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Are you spoiler-safe for Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and The Dark Knight? Did one or both of them make you angry with rage, even as you cooed and petted them? Did you notice how they're practically the same movie, except completely different?
I realize how pretentious of me it is to say that most people didn’t get Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but I do. But I just saw so many people talking about what a clever inversion it was of good vs. evil, or referring to it as a straight-up origin story of a villain, whereas I think the really clever aspect of it got mostly missed. The story has jack to do with good or evil; in fact, it’s explicitly about how incredibly meaningless those terms are. What does signify, in the DHSAB universe, is people as a collective vs. the individual.
Dr. Horrible is unique in his little world by virtue of *having a perspective on the world.* Captain Hammer in his narcissistic way and Penny in her kindly way are both, as Dr. H says, treating the symptoms – they’re looking at life in isolation. Am I awesome? Will you sign this petition to open a shelter? They’re not critical of anything. Hammer is a Big Fucking Winner, and he likes things exactly the way they are. Penny’s characterization is kind of subtle – you have to listen carefully to the lyrics she sings in her timid, little-girl voice – but she’s clearly someone who’s wrestled with sadness and disillusionment just like Dr. H, but her disillusionment only barely extends beyond the bounds of her own life. Once she’s being wooed by Captain Hammer, as far as she’s concerned, the world is suddenly a better place – “finally becoming wise,” which seems obvious to her because she herself is happier. Both of them are people who want, themselves, to be happy – they’re ordinary in that way; they’re just like everyone else. (Penny is smart enough to be slightly troubled by that viewpoint – she is *not* as happy as she feels like she ought to be, but she doesn’t understand the source of the disconnect, and she dies without doing so.)
Dr. Horrible is a ball of outrage and despair. His enmity with Captain Hammer isn’t because one of them is good and one of them is evil, it’s because Dr. H hates and resents the fact that *no one but him* seems able to see how self-serving and petty Captain Hammer is, what a half-hearted sham his “heroism” really is. Dr. Horrible wants a world of truth, however ugly it is; he doesn’t want to kill or get rich, really, he wants to be heard when he screams about what’s wrong with the world, and what drives him insane is that he knows he can’t scream loud enough to make that happen. Even as he’s on the point of assassinating Hammer, he looks around the room and is haunted by the reality that no one will see why he’s doing this, no one can hear him. He’s just distant thunder, in spite of the fact that he has truth on his side.
If you identify with that description, I wouldn’t be surprised. Most comic books have an underlying conservative ethos (more on that in a minute); DHSAB subverts that into the outraged scream of the progressive soul. The fix is in, your Important Men are selfish and false, nobody wants to hear the truth, people don’t understand anything but fear and are easily manipulated by shiny, pretty things and the lies that the talking heads feed them from the tv screen. Think I’m reading too much into this? Remember that DHSAB was written as Joss Whedon’s WGA strike project, and remember that he is the union organizer who famously warned people in the last days of the strike not to trust the men of power, and not to forgive them. This story is absolutely a screed about helplessness in the face of power that, corrupt or not, is still in power – and about a world where most people just won’t or can’t see it.
Captain Hammer’s act 3 song is an incredibly twisted piece of satire that cuts several ways at once. Everyone’s a hero in their own way? Well, we’re supposed to want that, aren’t we? That’s democracy, that’s empowerment, that’s populism. Yes, We Can! Yes, *you* can change things – sort of, a little bit. Less than the Important Men, but you matter, too! It’s something we want desperately to believe, and something that seems impossible to attack on moral grounds. And yet, and yet. Look who’s selling you this vision of empowerment. Look who wants you to believe it, and ask yourself, as you go about performing your small personal heroics, whose interests are served by fixating you in the minutiae of your own life, in showing you that your place is to be a hero *in your own way.* Not in theirs. The first half of act 3 is daring you to look up at the podium and ask yourself *who benefits from individualism?* And if what you see is that it’s the individuals of privilege – the special people, the talented, the fortunate, the blessed – then who is everyone else sitting in the peanut gallery, raptly attentive and swaying in their seats to the sound of the Important Man passing down his wisdom? Really let yourself think about that scene, and then see how soundly you sleep tonight. About like Dr. Horrible, I bet.
