us back to the days of blood feuds but which would prize the victim's sense of justice over the state's authority, or at least try and place them into more equal balance. I don't think you can go very far in this direction without leading to the kind of personalization of retribution which modern society would find deeply unnerving and which would also severely degrade the integrity of the state: the foundation of our criminal system is the principle that the state has a monopoly on the just and authorized use of violence (in a broadly construed sense of the word, which incorporates incarceration, asset seizure, etc.), and to hand our legal system over to the desires of victims would be to make state-authorized violence into an instrument of the individual citizen and ultimately corrupt the whole concept.

The other way to go is perhaps less intuitive but more interesting and maybe more feasible. Here we retain the primacy of the state's self-concern for its monopoly on violence, but compromise or reorder the details of how it executes the protection of that right. Right now the system is set up in principle to be, well, defensive of the principle. People break the law and they are punished. What could happen is to reimagine the criminal justice system as one which philosophically and statutorily promotes the kind of compromises prosecutors reach in the everyday application of the statute to real cases; the recognition that there are mitigating circumstances not explicitly provided for in the law and the somewhat crass (to an idealist) recognition that some cases are not worth trying because of the fiscal cost to the state or the possibility of an unwelcome jury verdict, hence plea bargains where the accused stipulates his guilt regarding a lesser crime in exchange for lenient sentencing. This is a pragmatic approach to the judicial system, but inconsistently so (is it really worth going after all those harmless pot smokers? - of course not, but we do it so often anyway). An overall pragmatic overhaul of our legal structure would require rewriting and reinterpreting the penal code and its associated sentencing rules, but would also necessarily empower prosecutors and justices to balance their estimation of how important it is to punish a particular instance of a crime against the overall rule. This would make Kant's head explode (not in and of itself a bad thing!); it would also make relevant the victim's wishes, which would be a good thing - borderline instances of statutory rape which are in fact legitimate "Romeo and Juliet" cases that happen to fall directly outside the arbitrary bright lines of the law would be let go, e.g. Samantha Geimer's desire for Polanski to be left alone doesn't stem from that place, though - it stems from the understandable but self-interested desire to be left alone and allowed to live an anonymous life without reading her name in the paper always connected with a traumatic violation. The agents of the state could weigh her interests against the potential threat Polanski poses to society at large, decide that he poses no such threat, and let be. But to be able to do that inside of a just and coherent legal system would require not simply looking at the somewhat exceptional circumstances of this case and making such a judgment, but would require recreating the state's interpretation of its own self-interest in pragmatic rather than idealistic terms. (I think this would be a bad thing on balance, because it would ultimately enhance the different enforcement of the law in different jurisdictions, such that in one locale a man who avenged his family's death [always back to the blood feud and the blood price!] would be let go and in another he would be guilty of murder; you can't be pragmatic and have hard-and-fast guideline at the same time. But it wouldn't be the kind of catastrophic method of arranging the legal system that I believe prioritizing the needs and desires of the victim would be.)

But needless to say, nobody's saying any of this about Polanski; they're just gesturing at the idea that he ought to be left alone because ... well, because. Of course, even in a pragmatic system the state still needs to be vigilant about protecting the integrity of its authority, and in this case Polanski is once again rightly doomed; he's not merely a criminal for the initial rape but a criminal for being a fugitive from justice. He's committed a crime that comes closer than any other to literally violating the state's authority, because he willfully evaded punishment, and a system that allows people to regularly do that is not a system with longevity. Of course, we could just this once make an exception because Polanski is so old and his crime was so long ago, but...

Oh, but in a pragmatic legal system the axe swings the other way. Letting Polanski go breeds cynicism that the law does not apply to the wealthy and famous (whether or not that's why he's hypothetically let go), which ultimately corrodes the state's authority. Making an example of him (justly or not) promotes the impression that the state applies the law equally to all, no matter their station, which strengthens the state's authority. Pragmatically, it's worth it to be less than normally lenient in certain circumstances in order to prove that no one is allowed to evade justice forever. So you've got that to ponder.

Or you could just say that Polanski is a fugitive who justly needs to face his crimes in the legal system that initially set out to try him, because as it turns out our theoretically inflexible, practically flexible (for good and bad) system is actually pretty good when weighed against the alternatives set out above (do you really want to live in a system that incentivizes the state to make an example of people?) and that being inflexible about its principles is generally the right way to go. ESPECIALLY WHEN THE GUY IN QUESTION IS A FUCKING CHILD RAPIST.

Ahem.

* The other anti-extradition commentary is what I'd call Hollywood-driven, in which all right-thinking people swallow a little uncomfortably as their favorite SoCal creative types seem to reveal themselves as, well, the sort of people I described in the prior paragraph. This isn't really so surprising, though. If a good friend of mine were accused of a crime like Polanski's, I'm not sure how I'd react, and if a good friend of mine were in the position I believe Polanski is in - guilty (of more than he pled to), a long-time fugitive from justice, very old and far removed from the time of his crime - I can't promise that I wouldn't say something unfortunate myself (or at least keep my mouth shut and not say what I probably should). Now, not everybody in Hollywood is a friend of Polanski's, of course. But he's widely (and, for his work, deservedly) admired to a considerable degree, and not at the kind of remove that I admire Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby, but with the special intensity reserved for the heroes of your own craft, profession, and love. Plus not everyone in Hollywood is personally associated with Polanski, but I'd be surprised if, taking the set of "people I've heard of in Hollywood" you could get more than three or four degrees of separation from someone who was professionally or personally friendly with Polanski. So basically they're acting like ignorant members of the same social circle, which is unfortunate but totally predictable in any given social circle; these just happen to be famous people.

I Don't Know What I Just Watched

Do you want to watch a film set in Thailand? In Thai?

Do you want to watch a Thai action movie starring a young girl (who's actually in her 20s)?

Do you want to watch a Thai action movie whose main character is an autistic girl who learns how to fight by watching other people learn how to fight, and by - metatextually - watching the prior movies of the director of the film I am right now discussing?

I mean, do you?

I'm actually not sure that you do.

If I told you that during the film's 20-minute action scene denouement the autistic girl - who at this point is a kind of Terminator rag doll of Muay Thai - meets perhaps her most difficult single opponent in the film in the form of a twitchy autistic boy who has also apparently learned some tricky moves by watching lots of movies, would that change your desire to see the film?

And if so, in which direction?

I'm honestly curious.

Lynchathon III, Part III: Inland Empire, Conclusion

FINALLY.

Actually, I think I've pretty much sabotaged myself, and probably did so intentionally, by waiting so long to write my reaction to Inland Empire that I'm left without much of anything to say, but in a more justifiable sense than I would've had nothing to say right after seeing it.

I suppose it's convenient at this moment in his career to look at Lynch's oeuvre as a whole and momentarily pretend that he's not going to do anything in the future. I assume that's not the case; in spite of my various misgivings and difficulties with much of his work, I very much hope it's not the case. But what you get by pretending that Inland Empire is Lynch's farewell work is that it's very much a return to the beginning of his career, as though he'd been following a long creative loop away from the example of Eraserhead and finally made his way back to the beginning; back to home. Like Eraserhead, Inland Empire begins with what appears to be an intelligible plot and then dives headlong, deeper and deeper, into a pool of Lynchian filmic dreamspace. It's as difficult to grapple with as every intervening Lynch film combined, and it's twice the length of Eraserhead. (Also, both films took literally years to make, unlike the rest of his works; the ever-unfolding production schedule undoubtedly both stems from and feeds the dreamlike, elusive relationship with normal cinematic storytelling that binds these movies.)

While I wasn't in the best frame of mind to watch it, I was in a more receptive mood than I was for Eraserhead, which is part of why - despite the aformentioned length - I drew more from it and had a better experience. But perhaps more importantly, and if I were going to pretend that Lynch specifically learned something from his sojourn in the relatively more accessible territories he mined for the 25 years between his first film and his most recent one it would be this, Inland Empire presents us with an inscrutable structure and story but marries it to a very scrutable emotional core, based in Laura Dern's astounding performance. The performances in Eraserhead are effective, but they're as inscrutable and outside the waking experience of life as everything else in the movie; we can reconstruct what the main character is going through emotionally - the film is, after all, more or less a dramatization of what's in his head and his heart - but the performances aren't so viscerally engaging because the emotional experience is presented in a way that's detatched from metaphorical viscera (though not literal, gastrointestinal viscera, of course). Whatever Laura Dern's character (characters?) is going through during Inland Empire, she puts that emotional experience onscreen through her own work as much as the film around her dramatizes it; though, as in Wild at Heart, her performance is by the necessity of Lynch's script and his world somewhat off-kilter, it's off-kilter in a way that ties directly back to recognizable human behavior, or rather the way we're used to seeing recognizable human behavior portrayed by modern actors in the Western performance tradition, which is the method of performance I - and most of you! - recognize as "realistic" however artificial its tropes actually are.

