If you like synth wave and/or Mad Max, this music video might improve your workouts or make you feel pumped.
Warning: Don’t try any of these stunts without a seatbelt.
Film
Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty, and the Devil
In the three most recent adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock, Elementary, and the Game of Shadows) at crucial moments Holmes is deceived by Moriarty into making a tactical error and in the mean time a song about demon forces is played.
There Are Spoilers Below
In the movie, Holmes is fooled into thinking Moriarty intended to bomb an Opera house during Don Giovanni. Upon Holmes’ arrival, the chorus of demons is played as the main character is received into Hell.
In the American procedural, Holmes is fooled into thinking a serial killer is Moriarty (when indeed the real Moriarty’s identity remains opaque to him) and Gil Scott-Heron’s, Me and the Devil, plays:
And in BBC’s version, Sherlock rides to the court house to function as an expert witness, and Nina Simone’s Sinnerman plays in the background:
Now, is this all just a coincidence or does something in the source material lend to this interpretation? No, it is not a coincidence. Yes, there is one reference to Moriarty as an evil on a diabolical level:
“[He] has, to all appearance, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of a most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the university town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and to come down to London…” – Sherlock Holmes on Moriarty in The Final Problem
I doubt that anybody I know was interested enough in that confluence of media and Sherlock Holmes source material. I had wondered to myself, “why had they utilized that sort of theme in these modern versions of Holmes, particularly when he’s portrayed as an atheist in two of them?” Since I hadn’t read the Final Problem in a while, the answer was unknown to me. When I went back to it, there it was.
I think part of the appeal of Holmes today is that his intelligence is used in fighting evil, I hope people go back to the books and read them though. Holmes is portrayed more humanely, more philosophically, and though I love the modern adaptations, more excellently in the originals.
Youth Science Projects and American Aspirations
I came across an archived usenet post linked on social media:
How come the heros of our movies are no longer Micky Rooney or Spencer Tracy playing Thomas Edison, or Paul Muni playing Erlich or Pasteur, instead Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison and Woody Harrelson playing Larry Flint? And movies whose heros are lawyers.
Paperwork and lawyering. Fixing and improving and advancing society by talk-talk, not building. A lawyer president and his lawyer wife. Crises of power that don’t involve spy planes and sputniks, but incredibly complicated and desceptive word defintions and complicated tax frauds. You think we’re not preparing to go to Mars because SF is too optimistic? Sure. But it was optimistic about whether or not the can-do engineering of the 40’s and 50’s, done by the kids who’d grown up playing with radios and mechanics in the 20’s, was going to continue. Needless to say, it didn’t. I’ve seen a late 1950’s book of science fair projects for teenagers that include things like building your own X-ray machine and cyclotron (no, I’m not kidding– it can be done). There are rockets in there, and cloud chambers, and all kinds of wonderful electronics stuff. But we didn’t go that way. Instead, we turned our children into little Clintons, and our society into a bunch of people sitting at PCs, entering data about social engineering, not mechanical engineering. So instead of going to Mars, we went instead to beaurocratic Hell. Enjoy, everybody. It really could have been different. Nature didn’t stop us– WE stopped us.
I’m not opposed to lawyers, we need them. I even that a few of them read this blog. But the idea that the aspirations of American culture were transformed by entertainment focusing on paperwork fields and the actual content of education are obvious. My wife and I intend to home school our children. And I suspect that we’ll be buying some of those old science books.
I think our young simply feel that the world handed to them is either good enough or impossible to bend toward their own success. So their aspirations end at “make enough money to chill.”
I loved Adam West’s Batman
The slap stick Batman of the 1960s is difficult for many to appreciate unless they’re signalling a blasé millennial irony, but as a boy I loved it. I also liked Keaton’s eccentric, deranged, yet god-like Batman. But the omni-competent, James Bond like, self-absorbed to the point of egomania, and utterly goofy Batman of Adam West was simply a joy for me. In honor of Adam West, here are a few favorite clips:
In this clip, Batman presciently described the results of the 2016 presidential campaign process.
This clip needs no explanation.
In my experience, this is literally true.
Batman can dance like no other, a true danse macabre.
Batman, without a hint of sarcasm, irony, or self-awareness opines that “this strange mixing of minds may be the single greatest service ever performed for man.”
I keep reading that his Batman was the best Batman. I disagree. But he was the Batman we needed.
Why Isn’t Wonder Woman Fat?
In an article which must be satire but isn’t, a woman asks:
When Will Wonder Woman Be a Fat, Femme Woman of Color?
Never.
- She’s not sedentary.
- She’s from an island without men, so modern day women’s issues would have little import to her.
- She’s Greek, so she can’t be.
If Wonder Woman became any of those things she wouldn’t be Wonder Woman. If somebody wants a fat, non-white, super-heroine who doesn’t need a man, that person can just do what normal creative people do: pick up a pencil and draw the comic.
If a film review says something like, “When will the movie (good or bad) deviate from the outdated source material?” rather than “Is this deviation from the source faithful to it while still creating a good film?” then the reviewer doesn’t care about the movie or the source.
