Automatic for the people

We adopted our cat when she was about eight weeks old. Her previous owners had abandoned her in the wilderness near our house, and we found her and took her in. She's twelve now, deaf, senile, and suffering from a chronic cold, making her a little unpleasant to be around. She's also very needy because she was taken from her mother at a young age, exploits every opportunity to curl up on you, even when it's inconvenient (say, when you're busy gardening), and she does not know to retract her claws. Plus, I'm allergic to cats. But we love her all the same.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a little like that: a deeply flawed - but, I insist, not fundamentally broken - show that I can't help loving anyway. It was cancelled after two seasons, and in all honesty it deserved to be: padded to the brim, unable to develop an identity, and frustrating to watch, its second season marked a steep decline from a promising opening. But even while mired in the depths of navel-gazing mid-season snoozefests there was a better series struggling to get through.

The Terminator (1984) is perhaps the best horror film of the eighties. Taut and terrifying, it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role he was born to play. (Okay, that's a lie. We all know Arnie was born to play Conan.) I prefer the original to its more family-friendly sequel (1991), but we can probably all agree that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) was an obnoxious misfire. After that, the direction the franchise could take was an open question. T3 had (spoiler right there in the title) ended with Skynet nuking humanity, so any future film iterations in that continuity had to be set after Judgment Day, as the uninspiring Terminator Salvation (2009) was.

But in a series about time travel there was another possibility: break continuity and establish an alternate timeline in which Skynet did not take over in 2003. A serial format would break the formula the films had fallen into, allowing for longer, slower-burning plotlines. After 2003 a TV series was the right artistic decision for the Terminator franchise: if I had to choose between The Sarah Connor Chronicles and the dreary Salvation, I'd pick the former any time. Not to mention that of course a series set in the present day was always more feasible than one filmed in a nuclear wasteland.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles accepts the Terminator chronology before (after? bloody time travel) T3 in broad strokes, tweaking a few details. In 1997, Sarah Connor (Lena Headey in the series, Sarah Hamilton in the films) and her son John (Thomas Dekker, for Edward Furlong) destroyed Skynet, which was to take over the world and wage war against a human resistance destined to be led by John Connor. In 1999, the Connors, still living under the radar, are attacked by T-888 Cromartie, proving that Skynet may yet be created, and time-travel to 2007 with the assistance of Cameron (Summer Glau), a reprogrammed Terminator sent back by Future-John to protect them. (The point of the time skip, of course, is to make sure we have our required setup of mid-thirties Sarah and teenage John, and to avoid a weird period piece set in 1999.)

Too much of this.

Sarah, John and Cameron decide to stop Skynet from ever being created, in which they're eventually assisted by Derek Reese (Brian Austin Green), John's uncle from the future. They're pursued by Cromartie, who, in one of the most awesome subplots of Season One, first has to reattach his severed head to his body and obtain a new biological covering, eventually assuming the identity of actor George Laszlo (Garret Dillahunt). The cast is rounded out by bible-quoting FBI agent James Ellison (Richard T. Jones) and, in Season Two, corporate executive and T-1001 Catherine Weaver (Shirley Manson), teenage love interest Riley Dawson (Leven Rambin) and tough-as-nails future soldier Jesse (Stephanie Jacobsen of Battlestar Galactica: Razor).

Right, so we have a series about killer robots from the future - awesome - and the promise of a techno-thriller series dealing with same, not to mention the potential for lots of fanservice in the form of Lena Headey, Summer Glau (relentlessly exploited in Fox's advertising campaigns: see page image) and later Stephanie Jacobsen. And instead we get... lots of angst and teen drama. And I like teen drama, when done well: my favourite show is The O.C., for crying out loud. As Daniel of Television Without Pity memorably put it in an episode recap:

She asks if he ran the idea past his mom, because she doesn't like surprises, and is this a revenge fantasy, and blah blah blah, and I'd just like to say that if I wanted to watch Dawson's Creek or 90210 or whatever shit teen soap is all the rage these days, I'm perfectly capable of choosing to watch that shit on my own, but this show has FUTURISTIC KILLING MACHINES, and that's what we want to see.

Well, quite. Season One, at a nimble nine episodes, has enough forward movement and great plots to be promising, not to mention a killer season finale; but the second season went exactly wrong in stretching roughly the same amount of plot to twenty-two episodes. That means stupendous, relentless padding, both overall (lots of one-off episodes that go absolutely nowhere) and within episodes (endless angsty conversations about whether John's future is determined, whether Sarah distrusts Cameron, etc. etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam). The writers' habit of stringing along plot points before discarding them, totally unresolved, makes viewing an unrewarding experience - not to mention that almost all of Season Two sort of just happens, without anything obviously at stake in the larger scheme of things.

Not enough of this.

