What’s the story, Graham?

February 15, 2013 ~ Graham Milne ~ 16 Comments

Who is that guy? — And while we’re at it, who is that guy?

I’ve never been good at self-promotion. Perhaps you can chalk it up to formative years surrounded by people telling me keep quiet, don’t boast and give someone else a turn. Like most people, I enjoy attention, but excessive notice tends to turn my stomach inside out. It’s why I had to stop reading the comments on the stuff I submit to Huffington (that and the occasional threat from a pissed off Tea Partier). The problem is that these aren’t qualities that serve one well if one is attempting to establish a writing career. Publishing firms are tightening their belts and seem to expect their authors to do most of the legwork in marketing themselves. You see the results often on Twitter – writers following other writers in hopes of a follow-back, and relentlessly pushing their tomes through tweet after tweet. Seems to work for some; I follow a few who haven’t published a thing yet have managed to build up their own expectant and admiring fanbases. My attitude has always been that quality will find its own audience, but, after blogging for almost two years to a relatively stable but small (yet tremendously awesome) group of supportive readers, it’s clear that my modest approach isn’t working. I need to give you more.

If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you’ll know I’ve made some periodic and cryptic references to a finished novel that has been sitting on my hard drive for far too long. A few years back I sent out some queries for it, received polite rejections all around, and then set it aside for a while. (I had a nice one from a literary agent who represents a very famous series of books, who said that her decision to pass was not a statement on the quality of the writing, which, though it may have been a form letter, was still encouraging to a fragile ego.) About two years ago I went back and rewrote large portions of it while painfully hacking out almost 60,000 words to get it to a publishable length. Perhaps a dozen family & friends have read it from cover to cover; dozens more have seen excerpts and offered suggestions, some of which have been incorporated, while others have been welcomed but disregarded (you have to use your judgement after all). Long and the short of it is that at this point it’s in the best shape I can possibly get it into, at least from my perspective. And I have started sending queries out again. So why have I not shared more about it here?

Well, in a strange way, I have. There is a lot here about the book. And no, you haven’t missed it. Let me explain a little.

We live in a spoiler-addicted culture. Everybody wants their appetite sated immediately; we all want to flip to the last page to see who did it. I went through that phase myself – because I am fascinated by the process of film production (an interest that probably stems from wishing in idle moments that it’s what I did for a living) I devour news about scriptwriting, casting, principal photography, and yes, spoilers. I had to give myself an intervention of sorts this past summer when I ruined The Dark Knight Rises for myself by reading the Wikipedia plot summary before seeing the movie. I realized I’d become what I despised – I’d often railed about being able to figure out the ending of rom-coms simply by looking at the two stars featured on the poster. For Skyfall, I purposely kept myself spoiler-free, and as a result I enjoyed that movie a lot more than I would have had I known how it was going to end. Trekkers have been driven up the wall over the last several by J.J. Abrams’ refusal to offer specifics on the identity of the villain “John Harrison” played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness. Is it Khan? Gary Mitchell? Robert April? Harry Mudd? Ernst Stavro Blofeld? In promoting his projects, Abrams has always embraced the idea of the “mystery box,” never showing his hand until the night of the premiere. And controlling the conversation by keeping it where he wants it, in the realm of speculation, is, if managed properly, a great way to keep interest high. It’s a dance though – give away too much and you spoil it, but say nothing, or remain stubbornly evasive, and people grow bored and move on to the next thing. My more introspective nature simply lends itself better to Abrams’ way of thinking.

I’ll crack open the mystery box a little: My novel is a fantasy. It’s the first part of what will hopefully be a trilogy. The main character is a woman with magical abilities. She encounters a mortal man. An adventure ensues.

Whoa, you’re saying. Back up a sec. This is basically Beautiful Creatures, right?

Argh. As writers we need to support each other and rejoice in each other’s successes, so I’m very happy for Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. We all dream of seeing our epics translated to the big screen and I’m sure they’re bursting with joy at their enviable accomplishment, as would I. But privately I’m suffering a few gutfuls of agita. You can’t help feeling like the guy who was late to the patent office when Alexander Graham Bell released the first telephone, even though our stories are completely different. Theirs takes place in the modern day; mine is set in the past in a fictional world. Their lead characters are teenagers discovering themselves; mine are world-weary adults. And of course the supporting characters and indeed the plot bear no resemblance to one another. But to the casual observer, they’re treading similar boards, and even though I could have written a story about a lawyer or a doctor or cop without garnering so much as a whisper of comparison, I have no doubt that someone will now accuse me of trying to cash in on a trend, particularly if Beautiful Creatures does become “the next Twilight” and thousands of lesser imitators flood literary agents’ inboxes (I’m fortunate I didn’t choose to write about vampires. Luckily, I find them tiresome.) Indeed, witches are all the rage in pop culture at the moment – we had Hawkeye and Strawberry Fields hacking their heads off a few weeks ago and we’ve got Mrs. James Bond, Meg Griffin and Marilyn Monroe bandying their magical wiles with James Franco coming up in March.

Well, it is what it is and no sense sulking about it now.

I’m going to sidestep into politics for a moment. My beloved federal Liberals are conducting a leadership race right now, and candidate and former astronaut Marc Garneau has recently fired a shot across presumptive favorite Justin Trudeau’s bow by accusing him of failing to offer up concrete plans. But Garneau (and those who are praising this as a brilliant strategic move) should understand that people don’t respond to plans, they respond to ideas – the why, not the what. Our current PM came to power not because he had a thoroughly researched and scored eighteen-point economic agenda, but because his campaign message was that the previous government was corrupt and he wasn’t. It worked. His two subsequent election wins have been based on similar themes – I’m reliable, the other guys are scary unknowns. I go back to Simon Sinek’s brilliant observation that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. It was the “I have a dream” speech, not the “I have a plan” speech. The trick, when it comes to trying to pitch a book through a query letter, is that you’re required to try and hook the agent through what is more or less a 250-word encapsulation of the basic plot. But the plot isn’t why I wrote the book and it’s not why I want people to read it.

For argument’s sake, and I’m certainly not trying to make a comparison here, but let’s quickly summarize the life of Jesus Christ: A baby is born to a virgin mother and grows up to become a carpenter, lead a vast group of followers and spread a message of love to his fellow men. This offends the ruling powers who condemn him to torture and death, after which he is miraculously resurrected. If you had no knowledge of Christianity or the substance of Jesus’ message, you would never believe based on what you just read that these events would inspire a worldwide religious movement that would endure over two thousand years and counting. The plot doesn’t make you want to read the book. You get no sense of the why.

