Posts Tagged politics
Harry Brown: jmag review
Here’s my short review of UK revenge flick Harry Brown from the latest issue of jmag. One thing I didn’t manage to squeeze into the wordcount was a mention of its killer opening scene – like a low-rent remake of the first moments of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.
HARRY BROWN
Directed by: Daniel Barber
Starring: Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer
Country: UK
Michael Caine has always been a “working actor”, happy to accept a role now rather than wait around for something better. It’s why he’s been in so many great films as well as so many shockers. Harry Brown is somewhere in the middle.
This “vigilante pensioner” flick plays shamelessly into the story currently fuelling newspapers worldwide: KIDS THESE DAYS ARE SOCIOPATHIC MONSTERS WHO’LL KILL YOU AS SOON AS LOOK AT YOU, GRANDPA! Caine brings echoes of his legendary 1971 Get Carter hardarse to Harry – an elderly ex-marine who decides enough is enough. The emotional realism of his performance gives the movie a classiness that doesn’t mesh with its grimy, cartoonish thrills. (Especially the ridiculous digitally-added spurting blood.)
Most vigilante films pay at least a little lip-service to the fact that revenge is wrong – fun, sure, but wrong. Harry Brown has no such qualms. You’ll have to balance your desire to see Michael Caine kill teenage thugs with how dirty cheering him on might make you feel afterwards.
Other reviews this month: Fish Tank, Baghead, and True Blood: Season Two on DVD.
Issue #40 on sale now.
Batman Cares
When I was chatting with Dylan Horrocks about his newly reprinted Hicksville collection, I quizzed him about his time writing Batgirl for DC Comics. The following didn’t make it into my Bookslut piece, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
“When I was writing stories set in Gotham City, I was very conscious that the whole Batman ethos presents a vision of the modern urban environment that I don’t think is true. I don’t mean that people dress up in tights and capes – people do! It’s that it presents the city as a kind of urban jungle, full of predators preying on innocent citizens. They’re poisonous, they’re corrupt, and so on.
“And the only way to protect innocents in that kind of setting is to be more violent than those predators. You have to become a predator who preys on the predators. That’s what Batman is. He uses violence – really nasty violence – and his stock and trade is torture.
“I was writing Batgirl at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal. I felt like this vision of how the world works presented by these comics went perfectly with the one the Bush administration was pushing on us. We’re engaged in a war on terror and, in the comics, Bruce Wayne is engaged in a war on crime. So it’s not just that I rejected Batman’s tactics – I rejected that whole view of the world.”
He’s not wrong. I mean, I love Batman – if pushed, I’ll admit that Batman might be my favourite character in the entirety of fiction – but he’s not wrong. One of the things about these iconic characters, though, is that they’ve been around so long that there can never be one coherent ideology throughout their thousands and thousands of stories. It’s how the Huffington Post can run a piece suggesting Batman would be pro-immigration and anti-jail for drug offenders, while conservative newspapers happily claimed The Dark Knight as a blockbuster with a Bush-friendly subtext.
So allow me to offer up proof that Batman cares, and from an unlikely source: the infamously grim Batman: The Killing Joke one-shot from 1988.
I know, I know. It’s the Batman story where poor Barbara Gordon gets crippled, right? And maybe raped? All in the Joker’s bid to convince Commissioner Gordon that the only thing between sanity and madness is “one bad day”? That’s the one. Even its writer, Alan Moore, doesn’t like it. He says it’s “a terrible book. I mean, it doesn’t say anything. It’s talking about Batman and the Joker, and says that yes, psychologically Batman and the Joker are mirror images of each other. So?”
Ignore all that – even Moore – and remember how The Killing Joke begins with Batman visiting the Joker, imprisoned in Arkham Asylum. “Hello,” Batman says. “I came to talk.” And he continues:
“I’ve been thinking lately. About you and me. About what’s going to happen to us, in the end. We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps later. I just wanted to know that I’d made a genuine attempt to talk things over and avert that outcome. Just once.”