In short, the writers have mysteriously decided to make a character drama out of an action premise. (To be fair, the fairly horrible special effects indicate that may have been for budget reasons.) What's more, it's a series about the end of the world, and someone decided it must be unbearably miserable for that reason. This makes especially Sarah - always cagey, anxious, serious - a character we just don't enjoy spending time with. The sluggish pace barely picks up even within major plot-moving episodes. Take the Season Two (and series) finale: thirty minutes of this and that - misery misery - and then they decide to go totally insane and throw roughly thirty-seven plot twists at the viewer, mostly utterly nonsensical. Including one that, though intriguing, destroys the show's premise - a really gutsy move, and it's a shame we never got to see how they dealt with it.

But with the bad there's just so much good. The performances are decent: Lena Headey is saddled with an impossible character but acquits herself well; Thomas Dekker is allowed to lose the emo hair and grow up a bit in Season Two; Brian Austin Green does a good job with my favourite human character. But the show's real strength lies in its machines. Summer Glau's Cameron is a terrific character exceedingly well portrayed; several of the strongest episodes (like 'Allison from Palmdale') focus on her. She's inscrutable and ruthless, but strangely likeable, and possessed of a strange innocence ('That's a window, bird'). Garret Dillahunt's Cromartie is as good, especially when he's linked up to the advanced AI John Henry. Dillahunt's performance as John - a computer who learns by playing Dungeons & Dragons, among other things - is an absolute highlight, and a reason to wish the show hadn't been cancelled.

Cancelled it was, and as I said I'm not sure I can fault Fox. The Sarah Connor Chronicles needed better writing (the dialogue, excepting that given to the cyborgs, is among the weakest on television in recent years), a bigger budget - it says something that in Season Two we only see, I think, one endoskeleton, the nightmarish image most people associate with the franchise - but above all it needed a vision and a direction. There's a whole lot of bathwater, but it's still a pity about the baby.

In praise of the Red Army

This post touches on a couple of issues regarding the Eastern Front (1941-45) that have irritated me recently. There's a popular perception of the German-Soviet War, refuted in numerous academic works, that runs roughly like this:

(1) Soviet forces overwhelmed the Wehrmacht by sheer numerical superiority: essentially, a four-year zerg rush.
(2) Hitler caused a great number of German setbacks by procrastination, recklessness, and stubbornness (e.g. a fixation on Stalingrad, the failure to cross the Neva in 1941, etc.)
(3) The Western Allies decided the outcome of the war when they invaded Normandy.

In Germany (3) is uncommon thanks to a general awareness that the Eastern Front consumed the vast majority of the war effort. (All my grandparents lost siblings in the Soviet Union; my grandfather fought as part of Army Group North from 1942 to 1945 and was a Russian POW until 1949.) (1) and (2), however, are widespread beliefs.

It's not difficult to see why. When German generals wrote their memoirs in the fifties, they were eager to exculpate themselves from responsibility for total defeat. Instead they blamed Hitler, who was unlikely to find vigorous defenders, and conveniently dead sycophants like Keitel. Of course Hitler was a bad commander-in-chief, terrible both at military judgment and at managing personal relationships with his generals; but in truth a number of people in the OKW would have found themselves with egg on their faces - like Franz Halder, who confidently noted that '[i]t's not too much to say that the campaign against Russia has been won within fourteen days' in July 1941. Collectively, the German generals easily displayed as much arrogance and short-sightedness as the Austrian corporal.

The Soviets, as pictured in German and Anglo-Saxon popular perception, were inferior to the Wehrmacht in everything but numbers. This sort of claim is at least partly a hangover from Nazi war propaganda: what was the Soviet Union but Asia's endless hordes threatening to overwhelm Western civilisation (the line adopted by the Nazis when they attempted to transform an opportunistic war of conquest into a pan-European crusade against 'Bolshevism' in 1942-43)? A few men, hopelessly outnumbered but superior in virtue, natural nobility, as well as technological and operational genius, fighting to the last against slavering barbarians - why, it's exactly the sort of romantic Thermopylae tripe the Nazis loved until the very end (see Kolberg).

In this racist fantasy the Soviets of course had to appear as the direct opposite of the noble Aryan: countless faceless goons (even though, as in the Battle of Kursk, numbers and losses were much more even than is commonly supposed), incapable of anything but mass charges (despite brilliantly executed operations like Operation Uranus and strategic offensives like Operation Bagration), indifferent to losses (there's some truth to this one, owing to the extraordinary situation of the Red Army in 1941-42, but from 1943 the Soviets were much more careful with their manpower), barbaric in their treatment of civilians (ignoring, like all empires, the systematic atrocities the 'civilised' troops committed against the populace).

It goes without saying that the Red Army was the decisive force in the war. Nazi Germany did not fall because it ran out of oil, and certainly not because of the Allied carpet bombing of German civilians: it perished because 80% of its armed forces were engaged and destroyed by the Red Army, and its conquered territories were occupied by the Soviets. In this the USSR was of course helped by supplies provided by the Western Allies; but it was Stavka that in extraordinarily difficult circumstances planned, and millions of Soviet soldiers that executed, the campaigns that brought European fascism to its knees.