After an enormous detour, we now come back to my novel and its why. The why is here, all around you, in the archives of this site. It’s in my values, the things that matter to me and that I ponder as I type, post and share. My opinions on politics, conservatism, the Tea Party, faith, spirituality, organized religion, charity, economics, ecology, literature, women, love, the loss of our parents, the shifting nature of good and evil, even James Bond, the Beatles and the writing of Aaron Sorkin as a part of the entire human experience – they are all represented in some form or another in my novel. Gene Roddenberry taught me that a great story can’t just be a journey from A to B to C, it has to be about something more. So mine is an adventure story that is as much an exploration of my personal philosophy and observations on the human condition as it is sorcery, chases, narrow escapes, explosions and witty repartee.

It is written in first person, from the point of view of the sorceress. Why did I choose to write as a woman? Part of it was for the challenge, I suppose, to see if I could do it without falling into chick-lit clichés about designer shoes, the appeal of sculpted abs and struggles with mothers-in-law and PMS. But more to the point, if the story is to connect with an audience, its themes must be universal, as must its emotions. Men and women both know what it is like to feel alone, to be consumed by a longing for something or someone you cannot have, and to make any kind of connection, no matter how meagre. We can both crave intimacy so deeply that we don’t care who we receive it from – even if we know we are asking for it from a person who is absolutely wrong for us. My fictional leading lady has tremendous powers, yet she remains vulnerable to the stirrings of a long-closed-off heart and the desire to be accepted, even by a man who despises everything she represents – a married man, to complicate matters further. The evolution of their relationship is the absolute center of the plot, their interactions the driver of all the events that follow. I avoid a lot of the external mechanisms common to fantasy like endless prophecies, quests, magical objects, creatures, specific rules about the casting of spells and complicated mythologies. Sorry, no Diagon Alley or Avada Kedavra or Quidditch or even white walkers, folks. The progression of my story hinges on emotions, personal choices and consequences, not getting the Whatsit of Whatever to the Mountain of Something Else before the next full moon. The people are what matter and everything else to me is background noise.

Does it sound like something you’d like to read? I hope so. I hope if you’ve come with me this far you’ll want to come a little further, and maybe invite a few friends along. Over the next few months I’ll post periodic updates on how we’re doing submission-wise, and maybe a few more details like character names, excerpts of scenes, even (gasp!) the title. We’ll see if we can get a couple more folks interested to the point where we reach critical mass and something truly amazing happens. It’s a story I’ve put a lot of heart into and really want to share in its completed form. But as I said, if you’ve been following this site and listening to what I have to say, you already know much of what you’re in for. Think of it as a buffet table of themed appetizers leading to a sumptuous main course – one that I promise won’t leave you with indigestion.

As they used to say on the late night talk shows, More to Come…

Fear and loathing: Christmas 2012

December 21, 2012December 21, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 4 Comments

It’s emblematic of our age that when a major event occurs, we are guaranteed to know what every person with a computer thinks about it, in various degrees of legibility and/or sanity. The thoughts expressed following the Sandy Hook massacre have been a virtual deluge of sympathy, anger, regret, confusion, disbelief, shattered faith and predictable political posturing, from both prominent public figures and unpronounceable cyber aliases. There is a compulsion to find sense in the senseless, meaning in the unimaginable. To ask how something like this could happen and ensure it never happens again. For many it’s too late for that; a resignation that these mass shootings are an inevitable consequence of the path the United States is on, where the power of the NRA has made firearms regulation a political third rail and attempts at increasing access to proper medical care lead absurdly to mass protests and election losses.

The little bodies were barely cold before the trotting out of the usual canards began – Republican congressman/professional moron Louie Gohmert (the slightly more evolved protozoan who was screaming a while back that “anchor babies” were the latest terrorist threat) wished that the teachers had been packing heat so they could have pulled the Charles Bronson routine against the killer. He and others of his ilk think the answer to every mass shooting is to increase the supply of guns amidst the populace – the idea, if you can dignify it with that word, being that potential mass murderers will be deterred from carrying out their insanity if they think it’s possible that one of their targets might shoot back. Setting aside the fact that not a single gun massacre has ever been stopped in this way, what message are Gohmert and his cretinous colleagues trying to send? That in the Greatest Country in the World™, people, little children even, should be walking around every day scared to their britches that someone’s going to pull a gun on them? Please define for me how that constitutes greatness – a land where everyone you pass on the street is a potential murderer to be horrified of. The other day a boy in Utah was arrested for bringing a firearm to school because he thought someone might shoot him. I have no doubt that Gohmert et al will hold this boy up as a patriotic defender of liberty instead of the terrified little child that he is, who should be playing with teddy bears and Lego instead of Glocks and Smith & Wessons.

The text of the Second Amendment reads: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” I’m no Constitutional scholar (nor, I suspect, are 99.9999998% of the people who howl about the sanctity of these words) but it’s my understanding based on my read of American history that this was written in light of the fear that the British might return and civilians needed to be able to fight back if the regular American army wasn’t able to get there in time. Perfectly logical, one supposes, for the late 1790’s, when the fastest public alert system was a guy on horseback yelling that the British were coming. But scanning through comment sections on news websites, one finds a different argument, that the citizenry must be able to own and wield guns in case the government needs to be violently overthrown (memories of Tea Party Senate candidate Sharron Angle and her infamous “Second Amendment remedies.”) The same folks who wail “Support the Troops!” every time they are sent into battle (whether or not the cause is just) think that on a whim these same heroes of unimpeachable virtue will transform into mindless pawns of the Antichrist dictator and begin sweeping through the streets mowing down patriotic citizens. In the highly unlikely (if not utterly impossible) event that ever happens, quite frankly, the government has the 82^nd Airborne and stealth bombers and you’ve got three guys with shotguns in a Dodge Durango – I don’t like the odds. And of course, the government only has those stealth bombers and an entire range of invincible high-tech weaponry because the same people who cite the above logic of the Second Amendment continue to vote for the party who thinks cutting defense spending for any reason is an act of sedition. If one feels the onset of a migraine at these unfathomable leaps in logic, one must remember that these arguments are not even in the same stadium as logical reasoning – they come entirely from a place of fear.

