Tag Archives: Gotham

Movie Review – Joker

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Joker is such a gritty and twisted re-imagining of the Batman mythos that the only way Batman could exist in this new world would be as a fascist enforcer in the mould of Judge Dredd, looking to preserve the status quo, and perhaps thump down on the sub-human scum who repaid his father’s benevolence with death and chaos.

Back in the days when Batman first scowled through the comic panes at a generation of youths whose fathers and brothers and uncles and childhood friends were about to go to war, society still clung to its belief in the quintessential goodness of the patrician class and its unassailable right to rule, in all its patriarchal glory.

The masses, particularly the American masses, believed that wealth was an emblem and consequence of hard-work, success and moral probity (many still do). The more money you had, the better you were. These days the left-leaning zeitgeist favours the idea that the ruling elite is inherently corrupt, a view that’s perhaps closer to the truth of human nature than the one that was sold to the war generations.

The fortunes amassed by billionaires like Thomas Wayne are increasingly seen as fortunes stolen from the common man and woman, or at least made upon their breaking and broken backs. The billionaires of the 2000s have been re-framed as walking black holes of greed; sucking out souls, opportunity, money and autonomy from states and whole nations, in the process helping to create the very conditions of inequality, oppression and violence that figures like Batman spend their nights wading through and fighting against.

In this movie, the good guys aren’t necessarily good, and the bad guy’s aren’t necessarily bad. Hence the Joker isn’t some unknowable force of murderous mayhem like Heath Ledger’s, nor a gangster whose evils have been amplified by a vat of toxic ooze like Jack Nicholson’s, but a very real product of his domestic and social environment. This Joker is the most human incarnation of the infamous villain, and all the more terrifying for it.

The intensity of Phoenix’s performance – how he seems to inhabit the very bones of Arthur Fleck; how his face no longer seems his own – makes watching Joker a heavy, visceral, fascinating, and often extremely uncomfortable experience. It’s a staggeringly brilliant evocation of mental illness; a disturbingly detailed and earnest exploration of frailty and rage. Arthur’s trademark laugh, triggered at times of stress and trauma, is chilling to the point of being blood-curdling. Phoenix makes you believe in, and feel for, Arthur Fleck, even when he’s shooting men in the back or bludgeoning the head of a betrayer off a door-jamb. Even at the very apex of his madness, we feel for him.  He’s vulnerable. He’s the underdog. He’s capable of great kindness.

Arthur Fleck’s a good boy. He loves his mother. He loves chat-show host Murray Franklin. He wants to be Murray Franklin; he wants to be respected by him; he wants Murray to be his father. Arthur wants to make people laugh. He wants to be noticed. He wants to be famous. He longs to be a somebody. He wants to be loved.

But piece by piece, slowly but surely, Arthur’s innocence and certainty – his very reality – is stripped from him by the society and institutions around him, as everything and everyone that ever meant anything to him betrays or fails him. Each time a layer of his vulnerable psyche is pulled away it’s replaced by anger and madness until finally, tragically – and, of course, inevitably – all that’s left of Arthur is the raw, open wound of Joker – a name bestowed upon him by his fallen hero, Murray Franklin.

Heath Ledger’s Joker was closer to a trickster God from Norse legend than a living, breathing human being; a creature with no history, or connections: an agent of pure chaos. But his and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker share, if nothing else, a multiplicity of possible origin stories. Where Ledger’s ever-shifting tales about his disfigurement, his very Jokerness, are borne of lies and delusion, Phoenix’s Joker is composed of a roulette wheel of possible root-causes:  who and what made him?

Was it his mad mother? Was it his own sprawling mental illness? Was it ideological cuts in funding to mental welfare organisations? Was it the harsh realities of a life lived in a pervasive, dog-eat-dog capitalist society? Was it rising inequality between the very richest and the very poorest? Was it our narcissistic cult of celebrity? The emotional toll of being rejected and humiliated by two father figures (Wayne and Franklin)? The broth of resentment, cruelty and hatred bubbling away on the streets?

The rioting, discontented masses of Gotham come to revere Fleck/Joker as the emblem of their violent movement – the hero of the underclass – but the movie is careful not to make that same mistake. Even when Fleck/Joker delivers a speech live on camera, admitting to murder and raging at society, moments before executing Murray Franklin (De Niro’s casting as talk-show host Murray Franklin is a nod both to Taxi Driver, with which Joker shares not only De Niro, but much of its tone and aesthetic, and King of Comedy, in which De Niro plays a crazed narcissist and wannabe comic who holds a talk-show host hostage in order to secure his big TV break) he doesn’t exhibit the confident, steely oratory of a rebel-in-chief. His words are the garbled, urgent outpourings of a man whose brain is electric with grief and madness; a man who only moments ago planned to turn the gun on himself instead of on Murray Franklin.

