Speaking of games, last night when I got home, The Game was on.
So I plopped down on the couch and watched about a half an hour of the excellent 1997 David Fincher movie starring Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, and Deborah Kara Unger (who probably played every mysterious and slightly off blonde in 90s cinema).
What an excellent movie, and very underrated as a nice little thriller.
I have it on DVD somewhere and hope to watch it properly again soon.
There’s a great joke in there about Ethel Kennedy too.
Random film fun facts: It was originally to star Jodie Foster (as the Sean Penn character), who was dropped by the studio. She then sued the pants off them. But it made it especially nice that she was then able to do The Panic Room (after Nicole Kidman dropped out due to injury) with Fincher. Spike Jonze cameos at the end as an EMT. And the script had a polish done by Andrew Kevin Walker, who probably does some script doctor work on every film Fincher does.
In other, unrelated viewing news, looking for the pilot of Virtuality on Hulu this morning, I instead found the much talked about pilot to The Philanthropist, the new show from Tom Fontana, starring James Purefoy (best known not just as Marc Anthony in Rome, but the guy who who did a full frontal nude scene and had them digitally enhance his penis, and was also the guy fired as V from V From Vendetta), Jesse L. Martin (I mention that just for you, Benjie Light), Neve Campbell (apparently back from exploring the Where Are They Now? voidspace), Lindy Booth (that’s for both of us, Light), and Omar from The Wire.
I dig the premise: Essentially a jackass of a rich man, think Tony Stark-lite, going around the world trying to soothe his demons and solve the world’s problems with money. Brilliant! Unfortunately, the show is incredibly mediocre and Purefoy is the television equivalent of watching paint dry in an empty room in a brothel.
This show belongs on USA or TNT or wherever dreck like Burn Notice dazzles the mediocre and undiscerning.
And man, they write Omar’s character as possibly the worst bodyguard in history. Plus, when Purefoy gets lost in Africa and surrounded by some bad dudes, who great would it have been to have heard, “Hey Africa… OMAR COMIN!’”
Omar fun fact: Michael K. Williams actually got his start dancing in Janet Jackson videos. That’s just awesome.
Lindy Booth was gorgeous as always though.
Okay, back to whatever you were doing. Happy Saturday night.
A laser watch? 007 gets a laser watch. Come on, throw me a frickin’ bone here, man.
The other night I was reading an interesting big on a variant of the Fermi paradox, but dealing with time travel, and I really wished I had saved the link. The Fermi paradox, by the way, is contradiction of… Well, if there are aliens out there, higher civilizations, or at least something more advanced than class 1 or 2 civilization and capable of traveling between worlds, then why haven’t we been contacted them (and no, abducting wack jobs and cattle and anal probing the hell out of them is not “contact,” no matter how right it’s done). Essentially the same idea applies to time travel: If people could come back from the future, then why haven’t they?
Especially if you think about how a person from a few decades in the future could travel back with the common cold from their time period to now, when we don’t have those several decades worth of immunities, and do some serious damage.
Oh well. I guess that just leaves us angry time travelers, all stuck going forward only and at the same speed.
All right, you primates, listen up…
I’m from the future, man. And I’m high!
Come with me if you want to talk about groping and economic reform in hard times.
Oh well, I guess that for now… that’s all we have. The here and now:
Now is the era of the end of excess. If you’ll excuse me, I’m just gonna go slip into my little time machine and go back in time (and maybe buy some Apple stock or something). Catch you in another time, another place.
Ugh. Lost is a repeat tonight . Wasn’t the whole point of these 24-style super runs in bunches that there would be a signifigant lack of repeats? Guess not (supposedly there’ll be another break week after episode 12). But now I can’t wait for next week’s episode, entitled “Namaste,” not so much for the reunion of Sawyer and Kate, but for the continuation of the 1970′s Geronimo Jackson dance party!
Reviewing the film version of Watchmen is inevitable but I’m going to give you two reviews. The first is the shorter one, the one for the more spoiler conscious, and the simplest and easiest to understand: The joke here is on us.
The second review… is about the same. The joke is still on us, not just as fans of the comic, but as people who enjoy good stories, decent acting, and quality filmmaking. Director Zack Snyder comes from the same slow motion then quick speed up school of snooze action as Peter Jackson, but not just that, he also has Jackson’s knack for diving head first into works that are far too big for him and then adapting them as if they were a piece of shit that just needed a flashlight and a camera pointed at them.
