Long road out of Eton

In the Golden Age of Hollywood, studios' control over the creative process was near-total. It strikes us as absurd now that to make the jump to Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock had to sign a contract for seven years of indentured labour with legendary producer David 'O.' Selznick of Gone with the Wind fame. But although they didn't always get on - both men were headstrong perfectionists - that collaboration paid dividends in the annals of cinema.

The first Selznick-Hitchcock production, 1940's Rebecca, proved something of a nightmare for the notoriously cash-strapped Selznick, who was aghast when the film cost a grand total of $1,288,000. Set in France and Cornwall but shot entirely in California, Rebecca was a first for Hitchcock in more than one way: not least, it netted him his only ever Best Picture Oscar.

The prologue is perhaps one of the most famous in cinematic history: 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again', a woman begins as the camera travels through the iron gate and up the overgrown road to the ruin of the house, and I must admit my heart sank, for although the sequence is gorgeous the voiceover narration is quite awful, intoned in the most strange and inappropriate way. It was early still, and even in 2011 voiceover is overused or used badly far more often than it is employed effectively.

We cut to Monte Carlo, where a man (Laurence Olivier) is standing at a precipice, seemingly ready to hurl himself over the edge; he is interrupted by a young girl (Joan Fontaine, cast against the objections of Olivier, who preferred his lover Vivien Leigh for the part). The gentleman turns out to be Maxim de Winter, recently widowed lord of the family seat of Manderley in Cornwall; she's a never-named orphan who serves as a paid companion to the horrid social climber Edythe Van Hopper (Florence Bates). (Unfortunately the film cuts my favourite moment in the novel, in which Maxim stealthily insults Mrs Van Hopper by assuring her that Manderley hasn't entertained royalty since Ethelred the Unready: 'In fact, it was while staying with my family that the name was given him. He was invariably late for dinner.')

The girl falls in love with the distant, wounded Maxim, and he soon asks her somewhat brusquely to marry him. To Mrs Van Hopper's chagrin, she accepts and, after a quick wedding in Monte Carlo and a honeymoon in Europe, Maxim and the second Mrs de Winter return to Manderley. She finds that the house is still living under the long shadow cast by the first Mrs de Winter, Rebecca, who drowned off the coast. Most servants are friendly, with the exception of the prim Mrs Danvers (Judith Anderson), who is fiercely devoted to Rebecca and makes it very plain that her master's nervous, low-born new wife does not measure up.

In the hands of Hitchcock and cinematographer George Barnes, who received a richly deserved Academy Award for his work, Rebecca is a film of windows, doors and shadows, of actors dwarfed by the house around them. It is also curiously fixated on curtains, opened and closed by the second Mrs de Winter and Mrs Danvers to enter and leave Rebecca's room: a number of great images spring from the juxtaposition between white curtains and Mrs Danvers's black clothes.

Hitchcock uses his characteristic zooms and pans to great effect, and creates what may be my favourite image in the film: the second Mrs de Winter in mid-ground as Maxim steps in front of the camera in the foreground, totally obscuring her. At the same time, Rebecca suffers oddly from mixing Hitchcock's two prevalent modes: in the third act, the film goes from mythic to procedural, and as a result of that dissonant tonal shift it sags mightily before rallying at the end.

It's tempting to read Rebecca as an allegory of the profound social changes then underway in England. My friend noted that there seemed something distinctly Jane Austenish about life at Manderley; but this, we agreed, was more appearance than reality. Jane Austen's works were read by a literate, sufficiently well-off élite; by contrast, in the age of mechanical reproducibility the troubles of Mrs de Winter were splashed all over the world's cinema screens. Frith (Edward Fielding), Manderley's oldest servant, refers to the fact that once a week the general public is admitted to the great hall; this would have horrified Austen's contemporaries, but by the 1930s aristocrats could count themselves lucky if they were able to retain their country houses by surrendering to the new mass culture.