If you aren’t rooting for and empathising with Arthur Fleck in the film’s first half, then you’ve got no heart; but if you’re still rooting and cheering for Fleck once he’s jettisoned the last of his fragility and humanity to fully become Joker, then you’ve probably missed the point somewhere along the line.

‘Joker’ blends past and the present, fact and fiction, fantasy and reality, infecting us with the uneasy sense of a world, or worlds, constantly shifting beneath our feet: we’re us, we’re Fleck; it’s Gotham, it’s New York; it’s present-day, it’s the 1970s; people are real, people are illusions; Arthur Fleck is a good boy, Joker is a bad boy. The crowds that tear Gotham’s streets apart are products of the hubris and lies of capitalist demagogues like Trump, but their behaviour more closely allies them with the supporters of people like Trump. A bunch of angry clowns. What is truth, what is lie, who must live, who must die?

As Fleck travels through the flaming streets of Gotham in the back of a squad car, he looks like a man who finally gets the joke. The mayhem outside matches the mayhem inside his head. He doesn’t have to fit in anymore, because the world has changed to fit him. Moments later a stolen ambulance thumps into the squad car. Arthur Fleck is pulled from a glass-fringed aperture in the wreck of that rammed and wrecked squad-car. He’s laid on his back on the bonnet, helpless, bloodied and confused. The figure who soon takes his first steps upon the bonnet of that squad car, to riotous bays and cheers, is Joker. Arthur Fleck is dead, all vestiges of mercy and hesitation gone from his flickering mind. He is reborn. While Arthur might have let a friend who showed him kindness walk away from a blood-bath, Joker has no such instincts, as evidenced by the bloody footprints peppering the floors of Arkham Asylum at the close of the movie.

We begin and end the movie in a psychiatric facility. Given how unreliable the protagonist is – how many times we’re fooled by his false perceptions – how much of what we see in the movie is actually real? Is the Joker real… or is he fake news? Are we nothing more than a symptom of Arthur Fleck’s madness? The observers he’s always craved…

“You get what you fucking deserve…” utters the Joker. It’s a line that’s swiftly adopted by the rioters, becoming their mantra and mission statement. It could also be the movie’s; the nihilistic spine that runs throughout.

Did Arthur Fleck deserve what he got: a childhood of poverty, abuse and madness? Did Murray Franklin get what he deserved? Did the Waynes? Did those guys on the subway? Did Gotham?

Batman will one day be the hero that Gotham deserves, but Joker is the villain that it fucking deserves right now.

And it’s the movie we need.

VERDICT: 5 STARS

Geeks may rule, but *that* ‘aint cool…

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Being a geek, or being interested in geeky things, isn’t the albatross around the neck it used to be when I was at school. As a teenager, I hid my love for Star Trek like it was a secret identity. Not a sexy secret identity like Superman’s, but one that if discovered would almost certainly prevent me from losing my virginity before the turn of the millennium. The third millennium.

I remember sitting in the opticians with my mum when I was about 15 or 16. I was browsing through an Argos catalogue when I spied the complete first season of Star Trek Voyager on VHS. I hinted that it might make a nice gift for a space-loving chap such as myself, but my mother never gave it any serious consideration, preferring instead to launch into a tirade about how I didn’t appreciate the value of things, and how her parents had never bought her box-sets of popular American science-fiction programmes when she was a girl growing up in the Glasgow tenements. I think the closest she’d ever got to flying saucers was when her mum got angry and threw plates at her.

About half-way through this parental primal-scream, the shop door tinkled to announce the arrival of a new customer. It was a girl from my class at school. She took a seat next to us. This wasn’t good. Mum was still in full, red-faced swing, a few ‘and another things’ leaping from her tongue. I couldn’t let this Star Trek-shaped secret get out. I mustered every sliver of verbal dexterity I possessed in a desperate attempt to derail the subject of conversation.

And I failed.

Miserably.

Have you ever tried to stop a mother from talking, much less a Glasweigen one? After a few awkward hellos, my mum turned to the girl, jabbed a finger at the Argos catalogue and said: “He wants me to buy him these bloody Star Trek videos. Look how expensive they are!”

She might as well have said: “Honest to God, I don’t know how I’m going to stop him from wearing his granny’s knickers to bed every night, and touching himself as he watches Prisoner Cell Block H.”

