The search for meaning

I was in Montana for a few days many years ago. I remember thinking to myself that when people called it "Big Sky country", they were right. The openness and the emptiness seemed to go farther than any other place I've seen. "Emptiness" doesn't have to mean "barren", though. There was life everywhere. It was just about looking for it in the right spots. This, to me, seems to be a central element to Chloé Zhao's film, Nomadland. From a certain perspective, the film is about emptiness. But it's a desired emptiness- a desired solitude -that the protagonist, Fern (the perfectly cast Frances McDormand) basically requires in order to live her life the way she is compelled to do.

Except for two sentences on a card at the beginning about the circumstances of the dissolution of Empire, NV, the story is told without any preamble and there are none of the normal setup cues, in which characters are introduced and some of their history and/or motivation are put on display. We're just dropped into the action and compelled to follow along with wherever Fern is going (I've often referred to this as the 'Howard Chaykin approach', after one of my favorite comic authors.) We only slowly learn the details of Fern's life before her current wandering, but all of her reality is written on McDormand's wonderfully-expressive face and in the matter-of-fact process by which she conducts her existence; traveling from job to job and gathering to gathering, making just enough to keep her and her van moving. She is the very essence of a nomad within the larger shell of the society that surrounds her. That society is pointedly demonstrated by Zhao with the long shots of an Amazon warehouse, a South Dakota national park, and a beet processing facility in Nebraska. We see the remnants of that society when she returns to the hollowed out remains of Empire and her former life. We see the open spaces that she yearns for on the California coast, the Badlands rocks, and the Black Rock Desert just past her former back yard in Empire.

Other than the capable David Strathairn, many of the rest of the nomad community that Fern interacts with are actual members of that community currently on the road in this country. Fittingly, most of them are there by choice, having not found what they wanted in that larger society. That's appropriate for McDormand, who often plays characters with tragedy hovering over them but with steel in their spines that won't let them be overcome by it. And, as usual, you can see every figment of that perspective on her face without her having to utter a word. Despite losing her long-time husband and her home, we later discover that she only stayed in Empire in the first place so that he, a man without parents or children, wouldn't be forgotten if she moved on. It's that sense of responsibility to the people around her that makes her a solid fit for the nomad community, who are made up of people just like that; presence remembered and given life by the people they associate with, whether they're actually present or not. Zhao does an excellent job of portraying that presence, those living memories, without allowing the story to become maudlin.  No matter how often she's presented with offers to stay with people who care for her, Fern can't bring herself to do it, as the solitude is the only thing that brings her respite from the memory of what she's lost and, mostly, what she's never found.

Tricia said she found the movie to be depressing and I can see why someone would think that. But I think that, despite the obvious pain and the struggle, the point was, in fact, the journey. It was predicted by a former student of Fern's whom she ran into in a store who, when asked if she remembered anything that Fern had taught her, recited one of my favorite bits from Macbeth:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It may seem depressing to those who can't understand the need for the solitude that the road and the life provides and it may seem as if it signifies nothing to simply keep moving and leave behind all the connections that most people feel help make them who they are. But Fern and the people like her feel that they don't fit into that model of society and it's better for them to escape the petty pace and keep finding new candles to light their way.

Batman: TAS, episode #30: Tyger, Tyger

Speaking of mad scientists, this episode is a complete Island of Dr. Moreau pastiche, including island. I'm OK with that, given that they were aiming for a younger audience who would be both unaware of and attracted to the idea of what is essentially just a ripoff. Also, it doesn't stray too far from the general concept of The Batman resembling Man-Bat. In this case, it's Catwoman becoming more Catwoman-like. One thing I'm less OK with is the general discordancy of the relationship between The Batman and Catwoman. We've already seen Catwoman and this episode continues with the "general knowledge" theme, assuming that viewers don't need to be told the origins of our hero's major opponents. But we've also seen Catwoman get arrested by The Batman for her various crimes in her earlier appearance and yet here Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle are back on the social circuit together, as if he has no idea who and what she is. This is DC Comics in a nutshell up to the mid-1970s, where they finally started following Marvel's lead. It's disappointing that this series, which extends credit to the knowledge and awareness of its viewers in so many ways up to this point, decided to partially abandon that courtesy here. It's not even ham-handed. It's just poor storytelling, since you're not extending credit to your viewer. You're suggesting that they ignore what they already know. In another discordant moment, Bruce Wayne simply brushes off the cops when investigating what happened at the zoo, despite them pointedly informing him that "This is police business." We know he can kinda do this because he's The Batman, but it makes no sense within the story for playboy Bruce Wayne to ignore the cops.

