Tag Archives: Noah

To the Bat Tunes, Robin!

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This first appeared on Madeloud.
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The old sixties Batman TV show with Adam West and Burt Ward is best known for the Batmobile, Bat Shark Repellent, and Bat Overacting. However, the show also featured a number of high profile musical guest stars. Here then, are some of the greatest Bat-cats ever to swing through stately Wayne Manor and environs.

Liberace
“The Devil’s Fingers/The Dead Ringers”
Episodes 49 and 50
October 19 & 20, 1966

Liberace was too perfect a choice to be contained in a single Batman villain guest spot, so he did two at once, portraying both piano maestro Chandell and Chandell’s evil twin brother Harry. The plot starts off strong as Chandell declares, “Listen for a moment; I’ll toy idly with the keys, and set the mood.” He then launches into a highland air, instantly summoning a trio of criminal Scottish lassies toting inhumanly piercing bagpipes. From there the plot only get sillier, featuring attempted murder by piano-roll puncher, the lassies transformed into Burmese dancing girls, and Bruce Wayne deducing the whole evil scheme when he realizes that Chandell made a mistake in a C-minor chord (“Holy impossibility, Batman!” as Dick Grayson says.) Oh, and we get to watch that ladies’ man Chandell seduce Aunt Harriet. And he utters the immortal line “I’ll cast off my criminal skin like a molting butterfly!”

While it’s fun to watch Liberace play himself as Chandell; watching him adopt a tough-guy, cigar-chomping persona as Harry is brain-meltingly preposterous, and somehow even gayer than gay — it’s like he’s wearing butch drag. Not to be outdone in flamboyance, Bruce Wayne spends a certain amount of the episode literally camping, and then he and Dick fake their deaths by incinerating themselves in a flaming closet.

Chad and Jeremy
“The Cat’s Meow/The Bat’s Kow Tow”
Episodes 63 and 64
December 14 & 15, 1966

Gentle moderately popular sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy appear here as insanely popular, dangerously wild sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy. However, in a daring plot twist, the dangerously wild sixties British folk duo Chad & Jeremy reveal to Bruce Wayne’s Aunt Harriet that they are in fact gentle and civilized, sipping tea and declaring, “Really we hope to go back to school as soon as we can to complete our education… Just think of it: every record our fans buy brings me closer to becoming a brain surgeon!”

Alas, their fans are not so cultured, and they screech, holler, and throw up their hands when their idol’s voices are purloined by Catwoman (an incandescently yummy Julie Newmar.) Catwoman’s dastardly plan is to hold the voices for ransom, demanding twenty-two million dollars from Britain since “Chad and Jeremy pay so much income tax to their native land,” and that if they stopped the entire economic structure of the world would collapse.

In other highlights, Chad & Jeremy provide jovially irreverent interviews like the Beatles and seek out hair salons. They also perform a few verses of the sunnily inoffensive “Distant Shore,” and almost all of the peppily inoffensive “Teenage Failure.” “Aren’t they great, Alfred?” the enraptured Dick Grayson asks. “Well, they do sway, don’t they?” replies the stoical Butler.

Also in this episode…Batman and Robin climb down the side of a building past the window of Hawaiian singing legend Don Ho.

Leslie Gore
“That Darn Catwoman/Scat Darn Catwoman”
Episodes 74 and 75
January 19 & 20, 1967

Leslie Gore was not only a teen pop sensation; she was also the niece of Howie Horwitz, the producer of Batman. On the strength of that connection, she got to wear a skintight pink outfit, pink cat ears, a pink bowtie and (improbably) big pink mittens as Catwoman’s evil protégé Pussycat. Pussycat comes on to Robin so strongly that the Boy Wonder’s voice jumps an octave, a scene all the more amusing since we now know that Gore was far more likely to have had eyes for Julie Newmar than for Burt Ward. Perhaps, though, Pussycat was under the influence of cataphrenia, a drug which reverses all a person’s moral and ethical standards, as Catwoman helpfully explains.

In any case, though Pussycat has turned to a life of crime and frequent flirtatious moments with Catwoman (and a couple with an ethically-inverted Robin), she still sometimes wishes she could pursue her dream to be a rock and roll singer. And, in fact she performs a wow-that’s-obviously-lip-synced version of the hit, “California Nights” for Catwoman’s henchmen in front of a giant green cathead with a glowing purple mouth.

