The Talkies / Crumb and Crummier

...But I've got to do it [cartooning in his obscene and scurrilous way...

...The fact that top executives of both have a taste for fancy dress can be put down to advertising...

...When it is said that he continues to masturbate to his own comics, Hughes comments, not entirely facetiously: "I'm sure Picasso did...

...I wasnot in the same world they were in"—and this produced "a sense of freedom...

...Maybe I should be locked up and my pencils taken away from me," he acknowledges...

...Robert Hughes is wheeled out, for example, to opine that "Crumb is the Breughel of the second half of the twentieth century...

...But all are like R. Crumb's drawings in being an essentially therapeutic response to the sense of frustration and powerlessness characteristic of our social atomization...

...Such cartoons and their live-action equivalents are increasingly all that Hollywood has at its disposal to treat serious subjects, which is why serious subjects are so frequently rendered trivial...

...But it is Crumb's long-suffering wife who sums up his art as "id in pure form: the dark side of everybody...

...It should not surprise us that so much therapy is the mark of a sick culture...

...For all of this, as for his chaotic personal life, Crumb cheerfully declines to take any responsibility...

...There are two new villains, Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face and Jim Carrey as the Riddler, but otherwise the saga of Batman goes on without missing a beat...

...Two-Face's attack on a circus is advertised by his taking over for the ringmaster and announcing his criminal enterprise as the next act...

...Crumb himself frankly admits to his "hostility to women," but he also seems to think that this is not so bad because "I get it out" in cartoons...

...A documentary about the cult cartoonist, R. Crumb, the man behind "Keep on Truckin'" and Fritz the Cat, among other classics (apparently) of the era, it turnsout to be a serious, if disturbing, piece of work and perhaps the best film ever made about the 1960s...

...The glow of neon is all around, and the bad guys dress in Halloween costumes and masks and parodies of evening dress...

...He claims to see "elements of Goya" in Crumb's work, while a gallery owner describes Crumb as "the Daumier of our time...

...Though androgynously named and in other respects a new Hollywood woman with a profession and a taste for working out with theheavy bag, Dr...

...Even worse was his older brother Charles, who was at the time of the film a middle-aged man still living with his mother and taking lots and lots of antidepressants...

...who engage his adult attention are always highly sophisticated, highly organized CEOs of high-tech conglomerates who, like Batman himself, give as much thought to their public images as they do to their criminal lusts...

...The most interesting of these have to do with the depiction of Gotham...

...The irony implied by its exaggeration of the super-hero trappings is itself ironic—a double bluff...

...Crumb and Crummier by James Bowman V al Kilmer has taken the place of Michael Keaton as the Caped Crusader, and we have for the first time in the cinematic redaction of the Batman story a version of Robin the Wonder Boy (Chris O'Donnell...

...It is about renouncing grand passion in favor of being a wife and mother, as Francesca does...

...Robert says he never had it...

...This is also because Eastwood partly turns away from the affair between Robert Kincaid (played by Eastwood himself) and Francesca Johnson (Meryl Streep) and pays more attention to the framing device of its discovery after her 60 The American Spectator August 1995 death by her son Michael (Victor Slezak) and daughter Caroline (Annie Corley...

...Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman), love interest of Batman/Bruce Wayne, comments on Batman's entrance in the opening section of the film...

...The only images we are given of "the nobility of living an ordinary life" consist of drudgery housework and one shot of the family sitting in the living room watching "F Troop...

...His personal hygiene is not too good and he says he has now lost interest in sex...

...Gone is the gloomy, desolate urban landscape...

...Blacks, women, gays were all a-stirring under their constraints in the sixties, but it was dorky white males like Robert Crumb and his two brothers—guys who were sex-obsessed yet more or less deficient in such traditional means of attracting girls as looks, brains, personality, money, or athletic talents—who were really in the driver's seat of the Revolution...

...has been created as a business competitor of Bruce Wayne Industries...

...In the event, what the affair does say to her, once she has read mom's diary after her death, is apparently: "Get a divorce...

...I was really a jerk," he says, but after a while he realized that this made him interestingly different from all those who were trying so hard to conform...

...But what really strikes home to Caroline, who is also troubled by a bad marriage about which no details are supplied (perhaps she, too, has unfulfilled dreams), is that her mother had been looking forward to the time when the then-16-year-old Caroline would "fall in love" and want to "build a life with someone...

...Yet if you look closer, there have been a few changes since Batman swept the country in 1989...

...We see a picture of the hated father, a corporate, gray-flannel-suited type with a frozen smile for whom Crumb, if not his brothers, now feels rather sorry: he was such a macho type and all his kids turned out to be "weird and wimpy...

...Although Batman is supposed to have come to his calling through seeing his parents gunned down by a mere mugger, the criminals James Bowman is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement and movie critic of The American Spectator...

...I n order to find its audience, female fantasy of the sort that we find in The Bridges of Madison County does not need to disguise itself so carefully...

...For the film is all about costuming and packaging and public image...

