The Dangerous Book for Girls: Happy Birthday, Pride and Prejudice

Monday 28th January 2013 saw a momentous occasion in the history of publishing, literature, feminism, and the fundamental identity of English prose.  I am referring, of course, to the passing of the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Pride and Prejudice.  Since this blog is named after (for my money) both the best dramatist and the best novelist in the English language* it seems only fitting that I honour Ms Austen with my own small tribute.

That, and I made a New Year's resolution to update the blog twice a month and I've only got a few hours left to think of ideas.

In all seriousness, this 200th anniversary lark is kind of a godsend for the thematically-frustrated blogger - I could talk about Pride and Prejudice for hours.  (I won't.  Maybe.)  I first read it when I was thirteen, which I think is the perfect age at which be struck by the pure, unbridled pleasure of reading Austen.  You will only read something for the first time once, after all, and coming to Austen with a head full of academic theory or wet-shirt-joke-pop-cultural-osmosis can get in the way of the fact that Austen is fizzingly, deliciously, deliriously enjoyable.  It also marked the first time I committed an act of academic defiance upon being told something was too difficult for me (the second, and only other, was doing far better in my university final exams than someone who spent three years in a cycle of putting on plays, staying up until 3am watching Disney films, necking Red Bull and writing essays in an hour had any right to do).  I remember very clearly the evening I decided I would embark upon what would surely be a formative moment in my development both as an intellectual, and as a woman.  (I must have been a delight for my parents.)  The BBC was broadcasting the final five books of its Big Read series, an attempt to whittle down the nation's hundred favourite books, and the top two spots came down to Pride and Prejudice and Lord of the Rings.  Since then I have read both, and if I say that only one of them induced me to throw it against a wall in frustration because of the fucking Council of Elrond, you will be unsurprised at my retrospective rage when that book won.  Anyway.  Prompted by the vague notion that Pride and Prejudice was not only clearly very good but seemed to carry an intellectual weight that struck a chord with my self-important thirteen-year-old heart, I expressed an interest in reading it.  "Maybe wait a couple of years," suggested my parents.  "You might appreciate it more when you're older."  I was, naturally, furious.  Imagine my (unfounded and confusing to all others) triumph when the book box in my classroom next Monday morning yielded a copy of the very novel.  "Look," I said, brandishing it, "I'm going to read it."  "Oh, well done," said my mother vaguely, which was not, I admit, the reaction I had been hoping for.

I needn't have worried.  From the minute I turned the first page and read that elegant, arch, oft-imitated, never-surpassed opening sentence, Jane Austen settled irretrievably into my heart.  Every subsequent sentence rang clear as a bell - even when I wasn't sure what Jane was actually on about (for god's sake, what is a syllabub?).  Incidentally, I still have that first copy, initially borrowed from school and later definitively nicked when I decided rather unfairly that no-one else would want to read it.  And Pride and Prejudice is the gift that keeps on giving - in the nine years since (there's a terrifying thought), I have picked it up at least half a dozen times and found something new each time.  It's not always a comfortable experience.  Imagine my horror at the age of seventeen, having systematically devoured every other scrap of Austen I could get my hands on (pro tip: the juvenilia, so not worth the time) realising that Austen was the most unflinchingly callous writer I had ever encountered.  Who else writes that fat people in mourning don't deserve sympathy because they're too ridiculous?  But Austen's morality code is based on being smart, not nice, and I don't mean book smart, but street smart: Lydia Bennet isn't 'bad' because she likes flirting with boys or anything so prudish. (Austen basically defined flirting in print, after all, just look at Catherine getting flustered by Mr Tilney's views on landscape painting in Northanger Abbey.  Woof.)  Lydia doesn't get to be a heroine because she has no idea how to handle herself in the society she was born into; Austen's leading ladies all learn how to navigate the choppy waters of the social and sexual minefield that is the mixed metaphor they call life.  It's a tough life with limited options, says Austen, and you have to be tough to survive it.

Not everyone likes Austen, of course, often because of this relentlessly controlled pragmatism that plagues the pages of what would otherwise be early-nineteenth-century rom-coms.  Charlotte Bronte didn't like Jane Austen.  She wrote a letter complaining that reading Austen was like finding "An accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with near borders and delicate flowers - but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy - no open country - no fresh air - no blue hill - no bonny beck." Well, no offence to Charlotte Bronte, but bollocks. (Maybe a bit of offence to Charlotte Bronte - I did cry upon finishing Jane Eyre, but with relief).** Bronte's criticisms amount to the idea that Austen is a series of miniatures, unrealistic and restrained, that all end in - pure fantasy! - marriage.  We won't dwell on the fact that this comes from a writer who literally wrote the book on how you can change a brooding, gambling, womanising misanthrope through the love of a good woman (but only if he's blinded to make up for the social inequality between you).  Austen is precise, economical.  She does not waste words on those who need not have words wasted on them.  Every sentence is beautifully constructed and furthers the story she is telling.  

Yes, her books all end in marriage to solvent men - but crucially, they end in marriage on the heroine's own terms.  No-one would call Austen a feminist, partly because it would be a pointless anachronism, but more partly (you know what I mean) because Austen's happy endings are deeply pragmatic affairs.  Want to have a comfortable life in early nineteenth century England, free from smallpox and gum disease? Marry a well-off man.  Want to have a happy life in early nineteenth century England? Marry a well-off man that you love.  Austen doesn't stint on letting us know how unlikely this outcome is.  Lizzie and Jane Bennet get lucky: they have the writer on their side.  Their three younger siblings present the shadow of a much more likely fate - one shotgun married to an unfaithful rake, one prodded into spinsterhood without a second thought, one sentenced to reform through hanging about with her clever, well-married sisters.***  There's a moment in Pride and Prejudice that I've always found telling - after younger sister Lydia (possessed of "animal spirits", nudge nudge wink wink) elopes with proto-lad Wickham, apparently scuppering all chance of a respectable match for Lizzie, she reflects on the man she herself has lost in the process:  

She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was a union that must have been to the advantage of both. By her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgment, information and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance. But no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was.

It's the "judgement, information and knowledge of the world" bit that gets me.  To Charlotte Bronte, no doubt, it sounded passionless, even calculating.  To me, it is a painful insight into the psyche of both a character and writer who found themselves trapped in circumstances in which they could never be their best selves.  Lizzie hasn't just fallen for Darcy as a man, but the life he brings with him, his ability to bring her a world that she wishes to - and cannot - be a part of, looking on from rural Hertfordshire.  In Austen, marriage exists to free its participants - male and female - from versions of themselves they have constructed to navigate the complex onslaught of the social, sexual and financial mores of everyday life.  Marriage is a refuge for honesty, a place that people arrive at when they come to understand themselves most truly, either singly or with the help of a partner.  In the former case it is treated, time after time, as a matter of revelation: Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park finds "exactly at the time when it was quite natural it should be so" that he's gotten over Regency vamp Mary Crawford and wants to marry Fanny Price, Emma Wodehouse has the sudden sparklingly blinding insight that Mr Knightley "must marry no-one but herself", Marianne Dashwood's trials with Willoughby allow her to emerge sharper and surer of herself, and ready to marry Colonel Brandon.  In the other instance, of a couple growing together, Pride and Prejudice is only the most obvious example, trading off its protagonists' titular flaws against each other; Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth have a profound effect on each other during and after their eight-year separation, Mr Tilney leads Catherine Morland deftly towards maturity by subtly (and flirtatiously) cutting away the language of gothic romance she has surrounded herself with.  All are instances of characters finding "knowledge of the world" through their partner and becoming, in the process, the fullest and richest version of themselves they could be.  I don't find that passionless at all.  I find that thrillingly, embarrassingly romantic.

And, in essence, that's what Pride and Prejudice does.  It teaches.  It is an unfailingly, uncomfortably honest book - lies and self-deceptions unravel at speed and Lizzie comes face to face with not only her own failings, but her sisters', her friend's, and her beloved father's.  Reading it is a self-exmaining experience: at the age of thirteen, the tang of well-deserved romance was delicious, at seventeen, I desperately craved Austen's pithy detachment from the world she lived in, at twenty-two, the age I am now, I think I'm finally beginning to understand what she's on about with this companionship and knowing yourself business.  I'm wrong, no doubt.  I'll come to it again in five year's time and my sympathies will lie with Caroline Bingley or Charlotte Lucas or Mary Bennet.  The day will come, I fear, when I find myself in agreement with Mrs Bennet.  But I don't mind.  In these moments of revelation about myself, I come the closest to being an actual Austen heroine that I'll ever get.****

*Sort of by accident, actually.  I swear, at the time I just liked the name, and it wasn't until my mother innocently enquired as to the literary origins of the nomenclature that I understood I was now committing acts of breath-taking arrogance unconsciously.

