Thursday night, how I love you.

* Jason Zengerle at the Plank undertakes a much more full-throated defense of Letterman than the one I offered last night, reminding us about Bristol Palin's recent publicity tour (which I guess I'd blocked out) and questioning the logic of the Palins making their own joke about their daughter being assaulted. For what it's worth, I still think the joke was borderline and shouldn't have been told, but it was plainly not about the fourteen-year-old.

* The headline reads: 'Tiny chance' of planet collision.

* Game theory and Batman villains. Isn't it well-established by now that the Joker would never kill Batman?

* New element added to the periodic table. Canavanium?

Friday Friday.

* New York in the 1940s: a great Flickr set.

* Change we can believe in: President Obama has vetoed the Mutant Registration Act.

* Problems with secrecy in comics' direct market.

* Homages to Ditko in the New Yorker.

* Failed Anti-Batmans.

* Ecocomics: a new blog devoted to the intersection of economics and comics regarding such questions as supernatural disaster insurance, the construction industry in the Marvel Universe, how Two-Face funds his crime sprees, and where the Canadian government get the money from to keep making super-soldiers.

* 'The God That Failed:' why we don't live in space colonies.

Misc.

* Batman and D&D alignment. I think "chaotic evil"'s a bit of a stretch. Via Neilalien.

* Lesbians have seized control of the world's supply of poems. It is appropriate to panic.

* Star Trek as liberal fantasy: 1, 2, 3. I'm planning on seeing it tomorrow, I'll have more to say then. (Image via Matt Yglesias.)

* Wire creator David Simon testifies before Congress on the death of newspapers.

Fun: 137 uncomfortable plot summaries. Some highlights:

ALIENS: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications.
BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Teenage serial killer destroys town in fit of semi-religious fervor.
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF: Amoral narcissist makes world dance for his amusement.
SERENITY: Men fight for possession of scantily clad mentally ill teenage girl.
GROUNDHOG DAY: Misanthropic creep exploits space/time anomaly to stalk coworker.
HARRY POTTER: Celebrity Jock thinks rules don’t apply to him, is right.
JFK: Family man wastes life for nothing in crusade against homosexuals.
JUNO: Teen fails to get abortion, ruins lives.
JURASSIC PARK: Theme park’s grand opening pushed back.
KILL BILL: Irresponsible mother wants custody of her child.
LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property.
RAMBO III: The United States provides arms, equipment and training to the terrorists behind 9/11.
RED DAWN: Despite shock-and-awe tactics, a superior occupying force is no match for a tenacious sect of terrorist insurgents.
STAR TREK: Over-sexed officer routinely places crew in danger.
STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE - Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.
SUPERMAN RETURNS: Illegal immigrant is deadbeat dad.
TERMINATOR: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications.

Via MeFi.

Successfully made it up to New Haven in time for my talk today. Aside from some technical snafus—my PowerPoint doesn't seem to want to play embedded movies at an audible volume—I think it went over reasonably well. The conference's title is "The Politics of Superheroes: Renegotiating the Super-Hero in Post 9/11 Cinema" and my talk was called "Person of the Year: Barack Obama, The Joker, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia." Essentially I try to make a few types of claims:

1) That although from a structural perspective he is obviously staged as the villain, in terms of The Dark Knight's narrative energy the Joker is unquestionably its central figure and creative engine, even (from a certain perspective) its hero;

2) that the film foregrounds the extent to which Batman (as a kind of stand-in for capitalism) and the Joker (creative destruction) need each other, that neither one can exist without the other;

3) that the Joker is therefore best understood not as a "terrorist" but as a kind of Deleuzean force of pure code-scrambling that (again despite the narrative framing) speaks to a revolutionary creative force ("schizophrenia") that is both capitalism's enemy and its limit;

4) that there exist certain theoretical similarities between the Joker and 2008's most important buzzword, CHANGE;

5) that taking all of the above to heart to the extent that Obama becomes a champion of continuity rather than change we supporters must be prepared to be the Joker to his Batman.

That's pretty reductive of a twenty-plus-minute presentation, but something close to the point.

I really enjoyed writing this one, but I'm really not sure where it goes from here. It doesn't seem exactly publishable; it's located very much in this particular moment right at the cusp of Obama's presidency—if it were to appear in an anthology or even a journal it would need to take a rather different and much more historical perspective on all this. I don't know. I'll think it over.

