Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Loose Canon (The Dark Knight Rises, continued)

I think ultimately a great deal of whether or not a person enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises or thought it was a worthy successor to The Dark Knight came down to what the person thought of this guy:

Bane was an interesting choice for the major villain of the final piece of the trilogy, because he stands out amongst the Batman comic book rogues gallery in a couple of ways. For one thing, he’s a fairly recent addition to the mythos; most of the classic Bat-villains were introduced early on in the 40’s or 50’s, maybe 60’s or 70’s at the latest, whereas Bane is a creation of the 90’s. Plus, he’s not crazy. A huge element of the Batman narrative tapestry is Arkham Asylum, and the idea that almost all of Batman’s foes end up in the nuthouse rather than a (theoretically much more secure) penitentiary after Batman turns them over to the legal system, and then they escape, and the stories cycle over again. There’s also inherent in that the dichotomy of Batman as a sane defender of stable society contrasted against all of the bad guys as insane manifestations of chaos, while at the same time many of them (the really good ones with staying power) are funhouse mirror exaggerations of different aspects of Bruce Wayne’s own psyche, which honestly could take up an entire post in and of itself (and no doubt has on many other comic book blogs, so I’d really be expounding redundantly there). Bane clearly has issues and an incredibly traumatic backstory, but he’s never portrayed as a raving lunatic. Evil, but not crazy evil.

Unfortunately, that’s potentially problematic in the medium of film. The unavoidable counterpoint is of course going to be Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight, which I think everyone agrees was brilliant, unhinged and unpredictable and perfect as a foil for the severe, serious and saintly Batman. Notwithstanding the concessions to physical reality necessary for transitioning from artwork on paper to performances on screen, the Joker still looked bizarre in The Dark Knight, with his muted yet odd-colored hair and face and clothes; appropriately, he looked like a supervillain, which is an unreal thing. And his personality was unreal to match. Bane is also a supervillain, and he also got a lot of bizarre trappings in his own stylized outfits and his muzzle-like mask with voice-distorter. But those were combined with a more grounded demeanor, which is very true to the comic book version of the character, but paradoxically made it harder to buy in completely to the film manifestation. Or so I assume was the case for at least some of the detractors; personally I thought Thomas Hardy was great and I really enjoyed his Bane, arguably moreso than I ever really dug the character in the comics.

The Joker is the apotheosis of Batman villains, but Bane is the ultimate Batman villain. The Joker is everything Batman is not (evil vs. good; chaos-worshipping vs. order-maintaining; insane vs. sane; brightly colored vs. dark; physically frail vs. robust; grinning vs. scowling; &c.) and you can tell just about any Batman story, from earliest days in his crime-fighting career to the twilight years, and use the Joker as the antagonist. Bane, on the other hand, is Batman (both trained their bodies and minds to peak capabilities; both dark and masked; both intensely focused and driven) with the crucial difference that Batman had a happy early childhood in the lap of luxury, then lost his parents but was still raised in wealth by an emotionally invested butler, and vowed to wage war on crime so that no one would ever suffer as he had. Bane had a miserable childhood inside of a prison with neither goodness nor light in any aspect, and vowed to wage war on society to make others suffer as he had. Oh, and one other distinction between the two weirdly parallel characters: Bane cheats. In his defining arc in the comic books, Bane actually defeated Batman, in an even more thorough way than he does in The Dark Knight Rises. Over the course of a huge storyline, Bane escaped from prison, orchestrated jail breaks in Gotham City which forced Batman to fight all of his other foes in rapid succession, and then finally once Batman was reeling and exhausted Bane confronted him physically. Bane was also amped on a sci-fi version of steroids at the time, so Bane won the fight, breaking Batman’s back. Hence my classification as Bane as the ultimate villain, in the sense of being the final one. He’s the heavy to be used in the last Batman story, when there are no more tales to tell.

In the early-to-mid 90’s, DC Comics attempted, repeatedly and with varying degrees of success, to revitalize their flagship characters (and their flagging sales) for a new generation of fans. The conventional wisdom held that characters who had been around since the 30’s, like Superman and Batman, were too stodgy and out-of-touch, whereas for example the competition like Spider-Man and the X-Men (who had been born of the more-modern 60’s) could still capture the imaginations of children because they were hip and edgy. If that sounds crass and/or altogether missing the point, it was and it did. Nevertheless, the ongoing saga of Superman reached the point where he battled an indestructible monster named Doomsday and had to sacrifice his own life to defeat the menace and save Metropolis. They milked that story literally for years, covering Superman’s last stand, death, funeral, the passing of the torch to other Supermen, and inevitably the original Superman’s return to life and resumption of his place atop the superhero pantheon. Batman/Bane played out much the same as Superman/Doomsday (and only about a year later), with the broken back serving as a metaphorical death, and it had its own passing of the torch subplot, as well, and then Bruce Wayne was miraculously healed and reclaimed the mantle of Batman. In retrospect it seems clear that DC Comics was never going to let things permanently change, such that the official history of their fictional world would read “Once there was a hero named Superman/Batman, who fought the good fight but eventually died/was crippled, and that was the end of that.” The returns of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne were implicit from the outset, but for a (surprisingly long) while the audience was given a taste of new, extreme and in-your-face and unafraid-to-get-blood-on-their-hands versions of Superman and Batman. If those versions truly had proven popular, and there had been little-to-no reactionary backlash to them from older fans, maybe DC Comics would still be publishing their adventures today.