I’d love talk to you about the original comic, the graphic novel, and how in comparison to it’s greatness, the film is so horrible. And I will, but don’t worry, I am fully aware that I’ll be screaming at the top of my lungs in a room filled with deaf people.
As for the original graphic novel, by Alan Moore (whose name smartly, or perhaps sadly, doesn’t appear anywhere on the adaptation) and Dave Gibbons, I could talk forever. I’d love to, in fact. We could talk about the original Charlton characters that got switched over into the story’s characters (Blue Beetle becoming the Nite Owl and the Question becoming Rorschach), and we could talk about why there is no letters column in the back of each issue (Alan Moore opted to go with the text backups to offer more depth into the huge world he was creating and because he didn’t want to print fan’s letters; he didn’t want to give them the idea their feelings mattered and rightfully so). We could talk forever about the fractal nature of the episodes within the larger story and we could talk about the two tools of a writer that Moore always uses perfectly: resonance and juxtaposition. We could talk about all of this and more, but it comes down to something simple with the original story in that no matter how much you like the story, if you think it’s just good, or if you think it’s great, or even brilliant, you have to agree on something very simple: It works. It just does.
Tonight I went to a screening of this film – called ” the most anticipated film of the new century,” or so I overheard a barista say in a Starbucks the other day and the very idea of that sends chills up and down my spine – with my associates Benjamin Light and Occam Razor. “Now Watchmen fans know how I felt after viewing Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy,” Benjamin Light says, and I agree with him perfectly. I feel his pain here.
On the way home, we discussed how a lot of the reasons why some of the idiots out there will love this film is evocative of what’s wrong with a good deal of the filmgoing public these days: They love cool shit. They love cool scenes. On it’s own, that’s not a problem. There’s a lot of films that I hate, but they have great moments in them. But there’s no longer an understanding of what a film is anymore, that it’s more than just a collection of “cool scenes” thrown against a wall of projected light with the significant hope that maybe, just maybe, it’ll work. We also discussed how, despite it being a cliche of it’s own (and cliches are not something this movie is a stranger to), this film could not be more soulless. More so than The Matrix even, and that is quite the feat.
To save us all a lot of time, I’ll list off just a few things that are wrong about this movie:
The direction.
The writing.
The casting.
The frequent willingness to dive into pointless montages just about always.
The constant and bizarre violence that wasn’t needed – if it’s there for shock value, it’s a laughable shock, I promise you – and the weird gore that came with it.
The oddly graphic sex scene set to “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen (I will attach kudos to using the original song and not the Jeff Buckley cover) that was… a bit too much i.e. weird thrusting. Zach Snyder, you are a weird little kid.
The poor special effects. I know the marketing budget for this film was astronomically ridiculous, but where did the rest of the money go?
The cut corners in just about everything. Or, as you could probably call it, the watering down.
The score. It worked so much better on Beverly Hills 90210, I promise you.
The bizarre “cameos” by real life people like Pat Buchanan and Lee Iacocca.
The lack of the giant fucking Cthulhu-esque squid at the end. You know what I’m talking about. It would’ve been so big and so weird and so perfect. It could’ve been the opening starship pan from A New Hope. It could’ve… well, giant fucking squids just make everything better, right?
The way that the filmmakers took one of Time magazine’s top 100 novels of the last century and turned into a parody of anything good. The all too willingness to take a piece of quality material and do it anything but right. The idea that if Darren Aronofsky and Terry Gilliam or even an overrated schlub like Paul Greengrass tried and were unable to do this film justice that someone like Zack Snyder could. Seriously. The guy who directed 300? Come on.
Now, as for something that the film did incredibly right… Let me get back to you, okay?
Shockingly, Roger Ebert gave this film four stars, but if you read his review, he’ll tell you that even he doesn’t know why, or even what’s going on here. He gets one thing completely right though: This is a film complete without nuance and it’s hand delivered to an audience who doesn’t think complex thoughts.
One last pet peeve about the film before I pour myself a drink and try to put this all out of my head: In the theater for an after 9 o’clock showing tonight there was more than a few kids. In this R rated film with lots of violence (which I know, I know, I know that no one really cares about protecting our kids from) and some sex. There wasn’t just a few kids there, there were a lot of kids. I still get carded at times going into certain films or bars, so this shocks me. Why weren’t they kids given some long island iced teas so they might actually enjoy the movie while they were there? And more importantly, why weren’t they enjoying them at home instead with a marathon of Heroes episodes?