Ethel Merman
“The Sport of Penguins/A Horse of Another Color”
Episodes 98 and 99
October 5 & 12, 1967

Teamed up with the Penguin (Burgess Meredith), the famously stentorian Ethel Merman elocutes her way through the role of Senora Lola Lasagne, a.k.a. common crook Lula Schultz. Merman doesn’t actually sing, though she does seem ready to burst into bombastic warble when she declaims “I am Senora Lola Lasagne!”

Eartha Kitt
“Catwoman’s Dressed to Kill”
Episode 108
December 14, 1967

“Funny Feline Felonies/The Joke’s on Catwoman”
Episodes 110 and 111
December 28 & January 4, 1967

Singer and actress Eartha Kitt stepped into Catwoman’s whiskers for the third Batseason, appearing in one stand-alone episode and a two-parter with co-villain the Joker. Where Julie Newmar played Catwoman as luxuriantly playful, Kitt was downright feral — when she widened her eyes and hissed, you really believed she wanted to pounce on and devour some flying rodents. She also threw herself into the vocal tics more enthusiastically than her cat predecessors, embracing lines like, “Rrrrr, I glow with the thought of that garment,” and rolling her rrrrs through words such as “Spaarrrrrk plug,” “perrrrsuaive,” “perrrrrturbring,” “perrrrrfidious,” and of course, “perrrrrhaps.” Despite such verbal shenanigans, Kitt never actually sings, though she does recite some doggerel verse (prompting the Joker to comment “Oh your voice has a nice lilt, Catwoman!”), as well as lapsing into a foreign tongue for a moment in homage to her big exotica hits (“That’s the first time I ever heard a cat purr in French!” enthuses the Joker.)

Incidentally, Orson Welles called Kitt, “the most exciting woman in the world.” You might think he was exaggerating…until you see her in that skintight black Catwoman suit.

Utilitarian Review 9/1/12

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Me on Chris War, Oedipus, and Superman.

James Romberger on a new TwoMorrows book on underrated artist Marie Severin.

Bill Randall from the archive on the distorted image of Tatsumi.

Ryan Holmberg on abstract comics and modernism.

Derik Badman on poetry comics and/or comics poetry.

Me on Stanislaw Lem’s idiotic “Return From the Stars.”

Jones, One of the Jones Boys pisses on the Golden Age of Comics.

Caleb Das on Portia de Rossi and funny women on television.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I argue that Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis doesn’t make the rich powerful enough.

At Splice I celebrate Julia Roberts finally getting a good role.

At Splice I plead with the GOP to deal with its coming demographic apocalypse.

 
Other Links

Craig Fischer on Kirby’s strengths and weaknesses.

Adrielle Mitchell on comics creators vs. comics academics.

Elizabeth Greenwood on Mirror, Mirror.

Darryl Ayo on Luke Pearson.

Jared Gardner on Joe Sacco.

Subashini Navaratnam on nice (and not nice) book reviews.

This really depresses me.
 
This Week’s Reading

I finished Chris Hedges’ “When Atheism Becomes Religion”; read Joseph Conrad’s short novel “The Shadow Line”, reread the first chapter of Giorgio Agamben’s “The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government” and confirmed that I really don’t particularly want to read the rest; read Stanislaw Lem’s “Return From the Stars” (which I reviewed this week); and am now reading Henry James’ “Portrait of a Lady,” which is awesome.
 

Virility Agonistes

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Donald Barthelme calls Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 Return From the Stars “stunning,” according to the little front cover blurb on the edition I’ve got. That seems about right, though not quite in the way that Barthelme meant it.

The book’s about Hal Bregg, an astronaut who returns from distant stars having aged only 10 years while more than 100 years have passed on earth (thanks relativity!) The world has changed a lot, and he’s having trouble adjusting. As he says on the first page:

The bright colors of the women’s clothes I had by now learned to accept, but the men I still suspected, irrationally, of affectation….

That’s pretty much the whole novel there. The problem with the future is that it is terribly, frighteningly effeminate. The world has developed a process, betrization, which is performed on infants and effectively surgically castrates them — they cease being able to even formulate aggressive thoughts. It also apparently reduces their size (the feminine clothing is maybe an unrelated development.) Thus, Hal is cast into a decadent world where he’s the lone virile uber-masculine giant in a world of meek and tiny girly men — and meek and tiny girly women. And if anyone doubts that this is a total adolescent power fantasy, Hal’s uber-masculinity quickly seduces the world’s most beautiful movie star, who he discards in favor of another woman, Eri, who he kind of sort of rapes, but it’s all right because it turns out she likes it.