Fear is the one emotion common to every creature that walks the earth. It has been ingrained in our being ever since we were swinging through trees to avoid being eaten by something bigger and stronger. As our minds have developed across the eons, gaining the ability to reason, we have still never shed this most basic instinct. Fear can, if properly tempered and managed, drive us to achieve greatness. In The Dark Knight Rises (ironically, a movie tainted by its association with a mass shooting), Bruce Wayne finds it impossible to escape a prison without the motivation of the fear of dying in the attempt. But fear run rampant is endlessly destructive, and there will always be those who understand this and prey on fear to make money. The political lobbying of the NRA and its offshoots, despite repeated publicly stated intentions of preserving freedom and promoting responsible gun ownership, is about the freedom of weapons manufacturers to continue to sell their product, regardless of whether those who purchase those weapons are the slightest bit responsible. And if you are not afraid of a big scary bad guy breaking into your house or the faceless drones of the evil government coming to drag you off to the gulag, what do you need a gun for? So it is in the interest of companies who sell guns and by extension advocacy groups like the NRA to keep the masses as scared as possible. They no doubt revel in the free assistance provided to them by the media who splash every act of violence across newspapers, television screens, websites and smartphones and then conduct weeks-long investigative reporting into every single facet of the event and how YOUR FAMILY might be threatened. Gun sales explode following gun massacres, ostensibly from the fear of being targeted next but really because somehow the government might actually get off its ass and do something about the absurd ready availability of deadly weapons, and nobody wants to be last to the buffet table. The government, in turn, rarely does anything because it’s too afraid of the ability of the NRA to swing elections, nor does it want to be labelled anti-business by regulating, sanctioning or otherwise restricting gun manufacturers. And so the cycle of fear creaks on, until it reaches its bloated tentacles into the one place in the world that should be utterly free of fear – a public school.

The children of Sandy Hook Elementary were not feeling any fear that morning. They were probably excited about Christmas, writing letters to Santa and helping to decorate the classroom with styrofoam snowmen, popcorn garlands and candy canes and reindeer cut from colored construction paper. They could never have fathomed in their innocent young minds that someone was coming to take everything away in a hailstorm of bullets. Why would they? They hadn’t yet had the chance to be properly programmed by the great slouching mass of fear that oozes from society’s pores unchecked by reason and common sense. Our collective inability to recognize the difference between vigilance and paranoia and to silence those who would exploit our fear for financial gain. I have to laugh, sadly, when I hear politicians talking about the necessity of beefing up arms and equipment stockpiles to protect our shores from unseen external threats. Yet what indeed is all this meant to protect? In a world where everyone has guns, how can anyone ever feel safe? Indeed, our very failure to check the expansion of the world’s supply of firepower, while enriching those who make the tools of murder, has only aggravated the foreboding hanging perpetually over every human head; like the famous doomsday clock inching ever closer to midnight, we seem to be willing accomplices in our own destruction, ensuring that we remain drugged with constant fear of our neighbour and ever readier to set off the fuse at the slightest provocation.

The suggestion purported by some that every school should post armed guards would be laughable were it not so tragic. They forget the subliminal lesson the presence of a scary uniformed guy packing an obvious .45 engraves upon the impressionable child’s mind – that the world is a frightening place to be regarded with suspicion and mistrust. The millions of kids who came home from school safely that terrible day would be full of questions, with parents and guardians struggling desperately for reassuring answers. It is simply not enough to reach for the usual prayers, platitudes and bromides and change the channel until the next incident occurs. We often speak about the kind of world we are leaving our children, whether it will be a better, more prosperous life, or something out of the most nightmarish dystopian fiction. What is needed to achieve the former – beyond the immediate fixes of an increased focus on mental health care and sensible, effective gun restrictions – is a fundamental re-examination of the wisdom of the agenda of fear: the invisible conspiracy convincing the world that we need to jump at our own shadows, not because shadows are scary, but so we’ll be the first in line to purchase deluxe-grade shadow repellent. We are hooked on fear like the proverbial junkie chasing his next fix. And in one area, I find myself in agreement with some of the Second Amendment advocates, in that I don’t think gun control is the panacea, although it will certainly help start the journey. When we learn to shun the fearmongers, when we evolve away from this notion that we need an arsenal to protect ourselves from the boogeyman lurking in the alleyway, when we celebrate the good instead of constantly giving airtime to the bad, when we reject the concept that safety only comes through deterrence, and when we recognize that the right of children to attend school free of fear should always trump somebody else’s freedom to blow a deer’s brains out, and resolve to do whatever it takes to make that happen, then we will be able to finally crawl out from the iron grip of fear, and into a better future. We owe it to those dear lost children who won’t be celebrating Christmas this year. The alternative – the slow, doomed march of the status quo – is simply too frightening to contemplate.

In any event, now you know what this anonymous idiot with a keyboard thinks. And my hope is that you and your family have a joyful, celebratory holiday season utterly free of fear and loathing. See you in the next one, and let’s get on with things, shall we?

UPDATE: The NRA has officially responded and predictably, they’ve blamed everything but guns and suggested the answer is more guns in schools. Armed guards in every school, which won’t necessarily have to be police but volunteers (because armed guards are wonderful but amateur armed guards would be even better!) And the taxpayer would of course be the one to pick up the tab for the huge bill the weapons manufacturers would then get to send to the government. NRA Vice President/Gun Pimp Wayne LaPierre says that “the only thing that can stop bad guys with guns is good guys with guns.” And while he was speaking, someone shot and killed four people in Pennsylvania, wounding two state troopers in the process, who, presumably, were armed.

Your move, America.

Skyfall Countdown Day 4: The World is Not Enough

November 6, 2012November 7, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

SPOILER ALERT: You might not want to read this review unless you’ve seen The Dark Knight Rises. The reasons why will become apparent soon enough.

Tomorrow Never Dies had been the usual James Bond box office success, which was of particular note on this occasion given that it opened on the exact same weekend in 1997 as Titanic. But it seemed clear to all involved that there was something lacking amidst the bluster and explosions. Pierce Brosnan himself asked for material to challenge him as an actor rather than continue to be a glorified stunt performer. The focus for the next movie then would be more on character, and to that end, producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, now steering the series together after the passing of her father Albert, enlisted the services of director Michael Apted, who had made the acclaimed “Up Series” of documentaries following up on a group of British schoolchildren every seven years of their lives, and had directed Sissy Spacek to her Best Actress Oscar in Coal Miner’s Daughter. The screenplay would return to the vein of Goldeneye, with its shifting alliances and a story set amidst the wreckage of the Cold War. In a first for the Bond series, the primary villain would be a woman. Recognizing also that Judi Dench was too strong a performer to be confined to the customary briefing scene at the beinning of the movie, M would take a much greater role in the plot, with Bond forced to grapple with the consequences of her past mistakes (an element that seems to be replicated in Skyfall, but I guess we’ll see at the end of the week). The World is Not Enough would take its title from the motto of the Bond family, first revealed in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: “Orbis non sufficit.”