On Guantánamo: Matt Yglesias has a great post summing up the various absurd turns the Guantánamo debate has taken since Obama has taken office. For me it begins and ends with the new 'supervillain' line, the notion that the people currently imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay are so cunning and all-powerful that we dare not trust them to any domestic prison for fear that they will somehow escape, Joker-like, and run amuck.



I think it's time to start bringing that "reality-based community" line back.

So those are mine. What are your imaginative Urtexts, dear readers?

For me, a few runners-up:

* Superman (really, Superfriends)
* Star Wars (naturally, but less than you'd think)
* the Adam West Batman TV show
* Back to the Future II

and maybe most crucial of all

* the LEGO Space franchise

That last one might be more important than even these.

Thursday links while I should be doing other things. Also, for the tiny handful of Final Crisis fans out there&mash;spoiler alert.

* DC is pretending they've killed off Batman. It's adorable.

* Was Che Guevara "a type of Batman"? So claims Benico del Toro.

* Superuseless superpowers. Via Kottke. "13th Bullet Bulletproof" made me laugh.

* In my email: the Wikipedia page for the hilarious sounding but actually fairly tragic Boston Molasses Disaster.

Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Here and there struggled a form — whether it was animal or human being was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mass, showed where any life was... Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly-paper. The more they struggled, the deeper in the mess they were ensnared. Human beings — men and women — suffered likewise.

* Earth from space. Just another awesome post from the Big Picture.

* Obama's people: portraits of 52 top members of the Obama team.

* Did the Victorian novel make us better people? Will computer screens kill literacy? What's going to happen all the white people? And is there life on Mars?

Son of news roundup.

* Burger King is pushing the viral marketing hard lately, following up its gag body spray with a Facebook application that gives you a free hamburger for every 10 people you unfriend.

* Speaking of body spray, here's an interesting study suggesting it's not about the smell.

And a new study in the U.K...found that men who used Lynx deodorant, Axe's British-brand cousin, were seen as more attractive by females than men who used a "placebo" deodorant with no fragrance.

But: the women just saw videos of the guys in the study—they couldn't smell them. Meaning that Axe actually works by making you feel more attractive. If you feel more attractive after soaking yourself in an aerosol version of car air freshener, you may not be the most urbane man to begin with, which leads to the second part of the study's results:

Women rated the fragranced men as more attractive when the sound on the videos was off, but had no statistically significant preference when the sound was on.

* Obama to team up with Spider-Man. Which wanted criminal will he pall around with next?

* Zipcar comes to Duke. More here.

* Larry Flynt says porn needs a bailout. Via MeFi.

* Creative billboards.

* Malcolm X on a Canadian game show.

* The cell-phone novel, or keitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age. For a new form, it is remarkably robust. Maho i-Land, which is the largest cell-phone-novel site, carries more than a million titles, most of them by amateurs writing under screen handles, and all available for free. According to the figures provided by the company, the site, which also offers templates for blogs and home pages, is visited three and a half billion times a month.

* It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. Gary Lutz on the sentence, via the too-sporadically-updated Black Garterbelt.

* And will The Dark Knight win Best Picture? Eli Glasner says it just might.

All is quiet on New Year's Day.

* As the Bush administration blessedly draws to a close, it's important to remember the casualties of the War of Terror, people like Alberto Gonzales. (via)

* More people get their news from the Internet than from newspapers. More importantly:

The percentage of people younger than 30 citing television as a main news source has declined from 68% in September 2007 to 59% currently.

That's good, good news.

* Howard Dean, Vermonter of the Year. Maybe next year, Ben and Jerry.

* Batman casting rumors you can believe in: Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Penguin.

* It's the future, and Microsoft still sucks.

* Top 10 space stories of 2008. A different 10.

* Top 10 cryptozoology stories of 2008.

* James Howard Kunstler's predictions for 2009. Prediction: Pain. Via MetaFilter.

* Thank god for philosophy grad students, the only graduate demographic upon Lit students can look down.

io9 has your year in Batman.

Links for your post-Christmas blues.

* In the future, all movies will have lightsabers.

* Rest in peace, Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt.

* Barack Obama is stupendously ridiculously popular.

* Al Franken is not quite so popular, but he's looking like Minnesota's next senator.

* Confidential for Mac users: the weird inability to change location in Finder dialogues is easily rectified.

* In the zeitgeist: people living life backwards.

* 95 Old School Games You Can Play Online. Via MeFi.

* So you're saying we need Batman? (Thanks, Kate!)

