FALLING SKIES RECAP 6: MOLON LABE

FALLING SKIES RECAP 6: MOLON LABE

Here's where we start to hope. Here's where we begin fervently, passionately hoping that two outstanding back-to-back episodes of Falling Skies make a trend, possibly the shape of things to come. I say this fully aware that the episode prior to these two was flawed and even irritating. But Molon Labe was excellent television; it was exciting, it was (as I so often say about Falling Skies) surprising, it was absolutely ruthless in its adherence to the realities of the world it is building, and it was full of promise for future episodes. If this show keeps fulfilling its potential, then I will feel genuinely rewarded for slogging through a very uneven first season and several episodes in Season 2 that were almost-but-not-quite, in terms of what excellent televised science fiction could be.

nullMolon Labe cranked the stakes up high. Last week, I noted that we had an excellent episode with no alien creatures at all. This week, there were aliens everywhere, including some sort of creature we've never seen before: a creepy-crawly, gut-wrenching (literally) metal-boring arachnid that may just give me nightmares. We saw other aliens in brand-new contexts as well. We got a clearer look at an Overlord, one of the ten-foot tall "grays" that are running the show, and we see how the other creatures—including Karen, a harnessed human—protect and serve them. And, almost as disturbing as the new spidery things, we saw Karen actually holding one of the giant slug creatures that becomes a harness; a symbiotic alien that merges with and overtakes human teens.

In addition to learning about HORRIBLE SPIDER THINGS and giant slugs, we also learned that the skitter rebellion hinted at in the last episode is real. Skitters are the creepy eight-legged lizardlike foot soldiers of the alien invasion. We recently encountered a skitter ("Redeye") who claimed that some skitters have formed a rebellion against the Overlords, and they wanted to join forces with the human resistance. Naturally, the humans couldn't know whom to trust. Redeye escaped.

Now we know that the Overlord in this episode fears the rebellion, and last week's elaborate ruse to kidnap Ben—our hero's formerly-harnessed middle son—was only done in order to gather information about the uprising, which corroborates Redeye's claims. 

Military stakes were high as well. Molon Labe (or Molon Lave) is an Ancient Greek phrase meaning "Come and take them." It was famously used by King Leonidas I of Sparta during the Battle of Thermopylae. He defiantly refused to surrender his army's weapons, although vastly outnumbered. This battle entered popular culture through the film 300.

Our hero, Tom Mason (Noah Wyle), was a history professor before the invasion, and Falling Skies has struggled to present that effectively. At worst, his history leads to a lot of lecture-hall-style speeches about military history and the Meaning Of It All. At best, Mason’s references contextualize the invasion with a deft hand. To me, this falls on the better side; we have a pervasive sense of history surrounding us. Ben mentions Revolutionary War soldiers in an argument with Tom. This makes sense, given their relationship; surely the historian lectured his kids at home, back in the day, and it strengthens the atmosphere of history without shoving it down our throats. (Their arguments this episode had the feeling of a real family’s arguments, and they were quite moving.)

Another such example is Anne describing Jamil as a "Trojan Horse" in the scene below. I warn you, it's a scary scene that will probably give you the creeps, but it's great.

This week we say goodbye to two regular characters, recurring guest stars throughout the season: Jamil (Brandon Jay McLaren), and Boon (Billy Wickman). Jamil was last week's super-mechanic and Lourdes's love interest: Two very strong reasons for thinking he'd stick around. (He was also played by an excellent character actor with real screen presence who previously appeared as the teacher on The Killing). Boon was recently seen getting his ass handed to him by Tom Mason for letting Tom's youngest son, Matt, serve as skitter bait. If you'd flat-out asked me who the writers would kill, I might have allowed Boon as a reasonable choice, but Jamil? No way. He was gradually worming his way into an important and visible spot, there was that romance, he's a bit of eye candy, and he was becoming vital to maintaining vehicles and other machines.

This is smart writing. Even minor characters, if they're important to us, if we know who they are, are shocking to lose, and they let us know this war is very real. A death like Jamil's matters much more than that of a character we didn't know—which is who writers kill off when they're afraid of alienating their audience.

And what a death! What a disturbing, horrifying, my-skin-is-crawling death! Watch it in the video above (if you're not squeamish, that is).

Last season, Lourdes (Seychelle Gabriel) was super-religious and featured in some heavy-handed sequences about faith in the face of devastation. I can imagine the collective television audience tearing out its hair in frustration. Surely even deeply religious people don't want such simplified pablum! This season, we've had one scene of prayer and that's about it. Lourdes has mostly been in the background as Anne's assistant, with some sweet touches of her burgeoning romance with Jamil. Now, with Jamil dead, we see her lose her faith, all at once. This resolves a question: Is Gabriel a bad actress, or was her material last year badly written? I now feel confident that the answer is "bad actress." The wave of bitterness might have seemed compelling in more skilled hands, but not from her. It's a shame to have a weak actress in the middle of things, because otherwise this cast is strong. I love a lot of the small character roles, and knowing that any of them are expendable gives small scenes a "life is precious" quality; I find myself really appreciating these characters.

The writing this week avoided a number of obvious pitfalls. The first was the "helpless people trapped in the basement" scenario. Recall: Tom goes around back to see if the battle out front is a diversion. It is, and he lights oxygen on fire to defeat a mech (mechanized servant of the aliens). The resultant fireball and explosion traps Anne, Lourdes, and Matt in the basement, unbeknownst to Tom.

Now, a number of clichés were just waiting to come to life at this moment. I expected characters to try to outrun a fireball. They didn't. I expected that much of the episode would revolve around a rescue attempt. Perhaps one of the trapped people would be injured, or in desperate straits, or become a pivotal pawn in the battle occurring outside. Mostly, I expected these three to be helpless. After all, they fit the expected trope: Anne is the hero's love interest, Lourdes is a young woman who had just been in a scene that reminded the audience of her young romance, and Matt is a little boy—the hero's little boy. Brilliantly, thrillingly, none of the action played as expected. None of these people were helpless, Anne and Matt were particularly heroic, and it was Lourdes’s male love interest who ended up helpless (and gruesomely dead), not sweet young Lourdes herself.

Tom had another encounter with another chatty alien. Yep. That gets old. This time, the same Overlord who tortured and interrogated him between Seasons 1 and 2 was his prisoner. The Overlord said a few predictable things about humans and their silly ol' sentiment and their screwed-up planet—things that sounded like they'd been written by Gene Roddenberry. But this time, the encounter was much shorter on words and much longer on action, with a tormented and manipulated Ben present to make sure it wasn't a gabfest. One Roddenberry-style sentence wrapped that part of it up, and then we were back to interesting and unpredictable content.

Now Karen is still out there with a wounded Overlord, Ben has run to join the skitter rebellion, and the surviving Second Massachusetts is on the road to Charleston, where a group of survivors may (or may not) have formed a rudimentary government and restored some modicum of civilization. Anything could happen. Anything.

Deborah Lipp is the co-owner of Basket of Kisses, whose motto is "smart discussion about smart television." She is the author of six books, including "The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book."

Old Man, Look at My Life: On NEIL YOUNG JOURNEYS

Old Man, Look at My Life: On NEIL YOUNG JOURNEYS

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In 1971, Neil Young played two triumphant homecoming concerts at Toronto's Massey Hall. He was twenty-six years old, a formidable talent parlaying acclaimed stints with Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young into an even more noteworthy solo career. Yet this young artist packed his Massey Hall set list with songs like “Old Man” and “Don't Let It Bring You Down,” obsessively touching on aging in lyrics like “Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself/when you're old enough to repay/but young enough to sell?” It's as if he knew he'd be standing there on stage, forty years later, in the Jonathan Demme concert documentary Neil Young Journeys, released this month, and he wanted the ghost of the young man he once was to welcome his future self.

Young didn't get around to listening to the original Massey recordings for twenty-seven years, and no wonder: he was a very busy man in the early seventies. That first concert was a stop not only on Young's solo tour (a US/Canada/UK commitment spanning four months in 1970-71, including stops at Carnegie Hall and an appearance on The Johnny Cash Show) but on a merry-go-round of activity that included a 1970 tour with Crazy Horse, the release of the “Ohio” 45 single (boosting sales of the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young album Deja Vu), as well as the release of his own solo album After The Gold Rush. (Much of the delay about the Massey recording also stemmed from Young's decision to release new songs he performed that night as tracks on Harvest rather than on a live concert album.) By the time of the Massey concert, he was suffering from severe back problems (from a slipped disc incurred while fixing up his newly purchased ranch a ) that necessitated he sit, rather than stand, through his acoustic set.

However, Young doesn't seem pained or fatigued in Neil Young: Live At Massey Hall (2007), a “concert” film assembled by Young from dark and grainy footage shot in 1971 at another performance with the Massey Hall master tracks dubbed underneath, but there's a moment when he drops a guitar pick and laments, “Bending over is not so much fun.” Maybe the freshness of the material kept his spirits up, as much of the now-canonical songs on the set list (“Heart of Gold,” “A Man Needs A Maid,” “Old Man”) had not yet been released on the album Harvest, and their elemental renditions here are bright, pure, and steady. The film's a time capsule of a newly minted solo artist stretching his wings at the height of his youth and resilience. Only his remark about his back injury, first sign of the body's slow treachery, gives any indication of clouds gathering overhead.