Lem’s a much-praised author, and this is one of his most-praised books, so you’re probably thinking there must be more to it than that. But nope; that’s all that’s on offer. Hal agonizes at this soft world without risk, performs manly exercise routines and drives dangerously to work off his stress, and wows the womanfolk, or stalks them — Lem doesn’t seem able to tell the difference. Risk and exploration are incessantly, obsessively figured as male (there were no women on Hal’s expedition, of course); home and hearth are just as obsessively figured as feminine, so that Hal’s decision to not go back into space is linked inevitably to his marriage to Eri, a character about whom we know nothing except that she finds the violent, whiny Hal unaccountably attractive (the book delicately suggests that this is because he’s such a good lay; betrization may prevent good sex too, maybe.)

Again, as Barthelme indicates, there is something “stunning” about the blatant idiocy of the gender politics. Sci-fi is almost as notorious as superhero comics for its bone-headed wish fulfillment, but even by the standards of Flash-Gordon-space-opera nonsense, Return from the Stars is eager to shove its virility under your nose. The main difference, and what makes this arty, I guess, is that most space opera revels in its protagonist’s power, whereas Lem coats his power-worship in philosophical hand-wringing (is a non-violent world worth abandoning the human spirit of adventure?!) and hypocritical self-pity (oh nos! I’m bigger and stronger than everyone on earth, and must fuck all the women! What ever will I do?) This is, in short, a dreadful, dishonest, sexist piece of crap, which manages to combine the worst aspects of male mid-life-crisis literary fiction with the worst aspects of stunted male adventure garbage. I’ve read some Lem books before that I’ve enjoyed, but this sure makes me not want to ever read another.

Voices from the Archive: Bill Randall and the Distorted Image of Tatsumi

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This is a comment Bill left on an article by Ng Suat Tong.
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I’ll add that Tatsumi’s story in English is about marketing and a lack of context. D&Q has marketed Tatsumi and “gekiga” very well, though it’s worth noting that the term “gekiga” first appeared in issue 12 (1957) of “Machi,” a rental manga, as a blurb on a Tatsumi title page: “GHOST TAXI” has the title, “Mystery Gekiga” (Encyclopedia of Contemporary Manga, p. 62). It feels closer to “Ghost Taxi Mystery Theater” to me than, say, an equal of any of Kurosawa’s gendai-geki or jidai-geki from the period. Decades later, the gekiga “brand” and an unimpressive body of work have Dwight Garner in the NYTimes saying of Tatsumi’s work, “It’s among this genre’s signal achievements.” (At least Gary Groth, to his credit, never bought it: “I usually only interview artists whose work I like, and I didn’t feel entirely comfortable interviewing Tatsumi. I was troubled by a number of tics that comprised the backbone of Tatsumi’s aesthetic…” TCJ #281, p. 37)

I wanted to add a footnote from a couple Japanese sources: The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Manga, 1945-2005 (Shougakukan), ends its sole entry on Tatsumi with with the fairly tepid, “Recently, his esteem has also grown abroad.” (Just before its publication, in 2003 AX #34 presented an unpublished Tatsumi story with a full-page ad proclaiming his work would be published in the West. AX is from Seirinkogeisha, now the Japanese publisher of his work as well as others in that tradition.)

The rest of the encyclopedia’s entry was a plot summary of the short story “Man-Eating Fish” and a sentence noting how Tatsumi “deeply expressed the dead-end circumstances of men living in society’s lower reaches” (clunky offhand translations mine). A true documentary of those men would be more interesting, but he prefers tidy immorality plays. Even his images, some fine examples of which you selected, no more than equal those of his peers. It’s telling that another Japanese work, the critic Natsume Fusanosuke’s formalist critique “Why Is Manga Interesting,” chooses artists like Nagashima, Tsuge, and Sait? in describing the old gekiga style, but not Tatsumi. Would that D&Q had published five volumes of Shigeru Mizuki and a slim one of Tatsumi. The rest of their gekiga line’s quite strong, but the word’s not very helpful, and the brand even less if it means Tatsumi’s the touchstone for excellent artists like Ouji, Sakabashira, and Mizuki. Mizuki’s a giant; Tatsumi was forgotten until D&Q picked him back up. The result has been a distorted image of his work’s importance more than a valid reassessment, one that even the New York Times repeated uncritically.

 

Shorter Utilitarian Review 8/23/12 — Vacation Edition

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I’m going to be on vacation and away from the internets starting tomorrow…thus this early and short Utilitarian Review. The blog will resume regular posting next Tuesday, August 28.
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on Archie’s hideous transformation.