Dern pulls the disparate strands together, whether she's playing what seems to be her actual character - a somewhat distant actress - or the character that actress plays, or one of the various mirrors and shadows of those women. It's in some ways one of the most impressive performances I've seen because it really has to stand on its own in a way that very performances do. Not to diminish the quality work done by the actors onscreen with her - it's not that her performance needs to stand alone the way a one-woman show/monologue does, it stands alone because it's the only thing we have to hang our hat on, the only thing that reaches out to the audience and says "here, you can use me, use this, as your entrance into this world." And as someone who's a sucker for good acting that's skating on the edge of near over-the top emotionalism, Dern makes a congenial Constant Companion through the impenetrable (to me, certainly) rooms the film travels through.

(Incidentally, since I spoke at some length about Dern's scorching presence in Wild at Heart, this is why it's all about the performance, and what makes it in some ways more impressive: I think Dern is more attractive as a mature woman than she was as a 21-year old or whatever she was back then, but her performance, and her sex scene with Justin Theroux, isn't burning-the-metaphorical-filmstock [Inland Empire was shot on digital video] hot the way almost every scene in Wild at Heart was because it's not that kind of movie and not that kind of character and so it doesn't call for that kind of performance.)

ANYWAY the point being that after Eraserhead, which was at most kind of an oblique film in emotional terms, Lynch went on to make a bunch of movies that, in tension with the received narrative about his work, are very accessible and recognizable emotionally, and actually wear their joy and sorrow and heartbreak and terror on their sleeve in a way that seems inaccessible simply because we're not used to movies where the emotional experience is so unfiltered, especially in an otherwise challenging context. Inland Empire then closes the (artifical, intellectual, critically-imposed) loop by bringing that heavy emotional attitude to the mystery and dreamstate of Eraserhead. That - the unfiltered, whether it be emotional or visual or structural - is really the throughline, I suppose, of what I've had to say about Lynch and what I ripped from David Foster Wallace's "behind-the-scenes" piece on the making of Lost Highway, that what we get in a Lynch film seems like a more or less unprocessed transference from the man's innermost brain to our screens. The structural conceits we're used to - plots, character arcs, orderly and clever structures - are the detritus of the way our brains help us to make sense of the stimulus around us, an often inescapable imposition of the higher consciousness on direct human experience, one that is arguable necessary for us to live the lives we do, but one which arguable shuts off some potentially valuable experiential real estate, if we can let ourselves go and just feel everything without organizing it. That's, from a different angle, what we're getting when we experience ecstasy in whatever form, be it religious, sexual, social, and of course chemical: a reprieve to some greater or lesser degree from the ongoing wear of having an evolved, social, human brain. Thinking becomes tiring without reprieve.

Of course the catch is that no trigger is universal; not every sexual encounter gives you that release, not every art form moves you in that way. I used to find something hair-raising and exuberant about elements of the Catholic mass when I was a boy, and I don't feel that any more. Music can take me there, and sometimes film or even more likely TV (because what's going to push me over that edge is likely to be a built up reaction to a character or an onscreen relationship, and TV gives me more time to build my own relationship with the people on screen, and more time for them to get into the depths of a character if that what they want to do). Most of Lynch's films, for me, miss the mark of pulling my non-cognitive trigger. There are moments, and in the case of Mulholland Drive (admittedly one of the more accessible Lynch films on a moment-to-moment basis) I'm wrapped up in that world with real investment (and again consider how that movie is tied together by a remarkable performance, or really two remarkable performances, by its central actress), but for the most part the presumably unfiltered products of Lynch's brain miss my personal mark.

But there's nobody doing what he does, that I'm aware of, certainly not with American prominence, neither in his most remote and inaccessible or most inviting and intellectually intelligible works, and I'm certainly a bigger Lynch fan than I expected to wind up being. He's a challenging artist, which is in itself something I respond to; I've said that a Spike Lee failure (and in my opinion there's a fair number of them) is more daring and interesting than most other people's successes, and while Lynch can't really be judged in those same terms, he's equally worthy of respect and consideration even at his most questionable moments. I can't think of a good conclusion here so I'm just going to stop.

But not before I leave you with the credits for Inland Empire. Just get up and go and feel something, for your sake and mine.

I run to the river.

Lynchaton III, Part II: Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive

So.

(This might get more spoiler-y than usual, or at the least, it's going to unfold the commonly understood explanation of "just what the fuck was going on" in Mulholland Drive, which I guess is like a spoiler for watching the film two or three times.)

(Also: I entirely refer to characters in Lost Highway by actor because I don't remember the character names, and because the notable thing in that film is that two actors play what ends up being, sort of, in some ways, the same character. I refer to the characters in Mulholland by character name because I recall them without having to refer to a castlist, and because the notable thing in that film is that Naomi Watts plays what appear to be, in some ways, two different characters.)

I was right to pull The Straight Story out of order because Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive really do share commonalities of style, theme, and structure, and really they stand together, and stand apart from the rest of Lynch's filmography.

Actually, let's break this down real fast: Lynch has made three films that were either written by other people or written by Lynch yet significantly "controlled" in script style by source material - The Elephant Man, Dune, and The Straight Story. The remainder of his work was either completely produced by Lynch or the result of a collaboration (Twin Peaks) or adaptation (Wild at Heart) that Lynch's personality dominated throughout the creative process. And in that group that I consider more or less Lynch's product from genesis to final cut, there are three subgroups: three works made consecutively that have relatively linear and comprehensible plots (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Twin Peaks), two works that at first seem to have linear and comprehensible plots but ultimately subvert that expectation (the two films under discussion here), and two films that are overtly dreamlike and most aggressively "Lynchian" from the get go (Eraserhead and Inland Empire).

Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive not only share a vague similarity in the structural confusion of their scripts, they have in common a theme that seems to animate that structural confusion: sexual jealousy. The details of how each film perverts your understanding of the narrative structure differ, but what really ties them together is that in a very real way it seems that the distorted structure is a result of sexual jealousy (and other stuff, but it's the emotion in common between the main characters). The emotional force of Bill Pullman and Naomi Watts contorts the fabric of reality. Now, in Mulholland Drive it seems clear that most of this stuff happens inside Naomi Watts' head, whereas in Lost Highway it all seems more or less real.

The blemish on the filmstock here is that Mulholland Drive was initially intended to be an ongoing TV show, and the majority of what's onscreen in the film was actually the pilot. When the project wasn't picked up, Lynch reshot some scenes and wrote a bunch of new ones to turn the whole thing into a movie. Now, all along, I've somewhat intentionally underread Lynch interviews and Lynch scholarship, so it's possible that I could have gathered a great deal more information about what was in the pilot and what was new for the film, and how much the overall conception changed from one project to the next. I kind of wanted to just see the films and experience them on their own, and suppress my natural urge to overread on a subject of new interest. I have a suspicion that the real structure of Mulholland Drive was conceived after the pilot was rejected, and that Lynch more or less intentionally drew inspiration from what he'd done in Lost Highway, though the execution is quite different. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, especially since Lost Highway is in my opinion quite the inferior film.

I mean, it's not bad or anything, but in comparison to Mulholland, which I think is a masterpiece, Lost Highway suffers. It's also the more difficult film to understand, as the final line of the film (which turns out to be the same of the first) upends what was already an overtly surreal film world. It sends you back looking for the hitch in time where the film kinked around on itself (or, you know, it would've done that if I'd enjoyed it enough to watch it immediately again, which I didn't). Lost Highway differs from Mulholland also in that it takes place in a world not only Lynchian but supernatural; things happen that cannot be explained away by the shifting narrative, whereas ultimately Mulholland can be easily understood in a realistic context - which should not take away from its magic. I'm not really sure what to say about Lost Highway other than rehashing its story, which isn't really interesting to me and not really why I bother to ramble on in these posts. But to return to what I wrote above, Mulholland Drive is a film where the force of a character's emotions (including sexual jealousy) drive her to murder (via hitman), then suicide, and in her last moments (falling, gasping into the pillow in the film's first moments) she dreams or desperately imagines everything that follows. The characters of Diane Selwyn's real life are reconfigured into an emotionally satisfying fantasy - not precisely wish fulfillment, but the self-satisfied fantasy of someone certain she's been wronged. The fantasy cannot hold, though, and grows progressively darker until "Betty" - Diane's alter ego in the fantasy - finds the dead body of a woman named Diane Selwyn, and not long thereafter the mysterious cowboy tells Betty it's time to wake up, and she does, and we see what led up to those final breaths into the pillow, as the real Diane fell apart.

