Looking through the chinks in the Dark Knight’s armor

The presumably final trailer for The Dark Knight is now out in very good quality.

Trailers are usually made by marketing departments, not the director, but we know Nolan was responsible for the thematically distinct teasers for Batman Begins. So he is probably in control of the Dark Knight trailers as well, but who knows?

Whomever is responsible, this new trailer shows a lot of leg (though never for too long) including the moment before Harvey’s face becomes scarred (at 1:54), as well as a split-second glimpse of his face post-scarring, barely seen on the away-from-camera side of his face which he’s touching with a revolver (at 2:03).

We also see the Joker tossing Rachel out a window (at 1:56), possibly to her death but — given Batman’s penchant for basejumping and gliding seen at the beginning and end of the trailer — not necessarily.

I am really loving Ledger as the Joker; I think he has more Caesar Romero in him than I had previously realized. One shot in particular reminds me of Romero, right when he says “go” (at 1:39).

For the past three days I’ve been wondering if Iron Man would turn out to be my favorite movie of the year but the Bat has come back with a vengeance in my constantly fluctuating geek leaderboard.

I think Indy 4 is going to be the surprise disappointment of the summer. It’ll still make a bucket of money but I predict that it will, like Spidey 3, make 45% of its total earnings in the opening weekend and have no legs. A bold prediction but I follow my instincts!

This Post-Ledger World Is Strange

The post title above is not mine but a statement of my friend Al which I think well expressed the somewhat unexpected feelings prompted by this least expected of all Hollywood deaths.

There are some interesting comments in Variety about how the marketing of TDK, if not the film itself, will be affected by Ledger’s death:

Principal photography on “The Dark Knight” finished in the fall; as of Tuesday, the pic is still skedded for a July 18 bow. The status of the pic’s marketing campaign, however, is uncertain. The first phase is built around the Joker and pics of his character are particularly ghoulish. Warner execs were still grappling with the news on Tuesday and had no comment on how they would proceed. . . .

The “Dark Knight” rollout will present more than a few challenges en route to opening weekend. One poster shows the Joker character drawing a clown’s smile on a mirror with red lipstick and scrawling the words, “Why So Serious?” Tagline was also used to launch a Joker-centric website that the studio used to bow new photos from the pic and a viral scavenger hunt, among other games.

“The Joker character is dealing with chaos and life and death and a lot of dark themes,” one insider with knowledge of the campaign said. “Everyone is going to interpret every line out of his mouth in a different way now.”

I just hope that Nolan & Co. resist the temptation to re-cut the film for sentimental reasons, either to include more Ledger screen time or to make it less disturbing than what was originally intended. But I’m fairly confident Nolan will trust and stand by his pre-Jan. 22 artistic intuition. Hopefully the studio won’t lean on Nolan to exploit Ledger’s death more than the movie is already going to do anyway.

But it sounds like the Joker might not have been too important to a third Batman movie, as Nolan said a couple weeks ago that he doesn’t really have a character arc in TDK:

“Harvey Dent is a tragic figure, and his story is the backbone of this film…. The Joker, he sort of cuts through the film — he’s got no story arc, he’s just a force of nature tearing through. Heath has given an amazing performance in the role, it’s really extraordinary.”

It will be impossible ever to enjoy this performance on its own terms now. His role, and the movie itself, will now be so overshadowed by everything outside the film, that it will be difficult not only to evaluate the movie sensibly but even to experience it without thinking about the actor instead of the character whenever Ledger is on screen.

However, Ledger is an extraodinary actor — his was the only good male performance in Brokeback Mountain, I remind you — and he may just be good enough to make us momentarily forget about his own death during his farewell performance.

Heath Ledger on Ambien

I found the source of the actual quotation everyone has been citing in reference to Ledger and sleeping pills, even as the quote gets further and further from its source. It’s from a New York Times interview on November 4th:

He is here in London filming the latest episode of the “Batman” franchise, “The Dark Knight.” … It is a physically and mentally draining role — his Joker is a “psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy” he said cheerfully — and, as often happens when he throws himself into a part, he is not sleeping much.

“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.” One night he took an Ambien, which failed to work. He took a second one and fell into a stupor, only to wake up an hour later, his mind still racing.

What those who blame his insomnia on the aftermath of the Joker role are leaving out is the “as often happens” part of the quote. He had just been filming a Terry Gilliam movie in London before he died, so he was in the middle of a role again and thus having trouble sleeping.

The NYT story also has this ominous comparison from the director of I’m Not There:

“Dylan was completely inspired by James Dean, and Heath has a little bit of James Dean in him, even physically, a kind of precocious seriousness,” Mr. Haynes went on.