If we take Manderley as a microcosm of England under the aristocracy, Rebecca is the symbol of that fading ruling class: commanding all the qualities of a lady, she is the final flowering of England's noble houses. Even in death, her vengeful spirit lingers on, resenting the intrusion of the upstart second Mrs de Winter into her place. It's notable, though, that Max is remarkably relaxed about the new equality. His social position permits him that luxury. Mrs Danvers, however, must defend Manderley: her whole identity is bound up with the old social order.

These three poles - the commoner, awed but increasingly assertive in the face of aristocracy; the aristocrat himself; and the faitful servant - are portrayed by three of the most capable actors to ever appear on screen together; but to me there's no doubt Judith Anderson is the greatest of the three. She plays the character to perfection: her contempt hiding behind cold courtesy, her faithfulness to Manderley, her devotion to Rebecca that carries more than a hint of lesbian infatuation (this, of course, makes her crazy). The famous window scene between her and Joan Fontaine is as chilling and moving as anything you're ever likely to see.

The film's gender politics are fascinating, too. Rebecca is known to have been sexually voracious in a way that Max can't seem to imagine of his new wife. There's something distinctly uncomfortable about his belittling of the second Mrs de Winter, whom he treats more like a child than an equal; but if he hopes to keep the shadow of Rebecca at bay by choosing a passive woman to whom he can be a father as much as a husband, he fails. It's a film about the failure of old loyalties, of feudalism, of patriarchy - and yet, at the same time, about their lingering terrible power.

Machine qui rêve*

Cyberpunk, it seems, is still with us. Inception was a latter-day example of the genre, and the Guardian recently published an article on William Gibson without an obvious anniversary. And so, having seen Blade Runner, I decided to go to the source, lest I miss out. And yes, William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) is pretty good, but it's far from a great novel, more interesting for its ideas than any literary quality.

Case** was a 'cowboy', a hacker roaming the virtual reality of the matrix, a global network representing all the world's computer systems. When he stole from his employers, though, they rewarded him by crippling his nervous system, making it impossible for him to ever 'jack in' again. Now he's a petty criminal with a death wish in Night City, Japan, a wretched hive of scum and villainy - until he's given another chance by a mysterious commando, Armitage, and cyborg action girl Molly, to be cured and take on the powerful Tessier-Ashpool corporation.

Before long, it turns out that their real employer is an artificial intelligence called Wintermute, owned by Tessier-Ashpool, which (who?) is trying to free itself from the restrictions legally imposed to prevent AIs from becoming too powerful and turning into Skynet. AIs are the big boys in cyberspace: cowboys tend not to go near them since attempting to attack an AI tends to result in deadness (because if you're killed in the matrix, that's it). Eventually, Case and 'the Flatline', the digitised mind of a braindead cowboy, attempt to breach an AI with a sophisticated virus, taking hours to break through the 'ice' (firewalls) protecting the system.

It's a heist novel, and there's an Avengers Assemble! sequence a third of the way in. But the whole thing is compromised by the shallowness of the characters, who are barely established and never developed. Molly, for example, is an action girlfriend, and that's it, and that makes later passages, when we're supposed to be invested in the characters, less compelling. Neuromancer does not much care: Gibson is much more interested in developing ideas of cyberspace. But it's regrettable, especially when Case at least is set up in a promising way:

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across the colorless void... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in th Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there. (p. 11)

Case is an addict who's been forced to go cold turkey. But the theme of his obsession with cyberspace is not developed properly. Once he's cured by Armitage, that's it, and cyberspace never becomes problematic again.

