Dumb Obsessions

Comics, a children's book, two movies and a poem from classical antiquity.

Sticking with the streamlined format I touted in the previous entry:

Literature Lean-To

I found a copy of The Aeneid of Virgil: A Verse Translation by Rolfe Humphries in a Little Free Library. This edition is from 1951. It has a succinct introduction by Humphries and then his translation of the poem followed by a very short contextualizing essay and a few pages comprising a Cast of Characters.

The poem itself is really good so far! I was supposed to read it decades ago for high school Latin class but I didn’t. I’m currently through Books I and II. Aeneas and crew survive a conspiracy by the goddess Juno to drown them at sea and then they wash ashore in Africa. Aeneas’s mother, the goddess Venus, intercedes by shrouding him in a cloud which will prevent him from getting into trouble as he goes down to Carthage to meet Dido.

There is an obvious kinship here — Aeneas, as we begin to hear in his expository retelling at the beginning of Book II, is a veteran of and refugee from the Trojans’ war with the Greeks while Dido of Carthage is a queen-in-exile who had to flee her original homeland after her asshole brother murdered her husband. These two are gonna do it for sure I bet, and if I remember my Aeneid outline correctly Aeneas has to choose between staying cozy with Dido or hitting the road again and fulfilling the destiny of his restless soul and preordained responsibilities.

This here Aeneid is whimsical, action-packed, demurely sexy, menacing, weird, bloody and sweepingly romantic with a set-change more or less every stanza. Book II is a viciously violent and exciting recounting of what Aeneas witnessed during the destruction of Troy and how he and a few of his best warriors disguised themselves in the armor of their enemies to navigate the apocalyptic collapse of their society and home, escaping with some refugee hangers-on and their household gods to set off wandering in search of a new place to live. Genuinely moving and gripping stuff.

I’m intrigued to see where The Aeneid goes (aside from that Aeneas’s descendants will go on to found classical Roman society, which if I hadn’t already known was the premise of the poem I would have been thoroughly hipped to by Jupiter’s statement thereof early in Book I). Will keep you informed.

Comics Cabin

As per last update I’m still reading a collection of old Moomin strips. Still loving Jansson’s work. No plans to stop until I’ve exhausted the San Francisco Public Library’s supply of Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip volumes. Might not even stop then.

At this point we’ll pivot to Roulette for the three randomly-selected items from the complete reading list I’ve maintained since the beginning of 2011.

Some Dinosaurs Are Small by Charlotte Voake, read in 2021. The frequency with which I read children’s books about dinosaurs came up the very first time I road-tested this Roulette game, when two of the three random drawings were of that genre. Here is another one, with a clue to the subject matter in the title: it’s about how some dinosaurs are small.

Voake means prehistoric dinosaurs like Compsognathus and shit, but she is correct to say “are” and not “were” because birds are dinosaurs and hummingbirds are birds and hummingbirds are really small, even smaller than Compsognathi. If one correctly counts hummingbirds as dinosaurs, some of today’s dinosaurs are very small indeed. (That’s my own addendum; I don’t really remember reading this book.)

R. Crumb’s Sex Obsessions by R. Crumb, read in 2017. Got this from the San Francisco Public Library. Crumb, the best and quintessential underground LSD cartoonist, is a noteworthy part of San Francisco history and the library system seems to have a decent supply of his stuff on hand. His comics have always been guided largely by his strange and unsettling sex obsessions and this book collects a bunch of his comics about them. This is one of the few very best places to start for anyone new to Crumb’s work or who only has to time to check out one or two of his books. Some of the most interesting work by one of the greatest and most troubled cartoonists ever.

Dumb: Living Without a Voice by Georgia Webber, read in 2019. I remember reading much of this while working at a single-screen movie theater in Seattle (there wasn’t much else to do while the movie was on and I was allowed to read while working the concession stand). It’s a graphic memoir about how Webber lost her ability to speak due to a medical condition. I respect Webber’s forthrightness and narrative accessibility, though her slapdash aesthetic and stop-and-go narrative flow didn’t especially draw me in. I remember being interested enough to want to read this and then rather breezing through it without ever feeling too invested. Still, Webber deserves much credit for making herself vulnerable enough to open a window into a difficult experience and for using comics to illucidate an interesting subject in a way that no other medium would allow.

Picture Portajohn

The Batman, directed by Matt Reeves, 2022. Like most people I loved the first two Nolan/Bale Batman pictures. I didn’t see any of the subsequent ones with Ben Affleck as Batman. This latest reboot with Robert Pattinson in the role is a peculiar, somewhat overlong and by no means terrible offering in the history of a character that the film business is running out of ways to reinvent.

Aesthetically The Batman appears to have mined its look from Nineties gloom cinema like The Raven, Seven and the Burton-directed Batman pictures of ‘89 and ‘92, sprinkled with a touch of Blade Runner high-contrast futurist neon. There’s also an anime stripe running through some of the wardrobe and makeup choices. This is a sleek, dour rain-puddle of a movie.