I think the reason that Penny’s death has raised so much ire and strikes people so much the wrong way is that what it does is derail DHSAB from this purpose, its actual narrative through-line. So, what have we learned today? Dr. Horrible makes a dreadful mistake when he loses control of his anger and becomes violent for the first time, because violence begets violence, live by the sword die by the sword, blah blah blah. His punishment for crossing the line is that he literally and figuratively murders the best part of himself – his human connection to Penny, and also the simple part of himself who seemed decent and had an inner life and cared about the truth. There is no more Billy, the nice guy from the laundromat; there’s only Dr. Horrible. How are we as an audience supposed to react to that? Five-sixths of the film is about the righteousness of fury in the face of pettiness and corruption and a system where bad people profit off the foolish and intimidate the ones who can see. The last sixth is a cautionary tale that suggests that Billy would’ve been better off if he’d left well enough alone and kept bringing Penny frozen yogurt. They don’t fit, which is why Penny’s death seems so unnecessary and arbitrary: from a narrative point of view, *it is.* It’s lazy. It’s an emotional manipulation that allows the story to step sideways and avoid carrying to any logical conclusion. Essentially, she dies because the writers had come up with a story too harrowing for them to end honestly. Instead the end it with a ball of cliches – the too-good-for-this-world woman, the pyrrhic victory of achieving worldly success over personal contentment, violence begets violence blah fucking blah – that are emotionally effective and artistically executed enough to distract us from the basic fact that nobody knows the answer to this. Nobody, even those of us who can see it happening, really know what to do next.
But what the hell, it’s still less offensive than The Dark Knight.
Now, as an action movie, I liked DK as much as the next fangirl; I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Bat-cycle fast! Aaron Eckhart pretty! But I’m going to punch the next nerd who tells me that it’s “the year’s smartest summer film” right in the face, because the plot is the most morally bankrupt thing I’ve seen come out of comic books since that one Heroes for Hire cover. For Christ’s sake, the whole emotional payoff of the movie is that Batman and Gordon collude to cover up the crimes of the city’s DA because they think it will make Gotham City *feel better* if they can continue to believe that some people are just too radiantly good to cause harm. If that makes any goddamn sense to you whatsoever, I hereby revoke your right to complain about anything your own government chooses to keep from you because you’ll feel better if you just don’t know.
But under the “your Important Men are acting in your best interests, we swear – just look over there, please” layer of bullshit, there’s another, sicker layer of wtfery, and that’s the fetishization of the Lone Hero, the One Man Who Can Save Us. The movie is all about whether or not Bruce Wayne dares to surrender that role to Harvey Dent, which everyone involves seems to agree would be much better, if it could be done. To deconstruct: if we could manage it, it would be much better if the One Man Who Can Save Us were an elected lawman rather than a rich vigilante. Which...okay, given those options, sure. But what kind of person still seriously believes that Saving Us is some kind of legitimate job, and we just have to pick the guy who’s best at it? Okay, that’s rhetorical. Plenty of people believe that, and it’s what keeps Jesus Christ and presidential campaigns in business. But at best, it’s a hyperconservative worldview that seeks a return to some kind of imaginary top-down utopia, be it the family patriarch, the philosopher-king, or Caesar single-handedly defending the gates of Rome. To buy into the Dark vs. White Knight, you have to be the kind of person who can swallow the whole concept of “the hero Gotham needs and/or deserves,” in order to get to the paramount importance of preserving Gotham’s faith in that hero *even if said faith is built entirely on misinformation and lies.*
And that’s what really enrages my inner Dr. Horrible. The filmmakers don’t give a fuck that it’s a lie. The characters don’t give a fuck that it’s a lie. Hell, the audience doesn’t give a fuck that it’s a lie. Our faith should be “rewarded” (what a patronizing fucking statement *that* is), and if our faith was in bullshit to begin with – if we had faith in the concept that good men never do bad things, that pain and suffering don’t truly touch the honorable soul, and that sheer, self-serving villainy is responsible for all the suffering in the world – well, it’s still better for us to have the comfort of our misplaced faith than it is for us to possess the truth. That’s the worst, most vicious, most dangerous message I can frankly imagine coming out of a 200 million dollar summer blockbuster. That couldn’t be more corrosive to true human potential if Chris Nolan were getting a paycheck from Satan himself.