Young's decades have been full of professional and creative successes, but good health has been a struggle, both for himself (the aforementioned back problems, epilepsy, an aneurysm) and his children (his two sons Zeke and Ben have cerebral palsy and his daughter Amber is also epileptic). As a film, Neil Young Journeys is not in peak condition, either. Demme's previous Young concert film Neil Young: Heart Of Gold (2006) is sleek and well-lit, and while the follow-up Neil Young Trunk Show (2009) is grittier, it's still considerably more polished-looking  than Journeys, a documentary that looks as though it was shot in two weekends – one spent at the concert, and one spent with Young driving through his hometown of Omemee, Ontario, pointing out childhood landmarks.  The grainy, shaky footage from both shoots crosses over from low-fi into amateurish. More perplexingly, during the concert, Demme places a camera just below the microphone, not at Young's mouth but at his stubbly, wattly neck, and lingers on those shots for unclear reasons, as if he wants the audience to have the experience of being pressed into Young's adam's apple.

But where the visuals are lacking, the music is strong. Young's guitar, as bright and pure as a castrato in the original Massey recording, has now gained a yowly patina of feedback and reverb, like a voice made smoky by hard living, and its muscular feedback fills every crack in the theater. The two concerts share only “Ohio” on the set list, but the difference between the acoustic and distorted versions lays bare Young's changes. In the 1971 concert, it's a protest song, a young man taking a slight personally. In 2012 it's a father railing against a world where children can die, a point Demme underscores by intercutting family photos of the deceased students.

This decrepitude is the undercurrent of Journeys. All things fall apart: the rip in the hat Young wears onstage, the childhood places that aren't there, the death of the earth and the way life snatches health out of our hands. (Maybe that's why Demme wants to shove Young's grizzled jowls in our faces, to remind us everything's sagging and going gray.) Songs like “Peaceful Valley” and “Love & War” mourn a world out of kilter, and “Walk With Me” is less an invitation than a plea. But closing “Hitchhiker” with a new coda where he reflexively repeats he's thankful “for the wife . . . for the wife,” Young shows all is not lost, that what remains is an old man still dizzy with gratitude for when life has been sweet. It's important to note that, as a young man hobbled by back problems, Young had to stay seated onstage at Massey Hall. Here, forty years older, he's standing.

Violet LeVoit is a video producer and editor, film critic, and media educator whose film writing has appeared in many publications in the US and UK. She is the author of the short story collection I Am Genghis Cum (Fungasm Press). She lives in Philadelphia.

Ten Uniquely Horribly Brilliantly Wonderful Music Movies

Ten Uniquely Horribly Brilliantly Wonderful Music Movies

Just as there is no such thing as a bad anti-war film, there is no such thing as a truly bad musical. The impulse itself is noble and raises any enterprise up 11 notches.

The people making a musical film may not be of the caliber of Terrence Malick or Paul Thomas Anderson, but hell—they not only had a song in their hearts, they imagined entire worlds where people burst into song. What kind of mean-spirited douche wouldn’t give extra credit just for that?

Not me. I love me some “bad” musicals. I love to see that what people think goes with sounds. Or vice versa.

Enjoying these films is about readjusting criteria, realizing that po-faced seriousness and Big Drama are all tricks anyone can learn—which is why TV writing staffs are always full.  But the music-based thing that happens in The Happiness of the Katakuris—what is that? You can’t learn it.

Ahem. In the following appraisals, I joke here and I kind of dis there, but I’m always in appreciative awe. I strongly believe that if Georges Méliès were alive and had a song in his heart, one of his films would be on this list.

nullCan’t Stop the Music (1980)

Steve Guttenberg's a totally straight boy who only wants to not have sex with his ex-super model roomie (Valerie Perrine) so he can put together a singing group (the Village People), so he can make disco records.

That Hollywood impresario Allan Carr thought straight America would buy that story, as well as scenes where men showing no interest in women danced with other men while singing about "The Milk Shake"—well, you gotta admire chutzpah.

As for the film, which clearly used up all the spandex, lurex, and Barbarella style “futuristic” plastic baubles that clubs of the period favored, quick dismissal is inappropriate. First, the songs are mostly catchy as hell, and positioned at the Hollywood and Vine where catchy and ludicrous French kiss.

Take a minute: 15 years from now, what do you think people are going to think about those skinny leg jeans and that impractical beard you maintain? And Fun, Jack White, and Skrillex? Yeah, sobering, isn’t it?

nullFlash Gordon (1980)

How much multi-track-mojo did the post “Bohemian Rhapsody” Queen own by the time Dino De Laurentiis decided on an un-upgraded version of the ‘30s Flash Gordon serial films?

So much that even when the film came out, people were contextualizing it within the band’s oeuvre.

Meanwhile, the only sound that outwits Queen’s magnificent Flash sountracksonic pomp is Max Von Sydow’s cackle as Emperor Ming the Merciless, who’s super evil and out to destroy the Earth unless football star “Flash” Gordon (Sam Jones) and journalist Dale (Melody Anderson) can stop them.

Flash doesn’t seem like a musical but it works like one. Through a color palette set to “Art Nouveau sunset,” we suffer through the enjoyably hambone story so we can get to the good parts: the bad green screen, matte, and model effects accompanied by those walls of overdubbed and orchestrated Brian May guitars and the many times overdubbed May, Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor master choir melodically proclaiming "AH!," "OH!," and, of course, “FLASH!”

nullSgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)

As a “jukebox musical film,” Sgt Pepper’s never had to do anything but throw together as many stars as corporate music’s golden age could and trust the great unwashed would come. Or so said the cocaine frying the makers’ brains.

Which is the only way to explain The Bee Gees and a mute Peter Frampton as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band looking for magic instruments. Which led to musical numbers by Aerosmith, Steve Martin, Alice Cooper, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Godzilla (kidding, but would you be surprised?).

What’s really on producer Robert Stigwood’s mind is Saturday Night Fever and how to duplicate its mad success. That the answer was a flat, five-camera TV comedy-style style spearheaded by a stogie-smoking George Burns in full Borscht Belt fettle . . . well, when people speak of America’s lost innocence, it’s the addlepated, guileless, ‘ludes-cancelling-out-blow, wanna-put-on-a-show-ness of Sgt. Pepper I think of.

nullThe Apple (1980)

In the Eighties, Menahem Golan produced meat ‘n potatoes actioners starring Stallone, Norris, Van Damme, and Bronson like he was falling off a log. But before that, he sewed some insane oats with The Apple.

Before losing its mind entirely, colorfully, amazingly, The Apple tells us of Alphie (George Gilmour) and Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart), two freakishly wholesome folk singers from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan (!) competing in the1994 Worldvision Song Festival.

Alas! They are beaten by Mr. Boogalo (Vladek Sheybal) who then seduces them into the music industry’s lifestyle of elaborate, badly choreographed dance numbers because Boogalo is also . . . Satan! He is also so powerful that he compels all of America to wear Mr. Boogalo triangular stickers and engage in compulsory fitness workouts.

The Apple just gets more insane, including—I think—God and His videogame sound effects, because there is no ceiling on crazy here just a time limit on how long a movie can be and still get distributed.

nullRock n' Roll Nightmare (1987)

God made the ‘80s so Jon Mikl Thor could becomes a bodybuilder, learn how to rock, and star as Triton, singer of a glam metal band that decamps to a skeezy house in Canada with some babes to work on their new record. But they’re soon infested by demons until Thor smashes. Everything you’re imagining this film will include—uproariously Poison-ous power ballads, over-permed hair, dubious latex demons—is here in abundance.

But the Direct-to-Video ethos hits a new apotheosis when a shirtless Triton battles some tiny flip-floppy eye demons and then, to the beat of hilariously literal hair metal (“We Accept the Challenge”) takes on the main demon, an immobile mannequin Jon Mikal has to be careful not to break.

Thor looks like a big male bodybuilder metalhead, but he’s a little boy and he wants to play with monsters. And so he does. It’s freaking adorable.

nullSpice World (1997)

So now that it’s long over, we can all exhale and admit that, man, did the UK blow in the 90s or what? I mean, okay, Napalm Death, Carcass, and Bolt Thrower, but Oasis? Blur? That poor man’s Muse, Radiohead?

Thank God for Spice Girls. I recall, vividly, that Spice Girls, the film, was what the recent Katy Perry film was trying to be—candy-colored ultra pop—but without Perry’s creepy porn-for-children lyrics and visuals.

Spice Girls personified goofball egalitarianism: all dancing terribly, all singing mediocrely, all embracing a power that was about not taking anything seriously, at a time when the UK boy kings of self importance—your Thom Yorkes and Richard Ashcrofts—could do nothing else.

Spice Girls was a poor girl’s A Hard Days Night, a bunch of skits and non-stop silliness. When I saw the model Spice Girls bus go over the model London Bridge, I nearly injured myself laughing, I do not know why. I love when that happens.

nullThe Happiness of the Katakuris  (2001)

I once interviewed Takashi Miike, the famed hyper-prolific Japanese creator of often disturbing films like Visitor Q and Gozu (both films featuring men crawling out of women’s vaginas).

Through an interpreter, I asked what was, like, up with that.

He chuckled, spoke, and the interpreter said, “Miike say he has trouble understanding women and through his films tries to maybe understand them better.”

The Happiness of the Katakuris lives in some completely mad limbo between his so-so Yakuza movies and exquisitely controlled art films like Box.

It’s a deeply spiritual, family-oriented zombie musical dealing with a failing guesthouse, a suicide, more death, some Claymation, a romantic daughter, her sweet parents and then everyone is SINGING, in a color scheme amped up to look like The Sound of Music.

Does Miike understand women better? Can’t say. But I’d swear he kind of loves them.

nullAcross the Universe (2007)

Across the Universe is so epically dreadful in conception and hilariously, absurdly, offensively and, yeah, beautifully absurd in execution that it manages to overwhelm even director Julie Taymor’s Mount Kilimanjaro of self-regard.