**Really.  I was in both an airport and my teens, and the heady combination of jet-lag, hormones and interminable religious imagery made me burst into tears on closing the book.

***Actually, Austen apocryphally told her uncle that Mary and Kitty do get married after the book ends, the former to one of her uncle's clerks and the latter to a clergyman near Pemberley, which sounds like Austen placating a tipsy, sentimental uncle to me.

****Apart from the time I got soaked in a downpour on my way to a restaurant where a group of friends were, walked in dripping, apologised for my appearance, and was answered by my best friend staring at me and shouting, "You look amazing!  You look like Lizzie Bennet!" But I think she was drunk.

The Hobbit: Dwarves are Heroic and In No Way Intrinsically Hilarious Because of Their Height (spoilers)

Spoilers! Heavy, heavy spoilers for The Hobbit.  But it has been around for 60 years so it's your own fault, really.

I swear to god, I have three draft posts sitting in my Posts folder, none of which were good enough to publish, even by my admittedly lax standards.  Please don't hurt me for my accidental five month hiatus.  I'm very sorry and it won't happen again (maybe). (To cut a long story short, life happened in the form of me starting an MFA and even when your MFA is in professionally playing Let's Pretend - or as it is officially known, Theatre Directing - it is still an MFA and demands much more of your time than watching X-Men cartoons and smoking out of your bedroom window.  Who knew?)

But I'm here! I am back this New Year because there has just been so much pop culture of late and I cannot possibly let it go by without whipping up a few rounds of my signature cocktail of capital letters and inappropriate drooling.  Where to begin? There's last autumn's telly-land, which saw The Hour pick up steam after a shaky start dicking about with an organised crime storyline that was somehow less believable than having a Soviet spy in the midst of a fairly inoffensive BBC news programme (um, spoilers?); however, after hanging in there only to see what the offspring of Anna Chancellor and Peter Capaldi might be like and how soon it would be taking over the world, the last two episodes were absolute barn-stormers.  Merlin ended for good with both a bang and a whimper and this truly is a tragedy for those who stuck with it from the beginning.  Although I don't think Arthur took his top off once last season, so maybe it is time to move on.  There's a whole new Twilight film to mock, coming hand in hand with the blessed knowledge that there are to be no more, hallelulah praise the Mormon Jesus that spawned this dust-bunny of menopausal fantasies and unfulfilled life prospects in the first place.  Christmas Doctor Who was tentatively promising for the coming season, starring not only a new companion but Lesbian Silurian and Lesbian Cockney, who are much more likely candidates for a spinoff than John Barrowman ever was.

But before any of that, there is a film that must be talked about.  A film that I have looked forward to, not with the pants-wetting fist-biting glee of The Avengers, but with something far more likely to warm the cockles of my Middle-Earth-loving heart.  And boy, were my cockles warmed.  I'm talking, of course, about The Hobbit.

Un petit confession, as the French say.  I love Lord of the Rings.  That's not the confession.  The confession is that I love the films.  Burdened with an English student's guilt over enjoying an adaptation before reading the source material, I turned to the books at the tender age of thirteen and commenced a three-month project of staring in horror at the bricks of text in front of me listing rhyming dwarf-dad name after rhyming dwarf-dad name.  Why was there another song in Elvish? Was I supposed to read it? Sing it? Perform an interpretative dance to it? Had it really been going on forty pages and these people were still talking about events that not only had we never encountered, but never would and would have no bearing on the plot? Even I have a saturation point when it comes to fantasy.  I OD'ed hard on A Song of Ice and Fire, making a headlong dash through the three-and-a-half-thousand odd pages of the first four books only to have some kind of breakdown around the beginning of the fifth and hurl it across the room crying, "I simply can't bear learning any more awkwardly partnered Latinate and Anglo-Saxon names!  Bear me to the fainting couch, I believe I have the vapours! AND WHO THE FUCK IS ARTHUR DAYNE?" At some point, I will pick up the fifth one again.  When the screams of beloved murdered characters have stopped echoing in the wind.

As always, I digress.  I was saddened that I did not love reading Tolkien because I had very fond memories of The Hobbit being read to me as a child.  The Hobbit is a very simple children's story, certainly not one that seems a natural fit for a series of of epic films.  But Peter Jackson cottoned on to something very clever with the LOTR films, which is that Tolkien is simply not a natural storyteller.  The universe he creates is rich in character and landscape, the morality of the books cleaves to something undeniably decent and stirring.  But by Frodo's quivery bottom lip, he cannot string a story together in a compelling way.  Peter Jackson, however, can.  Peter Jackson can sustain a story as complicated and rich as this one over nine hours and not lose anything from it that was worth keeping.  (Except the Houses of Healing in Return of the King.  That could have been kept in favour of a bit of Liv Tyler looking wry, surely.)  So if Peter Jackson turns to me and says, "Y'know, there's a lot of stuff I wanted to put in those films but couldn't", I am actually more than happy to hand him my copy of The Hobbit and say, "Okay, Pete.  Go to town on this."

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is still Tolkien's Hobbit.  It is not, as some have suggested, Lord of the Rings 4.  Which would be silly anyway, as The Hobbit is set 60 years before. Tch.  At its centre is the comfort of home, the bigness of the world, the notion that it is small acts and small people that stand against the dark.  The Hobbit is a (relatively) small story set in an epic fantasy universe and that is exactly what Jackson delivers.  When Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, he could not have known what it was the beginning of, what Middle Earth would grow to be.  Most of us reading The Hobbit for the first time did not know either - it is rare to find someone who read Lord of The Rings before its predecessor.  But we do know Lord of the Rings now.  Either we have read it or seen it or simply become unavoidably aware of it through pop cultural osmosis.  It would almost be impossible, I think, to create a version of the Hobbit in which we weren't watching it looking for the links with the story and universe we already know, and in which I wasn't asking the question, "Does Benedict Cumberbatch look sexy as a dragon?"*  Jackson has embraced this and turned The Hobbit into a kind of three hour bubble-bath for Lord of the Rings fans with a butler on hand to drop a chocolate into your mouth every now and then.  It is audacious, visually stunning, funny and, above all, surprisingly charming.  Sorry, just gagged on my own gushing there.  Let's fix that.

It's not perfect by a long chalk.  I've seen it twice and it doesn't stand up to second viewing in the way that the LOTR films yield endless delight, especially if you are a bit drunk and making once of your friends drink every time Gollum switches personalities.  After the initial thrill of being introduced to a whole new raft of characters to shout "take your shirt off" at during inappropriate moments, the second viewing had me checking my watch during the long (long, long) first hour and a half.  Then it starts getting really good (like, really good) and it's all slightly obscene looking Goblin Kings and Andy Serkis and fire and eagles and eagles on fire (except the last one) and then it ends.  Gah.  So the second one better be really good is all I'm saying because I remember the plot of The Hobbit as being there's some short dudes who go and get a slightly shorter dude and there's a dragon and some trolls and some goblins and a ring and then the dragon dies and everyone drinks lemonade. Most of those plot points have already been covered in great detail.  Peter Jackson better have something fucking spectacular up his sleeve (actually we already know he does, it's called LEGOLAS).  So if you weren't a fan before then you definitely won't be converted by this but if you were, then see it once in the cinema and then wait for the DVD so you can identify hilarious moments of homoeroticism with your friends (they really need some more women in this universe).  Also, see it in 2D and normal frame rate.  It seems much more like a film and less like a game of 'That was CGI, that was pyrotechnic, that was CGI'.

But.  Enough beating about the bush.  No, that wasn't a euphemism.  Because I know what you really want, you filthy little blog-readers you.  I know what you have been waiting for all these months, and frankly, it disgusts me.  If you think I am going to make a fool of myself disclosing the most intimate struggles of my shattered psyche in the consideration of whether it is a crime against all that is right and good to look at Richard Armitage dressed up as a dwarf and wonder whether a new and disturbing fetish has been awoken in me, well you can look elsewhere for that kind of smut because you won't find it here.  Nor will you find musings on whether Peter Jackson watched North and South before filming started and was so hopelessly smitten with Mr Armitage that he decided to put in a frankly alarming quantity of shots in which Thorin Hardwood or whatever his name is stands atop a rocky outcrop brooding so furiously on his lack of kingliness that Viggo Mortensen is considering suing.  Nor will I comment on how the background music seemed to so taken with him that the Latinate (Elvish?) chanting during that bit at the end where stands up on the tree to take down the Orc-Video-Game-End-of-Level-Boss might as well have been shrieking, "RICHARD ARMITAGE! STANDS ON TREES! RUNS THROUGH FIRE! HE IS MANLY WITH MAN PAIN IN HIS MAN EYES!"  I'm sure at some point they were considering having him saving some baby orphans from the flames on his way to the fight but it was cut for time (it was the only thing cut for time).