I Believe in Harvey Dent? Sure, I do. I absolutely believed in him as a character (Ledger’s performance was amazing and I’m glad to see it being praised, but sorry to see it overshadowing Eckhart’s equally amazing work in this movie), as his *actual character.* The guy who wanted to do right, but didn’t know how to handle the overwhelming reality of his own powerlessness. The Joker’s goal was to break Dent by showing him that you can’t create a world that excludes pain no matter how hard you work at it (interestingly, the Joker’s mental narrative for the world reminds me of nothing so much as the theme of Serenity), and thereby to render Dent’s life, wholly devoted to the work of saving the world, a meaningless disaster. And that’s pretty much how it went. Plenty of people lose loved ones, even in terrible, vicious ways, without becoming Batman villains, but those people are able to release their sense of control, to accept that life’s just *like* that sometimes, and that suffering may or may not have meaning, but the important thing about suffering is that it’s unavoidable. Harvey Dent ultimately couldn’t accept that; his belief that suffering *should* be unavoidable, that it’s something that should not happen to people who make their own luck, made him fragile in the face of the entropy that the Joker embodies. I believe that just fine. I think that’s a story that should be told, inside and outside of the Batman universe. I believe that we’ll all survive this world just a little bit more intact if we learn a little humility about the usefulness of our sense of order in the face of the universe’s chaos and the ability to suffer without losing sight of who we are. That’s a good story, and that’s the story that Batman and Jim Gordon don’t think you and I are fit for.
Oh, and just to add insult to injury, I think the story’s most vicious twist wasn’t the grossly cliched murder of Rachel Dawes, but the murder of Bat!Brian. There was a lot of talk in Batman Begins of “inspiring” people, but this movie gives us the one man who seems to have been genuinely inspired, and it treats him like shit. He’s pudgy and sort of nebbishy and he can’t kick ass like Bruce Wayne and he doesn’t have a mad scientist on the payroll, so it’s safe to treat him with contempt, even though he’s out there trying to do the exact same thing that Bruce is, with one hell of a lot less chance of surviving. They made him whine his question about what makes him different from Bruce, and they gave Bruce some kind of snappy comeback that, I can’t recall, had something to do with being a nebbish with bad fashion sense? Something that certainly didn’t answer the question, because the only honest answer to it is that in the Batman universe, only one guy gets to be The Guy, that job’s taken, and nobody else should bother showing up. It’s apparently vaguely embarrassing that some people think otherwise. Who do they think they are, anyway?
When Brian dies, he’s in tears, about to be tortured for the world to watch. But when the Joker asks him why he does it, he says that Batman inspired him to live his life in less fear than before. *To the Joker,* he says this. Would you have been able to string a sentence together? Would you have been able to look Heath Ledger’s Joker in the face and say he didn’t deserve your fear?
Everyone’s a hero in their own way? Maybe, maybe not. But that dude was a hero in every last fucking one of them that’s really worth something. I wish that movie hadn’t used him to prove how little we all matter when grand deeds are afoot.
I realize how pretentious of me it is to say that most people didn’t get Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but I do. But I just saw so many people talking about what a clever inversion it was of good vs. evil, or referring to it as a straight-up origin story of a villain, whereas I think the really clever aspect of it got mostly missed. The story has jack to do with good or evil; in fact, it’s explicitly about how incredibly meaningless those terms are. What does signify, in the DHSAB universe, is people as a collective vs. the individual.
Dr. Horrible is unique in his little world by virtue of *having a perspective on the world.* Captain Hammer in his narcissistic way and Penny in her kindly way are both, as Dr. H says, treating the symptoms – they’re looking at life in isolation. Am I awesome? Will you sign this petition to open a shelter? They’re not critical of anything. Hammer is a Big Fucking Winner, and he likes things exactly the way they are. Penny’s characterization is kind of subtle – you have to listen carefully to the lyrics she sings in her timid, little-girl voice – but she’s clearly someone who’s wrestled with sadness and disillusionment just like Dr. H, but her disillusionment only barely extends beyond the bounds of her own life. Once she’s being wooed by Captain Hammer, as far as she’s concerned, the world is suddenly a better place – “finally becoming wise,” which seems obvious to her because she herself is happier. Both of them are people who want, themselves, to be happy – they’re ordinary in that way; they’re just like everyone else. (Penny is smart enough to be slightly troubled by that viewpoint – she is *not* as happy as she feels like she ought to be, but she doesn’t understand the source of the disconnect, and she dies without doing so.)
Dr. Horrible is a ball of outrage and despair. His enmity with Captain Hammer isn’t because one of them is good and one of them is evil, it’s because Dr. H hates and resents the fact that *no one but him* seems able to see how self-serving and petty Captain Hammer is, what a half-hearted sham his “heroism” really is. Dr. Horrible wants a world of truth, however ugly it is; he doesn’t want to kill or get rich, really, he wants to be heard when he screams about what’s wrong with the world, and what drives him insane is that he knows he can’t scream loud enough to make that happen. Even as he’s on the point of assassinating Hammer, he looks around the room and is haunted by the reality that no one will see why he’s doing this, no one can hear him. He’s just distant thunder, in spite of the fact that he has truth on his side.
