The Dark Night of The Dark Knight

In answering critics who say that dark movies cause dark acts, movie industry apologists sound eerily similar to NRA apologists ....
by Rick Weiss (c) 2012 Trident Productions

As horrific as it is, the “The Dark Knight Rises” premiere massacre in Colorado is already fading from our “news-stream” mentality. Before it completely washes downstream, let’s throw a little keylight on two troubling, if related connections and see what we can learn from them, if anything.

We know from “Inception” that Chris Nolan can bend space and time and keep 4 or 5 different realities going simultaneously, but “The Dark Knight Rises” is even more ponderous, a kinda a big goofy allegorical soufflé. It rises, but falls flat soon after leaving the oven. Good girls and bad girls trade places with reality-defying aplomb. Batman is masked. Unmasked. Masked again. He needs to conquer his fear. He needs to learn to fear again. He's rich. He's poor. He's rich again. He's dead. Alive. Dead again, then alive again. The Scarecrow sits in judgment on the rich. The film’s best line is left to Catwoman:

"There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne," she purrs. "You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you're all going to wonder how you ever thought you could ever live so large and leave so little for the rest of us."

Stiegless in Seattle, Stockholm, Philadelphia and Everywhere

At the end of last week, I finished reading "The Girl that Kicked the Hornet's Nest," the third book in Stieg Larsson's startling trilogy. I'd first heard about Larsson in 2008 on NPR in one of Martha Corrigan's erudite but effortlessly seductive book reviews. Corrigan, a writer, lecturer at Georgetown, is one of NPR's jewels, the type you sit in the car with the engine off, just to hear the end of her latest installment. Don't know if it’s the timbre of the voice or the whip smart things it says, but I remember exactly where I was, when I first learned about Stieg, Blomkvist and Salander, (heading north on 11th, turning on Arch Street. I remember exactly what I thought, (that though I'm not much of one for mystery novels, this sounds just off-kilter enough for my tastes).

Perhaps, I was more receptive because I'd just finished reading Eliot Patttison's brilliant Skull Mantra, itself an offbeat murder mystery set in post-occupation Tibet. So okay, okay, I've found my "MM niche." Give me a tale of culture totally alien to mine own, kill off some characters in a grizzly fashion and let me follow the trail of a whip-smart investigator and I will read and read …

Lists, Advice and the joys of reading aloud.

A writer on one of the writers' groups I follow posted this link to the 100 Greatest Opening Lines for a novel. In some respect such lists are meaningless, but I am reading Huckleberry Finn to my 10 year old for his bedtime reading and this line appears as #12 of the "Greatest Opening Lines":

"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter." —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

This is the second child I've read aloud to from this, perhaps the most important American work of fiction by arguably the greatest American author. I tell him its for his erudition, but it's really for me. I maintain a "selfish selflessness" when it comes to reading to the boys. I only read works I love, so as best to communicate my enthusiasm for the work and for reading in general. Huckleberry Finn is perhaps my favorite novel of all time. Such a ripping adventure yarn, so simply written, in such a compelling voice on so many complex subjects. Racism, slavery, morality, identity, personal loyalty, the relationships of fathers and sons ... layers and layers, on and on.

That said, imho, the line is only memorable because the book is so damned good. But does that make it great? I always thought the line was a bit of a "throw-away," an understated device Twain used to quickly move readers from A to B. He gives permission to read Huck (his masterpiece) without having first read TS (his great work). Huck Finn is chockfull of amazing lines, all far more memorable than its first line.

How about this passage from Chapter 16, where we stopped last night:
Setup--Huck is bedeviled by his conscience, having had an opportunity to do the "right thing" and give Jim up. But for reasons he doesn't fully understand yet, he doesn't.

"I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get started right when he's little ain't got no show -- when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad -- I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time. "

What makes a great opening line? Is it the great poetic resonance that presages the story like a bolt of lightning? Is it how in a single brushstroke, it intros a memorable protagonist or sets the stage for the work's central conflict?

What virtue is inherent in a novel's first line that we as writers should study, know and emulate?

I always thought that the first lines of short stories were more "important" because of the economy of short stories v novels. Novels are about slow-cooking, delicate, complex nuanced flavors, while short stories offer sharper, faster brighter flavors but by necessity, less complexity. The short story format only allows you to hint at complexity, i.e., negative space, rather than develop it. In cooking, a good reduction, water is all that boils off. In a good short work or a good long work, there is no excess water. So, I'd argue that it's not possible to retain ALL the flavors of a long work in a short work, no matter how skilled or brutal an editor you are.