After Bond becomes an unwitting accomplice in the murder of British oil tycoon Sir Robert King, he is assigned by M to protect King’s daughter Elektra (Sophie Marceau) from the terrorist Renard (Robert Carlyle) who once held her for ransom and has seemingly returned for vengeance. Bond is immediately smitten with the beautiful and damaged Elektra, who intends to continue her father’s work of building a much-needed oil pipeline across treacherous old Soviet territory, in direct competition with three Russian pipelines also under construction to the north. Following a night in Elektra’s bed, Bond pursues a lead to Kazakhstan where he discovers Renard is attempting to steal weapons-grade plutonium from Soviet nuclear warheads that are being decommissioned under the supervision of Dr. Christmas Jones (Denise Richards). Renard, a remorseless, relentless man who is unable to feel pain because of an assassin’s bullet working its way through his brain (an assassin sent by M herself, no less) seems to have an insider in Elektra’s organization, and is successful in escaping with the nuclear material. Bond believes that insider is Elektra herself, who he suggests is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and helping Renard out of twisted devotion to her former kidnapper. But after Elektra’s pipeline is attacked, and M is taken prisoner, it turns out that things are the other way around – Renard fell in love with Elektra and has been her pawn the entire time; she has engineered her father’s murder to seize control of his company for herself. With time running out, Bond must rely on the help of his old frenemy Valentin Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane) to rescue M and stop Renard from using his stolen plutonium in a suicide attack aboard a nuclear sub that will destroy Istanbul and contaminate the Bosphorus with radiation, rendering the competing Russian pipelines useless and making Elektra’s the sole vehicle for delivering oil to the West.

I observed in my review of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service that it was one of Christopher Nolan’s favourite movies, and whether intentionally or not, the plot of The Dark Knight Rises mirrors what happens in The World is Not Enough as well. Bane, like Renard, is a terrorist villain who appears to be the primary antagonist, only for it to be revealed that he is a mere accomplice, driven by love to carry out a suicidal nuclear attack for the true mastermind who appears at first to be the hero’s romantic partner, Miranda/Talia al Ghul and Elektra, respectively. Both men are physically stronger than average, because of an unusual tolerance to pain (Renard cannot feel any, while Bane constantly inhales an anaesthetic gas to numb his sensitivity to it.) Where the films differ is in their treatment of the terrorist. Renard, with the makeup for his bullet wound giving him a perpetually sad-eyed look, is a villain whom you almost feel sorry for – he nears the verge of tears when confronted with his inability to provide Elektra the kind of physical pleasure she has received from Bond. He loves Elektra desperately, yet cannot be the man she wants, and so, with all he has left to offer – his life – he tries to give her the world. Carlyle is excellent and understated, conveying obsession, cruelty and a resigned acceptance of his own fate; a truly complex and intriguing bad guy. Marceau is elegant as a wounded young woman attempting to round out her life with empty pleasures, although when she unveils her true nature she veers a tad hammy. Still, equal opportunity villainy (as director Michael Apted put it) gives Brosnan the chance for a brutal and singular Bond moment when he shoots her dead.

As I mentioned earlier, Judi Dench’s role has been greatly expanded this time and we learn some history about the nameless woman who runs MI6, as she begins to show the motherly side of M that would fully manifest during Daniel Craig’s tenure. She also has a chance for an action beat of her own when performing some MacGyver-like modifications to a nuclear locator card while in captivity to allow Bond to find her. It’s also wonderful to see Robbie Coltrane back as the roguish Zukovsky, who after having his own loyalties tested becomes a full-blown if short-lived ally to 007. And the legendary John Cleese is on hand as Q’s assistant R with some witty one-liners and his talent for pratfalls. But then there is poor Denise Richards. More than enough has been written about her performance in this movie to satisfy the snarkiest Internet commenter. This seems to have been another case where she was shoved in at the behest of a studio uncomfortable with too many European names in the cast, but in Richards’ defense, I doubt Meryl Streep would have been able to do very much with the part, scripted almost as an afterthought with unsayable lines about tritium and radiation levels. Richards looks great though, which is really the only reason she’s there. Scratch that – she’s there because otherwise, with Elektra taking a bullet through her chest, Bond finishes the movie alone, and the filmmakers weren’t brave enough to try that departure from formula quite yet (especially when there are bad puns to be made from Jones’ first name).

Where The World is Not Enough is strongest, ironically, is when it does break away from the routine and venture into new territory. Bond has an emotional journey this time, his defenses peeled back as he tries to achieve justice for Sir Robert King’s death, clean up M’s old mess and grapple with his own betrayal by a young woman he was coming to care for deeply. Apart from the opening leap from an office window and the thrilling boat chase down the Thames, the rest of the rather low-key action (including a ski chase, a confrontation with razor blade-wielding helicopters and a disappointingly unengaging climax set aboard a submarine tilted on its end) suffers from being juxtaposed against character development scenes that are much more dramatically interesting – you find yourself waiting for the shooting to stop and the music to dial back so the movie can get back to its (mostly) terrific roster of actors exchanging nuanced dialogue. That’s where the real movie lies. The World is Not Enough is built on secrets and emotional revelations, not a technical mystery to be unravelled one explosion at a time. Despite critical indifference, centered largely on Denise Richards’ acting and the scaled-back nature of the story, I have a feeling that it’s one that Ian Fleming himself would have appreciated.

On a sadder note, this would be the final film for Desmond Llewelyn as Q, whose farewell as he sinks slowly out of frame after imparting some fatherly advice to 007 is deeply touching. Llewelyn, who joked that he would continue appearing in Bond movies “so long as the producers want me and the Almighty doesn’t,” passed away shortly after the film’s release in a car accident while returning from a signing event. While Llewelyn, somewhat regrettably, never earned very much from his long-running role as the irascible quartermaster, he was beloved by fans and the Eon crew alike and worked tirelessly to promote each new movie as it came out. I had the fortune of seeing him in person in Los Angeles in 1997 when he and Pierce Brosnan appeared on The Tonight Show to hype up Tomorrow Never Dies, although we didn’t get the chance to meet. The applause when he walked out onstage was louder than that which greeted anyone else that night. The spirit of dear old Desmond Llewelyn, I suspect, was indeed returned to his Almighty “in pristine condition.”

Tomorrow: Leave Die Another Day alone!!!

Occupy Gotham City?

August 17, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 1 Comment

bane — Bane strikes at the heart of the one percent.