If you identify with that description, I wouldn’t be surprised. Most comic books have an underlying conservative ethos (more on that in a minute); DHSAB subverts that into the outraged scream of the progressive soul. The fix is in, your Important Men are selfish and false, nobody wants to hear the truth, people don’t understand anything but fear and are easily manipulated by shiny, pretty things and the lies that the talking heads feed them from the tv screen. Think I’m reading too much into this? Remember that DHSAB was written as Joss Whedon’s WGA strike project, and remember that he is the union organizer who famously warned people in the last days of the strike not to trust the men of power, and not to forgive them. This story is absolutely a screed about helplessness in the face of power that, corrupt or not, is still in power – and about a world where most people just won’t or can’t see it.
Captain Hammer’s act 3 song is an incredibly twisted piece of satire that cuts several ways at once. Everyone’s a hero in their own way? Well, we’re supposed to want that, aren’t we? That’s democracy, that’s empowerment, that’s populism. Yes, We Can! Yes, *you* can change things – sort of, a little bit. Less than the Important Men, but you matter, too! It’s something we want desperately to believe, and something that seems impossible to attack on moral grounds. And yet, and yet. Look who’s selling you this vision of empowerment. Look who wants you to believe it, and ask yourself, as you go about performing your small personal heroics, whose interests are served by fixating you in the minutiae of your own life, in showing you that your place is to be a hero *in your own way.* Not in theirs. The first half of act 3 is daring you to look up at the podium and ask yourself *who benefits from individualism?* And if what you see is that it’s the individuals of privilege – the special people, the talented, the fortunate, the blessed – then who is everyone else sitting in the peanut gallery, raptly attentive and swaying in their seats to the sound of the Important Man passing down his wisdom? Really let yourself think about that scene, and then see how soundly you sleep tonight. About like Dr. Horrible, I bet.
I think the reason that Penny’s death has raised so much ire and strikes people so much the wrong way is that what it does is derail DHSAB from this purpose, its actual narrative through-line. So, what have we learned today? Dr. Horrible makes a dreadful mistake when he loses control of his anger and becomes violent for the first time, because violence begets violence, live by the sword die by the sword, blah blah blah. His punishment for crossing the line is that he literally and figuratively murders the best part of himself – his human connection to Penny, and also the simple part of himself who seemed decent and had an inner life and cared about the truth. There is no more Billy, the nice guy from the laundromat; there’s only Dr. Horrible. How are we as an audience supposed to react to that? Five-sixths of the film is about the righteousness of fury in the face of pettiness and corruption and a system where bad people profit off the foolish and intimidate the ones who can see. The last sixth is a cautionary tale that suggests that Billy would’ve been better off if he’d left well enough alone and kept bringing Penny frozen yogurt. They don’t fit, which is why Penny’s death seems so unnecessary and arbitrary: from a narrative point of view, *it is.* It’s lazy. It’s an emotional manipulation that allows the story to step sideways and avoid carrying to any logical conclusion. Essentially, she dies because the writers had come up with a story too harrowing for them to end honestly. Instead the end it with a ball of cliches – the too-good-for-this-world woman, the pyrrhic victory of achieving worldly success over personal contentment, violence begets violence blah fucking blah – that are emotionally effective and artistically executed enough to distract us from the basic fact that nobody knows the answer to this. Nobody, even those of us who can see it happening, really know what to do next.
But what the hell, it’s still less offensive than The Dark Knight.
Now, as an action movie, I liked DK as much as the next fangirl; I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Bat-cycle fast! Aaron Eckhart pretty! But I’m going to punch the next nerd who tells me that it’s “the year’s smartest summer film” right in the face, because the plot is the most morally bankrupt thing I’ve seen come out of comic books since that one Heroes for Hire cover. For Christ’s sake, the whole emotional payoff of the movie is that Batman and Gordon collude to cover up the crimes of the city’s DA because they think it will make Gotham City *feel better* if they can continue to believe that some people are just too radiantly good to cause harm. If that makes any goddamn sense to you whatsoever, I hereby revoke your right to complain about anything your own government chooses to keep from you because you’ll feel better if you just don’t know.