But I suppose you could find lots of “prescient quotations” about anyone after they die. Forunately most such comments never have the chance to become prescient.

Everybody Can Breathe a Sigh of Relief

The impending expiry of the WGA contract at the end of October is threatening production of the Justice League of America movie intended to be directed by George Miller of Happy Feet fame/notoriety. Admittedly he also directed the Mad Max trilogy so he might not have been completely inept, but the last news we heard was that Jessica Biel was in, then out, as Wonder Woman.

I actually think she wouldn’t be such a bad choice for the role, but I still think the movie is just a bad idea in general before Singer’s second Superman film or Nolan’s (hopeful) third if last Batman picture. Even though Superman and Batman would most likely not be played by Brandon Routh and Christian Bale in a Justice League movie — which I think is a good idea whether it were made next year or after the conclusions of the individual franchises — I think it makes most sense not to have the characters appear concurrently in separate continuities.

Let Nolan and Bale finish their trilogy, then reinvent Batman as a character that would be compatible with superpowered partners for a Justice League adventure. Let Singer and Routh have another try at a movie worthy of Action Comics, then recast Superman with an actor that would be more credible as the leader of a team of superheroes.

“It was not how to get into the Joker but how to get him out of my head”

At Wizard World Chicago there was a Dark Knight panel on Saturday composed of Christopher and Jonah Nolan, David Goyer, Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, and Gary Oldman (but not Heath Ledger). They showed a teaser with actual visual footage this time, which I haven’t been able to find online — check out how tight (and sartorially clever) the security was here — but there is a description of the footage contents here (minor but highly gratifying spoilers).

The most interesting comment from the director was this one:

What are the most important aspects of the Joker that you needed to incorporate in this film?

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: We looked at it the other way around. We found a way of looking at the character and saw what role he would play in the film. The Joker card at the end of the first film created the right kind of feeling. That was the hook that got us thinking about the next one. We were looking through comics and Joker stories and we started writing the treatment before we even wrote “The Prestige.”

Jonah [his brother and screenwriter] called me and said, “Have you read the first two Joker appearances?” I had but not in a really long time. We’ve come around to something that’s eerily close to those first two appearances.

I’ve never read them but now I’m really curious to read the first two issues with the Joker. All I know is that he was based on Conrad Veidt’s character in The Man Who Laughs, the Victor Hugo adaptation of ten years before which was recently featured in The Black Dahlia (another Eckhart film).

I’m also impressed by just how clever and shrewd Christian Bale is. After the filmmakers expressed a lack of interest in a World’s Finest film, Bale threw the fans some red meat without actually making a verbal statement that could be quoted:

On a scale of 1 to 10, is there any interest in a Batman/Superman World’s Finest movie?

DAVID GOYER: For me, after working on this project, it’s zero.

JONAH NOLAN: When I was a teenager, my brother gave me a copy of The Dark Knight Returns, which has a very similar scene in it. I couldn’t put a number on it.

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN: Creatively, I’m burned out so I have no interest.

PAUL LEVITZ: What do you say, Christian? Do you want to wrestle Superman? [Audience roars]

CHRISTIAN BALE: [Nods confirming he’d like to as the audience screams in excitement]

The rest of the panel comments are available here.

The Joker and Chaos Theory

Matthew Rossi has an ingenious story concept for the Joker, moving him away from homicidal monomania towards someone who better perpetuates the randomness and chaos he supposedly personifies:

Why did the Joker steal the costume from a local college team’s mascot and wear it while robbing the Gotham Stock Exchange, and for that matter, why did the Joker break into the Gotham Stock Exchange just to steal three stockbroker’s wallets at gunpoint? Why is he paying street gangs to slash the tires of every Audi 5000 in the city?

The Joker as a practitioner of Chaos Theory would completely confound the Detective who relies on following clues to solve crimes and looks for meaning in details. Villains like the Riddler who deliberately leave clues play to Batman’s strengths, but Batman’s attempt to impose order on an intentionally random series of crimes would necessarily fail if not drive him insane.

I love the thought of Batman insisting on drawing meaning out of clues that turn out to be dead ends. He would inevitably become a pathetic conspiracy theorist, like a Tom Hanks who can find something in anything but discovers at the end of the story that there is no Da Vinci Code after all. Sure, it might be a pessimistic conclusion implying that there is no continuity in the world, but it would at least be an authentically Noir ending for that darkest of private dicks.

The built-in metaphor of randomly shuffled playing cards would also make better use of the Joker’s name than merely his being a clown whose special pathology is telling jokes that aren’t funny.

