A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 7-9

I think I've already covered the bases with my criticisms of A Series of Unfortunate Events so far, and so I won't repeat myself here other than to say that in this current trio of books, I'm still having trouble buying into a world filled entirely with evil or uncaring adults. I understand that young readers might be able to accept this vision of the universe (as I apparently did when I was younger), but as an adult* now, I find it a little pandering to a young audience and a little lazy on Handler's part in terms of how he keeps the Baudelaires in danger. (I could go into a longer discussion on that second point, but I'm hitting my tolerance threshold for extended discussions of Lemony Snicket.) That carry-over criticism from last time out of the way, on a more positive note, these three books are not nearly as repetitive as the past six were. In fact, The Vile Village, The Hostile Hospital, and The Carnivorous Carnival represent a change of course for the series. Not so much so that the books are unrecognizable, of course: the Baudelaires still outsmart their way out of harm; Count Olaf adopts new, horrible disguises; Snicket begs the reader to stop reading; etc.

But this time around, as if taking a cue from the parody in my previous post, the Baudelaires finally buck up some nerve (I could point out that they're more or less forced to after they're declared murderers but let's just go ahead and give them credit), ditch Mr. Poe, and set out on their own at the end of The Vile Village, thus ending the "Baudelaires-are-stuck-with-a-new-horrible-guardian-until-Olaf-shows-up" structure that has dominated the first half of A Series of Unfortunate Events. Charging unhappily forward, the series shifts its focus (or maybe reveals, depending on how deeply Handler thought the books out when he began them) to a web of mysteries. The books are no longer just about the Baudelaires' surviving Olaf, they're about the secret history that binds together the Baudelaire parents, Count Olaf, the Baudelaires' guardians, and even Lemony Snicket himself. How well Handler pulls this secrets shtick off in the long run remains to be seen (I have vague but unpleasant memories on this front), but in these books at least, it's a smart new direction that helps liven the series up.

That's it! Nice and short, this recap was. Next time: A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 10-12! I'm almost done! Yay!

*Shut up.

The Dark Knight Rises

                   

Haha oh no, it's over! What are you even going to do with your life now? Try to like the new Superman movie? "Why is he lobster fishing? Why does he have a beard? Why are they playing Lord of the Rings music in this trailer? Why isn't Superman dark and gritty like Batman?" and other things nerds say. (Just joshing, nerds, I'm not even not one of you! "Let he who is without the blog post on Batman cast the first 'Nerd!'" -John 8:7.) Speaking of Batman, I recently played the Arkham Asylum game for the first time. It's pretty fun, but as I was mindlessly click-ordering Batman to beat prison thugs senseless, I also felt the pinpricks of mild disturbance. I was reminded of a quote by a long-time comics writer on the necessity of Batman's supervillains. I'm too lazy to look up the quote unable to find the quote, but in essence, he said that without supervillains to fight, Batman ends up being a very unlikable character because he's then just a messed up, rich guy who beats up poor people. His solution to crime and poverty isn't improving the Gotham education system or inviting the poor into his home and feeding them, it's beating them up and throwing them into prison. Batman is basically the opposite of Jesus. (Apparently making The Joker Jesus. "Why so serious?" -John 8:8.)

Now, Batman doesn't have to be a delusional fascist, depending on how his character is interpreted. As much disdain as the campier versions of Batman have received, they actually tend to elide this problem pretty neatly through their sheer un-realism, whether it's Ice Skates Batman, Shark-Spraying Batman, or what have you. But the more disturbing aspects of Batman are especially hard to downplay in a video game like Arkham Asylum because whereas a comic book or movie can center around Batman's fight with a supervillain, video games necessitate a steady supply of generic goons to fight. Arkham Asylum tries to sidestep the inherent discomfort of seeing a rich, self-appointed hero beating up poor people by portraying all its thugs as huge, spiky-haired (mostly white) bullies, but even so, the grossness of the power dynamic isn't quite swept under the rug. (On a slightly related note, the game also has to get creative with its boss battles whenever Batman faces a female villain because nothing shatters the careful fantasy that is Batman like having him hit a woman.) It's not that every Batman game has this problem--Lego Batman is adorable no matter who he's beating up!--it's just that any interpretation of Batman that consciously strives to be dark, adult, and realistic necessarily raises issues about Batman's power, class, and moral authority. All of which brings me back to...