But Lost Highway is more structurally daring, less easily explained, more sterotypically Lynchian. Bill Pullman's character appears to possibly murder his wife, and might have done so out of what seems like suspicions of infidelity, and then once sentenced to death row transforms himself into another man, played by Balthazar Getty, with a complete life of his own (but an incomplete memory). I'm honestly not sure whether Getty's character is meant to be diegetically real, and an actual transmigration of some sort took place, or if he's meant to be a fully realized fantasy brought on by extreme emotional duress, like the Diane/Betty dyad. I'm not really sure it matters, either, because I can't see how either possibility could make the film's pieces hook up as neatly as Mulholland's do. Balthazar Getty meets Bill Pullman's dead wife, but she's not her, she's her sister, (except there is no sister), and she turns out be everything Bill Pullman was afraid she was. Patricia Arquette ... doesn't quite make this all work. She's attractive enough to believe that men are going to be as drawn to her on first sight as they are, but not a good enough actress - in this role, at least, which let's be honest isn't what I'd call a rich or rewarding one - to sell the seduction necessary for us to believe they'd stick around and do what she tells them. (I should note that I thought she did a nice job in Flirting With Disaster, so it's not like I've got anything against her.) She just seems a little detached from everything, which I guess could come off as alluringly hard to reach, but for me at least comes off as kind of disinterested. On the other hand, her final line is effectively delivered, and effective; at what seems like the moment of sexual climax with Balthazar Getty, she leans down and whispers "You'll never have me," which is the heart of everything Bill Pullman was afraid of. And like the cowboy's gentle invitation for Diane Selwyn to wake, this is the invocation that returns Bill Pullman to Getty's body, so he can do whatever it is he does that brings us back to the beginning.

What Lost Highway lacks - aside from superior, magnetic performances, though Robert Blake is something awesome here - at least for me, is Mulholland Drive's rich, captivating visual imagery. The whole dream of the film gives us a rich tapestry not only of imagery but characters and behaviors and the totality of Diane Selwyn's dream is captivating for me, or to me. I've seen the film too many times, because I wrote a paper on its sound design in college, and had to watch it seven times in a row with nothing better than the occasional fast forwarding to get me to the points I wanted to see, because Lynch apparently doesn't trust DVDs with chapter divisions. But I still think it's a masterpiece, Lynch's most intoxicating and successful film, at least for people like me. Maybe that's in part because it just looks better, for what are likely reasons of technology and the quality of DVD transfers, but Blue Velvet, on DVD at least, seems flat by comparison to the lush and inviting colors - and imagery - onscreen in Mulholland. And invited in I'm completely given up to the weird Hollywood of Diane Selwyn's imagination and the ultimate tragedy it reveals.

By comparison Lost Highway is alternately shadowy and kind of dull, and the Lynchian affect of the performances seems here more narcotized and less genuinely odd. Putting aside the explicitly surreal work of Eraserhead and Inland Empire - coming soon to a blog post near you, since I already saw it a couple of weeks ago - I think the success of Lynch's more "realistic" films, at the least superficially realistic, is correlated with how closely they track to something like a severely tweaked verisimilitude. In Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive we're mostly watching strange behavior in a fairly recognizable world; in Wild at Heart and Lost Highway we're watching in some ways less odd people in an odder world - or we're watching equally odd people who seem less odd by comparison to their surroundings - and unfortunately part of the oddity of those films becomes a decreased focus on the characters. However off-kilter Jeffrey Beaumont and Frank and Betty Elms and Adam Kesher may be as people, they're full people, whereas Bill Pullman and Balthazar Getty are barely character sketches of jealousy and addled lust, respectively. Lost Highway appears superficially "realistic" - by Lynch's standards, at any rate - but is really a long step towards the nightmare logic of Eraserhead. I don't know if Lynch is incapable or merely, so far, disinclined to marry the more extreme elements of his imaginative superstructure with the more interesting depths with which he can endow his characters, but perhaps he believes or recognizes that in some sense those impulses are ultimately incompatible. Real people can be incomprehensible, but people in dreams are outside the ken of the waking.

Since I'm sort of trailing into babbledom, I should stop, because I've basically exhausted what I had to say about Lost Highway, and while I have a great deal more that I could say, both inquisitive and laudatory, about Mulholland Drive, I think I'll let this end here.

Silencio.

Just Saying

More to come soon, I promise. (Yeah, right!)

Just musing after staying up way too late last night watching dodgy movies on TNT:

(1) The film AEon Flux is not a good film.
(2) The film AEon Flux has almost nothing to do with the source material MTV cartoon, to a degree that serves as another brick in my "why bother with adaptations" argumentative wall.
(3) I get why both fans and the creator of AEon Flux the cartoon were hugely upset by the film. Since I don't really care about AEon Flux the cartoon, I don't really care about their upset-ness, except inasmuch as it bolsters (2) above.
(4) Nonetheless, AEon Flux the film was both visually and conceptually pretty interesting. Were the visual and conceptual notions put to best artistic use? No, but there was a lot of interesting stuff there. The central plot questions of the movie - which as far as I know are entirely unrelated to the cartoon - could've been put to excellent use in a much better film, which is sort of the point of this article, as much as I might quibble with its specifics.

***

There's another point floating around somewhere in my head about Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, which I'm relatively certain I like much more than the majority of the 152 people who have been watching it every Friday night. I think the show is still struggling to find its legs from time to time - no shame in that - which will be unfortunate if it's cancelled (which is more likely than not), but most of the criticisms I've seen people direct towards the show (out of those who are willing to sit down and engage with it in a fair/serious manner) seem sort of beside the point. Not beside the point to whether or not they should like the show - you like what you like and find important what you find important - but beside the point to the goals of the show. I agree that it's difficult to care about the characters, especially the dolls, but I think that's in part by design, because it folds so precisely into Whedon's point; these are individuals - at this point, really, bodies - who have been more or less literally dehumanized; one of the show's conceits is that the procedure is not (cannot be?) 100% effective, so some essential spark remains, at least in the cases of Echo and Alpha, but the spark is elusive and near-ineffable. (Unless Whedon's found God in the last few years I doubt he's literally endorsing Paul Ballard's platitudes about the human soul in religious terms, but the logic of the story so far indicate that Ballard is correct [for once!] about the impossibility of truly erasing the dolls' baseline personality, whatever that means in religious/metaphysical/pseudo-metaphysical/neurological terms.) I'm interested in Echo and Sierra and Victor and Alpha and SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Whiskey, but I'm not invested in them the way I was in Buffy and Willow and Giles. But that's part of the point. The annoying professor guy at the end of the "Man on the Street" episode who points out that if the technology really existed it would be both used and abused and ultimately spell the end of humanity...he's right, and the show in part makes the point by having its central characters be true ciphers with no dependable or consistent personality from week to week. Obviously, Whedon is interested in working with identity, and since that's a relatively new theme for his television work I don't really know what he thinks about it or where it's going to go (whereas I can pretty much guess that in a Whedon work about family, the family you create will be more important and dependable than the family into which you were born, because that's One of His Things), but so far I think he's going about it in a logical sense.

None of that helps someone who feels the need to relate or invest in a character, of course, and I'm not immune to that sensibility; the easiest way to summarize why I've spent the last few years rolling my eyes at House whenever I happen to watch it is because I think 95% of the time the writers "get" House wrong. That's a ridiculous thing to say, of course, because I didn't create the character and they did, and what I really mean to say is that there's a version of Gregory House I find interesting and compelling, and the guy who's given a wide berth to be a monumental asshole in ways both petty and profound to everyone around him, and indulged (by in-show logic) because he always gets medical results, and indulged (by the writers and I think the fans) because he always gets medical results and because he's also a depressed person whom the show will evoke sympathy for...that isn't the guy whom I find interesting and compelling. That Greg House, the one who stars in 20 out of the 22-24 episodes in a given season, is an asshole who doesn't deserve the indulgences he gets and who I can't stand watching for more than ten minutes at a time because both he and the way he's treated by his "friends" and colleagues are unbearable to me. (My other main issue with the show is that it's demonstrated the ability to create phenomenally good and creative episodes of television, almost always by deviating from its own incredibly well-worn tropes. If there was some sort of feed I could sign up for that would alert me when an episode of House is going to break from the traditional patient-of-the-week structure, I'd watch all of those episodes.)

Anyway, so I get why people don't think Dollhouse works, but sometimes I think they're watching the show with the wrong eyes. Also I, personally, appreciate the lengths to which Dollhouse is willing to be nasty; in series past, Whedon has never shied from going for the emotional gutpunch, but the degree to which Dollhouse wants to make you feel uncomfortable, emotionally and intellectually, is I think new for him. Ballard's affair, Echo's return to Patton Oswalt's character at the end of "Man on the Street," a lot of the Alpha stuff, a lot of the Topher stuff, Victor in the chair with Dominic's personality, SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Whiskey ... this is just meaner than prior Whedon, and I have to say that I like it.

Lynchathon III, Part I: The Straight Story

"What kind of pickup was it?"

That line is the setup for the biggest laugh in The Straight Story, and maybe the biggest laugh I've ever gotten from a Lynch film.

I pulled The Straight Story our of order, watching it ahead of Lost Highway, because of an idea that Highway and Mulholland Drive are giong to have significant commonalities that aren't shared with the intervening film.

Multiple commenters have referred to The Straight Story as un-Lynchian in subject matter and even much less than normally Lynchian in presentation, with punning nods to the layered meaning of the title, one of them supposedly being that in telling the story of Alvin Straight, Lynch has also chosen to "play it straight" for once in his career.