There's no story, just people with Beatle song names like Jude (Jim Sturgess), Lucie (Evan Rachel Wood) and Prudence (T.V. Carpio), who go to Beatles song places to do Beatles song things, like a Vietnam unit carrying the Statue of Liberty while singing “She's So Heavy'' (seriously), or Bono singing "I am the Walrus," which I'd suspected for years.

There’s tons of whack-a-doodle imagery—five naughty nurse Salma Hayeks?—but surprise MVP Evan Rachel Wood is so devoted, and her tremulous alto is so sweet it even calms down her director, suggesting what would happen if she had even a microgram of aesthetic self-control. Download: “If I Fell.” See?

nullREPO! The Genetic Opera (2008)

REPO! is a movie that I’m sure pretty much aimed for a certain degree of “bad” but not so “bad,” it couldn’t be treasured. In short, an intended cult film.

So! Does this dystopian story of a company that supplies organ transplants and the “repo men” who rip them out if you default—does it work as intentional comedy, or camp or what?

Actually, the marketing sells the film itself short.

With Broadway star Sarah Brightman fantastic as a blind opera singer, Buffy’s Anthony Head delightfully evil, and Paris Hilton as a plastic surgery addict (!), as well as an impressive Hellraiser-as-cityscape look, I’d say that, in terms of sheer sensation assault, REPO! is a success.

The actual songs by Terrance Zdunich and Darren Smith also use a metal/industrial style to create something that actually works as opera. So partial bad news to director Darren Lynn Bousman: your bad film is simultaneously kind of good—and that’s REPO’s odd, sanguine charm.

nullTron: Legacy (2010)

After about 40 minutes of Garrett Hedlund in a cathode-blue-lined black body suit on his video-cycle, zipping around a mainly-black videogame ‘verse, I totally spaced.

Even with occasional splotches of exploding color, and Jeff Bridges digitally shorn of 30 years of age (weird), it was like watching gloomy rave visuals. Even with Olivia Wilde in a fetish bob and body glove, I spaced out. Really—how long can you look at colored lights ping-ponging around a screen?

The answer came: The same way one would listen to Daft Punk’s fantastic score, suggestive of Vangelis’ Blade Runner work mixed with downtempo electronica.

As ambient music, or rather, ambient video.  If only there were a way to put Tron on an eternal-loop, you could totally play it during cocktail parties, or after you’d smoked a few, or whatever. In short, as a movie, not so great. But as a digital lava lamp, I’d totally invest in Tron: Legacy.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. Magazines and newspapers that have his articles include Detroit Metro Times, gothic.net, Icon Magazine, International Musician and Recording World, Lacanian Ink, MusicFilmWeb, New York Post, The Perfect Sound, Salon, Smart Money Magazine, Teeth of the Divine, Venuszine, and Time Out New York.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, But Not Quite High Enough

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, But Not Quite High Enough

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THIS PIECE CONTAINS SPOILERS. IN FACT, IT DEPENDS ON THEM. IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS, DON'T READ THIS PIECE.

Christopher Nolan's selective use of naturalism and realism in his three Bat-films has always been a double-edged sword. His literal-minded representations of the character, complete with declarative speeches that leave no symbol, gesture, or character motivation unexplained, can be maddening. Nolan's films’ biggest successes come from their massive scope. But The Dark Knight Rises is a half-baked success, a finale whose ambitions ultimately exceed the Nolan brothers' abilities.

The Dark Knight Rises begins eight years after the events of The Dark Knight (2008). Bruce Wayne has hung up his cowl as Batman to reinforce the myth that Batman killed "white knight" district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). The decision to hide the real reasons for Dent's death—he was driven mad after his face was scarred in an explosion, leading him to become the monstrous villain Two Face—supposedly weighs heavily on both Wayne and Commissioner James Gordon (Gary Oldman), but that is something we are more often told than shown (more on this later). Still, this secret is the sticking point for criminal mastermind Bane's (Tom Hardy) plans to discredit Batman and "break" his soul.

Much of The Dark Knight Rises' colossal 168-minute running time is spent watching Bane's plan come to fruition. But The Dark Knight Rises isn't all it aspires to be, because its creators fumble key establishing events, many of which are needed to convincingly establish the film's grand scope. For example, all three of Nolan's films use dialogue excessively to spell out what each character represents. While Batman Begins has a self-serious charm which is smothered by the Nolans' need to psychologically enrich the character through lame, posturing dialogue, The Dark Knight Rises often feels emotionally skimpy.

As has been noted elsewhere, the skill of the actors in Nolan’s films often carries the weight of their emotionally heavy dialogue. In this film, Christian Bale's performance as Batman and Anne Hathaway's as Catwoman are both impressive. However, the most chatty character is Tom Hardy's Bane, a guy who sounds like the descendant of Kenneth Mars's character from Young Frankenstein. Bane's speeches are not only sometimes hard to understand, they're also stilted well past the point of credulity. The scene where he reads Gordon's speech before freeing and arming the inmates of Blackgate Prison, a facility erected with the help of the Harvey Dent-supported, uh, Dent Act, is a dud. It’s a dud for a couple of reasons, chief among them its excessive fixation on the mechanics of what it is trying to convey, to the point where it fails to give good reasons why it’s necessary in the first place. Do Gotham City residents really believe that much in Dent and his heroic image, which Wayne and Gordon helped to establish? If his martyrdom matters so much, Nolan should have slowed down and let the implications of Bane's speech sink in. He doesn't, however, and as a result, a crucial scene has little impact.

Bane's dialogue is flatfooted throughout the film. At one point, he tells Batman that he too was literally raised among the shadows; at another, he enters a room with the line, "Speak of the devil, and he appears." It's impossible, at moments like these, to take him completely seriously. Nolan and his screenwriters have no ear for juicy dialogue, so their villain just sounds like a maniacal windbag missing not only an impressive backstory but also the ability to gloat properly (his most dry taunt line has to be when he compliments the "very lovely" sotto voice of the little boy singing the National Anthem during the stadium scene). 

But again, the Nolans' characterization of Bane and The Dark Knight Rises' other key characters is not, in theory, off-the-mark. The script contains several reverent allusions to the way its characters have previously been portrayed in comic books. Two of the most apparent examples of this can be seen in the way that Selina Kyle traipses around with gal pal Holly Robinson (Juno Temple), a meaningless but cute nod to Frank Miller's portrayal of Kyle in Batman: Year One. But then poor execution makes an ostensibly huge moment such as the one where Bane breaks Batman's back by slamming him down over his knee (as he does in the now infamous Knightfall comic book story) feel weightless. There is no appreciable eye for detail in this scene, no sign that Nolan wants the big, spine-crushing moment of impact to be felt. If this is Bane’s triumphal moment, why does this moment feel so inconsequential? 

I don't just mean to ask why Nolan didn't make Bane scream longer or have Batman’s back crack in slow-motion. Instead, I wonder why he chose to follow this seemingly pivotal scene with one where Bane explains to Wayne that he will continue to break his "soul," lessoning the power of the moment where he destroys his body. Likewise, Wayne's rehabilitation seems more perfunctory than grueling. Nolan should have taken a page from The French Connection II's book and not been so impulsive when fleshing out these pivotal lulls between action scenes. The effectiveness of these little moments and details distinguish an epic narrative from an over-reaching one.

The Nolans fumble in a couple of other small but salient ways, mostly because they don't know how to modulate the pitch of their representation of the character or his world. The Bat, the plane Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) creates for Batman, looks like a flying tank. That sounds trivial, given that that's essentially how the Tumbler, Nolan's spin on the Batmobile, has been described. But when it whooshes in out of nowhere to break up a tense standoff between bedraggled policemen and heavily-armed Bane supporters, its clunky appearance really ruins the scene.

The same heavy-handed approach makes it hard to take Miranda Tate's (Marion Cotillard) character seriously. It might seem unfair to complain that Nolan did a poor job of foreshadowing the revelation that Tate is secretly Talia Al Gul, the daughter of eco-terrorist and arch-Bat-foe Ra's Al Gul (played by Liam Neeson in Batman Begins). But Nolan really does do a poor job here, both in foreshadowing the betrayal and conveying its importance. You don't have to be a fanboy to anticipate that Tate is somehow related to Ra's, given that she is initially defined in Rises by her pro-environmental politics, a position that defined Ra's in Batman Begins (2005). Bane is also repeatedly presented as a representative of the League of Shadows, the group Ra's led in Begins, even having Bane go so far as to insist that he "is the League of Shadows."

The obviousness of Tate's real identity is a glaring problem. Nolan likes to get his audience to focus so intently on breadcrumb-sized morsels of information that it's often very easy to lose perspective on what pattern he's establishing as he builds a story. We are meant to be impressed with the complex nature of Rises' narrative but its details, both on a micro- and a macro-level, are frustrating. The scene where Tate cozies up with Wayne by a fire establishes adequately Tate’s significance to Wayne by the time she betrays him. But the scene where she does betray him, by actually thrusting a knife into his back, is emotionally slack. Is Nolan so creatively constipated that he has to make Talia a literal back-stabber?

Or take a look at what Talia symbolizes in the grand scheme of things. The political subtext of Nolan's pseudo-timely Bat-films has always been willfully evasive, which is striking since almost everything else in these films is blatantly spelled-out. But here, Talia tells Wayne point-blank that she is a foreigner in Gotham's midst, an alien who was only posing as a native-born citizen. While surely one can tease out an anti-Obama message from this, what's most striking about this political attack is how incomplete it is. Nolan only seems to point out Talia's foreign-ness and Bane's foreign accent, too, as a means of pointing out that the threat to Gotham has arrived disguised as an ally to Wayne, Gotham's real native son. But again, so what? That kind of weird, self-evident xenophobia does nothing to enrich our understanding of who Wayne is or why Batman is needed as a symbol for Gotham. If the answer is simply that he's not a mean false friend with a chip on his shoulder and a goofy accent, then maybe it's a good thing there won't be a fourth Nolan-directed Batman movie.

