The Penguin

Watching The Penguin is a deeply unpleasant experience. 

That's not a criticism. Presumably, it is supposed to be. The protagonist, Oz Cobb (nee Oswald Cobblepot) is portrayed as a genuine monster. His own mother thinks he's the devil. Normally, when villains and gangsters take centre stage, they are shown to have redeeming features. The Penguin has none. He's so amoral he makes Richard the Third seem like a nice chap.

Batman is probably more than any other character defined by his Rogues Gallery. Even if you aren't a fan you have heard of Joker, Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman.... If you read graphic novels you can list half a dozen more. Superman really only has the bald guy; and possibly the guy with the unpronounceable name. Most of Batman's enemies are grotesque and comical and very probably mad. The Penguin is posh and aristocratic. He wears tuxedos and top hats. He has a cigarette and a cigarette holder and usually carries an umbrella. In the Silly Era, gimmick-laced umbrellas were his modus operandi. Unlike Joker and Riddler, he's not a clown, although Burgess Meredith brought a large touch of W.C Fields to the 1960s TV characterisation.  

One could see the point of giving The Joker his own movie franchise. The Joker is iconic. The evil killer clown has a certain archetypal charm even when isolated from Bat-lore. The guy with the hat and the nose and umbrella, not quite so much. Especially when you take away the hat and the umbrella. 

In the last but one cinematic version of Batman, Penguin was the secondary antagonist. The main bad guy was the Riddler. The Riddler was a very minor comic book villain made unavoidably iconic by Frank Gorshin in the TV show. The comic book and TV versions of the Riddler wore silly green suits with silly question marks all over them. The movie version didn’t. He was a psychotic serial killer who turned out to have a political agenda. He did, however, leave riddles at the scenes of his crimes. Not that a serial killer who obsessively provides his antagonist with clues is a particularly unusual plot device. But you can see the point of connection between the guy in the film and the guy in the comic. He even says “riddle me this” at one point.

That seems to be the unique selling point of Ther Batman. Characters who are a little bit suggested by characters in the comic book, but properly frightening and without the fancy-dress costumes. (Except the Batman. The Batman dresses like the Batman.) 

Oz/Penguin runs a night club for the top gangster in Gotham. He doesn’t wear a suit, particularly, or have a top hat or an umbrella or talk about his fine feathered friends. He does have a big purple car but he doesn't call it a Pengy Mobile. He does have a big nose, and he waddles a bit due to his bad leg. He's still alive at the end of ther Batman, and clearly lined up to be the main villain in ther Batman 2, currently expected in 2027.

Edgar Rice Burroughs thought that Tarzan films ought to come out each year so kids could look forward to them in the way that they looked forward to the circus. (There were silent movies in 1918, 1919, 1920, and 1921. Johnny Wiesmuller made twelve talkies in sixteen years.) Five years is a hell of a gap between a movie and a sequel, particularly if the movie and the sequel are meant to form one coherent narrative. 

A superhero movie costs, like, two hundred million dollars to make (two! hundred! million!) but stands to earn six or seven hundred million (seven! hundred! million!) if people like it. We spent far more time and energy looking forward to these movies than actually watching them. There are teasers and magazines and web sites dedicated to this Looking Forward process. But in the end two hundred million dollars and five years boils down to a hundred and eighty minutes in the cinema. I don’t see how any film can possibly carry that weight of expectation. I don't see how any film can ever be anything but an anticlimax. We waited a decade for the Force Awakens and there are now people whose whole identity is disliking it.

Big Dinosaur Movies work best. You can go and see Big Dinosaur Movies over and over again because you are only there because you like looking at Big Dinosaurs. You wouldn't say you'd seen the Big Dinosaur once and don't need to see it again, any more than you would say that you once ate a cheeseburger and don't ever need to eat another one. If there is Another Big Dinosaur Movie, well, that refreshes the experience. I saw Star Wars eight, ten times during its first release. There is a story about Alec Guiness meeting a little boy who'd seen it a hundred times. Does anyone really need to re-experience Batman and the Riddler simmering at each other through the bullet proof glass in Arkham over and over and over again? 

Three hours every five years. 