In the First World War, Germany defeated the Russian Empire committing only a third of her forces. It's not to excuse Stalinism to note that Uncle Joe's assessment of the need to catch up in industrial development was spot on. By the 1940s the Soviet Union had become an industrial powerhouse. Soviet equipment was often of equal quality (the notorious German realisation, early in the war, that their tanks were inferior to the T-34 was not an isolated incident), but the Nazis' disastrous decision to focus on quality over quantity squandered what technological edge they did have, massively exacerbating the industrial disparity - another instance of Nazi racism digging its own grave.

It's true that in the early phase of the war - roughly, from June 1941 to the second half of 1942 - the Red Army did not have the strategic initiative and, faced with rapidly advancing German armies, indeed attempted to stop the Wehrmacht by resorting to human waves and other desperate tactics. The result, despite intermittent success, is well known: losses so devastating similar tactics could not be contemplated due to manpower depletion alone from 1943 onwards (although Zhukov did some 1941 re-enactment in the 1945 Seelow Heights and Berlin campaigns).

Instead, having recovered from the initial shock, the Soviets relearnt the doctrine of deep battle their theorists had developed in the 1920s and 1930s. Deep battle, superficially similar to 'Blitzkrieg', is designed to break through to an enemy force's rear and occupy its territory. Unlike the Germans' unhealthy obsession with encircling and annihilating enemy forces (a fascination which, while going back to Clausewitz, was certainly favoured by Nazism's prejudices), the Soviet doctrine envisaged not physically destroying an enemy but confusing him, throwing him off-guard, and breaking his ability and will to act at an operational and strategic level.

Early attempts to put deep battle into practice were not unqualified successes, but from Stalingrad onwards the Soviets perfected the strategy, revolutionising the Red Army at every level. It was most impressively displayed in Operation Bagration, launched two weeks after D-Day. The offensive destroyed far more German forces than the Battle of Normandy, brought the Red Army to the borders of the Reich and, most importantly, shattered Army Group Centre and left the Wehrmacht in shambles. Before Bagration, German forces on the Eastern Front had been well-organised; afterwards, the Wehrmacht never achieved the same coherence and was soon forced to throw together Kampfgruppen, improvised formations of whatever was at hand in a sector.

In short, Soviet forces defeated the Wehrmacht because, from late 1942 onwards, they were the better army. Of course numerical superiority, present in most situations, helped, and so did the Soviet Union's greater industrial output. But all this would have counted for nothing had the Soviets not gained the skill necessary to disorganise and defeat the Wehrmacht at a strategic, operational and, yes, tactical level. The stereotype of an ignorant mass driven to the slaughter by callous commissars does a disservice to the bravery, motivation and skill of Soviet soldiers.

The little exploitation gorefest that could

Well, you can't claim they lied.

Well, it's the end of the line: the last of the Grindhouse franchise.* Hobo with a Shotgun is quite a different beast from Grindhouse (2007) and Machete (2010). Where the earlier two films were designed to look like low-budget films, Hobo with a Shotgun is the real deal: shot in Nova Scotia on a budget of $3m (compare Machete's $10.5m), it might as well have been made in 1975. So it's tremendously easy to root for Hobo with a Shotgun, and it helps that the film is good - the weakest of the Grindhouse films, but good nonetheless.

The film begins with the titular nameless hobo (Rutger Hauer) riding into Hope Town, somewhere in Canada, on a freight train. Within minutes he's seen an innocent theatrically murdered by psychotic criminal Drake (Brian Downey) and his sons Ivan (Nick Bateman) and Slick (Gregory Smith).** He at first decides to keep his head down and stay alive in a city run by the vilest criminal scum ever conceived, but gives Slick a no-holds-barred beatdown when the latter attempts to rape Abby (Molly Dunsworth), a pure-hearted streetwalker.

Finding the local police hopelessly corrupt, the hobo decides to fight back, choosing to forego his dream of buying a lawn mower as the first step to his own landscaping business in favour of purchasing a (single-barrel pump-action) shotgun. Now he delivers justice one shell at a time!, dispatching paedophiles, robbers and Drake's agents. Eventually Drake puts out a bounty for hobos, leading to mobs of citizens hunting down the homeless, and - after the hobo and Abby survive an attack by Ivan and Slick - he summons an unspeakable ancient evil to deal with his shotgun-wielding nemesis...

Hobo with a Shotgun the trailer was a one-note joke, relying entirely on its title - and what a title! When I learned there would be a film called Hobo with a Shotgun, I immediately wanted to see it. I was consumed with anticipation for months, then, learning to my distress that no cinema in Nottingham would show Hobo with a Shotgun, had to wait until I could catch it on video. When there's a film called Hobo with a Shotgun, not watching it is not an option. The one thing the filmmakers had to deliver was a homeless man dispensing vigilante justice with his trusty smoothbore, and they come through - even if, like Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun is otherwise bedevilled by a serious shortage of plot.