Then again, apart from good supporting characters like James Gordon and Joseph-Gordon Levitt's John Blake, the Nolans do get one central character just right:Hathaway's Catwoman is, for the purposes of this last film, mostly well-realized. Her trepidation in her fascination with Wayne is largely believable, and she makes for a decent bad-girl-turned-good. But even this characterization is only relatively successful. The camaraderie that serves as the foundation of the Wayne/Batman and Kyle/Catwoman is more than believable in the scene where Catwoman half-leads Batman and half-struts into Bane's midst at Batman's request. But once Catwoman slinks back into the shadows and lets Bane take control of the scene, her passivity becomes unbelievable. It's hard to believe that a character who later appears to have suffered from serious pangs of guilt would, in that key moment, watch and not even recoil forcefully while she watches the man she just betrayed get his back broken. Even the stuff the Nolans get right in The Dark Knight Rises is frustratingly imperfect. Here's hoping that the creators of the next Bat-tent pole are a little more flexible and a lot more detail-oriented.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

TEN BAT-TAKES: THE TEN BEST INTERPRETATIONS OF BATMAN

TEN BAT-TAKES: THE TEN BEST INTERPRETATIONS OF BATMAN

“That’s what’s fun about doing this kind of work. All [sic] of it is organic. One idea suggests another, and it does grow.” –Denny O’Neil, Amazing Heroes #50

The concept of maintaining continuity in the representation of a character as simultaneously malleable and iconic as Batman seems like a lost cause, but it’s a noble one. No matter how much Bruce Wayne and his alter-ego have changed over the decades, the character’s various incarnations are all related, in a sense. So there’s no point in complaining that Neal Adams’s “photo-realistic” style, to borrow Bat-guru and writer Grant Morrison’s description, has been aped by a neophyte penciler. In that sense, Batman is a great symbol of modern pastiche. His best creators routinely borrow elements from the stories that have preceded them to create something new, or startling, or both. The evolution of Batman as a character is thus dependent on creative incorporation, repetition and re-invention: it only looks improvised if you don’t know your history.

This list of the best interpretations of Batman is intended to reflect that key aspect of the character. I have my personal preferences, just as anyone else does. If a major name or artistic creator is not on this list, their contributions are most likely discussed within the body of the text. So never fear, there’s a good reason why Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns are not prominently displayed on this list. I’ve also agonized over which stories to highlight for certain creators as sometimes it’s impossible to choose a story representative of a writer or artist’s talents at their peak. In these cases, I have chosen stories or collections which best show what makes that creator unique.

In making this list, I’ve found that that the aspects of the character I prefer are the kind that skew more closely to what Morrison identifies in Supergods, a history of comics, as the more surreal, gothic aspects of the character: “convention has it that Batman’s adventures work best when rooted in a basically realistic world of gritty crime violence […] but from the very start of his career, he was drawn into episodes of the supernatural, uncanny and inexplicable.” This aspect reflects what I like about Batman: the sheer weirdness of seeing a noble hero like Batman protect a city as crime-ridden and routinely besieged by pathological freaks and super-powered monsters. Also, did I mention that the said noble hero is a guy who dresses up as a bat to avenge the death of his parents? Modulation of tone and style is key here because, well, these are stories about a rich guy who fights crime because of a vow he made as a child to spend his adult life avenging his dead parents. If you exaggerate one aspect of the character, you can easily lose sight of that character’s greatest attributes.

Many of the comics I’ve chosen try to make use of established notions of who we think Batman is in order to get a better understanding of what he says to us. I hope you enjoy reading this list as much as I enjoyed making it.

null10) “Going Sane,” written by J.M. DeMatteis and Drawn by Joe Staton and Steve Mitchell

J.M. DeMatteis’s superhero comics are atypical in that they question the validity of solving conflicts through violence. In his most famous Spider-Man story, “Kraven’s Last Hunt,” DeMatteis forces Peter Parker through a draining gauntlet that makes him empathize and even go mad from burrowing so deep into the heads of two super-villains, Vermin and Kraven. “Going Sane” achieves a similar affect but through different means. In it, both Batman and the Joker believe that they’ve defeated each other. DeMatteis’s comic thus assumes that, as is shown in the 1989 Batman movie, the Joker was the man whp killed Bruce Wayne’s parents when he was a boy.

So, thinking that the personified reason for why they respectively fight and commit crime is gone, the Joker and Batman try to lead “normal” lives. Joker settles down, gets a day job, finds a girlfriend and Batman recuperates from his fight with the Joker upstate with the help of a nurse he falls in love with. Both men try to forget their pasts but suffer from recurring nightmares. Because they can’t forget what they mean to each other, they eventually wind up sparring again.

The sincere belief in reform driving DeMatteis’s exploration of this fundamentally goofy “What if” scenario is what makes it such a winner. It’s uniquely surreal to see someone like the Joker, a man we can’t help but consider a freak because of his white face and green hair, trying to lead a normal domestic life. But “Going Sane” is that much more effective for trying to introduce that level of normalcy into these characters’ lives: what if archetypal arch-enemies designed to hate each other tried to change their established personalities completely and forget that they existed?

Along the same lines, novelist Joe R. Lansdale wrote the teleplay for an episode of Batman: The Animated Series called “Perchance to Dream.” In that episode, the Mad Hatter brainwashes Batman into thinking that he’s living a normal life in which he never became Batman and his parents never died. Lansdale and the episode’s two story-writers, Laren Bright and Michael Reaves, come to the same conclusion that DeMatteis does: despite everything, Wayne would find a way to remember his obligation and would not rest until he could. His obsession is just that all-consuming and character-defining (more on this later).

Another thoughtful story that similarly makes light of Batman’s perhaps-myopic need to fight crime first and protect the citizens of Gotham City second is “The Night of Thanks but No Thanks” (Detective Comics #567), a story written by Harlan Ellison in which Batman constantly misreads situations and tries to give help where it’s neither needed nor wanted. In one scene, an old, handicapped woman beats up a mugger by herself, while in another, a car-jacker turns out to have locked his car keys inside his vehicle. As Batman jokes to Alfred at the end of the story, this is “the worst night of [Batman’s] life.”

null9) Batman as drawn by Gene Colan: “Nightmare in Crimson”

Many pencillers have put a definitive stamp on Batman, the prime example being Neal Adams. Morrison aptly describes Adams’s well-known Batman as “grown-up and contemporary:” “Adams combined slick Madison Avenue photorealism with the power of Jack Kirby in a way that made comic-book characters more naturalistic than before.” This added “naturalism,” which emphasizes dramatic poses and the athletic physique of the character, is what makes Adams probably the most influential artist to draw Batman. But Gene Colan, working with inker Klaus Janson, took the foundation of naturalism that Adams established in key stories like “The Demon Lives Again” (Batman #244), and made Batman look more like a character with one foot in a Gothic horror story and another in a modern-day superhero story.

After hyper-popular comics like Tomb of Dracula helped re-establish the prominence of horror in superhero comics, Gene Colan and writer Gerry Conway re-made Batman as a monster-fighting detective. Colan’s version of the Dark Knight certainly looked like Adams’s iteration of the character, complete with pointier ears and a gymnast’s physique. But Conway, Colan and Janson’s take on the character depended far more on the creatures inhabiting the inky shadows and psychedelic zip-a-tone fog of Gotham City at night. Batman not only fought monsters like the Mole and the Man-Bat, the latter of which was an Adams creation—he also became a vampire himself in stories like “Nightmare in Crimson,” featured in Batman #350 (August 1982).

The blurring of the line between Batman and the monsters he fought to keep Gotham safe is weirdly fitting. Since the character’s inception, Wayne’s always affected the look of a monster in order to frighten the criminal element, which co-creator Bob Kane called a “superstitious, cowardly lot.” Or as Morrison puts it in his description of an early Batman story where he fights the Mad Monk, “It was Batman as Dracula, the vampire as hero, preying on the even more unwholesome creatures of the night.” Conway and Colan’s Batman was still a detective and a physical, martial artist-trained crime-fighter. But while their Bruce Wayne had a well-adjusted aspect of melodrama to his life—more believable love interests, the return of now grown-up ward Dick Grayson—their Batman was now more than ever a creature of the night.

Writers and artists have taken many cues from Conway and Colan’s version of the characters. Writer Doug Moench and penciller Kelley Jones would later write a trilogy of stories set in an alternate reality, in which Batman becomes a vampire, stories that were unquestionably influenced by Conway and Colan’s own Bat-vamp stories (Moench began writing Detective Comics soon after Gerry Conway and even collaborated regularly with Colan). Furthermore, writer/penciller/painter Matt Wagner’s revisionist take on the old Mad Monk story, fittingly titled Batman and the Mad Monk, would almost certainly not exist were it not for Colan’s stylishly moody emphasis on monster-men.

null8) Batman in the Justice League International, written by J.M. DeMatteis and Keith Giffen, drawn by Kevin Maguire

It seems illogical to put Batman, a character who preys on the fear of criminals and is universally understood to be a loner, in a team setting. And yet, opposites frequently attract in Batman stories. Take the World’s Finest title that paired Batman together with Superman. In Amazing Heroes #50, quintessential Bat-writer Denny O’Neil described the pairing shrewdly but imperfectly by saying that Batman is the logical left brain to Superman’s can-do right brain (the right brain typically being defined as the center for creativity). Then again, Batman also has a history of teaming-up with just about every superhero in his The Brave and the Bold title; the series featured many incongruous pairings with the likes of WW2 hero Sgt. Rock, super-sleuth Elastic Man and even the Frankensteinian Brother Power the Geek.