(If for no other reason than it’s supposed to be Green Lantern Month here and I’m going on and on about Dark Knight movies, I will point out that DC Comics did in fact put GL through almost the exact same paces as Supes and Bats, again about a year later. The storyline actually spun out of Clark Kent’s return, which coincided with an attempted alien invasion of Earth that resulted in the destruction of Green Lantern Hal Jordan’s home city. Whoops. Jordan proceeded to go crazy, turn evil, kill off most of the Green Lantern Corps, and then seemingly committed cosmic suicide. The torch, in turn, was passed to Kyle Rayner, who got a new and improved ring and became the Green Lantern with a more modern attitude. Amazingly, that whole process actually worked out well for the Green Lantern mythos; Hal Jordan eventually redeemed himself and came back, but Kyle is also still around to this day after he was the solo GL for about a decade, and Kyle is my favorite Lantern, to boot. And now you know!)

I bring up the whole 90’s-era character-killing-and-redefining trend not merely to impress you with my encyclopedic knowledge, but because I want to talk about more cross-media transitions and coincidences of consumption. I didn’t really blog about it at the time, but towards the end of last year I made my way all the way through my dvd set of Smallville Season 8. The finale of that season was broadcast in the spring of 2009, but as luck would have it I ended up watching it in close proximity to The Dark Knight Rises at the close of 2012 (which at least was the same year the movie was in theaters). And also as luck would have it, just as Bane was the villain in The Dark Knight Rises, Doomsday was the big bad of Smallville Season 8. In both cases, the character on-screen had to be changed from their comic book origins in order to meet the narrative needs at hand, mostly by way of addition; in the comics, those villains were invented specifically as terminal plot devices and were pretty one-dimensional, whereas in the film and the tv series, an attempt was made to flesh them out.

A grand coincidence indeed, but it’s still pretty easy to tell the difference between the two: Bane in The Dark Knight Rises was an example of the right way to make the transition, while Doomsday in Smallville was all wrong. In the comics, Doomsday is more of an “it” than a “him”, an experimental biological weapon of mass destruction and nothing more (and even the explanation of who invented it and why came long after the pivotal Death of Superman story). In Smallville, Doomsday was given a human (or human-seeming, Kryptonian? it all got pretty muddled, honestly) alter-ego and an unrequited-love-for-Clark-Kent’s-best-friend subplot, for maximum emo angst. That is generally the worst rap against Smallville, and Doomsday is probably the most egregious example. (I have two more seasons to go, but I’d bet money on it all the same.) I have said in the past that I acknowledge Smallville is a teen soap and is therefore all about the passionate histrionics, but this seems like a cut-and-dry case of mismatched purposes. The Doomsday concept is that the monster is the most demanding challenge Superman has ever faced, fatally so. Even once Superman realizes that it is a mindless engine of devastation and he can’t pull his punches if he hopes to save everyone in Doomsday’s path, that there’s no moral dilemma in struggling to halt Doomsday’s rampage by any means necessary, it still proves so arduous a task that it kills him. The idiots running the show latched onto Doomsday as Clark’s greatest fight and then slopped on the moral dilemma of Clark not wanting to kill Doomsday because of his human side, which just resulted in a mess. Again, for the record, I am entirely accepting of tweaks (major and minor, cosmetic or constitutional) to characters when porting them from source material to a new incarnation. It doesn’t bother me when adaptations aren’t faithful; it bothers me when the adaptation misses the point entirely and somehow makes things worse.

So, back to The Dark Knight Rises (with spoilers!!!). In the comics, there is no connection I’m aware of between Bane and the League of Shadows, no relationship between Bane and Talia al Ghul. That was invented for the film, and it may very well have been my favorite part of the entire experience. I felt like Nolan was playing two different expectations games with the audience, simultaneously. (Granted, I may be reading too much into things and giving too much undue credit, but so it goes.) On the one hand, he had to set up and execute the twist of Miranda being Talia for everyone in the audience who is not a hardcore comics fan, reminding them of how the trilogy started in Batman Begins with Ra’s al Ghul as the main villain, so that his daughter’s emergence will mean something. On the other hand, he had to make the reveal equally surprising and satisfying for the very hardcore comics fans, who know very well that Ra’s had a daughter who would be both a love interest and adversary of Bruce Wayne. I think Nolan handled this extremely adroitly, by creating new backstory for Bane involving both Ra’s and Talia, allowing him to both have his cake and eat it too.

First Bane monologues about concluding the efforts which Ra’s al Ghul set in motion to restore balance to civilization. Then, in the prison Bane comes from, Bruce Wayne learns of a child abandoned by a mercenary to be raised in the inescapable pit. The mercenary was Ra’s al Ghul, Bane has laid claim to Ra’s al Ghul’s legacy, ergo the child must have been Bane. I admit, when all of that unfolded before my eyes, my only thought was “That’s an interesting re-mixing of backstories for the movie universe.” Because at this point, so many years and years after the Superman movies and the Batman movies, Spider-Man movies and X-Men movies, I more or less expect the screenplays to juggle around elements of character’s origins if only because they can. I did not expect that kind of juggling to have an obfuscating purpose, much less dual obfuscation. To the uninitiated, the film winds up saying “This new character introduced in this movie isn’t really Ra’s al Ghul’s offspring, but this other new character is!” To the faithful, it winds up saying, “Yes, we changed Bane’s backstory, but we didn’t make him Ra’s al Ghul’s son, we made him Talia al Ghul’s protector, and Talia the abandoned child who escaped the pit, which you probably should have seen coming, but totally didn’t!” I totally didn’t, at any rate. Should have, but didn’t. And I couldn’t be happier that Nolan’s narrative trickery worked on me, because I love surprises.

So all in all, Bane was utilized as effectively as possible in The Dark Knight Rises, in my opinion, but as I said in part one, the movie was all about endings. That makes it a perfect place for Bane in the overall trilogy, but in the long run it’s always going to be the Joker who steals the whole show.

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