To wit, this link from Writer's Digest for those of us considering, editing or pulling our hairs out over a novel in progress. Some solid advice within, which I'm taking to heart:

Writer’s Digest - Take Your Novel to the Finish Line

 

Here's again is the link to an essay I did on Twain while reading Tom Sawyer with Son 1. 

My how I roam and ramble. Twain would have me set on a raft without a paddle. 

Eye to Brain -- This post is too long!!!

My oldest friend, J, fellow writer and most observant critic emails:

My first take on (your blog) is hampered by my dis-inclination to read (with attention) off a computer screen. This is a real obstacle as evidenced by the efforts to produce a "reader" like Kindle. However, this may not be an obstacle for our kids but I worry about the loss of the habit of attentive, non distracted reading on our consciousness of the real, tactile world. Such may have been the medieval transition in human thought from oral tradition, bardic incantation of epic tales, wandering theatrical troupes to the emergence of print and the explosion of human knowledge.

My response:

J, I'm probably in the minority of early adopter types, but I still think Kindles suck and won’t get one until they get much better. Christ, they don’t even backlight, which means I can’t tote it to bed and read in the darkness while my wife sleeps. That's a deal-killer for me. I might as well sit in my comfy chair with a book or my desktop screen which has better resolution. But what's zero sum gain for one reader is a direct hit for another. I maintain each student in this country should be issued a loaded Kindle and juvenile backstrain would disappear overnight. Poor #2 Son has had to carry as many as 18 lbs. of treekill. I know, I always carry them for him on our walks from school and several times have weighed the bloody things.

From feeding to locomotion, there are some human needs so old and basic that the forms of the devices that service them are elegantly fixed by function, if not physics. Simple machines like the spoon and the wheel represent design perfection in their spooniness and wheelishness. With reading, the issue (as J points out) is also form factor, but as acquiring knowledge is a relatively new human endeavor, it is vulnerable to being pushed, bent, perhaps out of shape by the delivery mechanism. Books tire the eye less than e-screens. Portability, visibility, tactility are all easy virtues of books. Length becomes a design issue when it tires the eye and undermines rather than engages concentration.

So my essays are long and I'm faced with two choices:

Write shorter ones
/
or
\
acknowledge they are long because they have to be
to convey concepts that aren't easily condensed
and help the reader suffer through them as much as I can.

From a book aesthetic it seems artificial to mediate a solid argument with jumps, links, graphics, pictures, headlines and other publishers eye-candy to titillate tired or bored eyes. Yet, the British tabloids know exactly what they're doing with their (PG-13 rated) page three girls.

This is how we train people to write for the web. Content design born of the limitations and the audience's declining attention span. Fifteen years ago, I wrote an essay on a concept I coined as "deep interactivity" which I defined as using content driven branching and non-linear information architecture used to create the kinds of deep, meaningful resonances and complexities a reading a long passage in a story or essay provides. To quote U2, I still haven't found what I'm looking for. Perhaps the quest is quixotic.

The printed page is a linear storage device. However experimental a writer's style, it will always be linear and thereby limited. Why is linear limited? Because linear compels each user to use the author's argument architecture largely to the exclusion of his own. The disk-based nonlinear storage of content frees us from linearity, offers us search, linking, bookmarking, compact storage, but it sacrifices the best of what even the paperback has to offer, the intact human voice telling its own story from start to finish. Reading itself seems to be evolving into something we won’t understand a hundred years from now.

The bardic tales were passed by oral tradition, so Homer, Gilgamesh, the Upanishads and a handful of the great oral works fortunately survived long enough to be fixed in the amber of written language. But what we certainly lost are lesser known tales and even the finest extemporaneous interpretations of the tale, because a scribe wasn't around at a particular campfire to write it down. It would be like a 21st Century saxophonist reinterpreting John Coltrane, without any original recordings to reference from. Each oralist brought both enhancement and degradation in his ownership of the stories he committed to memory.

Modern disciples of the oral tradition, like my professional storytelling brother argue that the paradigmic shift from oral to written tradition lost something precious, i.e., storytelling as a socially binding, community-reinforced experience. In workshops, conferences and festivals all over the country, a new generation of bards are subversively deconstructing the modern media to reconstruct and reclaim the ancient oral arts.