Me on the mysterious black metal evil of Funeral Mist.

Me on how Philip K. Dick anticipated his own crappy remaking.

Jaime Green on how the play Clybourne Park is lying to you about race.

Me on the Dark Knight Rises and the pleasures of self-actualizing billionaires.

Vom Marlowe reviews the Glades.

Me on the small as life pleasures of Say Anything.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice I talk about Obama and the audacity of cravenness.

Also at Splice I weigh in on negative book reviews vs. positive book reviews.
 
Other Links

Robert Stanley Martin on John Cheever’s “The Country Husband.

Jeff Spross on how DKR is not really conservative.

Sarah Kendzior on how academia exploits its adjuncts.

The Atlantic sneers satisfyingly at Joe Paterno.

Ben Saunders is curating a exhibit of Charles Schulz’s drawings at the University of Oregon.

Small As Life

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I saw Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything again for the first time in years — and it’s still really good! Easily the best movie of Crowe’s I’ve seen…which maybe isn’t saying all that much, but still.

A big part of the film’s appeal is that both of its protagonists — John Cusack as Lloyd Dobbler and Ione Skye as Diane Cort — are likable and charming. This may seem like faint praise, but it seems to be an immensely difficult thing for modern romantic comedies to pull off. Maybe it’s because writers feel they need conflict and can’t figure out how to get it if somebody isn’t despicable; maybe it’s a misplaced effort at realism. Whatever the reason though, there are just an awful lot of romantic comedies where the guy is broken and repulsive and we’re supposed to cheer as the manic pixie dream girl saves him (as in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) or in which all the characters are fairly repulsive (Pretty Woman), or in which the guy sleeps with someone else and you’re/she’s supposed to forgive him…or what have you. You’d think the baseline for a successful romantic comedy would be a couple who, when they get together at the end, it’s actually a happy ending. And yet, for the most part, when I see romantic comedies, I either can’t actually believe the protagonists will be happy, or wish they weren’t because I hate them.

But, like I said, that’s not a problem in Say Anything. Diane Cort, high school valedictorian, Rhodes scholar (or the equivalent), and Daddy’s girl, is super smart and shockingly good looking (the “body of a game show hostess” as one of Lloyd’s friends puts it), but she’s also sweet and shy and awkward, and (in part because she’s taken so many college classes off campus) disconnected from her classmates. Lloyd is goofy and unambitious — but he’s also caring and gentlemanly and (as his numerous female friends demonstrate) ready, willing, and able to treat woman with respect. There’s a lovely scene, in fact, where several of those female friends are sitting around, and one asks, skeptically, “Come on, if you were Diane Cort, would you fall for Lloyd?” And they all think about it for a minute, and decide that, in fact if they were her they would — because Lloyd’s great, and why wouldn’t she?

The low key rightness of the romance is perhaps what I like most about the film. Neither Lloyd nor Diane is broken; neither is miles out of the others’ league. Their romance is made up mostly of small moments; Lloyd kicking glass out of the way so Diane doesn’t step on it, or the two of them giggling as they scramble over each other to switch drivers in Diane’s car…or Diane pulling a blanket over Lloyd on the first night they have sex together because he’s cold. Instead of love as salvation, the movie presents love as a series of small intimacies and kindnesses — as caring rather than as transformation (and yes, I’m talking to you Edward and Bella.)

Of course, the iron genre rules declare that small-as-life isn’t good enough. Instead, there has to be conflict and turmoil, break-up and tears and sadness and make-up. Say Anything has all of that…but it cleverly places the blame for it all on Diane’s overprotective and single dad, played with a convincingly unsettling blend of charisma and smarm by John Mahoney. Since Dad’s the one who pushes for the break up, Lloyd and Diane don’t have to cheat on each other or mistreat each other to provoke the drama — which means that when they get back together, it’s a good thing rather than a terrible decision that has you pulling your hair out.

The last scene in the film is one of my favorites. Diane and Lloyd are going to England for Diane’s scholarship, but Diane’s terrified of flying. She sits radiating tension as Lloyd babies her along, assuring her that the bump is natural, the wings always deploy like that, as soon as the no-seatbelt light dings they’ll be safe. She nods tightly and holds on to him and looks up to where the light is. “Any minute now,” he says. “Any minute now.” And then the light dings and the film ends. It’s not so much “happily ever after” as “small reassurance now” — which is perhaps what you build happily ever afters out of.
 