The girl was now an Athenian herald, sure to take news of my plummeting sexual stock back to school, where it would be met with frenzied murmurs of ‘… Jamie…Jamie…which one’s he again?’ This was the bitterest pill to swallow. The realisation that I probably didn’t have stock to plummet in the first place.

How times have changed.

Not in terms of my sexual stock, you understand, which still remains low, but in terms of the things that impact on a young lad’s sex appeal. These days, admitting you like Star Trek isn’t going to stop you from boldly going to bed with someone; admitting you like Star Wars isn’t going to stand in the way of you getting a good Chewie.

It’s a brave new world for the geeks of yesteryear. Superhero movies routinely gross billions at the box office. Sagas like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are almost universally adored, or at least universally respected. Sci-fi shows and comic book adaptations are everywhere. Fewer and fewer people are confusing Star Wars with Star Trek while wearing dismissive sneers on their faces.

Arguably, geeks have inherited the earth because technology has finally caught up with the dreams, visions and what-if-eries at the pulsing core of geekdom. Fans have finally been able to say to a scornful population (whose perspectives on sci-fi, superheroes and fantasy worlds had perhaps been shaped by stereotypes like Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons): ‘See? This is what’s been happening inside our heads all these years. This is what it looks like. It’s pretty cool, right?’

So geek is now cool.

Except… not all of it.

Oh god, not all of it.

Even factoring in mainstream acceptance, there are still elements of the best sci-fi and fantasy shows, and moments within them, that make me want to take up sports, bin my books, burn my DVD collection and never contemplate the fantastical or the high-concept ever again; there are things out there that must remain hidden from new geeks and the yet-to-be converted; things with the power to turn me back into that embarrassed, shame-ridden boy sitting in my local optician’s, ready to curl up into a ball that’s roughly the same size as the smallest letter on the bottom line of the eye-chart.

Strap yourself in. This ‘aint going to be pretty.

Kling-a-long-a-ding-dong

I watched the first season of Star Trek Discovery last year, and while I enjoyed it, it didn’t instantly convince me of its Star Trekkiness. It seemed to owe more of a debt to the 2004 series of Battlestar Galactica (and perhaps even The Punisher) than to its franchise forebears. Some of the violence is nauseatingly brutal, with frequent scenes of bloody torture and merciless bone-crunching. The characters even swear. OK, it’s not a Star Trek first. Data once uttered the word ‘shit’ to comedic effect in the The Next Generation crew’s first cinematic outing ‘Generations’, but until 2017 that was – to the best of my knowledge – the one and only swear word that Star Trek had ever dropped.

Now, not only do Star Trek crews say shit, they say ‘fuck’, too. The ‘f’ word?? In fucking Star Trek? What mirror-universe trickery is this? I can only posit that the creative team behind the show must once have been teenage Trek fans and found themselves sitting in a version of my opticians’ office, timidly browsing through a catalogue of Star Trek box-sets, terrified that their shameful secret would be exposed, and vowing to themselves: ‘When I’m eventually in charge of this show it’s going to have tits and it’s going to have blood and broken necks and shagging and people saying ‘fuck’ all the time, and everyone’s going to think it’s edgy and hip, by God! And the geeky kids who watch it are going to be drowning in sexual effluent – AND NOT THEIR OWN THIS TIME, DAMMIT!’

Despite being self-conscious as a lad, I always thought Star Trek was cool. Well, OK, not cool, exactly, but worthy, cerebral, exciting. If only the majority of people in my school and neighbourhood would set aside their preconceptions and give it a chance I was certain they’d grow to love it.

But not if they ever, ever, ever, EVER tuned in just as a bunch of Klingons started singing. Then all bets were off. They’d be left thinking to themselves that they’d accidentally started watching a documentary about angry German death-metal fans, or the final of the Eurovision Song Contest. Finally convincing someone to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and having them randomly select an episode with lots of Klingon sing-alongs is the equivalent of talking about how cool, friendly and funny your best friend is to a group of new acquaintances at a formal occasion, only for your friend to turn up dressed as half-Ike Turner, half-Tina Turner, and caked in human shit from head-to-toe.

Mind you, any episode from the first season of TNG would have a similar effect on the uninitiated. Almost without exception the episodes were hammy, crummy and execrable, and in one infamous instance really rather quite racist – looking at you, Code of Honour.