Eh, I’d love to say more here, or end this on a funny note, but what do you expect? The Comedian is dead.
I was stalking through the internet yesterday looking for people’s thoughts on 8 1/2 and where “asa nisi masa” was sprinkled about the world (it’d make the ultimate tattoo, body art freaks), I happened upon a blog of a woman whom appears to be a teacher, and she was talking about how she was teaching her students the classic Fellini film that week (the week she posted the blog, back in September of 2007). One of the commenters on her blog mentioned that she should take a gander at the Pauline Kael review of the movie, citing that the venerable critic hated the movie and it’s pretentious intellectualism, saying, “Fellini throws in his disorganized ideas and lets the audience sort out their meanings for themselves.” I think that’s called the Tarantino method, only Fellini is of course a real filmmaker and Tarantino is a fan boy with connections.
Pauline Kael then goes on to quote the film itself, when the wife says to the husband, “If you had any brains you’d take them out and play with them.” Which segues nicely into me saying that this, in the movie, all has to do with a seemingly orthodox fear of onanism and exploring a healthy guilt-free sexuality.
The commenter on that blog who mentioned the Kael review also essentially remarked that anything he said should be taken with a grain of salt after all, because he had only seen the movie once. And then he added, “Einmal ist keinmal.”
Being the third time I’d heard this phrase in the span of a few weeks, my ears (or eyeballs, I guess) perked up. I believe in connections. I don’t really put much faith in sweet little fictions like God, or Jesus as he’s known (I’m sorry, but I find it hard to believe that a carpenter who looked like Barry Gibb who was strolling around in sandals and wowing the hoi polloi with simple street magic should be my messiah), but I do believe in a much higher power in this sometimes breathtakingly beautiful, sometimes surprisingly fucked up universe: Synchronicity.
Yesterday it was asa nisi masa, the anima and the animus, and now it’s synchronicity. Somehow it always comes back to Jung, doesn’t it? Don’t just take my word for it, though I’m pretty sure this happy looking Asian couple will agree with me:
Einmal ist keinmal is a simple German phrase that literally translates as “once is never.” Or, if you want to get much looser: “Once is never enough.” But that has slightly positive connotations, doesn’t it? From what I read, when used in commonplace German conversations (which I imagine involves lots of yelling and screaming because, after all, it’d be Germans having this conversation)(and I know what you’re thinking, cause it’s the same thing I’m thinking when I see a bunch of Germans talking: “Hitler, Hitler, Hitler…”)(If you’re pondering where the humor is there, I don’t mind telling you: It’s in the racism) it pretty much denotes a having to prove something by doing it more than once.
Like I said, the blog comment yesterday was the third encounter I’ve had with this phrase popping it’s way into my life. The second was about a week ago when I was having a conversation with an incredibly smart and strikingly beautiful German girl in a bookstore. She was loud and very domineering (Hitler, Hitler, Hitler!), but in a very wonderfully European way, as was her freeness and her very casual charm. We almost ran into each other on the fiction aisle, both of us not really looking where we were going as we were thumbing through the I’s (that’s almost a meta comment right there). This lead to a conversation about Kazuo Ishiguro. I said I was a fan of his and she said she’d only read one of this books. “It was good,” she told me in a way that didn’t make her accent sound like culture vomit. “Very easy, very free flowing in a nice way, but you know… Einmal ist keinmal.”
And I have to tell you that she was impressed that I actually knew what the expression meant, and I did, because I had seen it a few weeks earlier when I was reading MOME #11. If yo don’t know what it is, MOME is a quarterly literary journal conceived by Gary Groth and published by Fantagraphics that’s primary storytelling medium is sequential art rather than prose, and featuring a lot of stars of the independent, high minded comics scene like Andrice Arp, Al Columbia (who killed Big Numbers), Jim Woodring, Sophie Crumb, Dash Shaw, and many others. It’s typically a fun read and nice for those of us who just can’t fucking afford Kramers Ergot.
Killoffer was the headliner of Vol. #11 with a story called, surprise, surprise, “Einmal Ist Keinmal.” Killoffer is a French artist and writer and one of the co-founders of an independent French comics publisher called L’Association. He doesn’t acknowledge it, but his style is a very experimental take on ligne claire(what that means to you is Hergé and a future Adventures ofTintinmovie coming to a theater near you soon, directed by Steven Spielberg and written by Steven Moffat). He only has one book published in America so far, but he’s considered one of the best of the foreign artists being sought for more appearances stateside.