Ehhh, not so much. For one thing, there's a reading of the film - that I won't go into, but you can find the link on the movie's Wikipedia page if you really care - that puts together a fair amount of information to suggest that another layer of the film's title is deceitful: Alvin Straight, through the movie, tells various strangers pieces of the story of his life, but the pieces don't actually fit. When you go back and reconsider the film with all the information you have by its end, contradictions emerge: the story Straight tells doesn't add up - it isn't (excuse me) straight. He's eliding a great deal, especially, this reading has it, his own agency in a domestic tragedy that he speaks of relatively early on, in which "someone should've been watching," but wasn't. The someone was him.

I suspect that this reading is accurate and that the film's script can in fact be decoded for clues to understand more about who Alvin Straight really was, and I suspect that such detective work would be more fruitful than in other of Lynch's works, but I think it's equally beside the point. The purpose of The Straight Story's narrative isn't to provide a mystery for the attentive viewer to unlock - to challenge the implicit flatness of the film's title, affect, and Iowan landscape - but like everything else Lynch has done, it's foremost to provide an experience for the viewer to take in as he goes along. Alvin Straight's contradictory reminiscences, if detected, create a subcurrent of unease that, really, is incidental compared to the more central mystery of the film. Why does Straight decide that he absolutely must journey under his own power to see his brother, even though the limitations of his own power (he cannot drive, he will not accept a ride, he does not care for public transportation) mean that an automobile trip of one day's hard drive takes him six weeks atop a lawn mower (a lawn mower slowed down [!] by the weight of dragging Straight's jury-rigged trailer). The orneriness of an old country man doesn't really suffice for answer, here.

Now, it's necessary to observe that the film is "based on a true story," because there was a real Alvin Straight who spent weeks atop a lawn mower travelling from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit a brother laid low by a stroke. I'm not especially interested in trying to find out how much of the script's detail was drawn directly from the true story (although supposedly the film shoot did follow the actual path the real Straight took), and I imagine that a lot of it is fabricated. Straight was already dead when the movie was made, and while the screenwriters interviewed his family members, they apparently didn't really know much of what transpired, either. (The Straight Story is the first and only Lynch film not written by the director himself, but one of its cowriters, Mary Sweeney, was Lynch's longtime editor, producer, and [romantic] partner; they married and divorced in 2006.) Perhaps I'm wrong and indeed the negative tones - both overt and covert - came from the family, but there are some revelations in the film that they probably could not have known. In any case, I would argue that no matter how much the film's story diverges from the reality, it isn't important; narrative and emotional truth in fiction is not the same as factual accuracy, and often the twain must part.

So back to the experience:

The Straight Story is beautiful. I was moved. I wept. Granted, it's a calendrical period of fraught emotion for me, but I may have never cried so early into a piece of art as I did at The Straight Story. It was the look on the face of the old shopkeeper as Straight mowed his way, molasses slow, out of town. He's sad, and afraid, for his friend and for himself, and the lonely vulnerability of the elderly is the sort of thing that can get to me reliably. (Which is why in addition to it being awesome I also found Bubba Ho-Tep so moving.)

Old people is the key; the film is beautiful and simple and despite some signature flourishes from Lynch's creative personality, it does appear sort of un-Lynchian, and those flourishes are relatively understated. And it's because, I think, the film's subject matter doesn't require an overt imposition of Lynch's personality to get us to see whatever it is Lynch sees or wants us to see in his movies, because the film's subject is inherently Lynchian and strange. Consider first the plot, again: an old man builds a trailer from scrap metal, attaches it to a damned riding mower, and drives a few hundred miles, at a pace you could keep up with by means of a low-key jog. It's just strange. But consider, more importantly, the elderly: old people are Lynchian in and of themselves. The work required to put us into Lynch's head - or, if you like, the experience of being in Lynch's head that comes from watching one of his movies - is generally a reordering of our cognitive processes, showing us new things or old things in a new light. Lynch's worldview is accessible (usually) but unusual (always). And yet old people are like Lynchian people: their preoccupations are strange, their language curious, their pace mystifyingly slow, their gestures and facial expressions bizarre and stylized and out of sorts with our experience of the world.

I'm obviously way overplaying this point, but think about it seriously: think about all the weird thumbs-up-ing and overlong grinning that marks the characters in Twin Peaks, and how weird if endearing that is (recognizable gestures of approval that are stretched out of normalcy into a sort of uncomfortable otherness), and then think about the really really old waiter who's apparently a vessel for the mysterious giant figure, and how when he does it, it seems more natural than when Dale Cooper or the sherriff does it, and think about why. It's because he's really old! Old people do things like that! So do small children - who are also quite Lynchian, which is really the point, I guess. At the margins of everyday society you find entire age cohorts of people who have either not yet been socialized into understanding the appropriate and expected natural behavior of a normal person, or have moved on and been passed by. The people who are currently old and weird by virtue of their oldness weren't weird when they were my age, they're weird because society changed (or they changed) as they aged out of the mainstream; in part I think this is because of the various lamentable degradations in mental acuity that so often come with advanced age*, and in part I think this is just a fact of changing social customs.**

So a lot of the things that seem Lynchian in their out-of-placeness about character behavior in a "normal" Lynch film are natural and don't need to be imposed as part of a directorial vision because he's dealing with a main character who's already kind of prone to seeming a little askew from what the median audience member recognizes as everyday behavior. (I stumbled upon what appears to be a copy of the original script online, including scenes which weren't in the final cut, and in one Straight's daughter asks why he's gluing pesos onto the band of his hat. His reply: "Ballast." Awesome.)

I'm, as alluded to above, overarguing this point, but it's because a lot of what I've read about the film highlights its curiosity in the middle of Lynch's ouevre, whereas I felt that aside from a much more linear and graspable plot than any Lynch film except The Elephant Man (and you could say Dune, which wanted to have a linear and graspable plot, but didn't), it was quite of a piece with the rest of them. More "Lynchian" to me, honestly, than The Elephant Man was. Again, if you get away from the notion that Lynch is putting us on or putting on a show or in any way doing something calculated with the presentation and meaning of his images, and instead just embrace the idea that he's more or less the guy he seems to be, and he's just (I say "just": he's of course and obviously a great technician and a supremely skilled artist who's almost always in command of his craft, however you feel about it) ... he's just putting images into the camera that match the images in his head when he closes his eyes (or keeps them open), the Otherness of Lynch's worlds fades into just another askew perspective, maybe more askew than others, and The Straight Story is askew like the rest.

But also, and most imortantly, I implore you, Reader(s), it's lovely. OK, I've got a thing for vulnerably sad old people, but really: Old people are Lynchian, yes, and they're also sad, yes, but they're also kind of beautiful, and whatever wickedness he may be trying to atone for on his ridiculous pilgrimage, Alvin Straight is beautiful, (played beautifully by Richard Farnsworth, who was incredibly ill during the filming and eventually took his life), and the film is beautiful. You should all see it. All of you. We should all ride for six weeks to go see Harry Dean Stanton on a beleagured front porch, and then sit down and look up at the stars.

* Comedy derives from truth, right? I assume that greater familiarity with technology from a young age will make this less apt as a comedic touchstone going forward (in terms of mere old-age confusion vs. genuine senility), but I giggled for a reason. Plus it's sweet when it could've been mean; sometimes the claws are better when you don't show them.

** Like in my puzzlement over prior modes of emotional display here.

That Appears To Be About The Size Of It

Obviously not 100% fair, but pretty durned close, when you get right down to it.

Of course, the dread facial expression in question is one that I suspect I make quite a lot, because I'm actually quite bad at smiling.

Lynchathon I, Part II: Wild at Heart, Blue Velvet, and Being Uncomfortably Turned On

The truth is that Lynch's stuff so far hasn't been the best blog-fodder because I don't generally have all that much to say beyond an uninvested critical reaction; there's very little yet that I react emotionally to, or am inspired by in some direction or another. These are by and large good movies - The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet are both at least near-masterpieces in my estimation - but they're not really in my wheelhouse and there generally isn't something I can latch onto as a point of self-indulgent departure. I'm not interested, e.g., in telling you whether or not Bones is a good show - watch an episode and decide for yourself. I write flabby and undisciplined rambles like that because I'm interested in some facet of the show or want to work out some thoughts I have about it beyond the thumbs up or down, and Lynch's first five movies don't dig into my brain in that way, the notable exceptions being the apocalyptic badness of Dune, and various aspects of Wild at Heart.

A lot of what's interesting to me in this film is the comparison it provides with Blue Velvet. Eraserhead was bizarre and completely introverted artistically, The Elephant Man was a well-selected project that nonetheless was someone else's and the least Lynch-like Lynch so far, Dune an ill-begotten catastrophe, and then Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart are near-accessible films with discernable plots and characters, but in a decidedly Lynchian mode. Here is where I recognize (and appreciate) the artist behind Mulholland Drive.