When we make it to the island, we're introduced to the main villain, Dr. Emil Dorian, who is bog-standard mad scientist, unlike Hugo Strange. And the main opposition is his perfect creation, Tygrus. The only real problem with him is that name, which sounds like "tigress", which is not exactly the audible image one wants to create for the aggressively male character that the mad scientist is using Selina Kyle as a potential mate to breed with. So we're already running into multiple odd style choices within act I. That pattern continues when we find The Batman going to Kirk Langstrom for help in identifying the combination knockout drug/genetic transformation serum used on Selina. Again, it's great that we're hearkening back to earlier episodes and creating a timeline within the series. But this is the same problem as before, since it would help to remember that this version of Langstrom, in a deviation from the comics, was criminally motivated in becoming Man-Bat, instead of inadvertently transforming as the original version does. And, yet, just like with Selina, The Batman is fine consulting with a criminal who's remarkably out of jail, despite arresting him the first time they encountered each other.

Another positive in this mixed bag is that the episode is filled with action, but it's not boring or confusing action, since much of the fisticuffs involves the "genetically-superior" Tygrus; a proper challenge for our master combatant hero. Despite the story not really involving what one would consider our preferred noir elements, since it's the Darknight Detective on a tropical island fighting mutant animals, it's at least paced well enough and in scenarios that involve The Batman trying to save his own life and that of Selina Kyle, while not trying to treat Tygrus as just any thug to be waved away or an opponent to truly be beat down, like most of his other villains. So the tragic aspect is played well, even if the genuine opposition in Dorian is fairly routine. Also in yet another upside of continuation and respect for the viewers, the effect of the first encounter with Tygrus is visually carried throughout, as the slashes on The Batman's chest never go away, which is a level of animation sequencing and continuance that was uncommon for cartoons of the time and hasn't even regularly been used in earlier BTAS episodes. We also take a slight deviation from our Island of Dr. Moreau retelling to also include elements of The Most Dangerous Game, which is fine because, again, we have to include our younger viewers who may not have seen something like this before, despite it being pretty old hat for those of us who've been around longer. On the other hand, I'm not sure why you'd include the line "Search your feelings, Tygrus (Luke.)" since viewers young and old will automatically associate that with the Star Wars franchise and be jarred out of any story you're trying to tell. And, perhaps appropriately for our discordant tale, the best line in the episode comes from a throwaway character, when the security guard at the zoo mentions that "Her taste in boyfriends lacks severely! Guy looked like an ape!" when talking about Garth, the substandard gorilla servant (in story and in action within the story.) Fittingly, Garth doesn't even get a voice credit(!)

So, a very mixed bag as an episode, for any number of strange plot and style choices. But the final product isn't horrible. Credit has to be extended for using the William Blake poem (even if Bruce Timm fumbled the pronunciation of the last line (symmetrI, not symmetree) and it was appropriate to wrap the episode with a return to the title card image. Again, it's a nice snippet of tragedy. It just doesn't particularly stand out, plot-wise, for only our second appearance of Catwoman. But next up is our third appearance of The Scarecrow in Dreams in Darkness.