Nor will you be hearing anything from me about the startling coincidence that sees the three most eligible dwarves - Thorin, Suspiciously Attractive Dwarf (Kili, played by Being Human's Aidan Turner) and his brother/boyfriend** Less Attractive but Still Doable Dwarf (Fili, played by Dean O'Gorman) - sporting a noticeably smaller quantity of prothetic nose and beard accessory than the rest.  James Nesbitt as Bofur, whilst hiding his everyman charm beneath a hat that I thought was going to take flight and a moustache that looked sad independently of Nebitt's own facial expression, could still legitimately have replaced all of his lines with "I'm James Nesbitt.  And now you want to have a pint with me."  Elijah Woods puts in a brief appearance as Frodo and I had to stop myself from standing up and congratulating Ian Holmes on having such a fine-looking nephew and asking if the cheekbones ran on the other side of the family and, if so, were there cousins? (I, by the way, was convinced that Elijah Woods has a painting in an attic somewhere looking like shit because as far as I could tell, he hasn't aged a day, but everyone disagreed with me on this point and said he looked haunted by the loss of times past.)  All this and the elves won't even make a proper appearance until Part 2.  (Although special points for Flight of the Conchord's Brett Mckenzie reprising his internet-stealing silent cameo from Fellowship of the Ring complete with a new elvish name that means 'singer' and even more special points for Lee Pace who you probably know as the guy who made pies and resurrected the dead in Pushing Daisies as LEGOLAS' DAD ON A FUCKING ELK LOOKING FABULOUS.)

So put that in your elongated Gandalf pipe and choke on it, good reader.  The various aesthetic qualities of the cast will emphatically not be reflected on in any way, not even how good Saint Cate Blanchett is at turning slowly in a shimmery dress (twice).  This is a new, more mature Jane Shakespeare and you can take your filthy gutter-dwelling minds elsewhere for that kind of thing.  Also Martin Freeman just deserves, like, ALL THE HUGS and those pointy little hobbit ears are really working for me.  He is everything you could want and more (less? There's a height joke in there somewhere) as Bilbo, and I very much admired his choice to play his scenes with Thorin as a particularly egregious rom-com. ("I'm just a hobbit.  Standing in front of a dwarf.  Asking him to love him.")

All in all, I really liked it the first time and bit less the second time but, as you can tell, I'm loving the prospect of cracking out the wine and settling down with the DVD to holler in a manner most women reserve for the stripper on their hen night.  Bring on Part 2.  In Pete We Trust.

*In the event, we will have to wait until the next film to find out, and yes, I am aware that Smaug will be CGI and not Cumberbatch in a dragon suit but it should be.
**Seriously, what's the deal here?  I'm pretty sure they're related in the book but they seemed to spend an awful lot of time going off to bond and then coming back looking flustered and out of breath.  Why were they the only two dwarfs up in the middle of the night tending the campfire?  Why were they sharing an eagle when there were clearly enough for everyone to have their own?  If they weren't looking out for the horses, then what were they doing? It's a conspiracy.

The BBC Gives Me a Present: 'The Hollow Crown' Review

A/N: Each mini review was written after the film in question was aired so this is really a record of my week-by-week responses rather than a response to the whole.  Consequently it's quite long, even for this blog.  Epic blogging for an epic series.  That's what it is.

...

The degree of excitement with which I greeted the BBC's announcement that they would be televising the Henriad, aka Shakespeare's Richard II, Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V, aka some of my favourite plays of all time ever, directed by Rupert Goold, Richard Eyre and Thea Sharrock aka some my favourite theatre directors of all time ever, with a cast that would not only include Jeremy Irons, Ben Whishaw and Simon Russell Beale but would also feature Tom Hiddleston aka my favourite actor of all time ever (I might have mentioned him here a few times) as Prince Hal, aka one of my favourite parts in Shakespeare of all time ever, could, in nuclear terms, have levelled a small conurbation. The BBC, it seemed, was like a drunken uncle in a generous mood who knows that your parents have been arguing: "Would you like a present?  There you go.  No wait, you've been such a good girl, have another.  No, that's not nearly enough.  Here, take my kidney."  Or similar.

I was very excited.  Like, Avengers-level of excitement.  And I'm not ashamed of being so plebbishly thrilled.  History plays were the Dallas and Dynasty of Shakespeare's day: sexy, glamorous men and women shagging and trying to kill each other, all for the benefit of grubby little groundlings like me watching with one hand in a bucket of popcorn (or holding an orange stuck with cloves for the historical pedants amongst you), gaping maw slackened with delight and reverence.  They're meant to be enjoyed, is what I'm trying to say.

Having said that, I didn't want to just come here and flail.  I purposefully have refrained from posting reaction posts or excessive abuse of the caps lock key.  These are my favourite plays, and I want to respond to them like the adult with an English degree that I am.

AND THEN THIS HAPPENED.

The BBC doesn't want me to respond like a mature, intellectual adult.  The BBC wants me to just offer my ovaries up on a plate and say, "I'm so sorry I ever tried to have coherent thoughts about your Shakespeare plays, I'm probably just over stretching my woman-brain."  The patriarchy has a new weapon, and its name is TOM HIDDLESTON IN A FUCKING SAUNA.

Pictured: patriarchy.

I am really quite annoyed.

Despite this obvious attempt by the forces of retrogressiveness to prevent me from giving a considered analysis of The Hollow Crown, I have overcome all obstacles and done so.  I have also rewatched the sauna scene several times in order to prove that its bewitching enchantments have no hold over me, thou foul televisual wizards at the BBC.  So let that be a lesson to you.  Anyway, on with the show.

...

Richard II is a funny old play.  It's full of pomp and circumstance (phrase copyright Shakespeare, cf Othello), and a huge percentage of it is spoken in rhyming couplets which are not the easiest things to make sound spontaneous.  It was slightly to my surprise then that Goold's Richard II was - Act 1 to Act 5 - completely stunning.  I'd like to go into more detail than I can, mainly because I watched it three weeks ago now, but also because there's not much else to say.  The way it was translated into film was gorgeous: long, locked-off shots holding the court inside them like a series of picture-frames, the couplets delivered carefully but fiercely.  The great risk of any production of this play is that it will stale quickly, everyone caught inside the huge, slow-moving machine of the court and its rituals; Goold avoided this beautifully and the whole thing flowed like gossamer.

Whishaw is perfect casting for Richard - a man who is a bad king yet good at being king.  He was perfectly juxtaposed with Rory Kinnear's Bolingbroke, an actor who will never set the world on fire for me but was well cast here.  Whishaw is elegant and neurotic where Kinnear is heavy and direct, Richard's growing astonishment that he could ever be deposed beautifully paralleled with Bolingbroke's astonishment that he must be the one to depose him.  Also Whishaw is beautiful and Kinnear looks like a turnip but I'm sure that's beside the point.  The deposition scene in particular was magic; Richard's unwillingness to physically let go of the crown devolves into a grown man having a temper tantrum - but what a temper tantrum it is.  Goold and Whishaw understand what Richard understands - to be a king requires an essential theatricality, one that Bolingbroke does not have (but his son totally will).  It's not often you can watch an adult man lying on the floor kicking and screaming because someone is taking his toy (really, Richard's whole objection to Bolingbroke taking over as king amounts to "BUT HE DOESN'T LOOK AS GOOD AS MEEEE.  LOOK AT MY BONE STRUCTURE, THERE'S NO WAY HE CAN PULL OFF THIS CROWN.  I WANT A BIGGER LOLLY") and your overwhelming reaction is to hug them.

The cast as a whole is an embarrassment of riches - Patrick Stewart turns up to deliver the 'sceptered isle' speech ("Oh," says everyone with polite surprise, "so that's where that comes from") and then dies.  David Suchet turns up as York, which was actually less surprising than Lindsay Duncan turning up for all of two scenes as his wife and, apparently, mother to the guy with slamming cheekbones from the first series of Silk.  James Purefoy and David Morrissey are also just about discernible under a layer of grime and beards as Mowbray and Northumberland respectively, and Clemence Poesy does a very good job of swanning about being French and beautiful as Queen Isabella.

Speaking of queens, I was both amused and skeptical about the heavy Saint Sebastian imagery: as a play, Richard II owes a large debt to Marlowe's Edward II, which features a similarly idle king insensitive to his kingdom's needs who is then deposed and murdered, this time by his wife (another Isabella, conveniently) and her lover.  Marlowe, let's be frank, makes quite clear the reasons for Edward's wife's displeasure in the form a strapping young lad called Gaveston who Edward seems much more interested in spending time with.  I've always unconsciously assumed similar things about Richard and, it seems, so has Goold, except without the unconscious bit.  Richard lingers around nubile young models being painted as Saint Sebastian - adopted as a gay icon, as I found out when I proudly brought home a postcard of a very lovingly rendered Caravaggio-esque version of the pierced saint from the National Gallery and got some very questioning looks from my family - before dying in a similar fashion, shot full of crossbow bolts.  It's sort of reassuring that someone else had the same thoughts but also I'm still mentally thirteen and all the Saint Sebastian stuff was so heavy handed that it did make me giggle uncontrollably.  Not enough to put me off the production as a whole though: a gorgeous, gorgeous rendering of a difficult play.