Gotham City exists in a kind of no time at all. Everyone has a mobile phone. (Everyone has the same ringtone, and if you have a soundbar on your TV, it can be rather confusing.) But Arkham Asylum is a kind of nineteenth century lunatic asylum, men in white coats and bare walls and inmates who kill each other without anyone seeming to care a great deal. The tabloids tell us that prisons are like luxury hotels and borstels are like summer camps, so maybe its essential for Batman to deposit bad guys in a nightmarish fortress. Otherwise he would seem to be rewarding crime and would have to become a freelance executioner like the Punisher and the Crow. In the second Joker movie, Gotham appears to have an anachronistic electric chair. 

Or perhaps it's all a metaphor. Arkham represents Gotham's collective unconscious; and the villains are all symbols of Batman's own madness; grinning laughing ha-ha-ha-ha- bedlam madness, not human beings with mental health condition. But then Batman himself has always been a metaphor which is why those memes in which Alfred tells him to spend his dough on drug rehabilitation programmes rather than Batcopters are so senseless. Is there any point of bringing social realism into a world built of metaphor? 

The Nth Batman movie, the one with Heath Ledger, did as good a job of being The Godfather Only With Capes as any film is ever likely to. Ther Batman did the same kind of things very nearly as well. I rewatched it as a warm up for the TV series. I still don’t buy the man in the silly suit standing around crime scenes with hard-nosed believable cops, one of whom may or may not be Commissioner Gordon, but that may be the point.  

So, Penguin, the one really memorable character, now has his own TV show. Only it isn't really a TV show: it’s an eight hour movie released episodically. I rather approve of eight hour movies: I think they are probably what young people in the next century will have instead of books. The Daily Telegraph, which complains endlessly about young-people-nowadays having short attention spans, complained that Penguin was long and boring. And it was long. And it did require a sort of commitment, a sort of buy-in, without ever making it quite clear why we ought to invest in it. I don’t think we should praise films for being novelistic any more than we should praise dances for being architectural, but I do think that the eight-hour-TV-show is the place where the depth and complexity of Mr Dickens and Mr Hardy is most likely to survive. 

I do not think The Penguin is as good as Our Mutual Friend, although it is arguably the story of a city, and quite interested in questions of class. I do not think that The Penguin is as good as Jude the Obscure although it is very nearly as depressing. But it does says “let's spend some time with these characters even though they aren't doing very much". And it says "lets suspend the action and go into a completely gratuitous flash back". That only happens when you have four hundred and eighty minutes and the winter number of Strand Magazine to play with.

Actual comic books go on and on forever but only in twenty page segments.

Clearly, the reason the Penguin has his own TV show is that he is going to be the main antagonist in the Ther Batman 2. Did someone think that audiences would have found it implausible for the night-club manager in part one to have risen to be Kingpin of Gotham by part two? But it would be too boring to waste some of those precious once-in-five-years minutes showing or explaining his rise to power, and therefore the backstory has to be dumped onto Now or Sky in the hope someone will watch it there. Or at any rate, know that it exists. 

Maybe Colin Farrell just had so much damn fun being evil that he begged for the chance to do it again, more expansively? 

Or is this, perchance, just the movie someone wanted to make, back-story and franchise and audience expectation be damned? 

Many, many, many years ago, when we were young and Batman looked like Michael Keaton, I said in some fanzine or other that Batman was a marketing campaign with a movie attached to it; that so long as there was a Batposter on every hoarding and a Batshirt on every tennis crowd, the film didn't need to make sense. It's only function was to not be boring -- to distract people's attention while they were in the cinema. But Ther Batman and The Penguin are too long and frankly too dull to appeal to the mainstream popcorn consumer: if you don’t to some extent, care what happens to Oswald Cobbedecook and his cute stammering sidekick you won't get to end.

I am compelled. I am engaged. I cared. It helped that I was by myself over Christmas had had time to binge watch with rather too much rum and stilton. I don't know if, under normal circumstances, I would have stayed the course. 