The undisputed kings of the 2012 summer box office have both been comic book movies: The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. While The Avengers is essentially a crowd-pleasing greatest hits package that you either dig or don’t (I dig, for the record), the final entry in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is a more complex tale probing the human condition behind the capes and cowls of its characters, and as such, opens itself to a wider degree of interpretation. One of the most interesting of the responses to the film is in how certain critics have seen it as condemning the Occupy Wall Street movement and praising the nobility of the 1%. For his part, Nolan has denied that the film has a political slant. I’ve seen the movie twice now, and while the tropes associated with Occupy are certainly present, I can’t get behind the notion that the movie is Ayn Rand redux. Great art reflects our times, and it’s natural for current history to bleed through the edges of the screen. But reducing the themes of The Dark Knight Rises to a simple political didactic for easy cable news consumption is to perform a disservice to the deeper moral questions at play here. Nolan’s Batman movies have always operated on a more primal level, exploring the nature of fear, chaos, and the case of the final chapter, consequences, and our ability – or our duty – to accept our responsibility for them, regardless of our means.

(Author’s note: MAJOR SPOILERS ahead. Please don’t read this unless you’ve seen the movie; I’ll hold nothing back.)

Eight years have passed since the Joker’s reign of anarchy led to the death of Harvey Dent, Batman taking the fall for Dent’s crimes and the caped crusader’s disappearance from Gotham City. In the aftermath, a draconian “Dent Act” has allowed police to rid the streets of organized crime once and for all. But the illusion of peace is built on a lie, and the two heroes who have allowed it to fester are being torn apart by their demons. One, Commissioner Jim Gordon, hides in plain sight, while the other, Bruce Wayne, has become a crippled recluse. Both know, instinctively, that the center cannot hold; Gordon prepares to read a speech denouncing Dent and admitting his role in the cover-up but chooses at the last second to hold back, while Wayne is restless in his isolation, like Sherlock Holmes without purpose in the absence of a case. And then, from beneath the veneer of deception and fabricated security, and literally beneath the earth, evil begins to rise, as unstoppable mercenary Bane sets his dark plan for Gotham City into motion. Gordon is wounded and Bruce Wayne is compelled to suit up. But they’ve waited too long, allowed their deception to endure long past its limit. They have forgotten that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Bane uses the time to outmanoeuvre the two, seizing control of Wayne’s secret armory, trapping Gotham’s entire police force underground and finally, breaking the ill-prepared and overconfident Batman.

Shades of Occupy first percolate through the narrative as Bane lays siege to Gotham, speechifying about punishing the corrupt and sending his minions to drag the wealthy and powerful from their mansions and haul them in front of a kangaroo court, in the name of “the people” of Gotham. But despite the illusion of his rhetoric he is hardly a populist hero or a masked MLK. Indeed, a man with a noble message doesn’t need the threat of nuclear annihilation to ensure that it’s heard – Bane’s goal is the total destruction of Gotham City, first envisioned by Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins. After confining Wayne to the same prison to which he was condemned as a younger man, Bane admits that the greatest despair requires hope, and like the most accomplished sadists, he will provide the people with Gotham with hope so that they suffer more. He wants them all to hurt. He intends, like the American army marching into Baghdad, to present himself as a liberator, in fact using that exact word, while espousing himself as a sort of “Occupier,” because he knows this is a sensitive button that can be pushed. Clearly Gotham is a place of great inequality, despite the false security brought on by the Dent Act, as noted when Selina Kyle tells Bruce earlier in the film over shots of the wealthy eating lobster and drinking champagne that “there’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” But Bane has no allegiance to the Occupy philosophy and is most certainly not fighting for the people, he’s using them – as cynically as the billionaires, politicians and professional lobbyists who seized control of the Tea Party and convinced common people to protest and vote against their own best interest. The theatricality and deception of a “people’s revolution” in Gotham is a mere smokescreen, as Selina comes to understand when the storm she predicted destroys everything it touches – not just the rich. For its part, the Occupy movement has never claimed to want to tear the wealthy down, nor does it begrudge the acquisition of wealth; it simply believes in fairness, the enforcement of the law, and not rigging the game toward the singular interest of the haves. Give everyone an equal chance to achieve a decent life, Occupy says, don’t purposely screw over those of us who’ve had a few bumps along the way to make it easier for the ones who already have it pretty good. Bane’s attitude of killing them all and pillaging their treasures would hardly be welcome in the true Occupy movement – regardless of what the doofuses on Fox and Friends tell you.

To the second point raised by the critics, this movie purported to glorify the rich and the status quo of capitalism presents the rich largely as remorseless manipulators. Bane is funded by billionaire construction entrepreneur John Daggett, who lets a terrorist wreak a trail of murder through Gotham City so he can seize control of the struggling Wayne Enterprises. Daggett is not satisfied with his considerable wealth – like the Koch Brothers, he merely uses it to acquire more. He cannot see his own complicity in what is to come, even at the very end, accusing Bane of being “pure evil” just before he has his neck snapped, when it was he who chose to release the genie from the bottle. And the most accomplished and cruellest manipulator in the film turns out to be billionaire Miranda Tate, who wears the veil of a philanthropist trying to save the world, but is in fact Talia al Ghul, daughter of Ra’s, as committed to destroying Gotham as her late father. She convinces Bruce to install her as chair of Wayne Enterprises’ board of directors and give her access to his dormant clean energy project, with the intent of using her other pawn – Bane, himself motivated by the easiest manipulation of all, his love for her – to bring her father’s wishes to fruition. She does not care that there are innocent people in Gotham City; she scoffs at the mere mention of the word. Her desire for retribution trumps everything – ideology, loyalty, even her own life. Money for her is but a means to a horrible end.