It's a shortage I won't complain of: after all, The Hills Have Eyes (1977) has about five minutes' worth of plot. Hobo with a Shotgun is not about that, but it is about recreating a particular look and feel. The entire thing is almost bizzarely seventies: take, for example, the film's obsession with urban decay and crime, straight out of Dirty Harry and countless other vigilante films, which feels comical now but was serious business at a time when anxieties about race, gender and social relations were channelled into square-jawed men shooting transgressors on sight. The whole thing even looks like the cheap film stock of 1970s exploitation cinema, courtesy of Karim Hussain's mad cinematographic skills.

And while we're on the subject of 1970s homage: yes, Hobo with a Shotgun is ludicrously gory. More so than Grindhouse, more than Piranha 3D (2010), which seriously tested the limits of my endurance. Hobo with a Shotgun is, I believe, the goriest and possibly the most vulgar film I have ever seen. There are beheadings, disembowellings, heads crushed between bumper cars and, of course, countless loving shots of people torn up by shotgun blasts. In the climax, a character uses their shredded forearm bone as a piercing weapon, all shown in lingering detail. It's hard to take at times, but the gore effects are solidly, deliberately old-timey: there are viscera aplenty, but none that look like the real thing. (Although my knowledge of such matters derives almost entirely from films...)

This excess of bloodletting is accompanied by the most over-the-top villainous performances you're likely to see this year: these people are evil, even if they're theatrically, gleefully so, and they deserve all the shotgunning they get. That's the supporting actors, anyway: Hauer's performances is bafflingly earnest, even subtle. His hobo is an increasingly confused old man heavingly implied to be suffering from dementia of some kind, who avenges the humiliations he suffers by lashing out with his twelve-gauge. ('You can't solve all the world's problems with a shotgun', Abby says. 'It's all I know', the hobo replies.) Is it too much to take Hauer's layered turn as a shotgun-wielding tramp as a comment on a great actor's career playing villains in B-movies?

The quote above is typical of a fantastic script. Beside badass evil lines ('When life gives you razor blades, you make a baseball bat... with razor blades') and laugh-out loud comedic ones (among policemen: 'At least he's only killing the dirty cops.' - 'We're all dirty cops!') there are plenty of deliberate misfires: the hobo tells Abby a rambling, mostly nonsensical parable about bears, while Abby later attempts to rally the crowd with a speech that is frankly incoherent. A special shout-out goes to the hobo's great final line to the villain, which it would be a crime to spoil. He should have remembered not to mess with a hobo... with a shotgun.

*Unless they make Werewolf Women of the SS into a real film, as they should.
**Incidentally, both sons dress a lot like Tom Cruise in Risky Business. It's weird.

In this series: Grindhouse (2007) | Machete (2010) | Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

Guns! Zombies! Women! Deadly car chases!

I don't usually include huge film posters, but in the case of Grindhouse (2007) I had little choice. It's a film that revels in its overblown garishness, that sets up a plethora of attractions that, despite Robert Rodríguez's best efforts at least, it can't possibly live up to. It seems that's part of the point. Grindhouse can't be evaluated in ordinary terms: it's a film is about the experience of watching itself. It's emphatically neither 'good' nor 'bad' - which is awfully convenient for Quentin Tarantino, at least, but more on that later. Most of all, it cannot be separated into 'two films' - Planet Terror and Death Proof - and sold separately, as the knaves in charge of video releases did.*

In the interest of honesty I must admit to being ill-equipped to judge Grindhouse as a pastiche of 1970s exploitation cinema. Granted, for better or worse I know more of such matters than the man in the street: my knowledge of slasher and countryside-revenge films, in particular, is decent, but there are other subgenres - such as the 'women in prison' and blaxploitation branches - that I've had no exposure to at all. In any case the film is crucially defined by its release in the twenty-first century, and I feel comfortable discussing it as a product of 2007.

As you know, Grindhouse is highly dependent on its structure. It's a double feature with trailers (and an advert for a fictional local eatery) before and between the main attractions. The order is, roughly: the trailer to Machete, followed by Rodríguez's Planet Terror, other trailers, and then Tarantino's Death Proof - a little over three hours all in all. This structure is deliberate and specific, but it immediately sets up a contrast to actual seventies grindhouse presentations, which were often ramshackle affairs. The filmmakers do their best to make the whole thing look improvised: both films have supposedly missing reels, and Planet Terror (but not Death Proof) adopts a deliberately grainy look that emphasises the artificiality of what is presented. It's an integrated experience, reinforced by the fact that a couple of characters from Planet Terror briefly appear in Death Proof.