...

On first watch, Henry IV Part 1 was a much more mixed bag.  I must confess, the Henry IVs have a special place in my heart, much of which is owed to the wonderful productions at the Globe in 2010, much of which is owed to Roger Allam's Falstaff and a slightly smaller amount of which is owed to Jamie Parker's Hal, who between them stole my affections much more successfully than Falstaff manages the robbery at Gadshill.  That was a joke to show you I've read Shakespeare.  It was a production that could only have worked at the Globe: rowdy, slightly pedestrian in interpretation and thoroughly reliant on a few charismatic lead performances, but ultimately big-hearted and sort of magical.

Eyre's Henry IV was, on a personal level, less successful.  It is a rather chilly, loveless interpretation of a hugely generous play that demands imagination from its dramatists.  The Henry IVs present life in all its little permutations, in all its unimportant nuances.  Perhaps the reminisces of Falstaff and Justice Shallow in Part 2 don't affect the movement of history but I dare you to listen to an actor - any actor - deliver Falstaff's line, "We have heard the chimes at midnight" and not feel like it's important to life.  This, perhaps, is what Eyre misses.  A history play is usually the story of a king; it is no accident that the Henry IVs, that seem so preoccupied with lowlives and rebels and general scum, tell the story of a prince.  The simple genius of these plays is that Hal isn't king yet: he's still a man (well, boy) and he responds to things like a man.  Henry V is a political play about war, no two ways about it, but so long as Hal is around, his drama is that of a man, encompassing life at its grandest and its most trivial and Shakespeare makes every moment of it important.

Eyre's production was a disappointment only in this respect: I simply didn't laugh enough.  I'm not being a pleb demanding more rotten fruit being thrown, it's intrinsic to the way the play works.  There is no other Shakespeare play that draws you so thoroughly into the protagonist's journey - we, with Hal, are seduced by Falstaff (though, thank heaven, not literally) and we, with Hal, are shocked when the cracks start to creep into the relationship even though we, with Hal, have always known that the party has to end sometime because when you are the crown prince the ending is kind of a foregone conclusion.  With Simon Russell Beale's dour, downbeat Falstaff, there was none of this seduction.  I was unsurprised by Falstaff's callous disregard for human life towards his pathetic band of soldiers -"food for power" he mutters as he marches - which is usually the point at we which we (and Hal) start to suspect it's not all Elizabethan Santa Claus and cups of sack.

Eyre's approach to the language was brilliant and frustrating in equal measure. On the one hand, it was treated like actual, living, breathing language that people uttered carelessly while they were riding or fighting or drinking or reigning, which was wonderful.  No-one proclaimed or declaimed or recited; Hal's eulogy for Hotspur after he kills him (roughly translated into modern English as "I'm really sorry I had to kill you so my dad would love me") was all the more affecting because Hiddleston - covered in blood and dirt and sweat - could barely get the words out for shortness of breath and pain from his wounds.  On the other hand, some of Shakespeare's most glorious and inventive language was simply glossed over, lines that held so much potential just thrown away.  In the 2010 production, something was made out of every single line, which may not be the way that people speak but it's a pure delight to watch.  Here, Beale's introspective, insecure Falstaff practically mumbles the man's most audacious and brilliant lie - that he knew all along it was Hal under the buckram cloak robbing him of his own ill-gotten gains.

This is not to say that Beale was a bad Falstaff - no-one was bad.  Jeremy Irons nailed it as Henry IV - though I can only assume that they decided to recast and not have Rory Kinnear reprising the role because there is no way Kinnear's children would be that good looking.  (Wow, he's really taking a pounding here.  Sorry, Rory.)  Joe Armstrong was a strong Hotspur with an enjoyably broad accent, managing to make a lot of out of part that can be fairly thankless and tiresome (but then again, Hotspur is Hal's foil and Hal is great so yeah, suck it Hotspur).  I also very much enjoyed the casting gag of having his real-life dad Alun Armstrong play Hotspur's dad Northumberland (also supposed to be an older version of David Morrissey from Richard II, again I will assume that having an attractive son came into this decision).  There was also a nice little moment for the unfortunates amongst us who happened to become somewhat attached to the BBCs execrable Robin Hood series that ran a few years ago (call it morbid curiosity that kept me watching), reuniting Joe Armstrong as Hotspur/Alan-a-Dale with Harry Lloyd's Mortimer/Will Scarlett.  They even had a little bromance moment.  For a moment, I was seventeen again.  Then when I had finished blacking out from the horror and taken a shower, I carried on watching.

Hiddleston's Hal gave me a multitude of FEELINGS (yes, it has to be in capital letters), most of them signals from my brain to my ovaries telling them to shut the hell up.*  He excels at characters that are hard to read and this ambiguity works perfectly with Hal, a character that writes the book on playing his cards close to the chest.  He tells us in the first scene that he's going to ditch his friends to make himself look better and then does so in a needlessly brutal way, and at the same time he's disaffected, displaced and unhappy, and suffers from a major case of Daddy-doesn't-love-me...itis (this is becoming another Hiddleston trademark, and regular readers will know that you will hear no complaints from me on this front).  Hiddleston is marvellously subtle and compelling and was a canny casting choice in so far as he knows how to use the camera - to the point where this almost overshadows the rest of his performance.  Maybe he's been away from the stage too long, maybe he's not picked up some Shakespeare for a while but there were a few moments of disconnect from the words; the beauty of the performance lay in his reactions, his expressions.  I'm not complaining because it contributed to the great strength of this production: Eyre's translation of Shakespeare from stage to screen.  Shakespeare's characters lie.  They lie all the time - to each others and to themselves and Hiddleston conveys this wonderfully.  Falstaff asks him if he's afraid of Hotspur.  Hal replies, "Not a whit, in faith."  Bollocks.  Hal's clearly shit-scared - and Eyre lets you know that with close-ups that focus on details too small to be read from the auditorium, twitches and half-smiles and grimaces that reveal a whole different narrative underneath the text.  Eyre's other trick of cutting away during monologues, often to the next room, is more frustrating.  It's sort of like someone changing the channel in the middle of your programme.  Hey.  Richard.  I was watching that.  I was also disappointed that Hal and Falstaff's great soliloquies about (respectively) image management and honour were done in voiceover - it's a good trick for the camera but goddammit, I'm an audience member.  Talk to me.  Share with me.  It's what Shakespearean characters do.

...

Watching Henry IV Part 2 made a lot of things a lot clearer.  My general concept of these two plays is as a great duet: major key and minor key, fast and slow, young and old etc etc.  Eyre takes this idea and shoves it out the window, giving us a slow, bitter breakdown of relationships between Hal and Falstaff, Hal and Henry, Hal and himself, Falstaff and the world - everyone and everyone, really.  Unwilling as I am to part with my view of these plays as simultaneously rambunctious, savage, warm, carnivalesque, etc, Eyre's conceit of them is compelling.  It is very much a cold, empty universe that Hal inherits as he steps up to become king; Part 2 is often observed to have a twilight feel to it - by which I mean everyone is tired and conscious of their own mortality, not stalking teenagers and walking around sparkling.

For me, the most electrifying of Eyre's directorial decisions comes in the scene where Hal, believing his father to have died, picks up the crown and puts it on.  Henry promptly wakes up and berates his son for being so eager to see him kick the bucket; it's a great scene anyway but Eyre directs it with incredible nuance, working through its arc beautifully.  Those close-ups I was talking about work overtime to give you Hiddleston wandering from his dead father's bed to the empty throne room, sitting and crowning himself before starting to cry.  By relocating the moment to the throne (in the play, Hal performs his self-coronation by the bedside) Hal becomes isolated and, most importantly, frightened.  It gives the moment a significance I never would have considered: for all his tactics, Hal is deeply insecure of himself.  I have always taken it as read that Hal has an intrinsic self-knowledge that enables him to pull off his prodigal son trick: he can defeat Hotspur in battle and he will be a good king.  Hiddleston's poker-faced prince is revealed to have no such certainty but, just when he should be assuming the mantle of authority, he collapses into grief like the young man that he is.  It's a brilliant counterpoint to Beale's Falstaff, who was immediately more satisfying in the melancholy rural world of Part 2, also playing his own great insecurity: that he is too old.