The apt comparison between these two films is once again David Foster Wallace's (all DFW references are cribbed from a several months' old rereading of his "on the set" piece about the making of Lost Highway, which was collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It's a great essay as well as a great exegesis of Lynch's major artistic accomplishments as of the mid-90s): Wild at Heart suffers in comparison to Blue Velvet because where the earlier film had distinctly drawn characters - and in Jeffrey Beaumont a relatively grounded protagonist with whom the audience could ally their emotional responses - Wild at Heart has fuzzily drawn characterish entities that are nearly impossible to relate to as recognizable human beings. Good or bad, they're all as inexplicably weird as Frank Booth. Wild at Heart actually has a more conventionally explicable and digestible plot (barring the wizard of Oz riff/detours). A getaway/chase/road movie winds up feeling kind of aimless even before Sailor and Lula (yes, those are their names) wind up stalled and temporarily doomed in Big Tuna, Texas.

There's an interesting, unsettling relationship between two scenes of sexual violation in these movies. Blue Velvet famously has Jeffrey hiding in a closet, watching Frank rape Dorothy. There's a lot of setup that went into the scene; Jeffrey snuck into Dorothy's apartment, watched her come home, watched her undress, and just when it's getting a little too Porky's, she realizes that she's not alone and goes after him with a knife. With Jeffrey at her mercy, Dorothy first chooses to humiliate him by ordering him to undress, duplicating and reversing the violation he perpetrated on her, and then she starts to treat him (still rather demandingly, still with the knife) as a lover. Whether this was a change in Dorothy's mood or if the initial (justifiably) vengeful humiliation was always meant as prelude to sex I have no idea. Dorothy's perhaps a naturally kinky lady, but she's also in a very bad place emotionally and it's clearly fucking up her sexual proclivities - there are people who like violent sex for its own sake, let's say, but I think Lynch wants us to think that Dorothy likes Jeffrey to hit her because her son is gone. Maybe I'm way wrong and oversimplifying, but it's definitely the case that sweet young naive Jeffrey thinks that's the case.

Anyway, after the foreplay but well before the consummation of Jeffrey and Dorothy's affair, Frank comes banging on the door and Jeffrey is sent back to the closet. Frank comes in, demands a drink, and then has sex with Dorothy. It's clearly rape, and it's also clearly a longstanding arrangement; Frank is verbally threatening but doesn't really resort to physical violence, because the threat of hurting her family is sufficiently coercive. He has a particular game he wants to play and she knows what Frank expects of her. Jeffrey watches all this in fascinated horror and, of course, horror at his fascination. He's in some degree titillated, which is discomfiting for the viewer because Jeffrey kind of is the viewer and we'd rather not be confronted with the fact that watching a sex act under these circumstances could be titillating while also morally repulsive.

But now we've got Wild at Heart, and Lula, who's just cottoned on to the fact that she's pregnant, is holed up sick in the motel room in Big Tuna while Sailor is out doing whatever, and Willem Defoe comes in playing the character of Bobby Peru, and he violates her, again without becoming physically abusive but backed by the verbal threat of physical harm (which he's clearly capable of). He touches Lula sexually and insists that she say "Fuck me." When she tries to pull away he grabs her and threatens to kill her, then continues to insist that she say "Fuck me" while continuing to touch her. It's deeply unpleasant to watch. And then Lula makes a gesture with her hand that we've already seen, earlier in the film, to indicate sexual pleasure, and she does in fact moan "Fuck me." At which point Bobby Peru jumps back, makes a joke, and leaves.

I had to stop the DVD and process that for a while. While nobody has any fun playing misery poker, it was simultaneously true that (a) intellectually, I believe what Frank did to Dorothy was much worse than what Bobby did to Lula, and (b) I was much more disturbed by the Bobby/Lula scene than the Frank/Dorothy one. So why?

First because we know Lula better. The scene happens past the halfway point of the movie and she's been on screen for much of that time. Dorothy is still a new character to us when she's raped, and we're less invested in her. Second because Lula absolutely loves Sailor with a crazy devotion and what Bobby Peru takes from her is an emotional violation as well as a physical one; she's clearly horrified that she could feel physically pleasure (and she clearly does) at Bobby's unwelcome touch, and that she emotionally may have betrayed Sailor somehow. Frank uses Dorothy's emotions to get what he wants, but he doesn't demand anything of her emotionally other than that she play the role he requires; he wants her to act, not to feel. Third because while identifying with Jeffrey's horror and a little bit of arousal in that closet was a discomfiting feeling, Jeffrey still provides a distance, a buffer, from what's going on. We're actually not really watching a rape (although we totally are), we're watching a guy watching a rape. In Wild at Heart it's just us in the room with Bobby and Lula in a scene that started with goofy piss jokes and then got real weird on us real fast. And Fourth because, honestly, the scene is kind of sexy, which is the really daring AND upsetting thing about it (and on the DVD Laura Dern is still clearly a little amazed if not that she was asked to play that scene, which apparently didn't really exist in the script, and one gets the sense that it took her a while to get OK with it). The Frank/Dorothy rape is shot from a distance and dispassionately, whereas Bobby/Lula is shot up close, sweaty, sun coming through the slats of the window, insert shots of hands and lips and people shaking while standing perfectly still. Which works - and the scene, and Lula's journey through it are both "believable" inside the film's world - because, frankly, Laura Dern is a Sex Bomb in this movie and there's no way around it. I've now seen six David Lynch films and this scene - two people in a room, no props, no violence, no funny sound design or prosthetics other than Bobby Peru's grotesque dentures - is easily the most disturbing thing, emotionally, that he's put me through. More than the Frank/Dorothy rape (gasmask and all), more than Jeffrey acquiescing to Dorothy's request that he hit her during sex, more than Naomi Watts' character masturbating while crying in Mulholland Drive...if there's a place where Lynch's introverted psyche does have a sympathetic resonance with mine, it's in his presentation of sexuality; not that I identify with it - whatever weird shit I may or may not be into, Dear Reader, I assure you with all honesty that it's not nitrous oxide, or crying, or blue velvet bathrobes, or bad teeth - but that something in me is going to pick up on these vibrations, whereas all the bulbous growths in Eraserhead and Dune just make me glance at something else. I'd already figured this out from Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet but I was completely unprepared and unarmed for the possibility that I'd find something like the Bobby/Lula scene hot. You win, David Lynch, you made me embarrassed of myself.

And since I'm arriving at this point, I'm going to shift gears and ignore the ways in which that scene totally fucks with the rest of my reaction to the film, and reiterate against my better judgment that Laura Dern is a Sex Bomb in this movie. I can't overstate this; it's astounding. I really shouldn't talk about this because I'm quite possibly guaranteeing that if I ever want a girlfriend again I should keep her from reading this paragraph. What's especially funny is that I think Dern is someone who's steadily grown into her looks; she's got sort of a funny, equine face, but I think it looks more attractive now than it did when she was a teenager in Blue Velvet, and she's still not completely there in Wild at Heart, when she was in her very early twenties I think. So it was weird watching the movie and registering that in her appearance Dern wasn't even as attractive as she was going to be later in life, and nonetheless she's turning in what is absolutely the hottest performance I've ever seen. It actually made me reflect that there are very few honestly sexy sustained performances from women in film (I'm abstaining from a consideration of male performance). There are lots of performances by actresses who are sexy, but few really sexy performances. And actually I've only seen two that can compare: Marisa Tomei in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and the young lady in the bookstore in The Big Sleep, but she's only got one scene to work her magic with Humphrey Bogart. Note that, on watching this scene in Film 101 in college, my friends and I readily agreed with no debate that it was the sexiest thing we'd ever seen. The key, I guess, is that actresses appear to tend to play "seductress" when they're supposed to be sexy. They're vamping for male attention, which certainly has its distinct charms, but instead consider that bookstore employee or Marisa Tomei in ...Devil... - they don't need to seduce anyone, they're incredibly attractive people who know that they're attractive AND most crucially they're unabashedly sexual beings, and therefore completely free not to try and turn on their scene partner (and thus the viewer) but rather completely free to be turned on. It's so simple I can't believe I never noticed this before watching Wild at Heart; Laura Dern melts my brain because I completely believed that she was turned on for most of the movie, which is a thing I've almost never believed of any actress for more than five minutes at a time, in a real movie or a pornographic one for that matter. Every shoulder shrug and neck stretch and balance shift and hand gesture screams arousal. If I'd seen this movie at twelve I would either have been desperately afraid of it or sprouted considerable chest hair. It's not nearly as good as Blue Velvet, but it made me think more and has stuck with me harder, despite the shitty ending and attendant weirdness. Now I just need to spend the rest of my life pretending not to be hopelessly infatuated with a Laura Dern performance from twenty years ago and I'll be all set.

Lynchathon I, Part I: Eraserhead - Blue Velvet

Towards the end of last year I decided that my new Netflix Project would be to watch the complete works of David Lynch.  (Well, the complete readily available works representing the main thrust of his career; my interest in seeking out examples of Lynch's painting, his music videos, his short films, his comic strip, or the various other things he may or may not consider essential artistic expressions is nonexistant.  I'm interested in the feature films and Twin Peaks.)  A Netflix Project isn't simply my decision to watch a TV show, because that's a contained work with a single plot and cast of characters; I don't consider watching all five seasons of Babylon 5, e.g., to be a Netflix Project.  (And yes, I have done so.  Lots to say about Babylon 5 good and bad [really, really bad] but I think the show raises an interesting quandary that I'll toss out for the moment: if your two best actors, by far, head and shoulders above everyone else, are also the two regulars most saddled with ridiculous costumes and oppressive makeup of the sort that most actors find it difficult to work through, is that on the whole a better or worse thing for your show?)  I have engaged in two prior Netflix Projects: watching all the canonical James Bond films (which at the time did not include Quantum of Solace, though I did later see it in theaters) and watching the films of the Coen Brothers (many of which I'd seen before; this project remains officially incomplete since I keep pushing The Ladykillers down in my queue).  Both of these projects were undertaken and essentially completed before I started this blog.
 