Killoffer’s “Einmal Ist Keinmal” fits in nicely to vol. #11 of MOME with it’s strong focus on visuals rather than text. The black and white 12 page story going about her life, waking up, showering, going to work, dealing with coworkers, going out to eat, dreaming, watching the news, etc. except that every man she sees or encounters looks exactly like Killoffer. Every man she works with is Killoffer. Every man on the street is Killoffer. Every guy on the mass transit system is Killoffer. When she sees the President on the TV, he’s Killoffer. The only deviation from this is in a dream she has where the man she meets has Killoffer’s hair but her face. Things get intimate and when she begins to fondle her potential dream lover’s penis we discover that hiding there in his foreskin is Killoffer’s very distinct head. That’s a striking image in particular, but the stark black and white works nicely with the vague nightmare-ish quality to the story that’s either an interesting take on the male gaze, or the fact that Killoffer loves himself. Or that he has a hard time drawing male figures that don’t look like him (which fits neatly with his English language book, The 676 Apparitions Of Killoffer). I won’t spoil the story’s excellent final mise-en-scène, but it works nicely.
It’s a nice introduction to the artist and at some point, I think I’d like to look at some more of his work, so I should get his book and have a look at it. Einmal ist keinmal!
It would also be a shame of me not to mention that the phrase is used to mean “what happens might as well never have happened” in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness Of Being. The books falls into the category of those classics that I’ve started and sadly not finished (something the fraulein in the bookstore gave me a good deal of shit about rightfully so), but maybe someday? Maybe. I do remember from it the notion that womanizing is man’s essential es muss sein! and that life basically sucks, full of unbearable lightness, and we all have only one life to live and therefore everything we do or decide is pointless and insignificant. The Prague Spring and super hyper existentialism! Oh, and eventually it made into a movie with Daniel Day-Lewis, Lena Olin, and Juliette Binoche that I’m told has it’s fair share of eroticism in it.
Now I totally want to see a future Counterforce post called “The Unbearable Lightness Of Benjamin,” don’t you? Ha ha!
As you may’ve seen an associate of this very blog say in the comments in my previous post, there will be some form of posse from Counterforce at next year’s Wondercon in San Francisco. I’d say we’ve established decent nerd cred for that already, right? Einmal ist keinmal! I’d like to sporatically continue talking about various independent comics and graphic novels here and there, but I believe my next post will probably be about Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and the slaying of the manxome Jabberwock. See you then.
An appreciation, of sorts, of the work of John Singer Sargent. And of Madame X…
I’m sure we all have our own Madame X lingering somewhere, but today I want to talk about American painter John Singer Sargent’s The Portrait Of Madame X. and it’s subject, Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautreau (born January 29, 1859 and died sometime in 1915), a Parisian socialite, artist’s model, and American ex-patriate. She was married to French banker Pierre Gautreau, and during her life she was known for her delicate beauty, her hourglass figure, and her especially ivory like skin. She was also known for her numerous infidelities.
The above portrait of her had it’s debut in 1884 at the Paris Salon, and the most anticipated of the paintings making it’s first showing there, partly because of Sargent’s reputation growing increasingly vogue but also because of Gautreau herself, a well respected if notorious woman, and one of the most sought out models at the time. Women wanted her lavender complexion and fashion style and painters wanted to capture it.
The painting above, however, isn’t the original version. The one that did debut that day at the Paris Salon was exactly the same, only the jeweled strap of the dress hung off her shoulder, raising the sex appeal quotient scandalously. Madame Gautreau’s own mother complained and begged Sargent to withdraw the portrait. Famously, he refused, informing her that he had painted her daughter “exactly as she was dressed, that nothing could be said of the canvas worse than had been said in print of her appearance.” Later, he did paint over the fallen strap and repainted a more secured one on her shoulder, which is the one you see above. A version of the original you now see below:
“One more struggle,” the reviewer in the French paper Le Figarosaid on the possiblity of further revealment concerning that strap hanging so seductively, “and the lady will be free.”
