Hot Vigilante Sex: Part One
Spare me if I don’t allow myself to be railroaded into a state of vicarious full-on body orgasm at the hysterical pronouncements of box office records being broken this last weekend ($158.3M !!!) by the new Dark Knight flick. This ambivalence is no anti-flying rodent parsimony on my part; indeed, a small screaming geek portion of me is ecstatic that the fiscal success of this latest film (partially predicated, it seems, on the efforts of quality “help” rather than novelty mercenaries, that the powers-that-be have entrusted their intellectual properties to some genuinely-talented iconoclasts rather than cookie-cutter artisans…) will doubtless mean my menu of Unhappy Bat Meals will still continue to be delivered to me uninterrupted tri-annually on a tarnished Gothic platter.
Even if director Christopher Nolan and title actor Christian Bale decide not to return to make the projected last part of a trilogy (and if so, bloody good for them! Let them defy the dictates of God, the concept of the pieta, and even the Dark Emperor George Lucas. Who the fuck other than craven marketing departments said that the best things come in threes anyway? What happened to twos in the scheme of things?) I am sure that the mothership corporation Warners will recast another iteration with… whoever, as they troll through a list of possible replacements, working down the cogs until they find the first greasy block that will jump at the path of lowest resistance and generate some reboot friction. Maybe Fred Savage or Uwe Bohl will direct it. Maybe Dean Cain or Whoopi Goldberg will retool Batman/Bruce Wayne’s tortured psyche into a new ground-breaking thespian interpretation.
Maybe they will get Barack Obama to play a Swanee Joker before November; and post-assassination green-screen him into the Gotham skyline, upping the ghoul stakes from Heath Ledger’s interpretation; that will have all those skinny Asian nasal twenty-something Entertainment Weekly window-dressing clones announcing it as “Like, Psychotic!” as they read, gulping and bug-eyed, from their autocues.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not cynical. Oh no. I LIKE TO LIKEY THE BAT. I have been personally seduced many many times as The Batman has clambered through my bedroom window, either from the silver screen or the cheap yellowing pages of old comic books. Indeed, as I write this blog, manifold versions of Batman statuettes peer down at me from my shelves - from a limited-edition Michael Keaton Japanese molding complete with protruded photo-realistic lip renditions doubtlessly painted by starving younglings in the sweat shops of Hong Kong, through to a ‘50s chipped and frayed money bank figure with a fontanelle gash that looks like the worst/best kind of bat-trepanning for a casual about-town multi-millionaire with a schizophrenic bent - and these pointy-eared incarnations all demand, in a steel, bent-thighed way, that I testify to the truth of my passion in this silver-mooned night.
And so, I sigh, and remember:
Eating baked beans and chips for tea on the sofa in 1969, bopping up and down as Adam Ward and Burt Ward gave Burgess Meredith and Frank Gorshin one up the hooter. Years later I turned away from these gauche buffons- like St.Peter denying the Christ after three cock crows - lured instead by the 1978 hyper-realism (as in: real to fanboys, whilst my peers started larning ’bout history and politics and stuff…) and Gothic environments of the darker comic book reboots, entranced by the dynamic reinventions of artists such as Neal Adams and Marshall Rogers. This was a dark, post-teenage odyssey that found its bleak apotheosis in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight in 1984, where the Joker broke his own neck (I know that’s in italics, but think about it: he broke his own neck. Just by turning his head to the side and applying a demonic will that made the Terminator’s commitment to the homicidal cause look like a flustered white liberal at a NAACP convention). In 1988 I rabidly devoured any information I could get on the upcoming Tim Burton reimagining in magazine and fanzine snippets (ah, young thing, ‘twas a time before the web and instantaneous multiple postings ‘cross geek web sites), falling on random reports of the sinuous exo-skeletal nature of Keaton’s body-casting, like a twelfth-century peasant stumbling across a potato with a great sirloin steak attached.
Now? It’s just that… I’m a little bit tired of being played through the corporate released drip drip drip of the first new bat-suit image, the teaser trailer, the viral campaign, the first real trailer, the geek site interview, the concept designs, and eventually the Reeses tie-in campaigns in the gas station when I’m paying$4.55 a gallon?
I have done my tantric sex thing with the Batman. I have waited for his steely midnight vigilante caress for almost three goddamned years even as he laid back on the media duvet and spread his bat-legs like something from an issue of Reader’s Wives (but with better teeth); coquettishly showing me his bat-thing, his bat-bush, and his bat-bits.
So BOY I hope this film is good! ‘Cos it’s time for me to get my end away. No jury would convict me. He’s asking for it.
PART TWO: our Blogger actually sees The Dark Knight. Don’t expect a review (gentlemen don’t tell, after all…).