Bruce Wayne, however, has never been one to let himself be defined by his wealth; it gives him no pleasure. His flaunting of it in previous films has been a form of misdirection, convincing people that he is the worst of the stereotypes of careless moneybags; the last person who would ever want to become Batman. However, when his wealth is taken away from him through a fraudulent stock transaction, he seems totally unconcerned about being broke. He does not miss it, and does not care about regaining it. He has long ago realized what Daggett never did – that more zeroes on the balance sheet don’t take the pain away. That pain is a point of bonding between himself and the young cop John Blake, a man who has grown up poor and in and out of foster care, but has, like Bruce, channelled his anger into a sense of justice (and unlike Bane, who grew up in the worst cesspool on earth and consequently turned against humanity). The film suggests that nobility, then, has nothing to do with wealth, and even the smallest acts of good are worth more, to invoke a cliché, than their weight in gold. Indeed, when Bruce is reduced to his lowest, broken and lying immobile at the bottom of a prison halfway across the world, he finds the strength to rebuild himself from nothing, to escape and return to fight for his city. These are qualities that cannot be bestowed; those who never confront desperation, loneliness and fear can never rise above them. Those who are insulated by fortune never achieve their greatest potential. Throughout the series, the moments that have shaped Bruce Wayne’s character for the better have come when he is separated from the life of luxury that is his birthright. As Carmine Falcone tells him in Batman Begins, “You’ve never tasted desperate.” Bruce Wayne may be a one-percenter, but he understands what it is like to have nothing – his empathy for the weak and powerless is part of what drives him to right Gotham City’s wrongs. I would find it very difficult to believe that David and Charles Koch have ever had to choose between rent and food, that they have ever sat up nights wondering how they’re going to pay their heating bill, that they would deign to come within one hundred feet of a homeless man – which is why they are relentless in their funding of politicians who share their disdain for social equality and the common good. They do not believe there are any wrongs out there, and if there are, it’s always somebody else’s fault for not trying hard enough.

The counter-argument goes, “see, Bruce Wayne pulls himself up by his bootstraps and works hard to defeat the bad guys – how is that not the attitude of the one percent?” True, Bruce does have to rebuild himself from nothing, but what’s most important about his recovery is that he does not do it alone. He has significant assistance along the way, from two of his fellow inmates in the prison, to Blake, Commissioner Gordon, Selina Kyle, Lucius Fox and the entire Gotham City police force. The final act of The Dark Knight Rises is not so much the rise of a single man but of an entire city fighting for its liberation – in a sense, they are all Batman. Perhaps the final act of heroism does belong solely to the caped crusader, but he does not get to that point without the help of his allies. It is something of a paean to the nature of heroism when Bruce explains that Batman can be anyone – that we do not have to look to a single person to find the courage within ourselves as a society to make the kind of world we want. The monument of Batman that is unveiled at the film’s finale is less a tribute to an individual than it is to a spirit, reflecting a time when the people rose up to take back their city from the thugs attempting to destroy it. It is not a resumption of the status quo – it is an evolution.

Ultimately, the chief reason why The Dark Knight Rises can’t be pegged as allying itself to either the Occupy movement or the one percent is because that is too easy a question to answer – it’s easy to say that the rich are all evil and that there would be a tremendous satisfaction in watching every single one of them thrown out into street. Our world is not that simple, nor is the moral universe of the Nolan Batman trilogy. Nolan’s aim after the cartoonish wreck of the previous four Batman movies was to treat the character with a realistic approach, one that recognized the frequent real-world ambiguity of the nature of good and evil. There are villains, but they are not simply forces to be destroyed – they upset the moral platform of both the heroes and the audience, and challenge us to re-examine what we think about the state of our world. The message of The Dark Knight Rises, if there is one, is that we should not put off these questions, that we cannot sleepwalk through our lives and expect that what we sweep beneath the carpet in the interest of expediency, or a temporary peace, will not someday come back to wreak havoc upon us. But it also assures us that no matter how deep we sink, we can come back. We have it within us. We can rise.

Selling out circa summer 2012

August 16, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 2 Comments

thewhosellout — Like many things in music, The Who did it best.

What is the most annoying trend in popular music? With YouTube and Auto-Tune making celebrities out of individuals who should never have come anywhere near a microphone, and genuinely talented singers continuing to struggle for any semblance of a break that doesn’t require an uncle in a senior management position with a record company, how could we possibly distil popular music’s faults down to the most egregious offender? It’s ultimately a matter of opinion, but if I had to pick a single irritant that most damages my appreciation for today’s sound, it’s musicians recording multiple versions of their songs for different markets. Nothing is more insulting to listeners than this shameless pandering to commercial interests. Every time you hear one of these bowdlerized abominations oozing through your speakers, you can feel the greasy fingerprints of the Armani-suited marketing committee as they scrape at your eardrums. Worse though are singers and bands bringing material to the studio they know they’ll have to re-record to ensure maximum market penetration (an apt metaphor if there ever was one). It speaks of greed, cynicism, contempt for the fans and a fundamental lack of anything resembling artistic integrity. And the worst part is, it’s totally unnecessary.

One of the big hits of the summer is Maroon 5’s “Payphone.” Maroon 5 was every mother’s favourite band for their teenage daughters: catchy and inoffensive with an easy-on-the-eyes lead singer. They faded away somewhat after their initial explosion onto the scene but are experiencing a resurgent popularity with Adam Levine’s judging NBC’s The Voice and their infectious smash “Moves Like Jagger.” But “Payphone” is an embarrassment. It’s whiny emo nonsense that rings completely false – the complaints of a fifteen-year-old upset that his crush doesn’t love him anymore, with no more depth than a chewing gum wrapper. Most irritating about the song, though, are the final two lines of the chorus: “All those fairytales are full of shit, one more fucking love song I’ll be sick.” What’s that, you say? I must be making this up, you haven’t heard that? Of course not – the radio version, the one you’ve heard, goes “All those fairytales are full of it, one more stupid love song I’ll be sick.” And it isn’t Godzilla-esque bad dubbing either – Maroon 5 deliberately recorded two different versions of this line. The reason? They knew the line as originally written wouldn’t be played on adult contemporary radio, and that’s a huge audience to forfeit for the sake of some naughty words. But that’s the thing – why did those words need to be in there in the first place? The song isn’t great, but at least the message gets across without the potty mouth. And don’t tell me it’s to express the depth of the singer’s anger; Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” is a much more honest scream of contempt at the woman who’s left him and contains absolutely no profanity (depending on your opinion of the weight of the word “screwed.”) “Payphone” is juvenile, a kid giggling at the dirty picture he drew on his school desk, and Adam Levine et al. should know better. And I say this as someone who admired Levine for telling off Fox News on Twitter after they used a Maroon 5 song in one of their promos. However, swearing in their songs is just making the case for the likes of L. Brent Bozell and whatever suspiciously well-funded “Parents” group wants to fundraise for the evangelical right on the backs of those evil Hollywood liberals corrupting your children again, and the willingness to record and release a sanitized version for mainstream radio play is evidence of the emptiness of their commitment to branding themselves as rebels, badasses or whatever the point of dropping the F-bomb in the original version was.