Game of Thrones created a genre which could be called “cinema of of ordeal”. You don’t so much consume it as try to get through it. The characters are believable and human and realistic—if they weren’t, it would simply be one more splatter movie. And then horrible things happen to them. Relentlessly. Over eight gruelling hours. People are set on fire; and have their arms amputated with razor wire; and have their fingers cut off with wire-cutters. Many, many heads are smashed into walls. Many, many brains are blown out with guns, Broken bottles are thrust into abdomens. But the violence is mainly release from the psychological trauma. Victor, Penguin’s adopted teenaged side-kick, at one point decides to do a runner and leave the state with his girlfriend. It's at just this point, naturally, that the Penguin starts telling Vic how much he trusts him and how much he looks on him as the son he never had and how much they are going to achieve together for Gotham City. It’s the “what will Oz say and how will he react?” which grabs us by the throat; not the “will Oz kill Victor when he finds out?” One of the flashbacks into Oz’s childhood I found myself having to fast forward through. The last time that happened was in one of the sex dungeons scenes in the Boys. Sensitive readers may care to know that although there is lots and lots and lots of violence and lots and lots and lots of trauma in the Penguin, there are hardly any breasts and no penises at all.

The gangster thing, has, truthfully, been done before. The Penguin kills the heir apparent to the crime empire from the last movie, and spends eight episodes playing everyone else off against everyone else. His amoral machiavellianism is very clever indeed. But it's very slow burn. Oz's rival for control of the mobs, and the sister of the guy he killed, Sofia, is an even bigger psychopath than he is. She's released from Arkham in the first episode: I don't think I was properly hooked until an extended flashback in episode four revealed how she came to be in there in the first place. The Godfather taught us that Mafiosi are violent and scary but that’s okay because they are honourable and loyal to their families. There is nothing even slightly okay about either Oz or Sofia. At best we can pity them, a bit, because Oz was poor and Sofia was abused. 

Oz's one redeeming feature is that he visits his old mother who has dementia. By the final part, his relationship with her is revealed to have been a complicated oedipal vortex. His final action in the final episode is pointlessly, gratuitously evil, and comes from nowhere, and yet is somehow in character. Is the plan that by the time we get to see Ther Batman 2 we will hate Penguin so much that we will be fully on board with whatever vengeance the caped crusader exacts, content in the knowledge that nothing, literally nothing, not even that Victorian mental institution, can possibly be worse than what he deserves? Or are we supposed to feel some level of empathy for him? This too is a human being. 

Meanwhile, there is a trailer for the sixth Superman reboot, due out next July. Superhero fans are very like Charlie Brown and his football: however many times we've been hurt by faithless adaptations we are quite sure that this time we'll have a Fantastic Four movie that is true to Stan and Jacks original vision and this time someone will do Superman justice. But certainly, the vibes that the trailer has generated have been universally positive. The Penguin is an extended setup for a proper serious gangster movie that happens to have Batman in it. But Superman may render all that passe. By 2027, the peanut crunching crowd may be expecting red telephones, Batpoles, visible sound-effects and Ace the Bat-hound.

If you found this interesting, please considering supporting me on Patreon. 

Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim

At one stage, Tolkien wanted the Lord of the Rings to run to four volumes, rather than the published three. Volume IV would have consisted of a greatly expanded version of the Tale of Years: a narrative timeline summarising the history of Middle-earth from its creation to the “present” day. Readers would have first experienced the War of the Ring from the inside, as a story, picking up tantalising hints about Numenor and Rohan and Gondor along the way, and then, once the story was over, they would see the whole history laid out before them in a linear sequence.

If he'd gone through with this plan, the core events of his imaginary history would have been fixed in print in 1955. Would that have hastened the completion of the Silmarillion, or made it even harder to achieve? Or would the Professor conceivably have decided that his Great Work was now finished and that he could move on to something else?

In the event the supplementary volume proved too ambitious, and we ended up with a rather piecemeal collection of essays at the back of Return of the King. Some people will tell you that the Appendices are disposable—pedantic world-building notes about runic alphabets and hobbit calendars that only the hard-core nerd needs to bother with. But the back matter also contains a lot of narrative. Shortened narratives—sketched out narratives—narratives in the language of saga, not in the novelistic language of Lord of the Rings. But definitely stories. And who doesn't want to hear more stories about Middle-earth?

About half way through the Two Towers, there is an enormous gigantic battle at a castle called Helm’s Deep. Tolkien tells us that it was “called after the hero of the old wars who made his refuge there”. When Theoden rides into battle, the Riders of Rohan shout “Helm has arisen and comes back to war!” In the movie, King Theoden says “the horn of Helm Hammerhand shall sound again in the deep!”: Peter Jackson even puts a statue of a big guy with a war hammer [TM] outside the castle. Appendix A fills out a little of the backstory: Helm Hammerhand was a king of Rohan about a hundred and fifty years before Theoden; he was besieged by wild men (Dunlendings) in the castle and fell heroically in the battle.