The writing is at once compelling and frustrating. Since I'm a fan of Raymond Chandler, Gibson's use of the hardboiled style shouldn't be too much of a problem, and there are some real gems, like the wonderfully evocative opening sentence ('The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel'). But whatever else you might say about hardboiled, being terse and peppered with colloquialisms it's not easy to read. Gibson makes it tougher still by throwing in a great deal of technobabble and future slang, and in consequence I felt like an idiot for stretches of the novel by not understanding very much at all. It makes sense, I suppose: Case as a 'cyberspace cowboy' is a future Philip Marlowe, who is himself a twentieth-century urban cowboy. At least we were spared a first-person narration.

As a vision of the future, Gibson's cyberpunk has three elements: virtual reality, advanced cybernetics, and general societal decay. The first is more interesting than one might think, considering virtual reality was abandoned in the nineties: the matrix, controlled by megacorps and difficult to access without sophisticated equipment, is at the very least a fair approximation of Web 1.0. Cybernetics is a much more interesting subject in a society obsessed with youth and beauty, and Gibson evokes it well, although there's a great deal of potential for body horror that is never exploited. Lastly, the decay: Neuromancer is not detailed in this regard, but there appears to have been some sort of nuclear war at least in Europe, which the US did not win. Organised crime appears to have become much more powerful (the Yakuza are an international organisation).

For a satisfying novel, however, Neuromancer has too many ideas and does too little with them. Case's interactions with artificial intelligence in cyberspace are pretty terrific, and I very much like Gibson's take on AI: unlike, say, HAL's grasping, childlike incipient humanity in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Wintermute is ineffable, too strange to be quite comprehended by people (and conversely unable to quite understand them). There are embarrassments, like the cringeworthy Rastafarians in space! the protagonist encounters. Neuromancer does a lot of heavy lifting in creating a world and introducing a plethora of ideas, and so its flaws may be forgiven; I only hope the other books in the series add more depth.

*Yes, that's a reference to the Spirou album of the same name, which unsuccessfully attempted to retool one of the best-loved BD to a noir techno-thriller. It didn't work very well, to say the least, and ended Tome and Janry's run on the series.
**Gibson's fondness for monosyllabic character names (Case, Zone, Wage, Finn, Chin...) is quite irritating.

Gotham in ink

Hollywood loves comic books. This is not surprising: the big comic-book films of the last years – titles like X-Men: The Last Stand, 300, Spider-Man 3, Iron Man, Wanted, and now The Dark Knight – have made mountains of cash for the studios. Even a supposed underperformer like Superman Returns grossed $391m world-wide and, to absolutely no-one's astonishment, a sequel (or, rather, the obligatory re-boot) is in the making.

The new films didn’t just make money; they also won over the dark kingdom of professional criticism, none more so than Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). The American star critic Roger Ebert speaks for many of his peers when he calls The Dark Knight 'a haunted film that… becomes an engrossing tragedy'. Alas, Ebert also claims that '"Batman" isn't a comic book anymore' and that the film 'leaps beyond its origins'. Wrong, Roger. What Christopher Nolan did – more than previous Bat director Tim Burton, and in stark contrast to Joel Schumacher, the perpetrator of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin – was to take the comic books seriously; he picked up the themes that permeate the Dark Knight’s universe and translated them to the big screen.

It's pretty much universally acknowledged that Batman is cool. The character is the ultimate adolescent fantasy: a millionaire playboy who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare fists. At the same time, he has no superpowers (unlike most of the Justice League) and relies on intelligence and  preparedness. But it's not, I think, that he is particularly relatable: Superman's feelings are much more plain, and the Man of Steel, though an alien, has a much more 'normal' family background as a Kansas farmboy. Batman, like his city, is something of an enigma, and it's no surprise that Christian Bale has portrayed him as a closed character, expressive only in the masks he puts on (Bruce Wayne the celebrity businessman, and Batman the crimefighter). His attraction lies, rather, precisely in his total disappearance into the symbol of Batman.