“Payphone” contains another example of what pop songs do to try and broaden their customer base: include a guest rapper in the middle eight. A few of the singles from Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream contain rap: “California Gurls” features Snoop Dogg and “E.T.” features Kanye West. Not that you’d know it if you’ve only heard these on the radio – they play the version where, like with profanity, the rap section has been neatly sutured out for popular consumption, in the studio long before your local DJ gets his hands on it. I have nothing against rap or the blending of genres (Aerosmith and Run-DMC’s “Walk This Way” collaboration continues to be awesome twenty-five years on), but these aren’t it. These are stitch jobs. In all likelihood the rapper and the main performer aren’t even in the studio at the same time – the result is a Frankenstein’s monster of a track where disjointed parts are cobbled together for commercial appeal rather than coherent performance. The fact that usually the rap can be lifted out without any significant effect (or even notice – it was months after I first heard “E.T.” that I discovered Kanye was on the original version) speaks to the argument that forcing it in to bubblegum pop is misguided, cynical marketing at its most insidious – a way to ensure that even though we’ve got the white kids, let’s make sure there’s something for the black kids too. More to the point – if the artists know they’re going to have to cut the rap for full radio exposure, why include it in the first place? The other reason you know this whole phenomenon is marketing B.S. is that it’s never done the other way; sorry for those of you eager for that Jay-Z featuring One Direction number. Here’s a radical thought – why not just write a better song that can appeal across color lines without pandering to them?

Since there is so much cross-pollination and cross-promotion of entertainment products these days, why not take pop music philosophy and apply it to novels? (Oh wait, they’re already doing that – witness Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.) But how ridiculous would it be if, for example, George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones came in both regular and sanitized versions, the latter where anything potentially offensive to Aunt Ethel was eliminated, so that Cersei and Jaime Lannister are just good friends, Bran fell out the window on his own and Eddard Stark died offstage due to a nasty throat infection? Or if somewhere about two thirds of the way in we had a guest chapter authored by Stephenie Meyer where Sansa mopes over the sparkly Tyrion, because we have to make sure to get the youth vampire audience in as well. Better yet, let’s do this in movies. Let’s have the second act of The Dark Knight Rises directed by Brett Ratner featuring Chris Tucker as a wise-cracking Gotham City police officer and Jackie Chan as his kung fu master partner taking on Bane (“When you touch my goddamn radio, y’all have my permission to die!”) Does that sound like anything we’d want to read or see? Then why do we let musicians get away with it? Chopped up, bastardized and sewn together alternate versions of songs ultimately please no one and only embarrass the artist.

In the end, quality is quality, and it begins from the ground and proceeds organically – piling stuff on top after the fact, or half-assing out a different version, is a sign of a last-minute lack of confidence fueled by focus groups and marketing gurus who need to look up from their spreadsheets. Like books and movies, there should be one song, and one song only. Putting out multiple versions for different demographic markets only reinforces the concept of music as product – the last thing I suspect anyone who fancies themselves an artist wants to admit.

Following the money, missing the point

August 2, 2012August 2, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 2 Comments

It’s with equal degrees of bemusement and resignation that I read articles speculating on how the real-life breakup of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart may affect the box-office performance of Breaking Dawn, Part II. Nor is it any stretch of the imagination to suspect that the morning following the Aurora massacre an emergency meeting was called in a studio boardroom somewhere to discuss how that tragedy would impact the ticket sales for The Dark Knight Rises. The biggest questions in the presidential election revolve around money – how much of it Mitt Romney may or may not have paid in taxes, how much his campaign is raking in from billionaire Super PAC donors, whether or not Barack Obama can become the first incumbent president to be outspent and still secure re-election. Austerity, whether advisable or not, and deficit reduction dominate the agenda of every government on the planet. The rich are vilified in one circle for acting like feudal overlords, and praised in another as job creators. Money is the filter through which we examine everything – we have become a species of accountants obsessed with numbers and the bottom line. And yet we’re more miserable than we’ve ever been: impatient, demanding, and more prone to outbursts of rage for the most insignificant reasons. Something is clearly askew. Is it perhaps time to undertake the first step in recovery and admit that we have a problem – that obsessing over money isn’t getting us anywhere?

I’m not naïve enough to suggest that the acquisition of wealth is ever going to fade away as a motivating factor in human behaviour; it’s been that way ever since the first Australopithecus looked out with longing at the bigger, cosier cave his neighbour across the way was occupying. But that motivation is rooted in the biggest lie of all – that having more means being happier. Marketers and advertisers understand this, which is why every commercial you’ve ever seen is designed to make you feel inadequate and envious, and to suggest, in somewhat the same manner as a drug dealer would, that you just need a hit of whatever is being sold – cars, shoes, cologne or designer jeans – to ease the pain of your unendingly terrible existence. We all know better, and yet we buy in – pun most depressingly intended – to the lie, sacrificing what we’ve earned for temporary relief, at least until the next ad comes on and we begin to think ourselves lacking in some other area. It does not have to be this way, and yet we have been conditioned in the same manner to define success in dollars alone – not influence or reach or the fundamental amelioration of our collective humanity. Somewhere along the way, the virtue of working hard as its own reward transformed into only a means to the end of securing one’s fortune at the expense of the well-being of our peers. Men of business the world over with less moral integrity than the average cockroach are revered as leaders and held up as ideals to emulate because they have managed to accumulate piles and piles of cash, with little, if any, consideration given to the lives that have been destroyed by their greed. We are forced to listen to their obscene rants and give credence to their perverted worldviews because we have decided that they deserve our attention based on the size of their bank accounts. Opinions that would otherwise be dismissed the ravings of lunacy shape policy for billions of people, because money defines the parameters of the conversation. To our everlasting shame, we have allowed it to – in whom we have voted for and whom we have chosen to place upon gilded pedestals to admire.

Enough is enough.

Some would argue that there is a moral imperative within each soul born upon this planet to leave it in a better state than which they found it. This is an aim hardly served by pillaging and plundering the earth’s treasures for the benefit of a select few. What is needed is a reorienting of our values and a new form of currency, one that cannot be tied to the whims of banks: a currency of ideas, in which the ideas are evaluated on their substance and not on how much cash is flowing behind them. Do I think this is ever going to happen? Well, probably not in my lifetime. The forces of money are too deeply entrenched within the corridors of power. But we can get the process started – by refusing to grant those forces our slavish attention, and by shedding the ridiculous belief that someone is better than we are because they are wealthier. By not caring anymore how much so-and-so gets paid for his latest album or her starring debut. By emphasizing quality over quantity, and evaluating character completely independently of the size of a person’s wallet. By making “successful businessman” roughly the same estimation of a man’s worth as “frequent water drinker.” Not going so far as vilifying financial success outright, but making it the very least important of the measures of a human being. Saying “oh, you’re a billionaire casino entrepreneur? How nice for you – my kid just scored three goals at his soccer game last Saturday.”