Let's take the trailers first: Machete (Robert Rodríguez) is about a Mexican cop who is double-crossed and left for dead in Texas by people who soon discover 'they just fucked with the wrong Mexican'. ('If you're going to hire Machete to kill the bad guy, you better make damn sure the bad guy isn't you!') Machete is now deservedly a real film, reviewed here. Don't (Edgar Wright) is a haunted house film, while Thanksgiving (Eli Roth) is an absurdly cheap slasher film (you know, all those Sleepaway Camps and Houses on Sorority Row that could only envy Halloween and Friday the 13th). Hobo with a Shotgun (Jason Eisener) has also been released starrin Rutger Hauer. The best of the trailers, though, is undoubtedly Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS, 'starring Udo Kier' and another famous actor in a role he really ought to play. (If you're not desperate too see a film called Werewolf Women of the SS - well, what's wrong with you?)

In Planet Terror, an altercation between a bioscientist (Naveen Andrews) and a rogue military unit led by Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis) leads to a zombie virus being unleashed on a Texas community. In the chaos, the survivors, led by Sheriff Hague (Michael Biehn, whom I've enjoyed in literally everything I've ever seen him in - The Terminator, Aliens, Tombstone, it's all good), one-legged go-go dancer and aspiring stand-up comedian Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) and her ex-boyfriend, El Wray (Freddy Rodríguez). (Other memorable characters are played by Jeff Fahey, Josh Brolin, Tom Savini (the man who created the gore and make-up effects on the original Friday the 13th), and Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, who has her brain eaten.) The missing reel in Planet Terror is cunningly placed to deprive the audience of expected nudity; what's more, when the film starts up again the entire set is inexplicably on fire, and everyone suddenly respects El Wray for reasons that are never explained.

It's a gory film, although, excepting a really rather harrowing scene in which Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) breaks her wrist, much of the violence is wildly cartoonish. That includes the zombies, who are shot to pieces in their hundreds by the heroes. Rodríguez was obviously trying to cram as much awesomeness as he possibly could into Planet Terror: there are zombies, Texans, soldiers, dangerously unethical doctors and, in what has probably become the film's greatest contribution to pop culture, a woman with an M4 assault rifle for a leg. The result is a film that is deliriously, gloriously overstuffed and unbalanced: not, perhaps, 'good' but certainly full of good things. (And unlike Zack Snyder in Sucker Punch, the director is obviously eager to please.)

By contrast, Death Proof is terrible, and bafflingly so. In the first half-hour it sets up a group of expendable meat who appear to be our heroes - until, Psycho-style, they're slaughtered by Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell). Then we're introduced to a whole new set of protagonists, including Zoe Bell (Zoe Bell) and Rosario Dawson Character, who do nothing but drive and talk for an hour while nothing whatsoever happens, before - diabolus ex machina! - Mike reappars and attempts to murder them. It's a strange, unstructured beast, and its endless middle section lacks the rising tension and subtle power struggles that make the extended dialogue of, say, Tarantino's own Inglourious Basterds so thrilling. What's more, it seems an immense waste of Russell, whose brilliant performance as an over-the-hill stuntman and serial killer deserves better than to appear in but a couple of scenes.

There's a theory, of course, that that's the point. Really, Tarantino had nothing to prove by this point. Death Proof may be a deliberate letdown, the infamous second feature that doesn't deliver on its promise. I was reminded of actual terrible exploitation films, which are like this: endless time spent with unlikeable characters, followed by sudden carnage without build-up. (All the more awful Friday the 13th sequels follow this pattern; Death Proof also resembles The Dukes of Hazzard in places.)

Really, Death Proof is exquisitely crafted. The dialogue ('Who the hell is Stuntman Mike?' - 'He's a stuntman') is vintage Tarantino, and the film, being about stuntpeople and featuring Zoe Bell as herself, constantly draws attention to its own creation process. All that strengthens the impression that Tarantino set out to disappoint his audience, and put all his considerable film-making skill in the service of that aim. Well, he succeeded. Hurrah?

But here Tarantino has his cake and eats it, because I can't just complain that Death Proof is 'bad': I must accept that my disappointment at Death Proof is part of the experience of Grindhouse. You come for a 'death-proof' car, an ageing badass and women; instead you get to experience the exquisite sensation of being ripped off, disliking Tarantino just like gorehounds in the seventies might have despised Roger Corman. All in all, Grindhouse isn't 'good' so much as it's unique. I can't imagine another film like it. It can only be experienced.

*Incidentally, this review draws heavily upon Tim Brayton's never-bettered discussion.

In this series: Grindhouse (2007) | Machete (2010) | Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

Gotham City always brings a smile to my face

We comic-book geeks live in a golden age. While the myriad popcorn epics featuring spandex-clad heroes may not always be good, at least they're there to enjoy or deride. Our forefathers were not so lucky. Once upon a time, live-action superheroes were confined to serials, action-comedies, and cheesy television specials.

Richard Donner's Superman (1978), released in the wake of Star Wars (1977), introduced the superhero blockbuster and dominated the eighties with its sequels, but during that decade films and comic books were out of sync: on the page, the Dark Age was dawning with Alan Moore's V for Vendetta (1982-89) and Watchmen (1986-87) as well as Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Batman: Year One (1987).* Tim Burton's Batman (1989), the first really serious superhero film, changed that and kicked off the first wave of comic-book adaptations. (The last film in the series, 1997's Batman & Robin, killed off that wave as well as its own franchise.)