SO:
 
Things I've previously seen by David Lynch:
 
Mulholland Drive.
 
That's it.  So I'm coming at all of this fresh.  I'm also coming at it in pieces, because it's kind of overwhelming and not exactly endearing to my easier aesthetic sensibilities.  So naturally being broken into (at least) three chunks, of which only the first has been completed.  This chunk consists of the five theatrical films made before Twin Peaks.  They are:
 
(1) Eraserhead
 
OK, I have to admit that I kind of fast forwarded through parts of this one.  I am a philistine, I know.  I wasn't really in the right frame of mind to watch it; kind of physically and intellectually tired is not the ideal state for engaging with some really slow moving black and white surrealism.  And I mean really slow moving.  There were things which made me laugh, but ultimately ... look, the film is a classic, and I can see why, and even muster up a "deservedly so" devoid of the condescension sometimes implicit in the qualifier, because you know there's a "but" coming afterwards.  But: especially in his more elliptical and plotless films, Lynch is - as David Foster Wallace, among many, observed - finding ways to transfer his inner emotional/imaginative/psychological state onto a screen for your consideration and, one might hope (though Lynch possibly doesn't give a damn one way or another) sympathetic identification.  Eraserhead would seem to be a very deep transition, which is unsurprising given the elongated, isolated process of filming it, with a tiny cast and crew.  Though it's surely an exaggeration, Lynch seems happy to let you think that for five years, he ate a grilled cheese sandwich and french fries every day, shot Eraserhead in a barn, and then slept in the barn, and when production had to shut down for some reason or another, he probably just faded into limbo until the finances and personnel were in place to continue, at which point he returned to a more reassuringly tangible corporeality and continued to process images from REM sleep with minimal mediation.  There are other works in which I find that I do have an emotional interaction with the projections of Lynch's psyche, but the stuff in Eraserhead just doesn't sync up with my personal wiring - a lot of things Lynch finds fascinating I find either boring or extremely upsetting - so what's left if you don't resonate with the film in that way is a lot of weirdness moving very slowly.  Lynch himself attributed the genesis of Eraserhead to his memories of and emotions toward the city of Philadelphia, where he went to art school; this is by itself enough to let you know that we're in the deep matter of one guy's brain, and how you feel about it is really a question beyond the ken and ambit of critial inquiry.
 
On the other hand, Eraserhead did produce "The Lady in the Radiator Song," the Pixies' cover of which I am quite grateful for.  So I owe it that much.
 
(B) The Elephant Man
 
The thing about David Lynch's lengthy career that I personally find most bizarre and inexplicable: that Mel "Yes, that Mel Brooks" Brooks, who was looking to produce a script about John Merrick, saw Eraserhead and thought to himself, "That's my guy!"  It's actually a pretty startling artistic leap of faith, frankly, to see Eraserhead and think: "This is someone who should make my pet project, an emotional yet emotionally restrained (because British) period film."  Somewhat less astonishing is that he was undoubtedly right.  The Elephant Man is a great movie and worth spending time with.  I have no personal desire to rewatch it at any point - it, again, doesn't really resonate with me, but unlike Eraserhead, where without the resonance I had no purchase, The Elephant Man is sufficiently conventional - maybe the most conventional film of Lynch's career? - that it's easy to appreciate the things one normally appreciates about a film.  Plus it's moving, although I don't know if I'm quite with John Hurt when he says on the DVD that if a person isn't moved by the end of The Elephant Man then he doesn't want to know that person.
 
Positive: Carr Gomm rhetorically asks Treves if he can possibly imagine what John Merrick has gone through in his life.  Treves rather dimly replies that yes, he feels he can.  Carr Gomm (a wonderful John Gielgud) immediately assures him that no, none of them can imagine what it's like.  The look on Treves' face is priceless; Anthony Hopkins throughout this movie delivers a beautiful performance of a man alternately too confident of his nobility and his wickedness.  Also he looks really dashing in a beard.  He was quite the handsome little man back then.
 
Negatives: This film was apparently ground zero for the vogue of using Barber's Adagio for Strings as overbearing musical blanket for Emotional Scenes, especially (though for this Lynch cannot of course be blamed) - as Kyle Gann puts it - "so many muted scenes of handsome young men dying in battle".  Also there's a slightly snotty little note (at least I read it as slightly snotty) distinguishing the film from stage adaptations of John Merrick's life, which is unfortunate because the film takes just as many liberties with his biography as the (unrelated) play does.
 
(Gamma) Dune
 
OhmyGOD you cannot even imagine, without having seen it, how painful Dune is.  It's worse if you've read the novel and worse still if you liked it.  This is like ground fucking zero for some of the things I said here.  You know what?  I can't even really write about this here.  Maybe I'll talk about it and the book(s) some other time.  But to pile on the mindblowingness of Mel Brooks seeing Eraserhead and knowing that he absolutely had to get that guy to direct British actors in Victorian dress, Lynch apparently agreed to do Dune INSTEAD OF RETURN OF THE JEDI.  GEORGE FUCKING LUCAS IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE OFFERED LYNCH JEDI ON THE STRENGTH OF ERASERHEAD AND A PERIOD DRAMA.  This is in its own way actually more explicable; the mind reels at the possibility of actually witnessing the intersection of Lynch and Ewok, but Lynch's comment on the episode is probably correct: Lucas' vision was so firm that Lynch wasn't really intended to be a creative participant, just a technician to hold the reins.  Lucas thought Lynch was a good director and any good director would do, because (a) Lucas's artistic control was viselike and (b) Lucas, clearly, doesn't really understand or respect what it is a director is supposed to do or be, or what he could do or be to a movie, so letting somebody else actually look through the viewfinder would've just been a relief of hassle.
 
(ZOSO) Blue Velvet
 
Yeah so you know this is the Big One, and as far as I can tell it's deservedly so.  David Foster Wallace posited that Blue Velvet's extreme popularity and success vs. other Lynch films is generally indicative of a trend in his work whereby those films with relatively three dimensional, well and "realistically" drawn characters are the ones it's easiest for an audience to (a) sit through and (b) relate with.  Jeffrey Beaumont is the realest of any character in a Lynch film other than The Elephant Man, and what he's going through emotionally is so compelling because universal that it makes what he's going through plot-wise seem halfway reasonable and accessible even though it's actually over the top nuts and doesn't totally make sense.  (At least it doesn't totally make sense explicitly; you can color in the gray areas of the plotline, but the plot is a MacGuffin so why bother, you know?)  It's almost like an artist playing with the fact that to a small child the adult world is huge by exaggerating the effect past what's strictly accurate.  I mean, there are people in the real world like there are in Blue Velvet, although maybe they don't use gas masks as part of their sex play (not in the way Frank does), but the aggressive weirdness of Frank and Dorothy to Jeffrey, combined with the heightened bizarreness of Frank's milieu in general, bolsters the (dis)comfort with which Blue Velvet can be watched as an expressionistic rendering of Jeffrey Beaumont's traumatic entry into adult life, where he finds out that people aren't noble and sex isn't simple.  The Rotten Suburbia thing, hammered in the film's opening moments, is a red herring.  I think Lynch is too smart and too sui generis in his worldview to think it's interesting to go after suburbia as a mythic ideal.  For one thing, Blue Velvet's true target of fear/disillusionment (not the best way to put it) is more daringly and more mundanely (oh ha ha) the adult world itself.  Decay happens everywhere, not just under pristine lawns.  For another thing, we know what it looks like when Lynch ostensibly sets out to process his feelings about a place in an explicit manner - he had a shitty impression of Philadelphia and produced freaking Eraserhead.  Blue Velvet's Lumberton is I think unimportant to the movie overall in that really it could've been set anywhere.  Lynch grew up, I believe, somehwere similar, and I would imagine is just interested in and comfortable with that setting.
 
I just ran out of interesting things to say about Blue Velvet that aren't better served in context with our next film, and besides, more than any other work of Lynch's, this film has been watched, analyzed, and considered both well and poorly for some time.  I doubt I have anything original worth adding to the discourse.

When You're In A Rut

You're in a rut. Blogging the contents of my Netflix queue won't get me to stop reacting to comic-book superheroes if my Netflix queue is bringing me...comic-book superhero movies. I watched, over the past few days, three classics of the genre.

Taken as a collective, they blow.