Batman: TAS, episode #29: The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne

We've been watching a lot of Gotham lately, since we didn't watch any of it while it was originally airing. It's an interesting retelling of the origins of many characters in the Batman mythos, not least among them, Hugo Strange. (B. D. Wong has been brilliant as the good professor in that show.) Strange is kind of the stock "mad scientist" villain in The Batman's history. He originally appeared in 1940 and was one of the first villains in the mythos to make a reappearance, which was relatively uncommon in the early days when most comics were seen as one-offs, as one never knew when the publisher would pull the plug (a phenomenon that hasn't changed that much in the subsequent decades.) And those couple appearances in the 40s essentially were an extended one-off, since Strange didn't appear again until Steve Engelhart took the tiller on The Batman in the 70s and that was where the character really blossomed in an extended tale involving the discovery of The Batman's identity and the haunting of Rupert Thorne to madness. This episode, The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne, steps right into those shoes, not only by learning The Batman's identity, but attempting to auction it off to The Joker, Two-Face, and The Penguin.

I have to confess that, in some ways, watching Gotham has made it a bit more difficult to keep up with my review of BTAS. In many ways, the former series has filled my taste for the character and his mythos and done so in a more interesting way, since Gotham was intended for a much more mature audience than our cartoon series. But it was definitely interesting to see this episode function in a way that was quite similar to the average Gotham episode, given the panoply of Batman characters who inhabit the same space and the real similarity in Strange's approach to his environment to that of the version of the character played by Wong. Starting out with a corrupt judge trying to conceal a past misdeed is certainly in the vein of the way the series ostensibly about James Gordon has handled the overall plotting. This episode of BTAS is notable for Alfred's rather direct involvement in the proceedings, being captured while spying and driving the car that allows The Batman to pursue his enemies, which is quite similar to how Sean Pertwee portrays the butler in Gotham. (Pertwee is also the pilot of the Lewis and Clark in the film, Event Horizon; one of my guilty favorites among SF movies.) However, it has to be said that Ray Buktenica gave Strange a very odd accent for this episode; sounding vaguely Eastern European of some stripe, which is not what I'd normally identify with the character.

There are a number of other little details that clearly weave this episode into the ongoing thread of BTAS, since Roland Daggett's name is dropped as the owner of the facility where Strange is operating. Also, Competent Robin makes two brief appearances, once in the also returning Batwing. Unlike the rest of the series to date, though, this episode assigned actual color to the irises of Bruce Wayne's eyes. They seemed to be intended for brown, but the way the contrast functioned, they often seemed to be red, which is an interesting trait for our main character. The story itself is relatively thin and doesn't take a lot of turns, especially when the three other villains show up for the auction to reveal to Strange just what dangerous company he's checked into with his scheme (putting aside the likelihood of those three sharing a ride from the airport, given they tend to detest each other in other joint appearances.) It was a moment of mild comedy when they arrived at said airport, with one of Strange's thugs holding the name sign, as if they could somehow miss the appearance of Joker, Two-Face, and Penguin. Indeed, when they arrive, The Joker largely takes over center stage, as is his wont. ("Get outta my face, clown!" "Which one?") Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne checking out the tapes of other people who've been victimized by Strange resembles nothing so much as Vice Principal Richard Vernon rifling through the confidential personnel files in the basement.

But, despite it representing one of those comics where multiple villains show up in place of a plot, the story proceeds decently and has enough space for everyone to be fully-realized in the action, except for Robin, which is no great loss. We get the background flavor of the whole series, with the noir elements of corrupt officials, and the visual cues of the BTAS Gotham City, with the airship bringing the Gotham PD into play to clean up after The Batman, like usual. Again, the similarities with what we're currently watching in Gotham are kind of remarkable, which is what I think helped sell me on this one.

Next time, Catwoman returns in Tyger, Tyger.