So when J.M. DeMatteis and Keith Giffen had Batman lead the newly reformed Justice League in 1987, Batman was already traditionally a team-player. The writing duo’s (now famous) irreverent take on DC’s biggest superhero team franchise made good use of Batman: he was both the voice of experience and pathological reason for the group and the hall monitor for the team’s mix of unruly newbies and aimless veterans. So on the one hand, Batman lead the group in order to keep loose cannons like Guy Gardner, a raging narcissist, and Green Lantern, too, in line, but also to make sure the team functioned as a group until they could find a good leader.

Still, DeMatteis and Giffen were both clever enough to know that Batman is a counter-intuitive choice to lead such a high-profile team. He routinely barks at Guy, and the first time he makes a joke, the Blue Beetle is so shocked that he has to ask his fellow team-mates if they heard it, too. Batman is the group’s stop-gap solution, a character who takes the role as leader until he can appoint someone who’s not only more comfortable in a position of power but also a good fit for this particular team to lead. Martian Manhunter soon took Batman’s place as the group’s leader but for a little while, Batman remained with the group, helping them as best as such an authoritative outlier could. This would not however be the first or last time Batman would lead a team: Mike Barr, the writer who conducted the aforementioned interview with O’Neil in Amazing Heroes #50, gave the Caped Crusader his own team to lead in Batman and the Outsiders.

null7) Tim Burton and Batman Returns

One of the most refreshing things about the two Batman movies that Tim Burton directed is the fact that he was not, before helming either film, a fan of the character or of comics in general. That lack of familiarity gave Burton the confidence he needed to futz around with the character and remake him using Burton’s idiosyncratically macabre sense of humor. Though Burton would become frustrated with mandates imposed on him by studio execs during the making of Batman Returns—he has said many times that he was unhappy with being forced to make the characters more accessory-friendly and thus more marketable for kids’ Happy Meal toys—his second attempt is much more tonally consistent and uniformly brazen in its take on the character.

Which is somewhat ironic, considering that Batman (Michael Keaton) is barely present in Batman Returns. Though he has some compelling scenes where he confronts both the Penguin (Danny DeVito) and Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer), he’s only vestigially important to the film’s plot. This is mostly because Batman is, both thematically and narratively, caught in between these two characters, one an outsider who has fooled himself into thinking he wants to be an insider (Penguin runs for Mayor of Gotham City but winds up trying to blow the city up) and the other disgusted with anything vaguely associated with the city’s patriarchial hierarchy.

When the film was initially released, many critics complained about Batman’s reduced status. But that’s part of what makes Batman Returns so exciting: it’s every bit the movie its (then) outré filmmaker wanted to make. It also doesn’t hold uninitiated viewers’ hands too much. Batman Returns is a film whose interests and sense of humor are hyper-specific to its creators: who else would have DeVito bite a man’s nose until he bleeds or have Catwoman grope Batman’s crotch while purring about how his penis is what really defines him? It’s too bad that Burton didn’t get to make a third Bat-film. It seems like both Burton and the Warner Brothers execs were sick of each other by the time it came to realize Burton’s tentatively planned third film. With Batman Returns, it looked like he had really hit his stride and was onto something.

null6) Batman: Year One, written by Frank Miller and Drawn by Dave Mazzuchelli

Batman: Year One’s biggest triumph is establishing the importance of Commissioner James Gordon, then only a Lieutenant—this development is part of what made it a milestone comic book, and one of the major influences on Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. In Miller and Mazzuchelli’s comic, Gordon, a tough, aspiring cop who refuses to be bribed by Gotham City’s corrupt politicians or their hirelings, helps to establish a much-missed human element in Batman’s story. Gordon’s obsession with protecting his pregnant wife Barbara and raising his unborn child in a crime-infested city makes him the personification of what Bruce Wayne returned to Gotham City to. He’s the core of humanity amidst so much squalor, characterized in Year One by pimps, mobsters, bent elected officials and crooked cops. 

Miller and Mazzuchelli’s greatest innovation was establishing Gotham City as being more than just a dense labyrinth for Batman to run around in. That approach would rub off on creators like John Ostrander and Mary Mitchell in Gotham Nights or Paul Dini and Dustin Nguyen in Streets of Gotham, two short-lived titles focusing on the various different people living in Gotham, from rival superheroes to citizen shop-keepers. And it’s telling that “Gotham Noir,” the only time to date that writer/artist duo Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have put their film-noir-influenced spin on Batman and his world, centers on Commissioner Gordon. Also, Gotham Central, one of the best Batman-related comics in recent memory, follows the misadventures of a group of cops that just happen to work in the same city as the shadowy Batman.

null5) Grant Morrison and The Return of Bruce Wayne

I’ve singled out The Return of Bruce Wayne as Morrison’s best story so far because it’s simultaneously his most ambitious and accomplished work. In the six-issue mini-series, Morrison has Bruce Wayne re-incarnated six times before he returns to his life in the present-day. Stories like the one where Batman, as a pirate or a witch-hunting pilgrim or even a caveman, retains his moral compass and learns more about himself in the process are inspiring for their simultaneously bugfuck crazy and gratifyingly character-driven spirit. Oh, and did I mention that Batman’s friends are trying to find a way to stop him from being reborn in the present, as he’s been implanted with a futuristic bomb that will blow up when he is reborn one more time? Return really does have something for everyone: romance, time travel and Batman dressed as a Blackbeard-style pirate, complete with fire in his beard.

No comics writer has approached the character of Batman with as much ambition as Grant Morrison. Morrison’s often-psychedelic takes on the character prove just how deeply invested in the character and the world he is: he views Batman as a heroic archetype unto himself. No matter the form, Morrison’s comics insist that Batman will always be a heroic presence. In “Batman R.I.P.,” Morrison creates a villainous group that nearly destroys Batman, causing him to revert to a back-up personality that he created years ago just in case his psyche was ever destroyed by a villain (in these cases, Batman becomes “the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh,” a purple, yellow and red-costumed hero that Morrison repurposed from Silver Age comics where Batman inexplicably visits the alien planet of Zur-En-Arrh). In Batman and Robin, Morrison and penciller Frank Quitely did a nightmarish riff on the Adam West-era Batman stories but, as filtered through, as Morrison put it, a David Lynch-style sensibility. And in Batman Inc., Batman unites with the various different countries’ answers to Batman, including England’s Knight, and Argentina’s El Gaucho.

null4) Bruce Timm’s Batman: Batman: The Animated Series and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

People often take for granted just how much Bruce Timm, along with his stable of voice actors and writers, did to modernize the character of Batman, as we know him today.Both the multiple Emmy-Award-winning Batman: The Animated Series and its one theatrical incarnation, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, achieved a tonal balance with the character that no live-action film has ever been able to beat. With show-writers like Alan Burnett and Paul Dini and voice talent like Kevin Conroy (Batman) and Mark Hammill (the Joker), animator and director Bruce Timm found a great middle ground in appeasing both child and adult audiences looking for a good Bat-story. The stories were consistently well-told, juggling Bruce Wayne and Batman’s various and sometimes contradictory character traits. He’s a womanizer, a detective, an athlete, a symbol, and yes, a cartoon character that does things no human man could ever do. Mask of the Phantasm, a film Timm co-directed and co-scripted, is probably the best Batman film to date: its narrative juggles two villains and features a strong love interest for Bruce without ever seeming over-burdened.

Batman creators owe an untold debt to Timm and company for modernizing the Batman and making him both more believable and kid-friendly. He turned a goofy villains like Mr. Freeze into a credible, sympathetic character by giving him a backstory (Freeze now commits crimes to find a cure for his wife, who suffers from a mysterious illness) and modernizing the character’s look. In that way, he also helped to expand the cast of characters that Batman fans would associate with the character to the point where they could not only easily identify a vast “rogues gallery” unique to Batman, but also a regular roster of sidekicks and allies, including two different incarnations of Robin. If any one creator can be credited with helping to build the foundation that has made Batman the most popular superhero film franchise to date, it’s Bruce Timm.

null3) Denny O’Neil and “Venom”

Comics writer Denny O’Neil is probably the most influential writer to ever take on the character. Stories like the now-canonical re-imagining of Batman’s origin story, “There is No Hope in Crime Alley,” and the formally innovative prose story “Death Strikes at Midnight and Three” set the pace for what scads of writers and artists felt they could do with the character. O’Neil’s take was grounded in Wayne’s obsessive nature. Romance, like the one Wayne briefly shares with Talia Al Ghul, was marginal in O’Neil’s Bat-stories because of the character was so mission-oriented. His most formative Bat-stories were written, as O’Neil described them in Amazing Heroes #50, as “pure comic books:” “It never occurred to me to plot social issues into these stories.”

At the same time, O’Neil’s take on Batman was semi-realistic, making his teaming with penciller Neal Adams a good fit. O’Neil treated the character as a real, psychologically understandable character, someone whose actions and world could make sense within a quasi-realistic context. His villains were not as flamboyant as the ones featured in the campy Adam West TV show from the ‘60s, a conscious decision that O’Neil has since expressed regret about (“I think it was also, however, a mistake on my part not to put more colorful, flamboyant villains in more of the stories.”). This is striking since Christopher Nolan similarly was hired to take on the Bat-film franchise because his take stridently opposed everything the two West-era-inspired Joel Schumacher-directed films offered viewers.