Twenty-odd years on, what was highly revisionist at the time has become 'classic'. The plot begins with Batman still a rumour, scoffed at by the less superstitious of Gotham's criminals. The new district attorney, Harvey Dent (Billy Dee Williams), is preparing to challenge the criminal empire of Carl Grissom (Jack Palance), who is struggling with his overly ambitious lieutenant Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson). Grissom double-crosses Napier, sending him to raid a chemical plant at night and ordering corrupt policeman Eckhardt (William Hootkins) to ambush Napier's men. In the ensuing struggle, Batman disarms Napier, who falls into a vat of green acid and is believed dead.

Napier, however, has miraculously survived both the acid and the ensuing botched plastic surgery ('You understand that the nerves were completely severed, Mr Napier. You see what I have to work with here...') and becomes the villainous Joker in the film's strongest and most iconic scene. After murdering Grissom, he plots to poison Gotham City's hygiene products with Smilex, which will kill the victim while fixing their face in a horrid rictus grin, in the run-up to the city's bicentennial celebrations. (Incidentally, this provides an excellent way to guess at Gotham's location: with a foundation date of 1789, the city is presumably in Ohio, the Great Lakes region, or the north-eastern Atlantic coast.) The Joker also pursues photographer Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), who is dating wealthy Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton).

It's a Joker picture, then, even more so than The Dark Knight (2008): Nicholson takes top billing,  and Batman functions almost solely as his foil. The focus on the Joker's origin sets the 1989 film apart from the latest Christopher Nolan picture, which has Batman's nemesis appear from nowhere. Giving a definitive origin story for the Joker was controversial among fans (Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore had given a possible, but deliberately ambiguous origin the previous year). But it works: Nicholson's Joker is a crazed villain even before being disfigured (his pre-murder one-liner, 'Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?', goes back to his ordinary criminal days), suggesting the Joker is merely a useful persona.

Nicholson gets the best setpieces, too, the most famous perhaps his dance routine desecrating an art gallery to the sounds of Prince's 'Partyman' supplied by a boombox-carrying goon ('I am the world's first fully functioning homicidal artist!'). The actor goes all out on the craziness, and while Nicholson's shtick can be irritating - witness his horrendous overacting almost derail The Departed (2006) - it's perfect here. Granted, I still prefer Heath Ledger's funnier, more anarchic, better-acted take on the role, but Nicholson's Joker, unlike previous live-action iterations simply a ruthless mass murderer, is very good.

That brings us to the film's darkness, infamous in 1989. Again, The Dark Knight has one-upped Batman's on-screen nastiness but not, I think, the earlier film's attitude. Whatever you may say about Christopher Nolan's films - cold procedurals all of them - he tends to choose scripts that ultimate believe in and reward goodness and humanity (as The Dark Knight does repeatedly in its last half-hour). Not so in Batman: here we have a hero who kills off henchmen like there's no tomorrow and, in the film's climax, defeats his opponent with a highly questionable move. If The Dark Knight is willing to show a great deal more darkness, Batman ultimately has a more pessimistic view of the world.

The casting of Keaton, a well-known comedian, was greeted with scepticism, but he is a revelation in the role. Christian Bale is a closer fit to the character's physical description in the comic books, but his Bruce Wayne is nothing but a mask, ultimately shallow, while Batman is his real personality. That works, sure, but Keaton's Wayne - a shy, ordinary man in a mansion he barely knows - is much easier to empathise with. We'd never suspect this nice guy of being Batman, so when he picks up a poker, screaming 'You wanna get nuts? Come on! Let's get nuts!' at the Joker it really works. Keaton's Batman cares about people, whereas Bale's Batman often seems to be quite ready to burn down half of Gotham to get at the Joker. (No-one would do that to Burton's Gotham: a Gothic excess of spires and gargoyles where the Nolan films offer the atmosphere of a techno-thriller, it's just too gorgeous to destroy.)

Despite everything, though, it's not a great film. The plot is functional at best, Basinger is phoning it in, and the action scenes are not quite top-notch. If I like Batman, it's as a radically different vision to the Miller-Nolan school of Batman as man become symbol, brutally disregarding the limitations of his body: in the Millerverse, if Batman's chest had been a mortar, he'd burst his hot heart's shell upon it. Keaton's Batman is defiantly human, struggling with relationships and self-doubt, and he's all the stronger for it.


*With the benefit of hindsight, Moore easily emerges as the greater of the two, but the jury is still out, I think, on who had the greater cultural impact.

Once upon a time in the Middle East

The recent slew of films on Lebanon has focused on the 1982 Israeli invasion of the country: Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Lebanon (2009) both dealt with Israeli soldiers' experience. Incendies (2010) is a high-profile film from a Lebanese perspective, based on a play by Lebanese-Canadian Wajdi Mouawad, that is singularly uninterested in Israel (the 1982 invasion is mentioned in a throwaway comment), presenting instead an odyssey of civil war, family and reconciliation.