But under the “your Important Men are acting in your best interests, we swear – just look over there, please” layer of bullshit, there’s another, sicker layer of wtfery, and that’s the fetishization of the Lone Hero, the One Man Who Can Save Us. The movie is all about whether or not Bruce Wayne dares to surrender that role to Harvey Dent, which everyone involves seems to agree would be much better, if it could be done. To deconstruct: if we could manage it, it would be much better if the One Man Who Can Save Us were an elected lawman rather than a rich vigilante. Which...okay, given those options, sure. But what kind of person still seriously believes that Saving Us is some kind of legitimate job, and we just have to pick the guy who’s best at it? Okay, that’s rhetorical. Plenty of people believe that, and it’s what keeps Jesus Christ and presidential campaigns in business. But at best, it’s a hyperconservative worldview that seeks a return to some kind of imaginary top-down utopia, be it the family patriarch, the philosopher-king, or Caesar single-handedly defending the gates of Rome. To buy into the Dark vs. White Knight, you have to be the kind of person who can swallow the whole concept of “the hero Gotham needs and/or deserves,” in order to get to the paramount importance of preserving Gotham’s faith in that hero *even if said faith is built entirely on misinformation and lies.*
And that’s what really enrages my inner Dr. Horrible. The filmmakers don’t give a fuck that it’s a lie. The characters don’t give a fuck that it’s a lie. Hell, the audience doesn’t give a fuck that it’s a lie. Our faith should be “rewarded” (what a patronizing fucking statement *that* is), and if our faith was in bullshit to begin with – if we had faith in the concept that good men never do bad things, that pain and suffering don’t truly touch the honorable soul, and that sheer, self-serving villainy is responsible for all the suffering in the world – well, it’s still better for us to have the comfort of our misplaced faith than it is for us to possess the truth. That’s the worst, most vicious, most dangerous message I can frankly imagine coming out of a 200 million dollar summer blockbuster. That couldn’t be more corrosive to true human potential if Chris Nolan were getting a paycheck from Satan himself.
I Believe in Harvey Dent? Sure, I do. I absolutely believed in him as a character (Ledger’s performance was amazing and I’m glad to see it being praised, but sorry to see it overshadowing Eckhart’s equally amazing work in this movie), as his *actual character.* The guy who wanted to do right, but didn’t know how to handle the overwhelming reality of his own powerlessness. The Joker’s goal was to break Dent by showing him that you can’t create a world that excludes pain no matter how hard you work at it (interestingly, the Joker’s mental narrative for the world reminds me of nothing so much as the theme of Serenity), and thereby to render Dent’s life, wholly devoted to the work of saving the world, a meaningless disaster. And that’s pretty much how it went. Plenty of people lose loved ones, even in terrible, vicious ways, without becoming Batman villains, but those people are able to release their sense of control, to accept that life’s just *like* that sometimes, and that suffering may or may not have meaning, but the important thing about suffering is that it’s unavoidable. Harvey Dent ultimately couldn’t accept that; his belief that suffering *should* be unavoidable, that it’s something that should not happen to people who make their own luck, made him fragile in the face of the entropy that the Joker embodies. I believe that just fine. I think that’s a story that should be told, inside and outside of the Batman universe. I believe that we’ll all survive this world just a little bit more intact if we learn a little humility about the usefulness of our sense of order in the face of the universe’s chaos and the ability to suffer without losing sight of who we are. That’s a good story, and that’s the story that Batman and Jim Gordon don’t think you and I are fit for.
Oh, and just to add insult to injury, I think the story’s most vicious twist wasn’t the grossly cliched murder of Rachel Dawes, but the murder of Bat!Brian. There was a lot of talk in Batman Begins of “inspiring” people, but this movie gives us the one man who seems to have been genuinely inspired, and it treats him like shit. He’s pudgy and sort of nebbishy and he can’t kick ass like Bruce Wayne and he doesn’t have a mad scientist on the payroll, so it’s safe to treat him with contempt, even though he’s out there trying to do the exact same thing that Bruce is, with one hell of a lot less chance of surviving. They made him whine his question about what makes him different from Bruce, and they gave Bruce some kind of snappy comeback that, I can’t recall, had something to do with being a nebbish with bad fashion sense? Something that certainly didn’t answer the question, because the only honest answer to it is that in the Batman universe, only one guy gets to be The Guy, that job’s taken, and nobody else should bother showing up. It’s apparently vaguely embarrassing that some people think otherwise. Who do they think they are, anyway?