Deep Space Nine was – and still is – my favourite incarnation of Star Trek. It quickly became a gritty, dirty, rough-and-tumble, serialised saga filled with flawed and imperfect heroes and relatable villains, an obvious spiritual predecessor to the revived Battlestar Galactica… but let’s not forget that it, too, began its life as, well… shite. The first season episode, Move Along Home, in which some of the principal characters become trapped in a weird alien game that can only be defeated by playing hopskotch and singing daft otherworldly nursery rhymes, is so cringe-worthy that even a young Russel Brand would’ve been killed by all the vicarious shame compressed and distilled into its ferociously fucking awful forty minutes.

Red Face in Space

I loved Red Dwarf as a lad, and was never happier than when out in the playground imitating the cast and trading catchphrases. I used to tape episodes from the TV so I could watch them with my grandfather, a continuation of a sci-fi-watching tradition that had started with repeats of Lost in Space and Land of the Giants. I had a deep, symbiotic relationship with Red Dwarf, as we all have with our favourite things, be they TV shows, football clubs or Gods.

My grandfather’s laughter wasn’t just a vindication of the writers and a salute to the comedic chops of Craig Charles et al; to me it signified acceptance, validation. As we bonded over those half-hour nuggets of space-based hijinks, my being became indivisible from Red Dwarf. If he hadn’t have liked it as much as he did, or actively hated it, I would have taken it as a personal insult, and left my grandparents’ home nursing a psychic wound an inch deep around my soul.

Watching Red Dwarf slowly die from 1997 on-wards was like finding out that all of my favourite childhood entertainers had been prolific child abusers, which isn’t just an extreme analogy, because most of my favourite childhood entertainers were prolific child abusers. I remember watching an episode from season seven with my Dwarf-sceptic sister and becoming increasingly angry at the show for being shit, and at my sister for not laughing anyway. Then came season eight – aka Chuckle Brothers in Space – featuring slapstick that was about as funny as watching your gran being beaten to death by angry werewolves with cricket bats.

After season eight the show was quickly and quietly (and completely understandably) dropped by the BBC, only to be resurrected ten years later on the satellite channel Dave. Red Dwarf’s come-back special was Back to Earth, a made-for-TV movie told in three parts. Creator Doug Naylor took the bold step of removing not only every shred of laughter from the new show, but all of its humour, too, replacing it with a mixture of existential dread and Coronation Street. Fuck, it was dreadful.

Seasons ten and eleven were a mixed-bag, but in their defence there were a few diamonds strewn among the rough, just enough to justify the show’s continued existence. In season twelve, though, Doug Naylor successfully squandered every dollop of goodwill he’d managed to build up by dropping a single episode that was so gut-grindingly, skull-breakingly, world-endingly awful that it made all of the shittest episodes he’d made up until that point seem like comedies co-written by Steve Coogan, Graham Linehan, Billy Connolly, Trey Parker, Matt Stone and the Marx Brothers combined.

It was so bad it made Mrs Browns’ Boys look good; truth be told it made having your eyes punched in by a spike while a crocodile rips off your cock look good. That episode was, of course, Timewave, signalling to even the show’s most ardent fans that it might be time to wave goodbye to the show forever. Red’s dead, baby. Red’s dead.

Oh, come on, was it really that bad, Jamie? Really?! WELL YES IT WAS, ACTUALLY, YOU DOUBTING THOMAS! So exquisitely terrible that if a nuclear missile were to wipe out half the planet as you watched it, the end of mankind wouldn’t be the worst thing to have happened to you during that half-hour; so bad that my grandfather came back from the dead to throat punch me for ever making him watch this shite when he was alive.

If you haven’t seen Timewave, I beg you not to seek it out. I don’t even want to describe it, lest the plot when written down opens a portal to Hell or something. Trust me and just forget it ever existed. It’ll make you hate not only Red Dwarf, but puppies, kittens, freshly-baked scones, rainbows, laughter and even your own children.

I worried about being exposed as a Star Trek Voyager fan, but being caught even talking about this episode could set back a teenager’s sex life by at least 65 ice ages.

An arrow through the ear

I stopped watching Arrow during its fourth season, so who knows, perhaps it broke free from its strange blend of cheese, grit and ridiculous character trajectories to become a slick, gritty Nolan-esque powerhouse… 

I always thought it was funny that there wasn’t anyone in Oliver’s orbit that didn’t eventually become a crime-fighting, vigilante superhero, complete with their own brand-name, trademark and costume. The roster was as impressive as it was improbable: the dude who used to be his driver, his ex-girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend’s sister (who is also his ex-girlfriend), his sister, his sister’s boyfriend, his employee (and now girlfriend), his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. At this point, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that in season five a new janitor started at Queen Consolidated and within two episodes was fighting off baddies with a titanium broom and calling himself ‘The Sweeper’.