Tactility has also suffered. I keep coming back to it as it might be at the root of what J is saying. You can touch a storyteller, hear him, smell her, hold hands with an audience member during a scary part. Emotions and social engagement are subcarrier waves for long, involved stories. Tactility is another content subcarrier.

Books have a more reserved but still profound tactility. Papers, bindings, edges, covers, fonts, illustrations, the shapes of paragraphs so fixed and legible that you can see patterns in the way the letters line up. The smell of a new book. The smell of an old one. The soft flick of a turning page, the satisfying thunk of the cover closing to assure that everything you've read and yet to read will be in exactly the same neat rectilinear package tomorrow.

The web; keyboards, speakers mice and screen. We're still clicking away. Each generation abstracts the kinesthetics of knowledge acquistion a bit further.

Yet those who only look back without looking ahead (and J is certainly not one of them) demonize the web as an anti-socializing, anti-intellectualizing force, neglect to grasp something fundamental. The web has taken giant strides toward synthesizing the instantaneous emotional resonances of the communally shared story and the archival compactness of text, adding search, networking and infinite storage, a synthesis paper can never accomplish on the same scale. Synthesis is meaning and context. Community is meaning and context. Community adds complexity. The tactility issue is addressable by bandwidth and innovation.

Today, the Kindle, tomorrow i-glasses, which will let you read the entirety of the world’s web of knowledge, while walking, but only line at a time. Or you'd rather have a v-hat that plunges you full and deep into 4-d holospace. You could experience the classics of world literature in full Sensurround without ever needing to learn how to read. Will you want to? What will change next? Will the language itself become more pictographic to balance the inverse proportionality of textual and visual literacy. Will density and complexity of information continue to degrade or can a newer, meatier sensory-augmented alphabet convey more with less.

As our generation ages and dies off, many believe the trend of information decay will accelerate until like pond scum it blankets the surface and blots the sun from the deep spaces, satisfied to be skipping along the bright and superficial, the odd and confrontational while avoiding the deep elaborate organic tide pools where complexity flourishes and well-reasoned resolutions to multivariate arguments are forged.

Are we really the last champions of "complexity" that we so smugly assume ourselves to be?

Or are we witnessing the watershed of language evolution, the indrawn breath before the explosion of the new language, new concepts and new achievement in thought and word propel us to new heights.

Or did Gutenberg, like the Beatles, get it absolutely right the first time, only to have successors dilute and degrade the medium and the message beyond all future recognition or hope.

E-books not near ready for prime time:

-@v@- wrote:

Story: Will-e-books-ever-be-a-best-seller?

Amazon and Sony better hope Apple doesn't show up in this space, because the one tipping point feature that trumps price, killer "app-titude" or usability, i.e., “design cool" just ain't there. No eye appeal in either e-book package. These things are both butt ugly; they scream prototype even though they aren't.

Nobody reads 170 books at one time, so who cares, capacity is a non-starter at this point. Add to which they're way out of the price range of the one market they make the most sense for, the poor beleaguered students who have to cart dozens of monster textbooks around in their groaning backpacks. If my kids could replace all their textbooks with the one device they plug into their school's server or the net, I'd jump just to save them the backstrain and myself the doctors’ bills. But for now, fuggedaboudit!

Back to the drawing board kids, but don't take too long. Mark this. Apple will sit out a couple of cycles, then jump in with a sexy, far prettier face, toss in some of the cool interface doodads they do so well and we will all go oooh and aaah and cue up overnight at our nearest Apple Stores to buy the first ones.. Then they'll further solidify their market by giving them away to public schools along with Itunes textbook downloads and Steve Jobs will finally and irrevocably become William Randolph Hearst.

Skating on the Superficial

Rescuing Masculinity for What It's Worth

I’m reading The Road with my 13 year old. We’re about two-thirds through it and I pretty much know how it’s going to end. My boy snuck a look at the ending and he says he also knows the outcome. But we press on—a chapter a night. There’s not a lot of plot, suspense or character arc here. This doesn’t bother me. Maybe it deserves a Pulitzer, maybe not. Maybe this isn’t the best book I’ve read, not even this year, but I’m glad to be reading it and glad to be reading it with my son. I certainly don’t think it deserved the round pounding it received from the Inky’s book critic.