The Dark Knight Self-Actualizes

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A little bit ago, Peter Little wrote an essay for this site in which he argued that Dark Knight Rises was the fever dream of a ruling class in crisis:

Although Bruce Wayne has developed a revolutionary source of, “sustainable,” nuclear energy, he has hidden it from the outside world for distrust of the existing social structure’s ability to manage it. It is this very technology which Bane steals and transforms into the nuclear device which threatens Gotham’s annilhation. The ruling class’ implicit understanding of the limits and failures of their dreams of a technocratic solution to the crises of ecology, economy, and culture, are vivid, however, in the moments when Bane’s insurgency takes control of Batman’s arsenal of weapons and toys, employing them against the former ruling order in Gotham City.

The ruling classes’ terror is vividly painted; the possibilities of liberation are more confused.

I finally saw the Dark Knight Rises myself, and I don’t think I agree with this. Specifically, DKR doesn’t feel like a terrified film to me. And certainly, I think saying that the ruling classes’ terror is vividly painted is giving way too much credit to Christopher Nolan, whose imaginative powers, at least in his Batman work, are almost uniformly pedestrian. We never get to “mildly striking,” much less “vivid.”

Peter does a good job limning the ideological positions and tensions of the film, about which I think he’s broadly correct. Nolan is riffing on the financial collapse and the Occupy movement (as I think he’s said in interviews.) Bruce Wayne’s position as beneficent billionaire and technocratic expert is questioned, and the dangers of populist revolt are raised.

But they’re raised only in the most perfunctory manner, and then dismissed via half-assed genre conventions that are, at best, marginally competent. Just as one example, consider the police.

The real terror for a ruling class is always that its own security forces will join the opposition — that the order will be given to shoot the perpetrators of the mass uprising, and instead the police will give them guns. The police are, after all, basically workers in shitty blue collar jobs; they’re definitively not part of the 1%. They’re even (horrors!) unionized. If the ruling class is running scared, one of the things they should be running scared of is the possibility that the police will betray them.

But this is never even hinted as a possibility in DKR. Oh, sure, the police are dumb, ambitious, occasionally venal, at times cowardly, and, at times, too meticulous in the execution of their orders. But they never consider joining their fellow citizens in an assault on the Gotham elite. For that matter, Bane never considers the possibility that the police might betray their masters; on the contrary, he locks the officers up underground, and hunts them down when he can. For Nolan, for Bane, and for the police themselves, the police are always going to be on the side of order. That doesn’t strike me as the vision of a terrorized ruling class. It strikes me as the vision of a ruling class so comfortable that worst case scenarios haven’t even occurred to it.

Of course, part of the reason that the police can’t join the mob is that there isn’t actually a mob. Maybe I blinked and missed it, but as far as I could tell, all the on-screen violence in the film is perpetrated by Bane and his cronies. There are some show trials which I guess are ambiguous…but even those come off pretty much as directed by Bane, and the judge is not some pissed off derelict, but the Scarecrow, a supervillain. Bane does make some speeches in which he urges the people of Gotham to attack their betters, and we see some trashed apartment which seems like it may have been looted by citizens rather than Bane’s thugs (though again it’s unclear.)

But what we never see is actual members of the Gotham 99 percent rioting on their own behalf. The police, in their final showdown, are fighting Bane’s men, it looks like — the battle is against folks armed with machine guns who know how to use them, not against a random crowd with knives and clubs. Of course, there’s some suggestion that Bane’s recruits are from the Gotham underclass…but the underclass is filled with criminals and losers anyway, you know? A ruling class which thinks its foes are the lumpen is not a ruling class that is looking down the barrel of despair. It’s only when you can imagine that even imperial retainers like that lawyer Robespierre are out to get you that you can really start to talk about terror.

Nolan is exploiting the rhetoric of class war because it’s timely and gives his film a patina of contemporary meaningfulness. But I see no indication that he actually cares about the issues he raises, or that they have troubled his sleep for even a moment. The emotional center of his film is not the fear of rebellion against the ruling class. It’s the truly preposterous sequence in which Bruce Wayne climbs out of a foreign gaol pit while his fellow prisoners cheer him on. The 1% will be saved by their love of extreme sports. That’s a profoundly stupid vision…but its stupidity seems born of snug obliviousness, not desperation.

If Christopher Nolan has one rock-bottom belief, it’s that everyone — Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Catwoman, random incarcerated Arabic-speaking ethnics — loves billionaire playboys and wants to see them self-actualize. And, hey, if tickets sold are any indication, Nolan’s absolutely right…which means that the 1% have little if anything to worry about.