                        

The Dark Knight Rises! (Were you afraid you'd been tricked into reading some sort of Batman video games essay? I guess you were a little bit!) When the movie begins, it's been eight years since Harvey Dent died, and everyone is very sad and grim. Bruce Wayne has spent the past eight years hobbling around his mansion. He has a cane now, which he uses for hobbling. It later turns out he could apparently fix his leg fairly easily, but I guess he chooses not to for eight full years. We wouldn't understand, it's a Batman thing. Chief Gordon is sad too, and he begins a speech about the truth of Harvey Dent but then decides not to give it. Strangely, this is how he begins his actual speech, which seems like it would raise some questions regardless, but no time for that, we have characters to meet and Gothams to explode. Anne Hathaway is a demure maid who turns out to be a, ahem, CAT burglar. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, on whom I've had a man crush (homo) since Angels in the Outfield Brick, is a young orphan cop who answers to Chief Gordon and who is getting increasingly fed up with The System.

At its beginning, the movie seems to be a critique of right-wing politics. Public funding for institutions like schools, orphanages, and reform programs appears nonexistent, and the private sector's wealth is concentrated to a small percentage of citizens (1%, perhaps?) who care little for the poor and who are mostly interested in increasing their own influence and power. Even Bruce Wayne has failed Gotham's underprivileged, enjoying hobbling around unnecessarily on his cane while his charity funds dry up. With few legitimate economic opportunities, the poor have largely turned to lives of crime. Unfortunately for the poor, though, in the wake of Harvey Dent's death, harsh anti-crime laws have been passed (and also possibly a law that forbids anyone from even mentioning the Joker), and the majority of criminals have been thrown in prison. This system is hell for Gotham's poor, while Gotham's wealthy believe they're living in a golden age.

                       
Enter Bane, accompanied by the catchiest little chant in the world. ("Ben, please stop yelling 'Dehshay bahsaruh' at the breadmaker." -my mom) At first, I was pretty excited to see how Bane and his army would figure into the movie's larger political themes. From what we saw in the beginning of the movie, it seemed like we were at least supposed to see where Bane was coming from, what with how everybody in Gotham but for the very richest were broke and/or in prison. Then, of course, Bane loses our sympathy by blowing everything up. Literally, like everything. The football field explodes! The subways explode! Richard Alpert explodes! ("All we found left were his perfect mascara eyes" -scene from The Dark Knight Rises Extended Edition.) Things get very French Revolution-y very quickly, and what began as an uprising of the oppressed quickly devolves into an anarcho-fascist state where Bane and his armed thugs rule the city.

According to Wikipedia (it's called journalistic research, look it up! On Wikipedia!), Christopher Nolan claims The Dark Knight movies are apolitical, which is exactly what I'd lie if angry people were yelling at me. The Dark Knight Rises is very clearly thinking about the political issues Batman raises as a character: where does authority justly lie? What happens when a supposedly just authority abuses his or her power? How should society deal with poverty and crime? The movie approaches these issues, flirts with them, and then ultimately doesn't really go anywhere with them. Or at least doesn't go very far. First base, maybe. I don't know what I'm doing with this analogy anymore. To a certain extent, I appreciate Nolan's refusal to give a grand political statement and to select a particular ideology as the be-all, end-all solution to society's problems. Instead, he seems more interested in exploring systems both right-wing and left and is content tapping into the cracks of these systems without ultimately canonizing any one over the other. That said, my disappointment with this film comes from what I think is its failure to satisfactorily produce any kind of meaningful concluding statement about its larger political themes, especially in regards to the issues Batman raises himself.

                         

In the ending of the film, Nolan seems to want to have it both ways, validating Batman the hero and Bruce Wayne the humanitarian, which Alfred suggested early on in the movie were roles in conflict. At the end of the movie, the orphans' money is a-flowing again, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is ready to don the Bat-stume and become the younger, hotter face of Batman. By the closing scene, JGL has expressed his disgust with and resignation from The System by tossing his badge away in a High Noon/Dirty Harry homage. Shortly before this, Batman tells JGL something or other about the unreliability of any system and about the power of symbols like the Batman. This is about as close as the film gets to resolving its various political themes and ideas, and as such, it was total BS because a) what does that even mean? and b) Batman is not just a symbol floating majestically outside The System, he's a self-appointed crime fighter who raises numerous questions about The System itself and of which he is a participant, not to mention all the questions he raises about poverty and wealth and crime and how he, and vigilantism, and all sorts of things fit into the larger societal picture. I know the orphans get to eat sandwiches now thanks to Batman's money, but wasn't it partly Batman's fault that the orphans faced poverty and crime after orphan graduation in the first place? Not to mention the fact that maybe it's bad in and of itself that children's lives should hang on the whims of unreliable rich people? And are we supposed to take it that Robin will be a more morally upright Batman than Bruce Wayne was or will he just be a sexier Batman? (Just kidding, it is self-evident that he will be a sexier Batman.) I understand and accept "ambivalence to the success of human institutions" as a legitimate perspective, but The Dark Knight Rises's ending didn't strike me as resigned and nihilistic a la the masterful finale of Watchmen so much as just muddled and confused.