If you’ve watched shows like Daredevil and Punisher with their cavalcade of brutal, hyperkinetic, technically impressive fight scenes, then you probably find it hard to appreciate Arrow’s fight scenes, which in comparison look like they were staged by a local Morris dancing troupe.

By far the most embarrassing element of Arrow, though, was the Canary, aka Laurel, the ADA, not only the least likely and least plausible crime fighter among Oliver’s friends and relatives, not to mention the most irritating character by a country mile, but also the crew-member with the very shittest ‘power’. Her method of dispatching the baddies was to open her mouth and shake her head around like a nursery teacher pretending to be a dragon, while making a noise that sounded like a vacuum cleaner with tonsillitis.

Canary, you have failed this.

Shitty.

O Batman, Where Art Thou?

Gotham the series was a bubbling mish-mash of tones, vibes and characters that didn’t quite manage to simmer into a particularly flavoursome or satisfying pot of soup, lacking pep and sustenance. It didn’t taste awful. Some sips were quite tasty, even sometimes had a bit of a kick, thanks to a sprinkle of salt here, a dash of pepper here, the Penguin with a rocket launcher there… but in a medium awash with such a glut of delicious televisual fare it regularly failed to justify its existence.

However, despite occasional bouts of cheese-scented preposterousness, it was rarely cringe-worthy. It’s actually pretty hard to come over as embarrassing or ridiculous when you’re already a show about people in costumes trying to kill each other in the campest ways imaginable.

There were exceptions. Like when Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play anything other than stoic. In a set of sequences near the end of the second season Ben Mackenzie was called upon to play the face-morphing baddy Clayface masquerading as Jim Gordon. Mackenzie’s acting technique was to channel a sex-addled Popeye after an entire brick of cocaine, which admittedly sounds awesome when I describe it like that, but really wasn’t. It made me cringe to the point where I wanted to take a whole brick up my own nose, but an actual brick. The kind you build houses with.

Doctor Oooooooh, that’s nasty

The first 26 seasons of Doctor Who gave us some truly great science-fiction, a vast multitude of episodes and ideas that were thoughtful, imaginative, resonant, frightening, exciting, funny and unapologetically weird. It also gave us potato-headed monsters, great snuffling genitalia beasts and men wrapped in tinfoil chasing screaming women around cardboard spaceships.

Even allowing for the technology that was available at the time, and the limited budget, some Who serials looked like they were knocked up by a gang of hobos between bouts of under-bridge boozing. There are episodes in the Classic Who canon that are about as welcome as an actual cannon would be if you found it pointing up at your arse cheeks from the bottom of the toilet bowl seconds before it fired.

I watch an episode from the early years with my kids every morning at breakfast time. They love it, no matter what they see. They’re too young, and their imaginations too immersive, to let a silly little thing like a man in a rubber suit with big googly eyes selotaped on to it ruin their enjoyment.

My partner, though, occasionally wanders in when something really, really, really shit is happening, and she always judges me for it. Like Bonnie Langford screaming as a giant cock waddles towards her; Jon Pertwee’s face bulging out hilariously as a sentient telephone cord tries to strangle him; London being invaded by the shittest dinosaurs ever imagined; Tom Baker being subsumed by a pulsating testicle; a man being eaten by an evil plastic seat; a human eye peering through the neck of the Jagaroth; Sylvester McCoy; Jon Pertwee again, singing a gibberish Welsh lullaby to a man in an unconvincing Singing Telegram costume whilst waving a dentists’ mirror in his face.

‘How can you watch this shit?’ she’ll ask me.

‘How can… YOU… watch this shit?!’ I sputter, flouncing out of the room, all red-faced and agog.

It’s still tough being a geek sometimes.

And don’t you forget it.

Please feel free to recommend your own most cringe-worthy moments from otherwise serviceable fantasy and sci-fi shows in the comments below, or over on the Facebook page.

Is the Billionaire Superhero Fake News?

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Sometimes all you can do is wait, and hope that a billionaire will save you.

It was a cold, dark night in Gotham City. Wisps of black and violet smudged across the sky like old paint. The moon struggled to illuminate the gloom below its ephemeral bulk; the night – getting darker and heavier with each passing minute – threatened to swallow not just the faint glimmers of light, but the moon itself.

Bernie Roberts stood inside his underpass. If he wasn’t exactly comfortable, then at the very least he was sheltered from the elements: it could be worse. He warmed his hands in his pockets, trying to flex the feeling back into his fingers.