Québec, 2009: at the opening of the will, Jeanne Marwan (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and her brother Simon (Maxim Gaudette) discover that their recently deceased mother wants them to pass on letters to their father, whom they believed dead, and their brother, of whose existence they were unaware. Simon, angry at his mother's unusual request, refuses to return to the unspecified Middle Eastern country, but Jeanne decides to find out the truth in a country whose language she doesn't even speak.

This is interwoven with the story of her mother, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), a Christian from the south of the country, who in around 1970 conducts a love affair with a Muslim refugee. Members of her community kill her lover, but Nawal is already pregnant. She consents, ath the insistence of her grandmother, to give her newborn son to an orphanage and is sent away to university. As the country descends into sectarian strife, she leaves in search of her son but finds the orphanage destroyed. Pretending to be a Muslim for safety, she travels in a group that is eventually massacred by Christian militias. Having escaped only by revealing she is a Christian, Nawal joins a Muslim warlord's forces to wreak vengeance on the killers.

For much of Incendies, I was confused by the film's refuseal to name its setting, for the fictional Middle Eastern country is clearly Lebanon, the place of Wajdi Mouawad's birth. The specific situation of a civil war between Christian and Muslim militias over large numbers of refugees in the south, interrupted by a 'foreign invasion', is not what you'd call vague. By the end I understood. There is a plot twist that is grossly unlikely 'in reality', but brings home the theme of the film:

Jeanne and Simon's brother (Abdelghafour Elaaziz) is also their father, Nawal's son who, rescued from the destruction of his orphanage by a warlord, became a soldier and, after switching sides, eventually a torturer in the service of the government. In this capacity he raped his mother, rendering her pregnant. Further, he no longer lives in Lebanon, having left the country for Québec after the conclusion of the civil war.

This twist, an allusion to Greek myth, necessarily throws the film into unreality. Nor, for a film about Lebanon, is Incendies terribly interested in judging that conflict: it is neither pro- nor anti-sectarian, but treats the events of civil war as fate. This attitude is best encapsulated in the retired Muslim warlord Wallat Chamseddine (Mohamed Majd, in a terrific scene-stealing performance), who is neither regretful nor proud of his actions, only wary of the possible consequences. Incendies depicts the civil war as terrible but nonetheless unalterable: its focus is on family shaped by conflict.

All the same, Incendies is a harrowing indictment of inhumanity. A number of scenes dealing with rape as prison torture and its aftermath are very difficult to watch, as is the massacre of a passenger bus by militias, including the shooting of a child. The acting is excellent, especially Lubna Azabal, who portrays Nawal as a person driven by love and, increasingly, revenge for her suffering that leads her to participate in the civil war on the 'other side'. The fluidity of her identity is signalled by a scene in which she quickly hides her cross necklace and puts on a headscarf to approach a group of Muslims.

The writing, adapted from a play, it is perhaps too 'literary': 'L'enfance est un couteau planté dans la gorge' is great writing, but it rings false in the film's setting. (Incidentally, I was pleased to discover my French appears to have gone from abysmal to merely bad, as I was able to understand most of the French dialogue.) The often over-elaborate style points to the film's mythic quality: though rooted in the Lebanese Civil War, it becomes a parable of conflict in the region.

Against the anti-papists

(Note: this is an English paraphrase of an earlier post.)

The Left Party took a clear position on the pope's recent visit to Germany: half its MPs were to leave the room during the pope's speech before the Bundestag. I believe this attitude, widespread among the German Left both within and without parliament, is wrong both theoretically and strategically. The following is intended as a kick-off to a left-wing response to no-to-popery rhetoric in Germany: a critique of the critique of the pope, if you will.

Last year's papal visit to Britain, until recently my home, was similarly contested. At the time, Simon Hewitt outlined why hostility to the pope was suspect, but his argument, rooted as it is in historical materialism, applies mostly to a British context. But just as in Britain, German anti-Catholicism would do well to understand its own history.

Germany, almost uniquely among the European states, is divided into two denominations of roughly equal size.* The religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ended in a draw. The decline of imperial authority left no power above the princes, who proceeded to enforce uniform religious observance among their subjects. (It may have been for this reason that my Protestant ancestors left Upper Austria for Pomerania in the early eighteenth century.) After Prussia expelled Austria from the German Confederation, sixteen million Catholics remained in the newly unified German state: mostly in the south and west, in Ermland, Upper Silesia and the Polish border regions - beside twenty-eight million Protestants.