When Brian dies, he’s in tears, about to be tortured for the world to watch. But when the Joker asks him why he does it, he says that Batman inspired him to live his life in less fear than before. *To the Joker,* he says this. Would you have been able to string a sentence together? Would you have been able to look Heath Ledger’s Joker in the face and say he didn’t deserve your fear?
Everyone’s a hero in their own way? Maybe, maybe not. But that dude was a hero in every last fucking one of them that’s really worth something. I wish that movie hadn’t used him to prove how little we all matter when grand deeds are afoot.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-24 11:26 pm (UTC)From:I had a very different take on Dr. Horrible, though, centered, I think, around my disagreement with this:
His punishment for crossing the line is that he literally and figuratively murders the best part of himself – his human connection to Penny, and also the simple part of himself who seemed decent and had an inner life and cared about the truth. There is no more Billy, the nice guy from the laundromat; there’s only Dr. Horrible.
From the start, Billy only struck me as the kind of "nice guy" who whines about how he might as well be a dick to women, because they never actually go for a nice guy. He didn't have a connection to Penny--he just fantasized about an ideal of her, ignored her while she was talking to him, or lectured her. Granted, there were little glimmers of chemistry in their scene, but it was obvious from the start that his desire to be a real, certified bad guy (approved by the guy who rules the bad guys with an iron hoof!) outweighs his desire to connect with her. And, sure, he has a point of a sort when he says that homelessness is a symptom of a larger problem--but I'd argue that doing something concrete in one's own community is the best way to do something about it.
It's also understandable, in its way, that Dr. Horrible is disgusted when Penny swoons for Captain Hammer, since he *did* in fact, throw her aside into the garbage, the better to pose for his "heroic" rescue. But Hammer's skeeviness doesn't mean Billy is any better--Billy just wants the fawning Penny's bestowing on Hammer bestowed on him. He's pouting about how he's not getting credit for being the one to stop the van--with no recognition that he's the one who *started* the van, which would in fact have run Penny over if Hammer hadn't thrown her out of the way. He stopped the van, but it would have been too late, which he doesn't even seem to notice at all--and I'd argue that's because Penny, as a person in her own right, isn't actually important to him. All that's important to him is getting Penny to see him the way he wants to be seen.
Similarly, just as I don't think Billy was a nice guy who had a human connection to Penny, my take is that Dr. Horrible didn't care about the truth. He just wants to get everyone to see *his* truth, by whatever means necessary, and then to become the ruler of it all, because he's sure he knows how to run things better for everyone. To him, an "overhaul of the system" just means "putting the power in different hands"--which happen to be his, the better to pull Penny to his side and bend the world to their will.
I just didn't see him at all as decent--I see his outlook as the kind that inspires totalitarianism. And it's a big reason why I didn't stick with watching the episodes straight through after that bit with the runaway van--I just had no one to sympathize with.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-24 11:38 pm (UTC)From:I agree that one of the (several) problems with Penny was the narrowness of her view--it's so foolish to think the "world is getting wise" just because you're feeling happier and things are going well for you personally. But that's just because "the world" and human nature and all that just doesn't change that much.
Dr. Horrible doesn't have a more accurate view of things. It's just as foolish and narrow for Billy to think the world is getting worse--that everyone's heart is breaking, that humankind has only just recently gone insane--just because he's unhappy and things are going badly for him.
The fact that he uses this as an excuse to let himself go evil, and the fact that it's precipitated by his unjustified possessiveness of a woman he has a crush on, makes me all the less impressed by him.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-26 08:50 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-07-25 02:08 am (UTC)From:I couldn't hear Bruce's line very well in the cinema, but I'm told it was "I'm not wearing hockey pads." (I initially heard "hockey pants" and interpreted it as having something to do with mocking his dress sense as well, but if the other one is correct, I assume the intended meaning was more to do with your other point--Bat!Brian is just a dude, using whatever he had around the house to fight crime, whereas Batman is The Guy.)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-25 06:38 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-07-25 07:05 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2008-07-25 02:48 pm (UTC)From:TDK: I disagree with many of your points. There are a few reasons why the film is so intent on hero-worshipping, not the least of which is culturally endemic. Western culture, particularly American culture, is obsessed with the concept of the hero. It's why we have superhero comics in the first place. Teamwork, gradual improvements, and rule of law are not sexy, but a lone warrior battling injustice is.
