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Journalism of Courage
A few months ago, I saw the classic crime film The French Connection. It contains one of the most impressive car-chase sequences ever filmed, where Gene Hackman, playing a policeman who isn’t exactly lawful, chases an elevated train – about to be hijacked. While watching it I thought, funny, this reminds me of Batman Begins. After doing a little research, I discovered that Christopher Nolan, the director of Batman Begins, had meant the scene as homage to The French Connection. It wasn’t surprising. The films had other similarities – their bleak tone and colour scheme, and the common theme of the failure of justice and law and subsequent emergence of vigilante heroes. The Dark Knight, Nolan’s ambitious sequel to the first Batman film, releases this weekend. Advance reviews are calling it a crime epic, some even drawing comparisons to Godfather II and Heat. Not bad for a film based on a comic book about a man who fights crime dressed as a bat.
Comic books had until recently been thought of as tools of hero-fantasy fulfillment for children, using bright drawings and quick, evocative phrasing — POW! — to get their stories across. Now, however, they have been edging their way into high culture, delving into ever-more serious subject matter. While comic books always translated well onto the big screen, their more sober counterparts, often relabelled “graphic novels,” are doing well, too. For example, the recent award-winning film Persepolis is an adaptation of a graphic novel about a young girl’s experiences growing up in fundamentalist Iran. However, classic comic books, never intended to be regarded as high art, or anything more than escapist entertainment, are now experiencing a something of a renaissance in cinema.
This is largely due to the directors who are taking on these projects. They aren’t the standard studio picks — rather, they are independent-minded, critically acclaimed auteurs. Guillermo del Toro, the Spanish director of the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth, has directed the adaptation of Hellboy and its sequel, a comic far less popular than Spiderman or Superman, and has injected it with wit and a touch of the macabre. Nolan, credited with single-handedly reviving and reinventing the Batman series, first directed the modern black and white noir Memento. Not only are these new adaptations meeting with critical approval, they’re making money. Naturally, this is good news for both the investors as well as those involved with the creative side of these films. Yet there is a small contingent of critics and viewers asking, as Heath Ledger’s terrifying joker does in The Dark Knight, “Why so serious?” Why can’t comic book movies remain the stuff of fantasy, instead of moving further into the realm of realist drama? The usual explanation for this shift is a reaction to current events – the Joker and other villains are terrorists, and superheroes step in when the government and law enforcement agencies fail. Audiences embrace hero stories in times of crisis.
However, it is the comic book stories themselves – decades old – that contain these wartime allegories; it isn’t the directors who invented them. Comic book stories are essentially pop epics that deal with the battle between good and evil, with identity crises and romance thrown in for good measure (what’s a good epic without them?). Nolan and del Toro, along with directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Ang Lee – who followed films such as Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with a tepid Incredible Hulk film – recognise this. Rather than relying on the plot itself, as the Spiderman and Superman movies have done, they highlight the underlying themes of recklessness, despair, frustration at human and organisational failings, and self-doubt that exist in every superhero story. Doing so lends them the potential to turn a blockbuster into a serious film – sometimes falling flat as a result of trying to blend explosions and bangs with grand artistic pretensions, but occasionally succeeding. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight have arguably been the most successful. They are visually stunning, their characters deeply drawn and the scripts intelligent and provocative. Their realism owes itself partly to the character of Batman, who is human and without superpowers (though he does have some fantastic gadgets). However, it is mostly due to Nolan and his team’s choice to make Batman more of an antihero than a hero. He is far from a saviour, and is too frightening and flawed to inspire cheers and grins from children the way Spiderman does. Above all, his morality is questionable. He is not always motivated by altruism: it is more a mixture of revenge and frustration that causes him to take to the streets. And he doesn’t always succeed, either – casualties abound in his wake, his nemeses aren’t afraid of him, and the law isn’t always on his side. Most of all, he is often overshadowed by the villain. What draws our attention these days is not the desperate efforts of the good, it seems, but the bizarre yet ingenious cruelty of evil.
express@expressindia.com