 “Venom,” a relatively recent Batman story by O’Neil, is a very good example of what O’Neil could do with the character. In it, O’Neil takes the social-issues-centric, anti-drugs stance that he famously pursued in his Green Lantern/Green Arrow team-up comics and applies them to a rather moving Batman story. After he’s incapable of lifting a piece of debris trapping a small child, Batman resorts to experimental steroids to help make him as physically capable as he is mentally adept. The way O’Neill merges his psychologically rich understanding of the character, as shown in Wayne’s daily setting of the grandfather clock leading to the Bat-Cave to the time of his parents’ death, is remarkable. And more importantly, the plot, which takes Batman to the fictional South American island of Santa Prisca (the island where, in the comics, The Dark Knight Rises’ villain Bane originated), is a good mix of detective story and action-adventure.

null2) The Killing Joke

With The Killing Joke, British New Wave writer Alan Moore and 2000 A.D. artist Brian Bolland put a definitive spin on the Joker as Batman’s mirror image in a story that’s still considered one of Moore’s best stories. Like “Going Sane,” Moore and Bolland’s story starts from the premise that Joker and the Batman can’t stop the cycle of violence that keeps them at each others’ throats. But unlike that later story, The Killing Joke really drives home the psychological violence that drove the Joker to drop out from society and turn to crime. “One bad day,” as the Joker puts it, is all it took to push an otherwise sane man over the edge, turning him into a monster.

Normally, the idea of giving a villain like the Joker a specific origin (in this case, the Joker is a failed comedian who gets involved with gangsters in order to help buy a better life for his pregnant wife) seems tacky. But that’s the crux of what makes Moore and Bolland’s Joker so sympathetic: his madness is a product of his refusal or perhaps inability to stomach the random injustices of life, the kind that made his life determined by a series of circumstances that were well beyond his control. What makes The Killing Joke a great Batman story is its taking advantage of the notion that Batman’s villains are just reflections of his personality, versions of what might have been, had Bruce Wayne’s life been determined by completely different forces.

null1) Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers’ Batman

No one take on the Batman character and his development as a modern hero is as influential as Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers’ eight-issue run. The pair left their indelible mark on the character in mystery-oriented stories like “The Laughing Fish,” a story that was the loose basis for Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie, and with villains like Hugo Strange, a psychologist who became obsessed with revealing Batman’s identity after trying to recreate the conditions that made Bruce Wayne Batman. With Silver St. Cloud, Englehart and Rogers were the first team to give Batman a memorable independent love interest. And the pair’s treatment of the Joker is equally crucial to the character’s development as a lethal psychopath and the most dangerous of Batman’s villains.

Though O’Neil readily admitted that there are similiarites between Englehart’s and his own vision of the character, he also correctly identified what separated his Batman from Englehart’s: Wayne was a more emotionally well-balanced character under Englehart and Rogers’s stewardship. He was more understandable, too, perhaps because he had functional social relationships and could still be defined by his extra-curricular obsessions as a super-rich, tights-clad vigilante. Here was a recognizably human Batman, one that should be looked on as the Platonic ideal whenever superhero skeptics wonder how a superhero comic can be simultaneously pulpy, thoughtful and character-driven.

Simon Abrams is a New York-based freelance arts critic. His film reviews and features have been featured in The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Slant Magazine, The L Magazine, The New York Press and Time Out Chicago. He currently writes TV criticism for The Onion AV Club and is a contributing writer at the Comics Journal. His writings on film are collected at the blog, Extended Cut.

VIDEO ESSAY: BEAVER’S LODGE: OUR HOSPITALITY (1923)

VIDEO ESSAY: BEAVER’S LODGE: OUR HOSPITALITY (1923)

This is the second installment of BEAVER'S LODGE, a weekly series of video essays narrated by actor Jim Beaver which will offer critical takes on some of Beaver's favorite films. Jim Beaver is an actor, playwright, and film historian. Best known as Ellsworth on HBO’s Emmy-award winning series DEADWOOD and as Bobby Singer on SUPERNATURAL, he has also starred in such series as HARPER'S ISLAND, JOHN FROM CINCINNATI, and THUNDER ALLEY and appeared in nearly forty motion pictures. You can follow Jim on Twitter.

A guest at a screening of this masterpiece at my home recently literally leaped out of her seat upon seeing the final, transcendentally beautiful stunt executed by Buster Keaton. I've never seen anyone do that except at a horror movie. Our Hospitality is a comedy, without an ounce of horror element. Yet it has heart-stopping thrills, made all the more heart-stopping by the knowledge that it was Keaton himself risking his neck in stunts that no star until the Keaton-inspired Jackie Chan would approach, seventy years later.

The title Our Hospitality refers to a peculiar brand of rural courtesy that says one can't murder a guest INSIDE one's home. The Hatfield-McCoy feud of legend is the inspiration for this story of a young man (Keaton) coming home to claim his inheritance, unaware of the feud between his family and another that will lead anyone in the other family to try to kill him on sight. Invited by fluke into the Canfield family residence, young Joseph McKay (Keaton) learns of the feud and realizes his only safety lies in never leaving. This is the setting for the central comedic sequence of the film, in which the Canfield family is constantly on the ready to shoot him whenever he gets anywhere near an exit door. It's pretty amazing how many brilliant comic variations Keaton is able to play out with the situation.

The earlier portion of the film is wonderful in its own right, both for the masterful comedy of which Keaton was unmatched at creating and for the wonderfully amusing look at 1830, the period in which the film is set. Manhattan's Broadway and 42nd Street intersection is not much more than a pasture, yet people are already complaining about the traffic. Keaton, who in real life was a railroad buff, recreated the first locomotive for this film, and it is both historically fascinating and wildly funny to watch his trip across country on rails that can be moved out of the way to avoid obstacles and which aren't always even necessary for the train's progress.

The final third of the film is a thrill-seeker's paradise. On the run from his enemies, Keaton finds himself adrift in a cascading river along with the girl he loves (the daughter of the enemy Canfield clan). Keaton's attempts to save himself and then his girl from the spectacular waterfall toward which they race is one of the great comedic stunt sequences of all cinema.

It's difficult for me to pick my favorite Buster Keaton film, but this is usually the one I show to people I want to convert to Keaton idolatry. I've never known it to fail. The word classic gets thrown around a lot—maybe not as much as the dreaded awesome, but far too frequently, nonetheless. But this is a genuine comedy classic. It's awesome.


 

POLITICAL ANIMALS: Purple Haze

POLITICAL ANIMALS: Purple Haze

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When we first see Elaine Barrish Hammond (Sigourney Weaver)—former first lady, former presidential candidate, and soon-to-be secretary of state—in Political Animals, she's onstage giving a concession speech, dressed in a purple disco jumpsuit. “Postpartisan purple,” says a friend who's writing a book on color. Purple serves two functions in this soapy miniseries: to signal Elaine’s shifting position in the red-blue Tron that is federal government and to provide an easy mnemonic for her alliance with conflicted journalist Susan Berg (Carla Gugino), who also sports purplish hues.

Berg is correct to wear the color of indecision, because she dwells in a twilight world of journalism in which talking about blogs and pageviews is vulgar and one wins a Pulitzer in one’s twenties for covering Southerner Bud Hammond’s Clintonesque infidelities. She has a dangerously high level of access to the Hammonds and has always been the family’s enemy, because she combines the clout of a sterling newspaper and the temerity to say that Elaine is a fool and a bad feminist to have stayed with her philandering husband.

When the show’s pilot aired on Sunday, this seemed like a stretch. If Political Animals is Hillary porn—a revisionist fanfic in which she leaves Bill and runs for president without his greasy hands on her apron strings, or Obama drops Biden to finish the marathon’s last leg with a proven winner—it’s also not a plausible alternate universe. A well-connected Washington friend confirms that, while it’s common scuttlebutt that HIllary will run in 2016 so as to "get a position that's not seen as coming from her relationship with a guy (wife, opponent who lost),” no one in real-life D.C. circles still thinks or cares about Bill Clinton’s infidelities or considers them a hindrance to the career of Hillary, who seems to be doing fine. Also, says my friend, “she'd never leave Bill; she needs him by her side exactly like people like The Good Wife's husband need their wives. It's all a political calculation.”

Then again, the day after the pilot aired, Slate reported, “Protesters threw tomatoes and shoes at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s motorcade Sunday during her visit to Egypt. Although a tomato hit an Egyptian official in the face, the armored car carrying Clinton was around the corner from the incident, reports Reuters. Protesters were chanting ‘Monica, Monica,’ in reference to Monica Lewinsky.” It’s a chilling picture. Just as Elaine can’t take a step without hearing that Bud has, in Berg’s exposition-laden phrase, “been linked to TV star Eva Flores,” Hillary may never quite be free of that cursed cigar.

Aside from being a wistful/schadenfreudistic fantasy about the Clintons and a muddled exploration of modern journalistic dilemmas, the show also wants to comment on feminism. In this season of “Why Women Still Can't Have It All,” in which Anne Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic story has brought work-family conflicts back into popular and two-gender discourse, we have two heroines (in purple), torn between professional ambition and personal and moral responsibility.

It looks so far as though Elaine will be okay with further sacrificing her privacy, since there’s probably not much left for the media to uproot. As for risking being perceived as unfeminine, it’s one of the show’s subtextual obsessions; we must continually be reminded that despite her ambition, Elaine is still smokin’ hot, that she has current sex, that she has a soft, motherly heart that just doesn’t show to those cold reporter and pundits.

But Berg, retroactively sheepish author of the book When Bitches Rule, has a residual yearning for traditional things even as she spews unlikely, and probably punishable, sexist abuse at her hot mini-Wonkette younger colleague. Her newspaper-editor boyfriend is cheating on her with said Wonkette, a demonic robot of new media (“My blog hit over one million unique users this month!”), but he’s such a blank-eyed Bil Keane nonentity that there must be another man in store for her. Perhaps the Hammonds’ anxious son Douglas (James Wolk), Elaine’s chief of staff who’s properly engaged to a nice girl? As the Gallant to his brother TJ’s Goofus, so eager to please his parents that he doesn’t notice his fiancee’s bulimia, Douglas is surely destined for some politically inconvenient temptation.