Flipping between page 528 and page 1065 doesn't make the Helm’s Deep passages any easier to understand. The main text tells us that Helm was a great hero from the olden days; and the appendix confirms that he lived in the olden days and was a great hero. But it does greatly contribute to the illusion that Tolkien was recounting history, as opposed to simply making up a story. You focus in on a bit of background colour and find that there is a solid chunk of narrative behind it. We aren’t just looking at suggestive stripes of brown and green on a painted backdrop, but an actual fully realised tree. Which of course, allows us to believe that behind the appendices are more lives and more stories which Tolkien never told. And if you have the sort of mind that is inclined to play role-playing games or invent fan fiction—and nearly everyone who likes Tolkien does have that kind of mind—then the temptation to imagine what those untold stories would have been is overwhelming.

Does filling in the gaps create a Middle-earth even more real than the one Tolkien left us? Or does imagining the details which Tolkien only hinted at rather spoil the illusion? Some of my friends at college played a long, long Middle-earth Role Playing campaign in which they were Dunlendings. For all I know it is still going on. I am not sure at the time I could have told you what a Dunlending even was. “Our MERP campaign” has not changed Tolkien’s text, or rewritten Tolkien’s appendices. But it has probably changed how those six or seven gamers read those passages.

Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim hangs a two and a half hour movie on those five hundred or so words which Tolkien wrote about Helm Hammerhand. It’s an anime, or as we used to say, a cartoon, but it has Peter Jackson’s name on it in quite large letters; and borrows musical themes from Howard Shore. It begins with a hushed female voiceover, possibly Eowyn, talking about how history is remembered and forgotten. It ends with an Enya-esque dirge over the rolling credits, which feature sepia drawings of the main characters. It is, in short, trying really, really hard to be the fourth part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Possibly Kenji Kamiyama is pretending that the Hobbit didn’t happen. I know I am.

The film sticks really quite closely to the text. Helm really does call the Dunlending lord fatty (“you have grown big since you were last here”) and he really does suggest that they step outside (“the king does not permit brawls in his house, but men are freer outside”). When the King sneaks out of the castle during the siege and starts killing individual enemy soldiers with his bare hands, I must admit I found myself thinking “oh, now you have gone too far this is completely unTolkienesque”, but this is indeed exactly what Tolkien says happened. (the king “went out by himself, clad in white, and stalk like a snow-troll into the camps of his enemies, and slay many men with his hands”). The Dunlending really do think that his wraith carried on fighting them after he died, and he really was found frozen solid but still standing.

I assume that Weta’s CGI models from Lord of the Rings still exist on someone’s pen drive; and have been reskinned for the purposes of the cartoon. Certainly Helm’s Deep and the Meduseld look exactly as they did in the Jackson trilogy. This sometimes creates the impression that painted characters are walking across photographic landscapes; and sometimes their feet appear to not be quite in contact with the ground. But everyone is proportioned like a grown up human-being and no-one’s face is caricatured, and the voices are all done by proper actors and it is mostly possible to forget you are watching animation and just treat it as a Jacksonian prequel. It’s all great fun, if people with beards, clashing shields and shouting “forth Eorlingas fear no darkness” is your idea of a good time. It’s very much a Tolkien movie for people who actually like Tolkien,

If there is going to be a Tolkien-Jackson extended cinematic universe—and I am very far from persuaded that there ought to be a Tolkien-Jackson extended cinematic universe—then clearly, somewhere along the line, someone is going to have to make stuff up which isn’t in the book. Anyone who has ever written fan fiction or run an RPG is familiar with the dilemma. Where are the narrative blank spaces? Where do the new characters or the new events fit into the established universe? Do you invent a new adventure for Sherlock Holmes which Watson somehow failed to mention? Or do you decide that the Baker Street Irregulars were off having adventures of their own, independent of the Great Detective? Or decide to make up stories about Mr Shereford Doyle who lived at 221A Baker Street and solved crimes when his famous neighbour was out of town?