Sure, it turns out that Batman’s not talking to the Joker at all, but just a stooge in white facepaint who’s taken his place while the Joker organizes the lovingly-drawn horror that follows. That’s not the point. I can enjoy the gritted teeth of near-fascist Batman; I can enjoy the gaudy and ludicrous BIFF! KAPOW! 1960s TV Batman; but my favourite Batman is the one who’ll do anything to avoid more violence and death…
…even sitting down with his psychopathic arch-nemesis in a heartfelt – and inevitably pointless – attempt at conversation.
My favourite Batman is the one who hates goodbyes.
Capitalism A Love Story: jmag review
Here’s my quick review of Michael Moore’s latest documentary – now out on DVD – from the new issue of jmag. That’s a genuine question at the end, too: noble, or naive?
CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY
Directed by: Michael Moore
Country: USA
“Capitalism is evil”. That’s a direct quote from Capitalism: A Love Story, the latest of Michael Moore’s documentaries about what’s wrong with America. (In case you’re wondering, the answer is: a lot, actually.)
In his sledgehammer style, Moore wades into the US economy: families evicted from homes; hilariously evil memos leaked by major companies; profits made on human misery; all ending with post-Katrina New Orleans and demands for revolution.
Fans of his mid-90s TV Nation series will find even fewer stunts this time, and those that remain – like driving an armoured car to bailout banks and demanding money back – are weak. Instead, Moore relies on sincere voiceover, melodramatic music, and ironic stock footage to spice up his interviews.
It’s effective enough, too. It’s just hard to watch Moore using the same leading questions, manipulative visuals, and fear-mongering that are usually considered the domain of his political opponents. Does refusing to use those same underhanded tactics make you noble – or just naive? I honestly don’t know.
Other reviews this month: Paul Greengrass’ Green Zone and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Micmacs in cinemas, and Vampire Girl Vs. Frankenstein Girl, Paranormal Activity, and FOX’s Glee on DVD.
Issue #38 on sale now.
Psy-Ops, Simplicity, and Superheroes
When I first heard that comic books were air-dropped onto war zones, I remember thinking it must be a goodwill gesture. Something fun, something bright. Something to distract the suffering children.
Yes, I’m an idiot.
It somehow didn’t click that the thousands of comics, say, dropped on Iraq in the early ‘90s were more likely show Saddam Hussein cutting off his own head than a cheery selection of Calvin and Hobbes.
I was planning to discuss psy-ops and propaganda comics while writing about Joe Sacco’s Footnotes In Gaza for Bookslut, but Sacco distracted me with his hundreds of pages of heartbreak. Would it have been too tenuous to compare his work with Captain America punching Hitler back in 1941? They’re both designed to win hearts and change minds, after all. And comics have a long history of being used as propaganda – whether to rally support at home like Hitler’s glass jaw above, or loaded into cluster bombs and dropped on the enemy to destroy morale.
Sometimes, however, the pretty pictures can have the opposite effect. During World War II, the Japanese reportedly dropped leaflets designed to convince American soldiers their wives were busy being unfaithful at home; they were illustrated – ahem – graphically enough that they became collector’s items. “Our guys loved it,” says military historian Stanley Sadler. “They’d trade them like baseball cards.”
That same article by Ian Urbina references a failed use of superhero-specific propaganda, too. In 2000, DC Comics made special Superman and Wonder Woman comics in multiple languages to illustrate the dangers of land mines. But… umm… what were those weird, word-filled clouds hanging over the heroes’ heads? Urbina explains:
“Though widely understood in some contexts, thought bubbles appearing above a cartoon character’s head left some readers, especially rural ones, completely baffled, according to press accounts.”
The perceived simplicity of comic art is what makes it so appealing for cross-cultural propaganda. Unfortunately – and setting aside the possibility that this story is another example of the “caveman panic” rumour circulating around the Lumière train – it’s never that simple. Read this fascinating piece on the attempts to cure “The Forever Problem” at a New Mexico nuclear waste vault. Once you set aside a shared written language and a shared visual vocabulary, how do you communicate grave danger to humans living a thousand years from now?
Comic books have hundreds of specific visual conventions, from the wavy lines above an angry man’s head in the newspaper funnies to the ornate font Marvel’s currently using to imply that Thor and their other Norse Gods sound kinda ‘Ye Olde’.
And superhero comics may be many things – daft, adolescent, awe-inspiring, overtly sexist and conceptually daunting – but they’re rarely simple.