Superman, the Richard Donner film with Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman, is alright. Reeve is really good, actually, and Margot Kidder is some kind of charming, and Hackman belongs in a different, yet highly amusing, film. Actually, Reeve is really good as Clark Kent and merely good as Superman, in my opinion; he handles the bumbling put-on with considerable panache, and the two or three moments across both films where you see him, dressed as Kent, drop the facade, are really cool. (Didn't even notice he was slouching, but he uncoils to full height and takes off the glasses and his whole face changes. I think one time they even cheated a hairstyle change, from Kent's goobery combover to Superman's iconic forehead curl.) Some of the Superman stuff, he comes off as smirking more than, well, Superman-y. Also, I'm not down with bringing Lois back from the dead, but they also weren't originally going to kill her anyway, so it's a pointless zero-sum game.

Superman II is awful. It's a miraculously stupid movie full of some miraculously stupid people, not least of whom include main characters who were not blithering idiots during Superman, which nominally speaking was scripted and partly shot at the same time as this abortion of a film. It's really bad from a storytelling craft standpoint, and salvaged only by some fine work from Hackman and the completely out of place yet enjoyable coda at the end, where Clark Kent returns to a moment of humilation, kicks a guy's ass in blatant Superman-y fashion, and then dorkily mimes doing a bench press while shrugging his shoulders and telling an awestruck onlooker, "I've been, you know [dorky bench press] working out."

Batman was coincidentally summarized by a coworker as "candybutt," which I guess is true. I liked it less than I remembered. Basically, it strengthened my impression that, as a director, Tim Burton is a really interesting production designer. His quasi-famous disdain for actual comics doesn't really help him out here; Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns was apparently highly influential to everyone on set (and it's easy to see why someone who otherwise doesn't care for comics would respond to it), and the movie's tone is basically TDKR crossed with the 60s TV show starring Adam West. Superdark crossed with high camp and we wind up actually in very Burton-y territory: the frighteningly whimsical, or whimsically frightening, that doesn't do much for me, even though I kind of dug Edward Scissorhands. The tone is all wrong because it's all mixed up; a campy Batman isn't what I want to see, but it's a valid and historically grounded take on the character and his world. Michael Keaton (nice job, by the way) isn't campy, but Nicholson is, except he's killing people. Nicholson's Joker murders people, horrifically, left and right, but plays the character for over the top looniness, and what's worse is that the movie follows him. If this movie is supposed to make me laugh, it shouldn't try to make me laugh at the death of innocent people.

Far superior, as a mashup of Adam West and The Dark Knight Returns, is this work of genius. Excerpts:

Who Watches The Watchmen Adaptation?

This is, obliquely, another comics-y post, but with much more generic concerns.
 
I've often said that films should adapt short stories rather than novels.  As a matter of course, they do sometimes adapt short stories - I gather that this was more common several decades ago than it is now - and of course a very high profile recent Oscar nominee (Brokeback Mountain) was adapted from a "novella," I don't know how long.  The crux of my argument is that it takes, on average, two hours to experience a film, and depending on length it might take anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours to experience a "short" story.  A 350-page novel probably takes me about seven or eight hours to read, less if it's breezy or I've read it before, more if it's got any kind of density.  You simply cannot put the contents of a novel into a film; there must be abridgements of something.  I think there is a real art to adaptation (I'll come back to this in a minute) and recognizing how the strengths of one medium are not the strengths of another, and what must be done to compensate.  But when "adaptation" means "cutting out at least 50% of the content" then something is wrong with your conception.  Or your source material.  One of my favorite movies, Fight Club, was adapted from a novel, but it's not in my estimation a very good novel.  Airport books, techno thrillers, and so forth can make compelling source material because much of the content winds up being purely descriptive and/or marking time.  A two-page disquisition on the merits of an Uzi vs. a H&K submachine gun may or may not be interesting in text but is ultimately best shed in the transition to film; likewise a lengthy explanation of a tactical team's deployment as they prepare to assault a warehouse/terrorist training center is effectively compressed into three seconds' worth of camerawork.
 
But for the most part either plot or characterization or dialogue - and the three are all caught up in each other, of course - needs to be severely compromised to make for a bearable running time.  And so: why?  The market for a particular book is much much smaller than the market for a movie adaptation of same.  I can't imagine that Wonder Boys, one of my favorite adaptations of a novel - and yet which cut my favorite scenes from the book - and which lost money while grossing about $33 million, rose or fell based on the book's status as a bestseller (which it was).  I can't at the moment find sales stats for the book (Evan? do you know where to look?) but it surely didn't gross $33 million for its publisher, which would imply that it sold well over a million copies.  I have a hard time imagining that it sold as many copies as the movie sold tickets, though I could be wrong (call it around 350K tickets?).  For the movie to have turned a significant profit its audience would have needed to be much larger than that of the book.  So even in the best case scenario, the popularity of a book (unless we're talking about a cultural phenomenon like Harry Potter) can't really have much to do with its success as a film.  What's the appeal, then?
 
I presume it's something like cachet.  Film culture is heavily invested (mistakenly, in my opinion) in turning to prose literature for its source material, and the novel is the prestige format for prose material (who reads short stories these days outside of MFA programs? and who writes them except people who went to MFA programs? I'm exaggerating, but only so much), and so that's where the film industry turns.  And why do all these books and their publishers/authors want to be turned into movies?  Well, $.  Excuse me: $$$.  But also because the feature film that opened in a cinema was and is the prestige format for the filmed medium.  I happen to think that to the extent there should be a prestige format at all vs. a recognition that different things work best in different circumstances, it *shouldn't* be the cinema, but the point isn't worth arguing.  I think it should be TV, but that's based entirely on what I perceive to be the potential of television vs. the reality.  It's only over the past fifteen or so years that (American) television has started cashing in on its artistic capabilities on a regular basis and routinely turning out product that's easily as strong as the best Hollywood has to offer, if not stronger. Still, the advertising mandates and seasonal structure that continue to undergird network prime time programming are semi-permanent barriers to television's full flowering as an artistic medium; so be it. The point remains that if you're going to adapt a story that took eight or ten hours to read, if you think it's worth adapting to another medium in the first place, shouldn't you want to preserve as much of it as possible? Why did the network TV miniseries die? (because they haven't done an interesting book since Roots, aside from all those late 90s classics adaptations like the Odyssey and Gulliver's Travels?) - why hasn't anyone done before now what the guy who wrote Generation Kill (a nonfiction book about Marines in Iraq) did, and spin it into, essentially, a one-season series for HBO?
...

All of this is in response to the newly available trailer for the movie adaptation of Watchmen, coming out next March:



The trailer says it's the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time, and you might quibble about Maus, which after all won a damn Pulitzer, but I'll quibble back and say that Maus is to some ostensible extent nonfiction. Watchmen was also included in Time's list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923, which is a grossly stupid thing to do, but I guess we're supposed to take it where we can get it. (Watchmen is, in my opinion, better than any number of great novels, but it's not a fucking novel; it's also better than any number of great paintings, movies, albums, and so forth.)

So: Watchmen is really fucking good. It's not my personal favorite work in the comics medium, but I (neophyte fan yet) haven't yet read anything that I would critically argue surpassed it. The trailer also looks pretty good; I'm not crazy about some of the aesthetic updates in the costuming, but several of the shots are ripped straight from the panels as drawn by Dave Gibbons. I'm also, a priori, impressed that they chose to keep the period setting. However, first we can turn to the author, Alan Moore, who is famously curmudgeonly about his work being turned into movies, but if you'd written V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all highly acclaimed works in the comics medium, and watched them get turned into, well, V for Vendetta, From Hell, and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you'd be a curmudgeon too. Moore: "You get people saying, 'Oh, yes, Watchmen is very cinematic,' when actually it's not. It's almost the exact opposite of cinematic...I didn't design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn't." He's, oh, at least 95% right about that.

I should also say that if they actually manage to get the ending from the book into a major theatrical release, I'll have to tip my hat to them regardless of how shitty the movie might otherwise be. I don't believe they'll do it, but I guess I could be wrong. Supposedly the ending scripted and shot is faithful to the book, but I wouldn't be surprised if the studio "tinkered" with it between now and March. Let me put it this way, in no uncertain terms: I'm fairly certain that if they faithfully reproduce the true ending to Watchmen it will be the most unsettling, morally confounding, dark, potentially divisive conclusion to a (semi) major Hollywood film. Ever.

But anyway: Watchmen was twelve issues of 32 pages apiece. Total of 384 pages. Out of those 384 pages, 46 are primarily prose text (with some illustration), non-story elements inserted at the end of each issue which enrich the overall texture of the work and provide some background, but I guess you could skip them and not miss anything you "needed to know". So that's 338 pages of actual comic. Out of those 338 pages, roughly twelve to fifteen pages' worth tell the intertextual "Tale of the Black Freighter," which is being animated for a feature on the DVD but excised from the theatrical release. This comic-within-the-comic is thematically and aesthetically tied into the rest of the work and comments on it, but you can cut it out and, again, "not miss anything". Let's say we've got an even 320 pages of comic left. I would have guessed that it took about a minute on average to faithfully reproduce the action and/or dialogue of a page, which would leave us with 320 minutes, or 5 hours and 20 minutes, of film. However, I'm obsessive enough on this point that I've actually, on several different occasions, acted out one or more of the twelve chapters, trying to be honest to what I think it would take up if you filmed everything (and, look, in Watchmen, and really in anything of Watchmen's caliber, in my opinion, in any genre or medium, everything is important). I came up with about 20 minutes per chapter, which is a little shorter than the real content of a 30-minute program on network TV (22 minutes and [I think] change, by standard; the "hour" is canonically something like 44:20 or 44:40). That would translate to a total of 240 minutes, or 4 hours. I do think I probably short-changed what you'd need to make some of the quieter passages work effectively. But let's say 4 hours; Zack Snyder's first cut was apparently three hours, and to make the film more topical he introduced a subplot about energy resources. So we're already short of my proposed time for a faithful adaptation and yet there's been other material added. The final cut is supposedly going to be 145 minutes long. That paces out to twelve minutes per chapter. I'm really not kidding about the time it takes to do this justice.

