Superhero noir
Posted by Solomon on 10/1/2020, 6:42 am
I'm inclined to eliminate all superhero noir, and it seems that we already have.
Nonetheless, fair is fair and I do put one on now and then and give it a chance.
Last night it was Batman Begins, the Nolan-Bale collaboration. I admit to falling asleep after 60-70 minutes due to age and no more than a few very small sips of Tia Maria.
It's a noir lighting movie, no doubt. The opening sequence lasting about 30 minutes starts off well enough with a well and a bat fest scaring poor Bruce Wayne, plus his parents being killed before his eyes. But do we really feel the latter tragedy? Anyway suddenly he's resorted, like a Ronald Colman, to some eastern semi-religious sect where one is trained by Liam Neeson, only it's all very violent and nothing like the spirituality in Colman's case. First thing you know, there are huge explosions and I'm wondering where they came from. Was that gas on top of a mountain or stockpiles of bombs or what? It sure wasn't sharp swords. And, oh yes, Neeson soft-pedals his voice. Poor Christian Bale, attempting to look so manly. What worked for him as a Psycho seems to be working against him here. I just do not see him as overcoming his neurosis, but he does and he goes back to Gotham, which is in the hands of Tom Wilkinson attempting to speak New York American or something. Plus now there is the obligatory female justice official. But having left the fantasy behind with its blue flower and trek through ice, we next get quite a good sequence of the Batcave and bat accouterments, complete with Morgan Freeman. It's so convenient for Batman-to-be, but Wayne's dad's interests ensured this; and, well, given time and money which he had, Bale could have built up these gadgets on his own if he weren't so fortunate as to find them ready-made.
With the screenplay now beginning to bounce back and forth back and forth between all the characters that have been introduced, we hone in on a sequence in which Wilkinson is hoist to a petard, that's the wrong thing to say. No, there's no explosive. He's hoisted to something or other and his drug deal is busted up, a first victory for Batman.
Bale begins to play playboy as Wayne as a cover and Katie Holmes, I believe it is, thinks he's a clown, and he almost tells her he's a hero. No, inside he's really not a sex maniac, but she's pissed.
I'm losing consciousness by this time and must postpone the effort of watching this spectacle. I've already endured several "action" scenes where it was impossible to decode the fight. Now there is a hallucinogen introduced.
Bale's enunciation begins to annoy me, there is some abnormality there or else I'm terribly politically incorrect. I am totally incorrect, it is true, and even glad of it. It's like a lisp but it isn't. Won't people see this and know who Batman is? I tell myself that it's amazing how many famous actors have such things going on, and I'm no better with my physical issues. I tell myself that they've overcome them and deserve great credit. But it still distracts me, but only now and then. I want Bale to appear strong, but he doesn't. I want to identify or at least lose myself in the story but I can't.
This has nothing to do with noir, mind you. It's just that unless the rest of it redeems what has been screened so far, I'm inclined to forget superhero noir. I've sampled Keaton and Kilmer, but it's all a blur. A long time ago, I saw Treasure of the Sierra Madre and I went to a theater to see a revival of Gone with the Wind. These movies made impressions and you could revisit them and savor them.
Nolan-Bale are not doing it for me, and that's why they're not on my list. Peter Boyle's evil and his performance in The Friends of Eddie Coyle are of another order of noir altogether. Nolan couldn't get that kind of thing on screen in this case. Maybe later in the film.
"Batman Begins opened on June 15, 2005, in the United States in 3,858 theaters. It grossed over $48 million in its opening weekend in North America, eventually grossing over $373 million worldwide. The film was met with highly positive reviews, with critics praising the tone, Bale's performance, action sequences, score, direction, and the emotional weight compared to previous Batman films. Batman Begins was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography and has often been cited as one of the most influential films of the 2000s."
I'm so totally out of step with this that I'd rather watch Atom Man vs. Superman or Superman and the Mole Men or Superman cartoons. I seem to have disconnected from the culture around me.
At any rate, we have no superhero noir on our list but this one has these high scores (8.2 and 70), so I'm asking others to explain why they are not nominating this acclaimed movie for a prominent place in the neo-noir list.
Re: Superhero noir
Posted by Don Malcolm on 10/1/2020, 3:24 pm, in reply to "Superhero noir"
Short answer: superpowers means "superhuman." Noir is not about that. Can superheroes experience alienation? Sure, but it's usually baked baldly into their character as a gimmick to rig the plot (another category of "overdetermination"). Apparently there are entire primers on how superpowers affect human psychology (since many of these beings are "hybrid humans," after all)--all of that is so overly delineated that it is clearly the work of folk who are using the comic book form as aesthetic shorthand for actual character development.
If we don't have BLADE RUNNER (but why not dystopia, even if in the future?), then I don't think we should have any of these superhero films. The character of Batman would have the strongest case as an exception to this rule, as he himself has no superpowers--but most of his adversaries do. (Oh, you say that this one doesn't actually have such an adversary? Clearly nature abhors a vacuum, because once there's a Batman to fight crime, the criminals "up their game.")
I think comic books have been elevated to a status way above their pay grade as a result of this sideways approach to "the seventh art" that has been mined over the past three decades as an ever-more-lucrative pop-culture profit center. The counter-argument would be that this really is a bonafide artistic movement gaining in nuance as its popularity attracts the creative contingent, as manifested in serious (meaning "high and higher budget) films, graphic novels (the gentrification of the comic book), etc. Good grief, they even had a NOIR ALLEY comic book called BATMAN IN NOIR ALLEY, with the Czar of Noir himself as confidant to the Caped Crusader.
Given that, my inclination to keep "superhero noir" (even Batman, who is not actually a superhero...) in its own artistic ghetto is now a full-fledged imperative... :-)
Re: Superhero noir
Posted by Solomon on 10/1/2020, 4:55 pm, in reply to "Re: Superhero noir"
Thank you, Don. In this case, they made Bruce Wayne alienated from a corrupt system that didn't provide him with the justice he wanted. They did bake it in. Gotham here is entirely corrupt.
However, however, a bit of research shows that they followed the comic book origins precisely! https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Batman_Origins
It's hard to accuse the comic book authors of baking it baldly into the plot, unless you argue that the killing of his parents by a small time hood is a gimmick for 10 year olds to identify with Batman's life course after that and buy comics.
To me the telling point against the superhero being noir is that noir and fantasy do not mix. Why not? Once fantasy enters in and the hero can do somersaults in the air bereft of gravity, he or she is above human issues. At least Claude had some problems as the Invisible Man and some trace of noir or pathos creeps with poor Lon Jr.
Re: Superhero noir
Posted by Don Malcolm on 10/2/2020, 6:59 am, in reply to "Re: Superhero noir"
Mike, it's the "trauma from the past" trope that is baked into these stories and exaggerated--related also to the upsurge in usage and reference to "repressed memory" as a basis for psychotic/psychopathic behavior.
What I'm telling you is that comic book plots are themselves bald appropriations of archetypal stories, with superheroes standing in for various pagan gods. Much of "modernist" art (at least in terms of literature and film) stems from such strip-mining activities. Noir is itself a hybrid form, with an underlying destructive energy that it unleashes while attempting to ape the arc of classical tragedy.
I agree with your line of demarcation. These films are a "genre" unto themselves, and best of luck to them...
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