The Dark Knight, Terrorism, and the Joker Virus

The teaser trailer for The Dark Knight is up at WhySoSerious.com. This must be the first ever audio-only teaser, and only Bale and Caine could pull it off. (Actually Clive Owen and Daniel Craig have the most compelling voices alive and I wouldn’t mind if they did radio for the rest of their careers.)

The Joker sounds pretty chilling and his line ”I’m a man o’ my word” sounds a bit like Jack Nicholson as well. Ledger seems to be really exaggerating the American accent, with the ‘L’s way back in his throat (in “people will die”) and the hard R in “word”. What’s especially creepy though is his breathing, not only at the end of sentences but in the middle, between “Starting tonight” and “people will die”. He seems very disturbed. 

It sounds like Nolan is continuing the terrorism theme of the last movie, if not making it more explicit, with Caine’s line that “some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men j ust want to watch the world burn.” But lest anyone think The Dark Knight will offer a simplistic criticism of terrorism, Alfred responds to Wayne’s comment that “this is different, they’ve crossed a line” by suggesting that “you crossed a line first, though. You hammered them. And in their desperation they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.”

If I had to predict the trajectory of Nolan’s trilogy, the focus of this second movie on Batman’s antithesis, the Joker, will be resolved in the third movie by some variety of moral relativism represented by Two-Face who synthesizes the noble desire for justice with its necessarily destructive means. Whether Nolan emphasizes the conflict in Two-Face or favors the image that his alter egos are ”two sides of the same coin” remains to be seen, but I think the first movie already told us when Wayne defined “the means to fight injustice” as the ability “to turn fear against those who would prey on the fearful.” Unless Nolan manages to transcend ordinary oppositions as Team America: World Police did, the dualities inherent in the Batman mythos will necessarily keep the films locked into the unhelpful binaries that are usually insufficient to explain the world.

UPDATE: The following links are currently obselete as over the past few minutes every page at WhySoSerious.com has been redirected to Rent-A-Clown.com, which shows only the mugshots of the fans participating in the event described below. Luckily I downloaded the trailer before it disappeared!

Also on the site, the “police report” in the lower-right corner links to coverage of the flash-mob and scavenger hunt held outside the San Diego Convention Center on Friday morning that was incited by the same website when it looked like this last week. Anyway there are several links from this page that will let you piece together what happened.

I usually hate gimmicky websites promoting movies in “unique” ways but I love the way Nolan made up for the lack of visuals in the teaser but creating an event for fans to sort of participate in that is no doubt somewhat related to the plot of the movie. I love the concept, combining those online-originating flash-mobs with the disturbing fact that terrorist recruitment videos are disseminated publicly on the web and there’s nothing that can be done it.

I also love the conflation of audience and actor in the Joker’s mob walking around San Diego, their clown faces making them basically unpaid sandwich-board advertisers of the movie. Of course they’re being willingly exploited by Warner Bros. but that doesn’t diminish the fun of running around in Joker paint and pretending you’re part of a criminal gang for an hour. It’s the perfect kind of harmless, wish-fullment fantasy thrill, incorporated ex post facto into the Batman narrative by the website.

I know “viral” is the overused adjective of the moment, and The Dark Knight’s “viral marketing campaign” is a contradiction in terms insofar as it is corporately generated, but a virus is an evocative metaphor for the self-replicating nature of the Joker meme  — another word o’ the mo — as fan(atic)s paint their faces to become increasingly anonymous but also individual, as the hundreds of variations of the Joker makeup in the online mug shots attest.

If nothing else, it’s much more exciting than the Guy Fawkes mask-wearing mob at the end of V for Vendetta, and it’s much more interesting insofar as its a thinly veiled metaphor for terrorism rather than explicitly terroristic as in Vendetta. Besides, the Guy Fawkes masks were just too slick to catch on, while Nolan has broken down the Joker face to three essential parts which are endlessly variable: white face, black eyesockets, and messy red lipstick.

Now we see that the very first image of the Joker online, fuzzy and closely cropped, was not a hastily prepared shot that was rushed online to appease fan interest, but the beginning of a meme intended to spread over the course of a year. What better way to promote a film than by building it up in the audience’s mind, augmented by an audio clip, rather than gratifying them with visual footage. As much as the Iron Man teaser excited me, it has only served to satisfy its audience rather than increase their anticipation as Nolan is doing for The Dark Knight.

Eckhart Elected DA

I don’t know how I missed this piece of news almost two weeks ago. Oh wait, yes I do: I’ve been busy!

 So Aaron Eckhart will be Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight (he shares a few thoughts on the character here). Gotham City’s District Attorney sounds like a natural blend of his roles last year as charming corporate spokesman and obsessed cop.