I am surprised that Part 2 should be more successful than Part 1 - it's a much less substantive play - but perhaps it allows the strengths of the actors to shine through more.  Hiddleston is a cerebral actor and doesn't entirely convince in Hal's carousing scenes, but in Part 2's long, introspective speeches and moments of self-realisation, he shines.  The famous dismissal of Falstaff loses some of its shock factor only because Eyre builds up to it so organically: when it comes, we wonder how Falstaff can have had any other notion of how this story would end.  No-one is suggested to be at fault - there is no calculating, opportunist Hal or sly, opportunist Falstaff - but it is merely the price of kingship.

I would suggest watching both parts of Henry IV together.  It's a long viewing experience, but you need the second part to make sense of the first.  Eyre connects the two stories in a way I never thought possible, not presenting you with a replaying of the same arcs in major and minor key, but the full and dazzling story of a young man's ascent.  Hal's coronation is the dynastic high point of The Henriad, yet it is packed full of attendant sorrows.  This seems to be the best way of describing Eyre's films: the ascent is grim and full of obstacles, but the triumph is earned.

...

It's hard to be really surprised by Henry V anymore.  It's amongst the most adapted Shakespeare plays, with Branagh's and Olivier's being the obvious contenders and massive box office smashes in their day.  All that potential for blockbuster action sequences, all those rousing speeches etc etc, it's Hollywood's wet dream.  I've always found its popularity strange, though, seeing as it essentially starts with a Chorus apologising for CGI not having been invented yet.  The entire play is an exhortation of the imagination, a plea that the audience go along with it - because if they don't, all that patriotic guff about England's favourite warrior-king sounds terribly hollow.  Thea Sharrock's Henry V is, to my very great surprise, my hands-down favourite of the Hollow Crown films.  Why? Because she locates the heart of the play in this: the audience's understanding of Henry as a man.  She refuses to make the play either pro-war (as Olivier does) or a commentary on the horrors of war (as Branagh does).  She simply tells you the story of Henry.  And I was surprised again and again and again.

It is entirely valid to argue that the visual spectacle is what lets this film down: indeed, there is a little of the usual television-epic-army-of-twenty syndrome in the battle scenes and the courts are neither spectacular nor imposing.  I understand that some might be disappointed in this film precisely because it isn't Branagh's huge, roaring blockbuster.  But as I said that's not the story being told.  There's a huge preponderance of close-ups - not just of Harry but everyone, from the high-ups to the low-lives.  Sharrock tells the story of a series of individuals in war.  Of the four plays, it is the most successful in using film to convey the interiority of its players.  Heavily cut down to just over two hours, the paring back of the story to its essentials (the Scroop/Gray treason subplot is cut) allows us to focus on the lives at stake.  For god's sake, I cried over the Duke of York's death (an excellent Patterson Joseph).  I couldn't have told you for certain that there even was a York in Henry V previously but now I don't think I'll ever forget.  Sharrock also navigates the issue of the Chorus being a fundamentally theatrical device fantastically - Olivier and Branagh both took a meta approach, with the film starting on the stage of the Globe, and the Chorus walking through a film set respectively - by having Falstaff's page (usually martyred in the slaughter of the baggage train, an episode which was cut) morph into John Hurt's Chorus, present only in voiceover until that moment, still holding his bloodstained St George armband.  It's incredibly poignant, not because of the George's cross, but because we understand that we've simply been hearing the story of a man told by another man who was there.  Henry V is a mythologised king; Sharrock un-mythologises him brilliantly.

A large part of this is due to Hiddleston's performance, carrying on from the Henry IVs.  I freely admit that I was wrong in my predictions that Hiddleston would make a better Hal than Henry - while he was good in the previous instalments, he's extraordinary here.  Sharrock and Hiddleston explode all my lazy prejudices about Henry being an unsatisfying cipher of a hero; this is a young king learning on the job and all too frequently making mistakes.  "Once more unto the breach" is delivered to a small group of soldiers, each one addressed individually by a king who is clearly bricking it himself.  The threats to rape the women and murder the children of Harfleur are delivered with a desperation and tension that suggests Henry is shocking himself as he speaks.  It stands in beautiful contrast to his later order that all the French prisoners be killed, coming in a fit of rage after York's death and the apparent refusal of the French to surrender.  "I was never angry since I came to France/ Until this moment" he says, and boy do we believe him.  The Agincourt speech is not - as it usually is - a rousing call to the whole army but a quiet and simple exhortation to his nearest and dearest to simply be brave.  It brings out something dazzling in the speech - that Henry never actually says they're going to win.  All he asks is that they do their best.  It is perhaps the most affecting interpretation of it that I've heard.

This is the thread that Sharrock finds in a play usually cast as being pro- or anti- war or patriotism: the idea of courage.  It is never suggested that the English victory is due to Henry - heavy emphasis is placed on his prayers that God be on his side.  Rather than confront the validity of the war, this Henry resorts to something unquestioningly admirable: bravery.  Yet even then, bravery is not presented as morally superior; Paul Ritter's bitter, raging Pistol suffers a form of PTSD - faced with the battlefield, this "swaggerer" from Eastcheap simply breaks down.  Williams, the soldier that questions Harry in disguise, is likewise not condemned for his view that the king has blood on his hands - rather, you get the sense that Henry agrees.  York asks to lead the vanguard and dies - yet he dies at the hands of a rogue Frenchman (damn those rogue Frenchmen) and we never question his sincerity or wisdom.  It is a fantastically nuanced portrait of individual responses to war, from command to foot soldiers.

I'd also like to mention Tom Brooke's Corporal Nim, who was something of a revelation.  I've honestly never thought that hard about Nim before - another Eastcheap tavern sweller who goes off to war because there's sod-all else to do in Medieval England - but Brooke's unhappy, melancholic performance imbued the part with a huge amount of pathos and yet again reminded us not of the 'cost of war' or anything so sweeping, but simply of the single human lives that interweave throughout the story.  Similarly Melanie Thierry's Katherine - usually such a thankless task with the awkward lurching from war drama to rom-com - was brilliantly rendered.  The scene where she starts to learn English was imbued with a tension I'd always suspected was lurking there: she knows that her future is going to involve England in some way, and there's a war going on - something, anything to distract.  It's both pragmatic and strangely affecting.  The wooing scene is less successful but I'm going to blame Shakespeare here - it always seems oddly bathetic after the charge and energy of the battle scenes. Nevertheless, it is charmingly and (remarkably) convincingly done: the pledge of two young pragmatists who understand that their futures are linked and start to see that they could, despite everything, love each other some day.

Ultimately, Sharrock does things I never thought to see in a Henry V. Rather than cutting the play's problematic epilogue, in which we are reminded that Henry died not long after his conquest of France and left his infant son in the hands of the nobles who would begin the Wars of the Roses, Sharrock allows Shakespeare his final note of tragedy.  Opening and closing on Henry's funeral, we are left with a heavy mix of pride and grief: never for a moment is Hiddleston's distinctly flawed and human king anything less than the text's "star of England" - but stars fade, and history marches on.

...

Overall, The Hollow Crown has been stunning television.  It has not only lived up to my expectations, it has surprised me over and over again with its deft, intelligent, even revelatory interpretations from directors and actors.  Is it perfect? No.  Do the four films hang together? Not really.  Could it have afforded a bigger budget?  Almost definitely.  But it has, I think, changed the way we think of Shakespeare on film.  All four are defiantly cinematic envisionings of a series of plays that demand much of their dramatists.  Richard II is slow and gorgeous; Henry IV 1 and 2 is an uncompromising look at plays that usually go affectionately unchallenged; Henry V is a brilliant answer to a play that the nation seems simultaneously obsessed with and troubled by.  I really couldn't have asked for more than this: a series that presents some of my favourite plays beautifully, intelligently and viscerally, yet reminds me that no matter how many times I think I've got the measure of them, the Henriad still has more treasures to give.  Standing ovations all round.

...

*It sounded something like this: "oh huh wonder why they cut that line look they gave that bit to Doll oh that's interesting HIS SHIRT IS OPEN ooh I like that interpretation interesting I never thought of it like that OH MY GOD HIS HAIR IS WET AND ALSO HIS SHIRT jeremy irons is great oh look its will and alan from robin hood man that show was bad oh yeah shakespeare FUCK DID YOU SEE THE LIGHTING ON HIS COLLARBONE JUST THEN I wish these soliloquies weren't in voiceover HE JUST LOOKED INTO THE CAMERA oh no why did you cut that speech down HOLY FUCK LOOK AT HIS HANDS SO I GUESS I HAVE A HAND THING NOW OR SOMETHING IS THAT NORMAL LOOK HOW BLUE HIS EYES ARE CONCENTRATE ON THE SHAKESPEARE YOU HAVE A DEGREE OH FUCK HE WINKED AND NOW I'M DEAD".  But also he looked like this:

Oh hello.