Batman: TAS, episode #28: Night of the Ninja

We start with an industrial espionage scene, which is appropriate for the overall theme. In the early 90s, the more modern conception of ninja was that they were useful tools in the conflicts among the zaibatsu. West End Games' TORG had a setting known as Nippon Tech that emphasized this approach and it was something that many other writers and comic creators of the time sought to emulate. So, while it's a tired topic now and really kind of was then, too, writer Steve Perry at least seemed to have grounded the story in an appropriate basis. What this turns out to be is much more of a personal examination of Bruce Wayne, how he deals with his past, and how his obsession has shaped his life. Unfortunately, it also involves Incompetent Robin, who sticks out in the episode like the plot device that he basically is. Come on, kids! Get excited about being the superhero's sidekick who only inadvertently saves people (by tripping an alarm), has obnoxious and non-sensical dialogue ("He can be a major jerk, but ya gotta love him!"), and is somehow running around the rooftops with the world's greatest martial artist as a... green belt. Seriously. The teen/college-aged sidekick is fighting criminals as a green belt of whatever style it is they were practicing. They could've just drawn him as a black belt and still had Bruce Wayne tossing him off the mat and no one would've raised a fuss. This is especially funny when considering Burt Ward, the Robin of the 1960s TV series, who was an actual black belt in karate and used to spar with Bruce Lee.

But let's forget stupid sidekick for a moment and consider the story as a whole. As a tale about Bruce's past, while largely stereotypical (young man trains with aged Japanese master to learn combat mastery), it does allow some room to both study how Bruce interacts with people in that frame of mind (Alfred and Dick are treated with as much disdain as annoying reporter, Summer Gleeson.) This, more than anything, lets us know that The Batman's efforts are a solo endeavor. He's the one-man scourge of crime and no one will ever go as hard as he does and he really doesn't expect anyone else to understand. When contrasted with Kyodokai's (Bob Ito credited only as The Ninja, despite his character having a name repeatedly referred to) equal obsession: to be the best for personal glory and to have everyone acknowledge it, one can see the pseudo-nobility of Bruce Wayne's perspective. He's also presented as more hardcore than necessary, such that he becomes the personal-feelings-bad-guy of the episode, which ties right in with our "antagonist of his own stories" theory. But his adversary is nowhere near as interesting as the usual members of the rogues' gallery, because he's just a plain, old ninja with a serious vanity problem.

I wonder, too, at some of the visual stylings presented. Was Summer Gleeson's mouth as she comes onto a crime scene supposed to precisely mimic the neon billboard of Wayne Cosmetics? Was there a hidden message in the overly broad smile and bright, red lips that I missed? Considering the solid level of the writing, overall, it's certainly possible. I really enjoyed Commissioner Gordon harping on actual police procedure ("Don't touch it! You'll break the evidence chain!") and Kyodokai's allusion to an all-time Alan Rickman line from Die Hard ("I'll have you know I'm an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane, and since I'm moving up to kidnapper, you should be more polite!") when Summer disdains him as "just a common thief!" Perry's presentation of him as blissfully unaware that he'd descended to be everything that he pretended to hold contempt for was smart. That and, despite including Incompetent Robin, using him to free Bruce for a proper showdown with his old rival by not interfering in this personal test, but instead making sure that Summer couldn't interfere with it, demonstrates an awareness of story. That also allowed for the best line of the episode: "Shut up and fight!" Given all of that, we can perhaps ignore the phenomenon of a regular katana repeatedly piercing concrete, both by point and slash which, OK, this is a superhero show.

I went into this one mildly dreading "the ninja thing" but it came out better than I expected, story-wise. Next up, we introduce one of my favorites among the lesser-known Batman villains (and someone who's been excellent in Gotham (we just started season 3)), Professor Hugo Strange, in The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne.

