This started as a reply to a comment on my last post, but it just kept getting longer in the conception.
Having seen The Avengers, I saw the latest trailer for The Dark Knight Rises as well. So, let's talk about that.
Okay. Batman Begins was surprisingly good. The Dark Knight was surprisingly better. If The Dark Knight Rises is as much better than The Dark Knight as The Dark Knight was than Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan may actually become a god.
Do I give TDK too much credit? I really don't think I do. Begins may have been the best Batman movie to date, when it came out, but TDK actually transcended. It gave people new ways to see the world, which I think is a big part of what art is for. The Joker's makeup and Glasgow smile became new shorthand for a modern kind of evil.*
All that to say that I am braced for disappointment by TDKR, because there's a lot more room to go down than up. It may do me good to lower my expectations, anyway.
But what about the trailer? Well, the hopes and fears it provokes in me can be sorted by character.
Batman: I think I've guessed how this movie will go down, but I hope to be surprised along the way. For now, I'm glad that the movie's marketing has gotten ahead of the "Batman dies" thing. That is, a lot of people are thinking it. If we did die in this movie, it would be an easy mistake to underestimate fans' intelligence and studiously avoid mentioning the possibility, so that it would come as a "surprise." Instead, the trailer is full of "maybe."
Bane: It's hard to tell where they're taking this guy. He's got some sort of xenomorph thing going on with his face. When they put a bag on Cillian Murphy's head and called him "Scarecrow," it made sense to me, but whatever they've put on Tom Hardy's face is harder to believe than the leather fetish/luchador mask in the comics. He's clearly got it in for Batman personally, and that's about all I can tell.
Catwoman: I've always worried about what they would do with her, because she's an easy character to make ridiculous. The workplace romance she has going with Batman will be a hard sell after what happened in TDK. Most of all I'm just afraid that she'll fall victim to what I call Julia Roberts syndrome: the belief that when the camera is pointed at an attractive woman, nothing interesting can go on for fear of distracting the audience. On the other hand, in what little we see of her in the trailer, I'm almost worried that she'll be--dare I say?--under-sexualized, a failing I had not thought Catwoman even eligible for. In what is surely, granted, an emotionally climactic scene, she seems so darn sincere. This from a character whose persona normally says, "Come play with fire."
John Blake: Who the hell is Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing? I'm as glad to see him in this movie as the next guy, but what is he doing? If nothing else, he's promising that the movie will have more plot than I can extrapolate from a teaser trailer and Wikipedia.
* To be clear, I think photoshopping it onto a politician's face is a vicious and puerile way to make a point. If we must be so crass, though, the toothbrush mustache was overdue for retirement. The point is that it speaks to the penetration of the image.
Ok, I have to say that I am ALL FOR an undersexualized Catwoman, and I'm not totally convinced that they'll pull it off, or even that they'll really try. That aside, I am curious as to why you're concerned about that aspect of her character. Isn't it possible to have a sincere Catwoman?
ReplyDeleteA while ago I read a post by Laura Hudson on Comics Alliance that changed--or at least defined--my biggest issue with sex in media. Some characters are sexy because they want to be sexy, and some characters are sexy because that's what the audience wants to see. Now that first type is overrepresented, too, but it's less integral to some characters than others.
DeleteI would hope that TDKR's Catwoman is less *objectified* than some other iterations. But Catwoman is iconically a femme fatale, and I think trying to vamp Batman is part of her character.
I have to disagree with you here. I would like to see a Catwoman whose primary identifier is not "sexy" and given the inconsistencies inherent in writing the same characters for sixty or seventy years, I don't think that imagining a new take on her character is out of bounds. I don't think that she has to be a femme fatale, and I think that she can have a relationship with Batman without having to "vamp" him. She does have other identifying factors - she's Batman's adversary, for example, and she's got an ambiguous sense of morality, and she's got a complicated relationship with Batman - so why is it that her sexiness gets picked out as her main trait?
DeleteI read the same article by Laura Hudson (this one, yes?: http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/09/22/starfire-catwoman-sex-superheroine/) some time ago and found it interesting. I do think it's a little disingenuous to say that a female comics character is sexy because she wants to be sexy when so many female characters in comics are written to be titillating and not much else. Gail Simone manages to write sexy, powerful, fully developed female characters, or least she did with Wonder Woman, but from my admittedly limited experience, those characters are few and far in-between. That power imbalance doesn't do much to redeem the portrayal of female sexuality in the comics universe.
I want to like Catwoman. There's potential there for an independent, badass female character, and I want to see that. It's just that it's overtaken by the sexy, and I don't think you can get past that without characterizing a Catwoman who is more than just sex. Maybe this movie can do that, but I don't find myself terribly optimistic about that.