I’m paraphrasing all of this from the variousWikipediapages (one of which explains how the dress is made and what holds it together and asserts that one fallen strap, even two fallen straps, wouldn’t cause the dress to fall) and an excellent write up down here at Evil Slutopia, all of them very worth reading. The dress she wears, the way she reveals so much skin was incredibly provocative at the time and her pose is brilliantly sexually suggestive, having required more than 30 sittings with the model and artist before Sargent saw what he wanted.
Evil Slutopia quotes from a fascinating look about the painting, Gautreau, and Sargent as well called Strapless by Deborah Davis: He wrote about his struggles with “the unpaintable beauty and hopeless laziness of Madame Gautreau,” and in a letter to his friend Albert de Belleroche, “Mme. Gautreau is at the piano driving all my ideas away.”
They must’ve had a great time working together. The scandal that erupted from how risque the portrait was perceived to be caused Miss Gautreau to retire from society afterwards, though she was painted again by Gustave Courtois in a style that directly paid homage to the Sargent portrait, but was much better received publicly.
It’s fascinating since today it’s getting harder for a starlet to get out of a car without some photographer laying on the ground with a camera pointed up her skirt to capture a picture of her vagina. Or for a woman to go on a vacation with a married man without photographers drooling at the chance to snap topless photos of a “secret romantic break.” And yet, there’s Sargent’s Madame X, so scandalous in it’s day and age, so highly thought of in the modern age.
In 1907, Sargent was offered knighthood by Her Majesty’s government but he declined it, preferring instead to keep his American citizenship. He was “the unrivaled recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours, paid excessive court to both,” said critic Robert Hughes. In 1927, Evan Charteris wrote, “to live with Sargent’s water colors is to live with sunshine captured and held, with the luster of a bright and legible world, ‘the refluent shade’ and ‘the Ambient ardours of the noon.’” And painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, whom Sargent did a portrait of 1886, said after Sargent’s death that his sex life “was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger.”
Originally I was inspired to write about Sargent after discovering a pretty generic book of his art a few days ago. I flipped through only a few pages, and knew I wanted to go read about the painter. I’d seen The Portrait Of Madame X years ago, but had completely forgotten about it and was happily reminded of it due to some rudimentary investigation online this morning. But originally I just wanted to talk about Sargent’s work in general. Sargent “made everybody look glamorous. Taller. Thinner. But they all have mood, everyone of them has a different mood,” Andy Warhol said back in 1986. But, not just his work, I wanted to talk about the little connections that I saw springing out from the man, like the fact that one of his critics was another painter by the name of Walter Sickert. Sickert was like the Eli Roth of painters in that time period and seems to be more famously known more for his connections to the Jack The Ripper case than his actual creative work.
Sickert believed that he had rented a room from a woman after Jack himself had lodged there, but many believe that Sickert himself probably was the Ripper. Some look upon that theory with derision, but either way, it’s a fascinating theory when you look at the evidence. And Sickert of course was also a character in Alan Moore’s brilliant From Hellgraphic novel about the Ripper murders, playing a small but pivotal part by making the fatal introductions that got the whole wheel of fire spinning.
The latest issue (#10) of Frank Miller’s comic book The Goddamn BatmanAll-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder was recently pulled from shelves because of adult language which wasn’t quite censored well enough for powers that be at parent company DC, and because quite possibly, a lot of the foul language revolved around teenage heroine Batgirl…
Clearly, as you can see above, Batgirl takes care of business. The little black bars over the offensive words (as you can also see above) weren’t printed dark enough, so you could also make out comments from the crowd such as “little jail bait CUNT’s making us look bad… we cut her, come on…” and “…sweet little piece in sweet slices… tasty sliced booty the little CUNT…” (Miller is obsessed with throwing certain words into all caps for crazy amounts of emphasis.) So far (the fact that there’s actually been ten issues of this full blown off the rails crazy ass trainwreck amazes me), this is the best part of the comic which was depicted Batman as a borderline psychotic (which may be a fair assessment) doing a bad Clint Eastwood impression, especially since he’s abducted a 13 year old boy and subjected him to some rather bizarre things, then had sex with Black Canary right after beating up a gang of thugs (“We leave the masks on. It’s better that way”), and shown heroes like Superman and Green Lantern as spineless morons. In fact, one of the few things I do like about this series (besides Jim lee’s overdrawn but occasionally beautiful art), is the depiction of Wonder Woman as an incredibly tough Amazon who’s disgusted by the lack of balls and inaction of the ubermensch in man’s world.
Oh, and shoehorned into this great big mess is Batgirl, too.