Batman: TAS, episode #27: The Underdwellers

This episode is one of those moments where one wonders if the writers were tasked with taking some liberties to try to expand a weak and very clichéd pitch into something workable. That concern emerges in the opening moments, where The Batman takes time to rescue a couple kids from the top of a moving train. Shall we say that the idea of two kids leaping safely from the back of an elevated train in full flight is less than realistic? But this is an action opening and it carries the theme of The Batman saving children!, you could say. Yeah. That still doesn't make it a better story. They could've just set the story in the winter and had him save a couple kids from shagging buses and it still would've carried the theme effectively. But this episode carries on like that throughout. We have a lead villain, the Sewer King, who talks like Yoda ("Ready I am, yes.") and whose army of child thieves (not an uncommon concept in the adventure story world) are kept in line by a collection of pet alligators. In the sewers. You have to work hard to put this many tired concepts into one story. And that carries over to the execution. Despite them living in the sewers, when The Batman investigates the seeming disappearance of one of the Underdwellers, the answer isn't that the small, lithe, and probably malnourished (hence, thin) child slipped down a storm drain, but instead that there's a secret door built into the wall of a building that our hero discovers with infrared goggles. The Sewer(!) King is living beneath the streets with pet alligators, yet somehow has the technical expertise and wherewithal to install a secret door? Or thinks it's even necessary when his young charges use those sewers as a highway?

This episode hearkens back to a much earlier style of cartoon presentation, where leaps of reason from one moment to the next are simply ignored for the sake of being along for the ride. Unlike much of the rest of BTAS, this episode is Saturday morning cartoon stuff, which is an awfully low reach for a series that, despite the challenge of trying to serve two audiences, has largely done just that to this point in our review. And now suddenly we're presented with Hanna-Barbera level material. It's disappointing. But even if you can accept the abandonment of logic and story structure, it's obvious that said story was thin from the beginning. At one point in the episode, we go through the animation equivalent of about 10 seconds of flavor text: the Batmobile hurtles down roads, bats fly by, it enters the Batcave. None of this is needed for atmosphere unless you're just trying to pad out your production with stock material that would be on hand for any episode of the series. You can shrug your shoulders at just 10 seconds of that, but it doesn't stop there and all of those flavor text seconds can be huge in the context of an episode that only runs 22 minutes. Much of it makes you wonder how closed the production team was, such that outside opinions may not have had enough access to get people back on track. It's like the quote from the villain: "Destroy that costumed freak!", says the guy calling himself the Sewer King, with pet alligators with matching studded collars, wearing 16th-century finery, and who tortures children. Hm.

Technically, you get the Hanna-Barbera vibes from several other aspects. Despite the better overall visual trappings, you see both the villain and The Batman doing "the pose" to little story effect; you see the children all moving and marching in lockstep during crowd scenes, with one exception when the meeting bell is first rung, so we can know that Frog will somehow be the outsider who breaks the mold of their condition. I found it interesting, as well, that the Sewer King resembled no one so much as Callisto, the original leader of the Morlocks in Marvel's X-Men. I don't recall that being a period when subterranean warlords all had to have eye patches and straw-like black hair, but maybe I missed something. Appropriately enough, the voice of the Sewer King was Michael Pataki, who also played Amenophis Tewfik, one of the henchmen of the awful King Tut villain from the Batman TV series in the 60s. To their credit, we're not subject to another "normal guy somehow defeats the combat master" moment, with The Batman engaging in most of his physical exertions against the resident reptiles. There's also one glimpse of sharp dialogue between Alfred and our hero when debating the existence of little green men: "You think I'm crazy, don't you?" "In what sense, Master Bruce?" That is, unfortunately, the high point of our Alfred experience, as he spends a good chunk of the episode trying to corral a wayward child, which doesn't do much for our story other than to waste (more) time. There is also one really excellent visual moment, though, when we see the image of The Batman's chest symbol reflected in the eyes of the cop who's about to run him over in an alley.

But those brief moments can't rescue the overall low quality of this entry, which has become a frequent occurrence in the last few that we've looked at. I don't want to look askance at what follows before even seeing it (after all, I expected little from Perchance to Dream and it turned out OK), but the next episode is entitled "Night of the Ninja". I was just talking about tired concepts, right? Trying to be positive.