As for Goofus (Sebastian Stan), he seems to have been dropped into this ostensibly stentorian family from an episode of Entourage. He snorts coke, has nightclub-ownership dreams, says “bro” a lot, and gets away with murder. We’re meant to believe he’s just spoiled, but maybe the family is just afraid of what he’ll do if they don’t tolerate his whining, rudeness, and capacity for public embarrassment. That he was the first out gay offspring of a sitting president is meant to excuse his terrible behavior, and his noodling around on the piano demonstrates that he still has a sensitive soul. But the near-stereotype of a damaged, dangerous gay man is a retrograde premise that may entirely negate the show’s purportedly enlightened inclusion of a gay character. TJ may be standing in for the Bush twins, and seems to enjoy as few serious consequences for his manipulative-addict behavior as did Jenna, Barbara, and Bush Jr.

Perhaps appropriately for the perpetually identity-seeking USA network, in a season of far-fetched political promises, Political Animals wants to include a little something for everyone: a fast-paced Middle East story for the 24 junkies, some goofy canoodling for fans of Dave and The American President, the requisite staff backstabbing and wisecracking à la The West Wing, and a touch of Intervention for the rest of us. As a bonus, Ellen Burstyn, as sexy grandma Margaret Barrish, flings outré zingers in the tradition of Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.

No one could accuse the miniseries of being intimidatingly cerebral or edgy in its gender politics, but, aside from the winking mise-en-scène of the purple outfits, semiotic crumbs seem to be scattered everywhere. Do they merely allude to familiar things —i.e., Barrish is a secret smoker with killer arms, combining both Obamas in one—or are they Agatha Christie–style clues to a sinister subplot we won’t see coming until the finale?

Americans never do quite seem to shake their royalist roots, and Political Animals is ultimately a familiar story of rich people in nice clothes, plotting successions and scandals from a comfortable position of power. Meanwhile, there’s a story here that hasn’t been told to my satisfaction. You know who really can’t shake her legacy? Monica Lewinsky. She’s in a purgatory of perpetual internship and disgrace despite her subsequent education and accomplishments.

I’d like to see a miniseries starring a Lewinsky character, wearing purple, with a political bucket of blood for the prom-queen politicos who left her high and dry. As Barrish explains to Berg, “You’ll never get to the next great moment if you don’t keep going.” When bitches rule, indeed.

Emily Gordon is the online editor of The Washington Spectator and has written the blog Emdashes since 2004. She tweets at @emdashes.

VIDEO ESSAY: CRUEL SUMMER: BATMAN (1989)

VIDEO ESSAY: CRUEL SUMMER: BATMAN (1989)

The "Cruel Summer" series of articles examines influential movies from the summers of the 1980s. The previous entries in the series have covered THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980), STRIPES (1981), ROCKY III (1982), WARGAMES (1983), PURPLE RAIN (1984), PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985), TOP GUN (1986), ROBOCOP (1987), and DIE HARD (1988).

Tim Burton’s Batman was a game-changer for summer blockbusters. It closed out a decade marked by light and sunny escapist entertainment by applying a more serious, atmospheric attitude, both dark and thrilling. It also ushered in a new level of hype that became an integral part of the movie-going experience. And it pointed the way for comic-book movies to become the dominant vehicle for summer entertainment.

Before Batman, Hollywood had created comic-book movies as silly, second-tier product. With the exception of the first Superman movie, comic-book movies lacked high production values and fidelity to their source material.

Things began to change when comic-book artists like Frank Miller and Alan Moore offered their takes on the superhero genre. Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns brought a new level of psychological depth and graphic sophistication to comics.

Meanwhile, Hollywood was searching for the new Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, another prodigy with a childlike sense of wonder to dazzle audiences. Enter Tim Burton, who scored two hits, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, before turning 30. The surprise success of these dark, anarchic films marked Burton as having the ability to be edgy and still appeal to mass audiences. The execs at Warner Brothers could sense that audiences’ tastes were changing and a risk-taker like Burton might be necessary for Batman.

Batman arrived at the end of a decade where greed ran rampant, recession was imminent and people sensed things were getting worse, not better. Burton’s vision of Batman matched his audience’s feelings of restlessness and unease.

Every aspect of the movie was infused with Burton’s desire to present the world of Batman as a reflection of modern dystopia. Anton Furst’s groundbreaking production design took elements of Metropolis, Blade Runner and Depression-era Art Deco Manhattan, heaping layers of urban squalor upon itself.

But if there’s one image that defines the bold new vision of Burton’s Batman, it’s the Batsuit. Designer Bob Ringwood totally rejected the gray and blue image from the camp TV series. Ringwood’s design is a suit that contains drama in itself, something powerful but unwieldy, something closer to Robocop than Adam West. The Batsuit is a vision of man made superior by advanced technology, but also encased and imprisoned by it. It’s a 21st-century suit of armor for a Dark Knight, and it is still the template for how we see Batman today.

At the same time, the new Batman’s rigidness made him a foil for the film’s true protagonist. The Joker, with his anarchic wit and irreverent gags, is the heir to Beetlejuice. the charismatic anti-hero and master of ceremonies of Burton’s funhouse. At the same time, he was the comic alibi that could make Burton’s seriousness acceptable, breathing life and energy into his arty aspirations.

The Joker may have overwhelmed Batman in this film, but looking at the superhero movies that followed, we see the real winner, in a legacy of dark, disturbed protagonists whose vulnerabilities reflect the anxieties of our era. At the same time, Batman’s demons yielded a new dimension of interior drama and fragility that feels real—something that modern-day superheroes with their unlimited CGI powers can’t compensate for.

With its groundbreaking character types and radical visuals, Batman provided a new template for blockbuster storytelling, one that could even overcome its greatest weakness: its script. The plot of Batman may dip into incoherence, revolving around the Joker’s wanting to become some kind of homicidal artist by poisoning the citizens of Gotham until they die with a smile on their face.

Then again, the plot holes didn’t seem to matter to audiences. What mattered was the vision, the mood, the experience of a live-action comic-book movie that treated its source material seriously. Burton’s Batman provided the signal for a new comic-book movie whose ambitions often surpassed its abilities to deliver. These films are often incoherent or overloaded, but at their best, they come through with unforgettable images and moments. The Joker’s master plan has come to fruition. For better or worse, we exit the theater with a smile on our face.

San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television.

TRUE BLOOD RECAP 6: HOPELESS

TRUE BLOOD RECAP 6: HOPELESS

Tonight’s meh True Blood was proof double-O positive of the Law of Fives. Seriously, if physicists applied themselves, I trust they’d find the Law of Fives almost as immutable as the Law of Gravity, and not nearly as funny.

nullAs much as tonight’s episode sort of amused us it was also reminding us that it was, in this final Alan Ball-written episode of this final Ball-supervised season, one over-repeated riff, theme or trope away from self parody, accidental camp or worse.

What I mean: a troop of rednecks in Obama masks yelling, “Yes we can!” as they blow up a vampire . . . . Well, can’t speak for you, but that’s pretty much what “trying too hard” looks like in True Blood terms.

But back to the Law of Fives: from The Wire to Alias to that other great vamp show, Angel, five seasons is just the perfect amount. Under, say, four seasons, is cruel undernourishment (Deadwood, Firefly, Terriers) and over five seasons, just wears a show down, out or beyond its strengths, even for titans (much of Lost and Buffy’s respective six and seventh seasons, sadly.)

The issues of time and termination are raised right off after Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) and Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgård) lead the forces of the Authority to the insane asylum where the batty nihilist Russell Edgington (Denis O'Hare) is getting ready to wreck havoc on everything he can find.

“Maybe you’re just bored after one thousand years but you not not make that decision for me,” says Bill to Eric, for not playing along/kissing ass with the Authority.

Eric, alas, is being pulled under by some deep seas of ennui now that he’s separated from Pam, the social context of Fangtasia, the love of Sookie (Anna Paquin and hey, remember her?), and now he learns that his sister Nora (Lucy Griffiths) is a crazed member of the blood cult fundamentalist Sanguinista movement. Skarsgård is such a terrific actor—who knew there were so many colorations of “disinterested because of multi-centennial pain”?

Jason, meanwhile, is pulled in the direction of ultimate discovery: a dream brings the vision of his lost father and a possible truth of his death.

Terry (Todd Lowe) is, as psych professionals might say, totally fucked.

He confronts Arlene with getting wasted in Iraq and his unit killing a family and his killing an old woman after she cursed him. “Now I’m being hunted by an evil smoke monster,” he complains, which when we saw them in a flashback looked just like the fire god from Wrath of the Titans but way smaller.  We’ll see what redemption looks like; I’m leery.

The show’s other problematic male, Lafayette (Nelsan Ellis), did poorly this week as well. He visited his crazy mom at the convalescent home where Jesus used to work, which meant lots of zany sentences where the name “Jesus” was inappropriately placed in sentences.  Please.

At one point in this very randomly structured episode—I find myself writing about it out of sequence to try and enforce a shape on it which the writers didn't supply—Eric and Bill must glamor Sookie—hey, remember her?—lest The Authority have them killed for seeing something they shouldn’t have seen.

Bill goes gallant. He tells her that not only will she not remember this night, she will not recall ever knowing him and furthermore, she will only love those who live in the sun. Oh, Bill.

Eric, meanwhile, tells Alcide (Joe Manganiello and his freakishly well-defined upper body) to forget as well, and to take care of Sookie—and to develop a deep loathing of any physical contact with her forever.