Someone- possibly Churchill, but I can't recall- once said, "Government secrecy is necessary. People must never know what their government does during wartime." I stand by this statement. People are all different- some can handle everything and some can handle nothing, but most are inbetween. If the people knew that their government had to lie, cheat, steal, kill, torture, and spy to keep them safe- and make no mistake, every government does this, and they must- many of them would not be able to handle it. It is not an approval of government dishonesty, but an acceptance of human fragility.
Gotham was a city on the edge of self-destruction. They had no hope, no optimism, and then out of nowhere they received their hero: Harvey Dent. They put their faith in him and believed in him, and for a minute there it looked like things really could get better. If Dent- their sole shining light, their only hope- was crushed, it's very possible that the people of Gotham would have lost all hope- even the capacity for hope- and the city of Gotham could very well have been lost forever. It's for this reason, and no other, that Batman and Gordon decided to lie to the people. Batman was equally loved and hated, and as a shadowy and vicious figure he could take the hate. Harvey Dent was clean and white as snow, and damage to his image would have had catastrophic results for the people of Gotham. There's a point at which every leader must decide whether his people need the dirty truth or a white lie, and if the truth will do more harm than good, I feel the leader is justified in telling the lie. After all, the leader is not a conduit of information, he is a guardian and a servant, and his sole purpose is to help the people.
Then there's Brian. I think the purpose of him and his comrades was to show the fundamental flaw of vigilantism: that if often hurts more than it helps. Brian was certainly brave, but it might have been bravery that strayed into the realm of stupidity. What really makes Batman special, aside from his psychosis and his drive and more than his gear, is his training. He doesn't just want to fight crime, he can. I think this is an important lesson: not everyone is right to be a warrior, just as not everyone is right to be a teacher or a leader or a doctor. Having untrained Brian try his hand at crime-fighting is like having him try his hand at surgery- don't. Professionals are there to do what they are trained and equipped to do, and if you try to do their job you will only make things worse. That being said, I agree that his character was not treated respectfully. He should have been made less pathetic and more sympathetic.
However, his response to the Joker is nothing special in my eyes. People react three ways when faced with inevitable and unescapable death: ignorance, terror, or defiance. None of them are particularly related to bravery. Certainly he was scared, but he also probably knew that he wasn't going to make it out of there, and thus he had nothing to lose. He could say and do anything and it wouldn't matter. Would I have been able to say something like that? Probably- but so would you. Once the mind accepts the coming pain and death, things change and one acts very differently.
(continued below)
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Date: 2008-07-25 02:48 pm (UTC)From:Personally, I'm not big on heroes or heroism. Trying and failing is not very attractive in my eyes, and that's why I like Batman in the first place. He doesn't always succeed. Heroes are defined by their actions, not their intentions, and thus Brian is not a hero in my opinion. His crowning achievement was to attempt an endeavor far outside his abilities and fail predictability. That indicates a flawed objective, poor planning and equally poor execution, and that is not terribly impressive. Batman is a hero, most of the time, because he gets shit done. It is important the we make this distinction: celebrating people who try and fail is celebrating failure. We must celebrate the results, not the attempts to achieve them.
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Date: 2008-07-25 10:29 pm (UTC)From:That said, I'm in complete agreement about The Dark Knight (though I still liked it as a piece of storytelling). I walked away from the ending dissatisfied and perplexed, feeling that I'd just been told that what people need is a handsome white man to lead them, even if his perfection is a lie. And this just after we're shown ordinary, and decidedly imperfect, people, choosing not to play the Joker's game, no matter how scared and petty they are - the idea that these people need to believe in the lie of Harvey Dent is indeed offensive.
I did, however, feel that the fate of Brian the BatGroupy was treated with all due horror and grief, and that the narrative did respect him for his courage in the face of certain torture and death.
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Date: 2008-07-26 06:06 pm (UTC)From:Yes, this! And it's not the only place in the movie that we see Gothamites making that choice, on one scale or another. The narrative works as hard as I think it could to make Harvey as crucial as Batman & Gordon say he is--but in the end, it's still saying "The people deserve to be lied to." This is bad regardless of context, and after the movie we've just seen, it really doesn't fly.
And do the people deserve and/or need to be lied to because they're not strong enough to handle the truth, or because they're good and they need a beautiful lie as a reward for being good, or what? I've, um, seen it three times now and that final speech seems less coherent every time...
(I agree with you about the way the narrative treats Brian, too.)