The Hohenzollern emperors were none too fond of these Catholics. They suspected them, the 'inner France', of conspiring with foreign powers and branded them 'enemies of the Reich'. Bismarck waged a protracted war of position - the Kulturkampf of the 1870s - against the Catholic Church. In short, Catholicism served the rulers of the Junker State as an imaginary enemy to secure their own power. Catholics fought back in the political arena through the Centre Party; many also joined the fledgling Social Democrats. At the same time, German nationalists in Austria-Hungary founded the 'Away from Rome' movement, combining virulent anti-Catholicism with antisemitism; protofascists like Georg von Schönerer converted to Protestantism.

Though officially neutral with respect to religion, Nazism was suspicious of the Catholic Church as a 'foreign' power from the beginning. In Catholic regions the Nazis never achieved the electoral breakthroughs that made the rural Protestant North their stronghold. In his infamous Myth of the Twentieth Century, Alfred Rosenberg claimed the Papacy descended from the haruspices - Etruscan soothsayers - and was thus of Asiatic, 'non-Aryan' origin. In western Germany, Catholicism only won equality and the capacity to contribute equally to public life after 1945.

Of course most latter-day anti-papists will be appalled at the unsavoury history of German anti-Catholicism: many, indeed, will not be familiar with it. Most of those hostile to the papal visit are of a generally secular frame of mind rather than hailing from a traditionally Protestant backgrounds. Either way hostility to the Catholic Church is not neutral terrain: any critique of the pope must formulate a response to the historical persecution of Catholics and unequivocally defend Catholics' enduring right to practise their faith in Germany.

Rejecting simplistic criticisms of the pope does not, of course, mean a blithe acceptance of the Vatican's teachings. Critics are right to lambaste Rome's stance on gender and sexuality as well as its treatment of the abuse scandal. As a Protestant, I also have fairly wide-ranging disagreements with Catholic teachings, from salvation to ecclesiology, the Eucharist and the use of images. None of that means, however, that one shouldn't invite the pope and hear him out. Not to mention that anyone who rejects the pope must be consistent: will he or she show the same zeal protesting President Obama, who is responsible for the deaths of thousands through drone attacks - which, however hostile, no-one could quite claim of the pope?

Liberal secularists opposing Protestants and Catholics as well as Muslims and religious Jews must be prepared to be self-critical and accept that, just like the Christianity of yore, their agitation has frequently been exploited in the cause of imperial aggression in recent years. Western Crusaders like Henryk Broder and Christopher Hitchens use a critique of religion to justify the invasion of Muslim countries as well as the continuing occupation and colonisation of Palestine. Secularism must be as wary of its false friends as it is of its supposed or real enemies. It must be critical of its own vocabulary and accept that it is counter-productive to stereotype Christians as, in the admirable words of Professor Dawkins, 'dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads'. Painting Joseph Ratzinger, a highly intelligent theologian, as an out-of-touch fuddy-duddy won't do much for anyone's credibility.

Most varieties of secularism find their origin not in Marxism but in a - particular and arguably wrong - interpretation of the Enlightenment, and the Left should be wary of applying them uncritically. Marx's real critique of religion cannot be separated from his critique of the social order, as a quick glance at the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right will show:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Unlike Marx I do not believe 'religion' - which Marx rather unacceptably generalises as a universal phenomenon - to be an illusion, but the main thrust of Marx's argument is hard to argue with. Proclaiming the end of religion without at the same time fighting for the end of a state of affairs that leads people to long for a less terrible Beyond is not just an admission of impotence, but apologetics for the vale of tears. Unlike liberal atheism Marxism dissolves superstition into history, not vice versa: it seeks to overthrow the present society rather than pointlessly demand that people should bear it without illusions.

But left-wing anti-papism is wrong not only in theory but also in practice. The Left Party has struggled for years to overcome its own east-west division: a mass party in eastern Germany but often the weakest of five parliamentary parties in the West, it is faced by the task of establishing itself among the West German working class. The most industrialised regions of the West (the Ruhr and the Rhineland), however, are also among the country's most strongly Catholic. Spicing up democratic socialism with God-is-dead sloganeering is self-sabotage. Left-wing politics must approach workers without prejudice, not condemn their beliefs, whatever they may be, as antediluvian.** It must engage real human beings, not the sort it would like in a perfect world. The party oddly has no problem grasping this when it comes to Iraq or Palestine, which should make one at least a little uneasy.

In other news, the decline of Christianity in Germany has led to strange side-effects. When the pope declined to advance the ecumenical integration of the churches, the press considered this a 'disappointment' to Protestants, whose hopes were apparently 'dashed' by the Pontiff. It would appear that when he said he felt closer to the Orthodox than to the Protestant churches, the pope made Protestant bishops cry. One might imagine the Eastern and Lutheran churches as prodigal sons competing for the approval of a displeased father and eager to move back into his house at the earliest opportunity. Well, I must announce my disappointment is somewhat limited: the Protestant tradition, be it Lutheran or Calvinist, has long been sufficiently strong to survive without a papal blessing. We'll live.


*Yugoslavia and Ireland are somewhat similar in this respect.
** Of course there are limits: the Left must always be a force against racism and sexism among workers, for example, which are morally unacceptable and weaken the working class.