Here he was, spending another night of countless nights beneath the neon stars of his hollowed-out home, empty tonight of the howling wind that sometimes threatened to evict him. He was 48. This was his first and last step on the property ladder. He didn’t feel sad about that. He didn’t feel much of anything. There was no time for pity in a city that alternated between cold indifference to your very existence one moment and then actively trying to snuff it out the next. Gotham had all the love and wisdom of an Iron Age God.

There was death on every street. Down every alleyway. Round every corner. That was just a fact.

Bernie watched as a crowd of men in bowler hats and balaclavas sped towards him from the darkness outside, their heavy wads of stock portfolios held aloft like clubs. He didn’t even try to run; there was nowhere to hide, and, besides, his limp was too stiff to take him anywhere fast. They swarmed him; beat him long and hard; beat him until so much blood fell from his face that he looked like he was fighting not men, but Ebola.

Bernie had lived inside that underpass since he was a teenager, and now he had to face the prospect that he was going to die there.

No, he said to himself, in a voice he’d long considered dead.

I will not die here.

Not here. Not tonight.

I want a home of my own. A family. To get a job in a hotel and raise chickens in the backyard. It’s not too late… I won’t let them kill me…

Adrenalin returned sharpness to his senses. His arms turned to steel, propelling the boulders his fists had become into the faces of his shocked attackers. He clung on to the miserable shadows of his life with a violence and vigour that hadn’t raced through his sunken veins in decades. His fire and fury caused the bankers to redouble their efforts to destroy him. Or at least try to. They were reeling. Hurting.

They were losing.

And their breed wasn’t used to losing.

Their blood splashed the walls of the underpass like paint flicked from a laden brush, as those grimy, bony fists of Bernie’s continued to punch and pound at the bankers’ Bryl-creamed skulls.

From the darkness beyond the underpass came a sound like a kite unfurling in the wind. Something swooped from the murk and dropped down firmly at the tunnel’s dark jaw. The men’s shaking fists all fell silent as they turned to look. They froze: meat-puppets in a life-sized diorama. The eerie, artificial lights of the underpass made it difficult to make out the dark figure who was now watching them from the night beyond. But the dark figure could see them.

And he was angry.

“It’s… it’s the Batman!” cried one of the bankers, as the caped crusader emerged from the darkness.

Batman hated these kinds of scenes; they made him sick to his stomach. That’s why he’d made the mask. That’s why he paced and prowled through the city of Gotham at night. Waiting. Watching. Ready to put things back the way they should be.

Ready to make things great again.

Batman swished through the underpass, and positioned himself right in the middle of the huddle of men.

“Now you’re going to pay for what you’ve done,” he growled.

And, with that, he grabbed Bernie by the scruff of the neck and started kicking the ever-loving shit out of him.

BIFF! (Tannen)

“You’re a bad dude!”

KA-POW!

“You’re deep state!”

SMACK!

“You’re fake news!”

CHA-CHING!

The bankers huzzahed and hoorahed!

“Thanks for saving us, Batman!” they shouted excitedly.

Batman dropped the tramp’s corpse to the ground, reached into his utility belt and pulled out his bat-penis, before showering the dead man’s chest with a tremendous amount of bat-piss.

“I’m Batman,” he said. “The greatest Batman. Believe me. Nobody Batmans better than me.”

The bankers danced in a circle around Batman shouting ‘MAKE GOTHAM GREAT AGAIN! MAKE GOTHAM GREAT AGAIN!’ as Batman found a hidden reservoir of piss in that little winkie of his, spun round and around in a circle, pissing all over them, too, as they grinned and clapped with glee.

I watched – astonished – not quite sure what to make of it all, and feeling slightly guilty that I’d just stood there scribbling down notes as a middle-aged man had been beaten to death by a fat old maniac.

Batman’s identity is no secret, of course. No sooner had billionaire property magnate Bruce Trump yanked on his suffocatingly-tight bat-themed corset for the first time than he’d taken out a full-page ad in the New Gotham Times that revealed his ‘secret’ persona to the world. Naturally, this was next to a full-page ad, also taken out by Bruce Trump, in which he vehemently denied that he was Batman, and threatened to sue anyone who repeated the claim. Which of course he’d already done himself in the adjoining advert. Bruce Trump is now the only man on earth ever to have successfully sued himself. Under the terms of the law-suit, Trump now has to pay himself damages of £500m.

Which of course he’s refused to do.

Trump always releases details of his vigilantism schedule well in advance to ensure full-spectrum press coverage. That’s how I managed to be present at the bloody demise of Bernie Roberts. I conducted a short interview with Trump as we stood next to the piss-covered dead guy.