The purpose of the All-Star line of comics was to present to the reader a purer version of their favorite iconic characters, without all the hassle of continuity and paying lip service to all that’s come before. You could distill a simple story down to it’s basic and most essential elements, as delivered to you by the best and the brightest in the industry. It’s part of the reason why All-Star Superman (which just ended) is one of the greatest fucking things you’ll ever read, making Superman not only relevant again, but perhaps making Krypton’s last son actually interesting to this generation for the first time. But those same guidelines are what makes Frank Miller’s bat shit crazy, women hating serial so fascinating in a bizarre sort of way.
There was talk a while back of doing an All-Star Batgirl, which I would’ve enjoyed seeing because I’ve realized from how bad Frank Miller’s comic is that I really like the character. In fact, if my love of the teenage heroines of Neal Stephenson’s work and of stuff like Buffy proves anything, I like seeing teenage girls as lead characters in stories. Maybe I just like looking at attractive young women kicking ass? Well… yeah, but who doesn’t? But I also just prefer female characters (I should add “well written female characters” there, because that is something of a rare commodity), just because women tend to be more rational and logical, and possibly at times more emotional, which frankly makes for better storytelling. Especially in the teenager years, when all the pain and frustration and curiosity and excitement of growing up beings to crystallize. For guys during that period of their lives, it’s nothing but sex fantasies and getting high in their rooms with Bruce Springsteen albums, but as pop culture has shown us in the last few years, for girls it’s all about going out into the night, taking on impossible odds with nothing but a reliance on one’s self, a limited arsenal of weapons and and deadly puns, and making the world a better place.
And that’s the kind of thing I can get behind.
The Batgirl used in the Miller’s comic is the classic and best known: Barbara Gordon, daughter of Batman’s ally on the police force, Commissioner James Gordon. Here she’s only about 15, but in other iterations she’s been adult (head of the Gotham City Public Library at one point). She’s not the first version of the character, but she’s by far the most popular.
The original Batwoman, whom the original Batgirl was copied off of, seemed to be to be exactly what the critics called her: A cheap imitation of Batman, an attempt to pander towards women. The Sarah Palin of comic book heroines, if you will. The two of them were retconned out and in came the new version, the Barbara Gordon Batgirl. Inspired to action by her hero, the Batman, Babs took the Bat motif as her own and instantly made it her own. For a long time she was on her own, with no support or acknowledgement from Batman, but soon her skillz and efforts had to be appreciated and she was welcomed into the Bat family with open arms (especially by the Robin of the time, whom developed a life long crush on young Babs). The Bat family, it should also be pointed out, was an attempt to prove Wertham’s Seduction Of The Innocentwrong and show that something much more wholesome and American was going on in the Batcave.
The nice thing about DC comics over it’s rivals out there is that the characters are allowed to grow and mature and change, even if it is only glacially. Whatever demons and inner drive that Barbara Gordon felt that compelled to her put on a mask and costume and those fancy boots and risk her life day in and out, she eventually was able to work through it and move past it. She didn’t have that certain crazy that Batman and his teenage wards had. It wasn’t a junkie thrill or unbeatable obsession for her, like it was for them, and eventually she retired from the costumed vigilante game, deciding to be a normal young woman with a normal young life. It was a nice ending for the character. Or, at least, it should’ve been. Of course, this is back before we had a name for the woman in refrigerators syndrome.
One night, while enjoying a quiet evening in with her father, there was a knock on the door. And at the door was The Killing Joke, the classic 1988 Batman tale by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland that changed everything forever for Barbara Gordon. The Joker, wanting to prove to Batman and the Commissioner that all it took for someone to end up as crazy as him was just one bad day. And he made Barbara Gordon, unaware that she was ever Batgirl, the subject of that bad day by shooting her through the spine, crippling her, and then sexually assaulting her and photographing it to show her father later. The story is good on it’s own terms, and was one of the many research pieces used in preparing for The Dark Knight, even while it steps on the characters that many fans loved. It also manages to end both on both a very emotionally true ending that also manages to feel incredibly false as the Joker and Batman share a good hearty laugh.
Somehow the Joker survives all of this, as a testament to Batman staying true to his own morals and not resorting to murder, despite what the Joker did to Batgirl or that he killed one of Batman’s partners. And the story, while good, proves one of the major points of the women in refrigerators syndrome: Big events such as these in a male character’s story are something that usually easily reversed, but for female characters, they’re permanent. In Bab’s case, that’s (sadly since she’s been put in this position) probably a good thing because of how callous it would be to see her suddenly overcome being handicapped.
