Batman ... and a knight to remember
The late Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight
Saturday July 19 2008
In the late 1980s I was given a graphic novel by a colleague. As my fascination with comics had ended abruptly around the age of 10, I was initially rather taken aback by this gift, but in the end decided to give it a go. It helped that it involved Batman, the favourite fictional character of my youth.
But this Batman had very little to do with the rather camp and sternly upright character played in the 1960s TV series by Adam West.
Written and drawn by Frank Miller, The Dark Knight Returns portrayed Batman as a twisted and vengeful vigilante, an ageing embittered hero who seemed to revel in the pain and suffering he inflicted on the villains he encountered. His arch-enemy The Joker was here recast as a Manson-esque psychopath who dreamt up massacres and dared Batman to kill him.
Miller's book was dark stuff, and the visual mood flamboyantly gothic: one instantly thought of its cinematic potential, and I imagined the then-middle-aged Clint Eastwood being perfect for the part.
I later learnt that Miller's brilliant graphic novel was an attempt to return Batman to his roots in the detective pulp comics of the 1930s. When he first appeared in 1939, Batman was a hardened urban crimefighter who showed no remorse over maiming or killing criminals, and was not above using firearms to do so. As a child his millionaire alter-ego, Bruce Wayne, had watched his parents being shot, and as a consequence was not entirely right in the head. He had used his money to finance his battle against crime, but his crusade was personal rather than moral, and when you thought about it he was not especially admirable.
Within a year of his appearance, however, Batman's austere persona began to be softened. The rather annoying do-gooder Robin was introduced as a morally upright foil; Batman's sadism was exorcised; and Bruce Wayne became a generous philanthropist who was lonely, rather than mad. All of which made the character far less interesting.
Frank Miller was the first to return Batman to his dark, violent and politically incorrect roots, and he helped spark a revival in the hero's fortunes. Tim Burton's 1989 film, Batman, was strongly influenced by Miller's timely reappraisal, and the director revelled in the gothic possibilities of the story. His choice of an edgy rather than a mainstream character to play Batman was brave, and Michael Keaton proved a worthy foil to the excesses of Jack Nicholson's Joker. But while Burton's film may have looked a bit like Miller's drawings, the tone was less threatening, and there was nothing morally ambivalent about Keaton's Batman.
That film spawned a mighty franchise, but Burton himself bailed out after the first sequel, Batman Returns, and thereafter Joel Schumacher made such a hash of things that by 1997 the character's cinematic future looked decidedly bleak.
Enter, some years later, English director Christopher Nolan, who in 2003 became involved in a new project that would become Batman Begins. Based on the generation of Batman comics that succeeded the Miller revolution, Nolan's 2005 film was the hero at his very darkest. Christian Bale played Bruce Wayne as a psychologically disturbed seeker after the truth, who gains revenge on elements of Gotham City's criminal underworld by turning himself into a ferocious bat. Nolan insisted he was after realism in his film's look, but in the end it was as stylised as any of the other films, and perhaps most fully realised the visual possibilities of the story. It looked like Miller's comic.
Which brings us to Christopher Nolan's eagerly anticipated sequel, The Dark Knight, which may just turn out to be the definitive Batman film, and the greatest of them all. Nolan was initially not keen on returning to the character, and was dead against attempting to recreate the character of The Joker onscreen. Jack Nicholson's operatically over-the-top portrayal had certainly made re-interpretation very difficult, but by returning to basics Nolan discovered a way of reinventing the role.
The early '40s comic book Joker was an out-and-out monster with no redeeming characteristics who insisted on the similarities between him and Batman and may have had a point. The choice of Heath Ledger to play him was inspired, and his warped and clearly mentally ill Joker seems a stand-alone character who bears no relation to the Nicholson clown. Ledger's most untimely death in January has of course sparked added interest in the film, but his performance is already being talked of in terms of Oscars -- and not a sympathy Oscar either.
Critics are now wondering whether Nolan will do another Batman film, and while Christian Bale has already said he'll do another if Nolan will, the director is being more cautious.
How, meanwhile, do we explain the Batman's enduring appeal? It's probably partly because the imagery the character evokes is so graphically appealing and open to re-interpretation. But mostly I think it's because Batman is the most flawed and human of the superheroes. He isn't really a superhero at all: he can't fly like Superman, or scale the sides of buildings like Spiderman.
He depends on his wits, his cunning and gadgetry to keep him one step ahead of the criminals. Also he's a crusader who seems to care at least as much about revenge as he does about justice, and does not play by the Queensberry Rules.
He is, in other words, a hero for our times.
'The Dark Knight' opens nationwide on 25 July pwhitington@independent.ie
- Paul Whitington