I first asked his opinion on other superheroes in the public eye.

“Superman?”

“Weak.” He nodded, before adding: “Retard.”

“Captain America?”

“Unpatriotic.”

“The X-Men?”

“Shouldn’t be serving in the military.”

“Wonder Woman?”

“You know my policy on fucking all things Amazonian.”

“Doctor Victor von Doom?”

“Great guy. Strong. His people love him.”

I pointed out that Dr Doom rules the Kingdom of Latveria as a brutal dictator; not to mention that he harbours super-criminals and ploughs billions into developing different ways in which to destroy the earth.

“Strong,” he repeated, nodding. “Good chest.”

I asked him what had motivated him – a man of such disgusting wealth – to take a more direct hand in society through his role as Batman – besides, of course, being able to bill the city for his services, and forcing the mayor to give him a massive tax break to boot.

“Well, I’m finally able to take on the greatest scourge that modern America has yet faced.”

“Income disparity? Inequality?” I asked.

[“You?” I thought to myself]

“The poor,” he said.

“The poor?”

“And Mexicans.”

“Are there any Mexicans in Gotham City?”

“Not now,” he said, pouting.

“OK. But let’s talk about tonight: what’s the tangible benefit to society of kicking an ostensibly innocent homeless man to death?”

“And poor Mexicans, they suck the worst,” he continued.

“We’re done with Mexicans now.”

“You’re damn right we are. Bad hombres.”

“Let’s get back to the matter at hand. You kicked a homeless man to death.”

“Did I? Or did Trump just free up hospital staff and help to lower house prices?”

He tapped the side of his skull.

I stared down at my notepad. I didn’t know what to say.

“How much do you spend on R&D at Trump Enterprises?”

“If they want to dance, that’s their business, but I’m not paying for it.”

I stared at my notepad again. “It means Research & Development…”

He continued. “I didn’t do it anyway.”

“You didn’t do what?”

“The homeless dude. It wasn’t me.”

“You didn’t beat him to death?”

“It was the Black Panther.”

“Obama?” I asked incredulously.

He nodded.

“But I watched you do it.”

“’Trump has more class than to do what Obama just did, which is to beat a homeless gut to death.’ Use that quote in the write-up, OK?”

“But…” I said again, “I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Your eyes are fake news,” he said, “You see, Jamie, the problem with Trump City is that the…”

“Gotham City,” I corrected him.

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “There are bad hombres here.”

“And you’re getting rid of them?”

“I’m draining the swamp.”

“I thought that drain the swamp thing was a reference to corruption. Aren’t you supposed to be fighting corruption? How does attacking the poor and making life easier for the rich fight corruption?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but I cut in before he could say it: “Fake news?” I suggested.

He slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re getting it.”

I later discovered that prior to losing everything and ending up cold and alone in a Gotham City underpass, Bernie had run his own construction company. He and his crew had worked the contract for the ‘Trump Enterprises’ building back in the 90s, but the business was wiped out when Trump failed to pay Bernie for any of the work he’d carried out or compensate him for any of the cash outlaid for materials. All of which makes Bernie Roberts’ last words all the harder to process:

“Thank you… Batman.”

Bruce Trump would like to think he’s a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, when in reality he’s a contradiction wrapped inside an improbability. Without his inherited wealth and narcissism a man with a face such as his would’ve struggled to seduce Mrs Miggins the school dinner-lady – a lady with significantly more chin-warts than hygiene certificates – and probably would’ve found himself fired from a succession of fast-food restaurants for continually sexually harassing customers and pilfering from the till, before eventually finding himself – quite appositely – sleeping in an underpass before being beaten to death by a crazed billionaire.

I wondered if there really was such a thing as a benevolent billionaire, or if the billionaire alter-egos of ostensibly ordinary superheroes in comic books are only written rich to explain how they’re able to finance an expensive life as a vigilante without having to work.

Was Tony Musk – aka Iron Man – a good guy?

Tony Musk looks like the by-product of a DNA-gangbang between John Barrowman, Ally McCoist, and some description of hideous merman. Musk is his name, his brand, and he very much looks like he has a musk; a heavy one, probably redolent of seaweed, skunk and self-satisfaction.

I interviewed him in his lab in Musk Tower as he pored over plans for the new crowd-control robots he planned to market to the middle-east.

“You know, it might shock you,” he said, his eyes darting around crazily, “but I’ve got some great ideas for the poor. First of all, to put them in rockets and shoot them into space.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding. “So they can learn satellite repair, and maybe help to explore and seed other planets?”