But instead, she became very handicapable, and possibly became one of the most realistically powerful characters in the DC universe of comics. She, still in her wheelchair, adopted the moniker Oracle, letting her intellect take center stage (while still being very capable in a form of martial arts called eskrima despite her paralysis) and became a sort of information broker to the heroes. She backed up the Justice League with her super computer skills and eventually formed a group called the Birds Of Prey, made up of other female heroines that, as written by Gail Simone, who started the Women In Refrigerators website, provided a shining example of female characters done right in comic books.
In the mainstream DC universe, that’s still where she essentially is, until something new and horrible is planned to have happen to her (current editor-in-chief Dan Didio seems to be on a personal mission to kill all the pretty girls). And the Birds Of Prey concept briefly became a TV show on the CW (well, WB back then) in the kind of watered down Smallville format (thankfully they didn’t go with the young Bruce Wayne show). I’ve seen bits and pieces of a handful of episodes and wasn’t really impressed despite the fact that I thought Barbara Gordon was played well by Dina Meyer. They even did a flashback episode to her days as Batgirl:
…who was brought in towards the end of the 60s Batman show with Adam West and Burt Ward as an infusion of fresh blood to hopefully stave off the declining ratings. She represents everything that you remember fondling and despise about that show: It’s bright, ludicrous campiness, it’s purely bubble gum attitudes towards everything, and it’s pop sexism. While not having as much impact as maybe Julie Newmar as Catwoman (or Eartha Kitt for that matter), I’d definitely say that Craig’s Batgirl caught my eye since she was my first introduction to the character. I mean, even though it was fake in that particular series, who doesn’t love a red-headed superheroine? No one, that’s who. Enjoy this incredibly ridiculous theme song they gave her:
“What is your scene, baby? We just gotta know!” Amazing stuff right there. “Yeaaahh, who’s baby are you?” Since Barbara Gordon hung up her yellow cape and boots in the comics, there’s been at least three more women to wear some form of the outfit and name, with one of them being an incredibly good match (despite her initially not being allowed to speak, seriously) for the title, but has been since turned evil (under Didio’s edict that if we can’t kill off the pretty girls, then by God, we can ruin them!), but that move proved both awful and absurd, so they’ve been working to slowly counter it. Something similar was done to one of my favorite teen heroines, but it’s been clear that as they attempt to restore them to status quo there’s just no editorial emphasis on doing it right or making the characters interesting again, just on minimizing complaints. Sigh.
It’s a shame. And while I don’t expect to, or really want to for that matter, see an incarnation of the Batgirl character in the current film direction, I would like to suggest that Warner Bros. consider that they do have a small goldmine in this character. A smart, cute girl who can be strong and fragile, dressed in black leather, swinging from the rooftops at night, kicking ass and cracking wise? That’s a license to print money right there. Or, at least slutty Halloween costumes:
The last comment I’ll make is about those who would say that Wonder Woman is the ultimate feminist super hero icon…
Normally I’d agree with you people. Especially back when it looked like Joss Whedon might be handling the movie, because at least then you knew you’d get a character treated with some class and dignity who’d be taken seriously and that there’s probably be a pretty decent movie coming out of the whole thing.
But does she have to wear that outfit? Whenever I see her in that getup, I can’t stop thinking about patriotic porn… which is cool.
There’s nothing cuter than 
And yet, it leaves me wondering about the simple things in life. Happiness. Love. Acceptance. Security. And also, 
I mean, 
Granted, 
A laser watch? 007 gets a laser watch. Come on, throw me a frickin’ bone here, man.
The other night I was reading an interesting big on a variant of 
Especially if you think about how a person from a few decades in the future could travel back with the common cold from their time period to now, when we don’t have those several decades worth of immunities, and do some serious damage.
Oh well. I guess that just leaves us angry time travelers, all stuck going forward only and at the same speed.
All right, you primates, listen up…
I’m from the future, man. And I’m high!
Come with me if you want to talk about groping and economic reform in hard times.
And people who paint 
“The Decider” is 
Oh, and today is the day that SKYNET takes over! Er, I mean, 
This actually makes a certain kind of sense. 
Say hello to the 
Ugh. 
And then there’s 
from 