A Hulk fan being concerned about the Absorbing Man somehow being Hulk’s father in the 2003 film or the Absorbing Man being too weak to be a Hulk villain in Marvel’s agents of shield, that makes sense. Complaining that the work of other people is poorly designed art or even fundamentally immoral garbage makes sense.
Complaining that an adaptation of somebody’s art doesn’t fundamentally fail to represent that art is stupid. Complain about Wonder Woman as she was, make a new hero, complain about the coherence of the film, or the film’s intrinsic morality…but why complain that the film doesn’t adequately reflect moder social movements foreign to the creator when you could just make your own?
The Dark Knight Trilogy and Intertextuality: Stallone, Dumas, Hugo, and Dickens
I’ve always loved intertexuality. I especially love the interplay between books and film.
Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy is a great example.
The movies have many resonances. For instance, the trilogy is intentionally based upon Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. Most obviously, when Commissioner Gordon reads from the book:
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
But there were other allusions as well. Some outside of French literature. For instance, there’s an almost plagiarized line from Rocky III in the film:
“I was wondering what would break first…your spirit…or your body!”
And then:
“If I can’t break your spirit, I sure enough can break your back.”
And then, of course, the movie also follows the pattern of Rocky III as well as the Rocky III theme song, Eye of the Tiger:
So many times it happens too fast
You change your passion for glory
Don’t lose your grip on the dreams of the past
You must fight just to keep them alive
And again:
“Peace has cost you your strength. Victory has defeated you.”
While Thunderlips couldn’t break Rocky’s spirit, Clubber Lang did. But his former opponent, Apollo Creed invites Rocky into a dangerous and new training environment in order to come back and attempt one last fight against Lang. Similarly, Bruce Wayne, after having his body and spirit broken by Bane ends up in a prison filled with the criminal element of the world (Wayne’s primal enemy). But it is the criminal element that understands the fear of death and the desire for life and freedom that allows the Batman to fight Bane with renewed vigor, “Rising up to the challenge of survival.”
But aside from Rocky and the Tale of Two Cities, what other literature adds meaning to the films? Two examples are Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.
The character Bane, is essentially a combination of Javert from Les Miserables and Dantes from Monte Cristo.
For instance, Javert and Bane are both born in prison. Both are deeply obsessed with the idea of innocence. To the extent that both are willing to die rather than be implicated in actual wrong doing. Bane is willing to die in a nuclear blast in order to cleanse Gotham of evil as well as for the sin of allowing Batman to escape prison. Similarly, Javert ends his life when he realizes the contradiction between the law and his own life. Also, in Javert’s confrontation with Valjean (I’ll quote the musical for familiarity’s sake), he claims that he can easily understand and defeat Valjean despite Valjean’s superior strength because of his personal familiarity with the scum of the earth:
Valjean I am warning you, Javert
I’m a stronger man by farThere is power in me yetMy race is not yet run!I am warning you, JavertThere is nothing I won’t dareIf I have to kill you hereI’ll do what must be done!
Javert Dare you talk to me of crime And the price you had to pay Every man is born in sin Every man must choose his way You know nothing of Javert I was born inside a jail I was born with scum like you
I am from the gutter, too
This is essentially Bane’s line when the Batman attempts to use the power of the shadows to defeat him:
“I was born in the darkness…the shadows betray you because they belong to ME.”
Both Bane and the Batman are painted with shades of Edmond Dantes. For instance, in the comic books and in Bane’s backstory in the movie, he was trained in prison by a priest who taught him deeply in philosophy, mathematics, science, and linguistics. And Bane, in the film, can perform advanced nuclear physics in his head, not only so, but he was picked up and trained by the League of Shadows partly due to his already considerable fighting prowess. But this training is what Edmond Dantes received when he was wrongly imprisoned, with the addition of fencing. Bane, after further training from the League of Shadows, seeks to do anything possible to cleanse civilization from any elements which are dangerous or corrupting of children. But Bruce Wayne is also an allusion Dantes. When Bruce Wayne is wrongly imprisoned, he sinks into despair and wishes to simply die until a wise sage-like character (perhaps Bane’s teacher) who encourages him to regain his strength and escape and gain vengeance upon the man who broke his spirit and left him to languish unjustly in prison. This is, of course, very important in the Nolan Trilogy, because Bruce Wayne becomes the Batman from prison in the first film, for there he means the leader of the League of Shadows.
While I doubt anybody still thinks about those films, they really are rich with intertexts as well as archetypal figures (remember, in the first film the penultimate villain is a Jungian psychiatrist!). The key archetype is the relationship of vulnerable humanity to the chaos and danger in the world. For Bruce Wayne (or Bane) to overcome evil in the world, they must descend into the depths of the underworld as well as their own souls. This is analogous to the Christian discipline of confession. One must truly discover one’s own filth and admit it in order to take any steps to clean up the world. Or, to put it another way, one must gain the cunning abilities of the serpent, but only use them innocently in order to avoid becoming the serpents prey (Matthew 10:16). You have to have the teeth of the predator in order to be a protector, etc.
Because the movies touch on such universal themes, they will remain significant to any who watch them regardless of whether their legacy will endure.