My fantasy casting has long been Gary Sinese for the role but he’s probably too obviously sinister, while Eckhart should be able to convey a genuine likeability necessary to offset his dark tendencies. He has to make us believe, even as Two-Face, why Bruce doesn’t give up hope for him and still considers Harvey his friend.

Once again Chris Nolan demonstrates his casting genius. The only thing I’m not happy about is the rumor that Maggie Gyllenhaal will be replacing Katie Holmes… as the same character. Sure, K.Ho was the weak link in Batman Begins, but who wouldn’t be when the other links are Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Morgan Freeman, Tom Wilkinson, and Rutger Hauer?

Say what you like about Gyllenhaal’s acting ability (overdone being the operative word, making her the “weak link” in Stranger than Fiction) but not even possession by the spirit of Thespis could compensate for her droopy face and slouchy shoulders. Good gravy, man, you’re making a motion picture! It’s a visual medium! How are people going to appreciate the photographic genius of Wally Pfister if an actress makes the audience look away in disgust!

The only thing inspiring about that piece of news is the fact that MTV used the world “frienemy” in the title (I only recently discovered Mean Girls).

Would you let this woman spoil your negatives?

Of course not.

Saint Bruce and the Batman

As mentioned previously I haven’t been buying 52 on a weekly basis, prefering to read it in collected format, but I did give in and pick up the issue for Week 24 given Jim Roeg’s allusive review. Given that precedent, then, all it took was J.G. Jones’ ingenious cover to make me pick up Week 30 no matter what was inside.

The icon of Bruce Wayne slaying his cape and cowl a la Saint George and the Dragon is perfect on so many levels, I think it is the best cover of a series without a single bad one, if not the Image of the Year outright.

Since I bought it, I figured I might as well read the insides, and while doing so I had exactly the same thoughts as Caleb Mozzocco, but since he posted them first I’ll quote him:

The history of the Batman, for example, sounds an awful lot like what Grant Morrison told Newsarama.com in an interview was his vision of Batman’s personal history, and some of the lines read like they poured right out of Morrison’s finger tips (Not only the “Defeat me and the ten-eyed surgeons of the empty quarter will come to slice out your demons,” but even the offhand comment about the Joker being “this crazy, brilliant clown running around”).

That last phrase reminded me of the same interview, in which Morrison conceived of the past 62 years of Batman continuity as fitting into Batman’s career overall. We can now see that this interview basically functions as a gloss on the first three pages of this issue, a more self-conscious elaboration of Batman’s timeline:

So before starting the book [i.e., he flagship Batman title], I read through every Batman story I own and tried to synthesize all of the portrayals — from the ’30s to the present day — and all that history into the real life of a single extraordinary man. When you condense nearly 80 years [No idea how he figures that. --Nobody] of Batman’s adventures into a little more than ten years of Bruce Wayne’s life, his descent into grimness becomes not only clear but quite understandable! And the need to get him out of it is even more urgent.

The very rough timeline I have in my head runs as follows — 19 year old Bruce Wayne returns from his journey around the world and becomes the (1930s style) Dark Avenger Gothic Vigilante Batman for his first year of adventures. Then, aged 20, he meets Robin and his whole outlook changes — now he has responsibilities, he becomes less reckless, now he has a partner, he lightens up and learns to have fun again for the first time since his parents died. The police stop chasing him, the Joker stops killing and becomes a playful crime clown, and Gotham is bright and crazy like Vegas. Batman’s having the time of his life in his early 20’s, fighting colorful villains and monsters with his irrepressible young pal.

In 52, Dick Grayson narrates:

I made him laugh, and he was like the greatest big brother you could ever imagine. Those were pretty colorful years in Gotham, when it seemed like anything could happen and it was our town. The Joker gave up being a murderer for a while and there was just this crazy, brilliant clown running around.

It’s not surprising that his terminology in the interview should match the language used in 52, since he specifically mentions issue #30 below, so he was probably working on or had recently finished the issue when he gave the interivew. To continue then:

But by the time he’s in his mid-20s things are starting to go wrong — the first Robin leaves to go to college and hang out with the Teen Titans. Batman enjoys a period as a swinging bachelor for a couple of years but it’s not long before the hammerblows start to fall — in rapid succession, the now-homicidal Joker kills Jason Todd, the new Robin, and maims Barbara (Batgirl ) Gordon, Bane breaks Batman’s back, then Gotham is devastated by earthquakes, plagues and urban warfare, the Joker kills Jim Gordon’s beloved wife, Jason Todd returns corrupted, and a betrayal by his superhero friends leads Batman to the creation of Brother Eye and leads him on to Infinite Crisis where Batman winds up pointing a gun at Alexander Luthor’s head before deciding to leave Gotham for a year.