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Date: 2008-07-31 02:46 am (UTC)From:Also, because I promised him I'd link you, one of my BFF's opinions on Batman:
http://users.livejournal.com/__marcelo/400505.html#cutid1
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Date: 2008-08-06 08:02 pm (UTC)From:I despised The Dark Knight and, I know I'm differently brained than most, but I was beginning to think I was the only one who did. I sat there watching it, arms crossed and glaring and I said, holy shit, I'm Rodney McKaying at this movie. You actually listed a few reasons to hate it that I was too busy, well hating it, to notice.
Dr. Horrible, I adore even if it isn't perfect. I like your take on the ending - it's got merit, though I think a large part of the motivation to kill Penny off was the whole, 'I'm Joss Whedon, I do it because I can' thing.
I'm caught up on the idea that Bruce Wayne sacrifices his Batman identity, while Dr. Horrible sacrifices his Billy identity. The question is, is either sacrifice worth anything?
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Date: 2008-08-19 02:56 am (UTC)From:You really nailed what was behind the creepy wrongness of TDK for me (apart from the pretentious monologue concluding with the title of the thing - an epic example of creepy & wrong.)
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Date: 2008-08-22 04:11 am (UTC)From:Um...oh yes. This entry caught my eye in particular, and I think you're kind of awesome, and I've friended you and I hope you don't mind!
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Date: 2008-08-24 12:31 am (UTC)From:For one thing, I think you oversimplify DHSAB more than necessary. I think it IS a villain origin story, and a parable of frustration with The Man, AND a clever inversion of good vs. evil, and above all a pretty tight & snappy little musical tragicomedy. Please don't try to fit the characters into little ideological types and then complain when they don't conform to those types. If Joss Whedon & Co. had wanted to say "Wake up sheeple! Society sucks! Burn the world!" they could have just put up some graffiti.
As for TDK:
- Batman & Gordon don't cover up Dent's crimes to make the city "feel better". They do it because they're both trying to fight crime, and by preserving Dent's reputation they increase the chances that others will be inspired to step up and join the fight. It's a legitimate - if somewhat sneaky - tactic, considering their objective. Consider: Martin Luther King Jr was a serial adulterer, but we don't exactly shout it from the rooftops. Do you think it would help the civil rights movement if we did?
- Nobody's trying to Save Us All in some grand metaphysical sense. Gotham has a disastrous crime problem, and Batman et al are trying to fix it. Nothing wrong with that. The reason Batman does so as a vigilante is because the official channels were and are corrupt and ineffectual, which is another problem he's trying to fix so as to render himself unnecessary. I agree the movie overdoes it with all the "hero Gotham needs/deserves" rhetoric, but the bottom line is that there are real problems and nobody else is trying to solve them.
- Batman's "snappy comeback" ("I'm not wearing hockey pads") wasn't contemptuous. He was warning BatBrian that whatever his good intentions, he was not equipped for vigilantism and if he kept it up he was going to get killed, which turned out to be 100% accurate. A few blubbery, semi-defiant last words don't make BatBrian a hero; he ignored a reasonable warning and paid the wholly predictable cost. Incidentally, I agree it's a shame we aren't all billionaires with ninja training, but that's the breaks.
- Tacitly claiming that Batman is a totalitarian Ubermensch and a "morally bankrupt" menace is a phenomenon anticipated decades ago in The Dark Knight Returns. It was satirical back then (because some people can even find nits to pick about someone who dedicates his entire life to fighting crime) but just seems tired now.
Very good essay
Date: 2008-09-20 03:32 am (UTC)From:Brief thoughts: I do agree with viertalla's first comment on The Dark Knight--think of LBJ using JFK's assassination to pass major civil rights legislation. Nobody was talking about JFK's flaws then, either. Sometimes, the truth *is* too much for people to bear (and yes, who are Batman & Gordon to be making that call in the first place...but I don't think it was necessarily a bad one.)
As for Dr. Horrible/Penny's death:
(SPOILER ALERT FOR BUFFY S2, BUFFY S6, ANGEL S5, SERENITY, BUFFY COMIC BOOK S8)
Joss Whedon likes to kill off his most innocent characters in often cruel ways to remind us that, unlike in other TV shows, no one is safe. Period. See Buffy, season 2 with Jenny Calendar, Buffy season 6 with Tara, Angel season 5 with Fred, Serenity with Shepherd Book and Wash, even the Buffy season 8 comic book (not saying who.) So Penny was pretty much doomed from the moment she walked onscreen. This may indeed muddle Dr. Horrible's anti-heroism/pro-reality message, but I agree with the commenter above who stated that Dr. Horrible was an imperfect messenger, at best. I don't think the writers got scared of their message--I think they were always going to screw with the tone.