Vroom Vroom, I’mma superhero!

I like The Dark Knight. It’s a fun action movie, with some interesting nods toward Bush-era anti-terrorist policy, a pair of great performances from Aaron Eckhart and Heath Ledger, lots of cool gadgets, some cool action. Yeah, it’s got troubling elements: Batman’s silly growly voice, the inability to determine what’s going on in the action sequences (this was a problem with Batman Begins too), some typical superhero fascism (though the film draws enough from the last 20 years of comics to know not to treat this sort of thing as uncomplicated). Basically, it’s everything I look for in a Batman movie: fun escapism.

But don’t tell that to the fanboys - they’re going batshit(!) over this movie! They voted it the #1 film of all time on IMDb (the people’s AFI list) and they’re attacking mob-style any blog or reviewer who DARES to pronounce that the film is not a masterpiece (it isn’t) and that it has troubling implications (it does) and some murky, almost incomprehensible action (yes).

The level of vitriol over these posts is ridiculous - people calling for the head of Keith Uhlich, accusing him of willful contrarianism and over-intellectual ‘nitpicking’ (it’s called close textual analysis, and it’s the bread-and-butter of film criticism, rather than nodding your head at monologues discussing the film’s  ‘themes,’ Johnny Fanboy), claiming that Stephanie Zacharek (who is, to be sure, a critic I often disagree with) doesn’t like movies.

So why the ANGER, fanboys? What do you have riding on this film?

Here’s my thought: much like how I get infuriated when I read an asinine IMDb review of a great movie, fanboys are invested in making sure that people understand them and their obsession: it’s not simply a review of a movie. The fan community wants the reviewer to communicate that yes, their obsession is worthwhile, that there is a deep, important meaning to their stories about men in tights fighting bad people, which is why the phrases “modern mythology” and “like the gods of the Greek pantheon” get tossed around so much. The rehabilitation of comics’ image sees critics like Uhlich and Zacharek - who have very open-minded but rigorous understandings of how movies convey meaning, intentionally or not - as elitist anti-comics enemies. They simultaneously clamor for the critics to not take the films so seriously - don’t review Batman like it’s Bergman, even if the Critical Mass is saying Batman is like Bergman, and so that sort of silliness needs to be dispelled - and to take it very, very seriously - repeating thematic phrases like ‘Manicheanism’ as though these mantras will convince critics that, oh, yes, indeed, the film is a masterpiece - it interrogates Manicheanism! (I’d actually claim that the film rebukes dualistic notions of mankind, but that’s just one man’s opinion). They want critics to take the film seriously, but not to take it seriously enough to call it on its failures.

Related phenomenon: when did Watchmen become ‘the most acclaimed graphic novel of all time’, as seen in the trailer for it before The Dark Knight? Did we forget Maus (a Pulitzer winner!), Jimmy Corrigan, and David Boring when anointing the film to the top of the heap, or is it simply because it’s a comic about superheros that legitimately produces a complex discussion of superheroism? Inquiring minds would like to know.

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