So it turns out that this was literally a panel-by-panel description of pages 2 and 3 of 52 #30, except that the comic book leaves out the Joker killing Sarah Essen Gordon and adds the death of Tim Drake’s father.

Thinking about it this way, the grim Batman of the last decade or so makes a whole lot of sense — the guy went from cool, assured crimefighter to shattered ***-up, barely clinging on with his fingernails. His mission, his life and his sanity had all gone off the rails. His confidence was shot. After a few years of relentless pain, bad luck and betrayal like Batman’s had, any normal man would be canceling the papers, pulling the blinds, then pulling the trigger. We had to address the effect of these tragedies and then move him beyond them.

In the upcoming issue #30 of 52 we see the post-Infinite Crisis Batman reaching rock bottom. The story of how he starts his comeback is revealed in a later issue of the weekly and it’s that revitalized Batman Andy and I are picking up on in our book.

If anything, this is a lesson to us to study every word of interviews with Grant Morrison because the man’s memory is so good he can’t help but reveal the content of future issues in detail.

Morrison on Seven Soldiers and Co.

Newsarama has posted a substantial interview with comic book rock star Grant Morrison. It’s obviously an email interview since his responses are long and comprehensive. Most of it is ideas we’ve heard from him before but compared to the usual creator interviews a Morrison Q&A can’t not be a highlight, and a few things caught my eye.

Having picked up Batman #658, the conclusion of Morrison’s four-part arc introducing the son of Batman and Talia, I felt that it just kind of fizzled out in the last few pages despite its great promise. Apparently it was a last-minute change, and the whole arc should be seen as an introduction to Morrison’ run on the title rather than a self-contained story:

I’d originally planned a heartbreaking death scene for the Damian character in that book. He was to save Batman’s life then perish in what was a really nice and emotional conclusion…then I started writing the character and realized he was too good to waste. He started coming to life as I wrote and I soon realized there was too much long-term story potential in this kid, so I had to completely discard my beautifully-constructed ending and instead leave it open and inconclusive for Damian and Talia’s comeback which now forms a major strand of this 15-part Bat-novel I’m planning. If I’d stuck to my original plan, I’d have had a more affecting conclusion to a 4-part story but I’d have lost a character that will now provide me with a much bigger and more powerfully resonant finale.

It sounds like Morrison isn’t exactly overjoyed (”disappointed” might be more accurate) with how “his” Seven Soldiers characters have been subsequently used in the DCU, since he was hired in the first place to revamp these second-rate characters into viable properties. Surprising, perhaps, since Morrison is supposed to be one of the four writers of 52:

Ian Brill: I must know, what happened to The Buleteer between Seven Soldiers #1 and 52 Week 24 where she goes from being a severely reluctant hero to someone who joins a version of the Justice League (a rather makeshift version, but still)?

Grant Morrison: Beats me. She’s found her way into the regular DCU as a kind of cipher who crops up when writers need a ‘lame’ hero to stand around in crowd scenes. I have no control over how people handle the Seven Soldiers characters in my wake - Klarion already seems barely recognizable and appears to have returned to his role (a role no-one could ever sell in the first place) as a teen warlock who turns up to fight DCs younger characters - a sort of Goth Mr. Myxyzptlk. I honestly don’t expect anyone to actualize the potential of these characters, but I’d like to be proven wrong. The Guardian and Frankenstein could join the JLA.

Finally, a lot of my recent posts have been related to metafiction in the DCU, including Infinite Crisis as well as Morrison’s own Animal Man, and similar themes are woven into Seven Soldiers. Ian Brill comments: “There seems to be meta-commentary on the superhero comic book industry in Seven Soldiers. The major example I can think of is The Seven Unknown Men, who are like seven editors arranging and rearranging these characters’ lives.” After a couple long paragraphs Morrison says:

So the Time Tailors/Seven Unknown Men (whom I imagined to be all the DC writers who have appeared as themselves interacting with characters inside the DC Universe - like me, Julius Schwartz, Cary Bates, Elliot Maggin etc…) present a sci-fi take on the job of maintaining a comic book universe, repairing its plot holes, refreshing its characters and set-ups and generally patching it up, like tailors adding to an old, tattered quilt.

I haven’t yet read the final bookend issue of the series myself because I still haven’t finished Volume 3 but it shouldn’t be long till Volume 4 is out, including the final issue. I flipped through it at the shop though and JHWIII’s art is amazing.