However, even as I type these words and formulate fresh, new ways the movie dissatisfied me on a thematic level, purely on a geek level, this movie won my heart, proposed, and now they're married and my heart has a tattoo of Batman on it. So many things in this movie made me grin like an idiot! I loved the way the movie ended up incorporating the classic "Gotham in Isolation" storyline a la Batman: No Man's Land. And it was very clever and satisfying the way the movie mythologized the previous two films to form a story in this movie that brought everything together into one complete arc. Although I have to point out again, I know Heath Ledger passed away and everyone wants to respect his memory and final performance,* but nonetheless, it did feel a little odd to me that no one in the movie even mentioned the Joker. Did he die in the movie world too? He couldn't have been in prison or he would've been running around having the time of his life after Bane's prison break. At any rate, I don't think it would have been disrespectful to Ledger and probably would have benefited the film as a whole if someone had at least mentioned the Joker. As is, the movie goes out of its way in going out of the Joker's way, and he was just too monumental a presence in The Dark Knight to be completely left out of this film without its feeling awkward.

<3 <3 <3

But even though the Joker didn't appear in this movie even in words, everyone else certainly seemed to be in it! Ra's al Ghul was back! The Scarecrow had a great cameo! I had no idea this movie was going to be so full of twists! ("More like The Dark Knight Surprises!" Ben repeated to his girlfriend, as if the problem the previous three times were that she hadn't heard him.) Miranda Tate's secret identity as Talia al Ghul was at once very surprising and then immediately so obvious once she said who she was. (Although your foreknowledge of her existence hinged on how familiar you were with the Batman mythos beforehand, which the guy who just name-dropped No Man's Land a paragraph ago was, if you can even believe it.) Forget Talia al Ghul though! Robin! My grin nearly took over my face as a separate, Batman-loving entity of its own when that secretary revealed that JGL was actually Robin! It was especially so great specifically because Christopher Nolan had previously said in an interview that Robin would never appear in his Batman movies. And it turned out he was just straight-up lying! (I told you he was a liar.) Ha ha! What a wonderful, dishonest man!

So, as mixed feelings as I have about this movie thematically, all those mixed feelings (almost) just melt away in the pure, blazing heat of my geeky affection and my crush on new Hot Batman. TWO BATARANGS UP!


*Oops, I meant the Joker and not Dr. Parnassus.

A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 4-6

                                         
So... this project might have been a bad idea! Or at least choosing to reread A Series of Unfortunate Events might have been a bad idea! At any rate, it's six books in, and I'm getting pretty sick of this series already. Granted, I don't think these books were designed to have been consumed all in one go, but their constant repetitiveness certainly isn't helping either. The series was already starting to grate on me by the time I was skimming my way through the end of The Wide Window last week, but it's getting even worse now because I'm beginning to find the characters annoying too.

As I mentioned in my last post, the Baudelaire children are very mild-mannered. They are polite and demure, poised and virtuous; so much so that sometimes the books read a little like the child-saint hagiographies I had to read in elementary school. The Baudelaire saintliness is admirable in the way it provides young readers with good literary role models, but I am not a younger reader and these kids' passivity is starting to p. me o. (plus it's not like extreme passivity is that great in a role model either). As brash and dunderheaded as Harry Potter is, I'm starting to yearn for some of his devil-may-care attitude in these orphans because at least the boy wizard gets stuff done. In A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Baudelaires mostly wait around for miserable things to happen and then deal with the misery as it befalls them. Their default emotional state is a kind of glum resignation, when by all rights, it should be an almost insane rage. Time after time, the Baudelaires are ignored or cut off by some adult, and they sort of shake their heads sadly and decide it's no use to try arguing further. It's becoming unbearable for me that, even if it wouldn't do them any good, these kids don't scream and cry and plead with every fiber of their beings for someone to listen to them.