And also all the promo shots for Henry V looked like this:

STOP LOOKING INTO MY SOUL.

THAT IS NOT AN APPROPRIATE WAY FOR A KING TO SIT.

So on balance I think I did quite well.

Finally A Post About Batman

It's no secret that Batman is kind of the unofficial mascot of this blog.  It was described to me today by a friend as "Shakespeare surrounded by Batman".  And yet I've never actually done a post exclusively about everyone's favourite winged vigilante.  I'm seeing The Dark Knight Rises tomorrow, so there'll be plenty to come on that but before we plunge into - let's face it - the end of a Batman epoch (because seriously, who is going to touch it for the next ten years after Nolan?) I want to address the "original" Batman film franchise and what went so badly, badly wrong.

I say "original" because, as any good nerd knows, Batman has been around in various guises since 1939. (Mostly bat-shaped guises, though there was that one comic where he was a pirate.  No seriously, google it.)  Pretty much all of my Batman knowledge comes from screen adaptations.  Despite my penchant for all things geek-shaped, I've never picked up/illegally downloaded a comic from the D.C. universe, nor will I because a) too much continuity and b) I hear they recently rebooted the D.C. universe for the seventeen billionth time and apparently it - to borrow a vulgarism - sucks ass.  Also, beyond Batman, the characters of the D.C. universe/Justice League have never really appealed to me as much as Marvel for whatever reason.  Maybe because Marvel keeps being so obliging with the abundance of cheekbones in their films.

Tons has been written about Batman in various cultural studies journals, so I'm not going to pretend that I can add anything new to the pot here but I know why I like him: he's mortal.  Batman is the most direct descendent of the heroic archetype that we have today. Beowulf, Odysseus, Spring-Heeled Jack - all of them went into making this guy who doesn't have any superhuman powers, just a gym membership and a large disposable income.  He's also hugely adaptable.  As far as I can discern, Batman has three main modes: gothy, campy and gritty.  All of them have their pros and cons but the character is always unfailingly Batman.  Not just in essentials (Batmobile, Batbelt, Batarangs, Batsignal, any other noun you can add 'Bat' to) but in motivation: "you fucked with my parents and now I'm going to dress up like a large rodent instead of visiting a psychiatrist like I probably should."  For great justice.

So let's take a look at Batman B.N. (Before Nolan).

Batman (1989)
This is a classic for so many reasons, but it has some flaws.  The main reason to watch it is Jack Nicholson's Joker.  We credit Heath Ledger with turning in an Oscar-worthy performance as a comic book villain, and rightly so, but let's not forget that this guy did it first.  Nicholson's Joker is more affable than Ledger's and (often literally for those onscreen) rib-crackingly funny.  He has the volatility of the character down perfectly post-chemical dip and even before 'Jack Napier' becomes the Clown Prince of Crime, Nicholson pulls no punches letting you know that this guy is a psycho with a nasty sense of humour.  Also, I defy anyone not to enjoy the sequence where the Joker and his goons burst into the art gallery to deface famous works of art accompanied by a huge 80s style boom box playing Prince's 'Partyman', written specifically for the film (oh yeah, loads of the songs are by Prince because that's not at all bizarre).

It's maybe not surprising that the Joker is the main draw of this film, given that it was directed by permanent-outsider-teen Tim Burton.  I unapologetically love Tim Burton, up to about 2007 when the formula started to wear thin (but it took some people much less time, so no-one can say I'm not faithful). But in 1989 Burton was at the beginning of his glory days.  His only major film before that was Beetlejuice, which ranks as my favourite Burton film of his oeuvre, and being such a comparative rookie has its good points and bad points.  On the one hand, Burton is gloriously unafraid to break the mould, which is what his Batman does in the same way that Batman Begins did sixteen years later.  Like Nolan, he wanted to make something that would open up the potential of this universe to more than just comic book fans.  The focus is on the Joker because what Burton does best is freakish outsiders, and it's hugely successful here.  Also remember when Burton was a great satirist, and not just someone who made things look cool by adding spirals?  That's hugely in evidence here, with Gotham's middle-class elite taking a battering for their narrow-minded concerns, picking up from the 80s yuppies in Beetlejuice and paving the way for the candy-coloured houses of Edward Scissorhands.

On the other hand, he doesn't really know what to do with the man himself.  Michael Keaton is great, and remains a lot of people's favourite Batman, but his Bruce Wayne - nervy, awkward, bespectacled and, now I think about it, oddly reminiscent of Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner in The Avengers - is more successful than his Batman.  There's no origin story here (well, it sort of comes into the plot later but in quite a half-arsed way), no explanation of why he does what he does.  The nearest we get is "Because I'm the only one who can", which is profoundly unsatisfying.  You get the feeling that Burton already had his hands full with one costumed weirdo and didn't really know how to balance the two against each other.  There's a nice thematic parallel between the two throughout, as it is gradually revealed that each are responsible for the other's transformation, but really there could be a lot more angst is all I'm saying.  Never thought I'd say that about a Tim Burton film.  As a whole, the film feels vaguely unformed: it's not quite a blockbuster, not quite a Burton film.

For all that, it's so worth watching if you haven't seen it.  All due respect to Nolan, but he wasn't the first to make Batman mainstream acceptable.  And also Billy Dee Williams is Harvey Dent in an aborted sequel hook that never quite enters Two-Face territory.  For shame.

Batman Returns (1992)
This is hands down my favourite Batman film, Nolan trilogy included.  With one film under the belt, Burton is much more sure-footed here and it's an out-and-out gothic Burton-gold-standard freak-fest.  Once again, the focus is on the villains and once again they're classics: Danny DeVito's genuinely disturbing Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer's iconic Catwoman.  The Penguin is a villain straight out of Burton's own imagination - in fact, there's even a character in Burton's 'The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy', a strange and excellent little book of poems and drawings concerning various deformed children, called That Hideous Penguin Boy.  And hideous he is too.  On my 153rd rewatch, I still find it distressingly hard to look at the Penguin full on so I guess bravo to the make-up department there, and also kindly go fuck yourselves for igniting a metric fuckton of Nightmare Fuel in my tender developing imagination.  Christopher Walken is also on good eerie form as Max Schrek, the shady industrialist who pulls the strings and, despite lack of animal-themed costume/deformity, is implied to be the real monster in Gotham.

Also remember what I was saying about Burton being a great satirist?  Pfeiffer's Catwoman is my favourite part of the whole film because of the way she gloriously deconstructs the idea of the sexy whip-toting dominatrix who just needs the love of a good man.  Don't get me wrong, she's still guilty of launching an entire generation of boyish masturbatory fantasies and I'd be lying if I said she wasn't objectified even a little bit (vinyl catsuit) but Burton and Pfeiffer make it gloriously clear that Selina Kyle is, y'know, brain-damaged.  In close up, she twitches, smears her lipstick across her face, her eyes lose focus and she occasionally tries to eat live birds.  She should probably be in a hospital ward but, like Bruce, she's decided to work out her problems by dressing as a furry mammal and capering across some rooftops.  Accordingly, the Batman/Catwoman/Bruce Wayne/Selina Kyle romance is done brilliantly and is actually integral to the plot too, unlike poor Kim Basinger's tacked-on romance in the first film.  The sequence where they turn up to a masquerade ball (as Wayne and Kyle) and are the only two not wearing masks is a great touch, as is Pfeiffer's deadpan delivery upon their mutual realisation of each other's alter-ego in the middle of the crowded dance floor: "Do we have to start fighting now?" Just two damaged, combative, highly secretive individuals taking turns to kick the shit out of each other and make out.  Move along now, nothing to see here.  In conclusion, Catwoman manages to be empowered and deconstruct the idea of empowerment-through-male-gaze at the same time.  And that was in 1992.  What happened?

Batman Returns is much tighter than its predecessor, and darker too - something which led to Burton's polite removal from the director's chair for the next one.  The design is superb, Gotham City re-imagined as an art deco nightmare with shades of film noir.  At the time, a reviewer called the film "the first blockbuster art film" (that's some great citation there), a trick which Nolan again repeated with The Dark Knight, and I think that's the perfect description for it.  The action is a little meagre and there's no fine delineation of heroes and villains, but that's not the point - it's a murky, gruesome, beautiful world in which it isn't hard to believe that deformed children are cast into the river to grow up in sewers beneath your feet and secretaries are pushed out of top-floor windows.  Not our own world by a long shot, but with enough resonances to make it uncomfortable viewing.

Batman Forever (1995)
And here's where the rot starts to set it.  Making good on their pledge that no bad decision go unmade, Hollywood decided that Batman Returns was a just a little too controversial and there was a whole audience of families whose wallets were going unemptied.  Enter stage right: Joel Schumaker and a sudden cold wind blowing through everyone's hearts.  Burton stayed on to produce, which is apparent in the final mix of the film: the universe is cartoonish and silly, but the tone is weirdly gloomy.  It's like the opposite of one of those kids who dresses in stripy tights and black eyeliner but then smiles all the time and says things like "I'm kooky!"  It's like Eeyore in drag.  (You're welcome.)  It's also famous for being the film in which Schumaker decided that subtlety was for pussies and rubber nipples were for men.