So if Zack Snyder loooooves this material so much, why is he cutting it in half? If he wants to make a movie (and not, say, a miniseries) that reflects his love for this material, why not write and direct his own script where he touches on the things about Watchmen that are important to him? Because Hollywood wouldn't want to bankroll some newly created "superhero" movie? If everyone who's read Watchmen goes to see this movie in theaters twice it will not break even; I can't believe that a clever marketing campaign couldn't create comparable buzz for a movie with no pre-existing source material. Why not just write a fucking movie that captures what you love about this comic in a format and length that works for film? Why butcher the thing you're so in love with you just had to make it into a movie, even if that means you can't make almost HALF of it into a movie?

Sighs.

Apparently I'm trying to turn this into the Most Under-Qualified Comics Blog on the Internets.

I haven't yet seen The Dark Knight. I very very much want to. I want to enjoy it to a degree that's almost painful and probably guarantees disappointment; the last film I wanted to see this badly, The Departed, was a monumental let down because, basically, it wasn't the best movie I'd ever seen. It's a good, strong film, but it should have been my favorite movie of all time (that cast, that setting, that subject matter, that director). What I do want to express to the void, here, are two reactions I have to the cycle of reading online reviews and then reading comments on them.

(1) You cannot post a negative review of the movie, even a mildly critical one, without being flooded by, literally, dozens to hundreds of comments, about half of them anonymous, from people who by and large have never previously commented on your blog. It's really upsetting, especially because these comments so routinely whirl around nothing but insult and idiocy. If you wrote a negative review of the movie it's because you're trying to get attention for being contrary, or because you know nothing about film and aren't qualified to be a reviewer, possibly both. It's also quite likely that you abused your thesaurus in the composition of your "review" and aren't aware that masturbating over the dictionary doesn't constitute film criticism.

You think I'm joking about the characterization here; I'm not. This is the clearest example yet of the various iterations of the equation that "normal person + opinion + internet + anonymity = fuckwad."

(2) Many of the reviews evince some levels of ignorance about Batman or the history of the character and his characterization. There are a lot of reviews which seem to question the darkness of the film (often in relation to the question I'm still not getting into about the value of trying to make superhero comics realistic and/or take them seriously) or question the presentation of the character. Look: for better or worse there is no unitary "Batman" characterization. The character first appeared in May, 1939, and in the 69 years of publication history since then there have been at least five major interpretations presented in the comics, let alone the tie-in media:

(a) Batman as ruthless vigilante in pulp crime stories w/semi-frequent supernatural overtones. This is the character as introduced in 1939, a Batman who occasionally kills people (!) and on a regular basis semi-advertantly causes their deaths, and is happy to watch them die without helping them (!!!). The comics are crude and brightly colored, but the morality on display here is, somewhat childishly, much darker than any presentation of the character since. I've just bought a book that collects the first year or so of Batman stories; I haven't yet gotten to the first issue of Batman itself, which introduces the Joker, but I'm running through his initial appearances in Detective Comics. In the first ten stories (including one two-parter for eleven different appearances) he: knocks a guy into an acid tank which almost certainly kills him, kicks another dude off a roof, may or may not kill someone when he snares their neck with a lasso, breaks a guy's neck with a kick, kills two vampires, is semi-responsible for someone getting killed by a death-ray, causes someone's plane to crash into a bay, where it presumably kills him, causes a guy's car to crash and go over the side of a bridge, presumably killing him, throws a man onto another man's sword which may or may not kill him, throws a small but heavy statue at a guy's head which knocks him out a window and kills him, allows someone to get stabbed to death so he doesn't blow his cover, and punches a dude so hard that he falls backward onto a sword which had previously been run through a door. That's, in the most expansive counting, thirteen deaths (including the vampires) that are directly or indirectly Batman's fault in one year of publication, which is probably more deahts of that sort than appeared in all the Batman comics of the 60s combined. I'm glad Batman was revised away from being the sort of guy who's happy to punch a guy into a vat of acid and call it "a fitting end for his kind" - the dialogue isn't so much with the goodness, here - but there are dark, dark roots to the character.

(b) Batman as campy adventurer with lots of supernatural/silly foes. This was a big influence on the Adam West TV show, dominated much of the 50s, and this is where everything Batman uses has a Bat-prefix, he's got a Bat-dog, etc. All but one or two of the Batman comics I read as a kid were originally my dad's, and half of those fell into this category.

(c) Batman as the world's greatest detective, in somewhat more grounded stories with a darker tone but still relatively kid-appropriate. The fantasy aspects as such are cut way back and there's a lot of Batman saying things like, "Hmm, this tire tread can only be found on Ford automobiles manufactured between 1957 and 1959!" Subsequent Batman-as-detective representations sadly tend to get away from the investigative heritage the creators, especially in this era, had him share with Holmes and Poirot, and for the past twenty years his detective skills are largely based on knowing who to beat up for information which will lead him to the next guy out of whom he can beat some knowledge. This presentation was prevalent in the 60s and maybe the 70s, and constitutes much of the rest of the comics I read as a kid.

(d) Batman as superhero in the DC tradition of superheroes; this is a thread that runs throughout the history of the character, but probably came to the fore in the 70s, which was apparently (I'm less personally familiar with this era) when the character started being brought out of the confines of Gotham and made more of a worldwide figure. Though not superpowered, this is the Batman who's on par with Superman and Wonder Woman inside the fictional world of the comics, and though I just said he came to the fore in the 1970s, this is also how I think of the Batman who showed up in various crossover, Justice League type titles. Comics genius Grant Morrison refers to this Bruce Wayne as a globetrotting hairy-chested love god. My personal take on Batman is a combination of (c) and (d) with a judicious smattering of:

(e) Frank Miller's Batman, and the semi-regrettable twenty years of post-Miller influence that have largely dominated the character since. This is an attempt to take Batman dark dark dark again. And he is dark - if we think of what I've said about talking the comics seriously and at face value, what happened to Bruce Wayne is superdark, and the decision to funnel his rage into a hopeless quest to defeat Crime in the abstract speaks to some serious mental imbalances.* However, Frank Miller's monumental The Dark Knight Returns - which is not a story set in the DC continuity - is about a Batman at the end of his life, and even Miller himself seems to have ignored that going forward. Batman in TDKR is broken and bitter and nasty, because he's been choking on his own rage for at least the decade since he "retired". There's no reason to believe that this is what he was like thirty years ago, but that's the direction the character was taken in the wake of this story. The idea becomes that Batman is the real man and Bruce Wayne is the alter-ego, and the many voices who deride this characterization say (funny, true) things like "Batman's superpower is being more badassed than anyone else" and "Batman's true power is being a massive dick." I, personally, like the idea of a Bruce Wayne who's idly given some thought to what he'd do if for some reason all his superpowered friends went bad. I don't, personally, like the idea of a Batman who's actually developed plans for how he'd defeat Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, The Green Lantern, and all the rest. It's a little too much like the idea that the US continues to maintain plans for invading Canada - you know, just in case.

So who's the "real" Batman? Even as a fictional character, there isn't a "real" Batman in the way that there's a "real" Sherlock Holmes or a "real" Quentin Compson or whomever. That the Batman portrayed in one movie or the other doesn't match the reviewer's conception of the who the character is cannot be considered a failure of the film. There is no Ür-Batman to compare to, so the films' portrayals must be considered on their own merits as they relate to their own goals.

* Some, maybe lots, of people don't like this idea either, considering it part and parcel of the unpleasant notion that Bruce Wayne is the mask and the real man is the psycho vigilante who roams the streets dealing out nonlethal but highly unpleasant violence. I'm OK with it as long as it's not pushed too hard; the Joker is enough irredeemable psychopath for one story. Someone suggested a storyline where while investigating a murder a young detective never finds out that Bruce Wayne is Batman but does find out that Wayne's actually got his fingers all over Gotham in highly questionable ways, with the implication that Wayne's real goal isn't an ethically questionable and practically unreasonable quest to end crime, but an ethically questionable and practically achievable quest to turn Gotham into the sort of city that no longer needs a Batman. It's a neat idea. I like my Bruce Wayne pretty much how Christian Bale presents him in Batman Begins - clearly not 100% psychologically healthy, but a man doing constant war with his demons, never consumed by them.