But ten minutes later, Sookie reads Alcide’s mind and undoes all of this glamoring. Back in the day (last season) not remembering important things could power an entire season.

Now, I guess that the only reason the glamor scenes existed was to remind newer viewers what separates Bill (romantic!) from Eric (scamp!).

By the time Russell makes his appearance—"silvered" and bound—for an execution in the Council’s chambers, there’s an electric friction between the forced civil behavior of the council and Russell’s Southern gentleman nihilist nutjob. The performances come alive, but director Daniel Attias’s staging is clumsy.

Russell finds Roman’s notions of “mainstreaming,” of humans living with vampires in peace, to be nonsense. “Peace is for pussies!” he quips, a born politician yelling his first campaign button catch phrase.

Roman pushes the button on his killer I-Stake app but Russell doesn’t die—treachery!—and the episode flames out with Russell stabbing Roman in the chest: cue scratchy old blues record (a favorite, but tired True Blood trick).

Look, this is a not prime rub Blood. Or rather, the show Ball’s presided over for five years is getting some more parts together for the grand finales.

It’s just that Attias, an extremely experienced TV and film director, doesn’t display the needed élan or post-Hammer sleaze panache that Michael Lehmann or Romeo Tirone bring to knottier scripts.

And I worry this problem will leak into next week’s episode. Until then, we have the relationship between newly turned vamp Tara (Rutina Wesley) and maker Pam (Kristin Bauer) continue to complicate. And Hoyt continuing to debase himself to impress Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll) or because he really is a skeezy perv in the making while Jessica continues to solidify as the show’s most essentially decent person—whoddathunk?—and poor Sam the shifter (Sam Trammell) finally gets a family together for reals (if the Obama-faced crew doesn’t kill him.)

And Sookie (remember her?) goes with Jason to the fairy nightclub to learn more about their family/vampire issues. Sookie is actually kind of awesome in this episode: she’s discovered the rich world of grown-up self-loathing and Paquin's having hell’s own time not fluttering around that butter-colored set being all distressed and girly. She’s not angry, or sad either, she’s just over this vampire and fairy shit and her part in it. We forget, sometimes, that Paquin is a superlative, not just good, actor.

And that True Blood is, at heart, an incredibly lively, romantic, old school production. The queer hatred it poked fun at way back in 2008 feels way different now after the real Obama’s monumental legal changes, the elegance of Cooper and the acid of Savage changing the lenses but not the disease.

But the times are right, unfortunately, for the desperate, knowing self-gay-hate and pitiful monsters of desperate abjection and real fear of the terribly beautiful Teen Wolf. Even when it’s working, even when it’s delightful, True Blood already has the feel of a relic. I’m just not sure yet of what.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. Magazines and newspapers that have his articles include Detroit Metro Times, gothic.net, Icon Magazine, International Musician and Recording World, Lacanian Ink, MusicFilmWeb, New York Post, The Perfect Sound, Salon, Smart Money Magazine, Teeth of the Divine, Venuszine, and Time Out New York.

BREAKING BAD RECAP 1: LIVE FREE OR DIE

BREAKING BAD RECAP 1: LIVE FREE OR DIE

In the months since Breaking Bad's explosive season 4 finale, and Walt's certainly premature declaration of victory, we've had a long time to ponder what exactly he meant by saying, "I won."  Sure, he had won the most obvious victory in outsmarting Gus Fring, who, at least with Mike as his right hand, had mostly been able to stay a few steps ahead of the erratic and unpredictable Heisenberg (well, except for the whole Gale thing). But really, what Walt thinks he has won is his own freedom: freedom from the inconveniences that having a boss like Gus Fring brought; freedom to do things his own way; freedom to be the Southwest's real meth kingpin. We've been passing through the looking glass of Walt's need to cook meth to support his family after his presupposed demise from cancer for a few seasons now; it's obvious this guy has found something he's not only good at, but truly enjoys, except for (or more likely because of) all of the inevitable drama, chaos, and destruction he leaves in his wake as a result. And all of this havoc is completely worth it to him as long as he finally gets to be "the man" at something.

nullBut in the drug game, being "the man" is like having a target on your back, and Walt will realize soon enough that his problems have most likely been more augmented by Fring's murder than solved by it. In fact, below, in a callback to Season Two's predictive pre-credit scenes, we see a Walt with a full head of hair distractedly chit-chatting with a Denny's waitress, while nervously checking over his shoulder every few seconds. Breaking Bad’s signature sense of dread is almost overbearing (just watching the scene made me feel like I was about to have a panic attack), and as soon as we see that Walt is actually there to meet Lawson (his black market dealer for all things sidearm-related, played perfectly with cautious resignation ["Good luck, I guess."] by Deadwood's Jim Beaver), we know things can't be going as swimmingly as Walt thought they would when he said, "I won." When Walt uncovers the M60 machine gun Lawson has dropped off for him, it's obvious that something has gone severely pear-shaped.

There could be a few causes of such nastiness, knowing what we know now. Perhaps Hank has finally uncovered his brother-in-law's secret life as Heisenberg, and Walt is preparing for an all-out battle with the DEA. Perhaps the German conglomerate that was funding Fring's operation through the back door is more than a little annoyed that Gus has died, and has come to collect on their lost revenues. There is really no way to predict what Walt will have to defend himself against in the future, given writer Vince Gilligan's propensity for throwing viewers for a loop with left field plot twists. But, whatever has Walt packing such heavy heat is definitely formidable, and watching Walt dig himself deeper into whatever hole he's in will no doubt be equal parts terrifying, hilarious, and beautiful.  

For now, Walt is on top of the world. The drug trade in town has been decentralized, and is just waiting for someone to step into power ("There is gold in the streets, just waiting for someone to come and scoop it up.") His cancer's been in remission for some time, Gus can't kill him, and as much as Mike might want to put a bullet squarely between Mr. White's eyes, he can't until one last issue remaining from Fring's empire (the laptop containing all of the super lab video surveillance) is taken care of. In dealing with the issue, Walt buys himself enough time for Mike to consider joining Walt and Jesse in their proposed partnership. Mike clearly wants nothing to do with Walt; he hasn't ever, really. But the way he sees it, if he doesn't help clear up the hard drive issue, he's equally as "boned" as Jesse and Walt; naturally, in taking part, he inadvertently will be screwing himself somehow. Mike even tries to tell Jesse to take the money he's made and "skip town, today," knowing full well this White guy is rotten. But Mike's already in too deep, and it is not going to end well for him, especially if Gus's broken picture frame has anything to do with it, and I'm sure it will.

Walt's proclivity for self-destruction is exemplified perfectly in the electromagnet scene (posted below), when he (of course) decides to crank the amperage to maximize the likelihood that the hard drive will get wiped, making the box truck topple into the evidence building and putting Jesse and himself directly in danger. Of course, with Mike around, they're able to get away unscathed (for now), and Walt's new level of hubris makes itself painfully apparent when Mike asks how they can be sure the plan worked: "Because I say so." This isn't Walt saying something like this to pump himself up and convince himself it's true (a la "I am the one who knocks."); Cranston's delivery is almost flippant, making it clear that when Walter White is truly comfortable with the level of power he now has, he doesn't need gravelly-voiced machismo to sell it. He seems amused, which is far more terrifying than he ever was before Gus's death. Walt doesn't have to fake it 'til he makes it: he has arrived.

And of course, there's Ted Beneke to consider. I suppose I should have known that without seeing a body in a coffin that then closes and goes into the ground in one shot, there's no guarantee of a character's death on any television show, but I was quite sure that Ted had gone the way of Lindus from Terriers. It seems as though I was incorrect, and Gilligan and Co. aren't quite done with Ted. I'm certainly curious about this decision; perhaps Beneke, despite claiming that he's going to keep his mouth shut, could be the guy to unravel Walt's meth business, intentionally or not, directly or not. It's more likely that Walt, now knowing what he does about the situation, is going to give Ted the dirt nap I suspected he was taking all along, and in doing so yet again leaving more problems to be solved.

Finally, Anna Gunn's portrayal of Skyler has made a subtle but significant shift. We have grown accustomed to seeing Skyler act by turns distant, skeptical, spiteful and angry with Walt, at times unrelentingly (and perhaps cruelly) so. But Walt's new freedom seems to have come at the cost of Skyler's. In Gunn’s spot-on portrayal, Skyler now acts like an abused animal, trapped in a cage partially of her own making, with no escape possible. She slinks around, defeated, and speaks to Walt only when spoken to. Her knowledge of Walt's hand in Gus's death has shaken her to her core, but not as much as the knowledge that she essentially drove Walt to it by giving all of their potential escape money to Ted. Skyler hasn't always been the most sympathetic character, and her involvement with Beneke's cooked books has essentially brought the White family back to square one, financially. But now it seems she has broken under the combination of her psychic guilt at her own complicity and her fear of the husband she thought she knew until recently. Gunn’s performance stands out painfully against Cranston's portrayal of Walt’s overconfidence and obliviousness to Skyler's fragile mental state. In the scene below, Walt tells Skyler he forgives her for the Ted situation, replaying a familiar trope: Walt needs to use Skyler as an emotional punching bag, because if he has nobody to demonize, he's forced to look inward and come to grips with the monster he's created in himself. The hug at the end is so unnatural, I could barely watch. Barely.

Dave Bunting is the co-owner (with his sister and fellow Press Play contributor, Sarah D. Bunting) of King Killer Studios, a popular music rehearsal and performance space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. He plays guitar and sings in his band, The Stink, and dabbles in photography, video editing, french press coffee, and real estate. Dave lives in Brooklyn with his wife, son, and sister.