 

If you enjoyed the Nolan flicks, you might love the source material, for instance the classic Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller (1986). Miller's a funny chap. These days he's a millionaire after the success of the movie versions of his comics Sin City and 300. He was also the author of the rumoured Holy Terror, Batman!, a book of 'propaganda' (quoth Miller, no kidding) in which the Caped Crusader was to battle Osama (a project that has now been scrapped, for reasons that should be somewhat obvious), and of All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, which was released to richly deserved universal derision.

In The Dark Knight Returns a fifty-something Bruce Wayne decides he must don his cape once more, and Batman's return draws back both old friends and enemies. Returns is a wonderful exploration of the Batman and what he means both to Gotham and to Bruce Wayne, but subtlety is not Frank Miller's forte, and many of the writer's later obsessions are present in embryo here. All the same, this bold vision of a darker Batman has been hugely influential. Miller's own Batman: Year One tells the story of how Bruce first invented the Batman persona to inspire fear among the criminals preying on Gotham. Year One is the inspiration for Batman Begins, and a jolly good comic-book it is; David Mazzucchelli’s grim and realistic art (contrasting with Miller's own fluid, exaggerated style) complements the writing perfectly.

Another classic is Batman: The Killing Joke by British comic-book legend and Churchillian historian Alan Moore. Essentially a dark and disturbing story about the Joker and madness as escape from a maddening reality, The Killing Joke is the comic-book Heath Ledger read in preparation for his awe-inspiring performance in The Dark Knight. And Ledger certainly did portray the Joker as the homicidal sociopath Moore outlined – yet I cannot help feeling that Ledger actually does more with the character, transcending and excelling the comic-book original. Nevertheless this is the classic Joker story that uncannily makes you pity the villain (though whether that's a good thing I'll leave to you to decide - The Killing Joke is best read as the Joker's creation of multiple pasts, his own identity being supremely unstable).

 

There are villains galore in Batman: The Long Halloween and its follow-up, Batman: Dark Victory by Jeph Loeb (writing) and Tim Sale (art), an epic crime saga, murder mystery, and re-telling of Batman's early career in two parts. 'I believe in Gotham City', are Bruce Wayne’s opening words, and it is in full Godfather mode that Loeb tells the story of the Falcone crime empire and how three men – James Gordon, an ambitious District Attorney named Harvey Dent, and the Batman – try to conquer crime in Gotham. If this sounds a lot like The Dark Knight, that's because Nolan’s recent blockbuster is obviously inspired by Loeb, including the tragic journey of Harvey Dent; these two tales are also among the personal favourites of actor Christian Bale. Dark Victory introduces the reviled Robin the Boy Wonder, and the character actually manages to be bearable – testament to Loeb's considerable writing skills. Both books are overloaded with tropes, but that needn't be a bad thing.

Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is where virtually all of Batman's enemies are locked up. But one day the inmates take over the asylum, and they only have one demand: Batman must come and visit them. Arkham Asylum is a descent into madness that places Batman’s stay in the institution alongside the story of the rise and fall of Amadeus Arkham, the founder of the asylum. A 'comic book' that's not particularly funny, Arkham Asylum is a profound and disturbing exploration of insanity, drawing on sources from Lewis Carroll to Aleister Crowley (the subtitle is drawn from Philip Larkin). Dave McKean’s art deserves special mention for being terrifyingly weird and taking Grant Morrison’s excellent writing to a whole new level: in almost every panel dark shadows lurk around characters whose own edges are ill-defined, blending into the enveloping madness.

Something you'll notice about the Batman tales listed here is that they're all, well, rather dark. The trend towards more mature stories influenced by film noir seems to be nearing its end now in the comic-book universe, but it has spawned the equally gloomy new Batman films. And, lo and behold, people flocked to see them in their millions. The lesson, studio executives seem to think, is that any hero is instantly improved by being made dark and brooding. Jeff Robinov of Warner Brothers promises that his studio's upcoming superhero movies are 'going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it'. Superman? Dark? The money beckons.

Note: This is an updated version of an article originally written in 2008, hence the outdated references.