{"id":2479,"date":"2019-10-10T19:59:07","date_gmt":"2019-10-10T19:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=2479"},"modified":"2020-06-15T16:43:53","modified_gmt":"2020-06-15T16:43:53","slug":"seymour-movies-how-batman-cartoons-are-better-for-you-than-batman-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/?p=2479","title":{"rendered":"Seymour Movies: How Batman Cartoons Are Better For You Than Batman Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The best thing about Joker<\/em>, as far as I\u2019m concerned, is that it makes Batman: The Killing Joke<\/em> look far better in retrospect, if only because the latter animated feature from 2016 doesn’t try so hard to be anything other than a longer and more-risqu\u00e9-than-usual Batman cartoon.<\/p>\n

Given all the noise and clatter preceding and following Joker<\/em> \u2018s premiere, the controversy accompanying Killing Joke<\/em> \u2018s release three years ago sounds relatively quaint. It, too, presented a Joker origin story as first conceived by nonpareil comics writer Alan Moore in a 1988 graphic novel. As some of you may recall, the Joker was, as with the guy in the new movie, a struggling comedian. Only here, he\u2019s got a pregnant wife and no prospects. So in desperate search for scratch, he agrees to aid and abet an attempted heist at a chemical plant only to be disfigured and, thus, deranged from falling into a huge vat of\u00a0 toxic glop.<\/p>\n

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Which turned out to nowhere near as interesting as what happened in the same movie to Batgirl, who ends up shot and paralyzed for life by the Joker, but not before a separate subplot during which she and Batman\u2026Oh boy, do I want to spoil it for you! (Maybe I already have.) But some shocks to the system are most productively sustained in direct encounter.<\/p>\n

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Needless to say, fan boys and fan girls of all ages were scandalized, screeching, \u201cHow dare you heartless pigs do all this to Barbara Gordon?\u201d They were likely remembering all the good times they had back in the nineties when the original Batman<\/em> animated series was humming along as (since I have the floor and whether anybody cares to argue with me or not) the finest iteration of these characters on ANY sized screen.<\/p>\n

There were also many critics who wondered whether the world really needed an R-rated animated action feature. But even if Killing Joke<\/em>\u2019s animation wasn\u2019t exactly groundbreaking, the film was about as pure a noir<\/em> product as any black-and-white early 1950s thriller with Lisabeth Scott and\/or Glenn Ford. The storytelling was lean and measured, the dialogue was crisp and juicy and the vocal work was superb, most especially by Mark Hamill, whose rasping and cackling as the Joker over three decades of Batman<\/em> cartoons showed more engagement, invention and audacity than anything he\u2019s done as a on-screen actor.<\/p>\n

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Better than Joaquin Phoenix?\u00a0 \u00a0Maybe…And so here we go\u2026<\/p>\n

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Yes, Phoenix is brilliant in Joker<\/em>, a bony wraith with hooded eyes and a heart so broken that its fragments seem to poke out of his spine. But it\u2019s a lot of trouble to go to for a character we have no reason to connect with emotionally. Taxi Driver<\/em>\u2019s Travis Bickle was no better, the movie\u2019s defenders insist. But Robert De Niro\u2019s Travis had just enough charm at the outset to at least make Cybill Shepherd\u2019s campaign worker agree to a date, even if that date was a fiasco. The movie gives neither Phoenix nor us any escape valve, any outlet for irony, wit or joy save for a few precious seconds when Phoenix\u2019s Arthur Fleck joins an audience of entitled swells in laughing at Chapin\u2019s blindfolded roller skating in Modern Times<\/em>, a glimmer of footage evoking almost everything the movie either forgot or omitted.<\/p>\n

Joker<\/em> isn\u2019t a movie so much as a giant boulder in the middle of Culture Gulch that\u2019s too big to move or ignore. I suppose that\u2019s why there\u2019s been something about the Joker in every New York Times arts section over the last week and a half, at least. This morning\u2019s paper had an article contending the Joker was a case study in thwarted white privilege. Sure. Fine. Whatever. Let\u2019s by all means pump up the rhetoric about Joker<\/em> being both metaphor and rallying cry for the dispossessed who would rather watch the world burn than engage in any rational effort to save it. The conceit lasts for as long as one forgets how yellow and frayed comic book pages can get over time and how fragile a vehicle they are, ultimately, for the most complex of societal dilemmas.<\/p>\n

Still, there\u2019s one aspect of Trump-ism I found in Joker<\/em> that I haven\u2019t yet found in any review or analysis, though it\u2019s possible I may have missed it. The Gotham City depicted in the film looks most like a doppelganger for the New York City of the seventies with its graffiti-covered subway cars, its rampant street crime, its grimy, cluttered and combustible architecture. It has always struck me that at the core of so much of the president\u2019s rhetoric and, for that matter, the Fox News Channel patter that both feeds and feeds off it is a perverse nostalgia for those Drop-Dead years of the Imperial City, when the hopes and dreams of reformers literally went up in smoke, white flight was at its peak and stigmatizing people-of-color for being the sole agents of their own desperate circumstances was used as fuel for a slow-building mad-as-hell conservative resurgence in the eighties. The Trumpeteers may not have dug the seventies — except for the way those years of squalor and decline made it so much easier for them to hate the sixties.<\/p>\n

I realize that by bringing all this up that I\u2019m adding to the same overestimation of Joker\u2019<\/em>s significance that I\u2019m criticizing. My pallid excuse is that I\u2019m only going along with the rest of the culture \u2013 and with the movie itself. I need to stop it here before it gets worse.<\/p>\n

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So I\u2019m going to end this the way Killing Joke<\/em> ends: with both Batman and Joker, mortal enemies and mirror images of each other\u2019s obsessed, damaged souls, laughing together at the same dumb joke. It may not have the grandeur and oomph of Joker\u2019<\/em>s windup. But as with much else about that full-length Batman cartoon, it makes for a much more satisfying and logical conclusion \u2013 or do I mean punch line?<\/p>\n

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      The best thing about Joker, as far as I\u2019m concerned, is that it makes Batman: The Killing Joke look far better in retrospect, if only because the latter animated feature from 2016 doesn’t try so hard to be anything other than a longer and more-risqu\u00e9-than-usual Batman cartoon. Given all the noise and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124],"tags":[998,816,995,994,996,997,993],"class_list":["post-2479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-alan-moore","tag-batman","tag-joaquin-phoenix","tag-joker","tag-mark-hamill","tag-robert-de-niro","tag-the-killing-joke"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2479"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2699,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479\/revisions\/2699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}