...He is now dead, but he seems to have been a caricature of the 1950s paterfamilias whose expectations of his sons in particular (there were also two daughters who declined to be interviewed for the film) were very high and untempered by any love or understanding for their sensitive and artistic sides...

...In Batman Forever, more than in the earlier films, the organizing principle is symmetry, and what has always been essentially true is now made literally true, namely that a sort of Bad Guys Inc...

...castration fantasies and anti-female drawings of voluptuous women with the heads of birds of prey (or with no heads at all) or women who are huge in size and dwarf the bug-like little men who crawl over them...

...There the message conveyed by mom is that she was a schmuck to stay with hubby at the expense of those unspecified dreams...

...When Batman appears after Two-Face has crashed yet another high society party, the Riddler says to his partner: "Your entrance was good...

...Crumb is himself an engaging character who is still drawing pictures of the girls he had crushes on in high school while dwelling on his complete lack of success with them at the time...

...Crumb presents it all as an exercise in dork liberation...

...I can't help myself...

...Chase always appears in slinky, feminine dresses, and she ultimately needs Batman to save her life...

...Now it is gleaming, hi-tech, functional, clean, and sunlit...

...What would she think if her mom had run off with a photographer from National Geographic...

...Even the one scene depicting a descent into the supposedly dark underside of the city, where there are villainous looking street toughs and lurid graffiti and fires in barrels in title streets, has the look of designer decay...

...Likewise, the Riddler, in the climactic scene, plays a game-show host...

...It is still a banality (this housewife is said to have "dreams" that her husband, decent guy though he is, has been unable to fulfill, but we are never told what they are) pumped up with atmospherics, just like the novel—but the atmosphere is a little more breathable than in the novel...

...The result of this freedom was a seemingly never-ending succession of disturbed and disturbing sexual images in his cartoons...

...Of course the internal logic of the Batman concept has always been at odds with the idea of crime as something engaged in by squalid, solitary sociopaths...

...For both boys, as Charles says, "High school was a nightmare," but Charles seems to have been thrown into a kind of unrelenting despair by it (he committed suicide shortly after the film was made) while Robert made some use of the experience...

...0 The American Spectator August 1995 61...

...What she manages to make clear, even without using her credentials in psychology, is that underneath Batman Forever's glossy camp is a classic male fantasy...

...Indeed, the title of the latest in the series, Batman Forever, directed by Joel Schumacher, begins to sound like a threat...

...B ut the Movie of the Month, Crumb by Terry Zwigoff, reverses the process...

...But the movie, while it wishes to retain the book's pathos, really has no time for nobility and renunciation...

...There is so much beauty...

...Or, in the words of Meryl Streep's voice-over: "Do what you have to to be happy in this life...

...Getting it out" is what the various liberations of the 1960s were all about, and the most lasting consequence of that procedure has been the place of honor accorded to mere fantasy in our art and culture...

...How sixties...

...His was better...

...Thus the film itself may be said to be wearing a disguise...

...W hat is hilarious about the film is the way that it shows the world taking Crumb far more seriously than he takes himself...

...Skimpole in Bleak House, in the grip of his baser urges...

...No longer is there the pervasive sense of criminal danger lurking in the shadows...

...Everything works...

...The most interesting thing about this film is the way in which Richard LaGravenese's script and Clint Eastwood's direction have done wonders with Robert James Waller's novel, cutting down its vast jungles of poison-flowery prose and leaving the outlines of the fantasy standing stark and simple against the flat Iowa landscape...

...It really is about bashing bad guys, rescuing fair maidens, and playing with hi-tech toys, all of which are ingredients in traditional male fantasy...

...Thus, if the book's fantasy is improved on by the film in one way, it is debased and rendered as crass and cartoonish as Batman Forever in another way...

...She also serves as on-site psychologist to elucidate the hidden motives of both heroes and villains and their weird penchant for secret identities...

...Caryn James in the New York Times thinks that the secret of the book's success is that it "is really about the nobility of living an ordinary life...

...And it is the fantasy, not the tongue in the cheek, that makes it a commercial proposition...

...Batman and his enemies both make theatrical entrances and equally theatrical gestures...

...Before I went to see it I just thought of the sixties' counterculture as real dumb...

...He is engagingly helpless, like Mr...

...The Riddler is shown agonizing over what to call himself and the costume he will adopt...

...What unites the two brothers, together with a third, Maxon, who is in a home in California, is a common hatred for their father, whom Charles calls "an overbearing tyrant...

...Now I still think of it as real dumb, but I understand the impulses that made it what it was much better than I did...

...If this is "the noble choice," I don't think Clint Eastwood thinks so...

...White male fantasies like Batman Forever have lately taken to camouflaging themselves with irony, while female fantasies, like The Bridges of Madison County, are allowed to be more blatant...

...What would this say to her...

...Even their wicked henchmen are all dressed in leather jumpsuits and weirdly zippered hoods...

...Dr...

...Gotham has undergone the mother of all urban renewals...

...They are touched because their mother denied herself her great love for their sake...