He stared at me blankly for a moment. “Yup. Yup, let’s go with that.”

As we were talking, a woman fell past the window, as she hurtled towards the city streets below. We both ran to the window. War Machine whooshed down from the roof, scooped the woman in his arms and carried her ground-wards to safety. The crowd cheered.

Musk shook his head.

“Paedophile.”

Read Jamie’s other celebrated special reports:

After the Ban: What Happened to Tony the Tiger and Friends

The CW’s Arrow: one in the eye for logic

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arrow1Enjoyment of the superhero series Arrow requires a steel-reinforced suspension of disbelief. Don’t come to Arrow expecting the gritty, heightened reality of a Christopher Nolan project, or the air-tight, all-bases-covered, intricate plotting of the likes of your Wires and Breaking Bads, and especially don’t come to it expecting rich and subtle dialogue a la Better Call Saul, Transparent or The Sopranos. Your only choice is to wholeheartedly embrace Arrow’s two-fingered salute to sense, logic and reality, and simply revel in its slick ridiculousness. Switch off your reason-circuits and enjoy the glamorous, steroidal throat-punches that punctuate its cartoonish narrative.

This is a CW show, after all (apologies to the hyper-popular Supernatural and the exquisitely compulsive iZombie for the derogatory sneer). You know the basic template. All of the characters are ‘beautiful’, chiselled and dazzle-toothed, even those supposedly from the wrong side of the tracks, and living on the proceeds of crime and welfare in the unforgiving murk of the ghetto. People seem to spend their days trading clumsy snippets of exposition with each other. That’s when they’re not busy spelling out exactly how they’re feeling and why they’re feeling that way, at all times. Themes are hammered into your eyes like nails. Plots are always wrapped up with healthy helpings of coincidence, contrivance or deux ex machina. Or sex. If someone dies, you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll be back in an episode or five with a barely believable explanation for their survival.  

Furthermore, Oliver Queen is a ‘superhero’ who is rendered wholly invisible by a baggy hood pulled loosely over his face. No one ever tries to whip the hood off, even when they’re standing a half a centimetre away from him. And John Barrowman’s… a bad ass?

John Barrowman as 'The Black Arrow' in the CW's 'Arrow'.

John Barrowman as ‘The Black Arrow’ in the CW’s ‘Arrow’.

You see? That little voice – the one that watches TV and delights in shouting out, ‘Wait a minute, that could never happen, because x, y, z’ – must be silenced when watching Arrow. I’ve always done a pretty good job of suppressing that little voice. Until this week, when the fourth episode of season two turned my little voice into a crazed drill sergeant turned auctioneer.

I’ll set the scene. A black gangland boss calling himself ‘The Mayor’ rolls up to an army of cops in an armored personnel carrier. Flanked by a series of machine-gun-toting goons, The Mayor proceeds to give an angry and impassioned speech about guns, and how he’s going to use them to rule the city, ostensibly by killing lots of people with them. The violence is heavily sign-posted, to the other characters as well as to the audience. In fact, The Mayor couldn’t have less subtly foreshadowed the violence had he ended his speech by saying, ‘And now, without any further ado, and thanking you for your patience during my angry waffle about killing you, I am very pleased to announce the beginning of our bloodbath.’

arrow3

All the while the cops hunch uncertainly behind their squad cars, their guns drawn, just waiting for a cue to act, a cue to say something, a cue to do something, a concrete cue, an indisputable, cast-iron cue, but blast it, they can’t, because that cunning gang hasn’t done anything out of the ordinary, other than stand on a public street armed with automatic weapons threatening to kill everyone. Then The Mayor and his guys open fire. People dive for cover. Bullets pepper the squad cars. The cops wait a full six seconds before half-heartedly returning fire. By which point a significant proportion of the cops are dead.

Hmmm. Arrow expertly somersaulting through a horde of bullets and emerging unscathed? Women always having perfect hair even when imprisoned on a nightmarish island? John Barrowman being tougher than Chuck Norris? I can just about buy all of that. But to believe that American cops would hesitate to respond when faced with a heavily armed gang of black males in a deprived urban area – and not just hesitate, but allow themselves to be picked off like teen sluts in a 90s slasher flick? I’m sorry. In a world – in an all too real world – in which a well-heeled, unarmed black boy brandishing a hotdog is liable to end his day on a mortuary slab with fifty-six bullets ploughed into his chest, that’s just too much unreality for me.

I’m off to watch something a little more authentic, like Ben McKenzie’s acting on Gotham…

PS: I still love Arrow, even though every fibre of my being tells me that I shouldn’t.