I won't lie, it's been a while since I watched it.  I do know, however, that as great as Tommy Lee Jones generally is (and he's an okay-ish Two Face here), I feel robbed of not seeing Billy Dee Williams in the role.  Robbed.  Val Kilmer is also an okay-ish sort of Batman but to me he will never ever not be the gay detective from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which is a) awesome and you should see it it now, b) not in any way an insult because Kilmer is great in it and c) this is the film where we get Robin for the first time so the homoeroticism is already dialled up to eleven.  Speaking of: ugh, Robin.  Chris O'Donnell is the kind of charmless charisma-vacuum that studios loved casting in the mid-nineties because for a very short space of time, that is apparently what women wanted.  On that note, let's bear in mind that they also apparently wanted Mel Gibson at that point too, so let's just write the whole decade off as a loss for relations between the sexes.  I would actually have loved to see Nolan's attempt at a gritty reboot of Robin, given that this is something that has actually been attempted in the comics, with the second (?) Robin, Jason Todd, becoming Nightwing when he was fired from being Robin on reaching adulthood (also I think he died or something).  Let's not dwell on the fact that Batman stops employing his sidekicks when they reach the age of consent.  I still have a secret hope that Joseph Gordon Levitt's role in The Dark Knight Rises actually is Robin in some way, given that my theory is that he's there to take over when Christian Bale breaks his spine or dies or generally stops being able to go Batmanning of an evening.

Shamefully, there is one thing that I like about this film a lot, which is Jim Carey as The Riddler.  That makes no sense to me even as I type it, but there it is.  He fits with the timbre of the new universe, being kind of a walking cartoon as he is, and The Riddler is a pretty classic villain (again, I was hoping he would make an appearance in the Nolan-verse but I can well imagine the Internet's ringing cries of "Joker knock-off!", only with more swearing and casual misogyny).  That is it though.  It's maybe worth watching because it's so bizarre, but on the whole you should just pretend the franchise died with Burton's directorial involvement.

Batman and Robin (1997)
There's little I can say about how bad this film is that you won't have heard before but do you want the truth?  You'll probably quite enjoy it.  It reaches levels of so-bad-it's-good so quickly that you almost suspect Schumaker of trying to make a cult film.  And then Arnie turns up with another ice pun and you realise that if anyone willingly put themselves through the making of this for art, then that person is a hero.  It's scraping the barrel so hard on the villain front, it's practically through to the floor.  As well as the inventively named Mr Freeze (he freezes things), we get an unnervingly dead-eyed Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy and some other bloke as her henchman Bane (man, I am so looking forward to The Dark Knight Rises).  In the first three films, we had a psychotic clown, a hideous deformed penguin-man, and a man with half his face burned away by acid.  The weapons threatening Gotham this time are frozen water, and plants.  Also Bane, who is supposed to be one of the smartest and strongest of the Batman Rogue's Gallery - he actually broke Batman's spine leaving him paraplegic in one story arc (oh my god, is it time for Dark Knight Rises yet?) - is reduced to an inarticulate luchador.  Also Alicia Silverstone is Batgirl and loads of people called her fat, which is really uncalled for when her performance is so horrible, you could just focus on that. (Also, she's not fat.)

So yeah, I could go through all the puns, all the nonsensical plot points, all the bizarre unintentional homoeroticism, all the torturous adolescent flirting, all the fucking BAT CREDIT CARDS, but I won't because you should just watch it with some strong drink and then a) you can say you've watched it and survived and b) you might even enjoy it a little bit.  Or just look at George Clooney's calming, symmetrical face.  Don't you feel better now?

But in the end, it's not enough to say that's it's a bad film, you have to ask why it's bad - because no-one sets out to make a bad film.  The answer is quite simple: money, dear boy.  Batman and Robin is a purely cynical money-spinning exercise from beginning to end.  It could have taken Burton's quasi-cartoon universe and pushed it into something more trippy and disturbing but no - Batman and Robin is the way it is because the producers wanted to sell more Happy Meal toys.  That's right, McDonald's did what the Joker never could.  It killed Batman.


And then along came Nolan in 2005 to resurrect our Bat-shaped hopes and dreams with a trilogy that has not only redefined Batman (again) but redefined what we're allowed to do with blockbusters.  It's the film that everyone will see this summer - they might not have seen The Avengers, they might not see The Amazing Spider-man, but they'll sure as hell see The Dark Knight Rises, and they'll enjoy it.  Unless, as I predict, Christian Bale ends the film shattered into a million tiny pieces and even then, it'll happen in an awesome way.  Just please, please, please, Christopher Nolan - don't fuck up Catwoman.

Pixar and Me: A Toy Story Retrospective

Warning: this post contains spoilers for all three Toy Story films and some extremely emotional italics.

The first Toy Story film came out in the UK in 1996. I was 6 years old. Like a lot of six year old girls, I had more than a passing fondness for pink, princesses, Cinderella, ballerinas, that kind of thing.  I had a princess party for my sixth birthday, much to the joy of my male playmates.  When I tell people this now, it usually surprises them; as regular discerning readers may glean, I'm not so much one for romantic comedy, more one for spurious escapism powered by explosions.  So what happened?  The short answer is Toy Story.  Toy Story happened.

When my parents took me to see Toy Story, the excitement on their part was largely to do with this new form of animation, which was – gasp – done on a computer.  Maybe some of this excitement rubbed off on me because, so far as I remember, I was rather keen to see this funny-looking film, despite obvious lack of castles, dresses, oppressive patriarchy etc.  By the time the credits rolled, I don’t think I or either of my parents were even considering the artistic and technological advances in animation because oh my god Toy Story was the best thing we had ever seen.  To this day, the trilogy tops every list of favourite films I make: nostalgia value, artistic merit, tight writing, aesthetics, storytelling, voice acting, it's got it all.  You can keep Citizen Kane.  I've got Toy Story.

But my relationship with Toy Story goes beyond artistic appreciation. It had a huge influence over my development as a person: from the moment Woody and pals did their jerky early-CGI swagger into my life, princesses were discarded.  I was going to be a cowboy.  I then quickly amended this ambition to cowgirl.  Toy Story woke in me some dormant tomboy gene, a desire for adventure and thrills: it was the start of a whole new way of being that was very different to the narratives that Cinderella was feeding me.  There's nothing wrong with being a girly-girl, of course, but there aren't nearly as many good stories involved.  If all your fairytales end with a handsome prince, you're getting a very limited worldview to say the least.  Toy Story led to me devouring Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, Pippi Longstocking, Roald Dahl and, not much later, Harry Potter in a way I wouldn’t have done before.  Fairytales were swapped for Greek myths: so much bolder and brighter, with gods and monsters and heroes and people doing things.  Suddenly, there were more colours in the world than pink.

You know the montage in the first film where all of Andy's cowboy stuff turns into Buzz Lightyear stuff?  That happened to me.  Discarded was my faithful Snow White costume and in came a swanky new Woody outfit, complete with sheriff badge and hat.  The plastic orgy of Barbies in various states of hard, shiny undress were converted from dress-up toys into complex societies of doctors, superheroes, witches, singers and actors with more back-stabbing, secret alliances and political manoeuvring than a Game of Thrones episode (though probably about as much nudity, I had been gifted a lot of second-hand Barbies but not many clothes to cover their dubious modesty).  The cherry on the cake of all this was my own Woody doll - much chunkier than the film's lanky rag doll, but I wrote my name on his boot nonetheless - and a shiny silver special edition Buzz.  I'll never forget the horror of a friend's younger sibling asking to borrow Woody and the reproving look on my mother's face as I turned my beseeching eyes towards her.  Woody came back minus his hat and with his pull string broken.  They bought me a new one that played guitar but it wasn't the same.  Woody as I knew and loved him was gone and it probably wouldn't have happened if I hadn't done what my mother told me.  Goddamit, mum.  It was a dark chapter in my history and if you think I'm joking, only a little.*  I suppose the long and the short of it is that Toy Story taught me how to play. 