We cannot achieve true fairness in this world until we stop worshipping those things that make the world unfair. What’s most encouraging is that we still have the choice to do that. We just have to make it.

Rise of The Dark Knight

May 2, 2012May 2, 2012 ~ Graham Milne ~ 3 Comments

After groaning through a prehistoric glacier’s worth of ice puns in 1997’s Batman & Robin, I was done with the Caped Crusader. This was back in an era when I could usually find something positive to say about any movie I went to see, and my comment upon completing a slow funereal march out of the theater along with dozens of other disappointed audience members was, “That was $100 million that could have gone to feed starving children.” Batman & Robin was a two-hour sensory middle finger, stitched together to become less than the sum of its parts like some ungodly Frankenstein’s monster by accountants and focus groups. The old Adam West-Burt Ward TV show had been an after school ritual for me for many years, but the kitsch that worked so well in 22-minute installments in the late 60’s was excruciating when blown up for the multiplexes. What was fun and oddly sincere in one medium became insulting in another.

Since ’97, the theaters had been flooded with one superhero movie after another, some decent but most not, as studios plumbed their back catalogue to find some obscure character in a mask whom they could dress a star as and plug into basically the same script with a hip-hop soundtrack and thus secure a pre-sold blockbuster. Drubbed to death just as thoroughly around the same time was the concept of the prequel. “We’re going back to show you how it all happened.” It wasn’t enough to let a character exist with some mystery about their backstory; now it all had to be spelled out with each personality quirk given a deep, long-simmering Freudian rationale. (We can all admit that we thought Darth Vader was much cooler before we heard his boyhood self squeal “Yippee!” in The Phantom Menace.) So when I heard there was a new Batman movie coming out and that it was a prequel, my excitement level was roughly akin to what it would be if someone told me today’s special in our work cafeteria was a bowl of hot concrete.

The trailers for Batman Begins didn’t spur much enthusiasm either. Liam Neeson doing his Jedi mentor routine again. Bruce Wayne angst-ridden about his parents, even though we’d seen him coping with that in movies one through four. The only thing that seemed promising was the casting – heavyweights like Neeson, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman, each of whom has the freedom to pick and choose and certainly wasn’t going to sign on for the same old same old. After Jack Nicholson stole the first Batman, successive films had tried to compete by doubling the number villains and cramming whatever A-lister was available into the roles, regardless of whether or not the story was served by it. Screenwriter William Goldman, when discussing working with Batman Forever‘s cowl-wearer Val Kilmer, commented on this pattern by observing that “Batman is and always has been a horrible part,” and that it existed solely for the more over-the-top villain roles to play off. The casting of Christian Bale in the lead this time, not an unknown but not exactly a seat-packing screen presence either, seemed to suggest that there were slim pickings in the ranks of volunteers to succeed Kilmer, George Clooney and Michael Keaton. The trailer scenes showed a very low-key approach to the storytelling as well, almost pleading “um, excuse me, if you don’t mind, that is, if you’re not busy, we kind of have a sort of new Batman movie for you.” The director, Christopher Nolan, had made the fascinating low-budget Memento, and the plodding higher-budget Insomnia. Truthfully, it all added up to a spectacular non-event.

Imagine one’s surprise when Batman Begins turned out to be merely spectacular.

The reasons why? Well, Christopher Nolan made one crucial decision in crafting his film. Aside from the usual reasons offered – treating the material seriously, dialing down the camp – he defied both expectation and tradition and deliberately made Batman/Bruce Wayne the most interesting character in the movie. Admittedly borrowing a lesson from the casting of the first Superman, where Oscar-winners and other screen legends surrounded the unknown-at-the-time Christopher Reeve, Nolan uses his stars to reflect their light onto the lead. The movie remains Batman’s story through and through; while there are villains, they are not given equal billing, nor is any significant screen time wasted on the complexity of their origins (the burden of all the Spider-Man movies). Like the best villains, they exist mainly as challenges for the hero to overcome – impediments to his growth as a human being. Even in The Dark Knight, the Joker comes out of nowhere and simply is, like a force of nature – he lies repeatedly about how he got his signature scars, in effect taking the piss out of the tired “villain’s motivation” trope. And there is a mystery to be solved; an actual plot to unravel piece by piece, instead of the bad guys running around trying to kill Batman for two hours. It keeps moving forward in so compelling a fashion that you forget you’re actually watching a character study, that happens to have some cool fight scenes in it.

In addition, Nolan created a complexity to Bruce Wayne heretofore unexplored on screen. He has three personas: Batman; the private, troubled Bruce Wayne; and the flamboyant, spoiled rich 1%-er Bruce Wayne – a new dimension to the man, unseen in his Keaton/Kilmer/Clooney iterations, where Wayne seemed to be just a decent guy who happened to be extraordinarily rich. Bale’s public Bruce is a trust fund brat, careless with his millions, the last guy you would ever expect to want to be Batman, let alone actually do it – which makes it even more logical that he would choose to act this way. Bale’s work is so good in the part that he’s actually more interesting as Wayne than he is in the Batsuit – which is just as well, because it’s over an hour into the movie before he finally puts it on. The Dark Knight continues this dichotomy: Bruce Wayne continues to act like a colossal entitled douchebag, deflecting all suspicion that he could possibly be the noble, driven soul determined to save Gotham City from itself. In Nolan’s Batman films, the true battles are not “Biff!” “Zap!” “KaPow!” but the ones going on inside these incredibly damaged people who are essentially representatives of the conflicts and contradictions inherent in all human beings. Batman isn’t just a token good guy – he’s us. He’s what we like to think we’d do, given the means, but more importantly, the will. And like us, he is a man who must overcome significant flaws and weaknesses to push himself beyond that limit.

The forthcoming conclusion to Nolan’s trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, takes place nine years after Batman went on the lam, blamed for the murders of Harvey Dent and several police officers. It isn’t much of a spoiler to suggest that Bruce Wayne’s challenge in this movie may be to question whether he can truly leave the mantle of Batman behind, if the path of a hero is ultimately futile in that it has no end, no final triumph, way to know for certain whether the entire journey has been worth it. With apologies to William Goldman, Batman is no longer a horrible part. Truthfully, it never was – he just happened to end up in some horrible movies. Handled properly, he is an ideal vehicle for an exploration into the concepts of heroism, sacrifice and morality – the stuff of what the best stories are made. So go on and rise, Batman – we’re going to miss you when the last of the credits roll.