I've said for years there's only one man who can follow Heath Ledger's Joker, and that's Eddie Murphy as the Riddler. Shia Labeouf as Robin is a nice touch.

I haven't been reading Morrison's Batman: R.I.P., but Easily Distracted has, and has one of the few reads of the series that actually makes sense.

(Previously.)

Monday, Monday.

* The Criterion Collection Bottle Rocket is out tomorrow. Here's the Amazon link.

* Nate Silver projects Al Franken will win by 27 votes.

* The World's Best Colleges and Universities. Duke clocks in at #13, but more important, longtime domestic loser Case Western (#90) beats Tufts (#156) in the far more important world rankings, finally giving Neil the humiliation he deserves.

* Amanda Marcotte had the bright idea of reading Mad Men alongside some of the literary texts it makes allusions to, most notably the Frank O'Hara poem that bookends the season, "Meditations in an Emergency."

* Longtime reader Eli Glasner has a great new film blog.

* 10 Stories Behind Dr. Seuss stories. Thanks, Lindsay!

* "Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture." Via Neilalien.

* A school in New York has already been renamed for Barack Obama. Students initiated the renaming.

* The things you learn from Poli-Sci-Fi Radio: Val Kilmer is mulling a run for governor of New Mexico. Kilmer's only the second-worst Batman, but the one I think I'd want least in elected office.

* Top 25 Comic Book Battles. #1: Batman vs. Superman from The Dark Knight Returns.

* Heroes creator Tim Kring has apologized for calling his fans dipshits. Remember, a gaffe is when you accidentally tell the truth...

TPM has the leaked video of John McCain's debate prep.

Three for Sunday.

* Superbugs: all about the new generation of treatment-resistant infections.

“My basic premise,” Wetherbee said, “is that you take a capable microörganism like Klebsiella and you put it through the gruelling test of being exposed to a broad spectrum of antibiotics and it will eventually defeat your efforts, as this one did.” Although Tisch Hospital has not had another outbreak, the bacteria appeared soon after at several hospitals in Brooklyn and one in Queens. When I spoke to infectious-disease experts this spring, I was told that the resistant Klebsiella had also appeared at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, in Manhattan, and in hospitals in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, and St. Louis.

*Will the next Christopher Nolan movie be a straight-up adaptation of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns?

By leaving the Joker (literally) hanging at the end of The Dark Knight, Nolan left open-ended a story that begs to be finished. Even Tim Burton knew he had to kill Jack Nicholson at the "end". Nolan himself killed Ra's at the end of Batman Begins and he even tied-up a loose end regarding the Scarecrow in The Dark Knight. These are both clear signals Nolan knows the story has to have an end and has some idea for that end already in mind.

Nolan further foreshadows the future in The Dark Knight's climatic moments as well. Remember when the Joker tells Batman the two of them can "do this for years"? Filmmakers of Nolan's talent don't throw away lines like that, especially in a moment like that. That was the director signaling to the audience that he understands one of "The Dark Knight Returns'" main themes - that the Joker's very existence is primarily to be Batman's nemesis and their fates were inevitably intertwined, as well as a signal that their final showdown will in fact come years down the road.

Which brings us back to the three-act structure: Act One (Batman Begins) was the first Batman story. Act Two (The Dark Knight) was a classic tragic turning point.

So what does this demand Act Three be?

Well, not only the final battle of Batman and the Joker, but also the last Batman story, of course.

More discussion of the idea, which I can personally guarantee will never, ever happen, at io9.

* A not-quite-complete list of Kramer's business ideas. Not quite complete, because Wikipedia has even more.

Never say Hollywood can't learn from its mistakes. The producers have figured out how to please everyone: maintain earnestness regardless of the inherent absurdity of the genre, be 'topical' by way of empty allegory, be spectacularly violent, never stop moralizing. Meet these requirements, and a great deal of variety is possible: one has free reign to be jokey or serious, bright or gloomy, undisguisedly sexist, racist, homophobic, or none of the above, 'critical,' or 'wish fulfillment.' Or all of the above. These labels are simply not the creator's responsibility. Restore the superhero's propaganda function, in short, and in so doing prove Sontag's thesis that "pure camp" is always so for the future and not the present.** The comic book-loving nerds of my generation are now faced with the dubious realization of our pubescent dreams: the nerds have taken over Hollywood, and the responsibility thus falls to the Figure of the Superhero to 'teach us' something about the "human condition."