Batman: TAS, episode #26: Perchance to Dream

Right away, the relatively routine amnesiac/my life was a dream story that we know is coming gets a bit of a boost when we see the opening credits and the name "Joe R. Lansdale" as the writer. Lansdale is famed for over 40 novels in the genres of horror, mystery, and SF, and as the creator of such cult classics as Bubba Ho-Tep. So, we know we're in the hands of someone who knows how to tell a story from the outset and, pacing-wise, we're not let down. The episode opens with a full-on car chase and transitions quickly from typical Batman adventuring to the jarring displacement of Bruce Wayne without a Batcave, marrying Selina Kyle, and living with his aged parents. None of this is handled with the "shocking moments" approach, either. Just as with the opening scene that plunges us straight into the action, the rest of the episode is told with what I often refer to as "the Howard Chaykin approach", wherein we're just dropped into the story and expected to keep up with what's happening. There's no exposition and little explanation. We're just expected to experience the story at the same rate as our characters do. A dream sequence story is, of course, ideal for this, as we get to feel Bruce Wayne's distress and confusion in the same manner he does. And, of course, as soon as we see The Batman swinging by, the meme-aware among us can only think of the famous Spider-Man vs Spider-Man pic.

The presentation of The Batman is also interesting because we get to see his actions from a completely external perspective. Instead of riding along with our main character, he's an observer like everyone else. The director and animators take full advantage of this opportunity, with one of the more elaborate captures of a criminal while The Batman is swinging on a rope and with a bit more destruction and spectacle than the Darknight Detective normally engages in, especially when matched up against typical thugs, rather than his more visually florid villains. But we're still grounded in the fact that a lot of other things are as expected. Selina Kyle is still voiced by Adrienne Barbeau. Dr. Leslie Thompkins makes a reappearance as the one medical professional that Bruce Wayne can really trust. And Bruce's life is basically idealized and everything he would've wanted if he hadn't been shaped into the hardened weapon by the biggest trauma in his life. You can feel the horror writer coming through the visuals, as well, with the great shadows and elaborate, Gothic-style architecture of the church tower at the cemetery.

The confrontation in that church tower is very much a moment for introspection for Bruce Wayne, as he acknowledges that The Batman is the one responsible for many of his nightmares, but also for the life that he has and which he's been determined to follow. Bruce Wayne is The Batman, as much as The Batman is Bruce Wayne. You can't really separate the two, despite the reassurances of both Alfred and Leslie that Bruce's life isn't completely worthless as simply a dilettante playboy/executive. And then we discover this was all a Mad Hatter scheme. That makes sense in many respects, as the underlying question of Alice's adventures in Wonderland was whether they were all a spectacular dream, or had somehow magically occurred. But it's also only one episode away from when we first met the Hatter, which is a little awkward from a series pacing perspective. ("Him? Again?") Honestly, it was even more questionable based on the two episodes' original broadcast dates, as they were separated by only a week (October 12, 1992 and October 19.) So, it's not like HBO is really breaking stride here, but it's kinda strange for them to have maintained it.

But then we discover that the motivation of the villain is somewhat off-kilter, too. The Hatter claims that he plunged The Batman into this dream world because "You ruined my life!" So, he gave the object of his ire the perfect existence and then proceeded to complain that his target didn't accept it? It would normally be the complete converse. Either you trap your enemy in a nightmare and understand why they would break free or they're not really your enemy, right? Unless the Hatter understands that The Batman needs that torture, that drive, that pain in order to be The Batman? And depriving him of that is more torture than living with the memory of his parents' murder would ever be? That's something that I would expect The Joker to understand, given the deep-rooted connection between our hero and his most famous antagonist. And, if that's the case, why would the Hatter sound so offended that The Batman chose not to accept that dream world? It was either intended to inflict pain because "You ruined my life!" or it was intended to be a gateway to something better which the Hatter would provide for reasons unknown. So, despite a well-told version of a rather hackneyed scenario, the ultimate motivation of the villain seems kind of confusing here. In the end, it's more a tale that tells us something about our main character, with the Hatter as simply a convenient excuse to create it, which is disappointing from a character perspective, but still interesting for the overall series about The Batman.

Next time, we head beneath the streets of Gotham to find The Underdwellers.