I had my boy read the withering review to me early last week and I was kinda surprised when young Master W. agreed with Mr. Wilson’s critique of McCarthy’s narrative conventions, but not with his overall assessment of the book. Sure, of the short list of people who did it both first and best, McCarthy will never out-hem Hemingway, or fitz Fitzgerald, but The Road isn’t exactly the facile fast food sizzler of Love Story or Celestine Prophecy ilk, despite the fact that it’s being hawked at Oprah’s Book Club, right beneath a chastely voluptuous (but yummy) “Bras of Summer” banner ad.

Despite a million little pieces of egg on her face, a flyover the big O’s site reveals titles like As I Lay Dying, A Hundred Years of Solitude and Anna Karenina. Her O’ness seems almost self-consciously intent on steering her tube fed demographic toward big L literature. Years from now, inquiring minds may yet debate whether The Road deserves such a capital letter—whether it was oracular or just apocryphal goth. But it deserves whatever attention it gets, then or now, because The Road has grit.

I must confess I hadn’t know Cormac McCarthy’s work very well. I haven’t even google-imaged him yet because I’m savoring my precognitions. I want to see how my image of him jibes with the real deal. With celebrities, I find the reality mostly pales measured next to my preconceptions. I want a ruddy-headed, freckled David Caruso meets Charles Bukowski type. Craggy face. Pockmarks. A drinker's nose. Except that the title All the Pretty Horses is a bit of a discordant note. Kinda fem, more suited to a Dominique or an Emilie than a Cormac. I start all my journeys on the most superficial of terms. What do I know?

Ok, curiosity got the better of me. The last link didn’t exist before I wrote the previous sentence. And now I’m a little disappointed. The romanticized Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. is replaced with a www reality thumbnail. He looks a bit more clipped and buttoned down than I thought he would. Ex-USAF. He still doesn’t look like a “pretty horses” kinda guy, but it still makes sense. He makes sense. I understand his protagonist’s relationship with his son in this ghostly, monochromatic world they’re passing through. The dying man lives for only one thing. Love for the boy. The kind of love that kills without blinking to protect him. The kind of love that would die, with a song in its heart, rather than see the child hurt. It’s a fierce, joyful animal thing. It starts when you see them pulled out of their momma and placed before you on the warming table. It hasn’t diminished an iota in all these years. Twenty-first century life is overstuffed, supersized. It’s easy for the love between a father and a son to get lost in all the chromatic distractions of a life with so many choices.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

In pre-apocalyptic America, young men without models (from literature or real life) of how to be a man, turn to mass media and encounter two polar and equally loathsome caricatures—the neo-Neanderthal, misogynist, hip hop blingmeister and the emasculated, marginalized, post-modern milquetoast failure. Both leave one with the cheesy slide from masculinity to machismo to misomania. Alas in the 21st Century our spears have been beaten into laptops. Our questions of survival are more existential than literal. Men are still going off to the woods, beating on drums and trying to reconstitute their masculinity through metaphors. Masculinity’s virtues seem virtually, but not entirely extinct. Without actually going to war, we get precious few chances to be warriors. Save in the loving of our children. Cormac and I are together on that.

Wilson snipes at the scientific credibility of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic limbo. The Inquirer critic calls The Road “just the latest installment in the pornography of despair.” Possibly, because I’m reading it to a 13 year old, the phrase hit me with the impact of a slab of raw liver to the puss.

Master Weiss: What are we reading tonight, Dad?
Mister Weiss: I thought we’d indulge in some more of that pornography of despair, son.
Master Weiss: Gosh dad, aren’t I a little young for that?
Mister Weiss: No son, once you get acclimated to the harder stuff, you realize that Tolkien, Rowling, Twain, Lewis, Lessing, Lem and all the rest of the ones we’ve read over the years are just pantywaists and poofters. No more soft-core depression or Hollywood endings for you me bucko. Time to break out the Vonnegut. `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Master Weiss: Dad, your rant is cutting into my read time.
Mister Weiss: Okay.

Wilson utterly misses the point. Veracity, color and hope don’t live in landscapes, favorable outcomes or even in language, but in the relationship. Let’s pray it doesn’t take a cataclysm to make either the point or the men of my generation willing and holy warriors for our children. If we can’t do that, then we are not men. Happy 13th Birthday, B.
-@V@-