Good news for culturemonkeys: Ryan has a great post on superhero cinema over there. (And here too.) It's more or less the definitive post on Dark Knight. But a few quick thoughts. First, I think Acephalous's attempt to rehabilitate the film from attempts to understand it solely as a "balls-out obvious apolog[y] for the authoritarian, repressive 'excesses' of global capitalism" is instructive, and definitely worth reading.

Second, Ryan writes that we are currently experiencing the"repetition-as-farce of the '50s"—but this doesn't strike me as a new phenomenon. Isn't it more the case that post-war American culture is perpetually returning to the '50s as a site of degrading, doomed unity?

This is to say that Jameson's claim that WWII is the moment of highest American nostalgia par excellence is, I think, fundamentally correct, with the revision that it's more the period from Dec. 1941 to August 29, 1949, the day the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb. The '50s are the memory of "the good '40s" combined with and juxtaposed against the reality of 8/29/49—they are the dawning but perpetually unfinished recognition of how it all will go / is going / has already gone wrong. In other words, the '50s themselves were a repetition-as-farce the first time around of the ideologically unacceptable, apocalyptic shock at the end of the previous decade—and we find ourselves going back to the '50s for answers whenever we get shocked again.

That's why, when 1973 is the year of disaster for American capitalism, Happy Days premieres in January 1974.

Everyone is getting all political over Dark Knight.

* Andrew Klavan in the Wall Street Journal finds the movie a grand apologia for Bush:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

* But Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias want to trouble this understanding, where Matt makes what I thought was an interesting point about the leap from comic to film:

Shifting a bit away from the issues of the day, though, one interesting thing about the film is what a difference it makes to rip Batman out of the context of the broader DC universe. The DCU's other anchor character, Superman, is far more powerful than Batman. And of course Superman's hardly alone in this regard -- Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, etc. all wield vast power and even lesser lights like the Flash outpace Batman by far.

In that context, Batman rather uniquely doesn't suffer from a substantial legitimacy problem. You don't look at Batman and say "no man should wield this much power" in a world where Superman can see through walls. It's those other guys who have legitimacy problems and Batman is one of the important checks on them -- especially on Superman, who specifically entrusts a kryptonite ring to Batman for that purpose.

* But it's Kugelmass who has probably the best review I've seen thus far.

The reverse is also true, though—The Joker can’t kill Batman, because, he says, “you’re just too much fun.” That’s what we have to understand first before we can pick up on Ledger’s mannerisms and bizarre intonations. The Joker feels about Batman the way Shakespeare might feel if performances of Hamlet were being blocked in court by Thomas Kyd. In the previous film, Batman has taken the crucial plunge by deciding that his own personal neuroses have a global significance and relate in some meaningful way to the ebb and flow of order (law) and chaos (crime) in Gotham City. As a result, the whole city of Gotham has to play along with Batman, pretending as though shining the Bat Signal into the clouds and having one man karate chop his way around the city is the best way to fight crime. Being Batman is an incredibly excessive, libidinal kinkiness, but it is also a sort of splendor, without which the impetus to fight crime is lacking. It may seem ridiculous to assert that we have to let people dress up as sleeker versions of furries in order to persuade them to wield the baton, but in truth The Dark Knight is just illuminating the fantasies that play themselves out more tamely in normal professional lives. The Joker understands this so well that he’s out to climb the ladder and throw it away, by which I mean that he wants to turn the battle between criminals and vigilantes into a non-stop morality spectacular in which every normal ferry trip becomes a live, game show version of the prisoner’s dilemma. His polymorphous perversity is an end run around Batman’s incompletely sublimated fantasies. It’s not necessarily disappointing to him that the people on the ferries don’t detonate each other—I mean, isn’t that wonderful? They got to prove they were good people—Eichmann on the one boat, Bigger Thomas on the other. The Joker claps when Gary Oldman is made commissioner, perfectly well aware that this scene of goodness rewarded is only possible because he (the Joker) killed Commissioner #1. Ladies and gentleman, we are tonight’s entertainment.

That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes. Part of the problem with a fiction like Enchanted or Harry Potter is that it allows adults to feel themselves at a safe distance from kids’ stuff through (respectively) ironic misdirection and misty, head-patting sentimentality.

* And for the fanboys in the audience, via Jacob, 8 great villains we want in the next Batman movie.

Looks like Chris Nolan is now officially the Batman of movie directors: The Dark Knight broke a bajillion records this weekend.

Can we give him a crack at Superman next? He certainly couldn't do any worse than Bryan Singer...