Narratively it’s not bad, and that’s okay. The Batman is not nearly as good as Batman Begins or The Dark Knight and averages out to being better overall than The Dark Knight Rises, the wildly uneven and ultimately unsatisfying final installment in Nolan and Bale’s three-picture interpretation of the character. Nolan’s corporate-dystopian Gotham City infused quite a lot of daylight into the environment; Reeves’s vision of Gotham is a pit of darkness and brimstone that, like Burton’s of thirty years ago, puts the gothic in Gotham.

The other main difference from the Nolan era is the political inflection. Bale and Nolan’s Batman was a kind of center-right law-and-order conservative, which was made most apparent in The Dark Knight Rises when his two central antagonists were a class-warrior version of Catwoman and a fascinating interpretation of Bane who was essentially the head of Occupy Gotham.

In keeping up with the changing times, Reeves and Pattinson’s version of the character evolves over the course of the film into what appears to be a lightly woke progressive. He starts out pointedly referring to himself aloud as “Vengeance,” noticing when he does that those he is trying to rescue tend to be as frightened of him as those from whom he saves them, before ultimately pivoting away from that stance to realize that he should be a fuzzy beacon of hope instead of a bristling station of aggression. He is helped toward this conclusion by a Catwoman who offhandedly speaks out against white privilege and by a brave and honorable young mayor-elect of Gotham who could be read as an unveiled reference to certain prominent real-life politicians of our time, or just a general comment upon giving young women of color their fair seat at the administrative table. Along the way he learns that just about everyone in establishment government and Gotham’s police force (aside from a staid and workmanly Commissioner Gordon) is rotten to the core and finally confronts a Riddler who in terms from our current non-fictional culture represents a trolling, black-pilled manospheric message board denizen.

None of these themes especially energize the storytelling, but thankfully they don’t muck it up either. I don’t need nudge-nudge politics of any stripe in my capes-and-tights pictures but in this case the writing and presentation are smooth enough and the political viewpoint light-handed enough that I found these particular cultural markers more noteworthy than distracting. Paul Dano’s Riddler in The Batman isn’t as complicated or thoroughly-inhabited a villain as for example Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight, but he is still treated as a comic book villain first and a political token second.

To put it another way: it’s not as if everything else in The Batman is completely perfect and amazing. The choices that seem a bit silly, misplaced, overly dwelt-upon or mildly irritating are no more or less egregious than the woke politics. So the film’s political inflection, while noticeable, doesn’t come close to upending what unfolds as a somewhat banal and serviceably entertaining movie.

As with all three of Nolan’s Batman pictures, Reeves’s The Batman has one heck of a deep bench when it comes to acting talent. Zoë Kravitz is great at igniting Catwoman’s customary romantic chemistry with Batman in a way that manages to feel both PG-13-chaste and breathily sexy. John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard and Andy Serkis show up in relatively small roles and take them seriously enough to make them interesting. In one scene you even get Robert Pattinson, Jeffrey Wright and Colin Farrell all talking to one another. I’m gonna write a strongly-worded letter to someone lobbying for those exact three guys to do a really great non-superhero movie together, like a Michael Mann caper or something.

The parting note has a Didoesque Catwoman inviting Batman to ditch his responsibilities to Gotham and stay by her side, lamenting that this cannot be and redeploying the newly-upbeat Batman back to his Aenean responsibilities to the future improvement of his city. Like everything else in The Batman, it’s an odd, sideways-tilted and not unsuccessful coda.

Dressed to Kill, directed by Brian De Palma, 1980. A while back I wrote of Brian De Palma’s “signature obsessions (with duality, surveillance and the all-seeing eye of the camera) and techniques (point-of-view shots, split-screen compositions and suspenseful long-takes).” None of that is invalidated by my first complete viewing of his sexy 1980 B-movie psychological thriller Dressed to Kill.

This is a pretty okay, respectably-crafted and eventually quite silly and implausible picture which steals liberally from the novel template Hitchcock outlined twenty years before in Psycho. The implausibility of Dressed to Kill would be less of an issue if De Palma didn’t seem to be taking his overcooked material so seriously. The film gestures towards having some interesting things to say about the danger a sexually-frustrated married woman can invite into her life by seeking gratification outside of her relationship. But once that storyline is figuratively and literally killed, the movie ricochets into a discord about a gender-dysphoric serial killer, the confused life of a high-class working girl, an irresponsible jerk of a police detective and a kid who is a prodigy with electronic surveillance (that last character being partly based on De Palma’s own teenaged self, as I learned from watching that half-assed documentary De Palma).

There’s some cool stuff in this movie, including clever compositions, impressive long-takes and an unusual turn for the great actor Michael Caine who in 1980 already had much better projects in the rearview mirror and would later go on to do excellent work on Nolan’s Batman trilogy. But everything good about Dressed to Kill stands discretely detached from all of the other good things so that they don’t work in concert to overcome the dumb things. Like a lot of De Palma’s movies it falls in an uncanny valley between strikingly competent self-seriousness and unselfaware goofiness. If you’re prepared for that going in then it’s worth a glance — as something to be studied and analyzed more than appreciated or enjoyed.