I turned 22 on Sunday.  For my birthday present to myself, I sat down with a close friend and a lot of pizza and watched Toy Story 3.  Before I address the film itself, I'll just say this: even at this age, it is my 7-year-old self that enjoys car chases, heists, prison breaks, explosions and shoot outs.  When I reviewed The Avengers, what I could not show you was my facial expression, which was one of pure childlike glee.  Toy Story's influence lives on also in my sense of humour: silliness, snarkiness and surrealism living comfortably side by side.  Buzz proclaiming, "Don't you get it?! I am MRS NESBITT" will never, ever not be funny to me.  We love talking about how Pixar invented the kids-films-secretly-for-adults genre, although as I get older I'm not even sure they're for kids at all.  I was severely disappointed in Finding Nemo when I first saw it at the age of 13, but as (more of) an adult the scene where Nemo turns around and tells his Dad, "I hate you" is extremely powerful.  Witness also the separation and reunion aspects of Monsters Inc, the bleak yet hopeful view of humanity envisioned in Wall-E, the obligatory mention of the first ten minutes of Up: I don't think Pixar is making kid's films at all, not even secretly-for-parents-kid's-films.  I think Pixar is making films to please itself and by god, I salute them.  Except for Cars.  Cars was a bit shit.

No matter what else it produces, though, the Toy Story Trilogy in its entirety is always going to be the pinnacle of achievement for Pixar.  For me personally, it holds a cachet shared only by one other series - Harry Potter (the books, obviously) - of having grown up as I have grown up.  Both series place strong emphases on friendship, courage and resourcefulness, both are funny and wildly imaginative.  I spent a lot of my teenage years emulating the dress and mannerisms of various fictional characters (Winona Ryder in Beatlejuice, take a bow) in the fruitless quest for self-identity that is adolescence but there's probably only one fictional character I've ever really wanted to be, and though I've put away my lassoo-skipping-rope now, I still hold that if I can be something like Woody - wisecracking, courageous, loyal, a leader, flawed but ultimately good – I could do alright.  In fact, much of the first film is driven by Woody's flaws; on my recent re-watch I was kind of surprised to discover how much of a jerk he is, so I guess Toy Story is also responsible for starting my worrying tendency to become a furious apologist for anti-social fictional men.  And on the topic of changing perspectives, when I was a kid it was Woody's fears of rejection and replacement that I related to - playground politics can be so cruel - but as an adult, Jesus Christ, is there anything sadder than watching Buzz's heroic breakdown when he realises he's not a real space ranger?  With the sad song and the window and the no! I will fly! moment?  And because Hollywood teaches us that if you really really want something and are an attractive twentysomething or an adorable cartoon character you can definitely always get it, we believe he's going to fly and then he doesn't?  And he loses his arm for trying? Blimey, Pixar, you ever think about pulling your punches a little?

And, of course, the films only get progressively darker and more spiritually wounding as they go on.  Most conceptual universes don't tend to examine the ins and out of the realities they create, but Toy Story 2 took the difficult questions of toy ownership - and sentient toys - and ran with it.  What happens when the kids start to grow up?  There's only really a few exits for toys from the playroom: donation, the attic or, most likely, in a bin bag.  The bottom line is that kids grow up and move on.  Toy Story 2 was one for the parents in this respect: the feelings of abandonment and rejection that Woody and Jessie experience are a poignant analogue for the knowledge that every parent faces - one day they too will appear "used" and "outgrown" to their children.  But the final message is redemptive: we cannot stop ourselves or our children from growing up but we can enjoy it while it lasts.  And if we are loved, truly loved with the special bond that Andy and Emily shared with their toys, that love can sustain us when the relationship is no longer as immediate or dependent as it once was.  And it's probably no accident that the weepy Sarah McLachlan ballad that plays over the heartbreaking montage of Jessie's abandonment by her owner also borrows heavily from the semantics of a romantic relationship ending.  Far from the usual Disney fare, in which walking off into the sunset is par for the course, the second lesson Pixar taught me with the Toy Story trilogy was that relationships ending is a fact of life, but it doesn't have to be the end of the world.  The final note is bittersweet, a relative first for children's entertainment, with Woody proclaiming that Andy's childhood "won't last forever" but "I wouldn't miss a moment of it".  Of course, then Toy Story 3 took those themes and turned them into a harrowing emotional black hole from which I barely managed to escape with my battered soul intact.

I never doubted that Toy Story 3 was going to be good.  It was simply far too important to fail, not just to me but to the thousands of kids in my age bracket who were now packing up their bedrooms to head off into the unknown.  Like that other fictional boy I grew up alongside, Harry Potter, Andy was now my age, or thereabouts, and now here was Pixar, showing us that we had not been forgotten, that they were here to close the final chapter on our childhoods.  I'm pretty certain I wasn't alone in practically pushing small children out of the way to get to the front of queue because goddammit eight-year-olds, you have no idea what this means.  I also spent a fair few minutes in conversation with the girl at the desk trying to sell me Odeon membership.  After some rapid and confusing exchanges about how much money I would be saving, I wailed in a loud and plaintive tone that sent heads turning across the foyer, "I JUST WANT TO SEE TOY STORY 3."  So to say I cried might be an understatement - from the opening sequence, taken word for word from the first two films, to the last half hour solid, I was pretty much a mess.

When I re-watched it yesterday, sufficient time had passed that I could also appreciate how breathtakingly well made it is.  The animation had progressed astoundingly compared to the original 1995 film; Pixar has always been shy about animating humans unless cartoonishly stylised first (Ratatouille, The Incredibles) but they seem to have conquered Uncanny Valley (explained in this post) with a vengeance because holy crap, look at all those emotions!  Look at grown-up Andy playing with Bonnie!  Look at Andy's mum tearing up in his empty bedroom!  Look at all these people.  The textures and tones were richer, the lighting beautifully rendered: eerie and flickering strip bulbs, sunlight through leaves, rainstorms, every single piece of debris in the furnace glowing and casting individual shadows.  It's a beautifully designed film.  It's also gleefully funny.  Just when one is ready to condemn the Americans for lack of wit, they go and pull something like Spanish Buzz which was, without a doubt, one of the best things on celluloid this side of the millennium, and probably the other as well.  The level of nuance in it is far greater than I'd appreciated: I'd thought the real emotional heft was contained to the last half hour but my friend and I were brushing away stray tears from the first act as the toys make one last ditch attempt to reconnect with Andy and fail resoundingly.  Even the only thing that I actively disliked about the film - the absence of Bo Peep - wasn't something I could fault artistically since it established that the years really hadn't been kind to our gang (but seriously guys, did you have to make the look on Woody's face when he said Bo was gone so painful?  and did you have to not even say what happened to her so maybe she wasn't even given away, maybe she got broken or something?  Stop fucking with my essential sense of narrative justice).  The film juggles genres with a nonchalance that Joss Whedon (a writer on the first film, by the way) has wet dreams about.  First it's an adventure flick, then that's a dream sequence, that it's all farewells and gritty emotional drama, then it turns into an eerie dystopia, then it's a prison break film with Mission Impossible overtones, then we reach the last half hour and holy fuck every known reference point for film goes out the window because I'm crying like a housewife with a bottle of gin and a DVD of Beaches.

I am willing to admit that, like every other person in that cinema, I truly believed they were going into that furnace.  Even if you said afterwards you knew all along they were going to be fine, you're lying because a tiny part of you deep down was preparing to say goodbye to these characters forever.  Which is then exactly what we had to do ten minutes later.  God fucking dammit, Pixar, how dare you have such puppet-master-like control over my heartstrings?  How dare you?  And do you know why it worked?  Because having the toys melt into bubbling plastic globs would have been easier.  It would have been the cheap emotionally manipulative ending that we're so used to seeing Hollywood pull.  No, forcing us to confront the terrible, bleak, mentally-scarring reality - that we'd always have memories of childhood but we weren't allowed to be children anymore, that it was someone else's turn to be a child - that is so much crueller.  Damn you, Lasseter.  Damn you, Pixar.  Damn you all to the special hell.

So maybe what sets Toy Story 3 apart as a film, that cements the trilogy's place in my heart, is that it's neither for children nor for adults: it's for us, those in-betweeny, hard to place 'young adults' who grew up with the original films.  That doesn't mean no-one else can enjoy it - my mum walked in on the last ten minutes and started crying immediately - but it is for us.  For which one can only say, along with Andy, thanks guys.  You're all really special but I have to go away now.  And if we're really lucky, we get to see someone else enjoying the thing that we once enjoyed, and if we're really really lucky then we get to see them loving it, and that love doesn't fade or lessen even if time is against us in all other respects.

Blimey.  Batman Batman Batman.  That's better.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to stockpile some tissues and go watch Wall-E.


*EDIT: Since posting this, my mother has informed me that I wasn't actually there when the request came for temporary possession of my Woody doll, so I can only assume that what I'm remembering is outrage as only a seven-year-old can be outraged, along with a seven-year-old's morality which disregards things like kindness and common courtesy because everyone else should just stay away from my toys.  I'd also like to point out that I've neglected to mention that Toy Story was a hugely important series not just to me but my whole family - say "Mrs Nesbitt" to any member of my family and they'll laugh.  Or cry.  Damn, I think I'm starting again.