I understand that these books take place in a heightened reality in which the characters' emotions are intentionally one-note and somewhat preposterous, but that also doesn't mean that this heightened reality can't also be deeply annoying, especially over the course of thirteen books. By the time Count Olaf shows up in his sixth disguise with his sixth plot which Mr. Poe ignores for the sixth time, it's hard not to feel that perhaps by this point, the Baudelaires should quit moping and start preparing for this sort of thing in advance.

(Taking one look at their miserable new home overseen by their latest incompetent caretaker, Violet turned to her siblings and said, "Right. Enough of this. Klaus, what do you know about firearms?"

Klaus had read many books about firearms in the family library before it had burned down. "From the books I've read," he said, "I think I could explain how to construct a weapon from the items lying about this dilapidated house."

"Aboutime!" Sunny shrieked, which meant something like, "And I could put my tiny, sharp teeth to good use biting these bits of metal on the floor into bullets!"

Tying her hair up with a ribbon, Violet said, "Klaus and Sunny, with your respective researching and biting abilities, I think I could invent something to help us stop Count Olaf."

An hour later there was a knock at the door. Before the Baudelaires could even look up from their project, the door swung open to reveal a surprise most loathsome--a word here meaning "not very surprising at all because it was the horrible Count Olaf."

Wrapped from head to toe in bandages, Olaf appeared to be disguised as some sort of patient afflicted with a terrible skin disease. But even through the bandages, Olaf's nasty smile and gleaming eyes could be--

Violet shot Olaf in the face with a handgun.

"Violet!" Mr. Poe cried, approaching from the kitchen doorway. "You've just killed that poor, skin-diseased man!"

Not even bothering to respond, Klaus pulled Olaf's pant leg up to reveal the incriminating eye tattoo on Olaf's ankle. Violet dropped the homemade gun into Mr. Poe's arms with one hand and dropped the microphone she'd also invented onto the ground with the other hand. And walking side by side, the Baudelaires left behind the miserable house and their miserable lives as Sunny called back "FUUUU!" which meant something unfit to be printed here. The End.)

Parodies aside, I also feel that story-wise, things are similarly getting a little too unrealistic in this second installment of books, even within the heightened reality the Series has established. Gone more or less entirely are those dark moments of realistic violence that gave the series a sense of genuine danger. It's all derring-do and standard adventure-story peril now, or at least it is in Books 4-6. Perhaps because of the difficulty of significantly incorporating an infant into an adventure story, Sunny's storylines in particular tend to push things into a Roald Dahl level of fantasy that doesn't quite feel in keeping with the tone that's been established. In the climax of The Miserable Mill, for instance, Sunny uses her sharp teeth to engage in an actual sword fight with an adult woman. Not only did this stick out for me as unusually and disconcertingly fantastical for the Series, I also just found it difficult to imagine logistically (plus it hurt my teeth to think about, which, admittedly, might have been the intent).

On the bright (gloomy?) side, there are some signs in these books that Handler's getting a little restless too and that he's begun exploring ways to shake things up a bit. In The Miserable Mill, in which the Baudelaire children are shipped off to a lumber mill and forced to overcome Olaf's plot to hypnotize Klaus, Violet must research books in order to save her siblings while Klaus must learn to do some impromptu inventing. It's not a huge shake-up, but at least it indicates a willingness to change. In The Austere Academy, Handler reveals the first signs of a larger storyline at work in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Sent to live in a boarding school, the Baudelaires meet the Quagmire Triplets, also orphans and also future inheritors of a large fortune. Before the book's end, though, Olaf has kidnapped the Quagmires, but not before one of them yells out the notorious acronym "V.F.D." In The Ersatz Elevator, another major character comes into play for the first time in Esmé Squalor, a fashion obsessive and all-around miserable human being. Not much more is revealed in terms of what the grand plot of the series is, but this book at least makes clear that there is indeed a grand plot: the infamous V.F.D. is brought up again (although its meaning still remains unclear), and the Baudelaires discover a secret tunnel running under the city, one that leads up into where the Baudelaire home once stood.

These aren't game-changing developments, and they don't do much to diminish my existent complaints about the Series. But from these various changes and hints at a larger mystery, there's hope at least--and I do seem to recall this being at least partly true--that in the next installment of books, Handler breaks even more from established formula and tries even newer things and newer ideas in A Series of Unfortunate Events.


Next week: A Series of Unfortunate Events: Books 7-9! Will I enjoy these next books more than I did 4-6? Let's hope so! It's much nicer to enjoy things than to not enjoy them!