Phillippa Boyens spotted a gaping narrative hole in Appendix A. According to Tolkien, a local lord with Dunlending heritage turns up at Helm’s hall and asks if his son could please marry Helm’s daughter. Helm is not impressed with the suggestion. Helm and the Dunlending have a fight. Helm, being legendarily strong, kills the Dunlending, by accident, mostly. So the son of the Dunlending vows revenge, and comes back years later with an army. He usurps the throne of Rohan and drives Helm back to what would later be known as Helm’s Deep. Despite his impressive snow-troll tribute act, Helm dies in the siege; and both his sons fall in battle. But after the long winter comes to an end, his sister-son rides over the hill with the cavalry and saves the day and starts a new line of Kings.

Now, according to Tolkien, the Dunlending lord is called Freca; his son, the usurper, is called Wulf; Helm’s sons are Haleth and Hama, his sister is Hild, the nephew who saves the day is Frealas Hildeson and the daughter who Wulf wanted to marry is called…is called….

She doesn’t have a name. Or any agency. Or anything else. She doesn’t in fact have any function at all, except to not marry Wulf. So War of the Rohirrim gives her a name, Hera (which is, I think, Adunaic for “Mary-Sue”), and makes her the main protagonist of the story.

At one level, this is a very sensible thing to do. The focus on an “invisible” character enables the writers to invent new material without contradicting the source. It makes perfect sense that there were shield-maidens in Rohan before Eowyn; and that Eowyn (if the narrator is in fact she) would be interested in telling their story.

The decision to make Hera an all-purpose wonder-wench was a little, I don’t know, obvious. She rides horses wildly with her hair flowing out behind her; she outfights the boys; even giving Wulf a small scar when they were kids; she climbs up sheer mountains and talks to giant eagles and ends up (not a spoiler at all) taking an important message to a wizard whose name begins with a G.

It really is quite a lot of fun. But I kind of wonder if, as the narrator says, Hera was an important person who got left out of history, couldn’t she have been, say, a clever courtly lady working behind the scenes? Peter Jackson was understandably unhappy with an Arwen who sits at home doing embroidery throughout the adventure: but his solution, to put her on a horse and give her Golrfindel’s job, is not especially imaginative.

Tolkien fans are incredibly toxic. Well, fans are incredibly toxic. Or probably it’s just that some toxic people pretend to be Tolkien fans. Quite a lot of Tolkien fans think that the dark skinned dwarves and elves in the Rings of Power are part of a plot to abolish the white race. And quite a lot of Star Wars fans think that Rey Skywalker’s appearance in The Force Awakens was a preliminary step towards Walt Disney forcibly castrating the entire male population.

But in this case, the right wing commentariat are clearly in the right. War of the Rohirrim is absolutely a feminist appropriation of Tolkien. Re-inscribing the female perspective into a text which specifically excludes it is absolutely a political act. It’s somewhat akin to Jean Rhys retelling Jane Eyer from Bertha Rochester’s point of view. Kamiyama doesn’t just point out that Helm’s daughter doesn’t have a name: that would have been a perfectly valid feminist reading of Lord of the Rings. He goes beyond this: he creates a new story, which is extremely faithful to Tolkien—far more faithful than Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, his Hobbit, or god help us the Rings of Power—which asserts the centrality of that marginal figure. This is absolutely an act of political subversion. The act of doing it is arguably more interesting than the way it has been done; but as we have seen, there exists a category of modern art where the idea is more important than the artefact. Masculinist Star Wars fans were ludicrously absurd to feel emasculated by the Force Awakens: they are absolutely correct to feel that their male supremacy is critiqued by War of the Rohirrim.

To which I say, loudly and clearly, fuck them.

I am not sure that we need new Tolkien-esque works; but if we are obliged to have them, films like this that critique and destabilise the canon are the way to go. The existence of blokes who are bothered by this kind of thing is precisely the reason this is the kind of thing we ought to be doing, good and hard.

My reviews of Rings of Power Season II, complete without outtakes, extras and lots of digressions is now available as a smart little PDF. 

It is available free (along with lots of other exclusive content) to all subscribers to my Patreon. (Just pledge $1 each time I write an article.) www.patreon.com/rilstone

Alternative, you can buy the PDF document for $6.50/£5.00 (plus the Apple Tax, unfortunately). 

Art, post-script

Oh please don't agree with me! When people agree with me I feel sure I must be wrong! 

Is there no-one who actually likes and understands conceptual art who can tell me what I'm missing?